capcloud

Thank you, Google, for blinding me

Originally uploaded by sagipolley

Sent from mobile

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.

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.

UPDATE (18 May 2008): If you need an older version of Gears, you can get it here. (For example, the current version of Gears for Mac only works on 10.4 or later. I run 10.3.9, so I had to download Gears 0.1.56.0.)

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