An SQL query walks into a bar. He approaches two tables and says, Mind if I join you?
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Category: General
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Good Help is Hard to Find
One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.
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Metric Mania
the problem of reasonable aggregation is no idle matter
via The Way We Live Now – Metric Mania – NYTimes.com.
the “extreme and hypothetical” illustration is quite good.
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Usability of iPad Apps and Websites
This report is based on usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad.
We are making this report available for free to support our loyal audience of usability enthusiasts by providing them with early empirical data about iPad usability. This report is less thorough than our normal research reports and does not contain as many detailed and actionable design guidelines as we usually provide. We decided to publish the report anyway (as a donation to the community) because all experience from the last 30 years of usability shows that early usability findings have disproportionally large impact on design projects.
via Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: First Research Findings.
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How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell
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A Form of Madness – Dive Into HTML5
Everybody knows about web forms, right? Make a <form>, a few <input type=”text”> elements, maybe an <input type=”password”>, finish it off with an <input type=”submit”> button, and you’re done.
“If you board the wrong train, its no use running along the corridor in the other direction,” said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. Its the “standard model” of information technology organizations — the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business [1], meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.
via Run IT as a business — why thats a train wreck waiting to happen.
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When was your last restore?
But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.
via Let’s stop talking about “backups” – Joel on Software:
Twice in October on the home machine – dead internal drive.
The 2 major websites moved off of our servers, but before they moved I did a test restore every 4-5 months.
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Single-Application Mode
Having returned from an archeological dig into the dark history of Mac OS X, I’ve unearthed a feature that could change the way you interact with your applications, enabling you to focus on one or two more easily than in the past.
via TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Revealing Mac OS X’s Hidden Single-Application Mode.
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Forcing an IP Address
In the “real” world you simply add an entry to /etc/hosts like
1.2.3.4 myhost
The Mac OS X world is different. For version 10.5 and later you do the following
# Create the mapping
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z IPAddress 127.0.0.1
# flush the cache
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
# Show the mappings
sudo dscl localhost -readall /Local/Default/Hosts
# Delete a mapping
sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache