capcloud

So at my workplace, my group is moving its sites from an old version of SharePoint to a shiny, new ShitePoint 2007 setup.

I am trying to copy over some files from one of the old sites to the new one, and I get this pleasant, informative error message:

Now, these files (hundreds of them) were generated by Javadoc, Doxygen, and ndoc. You can’t just change the file names. They are all interlinked. It will just break.

So the only thing I can do is to leave the files where they are, link to them from the new site, and hope that the old site stays around in read-only form until I’m no longer working here…

[UPDATE] The Google is your friend. Turns out this is not a SharePoint problem, it is a Windows problem. Windows XP can’t handle file paths longer than 255 characters. Solved the problem by using Subversion to export the files from my local drive to their destination (instead of trying to copy from one site to another).

N.B. This doesn’t mean that SharePoint doesn’t suck. It does suck, just not for this particular reason.

I saw this on a shopping site today:

Nice.

Now, I really like my new Sony-Ericsson K610i. But there are a few things that annoy me. Things that usability testing should have picked up.

For example, one thing that I do a lot (i.e., every time I talk on the phone) is to hang up, then lock the phone.

Straightforward enough, you might be thinking. Press Cancel (right soft-button). Then star. Then Lock Keys (right soft-button again).

But what happens if the person you were talking to hangs up first?

This key sequence then becomes Menu -> bottom-left menu item (the menu items are in a 3×4 grid that corresponds to the keypad keys), which in this case is “calls” -> More (which brings up a list of actions for the last call).

So then you’re three levels deep in the menu system and you have to navigate your way out.

How could they have done it better? They could have put in a small delay after a call is ended by the other party, during which a press on the right soft-button is ignored. The key sequence would then be interpreted as Do nothing -> star -> Lock Keys.

And if I really did want to go into the menu straight after ending a call, having to press the key twice is no great inconvenience.

NOT a staged shot

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

Sent from mobile

New shorts

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

Sent from mobile

Following the instructions that I found on the Google Gears Google Group, I repackaged Google Gears as a Flock extension. (The only other converted Gears extension that I found seems to be for OS X.)

You can install the extension by clicking here.

UPDATE (24 April 2008): Updated the extension to use the latest version of Gears (0.3.14.0). Get it here.

The kibbutz has a deal with Cellcom where they change everyone’s phone about every three years. So we got new phones about a month ago. Keren and I chose Sony-Ericsson K610i’s. Keren’s two sisters both chose Nokia 6085’s.

I am soooo glad I took the Sony-Ericsson. My sister-in-law was complaining about her phone yesterday. Just one small example. When you send an SMS, after you press Send, it flashes up a message for about half a second saying that it is saving the message to be sent later.

What’s the poor user to make of this? What does it mean? Did it send the message or didn’t it?

Well, in this case, it did send the message, but the user could be forgiven for thinking that it didn’t. IMNSHO, the phone should have waited half a second to see whether it could actually send the message or not, and then, only if it couldn’t, should it show a message. And it should be more specific: “Couldn’t send message. Will keep trying.”. (For this half-second, it should show a suitable “sending” animation.)

Wouldn’t that be better?

Don’t get me wrong. I like my Sansa. It’s no iPod, that’s for sure, but it’s not bad.

But there are a few things about it that really bug me. Like what happened this morning. Yesterday, I turned off my Sansa while I was in the middle of listening to a podcast from SXSW. I plugged it into my PC, then deleted a few podcasts I had finished listening to and uploaded some fresh ones.

Guess what happened when I turned on the Sansa this morning. It was still paused, but now in the middle of a different podcast. WTF?!? I mean really, WTF? That is a BUG.

So I had to search around to find the podcast that I had been listening to and then go through the painful process of cueing through it to find my place. Which brings me on to my next peeve.

Cueing is by the now-unfortunately-widespread method of pressing and holding the skip button. I know it means you need less buttons or modes on your device, but it has great potential to be infuriating. Why? Because:

• It’s too easy to accidentally give it a single press instead of a sustained press, which brings you to the next track. If you have just spent several minutes cueing and just stopped to listen for a few seconds to get your bearings, this is super-annoying.
• It is SLOOOOOOOW. That’s OK for a music track (though I never understood why you would use it for music). But for a podcast, it is horrible. It should work like on DVD players, where once you are cueing, you can press the button again to speed it up. Or it could speed it up automatically after the button has been pressed for a certain amount of time. There is an alternative cueing mode that uses the wheel, but it feels just as slow as using the button (and there is the additional navigation excise of four button clicks to switch to this mode).

And if you have to do all this while driving, it is even more frustrating.

I have other peeves, but this post is starting to get long. Maybe I’ll post a sequel soon :)

Passover

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

Seth Godin says:

You don’t have ‘a facebook.’ Facebook is a place, a network, not a page. You’re ‘on facebook,’ or you ‘use facebook.’

You don’t look up things on ‘the google’. It’s just Google, no ‘the.’ ‘Google’ is also a verb, as in, ‘Google me’.

Unless you’re being ironic.

So you can search for my facebook on the google, if you like…