World Usability Day 2008 November 14
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“Today is World Usability Day
| Welcome message by Bill Gates - “It’s about making our world work better. It’s about ‘Making Life Easy’ and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a wa
“ Yeah, and a doorknob could be as easy as a door handle.. geez, these Yankees.. |
OODA Loop 2008 July 22
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I talked (ok, IM:ed) with Anders last friday, just before I got on vacation, and for some reason we started talking about PAD (Pen and Paper Aided Design). I googled the phrase, and to my dispare, I got my own post as the top hit. Ok, hoped the idea was a little more spread.
Anyhow we also got talking about product development and complexity, and I sphew out a lot of stuff. But I realized that everbody should read about the OODA Loop by John boyd. I saw “Generation Kill” s01ep02 today and I thought I heard the “Godfather” say something like ” .. and I can quote Boyd ..”. You wish! :-) I wonder how many of the marines that understand Boyd. But anyhow, it’s good stuff for most of us.
Also, do listen to Uffie! Thats not a recommendation, it’s a must! Of course, it’s her on the Justice album on the song “Tthee pparty” or whatever it’s called.
To much to fast to tired 2008 July 11
Posted by pethol in Development.add a comment
Little to much, to fast, to tired.
I created a new project - and namepace - today. I moved some files from another namespace into the new project, and changed their namespace. Apparently it was a little to much, a little to fast, and possibly I was a little to tired :-)
Book (manga!) recommendation 2008 June 17
Posted by pethol in Development, Friends, Stuff.1 comment so far
Me and Samme kinda started like this sort of book club. And in this book club, we don’t read the same book at the same time. We kind of just share them. So we finally got aroud (me) and bought a couple of books. Naturally we bought one book from the recommendation list of Jeff Atwood (www.codinghorror.com), namly .. og wait, it’s not on the reading list, but mentioned in one of his posts.. “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” by Robert L. Glass. I’ve only started very mildly on it, but it seams really great, and will help me settle some arguments with non CS people.
The other one I saw on a post on Presentation Zen, anpther great blog. This one is called “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko“. A fast read peace of ok drawn manga, but a great little book! REally liked it, and so did Samme. The 6 tips that johnny recieves in the book about ‘careering’ is not the american business type of tips, but rather genereal and abstract. I have this idea, that I’m going to pick each one of those, and in a zen-quizy way make a post about software development based for each one. Let’s see how that turns out in the next post, and the tip “There is no plan”. Facinating, is it not?! ;)
Johnny Bunko can be bought for us in Sweden from Bokus, and thats were I got ours from. The price is in pair with amazon or whatever.
Time to do my part of the sharing 2008 May 28
Posted by pethol in Pen and paper aided Design, Stuff.2 comments
It’s time to do my part of the stuff that Genne talks about. About sharing knowledge and information. I kinda’ have the idea that I must post something at least every week. Previous I posted about every month or so.
First thing I like to share, is the pen and paper I’m using write now. What?! you might think, pen and paper in our fine and digital world. PAD - Paper Aided Design should not be forgotten. Incredibly fast and easy to use in collaborative settings. And I use it for noting when I’m on the phone. Also, for me, what I write, and what I write on i important, and writing and sketching can be an aesthetic experience.
So, I went down to the local bookstore (last time they gave me a student rebate stamp card sort of thing. C’mon! I look more professional than that!?). And I bought four pens, and I previously got notebook. I prefer gel pens, and most of those that I encounter comes from Pilot. I now have 5 pilot pens and 3 or so uses gel.
The notebook is a little special. It’s a A3 notebook from Whitelines which have white lines on gray paper. Sounds unnecessary and expensive, and sure, you probably pay more than it costs. Still I find the notebook real nice, and I like the gray paper.
So, I can recommend the notebook from Whitelines, and I also recommend the Pilot G-Telematic 0.7mm gel pen. Just watch out for pen thiefs!
Do comment code! 2008 March 25
Posted by pethol in Development, Friends.add a comment
Genne has started to blog about coding, and thats great! Really nice to read, and his posts is full of enthusiasm. But, he came to the conclusion that one shouldn’t comment code. And thats wrong in my opinion. Here’s why.
Commenting code isn’t as much about pinning down knowledge, as it is communication. And when it comes to communication, redundancy is almost never a problem :) and you can never be clear enough. A well written method header and comments inside the method or function, is a much faster way of communicating the ideas and behavior of a method - for the people who maintains your code. And for the sake of misunderstanding.. I can see two major cases here. One, there are comments, but they are somewhat wrong because the code changed but not the documentation. The second case is no documentation at all. And then there’s the situation for the reader. He/She might misunderstand correct documentation (happens all the time), but can then try to read the code. Or, he/she reads the comments and they are faulty, and then tries to read the code. And in the third case, with no comments, the user must read the code, and, as well as before, the user may misunderstand or simply don’t get it.
And another thing, without documentation, I might misunderstand the code I’m reading and think that I find defects or suboptimal solutions.
And then there’s the case with APIs that you don’t have the code to… Ok ok, thats another story.
But hey, you can’t possibly mean that I shouldn’t document my Assembly code, do you? Super haxxor might read and understand ASM as I understand English, but the vast majority don’t.
Saying that documenting/commenting code is wrong, is saying ‘I don’t care if other people are able to read my code, and if they don’t understand their lazy and dumb’. And thats lazy and dumb :-)
So, of course, don’t comment/document every little simple thing, and mind that some documentation won’t be accurate / should be updated. But instead document what others need to know about your code.
Using your Office 2007-effect-pimped objects elsewhere 2008 February 2
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I like the new effects that Office 2007 brought on, like reflection and soft shadows. I use that sometimes to make nice presentations or for images in documents. Totally Art-deco, but still nice ;-)
So, the other day, I pimped my company’s PowerPoint template a bit with among others a part from our logo with reflection, shadows, and rotation. I also wanted to put this thing onto the webpage as an image. And since the webpage only have gradient background images, I needed to keep the transparency information. But how?
First idea was to screen shot the image and then transform the back color to a transparency. This turned out ok, using Gimp’s function “Color to Alpha”.
Better yet, copy-paste the object to your favorite paint program (Paint.Net). But this also required me to fake the alpha info.
But then! If I copied the object to Word, put it inside a Drawing Canvas, and then, copied it and pasted it into Paint.Net I got the alpha channel intact! The problem here is to get the object inside the drawing canvas. Copy the object, make sure canvas is large enough, then select the canvas, and past the object. Repeat until success.
But hey, I couldn’t get it to work just now. I added a second object, a square. I selected both and then copied. Worked some.
Moved the X next to the square and selected it. Didn’t work.
Selected both the X and the square, but with the X at the side. Worked. At last!
Got it!
Drawing and sketching 2007 August 1
Posted by pethol in Projects, Visualization.add a comment
A couple of weeks ago, before I went on vacation, I made an overview sketch of a system on paper. It was meant both as an overview for me as developer, and to show to the one who ordered the system. I like drawing, and almost always sketch with pen and paper before working a la digital. Visio have these really cute figures and icons, so I wanted to make a visio version of the my pen and paper sketch. This way I could share the sketch and so forth. But despite the cute icons and stuff in visio, and thanks to my way of using visio (i guess ;), the result is far from as cute as the PAP version.
Really wish I had a scanner and a smart software to interpret the image :-) The images here are from my mobile phone’s camera, so quality varies.
