Left Brain Right Brain

But then again, so is ‘love’.

Do you know what? I’m tired of fighting with people. I’m coming off the worst flu I’ve had for nearly 6 years, my wife’s had it, our kids have all had it and I’m physically, emotionally and motivationally drained.

All I wanted when I started this was to document my autistic daughters progress, make the odd little web development post here and there and stand up for what I believe is right. What I believe is right is that autistic people should be respected. I believe society should change to accommodate difference. In the same way that women are equal to men, people of different cultures and creeds are equal to the dominant population in whichever country you live in, senior citizens are as important as young people, homosexuality is as normal (whatever the hell that is) as heterosexuality – people with a different neurology *irrespective of its cause* are just as valid and deserving of rights, consideration and an equal voice as those of us with a typical neurology.

_Is that really so difficult to deal with?_

Autism is not a childhood condition. It first _occurs_ in childhood. Take a look around you. Read the reports. Study the science. Examineour history.

Look, I’ll give you this – its entirely possible autism could be caused by mercury. In some cases. But please try and _think_. All the Amish in the world don’t add up to an autism/vaccine epidemic. All the recovered children in JB’s PDF’s and Erik’s AVI’s don’t add up to a cure.

Why? What is it you think you are curing? If your child doesn’t smear, or headbutt or have constipation – does that mean they are not autistic? _No_. It means they’re not constipated or headbutting or smearing anymore. If thats your child then I offer you my sincere congratulations. I don’t want your child to be in pain any more than I want my child in pain. But I would urge you to be very careful – your child almost certainly still thinks and interacts in ways that are very different than you do. Would that be enough justification for you to carry on ‘curing’? If so, why?

Ginger presents the best argument of all. She says that if a child is likely to grow into an adult that cannot communicate their needs – especially when that person is in danger – then it is worth it to attempt a ‘cure’. And she certainly has a lot of very good evidence that autistic people are routinely abused.

I have no easy answer to this argument. When I read it, I’ll freely admit it, I want to remove everything that threatens my daughter. But is that right? In one way its absolutely right – every parent has a duty to keep their kids safe.

But, I agree with Susan Senator who said:

The “must eradicate” attitude drives parents to be nothing but nutritionists, behaviorists, and therapists, for their children. These parents, however motivated by doing their children good, end up spending most of their parenting time trying to subjugate aspects of their children.

No child – of any neurology – can be kept 100% safe unless you want to take them and wrap them up in cotton wool. Pre-empting Ginger, I think she’d say that this isn’t a case of wrapping them up but of giving them every chance to be independent enough to recognise danger and be able to do something about it. Certainly when I read some of what Amanda Baggs has had to endure at the hands of ‘carers’ my blood boils and my heart quails.

But. I believe that autism is not the cause of this misery. Attitude is. Institutionalised and abusive staff are. The non-recognition of autistic people as having a valid existence causes these attitudes to grow. When someone says ‘all autism is mercury poisoning’, that is essentially taking someones existence and traducing it as poison and invalidating it as viable. As can be seen from the links provided – thiomersal cannot be responsible for all cases of autism. Autism existed before thiomersal. Thats simply a fact. To deny it is not only bizarre it is akin to taking someone by the scruff of the neck and telling them that because they are ill, they are not fit to make decisions and thus abuse is legitamised and around and around we go.

I don’t expect anyone who believes autism is mercury poisoning to give up on their idea. What I am asking is that you can try and at least meet those of us on the ‘other side’ halfway. Try and understand that painting everyone with one brush is tantamount to little more than bigotry. I asked JB once to recant just one aspect of his belief – that all autism is mercury poisoning now and forever. I ask him again, with all respect. If you are an advocate for autism then please try and see that in this one respect you are wrong. All autism is _not_ caused by thiomersal. This isn’t a game. Nobody’s keeping score. I’m more than happy to entertain the possibility that for some children who have become autistic that there is an environmental trigger. If there is ever science that conclusively demonstrates a causative link I swear to you that I will be as vocal in going after the guilty as I am now in going after people like Rashid Buttar. As I say, what I ask in return is that you _see_ that you truly look at the world of autism beyond your child. Look without melodrama and look without preconception. I am deathly afraid that one of the things you are doing is making the world for autistic people less safe. You’ve seen some of the things that a certain Rescue Angel of our mutual acquaintance has written here. JB himself expressed unease at what this person had said. Do you think that such a person is interested in advocating _for_ autistics?

Some people think that if you can communicate you cease to be autistic. Again, I see that as a willful and purposeful denigration of people who’s crime seems to be that they can communicate – the punishment is excommunication from who they are. Invalidated people. And for what? Why would anyone think such a thing? As Tolkein said: “what can we do against such reckless hate?”.

At the core of who I am is a belief in personal responsibility. I take responsibility for who I am and what I do. I believe its the cornerstone of what makes us free people. I will do everything I can to ensure that my kids all have that same belief. We have a duty to our society as well as our children. And society has a duty to us and them. Everything in life works better when its driven by reciprocality. I say society must change for the good of all our children _and_ adults as well. I reciprocate by doing my best to raise self-aware, self-confident children to adulthood. I cannot do that if who they are is withdrawn from them on the basis of political need. I don’t try and stop you from curing (if thats the word you choose to use) your kids. All I ask in return is that you stop insulting mine. If you are right and thiomersal causes autism then I will fight beside you. Will you fight beside me if I ask you to advocate _for_ autistics, instead of _against_ autism? Can you turn some of that energy and anger I see in chatrooms and blogs directed into action to enhance the lives of adult autistics? Can you do it without talking about mercury?

I’m not asking you to change your beliefs. We both know you don’t agree with mine and I don’t agree with yours. But there should be lots we can agree on. Can we?

I’ve posted a few snippets from the client-side that have touched on a project I’ve been working on recently. This project is an e-commerce based website that takes a payment (via WorldPay) and then generates a download of the product the shopper has just purchased.

Offering paid-for downloads via the web is a tricky proposition. There are lots of security factors that need to be considered. You don’t want your product to be actually on the webserver for example as its possible for someone to stumble across it and download it. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it very difficult for a user to get to the right place to download their product from – that would defeat the whole point.

The product we’re downloading is approaching 60mb in size so we have another issue – that PHP doesn’t handle downloads of big files very well. So we need to find some way of making sure PHP doesn’t choke.

Further complicating this particular solution was the fact that WorldPay doesn’t offer a ‘download’ solution – it only offers solutions for objects that are sent offline (books, CD’s, clothes, whatever) so I was limited in that respect.

The whole process is complicated. The shopper fills out their details (name, billing and shipping address, email, tel etc) on our site. These details first get input to our database and then get sent to WorldPay along with a unique id for this purchase. The shopper then fills out their card details which WorldPay then process. If the transaction is successful then a variable called ‘transStatus’ is set to ‘Y’. If its declined its set to ‘C’. This variable is sent via POST to a callback script which sits on our server (this part of the process is invisible to the shopper). The appropriate markup is generated via this callback script and sent back to the shopper at WorldPay. Part of this generated markup (assuming a successful transaction) includes a link with a variable appended to it (the unique id for this purchase) which points to a script back on our server. When the shopper clicks this link they get returned to our server and the download process starts in earnest.

At this point the script needs to do the following. First, it needs to compare the sent back value to a value in the db and pull out the purchase details that apply to that value. It then needs to generate a unique serial number (quick side note: this is returned to my script via an XML-RPC script that connects to a Java web service one of the developers wrote). It also needs to create a PDF invoice (quick side note no. 2: I used the rather marvelous R & OS PDF Class to generate the PDF).

What it also needs to do is create a new directory, copy a file from an old directory to this newly created directory and then send the newly created URI to the user. As a point of interest, you should note that the file that is being copied is _not_ the downloadable file. As this is over 60mb in size it makes no sense to copy this across for every shopper. Instead we copy across a very small file that triggers a download of the downloadable product file. OK so first of all I uploaded the downloadable file _and_ the file to be copied into a directory _above_ the web root, thus ensuring they can’t be browsed to. I then set about creating the PHP to store the download script:

$oldPath = "/home/somedir/";
$filename = "myscript.php";

So, first we set two variables; the path to the directory above the web root that contains the download script and the name of the download script itself.

if (file_exists($oldPath . $filename)){
	
		$mdy = date("mdy");
		$hms = date("His");	
		$rightnow = $mdy.$hms;
		$dir = md5($rightnow);		

Next we open a check to ensure the file exists,r eferencing the two variables we set up first. If the file _does_ exist then we create a fairly random string of letters and numbers by taking the current date, current time, appending them together (no spaces or punctuation marks) and then hashing them using the md5() function. This pretty randomised string of letters and numbers will be the name of the directory we’re going to create.

$newDir = "/home/somedir/public_html/dowmloads/" . $dir;	
mkdir($newDir, 0777);

So here we actually create the new directory – first we use the new name and append it to the location we want the new directory to live in and then we do the actual creation using mkdir(). Note that we set the access rights to this new directory in the second parameter of the function.

$newLoc = $newDir . "/" . $filename;		
$oldLoc = $oldPath . $filename;
			
copy ($oldLoc, $newLoc) or die ("Could not copy file");	
$uri = "http://www.blah.co.uk/downloads/" . $dir . "/" . $filename;

echo $uri;

Next we create two variables which contain a string referencing the new and old locations (i.e. where the file to copy exists now and where we want it to be copied to) and we then go ahead and actually copy the file over.

After that its a simple case of building the URI from a string and then doing what you want with it. Your original file (myscript.php) will now have been copied into the newly created directory. Just put an ‘else’ clause in to tidy up and the code in full is:

$oldPath = "/home/somedir/";
$filename = "myscript.php";

if (file_exists($oldPath . $filename)){
	
  $mdy = date("mdy");
  $hms = date("His");	
  $rightnow = $mdy.$hms;

  $dir = md5($rightnow);		
  $newDir = "/home/somedir/public_html/dowmloads/" . $dir;	
  mkdir($newDir, 0777);
		
  $newLoc = $newDir . "/" . $filename;		
  $oldLoc = $oldPath . $filename;
			
  copy ($oldLoc, $newLoc) or die ("Could not copy file");	
  $uri = "http://www.blah.co.uk/downloads/" . $dir . "/" . $filename;
		
  echo $uri;
		
} else {

  echo "Uh-oh, it went bad.";

}

So what about the file ‘myscript.php’? What does this do? Well, its there to actually grab the file that needs to be downloaded. Using lots of small files instead of lots of large ones makes a lot of sense. It also means we can script solutions for large files.

$filename = "/home/somedir/myprogram.exe";
$filename = realpath($filename);

if (!file_exists($filename)) {
 die("NO FILE HERE");
}

header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: private",false);
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="".basename($filename)."";");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
header("Content-Length: ".@filesize($filename));
set_time_limit(0);
@readfile("$filename") or die("File not found.");

The first two lines are straightforward. First create a reference to where the file to be downloaded resides. then use realpath() to get the absolute path. Now, after that we perform a simple check to ensure that the file is there. if not, error out. If yes, then proceed.

The interesting bits of this script are the Header declarations. These are necessary for various thigns to make sure the download is fetched properly.

header("Pragma: public") works with header("Content-Disposition") as a known issue with IE6 is that the filename attribute of Content-Disposition is not always recognised. Using Pragma: public resolves this.

Cache-Control: must-revalidate and Cache-Control: private, falseensures the file is never cached.

Content-Type: application/octet-stream is the content type for application files and Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary ensures the correct transfer type is used (binary in this case).

The all-important line here is set_time_limit(0);. The time limit refers to the amount of seconds that PHP allows a script to execute. The default is 30 seconds which is obviously no good for a 60mb file. By setting the time limit to zero we set no upper limit on script execution time.

Lastly, we use the readfile() function to actually start the download off. Job done.

Part of my continuing quest to use Javascript in responsible, degradable ways is documented below.

I’m coming to the end of a development period that involved building an e-commerce solution and sign up procedure. I saw two possible uses for some nice unobtrusive Javascript here.

In the first example (and this is one is very simple indeed) I wanted a way to have a value in a form field as per WCAG 1.0 guidelines dictate. However, whenever I see these implemented, the author fails to clear the form when the field in question gains focus meaning a user has to manually clear the placeholder value themselves – something of a pain. The solution in this case is as simple as:

window.onload = function() {
	if (!document.getElementById) return false;	

	var e = document.getElementById("email");
	e.onfocus = function() {
		e.value = "";
		return false;
	}	
}

And the markup:

So, the Javascript first checks that the function we need is supported by the browser. If its not then thats that – it won’t work but nothing is visually affected and no error alerts will appear. The worst case scenario is that the user muse clear the field manually.

If getElementByID() _is_ supported then we declare an onfocus() function that clears the value – and thats that. Job done.

My second idea was to aid the process of filling out address details. In most cases when you are buying from an online shop you must specify and billing address _and_ a shipping address. Obviously, its easy to grab the values of one set of fields and marry them up with another set but all the solutions I’d seen had no non-js fallback position and most had loads of JS attrtibutes in the markup which is something I really want to avoid. So, first lets look at out form:

	

	

		<h2>Billing Address</h2>
	
		Address
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		Town
		
		
		County
		
		
		Post Code
		
		
		Area
		
  		  United Kingdom
                  Australia
                  Belgium                     
                  Canada
                  Denmark
  		  France
                  Sri Lanka
                  Venezuela
                  Zimbabwe
				
			
		<h2 id="addLnk">Shipping Address</h2>
	
		Address
		
			
		
		
			
		
		
			
		Town
		
			
		County
		
			
		Post Code
		
			
		Area
		
			
	
	

*NB: No, thats not the whole form, this is just the bit we’re interested in.*

Now, what I wanted was an easy way for the billing address details to be copied to the correct shipping address sections but if the user had no JS then to leave the form exactly as it was. Here’s what I did:

window.onload = function() {
	if (!document.getElementById) return false;
	if (!document.createElement) return false;
	if (!document.createTextNode) return false;
	if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return false;

	var h = document.getElementById("addLnk");
	var p = document.createElement("p");
	var a = document.createElement("a");
 	a.href = "#ready";
	a.className = "ditto";
 	a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("Shipping address is the same as the Billing address"));
 	h.appendChild(p);
	p.appendChild(a);

	var z = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
	var x = document.getElementById("buyFrm");
	for (var i=0; i<z.length; i++) {
		if (z[i].className == "ditto") {
			z[i].onclick = function() {
				x.sh_add1.value = x.add1.value;
				x.sh_add2.value = x.add2.value;
				x.sh_add3.value = x.add3.value;
				x.sh_town.value = x.town.value;
				x.sh_county.value = x.county.value;
				x.sh_pcode.value = x.pcode.value;
				x.sh_area.value = x.area.value;
				return false;
			}
		}
	}
}

The first four lines check that all the functions we need are available in the users browser. If they're not then nothing gets executed, nothing happens and the suer has the markup above presented to them.

The next section firstly looks for an element with an id of 'addLnk' (look in the markup above for it) and when it finds it, it dynamically creates then appends the following bit of markup:

Shipping address is the same as the Billing address

The link to ‘#ready’ simply moves the user down to the submit button (not shown in the above markup) for another added usability wrinkle. The meat of what this link does is triggered from the class ‘ditto’. Take a look at the last section of Javascript. This basically says that when a link with a class name of ‘ditto’ is clicked then copy the contents of one set of fields to the other. And thats it – job done here too.

These are both very simple bits of scripting but I hope they demonstrate real world practical use but executed in a way that ensures that the code is graceful in its degradation, accessible and separate from the semantic level.

Its not often I feel compelled to write a whole entry just for the creation of a new blog but every so often one pops up by an author that you know is going to have an impact. I’ve ‘known’ Hurricane (its up to you to tell you his real name if he so desires) for a couple of years mostly meeting at an online cesspit of debauchery and web design that I keep forgetting to go and revisit.

To put it plainly and with all false modesty aside, ol’ H is smarter than a bag of spanners at the technical side of things like accessibility, standards and CSS. In fact he cares so much he’s fully prepared to (sort of) launch his new blog in an unfinished state presumably so he can further the concept of a live re-design to a live _start up_ .

Already, H has posted some good stuff. Hopefully thats the start of a long blogging career established.

I recommend adding his feed to your feed reader and paying a visit. And maybe you should go leave a comment too – if only to tell him that he may want to rethink the grasshopper imagery ;o)

Memo to self: fix the height problem that makes smaller entries look crap without comments.

I’m working on a new product site for the company I work for at the moment and am trying to utilise as much sensible AJAX as possible in order to enhance the usability of the pages without destroying the IA or accessibility.

One of the intriguing challenges I came across today was using innerHTML in a more refined way.

Lets say I have data I need to return from a PHP script that I need to funnel into separate markup elements when they’re returned to the page. How to do this perplexed me for awhile – my experiences of innerHTML was that results are returned in a big chunk.

First lets have a look at the PHP:

$type = $_GET['type'];

if($type == "1"){
	echo "Vat No";
        echo "";
}

And the markup I wanted to receive each of these two strings was as follows:

<p id="label"></p>
<p id="inputElem"></p>

*NB: No, I didn’t really put my form elements into p tags, this is a smaller example of what I did.*

Obvious what I want to do isn’t it? I want the phrase to go in the ‘label’ id element and the field to go in the ‘inputElem’ element. Here’s the Javascript I started with. First we set up the AJAX connection:

// 'xmlhttp' variable will hold the XMLHttpRequest object
var xmlhttp = false;
        
// If the user is using Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/etc
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
        xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
        xmlhttp.overrideMimeType('text/xml');
}

// If the user is using IE
else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
        xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}

And after that I declare a function that can be called onclick later:

function getUK() {
	var lB = document.getElementById("label");
	var iE = document.getElementById("inputElem"); 
 
	var url = "_inc/vat.php?type=1";    
	xmlhttp.open("GET", url, true);
    
	xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
		if(xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {

			var r = xmlhttp.responseText
			lB.innerHTML = r;

		}else{
			lB.innerHTML = "Error";
		}				
	};
	xmlhttp.send(null);  
}

Which is crap. I can’t get both elements in and seperate them. So what we need to do is make our string passed through from PHP to actually be an array object that we can split. So we change the above PHP to this:

$type = $_GET['type'];

if($type == "1"){
	echo "Vat No|";
}

Now we can refer to the responseText as an array like so:

function getUK() {
	var lB = document.getElementById("label");
	var iE = document.getElementById("inputElem"); 
 
	var url = "_inc/vat.php?type=1";    
	xmlhttp.open("GET", url, true);
    
	xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
		if(xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {

			var r= xmlhttp.responseText.split("|");
			lB.innerHTML = r[0];
			iE.innerHTML =  r[1];

		}else{
			lB.innerHTML = "Error";
		}				
	};
	xmlhttp.send(null);  
}

The important lines are:

var r= xmlhttp.responseText.split("|");
lB.innerHTML = r[0];
iE.innerHTML =  r[1];

in which we split the string on the ‘|’ character (or any other character you care to use yourself) and then refer to individual elements in the array in the appropriate place.