Happy 22!
That's a little geek humor. See, 01/01/10 is 22. Get it?
You know, like, "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't"?
Right. Starting off the year well, I can see....
This may actually be funny.
My CCMBA class includes students from 30 countries, in every part of the world. Consequently, Duke has created a Flash-based Web portal, through which we take exams, submit assignments, attend classes, and keep in touch. The thing has worked more or less as advertised since we arrived in London two months ago.
By tomorrow at 23:59 EDT, we must hand in our Accounting and Management exams. We have 24 hours from download to complete the former, and 90 minutes to complete the latter.
Can you see where this is going? Of course you can:
See, as a Cubs fan, this doesn't bother me so much. There's always next year.
Update: Tech support just emailed me back. Apparently they had a hardware failure in one of the server rooms, and the infrastructure guys are on it.
Update, 13:30 CDT: The platform is back up. Here we go...let the exams begin.
Update, 13:35 CDT: They did a fu@!ing upgrade! During exams! Unbefu&@ingleivable.
Final update, 13:55 CDT: OK, it looks like they did a rollback to a known-working version of the platform, not a upgrade. That makes a lot more sense. I will just assume that, because it's exam week and I've had a little more caffeine today than usual, I might have some extra nervous energy that caused me to jump to hasty conclusions. I will now walk the dog, take some deep breaths, and start the first exam.
(By way of explanation why I'm being wery wery qwiet today.)
Actually, I'm hunting financial accounting (Duke) and bugs (client). Like this one, which shows one of the perils of refactoring. See if you can spot my stupidity:
Original code
private void OldMethod
{
bool canChangeThing =
(
_isCompany |
_isClient &
(
someConditionA == true |
someConditionB == true
)
);
if (canChangeThing)
{
// do stuff
}
}
Refactored code
private bool CanChangeThing
{
get
{
return (
_isCompany |
_isClient &
!(null == _thing) &&
(
someConditionA == true |
someConditionB == true
)
);
}
}
private void OldMethod
{
if (CanChangeThing)
{
// do stuff
}
}
Fixed bug
private bool CanChangeThing
{
get
{
return (
_isCompany |
(_isClient &
!(null == _thing) &&
(
someConditionA == true |
someConditionB == true
)
)
);
}
}
private void OldMethod
{
if (CanChangeThing)
{
// do stuff
}
}
The sound you hear is me hitting my head on my desk until it stops hurting.
The following photo shows a programmer, a usability expert, and an IT manager struggling to figure out how to add players to a bowling game using AMF's scoring software. I don't even remember the sequence we had to go through, but I do remember thinking (a) on average, we were sober; and (b) software that makes something so simple take so long should be punishable...in some appropriate way.
On the other hand, one doesn't go to a bowling alley because of the software they use. On the first hand, however, bad software makes everything less fun.
And yes, Virginia, Bengt (right) is wearing a custom-made bowling shirt. One of the other bowlers gave it to him for his birthday, which is how I came to be at a bowling alley, and sometime later that evening, at a seriously hard-core karaoke bar. Tambourines were involved, I recall...
Via Sullivan, I suddenly feel very old:
We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older.
So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters.
Wait! I'm not 40 yet! And I see just fine, with a little help.
This, on the day that I took a final exam in a class (Introduction to Microeconomics) in which every other student was younger than half my age. Yes, there were about 50 of us in there, and the day the Berlin Wall fell down I was older than they are now.
Sigh.
I had thought about writing a long entry on another technical aspect of the new version of Weather Now, but for the first time in weeks it's sunny and 20°C, and I just finished a final exam in economics. So, off to the dog park.
All y'all waiting for the lengthy technical stuff will just have to wait until it rains again.
Update: In the meantime, why not scratch your head, as I did, over meat business cards? Hmmm....
Arriving home this evening, after three days in San Francisco and frequent email checking while there, Outlook presented me with 295 unread messages (not counting the hundreds of messages in my spam filter). Of these, almost all were on my RSS reader—75 Facebook status updates, 50 posts from Andrew Sullivan, etc., etc.
It's amazing how much better you can feel after hitting <Ctrl>+A, right-click, "Mark As Read". Problem: solved.
Still, I hate feeling like I missed something....
The vernal equinox happened about two hours ago. Typical of this time of year, though, it's below freezing this morning in Chicago. Nature nerd Naomi has more from the wilds of northern Lake County.
Of interest to possibly no one, for the last two years I've worked on the innards of my flagship demo project, Weather Now. I'm now putting together a new user interface for it. The new version 3.5 UI, which you can see at http://beta35.wx-now.com/, looks a lot like the old one—for now.
So what's new? I've rewritten from scratch the core framework, geography and weather code, and the basic UI framework. The beta (version 3.5) looks nearly identical to the current (version 3.1) application, except that the trained eye will notice new features where the ground-up re-write peeks out.
Sometime before the end of July, I hope to finish the next version (4.0), which will have an entirely different database structure. (Version 3.5 uses the same database as the current version through a façade.)
Exciting? Probably not. But it's how I keep my saw sharp.
I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 3-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page two years ago, so I thought it's time for a quick review.
Here are the main topics on the Daily Parker:
- Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
- Politics. I'm a moderate-leftie by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
- Software. I own a micro-sized software company in Chicago, Illinois, and I have some experience writing software. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.
- The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
- Chicago, the greatest city in North America.
This is public writing, too, so I hope to continue a standard of literacy (i.e., spelling, grammar, and diction) and fluidity of prose that makes you want to keep reading.
So thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the blog.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen takes a look at Kindle 2 usability in his column today:
[T]he device is best for reading long linear material, such as novels and some non-fiction. Kindle's best user interface feature is turning the page; the reading experience you design should require no other interactions.
Writing linear books simply requires a skill that all good authors already possess: the ability to keep readers immersed in the plot.
Kindle also works well for the long, narrative articles common in certain literary magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. No surprise that The New Yorker is currently the best-selling magazine for the device.
... [But] it's awkward to interact with the device through its 5-way controller. Also, after every selection, you're doomed to wait for a sluggish response. And, once you finally get something, you get very little because of the small screen. Setting aside the header and footer areas, Kindle 2's content area is 525x650 pixels, or 341 kilo-pixels. In contrast, a mid-sized PC screen is 1280x1024, offering 999 KP of content, or the equivalent of three Kindles.
Given these constraints, navigating non-linear content on Kindle feels much like navigating websites on a mobile phone. Kindle content designers should therefore follow mobile usability guidelines for many user interface issues, including the presentation of article pages.