When our grandchildren look back on the late and early 20th century – the dawn age of computing and the information revolution, they will see a company called Microsoft writ large across it. Just how large is difficult to grasp until you compare the profits that Microsoft makes from their nearly unchallenged monopoly. Now compare these profits to the amount of innovation displayed by Microsoft in the marketplace. Who is this a problem for? I thin…
Cultural issues and technology are subtle things so I may be barking up the wrong tree, but on my recent trip to Japan, I met some teenagers who told me that they didn’t know much about computers (I’d told them that I design web sites. They were not impressed). Instead, they use their phones for almost everything. Why didn’t they use computers? The answer seemed to be that they didn’t need to, so had no interest in them. Computers are big, phones…
There are some posts that no real blog can be complete without, and that is some opinion about Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now and it occurs to me that I should write up something on it. Not that anyone’s asked, but then that’s what blogging is all about really isn’t it? I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for no reason other than I wanted to see what it was like. I kept my Windows install in place on a dual-boot just in case, but…
There are too many methods of designing digital media. We currently have “agile” (hip, groovy) at one end and “waterfall” (a term of abuse) at the other. Each of our projects at LBi inhabits a space somewhere in between these two extremes at any one time – although because we’re an agency it’s mostly just different takes on waterfall. There have recently been some laudable attempts to be hip and groovy, although I’ve not yet had the pleasure of t…
I will not be buying shares in Joost any time soon. This is not because they don’t have a good product – having been on their beta testing swarm for the last few months, I think it’s quite nice really. The trouble is, according to the Guardian they will be getting their content from media owners based on a lie. The lie is as follows: “… Joost boasts a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform, and is guaranteeing copyright protection for …
… Toronto Zoo Finding any Cope in the bargain bin it always a good thing. Nice one, Brother, Ben Gilmore Big fan of the Cope… I think my favourite still has to be Ye Skellington Chronicles. Saw him live once were he came on stage wearing Y-fonts, yellow wellys and a a police jacket….
I took out one of those incredibly dodgy-looking “100% cashback” mobile phone deals last year. Much to my surprise – it seems to have worked. £35 a month for a 12-month T-Mobile contract with 200 free any time/any network minutes per month. The handset was free too – a K700i. I didn’t go over my 200 minute limit, but did spend some money on texts. I think I ended up spending maybe £20 over the year (a couple of mistaken calls to 0800 numbers I th…
So the BBC is now the latest broadcaster to sign a deal with the force that is YouTube. Right now, the Beeb (and CBS, NBC and Fox) are all saying that YouTube is a “promotional vehicle” for them. Nothing to do with their core programming or anything like that. OK, and what about all those naughty uploads that were on YouTube before the agreement? “We don’t want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us…
… Eikoku Yes – it is pretty cool indeed. Eikoku Update your blog. It’s been days now ……
I like Flickr more every time I go there. I like it so much I’m now paying for it just as soon as my PayPal echeque clears. As a rule I pay for nothing in life if I can possibly help it. This alone is a measure that they are doing the right thing. And here’s one reason I like them even more. Today, in their news announcements, they said this: ” In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr BetterTM, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximu…
Those groovy people at AKQA are so groovy they are even in Second Life. Here’s a picture of me in their lounge, marvelling at the slideshow on the wall. And here’s one of me leaving a groovy comment. Although quite deserted (it’s a Saturday night after all – they’ll be at home looking at their KPIs), it’s all very groovy, as I’ve said. I’d better stop now because for all I know we’ll be merging with them in a few months time and I’ll have to be n…
Having taken this photo while waiting for our kid to chomp through a McDonald’s Kids Meal at new year (mea culpa – but it’s the winging, really), I’ve just noticed another frankly amazing example of a nutritional content “explanation.” This time, it’s on the cardboard sleeve of a pot of Sainsbury’s Cornish clotted cream (again, don’t ask). Here is a pack shot, and here is a close-up of what Sainsbury’s are calling the “Wheel of Heath” printed in …
Most people don’t know that under UK law, it is currently illegal to copy music from (say) a CD you have bought, to your own MP3 or other music player. As a result of a petition to Downing Street organised the Open Rights Group, the government has responded positively to the suggestion that we should perhaps not be thrown in prison for making copies of stuff that we own. “As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announc…
… Originally uploaded by Gilgongo. I don’t often travel on the tubes, but this must confuse the hell out of tourists! I wonder why they did it like this? Seems to be the case all along the line – well, as far as Camden anyway I think. …
Just posted this to Sig-IA in reply to somebody wanting some examples of good tag clouds (see also my earlier venture). I’m sure the following will be wonderfully arcane in about 10 years time. I was looking at movietally.com the other day. While it’s not exactly a shining example of good design overall, the use of the tag cloud struck me as particularly good when applied to the movie pages. The cloud here is much more effective than reading a sy…
It being near the end of the year, I find myself in retrospective mode, so I’ve got an excuse not be very topical in reviewing Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, written back in May this year. I’ve just finished reading it (it’s that long – doesn’t the NYT have editors?) and I can’t resist a pop. Kelly says some interesting things about the future of digitised books. For example: “Turning inked letters into electronic dots that…
Now this is interesting. Kaoru has been working on a site that allows you to upload videos – and schedule them. I like to think of myself as a contrarian (well, until it becomes uncomfortable), and there’s something about this site that tickles my contrarian fancies. Timeshifting, PVR-fuelled, 24-hour living is all the rage, and this is of course tearing society apart as we know it, obviously. But nobody, until now, has had the courage to explore…
I’ve recently been using StumbleUpon more, and although it’s fun, it’s not as fun as putting interesting strings into Google to see what turns up. For example, using this: “parent directory ” MP3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums and this: ?intitle:index.of? mp3 Brings up all sorts of interesting stuff. The University of Buffalo’s mouth and throat singing archive is wonderful. Compare and contrast this Tuvan classic (Borbannadir…
I’ve been reading 37 Signals’s book Getting Real on line. This caused a bit of stir when it came out as it self-consciously throws out the rule book(s) on application development and looks firmly towards the new dawn of Web 2.0, and (sort of) in the direction of an extreme “agile” methodology. All the rage. I have no doubt that if I were them, I would do things much as they describe. Don’t document – just start building. Don’t have meetings – jus…
I don’t read the Guardian much these days, but I’ve always known it as a broadsheet with a sense of humour. Their printing today of this article, “written” by Mick Hucknall, and the inevitable comments about it on line, must be one of the funniest online occurrences this year. Hucknall (oh OK, it’s some music industry lawyer, but let’s just imagine) inexplicably steps into the copyfight on the side of “socialism” and then plays Alice in a Wonderl…
It’s not long now until 3 starts selling its X-Series in the UK. Hidden among the usual bundling and partnerships fluff (eBay, Skype, etc.) is a rather quiet, yet potentially cataclysmic feature: X-Series will have flat-rate pricing. So, after the glorious £4.3 billion they spent on their 3G license and the completely predictable failure of picture messaging and video calls after that; the lying to the City about their churn, and having to rely o…
One of the sites I read rather a lot is Boing Boing. Some over-enthusiastic web filtering software (and possibly some oppressive regimes) classifies Boing Boing as an undesirable site and blocks it. So, I’ve installed the Distributed Boing Boing proxy on this website. The URL for the proxy is http://www.webtorque.org/dbb.php Now might also be a good time to mention the fact that I installed a Tor server here as well a few months ago. Call me a ca…
I’ve been meaning to record my thoughts about seeing Christian Lindholm, head of Yahoo! Mobile (and former Director of Multimedia Applications for the Nokia Ventures) talking about “Mobile Usability” at the Neilsen Norman Group’s User Experience 2006 in London a couple of week ago. Firstly, let me state that I’m not exactly a mobile phone freak, but I do use the things quite a lot. My experience with most of them has been that usability is genera…
10 Downing Street, in conjunction with mySociety, have recently launched an on-line petition system where citizens can collect signatures for issues with which to petition the government. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to lend your support to petition set up by Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group: “Thousands of people own MP3 players which they have filled with copies of CDs that they have legally purchased, yet making this cop…
This graphic “explaining” what the BBC’s honeypot might have been employed to do had it been hijacked (which I assume it wasn’t – how boring) is all but pointless. While rather an extreme example, I think it highlights rather well what I’ve realised recently is the biggest single problem I have with graphical representations of things like this: relevance. For example, how relevant, if at all, are the pictures of “Net routers” in order to underst…
… I’m only barely aware of this meme, but it’s bubbling up from here, apparently. …
… Originally uploaded by Gilgongo. I’ve been at User Experience 2006 (London). Don Norman looks even more like Capt. Birdseye than normal, but he had some good things to say along with bashing Microsoft and spending rather too long talking about cars. A good day out I think – and one that also might need to see me revise my attitude to Alan Cooper. …
… As prophesied, the roll-out of IE7 via Windows Update started today, and as a “High Priority” update no less. Webmasters everywhere now need to be afraid. Well, afraid of those running legitimate copies of Windows, since the wording on the download mentions that it’s for those with “genuine installations” – so WGA will prevent the bewarezed from downloading it, I assume. Future IE6 users – by their browser version ye shall know them… …
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001. This week, one of the biggest and most damaging private monopolies in human history relented, and fully five years after, we now have their MSIE 7. I installed it today. Coincidentally, a couple of days before I heard that the 7 was out, I happend to read an interview with Jakob Nielsen (Interaction Design, Reece, Rogers and Sharp, 2002) in which he says: “My prediction has been that Expl…
I’ve become a bit of a tag cloud hawk recently, looking for examples of their use and what I think is abuse, or just plain old misunderstanding. My definition of a useful tag cloud is something that allows you to get a feel for the “mood” of the information tagged on a site. On the web, it’s traditionally been hard to communicate this in any other way apart from using numbers (for example with faceted navigation) or worse, plain old lists. So I q…
When designing an e-commerce site, it’s hard to avoid the payment form. For an industry barely a decade old, the payment page has a powerful mystique – associated as it is with high technology like i-frames, fraud, mysterious loss of life savings, and alien invasion. I was thinking about this last week after reviewing some work that the mighty Ash Gupta, interaction designer of repute, had done for us last month. His design eschewed the tradition…
He’s gone for the irony hat trick…! Boingboing reports on this article is about a man who has asked his daughter’s school to take Fahrenheit 451 off the curriculum because of its use of “bad language” and (for extra irony points) smoking, amongst other things. The incident is wonderful not least for the fact that he chose to lodge the complaint last week – which just happend to be the American Library’s Banned Books Week as well! I checked to see…
I’d hate to be responsible for a website like World Usability Day, but since I’m not – I can’t resist a cheap shot. It happens at all browser and text sizes in Firefox. We were trying to analyse this at work and we think that it’s something to do with some irregular text sizing issue. Works OK on MSIE, although if you reduce the text size you see the text in the effected panel first go smaller then briefly bigger for some reason. Odd. Probably fi…
… Webtorque has gone Pink for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I know it’s American, but breasts know no frontiers. …
I’m sure there’s a wittier subject line for this, but it’s hardly worth the effort. The project I’m currently working on has some “wizzy” interactivity planned, and verges on being a proper “rich Internet application” sometimes. As mentioned here before though, people like me working in the stultifying confines of a web development agency are sometimes wary of RIAs because there’s no accepted method of communicating their design to the Mongolian …
… Blogging from Flickr – I am so Web 2.0! Not sure why I’d want to blog many photos on Flickr, but you never know. Another benefit of moving to WordPress though: at least I can. Assuming it works – which, if you’re seeing this – it has! …
I’m a bit late with this, but last weekend’s Slashdot discussion of this article on the ZDnet blog was interesting, if somewhat awe-inspiring in so far as some of the opinions expressed about designers (and the software development process in general) were breathtaking stupid. Ever since I got preview of Expression and the wonders of XAML last year, I’ve been wondering about the effect of elevating UI design to the same (at least practical) level…
… I’ve been keeping half an eye on Slashdot’s tagging beta since they gave me access to it a few months ago. Despite reading the explanation, I’m rather unsure as to where it’s going to go: (Good opportunity for me to try this new image-popping WordPress plugin…) …
Golly – it’s about time I wrote down something about user experience design, seeing as this is what this blog is suppose to be about. I’ve been doing some work for a site re-design, starting with user testing 24 people over two weeks. We asked them (a wide demographic) to use some currently live sites to see how they got on with them. Some people tested the client’s current site, others one of their competitors. There was only one task in the hal…
Microsoft’s “fastest patch ever” is interesting: If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don’t look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond’s DRM. One of the more stunning conversations I’ve ever had with a work colleague about the software we use went along the following lines once: Me: “Aaargh! Word’s so …
… Jonathan There’s no shortage of news on this in the tech sphere of course. During a four-day stretch, researchers at the Manheimm, Germany, honeynet project counted about 9,700 infections from a single command-and-control center and calculated that the attacker was making hundreds of dollars a day in commissions from DollarRevenue alone. That’s a pretty hefty business model they got there……
Welcome to a new Webtorque – now running WordPress. Drupal had fallen victim to the vagaries of software versions. For the geeks: I was running Webtorque on Drupal 4.4.2 (the current version is 4.7.3). This web server runs Red Hat Enterprse v3.2, which has PHP 4.2.2. Red Hat will not move RHEL 3 to a higher version of PHP, and versions of Drupal later than 4.5.8 won’t run on anything lower than PHP 4.2.3. So – clang! I’d hit the upgrade buffers. …
We’ve been on holiday in Scotland for a bit of Edinburgh Festival, visiting relatives and – amazingly – very good weather while it threw it down in London. I’ve had a cold, but am now better, and am thinking seriously about buying some Armor of God Pyjamas – not that the two are connected. Or are they? As an aside, there can’t be many ecommerce sites “salvation” as a link on the main navigation, and while greed is sin there seems to be nothing wr…
Alan Cooper: feted genius, father of Visual Basic and giant of user-centred design. Jonathan Baker-Bates: pitiful, microscopic nobody. But at least I’ve designed a few websites… I assume Alan Cooper hasn’t designed any significant web sites because Cooper Interaction Design only lists one in its case studies, and that is HP Shopping. Cooper (or more likely his acolytes) identified a needs-based persona and presumably designed for that and not any…
One of Microsoft Word’s biggest time-wasting functions is auto-numbering. This feature is actually an option which (of course!) is turned on by default. Hardly anyone knows this though, so most people struggle needlessly as auto-numbering rudely kicks in when they start a paragraph with “1.” It then usually refuses to actually number the other lines properly according to what the user wants, or to stop numbering when they want it to; or re-starts…
One of the less wonderful things about working as a permanent employee for a company larger than a certain size, is that you have appraisals every six months. And every six months both you, your line manager, and anyone you care to talk to about the appraisal system agree wholeheartedly that the experience is awful. Having passed through several companies, each with their own interpretation of what makes a good appraisal, I have the somewhat dubi…
… After years of trying to remember to give Technorati a go, I’ve finally now remembered. They make you put a link to them on your blog in order to get your blog listed. And so, while trying to ignore the snobbishness of all this, I hereby post my Technorati Profile. …
… OK I’ve listened to the recording now To be fair, Woodward appears to be describing one of the ancient worries about intrusion of privacy through the use of online useage information, so perhaps he’s not as guilty of technical ignorance as I first thought. However, I still think it’s a vapid comment unless he knows something that we don’t about government router sniffing or something. Until then, I’m fine with my anonymous usage info being used. …
… “I don’t think I’ve ranted here about what a pointless occupation ‘blogging is, nor why all ‘bloggers should be shot through the back of the head with a small bore rifle.” And so it is with rich irony and customary pointlessness, on a blog that nobody reads (and I have the Google Analytics stats to prove it!), that I link to the indefatigable Richard Lockwood’s, er, ‘blog! And thanks for the abbreviating apostrophe, if that’s what it is. …
Any normal person will of course have heard nothing about the recent merger between LBIcon (business consulting, branding, communication and technology services) with Framfab (web marketing, design and production) into the largest digital design, marcomms, branding and technology firm in Europe. Indeed, the newly-merged entity will rival that of the super giants of Digitas, Omincom and others that currently graze among the lush forests of digital…
I’m thinking of adding a new category of “copyfight” to this blog. There’s so much to write about! Hot on the heels of the AllofMP3.com news comes more news that the BPI wants to sue them! This after Tiscali is made to take down its juke box service. The BBC article above mentions that AllofMP3.com’s UK market share of online downloads is estimated as being 14%. Rise or fall now? I wonder. The Pirate Bay seems to be struggling to cope with demand…
I made some online music purchases today from AllofMP3.com. This was mainly because if the USA has its way, then the site may be taken down in preparation for Russia’s entry into the WTO. If you’ve not been there before, AllofMP3 is everything you ever wanted from Internet age commerce: dirt cheap goods sold legally (according to Russian jurisdiction), massive choice and as a finishing touch, stunning typos. Not surprisingly, a whole album for a …
As previously observed here, David Byrne and Brian Eno have not only recently re-released their My Life In the Bush of Ghosts album, but have also made all of the multitracks of two of the songs on the album free for re-mixing under a Creative Commons licence. Things are getting really interesting in this area. Eno and Byrne are the first artists of significant stature to do this as far as I know. This is what I think it might lead to at some poi…
… An announcement from the management: I’m getting so much comment spam now I’m going to have to turn off the anonymous posting or I’ll start missing the real posts. If you want to post, please create an account. I’m pretty sure this won’t matter since so few people read this blog anyway, and for those lovely people who have accounts – let me take this opportunity to say thanks. …
No blog is complete without some stultifying post about AJAX or some other generally asynchronous thing. As a user of the damn stuff it’s beginning to get me riled, but at the risk of adding more guff to the pile, two points occurred to me with some clarity the other day. Firstly, that whenever somebody mentions AJAX out of any context not bound strictly to discussions of the DOM and that godforsaken XMLHttpRequest object etc. etc. they are reall…
I was in Dallas last week. It’s a big place – it has the second largest airport in the world in terms of square mileage. Even the city is so big it gives you a feeling that hardly anyone’s there. We went there to observe some user testing of a prototype I’d created, and to conduct some marathon meetings with the client. We discussed, amongst other things, the juicy subject of how we’re to engage with the build team, etc. It struck me once again t…
… I love a good bit of historical perspective, and this Wired article is a good ‘un. I must admit to being a bit worried about people playing sudoku though. All that mental effort… why? …
… I commend you today to the “articles” section in the top right nav, where I humbly offer for your most worthy attention a treatise entitled “When the Internet is Gone.” It’s a load of rubbish, obviously, but it was fun to write. I’ll tighten up the bit about fall of the Rupee a bit later maybe. …
Recent events toward something collectively dubbed the “two-tier Internet” by journos have got me thinking about the future of the Internet again. Bear in mind Clay Shirky’s adage that whenever he thinks about what should happen, it prevents him from thinking about what will. The following is therefore not particularly considered against anything and is doubtless rooted in too many pre-conceptions, but what the hell. See what you think. Forward i…
I know the phrase “card sorting” either baffles, bores or does something else beginning with ‘b’ to almost everyone that hears it. Perhaps the most vocal source of information and critique of card sorting techniques recently has been the force that is Maadmob’s Donna Maurer. I recently caught her attention on this subject via comments on the blog of another Australian IA, Leisa Reichelt. Leisa had been blogging about her negative experience of ca…
… Thanks 1:48:35 – that’s a pretty miraculous time; without the beard it may have been even less! And six months is three months longer than you originally predicted – just make sure you keep that CD I lent you safe… Jonathan (above comment thread got mushed in the migration from Drupal to Wordpress, sorry)…
Music is like drugs – if you have a relationship with it at all it tends to be at its most intense when you’re young. But in common with most people of my age, I suppose I’ve drifted away from music as a passion to it being merely an occasional pastime. A CD on a Sunday afternoon, some backing music to a kids party… I feel this does most of what I like a huge injustice (and Axel’s friends must be amongst very few toddlers who have played pass the…
I have a rather sixth-form attitude to art. Something is art if a) I could not have thought of it myself (a standard that gets lower as I get older) b) it works on numerous levels and c) it says something to me or asks me questions I can’t answer, but I try to anyway, and fail. Crucifix NG gets a perfect ten on those things. If I had to pick out one aspect of this that fascinates me most: it’s made by a faith-based based organisation, yet has cle…
The absurdity of UK government agencies having to sell data back the very tax payers that paid for it has been going on ever since I was a lad. I’ve always regarded it as another one of the breathtakingly stupid things the Thatcher government did that, once done, could not be un-done. Like football hooliganism, chaotic public transport and the poll (now council) tax. But the Grauniad’s now come up with an interesting angle – and a campaign no les…
About once every six months or so, somebody on the otherwise excellent SIGIA mailing list posts to say they think there are too many “off topic” posts. This is invariably couched in some painfully lame justification – in this case appealing to us to “respect others” – but more usually assuming the mantle of “the silent majority” or some other hogwash. Naturally, I reminded them in my customarily restrained manner that they were idiots. Nobody too…
Somebody must be reading this blog. At least, I’ve now had postings and email on subjects as diverse as copyright, software and public speaking. I’ve even had to remove a posting after somebody complained! Surely it can’t get much better than that. I’m also particularly impressed that not one but two staggeringly famous multi-millionaire media and marketing liminaries have swung in from the ether in the last few months to ask my opinion on things…
I don’t write much about marketing, because I usually regard myself as somebody who designs systems for people, not profit. But lately I’ve been re-examining this because it’s hard to ignore Seth Godin. I watched Godin’s talk to Google this evening. In the past I’ve always regarded him as a bit of a marketing smoothie: how can the writer of Permission Marketing be anything else? But his talk has me thinking about that in a different way. You prob…
I suddenly recalled some billboard ads for O2’s i-mode launch last year and wondered: where’s the beef? I’ve been shopping around for a new handset and contract recently and don’t recall a single mention of i-mode on any of the spec sheets I’ve been reading. Maybe I’m not looking in the right price-bracket? i-mode has been massive in Japan, thanks largely to the near monopoly that NTT DoCoMo enjoys out there. Coincidentally, as I write this I rea…
At the beginning of the month, I posted a comment on one of Framfab’s public blog postings. It was, as usual, rather spur of the moment, in between coffee and the next round of application testing we’re doing. In it, I clipped some text I found around a quote from Naked Lunch that I was looking for. I originally just wanted the quote, but the text I found around it served my point rather well. I should have attributed it, but what happened next w…
I heard today that somebody I knew at Oyster Partners died a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t really know him, but I’d like to write something about him. I don’t know if this is the done thing or not – I hope his family and friends will excuse me. His name was Barnes Tilney. I spoke to Barns a number of times, and was present when he spoke to others. He struck me as an amusing, sharp and thoughtful person. I don’t know how long he had had lukemia, b…
I went to see Cory Doctorow and others on a panel organised by Free Culture UK last night. The subject was “Open Content” – a moniker given to the concept of digitisable works of either art or craft distributed under an alternative copyright licence (such as Creative Commons). Inevitably, a lot of ground was covered by the speakers, and one of the hottest topics of the evening was the recently-launched BBC’s Open Archive project. I wasn’t actuall…
I’d been only dimly aware of the “Amen Break” drum sample until now, although the sound, if not the rhythm itself is instantly recognisable. However, this video (34Mb MOV) puts the use of the sample into its fascinating social context. Anyone interested in music, popular culture and particularly the effects of recent copyright legislation, should see this. I get spammed by Zero-G every now and again as well. Bastards. Makes me want to download so…
… if it was made with real cat skin then it shouldn’t have been of cheap quality…
Blimey. You take your eye of your blog and what happens? More than a month goes by and you’ve not done a thing with it. I had an excuse: a pathetic new year’s resolution to only blog about positive things. And lo, I could think of nothing. But I’m not going to completely throw that out with the Christmas tree, because one of the undoubtedly good things that’s happend recently is Framfab’s blog. Framfab, you may recall, is the company I work for. …
The holidays now over, and even the first week at work done, I can now return to some good ol’ blogging now that we’ve bought a new car, almost tidied up our files (well, my files anyway – Kumi still just chucks all her papers under her desk and mumbles shoganai…) and packed up the plastic Xmas tree. My new year’s resolution (on my blog at any rate) is to think about more positive things. Too many of last year’s posts were cynical, negative rants…
… Blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. (This is impulse commenting) Normal service Will return after Xmas. Happy holidays everyone….
… I’m always late in on things, and this is no exception. But I’ve just put up a Shoutcast stream of the American Edit mashup tracks. First time I’ve done this, so hope it works. For a day or so anyway… …
Well I finally did it. I had no particular stimulus other than me being on holiday and saw a Slashdot post about a recent review of Linux distros for the desktop. They’d rated Ubuntu highest, so I went along to distrowatch.com and did some reading up. After downloading and burning the (single) ISO, I’m now running it. I always find descriptions of Windows to Linux migrations pretty boring, so I’ll lay off the details about how I got my printer wo…
I’ve just posted a rant on www.fool.co.uk about their awful site design. Hm. Feel a bit guilty. A bit soiled to be honest… I actually think the site’s content is fantastic. But the form of that content really, really stinks. The last straw was their announcement of some forthcoming “layout changes” which (I assume) have now gone live. In classic 1995 style, they’ve just made things worse. The site needs major surgery. I can imagine what it must b…
… Of course it’s too early to say, but I’d like to think that this is the beginning of the end for the music publishing industry. The terrible signal: too weak to even recognise… Unless you’re Madonna, Coldplay or U2, chances are that you’re not going to make money selling records. So let’s try something different here. …
… Found a pic Found a picture of that wheel (vidcap – hence poor quality)…
When you consider that IRC, chatbots, and whole instant messaging thing is now ten years old or more, then you’d think that AOL would at least get their new “AIMbot” adbot system out of the door without it being so utterly useless. But no. Who am I kidding? AOL, the worst ISP that has ever been, and will ever be, in the history of the world: purveyors of the most frantically confusing user experiences I have ever had, on line or off (yes, worse t…
… Wow. Sony BMG sure is having a bad, bad November. But this doesn’t really surprise me. Desperate times for music publishers will lead to increasingly desperate measures. It’s all part of the big flip. What did you do in the copyfight, Daddy? …
As luck would have it, my Internet connection went down yesterday. That’s not exactly a disaster because the only thing I could muster for World Usability Day (yesterday) was this: This is the password input screen for my online SIPP account. Part of me is glad it looks cheap, because it confirms that I’m not paying them to pay someone like me to design a fancy system. That said, I thought it was sufficiently novel example of a usecrime in progre…
I’ve always thought that everyone should nurse at least one heresy, and mine is that visual communications of complex ideas are almost always a load of cock. In the field of IA, this is most noticeable in the production of sitemaps, but it can be just as bankrupt for other artefacts as well. Here’s an example that flashed by me on my current project recently. Part of the design of an application called for the description of a “select tool” – muc…
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to find a better way of documenting designs. I’ve posted about this before, and I still think that Axure looks promising, but most of my IA life’s been based around Visio, some occasional PowerPoint – and on joining Oyster/Framfab – FreehandMX. None of these tools has really baked my cake when it comes to combining text with annotated graphics though. This is a shame because that’s what I’ve been do…
Incredible, amazing and funny as hell! US business-methods patents (and the people who pay money to bring them to the USTPO) just took another leap further into surreality – with Cereality! Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including “displaying and mixing competitively branded food products” and adding “a third portion of liquid.” If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereal…
When I was doing some user testing for A Very Large Company That Shall Remain Nameless, one of the questions we were asked to ask of the users was what, if anything, they thought about the fact that there was not one, but three terms of use links on the sign-up page to their service. Not surprisingly, just about all users said they wouldn’t even click on the links, let alone read the contents of them. One user was honest enough to say that even i…
Having spent three days writing one of the most rigorous and boring five-page documents of my life this week (a “Summary of Business Rules”), I decided that nobody was going to read the thing unless I could promise it to contain hidden Jane Austen references. This, I thought, would endear me to my classically-minded colleagues while turning them on to the finest points of whether hiding a shared Page transfers medico-legal responsibility to the P…
Coming home from work seems to be a time when I can think slightly creatively. This is a pity, since I’m paid to do that while I’m at work, but the sheer cacophony and chaos of the office I work in kills that stone dead about 20 mins after the morning coffee. Today, for instance, somebody’s PC fan started running in emergency cooling mode. This, combined with the telephones, keyboard tapping, seemingly constant car alarms and the (yes) children’s…
In an effort to make a visual change around here, I thought I’d start a collection of links to stuff in my new “Links” section on the right hand side. In true 1995 style, I’ve just saved the images out of a couple of sites. So say konnichiwa to Magnatune (and while you’re at it Brad Sucks), as well as the blog of my mate Kaoru – without whom none of this would be possible (probably). Update: I’m now being a little more sophisticated, having just …
Canadian law professors have produced a 600-page book that is being made freely available under a creative commons license in which they make the point that “The public’s interest in copyright, something inconceivable even a few years ago, is the result of the remarkable confluence of computing power, the Internet, and a plethora of new software programs, all of which has not only enabled millions to create their own songs, movies, photos, art, a…
OK, slightly misleading title: I’m not actually running Vista, I’m thinking whether I’ll ever run it. The other day I tried to think of one thing that WindowsXP Home Edition (the on that came with my new Dell) gives me that Windows98 didn’t have. I don’t consider myself a computer geek, just an interested party – but I could not think of a single thing. When I got my new Dell, I booted it up and winced at the slew of AOL, Tiscali Broadband, and o…
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!” Right on! I have a gun, I’m wearing a beret, and my daddy’s the richest man in America! After having a dig at crap on TV in my last blog post, I found myself watching the box for “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” on Monday night. I’d been vaguely aware of the Patty Hearst story, but this documentary really pulled me in close to the details and I found it fascinating. It w…
“At The Guardian,” writes today’s Sunday Times, “…they claim that they came up with the idea of a compact newspaper long before The Independent.” Well, I can confirm that it’s not just a claim, it’s a fact. What’s more, they even put out a prototype in 1994. Went to tea yesterday with Ben House, a friend of mine from way back; the power behind The Wire magazine and an astute observer of popular culture. He’d been going through some old papers whi…
… Earlier this year I took down the Tor server I was running, mainly because it was hoovering up rather a lot of bandwidth and throttling it down to the trickle that would have been necessary to keep under my bandwidth cap seemed a bit silly. I’ve now set it up again (nickname “Doormouse”) on one of our Hatters servers for the continuing good of all mankind (huzzah!). Wonder at the graph and bask in the glow of pure freedom – or something. …
I went to the Microsoft Campus yesterday to have an informal preview of some of the new Windows UI things to be announced next week (technically under NDA – so sue me). In the lead-up to Longhorn (now “Vista” – the next version of Windows), one of Microsoft’s aims is to make the role of UI/UX design as important as that of coding in the overall development process. This will be done by the introduction of the “Windows Presentation Foundation” und…
This blog post shows how chaotic the discipline of IA is (see the comments in particular). There’s not even a pretense of union, agreement or even polite tolerance of divergent views amongst the practitioners. I look at designs by other people and I feel almost bound by duty to pepper them with criticism. I even expect it in others: a senior colleague recently reviewed some work I’d done and drew large rings around some elements, writing the word…
Laurence Lessig’s written a great short piece (I didn’t know Americans could do that!) for Foreign Policy on the death of the public domain. He’s great at hitting the nail on the head. “There is no doubt that piracy is an important problem — it’s just not the only problem. Our leaders have lost this sense of balance. They have been seduced by a vision of culture that measures beauty in ticket sales. They are apparently untroubled by a world where…
For too long, login, registration and online point of sale processes have been designed either by IT business analysts who see users as UML symbols, or worse, by developers who don’t want to think about users at all. More often than not, information architects get frozen out. I’ve worked on loads of sites that had ecommerce or registration processes that for some reason were deemed out of scope for us. So we deliver a great experience up until th…
I bumped into SphereXP yesterday, which is one of the experiments in desktop management that’s been going on for a while (well, ever since Xerox PARC I suppose). Here it is running on my machine. If you have an interest in this sort of thing, I can reccommend you have a look. Whether it’s the future of OS interfaces I doubt, but it does give you the illusion of a larger monitor, and in the process shows you that perhaps trackerballs are the way a…
My BoingBoing feed had a story today about the Foxhills Golf Tournament’s sponsors. Being the letter-writing nutter I am, I thought I’d send in my views: I notice the hosts of Golf 2005 are the Alliance Against IP Theft. This is to let you know that I and many others do not regard the Alliance as anything other than a blight on contemporary culture; an attack on the rights of honest consumers and a hindrance to development in the third world. The…
There is a (possibly apocriphal – I’ve not checked it) John Lennon quotation: “Life is what happens when you’re making plans for other things” which is rather apt for me recently. For instance, I noticed that I’ve been blogging for more than a year now and that the anniversary (July 11th) completely passed me by. Not that this is in itself a wonderfully interesting event, but I did imagine I would be marking the date with a fantastic post on worl…
Once in a while you get “one of those moments” on a project. This time, it was courtesy of the off-shore developers we’re working with. I’ve inherited the acceptance phase from the first iteration of an application that was specced up before I got on the project (I’m picking it up on the second iteration). The requirements for iteration one are pretty simple, so I found it odd that while some aspects of the application were fine (the layout, menu…
… Here come the replies! This is fun. 20 replies so far! From the completely fished-in “Can you post your plans somewhere?” to (my favourite so far) advice about a “Licence to Crenellate” and “Face it, you just want to get away from the wife, don’t you?” Even something in… celtic? …
We had an email from HR on the company “fun” list today seemingly inviting all employees to listen to a popular music number called “Running Away’ by Roy Ayers.” Why, I don’t know. Out of lunchtime interest though, I was curious to find out whether we’d need a license to distribute music to employees. So I Googled about and got to PPL. Looks like we’d need to get one. Hmm. The phrase “screw you” came to mind. But even more surprising was the home…
I’m selling a shower rail on eBay, and a bidder has asked me how much it might be send to Germany. That should be easy to find out (indeed, why don’t they look it up themselves the lazy buggers?) I’ve got a vision of a nice form to fill out: dimensions, weight, destination, insurance, etc. And with this in mind I go to the Royal Mail. I go to City Link. I Google. The Royal Mail. One of those “stick a million links on every page” site. But “Send a…
… Seen on “overheardintheoffice.com”… http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/archives/000360.html Hmm… The washing machine The “the washing machine of communication” was something that I thought was rather descriptive at the time. It seems to have taken on a life of its own now, I see. However, “the janitorial chocolate delivery system” (also from my time at Warple Way) has not stood the test of time….
I’ve been fiddling with computers recently. It all started when my wife bought a video camera (Sony PC-110) with a DV output. Then I got a Firewire card. Then I tried to burn DVDs of my sister’s wedding. Then I f****ing tore my hair out and gave up. That was over a year ago, but time heals all things, and I returned to the quest to burn a DVD that could play on our DVD player in the living room. This time with film of my sister’s daughter’s chris…
I feel relieved that the European Parliament voted by 648 votes to 18 to reject the proposed directive on computer-implemented inventions this week. There was a heck of a lot of activity on both sides, and I did a bit with some letter and postcard writing, and trying (unsuccessfully) to ring MEPs in Strasbourg last week. It was also good to meet the goons from the DTI on the issue, even if there wasn’t enough time to table my question about inter…
This post is political – no apologies. Look away now. All my life the forces of evil have been embodied by “terrorists.” The IRA, Abu Nidal, Tigers, FARC, Al Quaida, the list is endless. All my life, the foreign policy of governments have been ranged around the war against terror, supported by the war against drugs and “organised crime.” It just goes round and round and round. It’s reached the status of a culture of our times and it’s making me s…
… They didn’t see this …
I’m three weeks into a brand new project, and my mind is on requirements and specifications. Like every project I’ve ever worked on, this is unique. This time, it’s unique because it was half documented and thought about, and was then mothballed. Now it’s back from the dead a year later, and I’m on the case trying to make sense of what was done. There’s one person in my department who worked on it before it was frozen, but the others (who wrote m…
… StumbleUpon is a nice idea and I’ve been using it a bit recently. Its categorisations are a bit too broad to be really useful, but if they hooked it up with some sort of folksonomy system that you could use to refine your profile, then it might get really interesting. Like del.icio.us/ only less… flat. I was impressed when the “random stumble” button took me to one of my favourite pages on the web, hence the title of this post. …
… One must wonder what’s worse – Blogging about the fairly banal incidents of day-to-day life, or blogging about whether or not one should blog such incidents. Particularly if one describes the incident in detail in the course of doing so. …
… Banjo A surprising number of people (well, two) have got back to me on the banjo reference above. If you play banjo, or are learning this wonderful instrument, you might like to know that there are MP3 lessons available, and the authors will only post another one once five people have sent them MP3 recordings of them playing the last lesson….
… And to quote the Register ‘the professional pundits and their pyjama-clad reflections in the “blogosphere” had been anxiously waiting for the Supremes’ verdict for a week… And off they went, like lab monkeys on meths sniffing fresh air for the first time’…
I spent most of this afternoon (almost five hours, actually) trying to get 25mins of video footage from my Sony DCR-PC110 DV camera onto a DVD. What a palava. Nero is a sorry mess of an application – so bad you don’t even know what program to launch, let alone how to use what you think you need to use. Do the manufacturers seriously expect me to understand their program menu items? Here’s what I’ve got: Nero Nero OEM Nero Cover Designer Nero Expr…
… This is apparently helping to finish somebody’s PhD, but it was mainly out of curiosity that I filled it in. He doesn’t give you the option of listing Trillian as your IM client, so he’s obviously a bit stuck up in his ivory tower. The results page is down at the time of writing, but it promises to be quite interesting. …
… Just as I’ve found a Greasemonkey script that fixes up Odeon’s site and provides a link to IMDB for all their films, I’ve now found a script that puts a link to a torrent for films listed in IMDB! So now I can see what’s on at the Odeon, and if I don’t think it’s worth the money to go and see after reading IMBD, I have the option to burn it to DVD and watch it the next evening. Sure, this is piracy, but at least it’s discriminating. …
… This article about making silver bullets is interesting, and mentions in passing that silver tarnishing is a relatively modern phenomenon brought about by sulfur pollution from power plants. Wow. …
You may or may not have been following the Odeon cinema website usability/accessibility saga over the last year or so. I installed a Greasemonkey script written to improve the site, and it’s pretty interesting. It completely changes the interaction design of the site, and throws in a new feature – a link to the IMDB page for each film – which the original site doesn’t have! This is all completely without the say-so of the site designers. Of cours…
When I was in Japan, I set my father-in-law up with an Internet connection. He’d been given some brochures about NTT broadband from his local electrical store. The pricing was just jaw-dropping: a 100Mbit (yes, one hundred megabit) connection, with no usage capping, is £24 a month. Holy cow! This got me thinking. Here in the UK, ADSL users have been getting letters from their ISPs to tell them that they’ll be getting a free (or free-with-string-a…
Avast! Brian Appleyaaard! The hammy Bible-bashing tech/culture journo we all love to hate came out on Sunday as a shameless raider of intellectual property in his article on the death of TV last weekend: “…the internet has begun to work as it should. Thanks to broadband, students now routinely download the best television shows — at the moment, that means the US hospital comedy Scrubs — over the net and, happily, pass them on to me. Video is no…
Ah, Japan: land of individually-wrapped bananas and toilets that squirt warm water up your bum. Ten days in Nagano (Ena City) with the in-laws followed by visits to other relatives and friends. The food! The technology! Even the interminable shopping trips for kids clothes were interesting. Japan qualified for the world cup against North Korea in a match that nobody could attend (so they did the whole thing on video screens by proxy), Takanohana …
… A holiday for three weeks in Japan, starting tomorrow! It’s been a while since I last went – the sushi, the traffic, the in-laws and the partial lack of understanding of what’s going on. I’m looking forward to all these things and more, starting with airline food (Korean Airlines! A kimchi wagon in the sky!). …
Observers of the date stamp will note that I’ve not posted for… weeks! This is not for lack of subject matter, of which I hope to expand at some point, but due to the fact that I’ve been working on a project with deadlines which anyone would be excused for thinking were some kind of Guinness Book attempt: two people writing a 200-page specification in three days and nine (nine!) other deliverables over three further, not to mention numerous updat…
… Firefox is fast becoming the Apache of the desktop. One day we’re going to see graphs looking like this, and it’s going to be good for web user experience all round. It’s not just about the tabs, the plugins, the skins, the goodness – it’s the phenomenon that I like most. Get firefox and do some good! …
Our weekly Monday-9am-with-buns department meetings usually consists of discussions about projects people are working on, techniques we have applied or are thinking of applying, department housekeeping issues etc. All good inward-looking stuff. But last week was a little different. We had a presentation by the head of the new Client Services division. For me this was a reminder that for an agency such as ours, no matter how far we get into inform…
It’s been a while since I had a foray in the genre that I call “half-formed ideas,” but here’s a good one that I’ve been brewing for a while. For no good reason I can recall, I was reading this essay about spontaneous use of chiasmus in contemporary English and it got me thinking. Not so much about chiasmus, which is of course fascinating in its own right, but about language and communication in general. Life has always been a crisis of communica…
My uncle Julian, Bagpipe Maker to the Stars (Warning: sound samples are not work safe) wrote me a letter the other day. It struck me that people writing to me by hand is now an immensely rare event, and that I myself have not written a letter to anyone in about fifteen years. The last may have been during my gap year in Japan. So, I’ve decided to write back to him. I have an old letter pad I found in the attic (“Elco of Switzerland”, green, 50 sh…
The content mapping monster has started its onslaught, and mother I can feel the soil falling over my head. This week, I have been doing what must rank as (I hope) the most uninteresting task of my career ever. Well, there have been others like it but I’ve erased them from memory leaving only some familiar brain patterns behind: an urge to read Das Kapital, clock watching, tea-making fixations and suicidal thoughts. For almost three days solid, s…
For some reason last night I decided to post a rather late April fool to uk.legal. It was a bit rough around the edges, but only took about fifteen minutes to do (and spookily time-stamped at exactly 00:00hrs). I’m quite proud that it seems to have at least partially hooked one person in, while producing some pretty good replies from others. Nobody picked up on the the first line about “giving me a steer” though. (The better replies are on the “n…
… Ah he ha ha. …
It’s obviously a by-product of collaborative websites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin that April 1st generates so many fake stories. One or two might be funny, but there were about ten on Slashdot yesterday: EU to ban Macs, UN to outlaw Internet, Opera inventing a new P2P system called “SoundWave” etc. etc. The best one this year for my money was BoingBoing’s. It got me fished in for a while… but I got it in the end. I’m still not sure if this is a fo…
I was reading this article on the BBC about people providing IT support on the side and it struck me that there’s a bigger thing going on here than simply offering a bit of help to a clueless neighbour. I have a love/hate relationship with helping people with their computers. I imagine that in the same way as specialists in fields of medicine (neuroscience, or plastic surgery, say) probably get pestered by friends asking them what to do about the…
After almost two days off line while we made the changeover from Plusnet, we’re now with Homechoice. It’s TV, phone and broadband down your phone line, so no dishes or cable laying. You get a nice brushed aluminum STB which looks very much like a Mac Mini only it has a large soft blue light on the front – very large. A bit too large. There’s also a disconcerting lag between hitting a button on the remote and the interface responding, which makes …
… Nice – somebody using the Yahoo API with their image search to generate random images in the shape of letters. …
Sometimes I think I’m the only person who lies awake at night worrying about content. Well, I don’t literally do that, but it feels like I might be sometimes. I’m certainly gaining broken record status on the issue and thinking crying-in-the-wilderness thoughts at times. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to articulate what the problem exactly is (well, I find it hard at least). It’s certainly made harder by the fact that according to the cont…
We’ve decided to move from our current ADSL provider (PlusNet) to Homechoice, the London-only provider of broadband, TV and telephone packages. They do all this via the little copper wire that runs from the BT telephone exchange to your house – impressive. The main reason for switching to them is not the tech though (oh no, read on about that), but the fact that out TV reception has been awful since the Arts Depot was built up the road from us. T…
I sold my old bike on eBay this evening – £320. That’s more than I thought I’d get. I can’t help feeling a little sad to see it go. 45 people had it in their watch lists, which was a bit like having a crowd of anonymous mourners at a funeral: a mark of some respect I hope. It’s been a part of me for almost a third of my life; longer than I’ve known my wife and many of my friends, and I’ve ridden every single one of those 30,619 miles. It may have…
Having worked for a print publisher for two years and developed a negative impression of that industry (and journalists) when it comes to all things on line, imagine my surprise when I saw the Sunday Observer Blog this morning! I can honestly say that if I were in charge of a serious redesign of any newspaper’s online presence this would be it, and more. I saw a link to it on BoingBoing: “The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, wit…
… Jono Thanks for sharing your experiences. The practical details were helpful for me. I’d love to hear your updated experience – different tools etc., do you still card sort remotely or have you moved on? Anyway, thanks….
… As a blogger, I call on the Iranian government to free Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, both in prison in Iran for expressing opinions on their blogs about the government. February 22nd, 2005 is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day – this blog is dedicated to them and their protection. …
… At last I’ve got round to doing something about that lame home page with the spinning pipes on it. It is now no more – and the blog page is king of the castle. Well, as far as I can tell, anyway. It was actually quite tricky to do in the end (I had to learn what ^ and $ mean) and pedants will note that things that link to “home” now link here. Hmm. …
… I’ve just looked at my Slashdot profile and I have three fans! Maybe I should move my blog there. Better for the ego at least. …
Just when it looked like things had got back to reality…. I’m getting sick of this, and worried too. Here’s a letter I’ve just penned to Robert Evans MEP: Dear Robert Evans, I read today that the European Patent Directive is not likely to return to the first reading as previously demanded by Parliament, and that the Commission may ignore the Parliament’s vote on restarting the legislative process for this bill. While in the past I have contacted …
Now that software patents in Europe have gone back to the drawing board, both sides will now doubtless regroup. I feel that we have a head start though, if for no better reason than the FFII looked like it was fighting an uphill struggle most of the time until the eleventh hour, when at last MEPs saw their point and showed their displeasure at the Commission’s railroading of the issues. Meanwhile, one of Lord Sainsbury’s invites for another sessi…
… “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all nations of the earth.” The Times, about the invention of the telegraph, 1858. …
… Seth David Schoen has done an interesting hatchet-job on a statement from the Business Software Alliance that shows (rather long-windedly, but that’s what Americans are like) exactly why there are issues with defending copyright law on the grounds that it allows the software industry to get richer. Nice of them to clear the air so… clearly! …
I find myself doing what I think might be an unhealthy amount of thinking about the tools I use to do stuff, and regular readers of this blog will know that one of my ambitions is to discover – or better still help to make – an Information Architecture IDE. So one of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about is the latest release of what was called Ubiquity RP, now Axure RP, by a company called Axure. Peter van Dijck published an interview on hi…
Amazing. I get in to work on Friday, and the senior PM comes in to say that the client has decided to go for an ecommerce deployment so that £250,000 they’ve just given us to redesign their site along non-ecommerce lines (because originally they weren’t up for that) is canned. Well, maybe about 20% of it can be salvaged for re-use, but all the work I’ve been doing for the last three months (along with two other IA’s, some graphic designers and a …
… Should have got this for Christmas. Maybe next year… …
… Standard & Poor’s site is larded up to the eyeballs with JavaScript and Flash, and (surprise!) is a broken wreak of a site because of it. Firefox users can’t sign up for one thing. I mailed them about that, naturally, while the chances of them replying properly are of course zero. At least they show you a warning – and a picture of somebody attacking their thumb with a dentist’s drill. Are their designers trying to tell you something? …
When I started this blog I told myself it would be a good place to critique online experiences of various kinds. I’ve actually done very little of this, mainly because it’s unexpectedly difficult: you only realise you’ve got a badly designed experience on your hands when you’re some way into the journey, and back-tracking to record the process is usually not possible. I’ve half caputured this mess of a customer registration journey though – it’s …
… I was working on a big CM project once Which involved copying/pasting vast quantities of content from word into rich text controls (ActiveX, I assume) – and the Official Instruction was to paste the content from Word to Notepad and then into the text field – this was the only reliable way of ensuring rogue formatting didn’t get carried across… Joe Leech Still relevant 12 years later. Come on folks, fix it!…
… Ahh – graphs! And I’ve got my own little status graph now! …
Just thought I’d check Slashdot after one last brandy and a mince pie (made by me: Ainsly Harriot BBC Top 100 recipe, the one with the grated orange peel in the pastry). I love Slashdot. Not that I understand half of what gets talked about there, but the responses to this Christmas day story are wonderfully heart-warming. From my RSS feed: phreakuencies writes “Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to it’s …
… Impressive: wireless on a train, but I was out for lunch at the time! …
It’s not over yet, but it looks like our protests to MPs, the government, my postcard to Theresa Villiers, and then that confab with Lord Sainsbury may have done something. It seems that the Poles have put a spanner in the works for us, and the final decision on patents has been delayed for more thinking. It’s good that we’ve got some more time, but we have to keep the pressure up. I’m increasingly thinking that this really is an us-and-them situ…
I got one of those actually rather nice “pass-this-round” emails from a friend the other day. I thought I’d blog it. In fact in one of those “when-I-ever-get-the-time” thoughts, a little web app to do this would be an interesting project… > > WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? I don’t read books. I read one a few months ago but it was geeky and too embarrassing to mention in public (“The Humane Interface” by Jef Raskin – see?) > > WHAT’S ON YOUR MOUSE PA…
One of the things I did on my holidays was to re-install my computer and get rid of all that junk on it. After about 18 months and it accumulated all manner of cruft and things were crashing. I took the opportunity not only to go to Firefox 1.0 (I’d been using 0.9 before) but to ditch Outlook as well for Thunderbird 1.0, released on the day I re-installed. Kumi and I have been using Firefox for a while now, and apart from the odd site site that d…
After managing to wangle an extra day’s holiday from work after I mixed my dates up, I attended the meeting today on the European Computer Implemented Inventions Directive today at the DTI. Lord Sainsbury of Turville had generously invited all those who had written to their MPs (well, some of them at least) to explain the government’s position on software patents and to allay fears of impending doom. It’s certainly a bit of a complex area, and it…
I was playing with Axel this afternoon while we listened to what I used to think was a rather boring album that seems to have grown on me even though I’ve not listened to it for about three years: The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. I was surprised by how many “rather British” samples there are in it. Churchbells, leather on willow, lawnmowers, that kind of thing. But for some reason I got thinking about what to do with that dusty old PC …
… Of course the birthday script is not without its own defects… It STILL says its your birthday, and it will probably continue to do so for another 2 days (if my equally un-observed birthday announcement was anything to go by). …
In my continuing adventures through the looking glass that is eBay, I have made a profit on a mobile phone sale. This is getting pretty weird. Who are these eBay buyers who are willing to pay so much? Kumi wanted a new phone to replace her really old one. “Get one of them 3Pay ones – they look like a good deal” I said. So we did. Brought it home, put the SIM in, put it on charge, then looked at the 3Pay tariff sheet. The minimum credit you can bu…
Well, I bought a Yamaha YP125 Majesty on eBay, picked it up in a van, got it serviced and am now waiting for the insurance to come through on it. I still can’t quite work out if I did the right thing or not, but it was fun. You only live once, etc. etc. For those interested in the details, read on. After a 10-day listing, I put an £813 proxy on it. The bidding closed at £561.00. The following weekend, I hired a van for the weekend. The plan was t…
Although I yield to no man in my respect for the rigour that David Danielson brings to IA research, at times I can’t help wondering if either I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, or he’s up his own a*se. This time, I’ve been reading Web navigation and the behavioral effects of constantly visible site maps: This study examines user movement through hierarchically structured Web sites and the behavioral effects of a constantly visible, textual cont…
That bike crash has shaken me up. I’ve been riding my trusty Honda CB250N for over 12 years and it failed the MOT last year, and it’s going to have to have some repairs as well this time. So, I getting new wheels. This time I’m going scooter. Bought my copy of What Bike? on Saturday morning, shortlisted a few, then hit eBay. By Sunday morning I’d taken a £500 punt on a 2003 Yamaha Majesty 125. It’s only got 2,500mi on the clock, but it’s had some…
I fell off my motorbike last week going in to work. I’ve done it before: pottering along at about 30mph you come up behind some stationary traffic. If you then use the bus lane, you stay relatively safe but run the gauntlet of the cameras (I’ve had two fines for that in the last five years), so I usually try to squeeze down the outside against the oncoming traffic and risk it. And no, you can’t stay in lane and wait with the cars. On a motorbike …
The performance of Bill Drummond’s “Seventeen” went flawlessly last night. Although Kumi and Axel couldn’t stay for my actual performance (way past bedtime), the place was standing room only as we mooed and whooped our way through the “score.” Mercifully, it was only a few minutes this time, although I could see one woman’s toes visibly curling as we sang. The Seventeen sang about an hour and a half into Drummond’s thing, and I’d almost forgotten…
… I assume you are one of the so-called “anti-software patent activists” and no, my name isn’t Frank Black…
Busy this last week doing “pixel-perfect wireframes” (don’t ask). I dunno. With seemingly the whole world going with Jakob on this one: low-fidelity, fast iteration prototyping with rapid whatnots; we’re plodding away with Freehand documents and hardly even a whiteboard sketch between them and the A3 colour printer that lovingly prints them out. All this after Visio purgatory and the dreaded “user journeys” as well (the latter not done by me, luc…
I tell myself I look down on blog posts that simply link to other things, but it’s Friday and I’m feeling lazy. The Charlie Brooker incident is (I’m gonna say it) significant, but not because he’s called for the assassination the US head of state, or that he’s annoyed so many Americans, but for what it says about the state of the “media.” And this time, NTK have put it best: Brooker may write in a paper, but he still posts like he was on a newsgr…
… Ah – the archives Who cares what Julie Burchill thinks….
For the past couple of weeks, I have been doing flow diagrams in Visio. These are supposed to describe the “flow” of pages that a user goes through when ordering certain things on our client’s site. They are exhaustive representations of every permutation of that journey, showing the exceptions, error screens, diversions, etc. that are encountered. And sweet Jesus are they boring to do. Not only that, but they’re frustrating, confusing, relentles…
… The Open Money Project looks interesting (although I wish they’d sort out their navigation). I can’t decide whether they are the seed of a revolution that will tear apart the rules of commerce as we know it, or just a geeky fad. Still, I’ve promoted it to my “stop” button above as it’s potentially a Rather Big Thing. …
… “Banner blindness” notwithstanding, I seem to have lost my Google ads from this blog. Not that I can be bothered to find out why (no messages on the Adsense account pages that I can see that might explain). I was earning about 10p a month off them. …
I’ve been reading some technical specifications for parts of a client’s web site that we are re-designing. I’ve read (and probably written) some really dire specifications in my time, but these are worse than even I’m used to seeing. Have a read of this clip, randomly sliced to my email this afternoon (specifics removed to protect the guilty): The criteria that (accessory a) can be ordered only when atleast (product a), (product b) would remain t…
… lunchtime… lunchtime… wasn’t that just about the same time the sysadmin folks’ long awaited pay-rise suddenly materialised?…
… Just run another spam report. Things are about the same as they were three months ago. Odd how the two addresses get quite different amounts and show such separate patterns. Not sure what to make of that. …
… Apple Much as I love Apple, they are as much an evil empire as any other megacorp. With as much of an idea about fair use as any of them. They just make things look and feel nicer and more different. A placebo effect. Placebo A placebo effect, I might add, which I fall for every time :p And now with a nutty and nutritious Unix kernel….
Despite being keen on free software, I’ve been using Microsoft Internet Explorer for years out of sheer laziness. But about six months ago, the weight of evidence against using this flabbergastingly insecure web browser drove me to install Firefox, and I’ve been using that fine ever since. The only significant web site I’ve found that doesn’t work with it is B&Q’s shopping cart and Trend Micro’s Housecall anti-virus scanner. But you can always in…
Well that was interesting. Last night I became one of North Finchley’s “Seventeen” at the soon-to-open Arts Depot. This is part of Bill Drummond’s latest project entitled “How To Be An Artist” and involved seventeen men (well, it was actually fourteen I think) recording an improvised vocal performance accompanied by the sound of Bill’s Land Rover engine and a C minor chord. Bill Drummond doesn’t come across as the scary maverick I was expecting –…
… I’m getting itchy to try out another blogging system. Drupal is really more of a content management system than a blog, and I’m not using even half of the bells and whistles at all. It’s also quite – urgh – difficult in places but it’s been fun to explore it. Maybe something like Blosxom would be better? But will I ever find the time to do a move? Perhaps I should concentrate on migrating bakerbates.com to CSS instead… …
I’ve just got a mail from Bill Drummond. He’s doing an installation of some kind (details rather sketchy) in the soon-to-be-opened Arts Depot, which is just round the corner from my house. The installation/project/work will be called “How To Be An Artist” and he needs male voice “singers” (in my case that term is applied loosely) to record something as part of that. I’ve always thought of him as rather scary ever since he left a dead sheep in the…
… This has been worrying me for a while: why does fruit get juicer as it ripens? If it’s off the tree, then it’s not got any source of water, so why doesn’t it just dry up? Why does it appear to have less water in when it’s not ripe? Hmmm. Ahmmmmm. …
Axel’s been showing quite an aptitude for making cubic structures. While most of his peers are content to pile up bricks repetitively, perhaps with the occasional asymmetric flourish, he prefers to create a base, then build Guadi-like cathedrals using the properties and shapes of the materials rather architecturally. Last week Kumi showed me something he’d made that was actually a little spooky in its complexity (remember, Axel is only just four)…
Lawd – I is churnin’ it out today! Why is content not treated in the same way as page designs and HTML? On most projects, one of the primary deliverables is a set of HTML “templates” to be integrated at some point into a CMS. The CMS then uses these templates to render content loaded into it. This represents a transition from an initial set of page designs (usually developed with a graphics package) into a format (HTML) generally suitable for “de…
As part of some recently expansive thinking, I’ve been jamming on the following theme recently as follows. So far, I’ve got some thoughts, but no good solutions, on streamlining the experience and graphic design process overall. I was thinking about one of our projects (referred to here as “Project X”) in which we delivered HTML and flat graphic “prototypes” for the purposes of user testing, client approval, etc. during the design phase. Ideally,…
There’s some interesting stuff here, including summary of some research showing that changing navigation in subtle ways actually helps users navigate (and aids their understanding of the depth of the site), thereby seeming to contradict the standard guideline that navigation should be kept consistent. Also talks about other things such as classifying information toward the end of the process, not the beginning. It’s a presentation but has some ci…
There’s been an upsurge in deep thinking about development process at work over the last few days, and I’ve been in somewhat expansive mood. With apologies to Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that one day the web development community will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that technology serves the user experience.” I have a dream that one day in the cafes of Hoxton, project managers…
… Now that Bluetooth can liberate my lo-res snaps from the confines of my phone to the wasteland of my blog, I thought I’d celebrate by puttin’ some up: …
Having recently bought a Sony Ericsson T610 on a deal from BT Mobile (and no, that’s not O2), I’ve been reflecting on the fact that while the phone itself is pretty good (if seemingly designed by somebody left-handed), the peripheral stuff like support, billing, accessories and general “off-handset” features, are appallingly bad. WARNING: The following post is probably very, very tedious. Take the route to purchase from e2save.com. After trying t…
I watched the DVD of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime epic today with Axel, who was (almost) glued to it throughout. It’s a spooky film, and I was worried he’d get nightmares, but he seems OK. I didn’t realise the film was made twenty years ago. The first thing that struck me was how much The Matrix (and in particular Reloaded) plundered it for ideas: the sentinels are in it (well, as huge insects) and some scenes are extremely similar. There’s even a bit …
“If Haydn had patented ‘a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced { in extended sonata form },’ Mozart would have been in trouble.” Since I am involved in software design, I feel I should oppose any move by the European Union to allow the patenting of software. Software patents threaten to stifle innovation in software design and given even more monopolistic power to existing software corporations to the detriment of smaller companies a…
The fact that millions of pounds a year are lost to credit card fraud makes the whole “chip and PIN” thing more mysterious by the day. When’s it happening? Why did it happen years ago? How will it be introduced? There seems to be a veil of confusion over it all, but most people seem either not to know nor care about it. Hmm. Well, maybe it’ll all be OK. But I began to worry when I got a flyer from Barclaycard entitled “Answering your questions ab…
I just had one of those Really Nice User Interface moments. I’ve been getting into tabbed browsing with Firefox, usually right-clicking links and choosing “Open Link In New Tab.” But after a while you want to re-cycle tabs as it gets a bit cluttered spawning new ones, and shutting down old ones can be a pain. So I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just drag the link to the tab I want it to load it in?” And guess what? You can! Ahh, it’s so…
So far, I’ve managed to avoid being paid to do HTML – and I count that as a Very Good Thing. To date, the pinnacle of my achievement in creating an entire site from scratch is www.bakerbates.com. Which is crap, obviously. In my defence, however, it was done in about 1998 before I knew much about anything in particular, and as I started to feel the blast wave of CSS about to make obsolete any HTML skills I had anyway. But for ages I’ve been meanin…
… Spookily, it’s coming round again Just after I posted this, I see that Intel is now predicting the net’s demise….
True story: somebody told me once they’d been looking at a site called “Flash Your Rack.” They said it was a bit like “Hot Or Not” but “raunchier.” I thought they meant effects (or perhaps server) racks. After all, I’ve seen some really impressive racks in Telehouse: twenty Enterprise 450’s divided by blue routers look cool, particularly if they have well-managed cable tidies with them and lots of flashing lights. But no. He meant tits. Neverthel…
I am not, and never have been, a smoker, but sometimes I find myself thinking things are far worse than I thought. This week was one of those times. In an echo of a flabbergasting report frome the BMA that tobacco should be made illegal, there comes a survey that shows that a large proportion of people in Britain think it should be banned as well. This opinion says more about misplaced belief in the rule of law than it does attitudes to smoking, …
I was going through my chat logs this evening looking for something. It’s only the second time I’ve ever done it I think, but I must do it more often – you find all sorts of interesting stuff. Anyway, I spotted this amusing account of an exchange I’d had (edited to protect the innocent and to correct my howling typos): I had a wonderful argument/conversation with one of the client-side developers today. Went something like this: He: We have a pro…
We did a paper-prototyping dry run the other day in preparation for some similar sessions for a client (not involving me, unfortunately). It was the first time I’d done it hands-on, having only read about the theory before. Here we were basically evaluating the technique. We played the roles of “stakeholders” from diverse parts of the business (the real thing will be properly diverse: marketing, management, legal, or whatever) and collaboratively…
It’s a landmark ruling! The decision of the US 9th Court to find Grokster not guilty to the charge of “contributory and vicarious copyright infringement” is the first sign that corporate manipulation of IP rights legislation is at last being reined in. It’s all on the Register today. It is incredibly important that we understand the current war going on in the IP arena, with P2P, open source, copyleft, creative commons, et. al. on the one side, a…
… Outlook Express repair I must admit to being more impressed for Outlook Express repair. I’ve even recommended it to all my friends….
… Never replied Oh well, he never replied to that. Pity. He’s a busy man I’m sure….
I note that Google indexes Flash (I’m probably the last to know this), which is interesting. I wonder how long it will take Googlerank to treat Flash movies in the same way as text, PDF and those other formats it indexes as well? Just re-read Clay Shirky’s demolition of the semantic web. This has got to be one of the best critiques of anything that’s come out in the last couple of years on the subject. Wonderful teenage philosophising on Slashdot…
A lazy afternoon this Saturday, playing with Axel and listening The Prodigy’s new album “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.” The Prodge are sounding simpler in their old age I think, and some rather obvious similarities with other stuff is showing through too much for my liking. Liam Howlett’s been going all Jah Wobble and listening to Middle Eastern music, which is nice, but one track (The Way It) has the bass sound off Michael Jackson’s “Thri…
Being in an expansive mood this Saturday morning, and having received the latest from Clay Shirky on his “Networks, Economics and Culture” (NEC) mailing list, I’m trying to gather my thoughts around what’s going on (from as high a level as my little mind can get). I’m a big fan of Mr Shirky. I once had the good fortune to talk to him while we were in (of all places) Rupert Murdoch’s “Fortress Wapping” several years ago. He was consulting for Curr…
Axel James Andoh Baker-Bates was four years old today. This post is a copy of the mail sent to all the noble subscribers to the Net Parent News mailing list, and for the edification of my blog. Selfish as his father is. Whether or not Axel fully understood the significance of the occasion today is hard to say, as he wasn’t letting much conversation get in the way of him and his Thunderbirds Tracy Island present. Zwoosh! Ba bada baa! But looking b…
It’s been nose-to-the-grindstone this last week working towards an insane deadline to write up the findings (and think up some suggestions going forward) from a large card-sort being done while I was in Milan the week before. Planning and analysing the results of a 30-user card sort is actually rather fun. It’s rare you get the chance to do one – I only regret not having the time to facilitate more than a couple of sessions. And of course it’s mo…
User testing in London and Milan last week. The scripts we’re using for this are pretty complicated, and the client wants us to cover off a lot of very specific questions about the system, which was pretty tough to do while making sure the user was relaxed enough to give us reasonably truthful answers. This has led to some complaints from the client that I’ve been asking users the dreaded “leading questions.” On at least one of the sessions, I di…
Blogging from abroad is sooo trendy. But I forgot to pack my camera so no piccies I’m afraid. We’re doing user testing (I facilitated the sessions in London, and sitting in on the ones in Milan – more about that later). It’s hot, but the testing suite is air-conditoned. Funny how net access is like drugs – we all have to fight for it as there’s no wi-fi here and some people’s GPRS is patchy. We found an ethernet cable and have been were passing i…
… I’ve been totting up the amount of spam I get per day on my two email addresses over the last few months. It’s pretty depressing really. An average of about 120 a day on each address. Odd how one address gets quite different numbers from the other one. Luckily, I only ever see about three or four a day, as I’m using Spamassassin, but the thought of all the junk pinging around the email system… …
I was waiting for Axel to have a pee yesterday before he went to bed, and was idly thumbing through my standard-issue-for-new media-nutters copy of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember it being thin on actual predictions (and therefore slightly disappointing), but I suddenly saw one, on page 173. He must have been pretty confident about it too, since he (almost) names a date: “I think videoc…
This is hardly an original subject to blog on, but it interests me nonetheless. I was at a new year’s party this year and discovered that I’d been to school with one of the guests. After chatting a while about jolly japes (slightly embarrassing as you’re aware it’s boring the crap out of the people around you…) we got round to asking what each other did. He told me he was as surprised as anyone to have become the MD of Sony Music Publishing UK. I…
Two blog posts in one day. A record! In what I think may become a bit of a regular feature of this blog, here’s a site that in my opinion has awful usability. Well, it pops up windows like they were going out of fashion. Try this: 1. Go to www.timesonline.co.uk and search for something in the search box in TLHC. 2. First you get a popup asking if you want to search the whole net (using eSpotting – eurgh) or the site. 3. Then you get ANOTHER popup…
I’ve been thinking about Vernor Vinge’s 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity. It’s a good read if you’ve not seen it, but in it Vinge says that he thinks one of the paths to super-human intelligence could be “intelligence amplification.” In particular, he says: “[Intelligence amplification] is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to a…
… Guinea pigs are highly allergic to egg white. How I bumped into this is a complete mystery, but it’s one of those things I like about the web – bumping into things. …
One thing that gets me irrational about BBC News Online is the glaring lack of any proper back channel. People want to talk, and I for one resent only having half a chance to do so. The “Have your say” links at the bottom of some (but not all) stories, accompanied by the pretty contemptuous small print: “The BBC may edit your comments and cannot guarantee that all e-mails will be published,” works me up even more. How long is it going to be befor…
I’ve been hearing about nanotechnology for a while, but for some reason was never motivated enough to find out much about it. Far future stuff… solution looking for problem… blah blah. But a random post on Slashdot the other day caught my eye. The poster was saying that once molecular nanotechnology and “nanoengineering” take off, then the nature of matter as we know it will fundamentally change – with massive socio-economic consequences. The det…
… Interesting – and timely – article on the Register today Seems I’m not only in danger of annoying everyone (although that’s as good a reason to blog as any) but the related article at the bottom of the page says I’m a saddo too. Nice. …
… Standard issue first blog post: It’s taken me about six months longer than I thought – but I’ve finally got this site up and running. I had some rather grander plans for it before, but after much reflection, I’ve decided to start small and just blog. Thanks Kaoru – you gave me that advice, so I took it. I’ll be expanding Webtorque according to my Secret Master Plan… later. Meanwhile, have a look at the Articles link. …