Nov 2002
Mon, 25 Nov 2002
WSJ: Feds Eye Computer Associates
The Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC) has picked up the Computer Associates accounting investigation.
Would you trust this man?
Posted at: 10:26 | permalink
Sat, 23 Nov 2002
I Knew There Was A Reason I Wanted A Cooler Laptop
Ouch!
Posted at: 22:23 | permalink
Heinz Field Sucks
So I went to the local high school football championships yesterday at Heinz Field. My dad explained that it was voted down by PA residents and still got built. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But it's pretty amusing that it only seats 64,450, small by even college stadium standards. Hell, Michigan Stadium was built in 1927 costing barely a million dollars and seats 107,501!
The parking was horrendous, both inbound and outbound. It took forever to find a parking place. And when we left the stadium, we sat in the parking lot for an hour while traffic was serialized out of one single lane exit. The parking design around the stadium is among the most ass-backward designs I've ever seen.
It has a natural grass field, which was nothing but a mudbowl. Many local high schools have the latest artificial turf systems that provide superior drainage, cushioning, and low maintenance costs. It was so bad that they had to bring some Zamboni-looking device out at half time to repair the damage, so the marching bands couldn't leave the track!
And lastly, due to the open architecture, there is virtually nowhere in the stadium to escape the howling wind and cold save for the restrooms. The result? People crowd the restrooms just to stay warm.
If anybody tried to give me tickets to this place, I'd turn them down on this experience alone. But hey, I'm sure it's another fine example of taxpayers dollars at work!
Posted at: 16:28 | permalink
Thu, 21 Nov 2002
BMW Design Chief Horks Up The Whole Line
From the NY Times: "We don't make automobiles, which are utilitarian machines you use to get from Point A to Point B," Mr. Bangle once wrote. "We make cars, moving works of art."
Oh, please; give me a break! I'll be the first to admit I'm not a BMW fan per se, but I've appreciated some of the design and engineering over the years. In my mind the pinnacle of the German coupe was the mid-80s BMW M6. What Mr. Bangle's crew is producing now couldn't come close. I'll keep my quattro, thanks.
Posted at: 07:55 | permalink
Computer Associates Investigation Deepens
From the NY Times: And now come the subpoenas. Maybe I'll get a subpoena? One can only hope. ;->
Posted at: 07:46 | permalink
Wed, 20 Nov 2002
Benjamin Franklin on PBS
People who know me well know that I barely passed most of the history courses that I've been exposed to over the years and I readily admit that it's not a particularly compelling subject to me. It comes as a surprise then that I was compelled to watch (without distraction) the Ben Franklin piece on PBS. The second bit is on tomorrow night and I'm gonna try and catch that too. It's fascinating. I have to admit, NPR's coverage is what compelled me to turn it on, particularly the way they projected the future onto Franklin by saying he'd have been a dot commer and open source supporter. Hmm...
Posted at: 00:55 | permalink
Fortune Cookie Koan
So I'm eating my Chinese take-out tonight and I get the following fortune cookie:
Grant yourself a wish this year; depend on them to guide you.
Huh? Depend on who to guide me?
Posted at: 00:44 | permalink
Tue, 19 Nov 2002
Watch Out For Blue Ice
From the Butler Eagle:
Nina Cadamore and her mother-in-law, Lucy Cadamore, stepped outside the house on South McKean Road to find purple and blue stained human waste, allegedly from a US Airways jetliner, covering everything in the back yard, including the back half of the house.
“It looked like someone loaded blueberries and grapes into a machine gun and shot it at the house,” Nina Cadamore said. “It was hard to believe what had happened, and pretty disgusting, especially when I found out what it was.”
Yikes.
Posted at: 23:44 | permalink
Charles Wang Leaves Computer Associates
Finally, the NY Times reports that Charles Wang has resigned from Computer Associates:
"Under Mr. Wang's leadership, Computer Associates became the world's fifth-largest software company, with almost 16,000 employees and $3 billion in annual sales. Mr. Wang will be remembered, analysts said, for aggressive accounting at Computer Associates and the $670 million payday he received in 1998, rather than for the company's programs, which, they said, are mediocre."
Good riddance. But I doubt things will change substantially for the poor souls who still work there.
Posted at: 10:15 | permalink
slashdot: Black Ops of TCP/IP: Paketto Keiretsu 1.0 Release
Posted at: 09:37 | permalink
Metalsite: The Redesign
We launched the new site tonight. You'll find that here. I'm too tired to say anything substantive. And I didn't even do any of the real work!
Posted at: 00:39 | permalink
Fri, 15 Nov 2002
Volkswagen Touraeg
I'm not usually one to pay much attention to SUV's but the Volkswagen Touraeg's numbers sure are compelling:
Engine: 4921 cc DOHC 40v V10 Turbodiesel, 313 hp, 527 ft-lbs
Transmission: 6-speed automatic, four wheel drive
Performance: 0-100 km/h in 7.7 seconds, top speed is 225 km/h.
And it's rumored to get 23 MPG!?! I wouldn't be surprised to see it pulling a nuclear class submarine out of dry dock. ;->
Posted at: 01:19 | permalink
Mon, 11 Nov 2002
Hewlett-Anderson
Hewlett-Anderson may be the best cover band I've ever heard. Don't believe me? Maybe I'm Amazed
Posted at: 09:07 | permalink
Sun, 10 Nov 2002
More on Web/GUI conundrum
Russell Beattie continues the thread on the Web/GUI interface design difficulties:
So here's my summary of what I'm thinking the way to design UIs are:
1. Document centric
2. No dialog boxes or "hidden" options
3. Able to describe any point in the application in a hierarchical manner
4. Minimal widgets
5. Minimal menu items
6. Data not tied to UI
7. Specific entry and exit points
No dialog boxes? Are the compromises worth it? If I don't have dialog boxes, the implication is that 1) I've got to partition the available screen real estate to acccommodate the dialog interaction, ie. much the way an IDE uses object inspectors to display and change characteristics of an object, or 2) I've got to have the main window be monopolized by the dialog interaction, like the web, or even worse... 3) I'm going to paint half the user interface off of the screen and force a scroll to discover navigation (my personal favorite in web apps) ;-> Keep in mind, those latter two options make document-centricity difficult because the dialog interaction gets mingled with the document.
Able to describe any point in the application in a hierarchical manner? While Randy Pausch at CMU's HCII lab will tell you that Bill Gates has ensured that everybody is comfortable with hierarchy, I still believe there's a time to flatten the hierarchy. The canonical example? Google. I think I heard Nielsen say that search is becoming the defacto navigation method; moving that into the GUI space is something that could yield real improvement.
Minimal widgets? While I'll admit that widget hackery has become an art-form practiced by a wide array of UI engineers, and that there's a point of diminishing returns on usability (discoverability?) when the number of UI widgets gets beyond a certain basic set, I still believe that the set in use on the web is not enough.
I think I understand what you're trying to get at but you have to watch that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are entire classes of problems that cannot be solved without some of these widgets.
For instance, how do you represent a multi-select list view on the web? You hack together your own table with checkbox for the item selection. That's certainly more intuitive than windows list view mouse semantics which conist of single select with a left click and ctrl and shift modifiers meaning add to selection and select range, respectively. However, with the web you have none of that. This leads every designer to invent their own table/checkbox row selection semantics and that's just for the single select case.
What about multi-select? Most designers implement a mother of all checkboxes checkbox in the checkbox column's title header which means select all. Random group selections are possible since you can select more than one checkbox but range selections are not. Don't think you need range selection? Think again. I've been designing GUI interfaces for over 10 years and I haven't worked on a single application that didn't require range selection for some collection of objects. In a list of 1000 objects, it would be painful without that capability.
Data not tied to UI? I'm not sure what you mean here. If the intended meaning is encapsulation, then I'm confused how that would impact the user interface. If the intended meaning is that you're not fond of the "data is the UI" school of design, then I'm not sure that I agree. I'll let this one go for a little clarification.
There are a couple things that I think can help with this design problem.
I've used the UI Design patterns on a variety of occasions and find them useful to clarify my thinking about interface design options in the same way that gang of four book did for the internal design of software.
A recurring theme in this discussion is that of designing for existing use precedent vs. naivete. That's a tough balance to strike. I believe Nielsen's view in the context of web design is that you should go with the precedent, if it's widely implemented on major sites, even if the resulting design is suboptimal.
A critical distinction may be that novice users (most users?) don't discern between memory and disk operations, ie. what is running and what is not. To the extent that the browser's page navigation model masks this distinction, it's useful. That's probably one of the advantages of homebase desktop. It's also the typical model that PDA's use. Why would a user care to distinguish? Because resources are limited.
What's needed is a stateless model that allows users to launch applications without worrying about what's running and what's not. The problem with existing desktop models is that the apps generally have state that will be lost if an app is closed prematurely which leads to the hideous save/close/cancel dialogs. Stateless and stateful applications are really the essence of the web/desktop dichotomy. Granted, there are examples that go against the grain, but they are in the minority.
In the long-term, it's my general view and hope that the web will remain intact for what it's really good at - displaying rich hyperlinked documents. I'd like to see applications that require database backends move toward a web services architecture which permits a variety of rich interface options beyond the browser's rather limited pallette. Fortunately, the tools, wireless adoption, and the proliferation of laptops are encouraging this migration.
In the context of the work that I do, we've been moving in this direction for some time, using SOAP interfaces that support HTTP GET and POST to provide a single set of interfaces that are easily addressable from both browser-centric applications and rich GUI applications. Then, the approach can be tailored to the application, and install/config headaches with rich GUI apps go down over time with approaches like java web start, .net, and XWT.
By the way, it's not a widely held view that user's experience with online banking is as smooth as your mother's. :)
Posted at: 08:27 | permalink
Sat, 09 Nov 2002
Mind Electric Glue To Apache Axis
I am pleased to report that my migration from Mind Electric Glue to Apache Axis is well under way.
The Apache Axis team has done a fantastic job of putting together an excellent 1.0 release. And I'm especially thrilled that I can deploy easily on jetty without the weight of a full-blown J2EE server. You may wonder why I abandoned glue. Well, after upgrading to their 3.2 release, I discovered that the config.xml and related descriptors that need to be deployed in a standalone glue app simply don't work. My pleas to the electric support group went unanswered and so I'll be porting all of our SOAP code to Axis on monday. I've had enough, I'm saying when. Chalk one up for free software.
Glue was great while it lasted but they went totally awry with 3.2 release, making it a pain in the ass to deploy standalone java apps and without source, it's pretty much a black box when you get a null pointer exception. I value simplicity, particularly when it comes to deployment. Deployment descriptors are overrated, especially when the code can reflect a lot of the details at runtime. If I need to set parameters, I'll do it in the code, thanks. The declarative vs. imperative approach is fine, but let me make the choice. Don't force me to use the damn descriptors when I have better things to be concerned about. These java libraries could gain a lot from merely emulating SOAP::Lite.
I've got Axis 1.0 running under Jetty 4.1.3 now. I am able to deploy the Calculator sample successfully:
public class Calculator {
public int add(int i1, int i2)
{
return i1 + i2;
}
public int subtract(int i1, int i2)
{
return i1 - i2;
}
}
as http://localhost:8080/axis/Calculator.jws
I'm able to invoke it via HTTP GET:
http://localhost:8080/axis/Calculator.jws?method=add&i1=2&i2=3
and get back the correct answer: 5. And finally, I'm able to run the following perl client against it using SOAP::Lite:
use SOAP::Lite;
my $service = SOAP::Lite->service('http://localhost:8080/axis/Calculator.jws?wsdl');
for ($i = 0; $i <= 9; $i++) {
for ($j = 0; $j <= 9; $j++) {
print $service->add($i,$j);
print "\t";
}
print "\n";
}
and get the proper table:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Posted at: 01:16 | permalink
Fri, 08 Nov 2002
PDA
In some places PDA doesn't mean Personal Digital Assistant. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought John Ashcroft was an assistant high school principal. ;->
Posted at: 00:41 | permalink
Spaces, GUI, and Browsers
Russell Beattie points out that Diego Doval has an email/PIM app called spaces that looks fairly promising. I wonder what this means for Mitch Kapoor's effort.
Russell also makes some commentary regarding his mother's relative ease of use with the web browser versus traditional Graphical User Interfaces.
Russell says, "People, in my humble opinion, have been given too many options in normal UIs. Browsers which limit those options are actually better. My mom can use a browser: Home Page, links, Back, Forward, Favorites, Forms, Address bar. Period. But she normally has trouble with regular UIs which have a different way of doing things for each screen, pop-up box, etc."
I believe this analysis is a bit off the mark, particularly considering that interface standards are generally much better defined in the OS GUI world than they are in the web world. The GUI world has a design guideline for every platform currently in broad use including Windows , Macintosh, and Unix. The web has Jakob Nielsen. If it weren't for his stop the insanity crusade, the web would consist of 2 billion pages of flash splash screens and javascript pop-unders. As it is, a fair number of designers I've worked with still aren't familiar with Nielsen's work. When I designed Windows software, the WIGSD was de riguer.
Comparing the browser's interaction model with other GUI applications is apples and oranges to a certain extent. A fairer comparision would be to examine user's experience with a single part of the application, say the tools/options dialog in both Explorer and Microsoft Word. Another way to level the comparison would be to compare a dialog interaction with a similar web form.
The browser becomes monolithic for most novices these days and thus, so does the navigation model. The browser's page stack back/forward model provides an answer to the discoverability of z-order for novice users in a similar fashion to the way that task bars have done the same for desktop users. In addition, most novices use a very small percentage of the browser's options, just as they would in a word processor. The difficulty comes when they need to go outside the most rudimentary browsing.
The homebase desktop folks have actually taken this idea to it's logical conclusion and implemented the browser's navigation model as the operating system's desktop. While there's some reason to believe that this may be an easier way for novice users to navigate their operating system, it can be incredibly frustrating for experienced computer users. Don't believe me? Try it yourself.
Posted at: 00:20 | permalink
Thu, 07 Nov 2002
MIT Media Lab's Cynthia Breazeal on HRI at CMU
Bryan and I went to see Cynthia Breazeal of MIT's Media Lab speak at CMU's HCII last night. It was an interesting talk that centered around her experience conducting research into human robot interaction. She explained two projects: Kismet and Leonardo. Check out the links for more info. I don't think we're going to get into designing robots anytime soon but the talks at CMU are always mind expanding drugs.
Also, this is my first post using the composite editor for mozilla that was recommended by brad choate. Not quite as slick as xopus, but it beats the hell out of editing in text mode. A tip of the hat to brad for the recommendation.
Posted at: 18:46 | permalink
Mon, 04 Nov 2002
It's Getting Cold In Here
I find increasingly that I can't do anything when I'm cold - not warmed up. I'm listening to the minidisc recordings of the gig we played saturday night and thinking, "this is horrible". It's out of tune, the tone sucks, etc. Then, I realilze that I just agreed to sing on a christmas album that a friend of mine is doing. Yikes.
I've known for years that I can't hit a golf ball cold, I can't write code cold, and I can't play music cold. I play golf better on the back 9, I write code best late in the evening after all of the office distractions are gone, and indeed, the third set at the gigs I play is far better than the first.
I guess I need to think about that warmup process. Maybe that's why I sit here for most of the morning every day drinking coffee - it's the ultimate brain warmer. ;->
Posted at: 10:17 | permalink
Fri, 01 Nov 2002
Vince Paterra's Pumpkin Art
My friend Vince Paterra has a real gift for pumpkin art. He's going to do a portrait of our boss next.
Guess who?
Posted at: 23:15 | permalink
