capcloud

At last, Google Chrome has shown me its sad face.

And while I was using Gmail, too… Who’d have thought?

(Via my Dad)

There have been some interesting discussions of late about the relationship between marketing and design.

I see them as being related, but not the same. The way I was taught about it, marketing is not selling, it is deciding what product to make or service to offer to best satisfy customers. Which sounds a lot like what user-centered design is about.

But I think marketing is the initiator, while UCD is more concerned with the details, given the initial remit. OK, we’ve decided we want to make a better microwave oven. Now let’s figure out the user goals related to a microwave oven and design to that. (Hey, let’s get rid of that clock!)

Not happy

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

Shachar the cat after his bath

Sent from mobile

Desert living

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

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Thank you, Google, for blinding me

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

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I can’t believe I didn’t think to Google for this before. After a couple of weeks of copy/pasting and moving things around until they were in exactly the right position, I’ve found a macro that will create an exact duplicate of the current page.

Thanks to Martijn van Welie for creating this macro. (There’s more to him than just interaction design patterns.)

I finally found out what was causing Apache to keep crashing. It was Service Pack 3. Thank the Google.

I had reinstalled Windows about half a dozen times. Each time I would reinstall Apache, and it would work. For a while, at least. Then it would start crashing. And not just crashing, either. Crashing in such a way that it could not be restarted without restarting Windows. Not good.

I assumed it was a virus, or some sort of incompatibility between the version of PHP I was using and the version of Apache I had installed. But no.

So now I have uninstalled SP3, reinstalled SP2, and everything is just fine and dandy. Now I can get on with my life.

So the interface that I am working on is for a very small group of users. These users are very important and they know it. They are far too important to take part in any sort of user research or usability testing.

I am designing one (quite complex) part of the interface for configuring a particular enterprise system. It allows the users to configure the system through a web application instead of manually editing a configuration file. It would be extremely helpful to know more about how the users do these tasks at the moment.

I have access to the developers, who, in turn, have access to the actual configuration files. So this gives me a static view of how things are configured, but it doesn’t tell me what they configured first or why. Or the logic and thought processes behind it.

I also have access to another major project stakeholder, who may be able to give me some pointers.

Any ideas for other ways of getting at this information without direct access to the users?

Thanks :)

I was pondering to myself whether there is an equivalent to Moore’s law for storage. Moore’s law states that processing power doubles every two years.

So I whipped out my calculator and did some calculating. I thought (until I just looked it up) that the doubling period for Moore’s law was 18 months. So. My first PC had a 40MB hard drive. This was 18 years ago, which (based on 18 months) means 12 doublings.

Which is 40 × 2^12, which comes to 163840. Dividing this by 1024 gives us 160GB. Guess what size the hard disk in my current PC is? Yup, 160GB.

But a reasonably-priced hard drive these days is 500GB. So if there is a Moore’s law for storage, the doubling period is even less than for processing power. It comes out at a little less than 18 months.

Interesting.