Different people use applications in different ways. Sounds simple and obvious, but how often do you look at the real implications of it? Just to take a simple example, let’s suppose you’re using Windows (pretty much any recent version), and you want to perform a simple task: Exit the active application. How many different ways […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 – 9:17 pm
If you haven’t been getting as much email as usual this past week, the culprit may be SpamAssassin. It turns out that SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (the current version, released in June of 2008) has a Year 2010 Bug. The problem lies in the core configuration file 72_active.cf, which contains a wide variety of “currently active” rules. On line […]
A “Blog” Is a Whole Bunch of Posts
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 – 2:13 pm
This is rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves, right up there with misuse of the word “literally”: This thing I’m writing right now? This single entry in my blog? This isn’t “a blog”. It’s “an entry” or “a post”. Sort of like that piece of paper in a book is a page, not a […]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 – 1:25 pm
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread […]
Does Wanting Privacy Make You Evil?
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 – 4:37 pm
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is the same stupid excuse we always hear from people who want to invade everyone’s privacy, and I’m sick of it. Incidentally, we need a good term […]
The Evolution of WordPress
Friday, November 6th, 2009 – 4:54 pm
For backward-compatibility testing, I’ve just installed a few versions of WordPress ranging back to version 2.0. It’s kind of fascinating to see a sort of fast-rewind retrospective of the software. Even just looking at the installation experience, it’s like watching HAL 9000 descend into childish incoherence as Dave Bowman yanks his memory chips. By the time you […]
OpenOffice Writer UX Warts
Monday, October 19th, 2009 – 10:30 am
The more I play with OpenOffice.org’s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do […]
Testing Backward-Incompatible Changes
Monday, October 12th, 2009 – 11:06 am
Let’s say one day you decide to add a feature to your software or service. For example, you need a new flag on user accounts, so that different types of users get different features. (These don’t even have to be tiered account levels; maybe accounts of type “music lover” get a widget in the sidebar […]
Solutions For Palm Prē “Signed Out of Palm Profile” Endless Loop
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 – 11:34 am
Yesterday, a wonderful person who goes by the handle of pzil on the Palm Prē forums gave me a solution to my “You are signed out, there is no escape” woes. You can read pzil’s solution as posted on the Palm forum, but just in case, I’m also reproducing the meat of it here, in […]
A Chat With Palm Tech Support
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 3:25 pm
We’ll see if anything useful comes of this… I wasn’t too happy with the rep’s cluefulness at 2:55, I must admit. 2:50 PM Connecting to Rescue Gateway: control.app51.logmeinrescue.com… 2:50 PM Connected to Rescue Gateway. A support representative will be with you shortly. 2:51 PM Support session established with Kade. 2:51 PM Kade: Hello. 2:51 PM […]