Don’t call me DOM

For my W3C work, I (and a good chunk of the W3C Team) use Vonage as a Voice over IP service that allows me to participate to teleconferences, call my colleagues, etc. for a very low cost.

But one of my issues with it is that, being with a US number, you can get spammers calling you at US hours, which may or may not match the actual timezone you’re in. I had asked a while back to the technical support in Vonage if there was a way to ask your line to be off (i.e. directly on voicemail) at well-defined times of the day, but to no avail.  Read more... (222 words, estimated 53 secs reading time)

Working with people around the world, I often ask myself what time is it where X is? How long Y will be available? Until when Z will be pestering me? Although there are plenty of web sites that give you that information (I particularly like the worldclock from time and date.com), this kind of information is something I want directly available on my desktop, especially when I’m using IRC – our primary mode of instant communication in W3C.

So, using a Gnome desktop, I installed a set of 4 clocks on my desktop set on the timezones of the people I work the most often with… Et voilà !  Read more... (110 words, 1 image, estimated 26 secs reading time)

As of this month, my time allocation is moving from half-QA/half-Systems Team to half-Mobile Web Initiative (also known as MWI)/half-Systems Team.

While I have a certain sadness to leave the work on QA after having been involved in it for the past three years, it’s good to leave it with a set of very satisfying results: the Specification Guidelines were published as a W3C Recommendation a few weeks ago, the Working Group – while its charter is not going to be renewed – is on track to continue its most important work items through the Interest Group, after a truly excellent face-to-face meeting in Dublin; among them, work has started on formalizing the group experience on test case metadata which should hopefully be published as a note in the upcoming weeks.  Read more... (409 words, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)