Quotes
"No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better." -- Alan Cooper
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." -- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
UI Horror: Windows 8 BSOD
My PC is sad. I know this because of the frowny face. Unfortunately, I know not much more, because my PC won't boot, and Microsoft decided to provide as little information about the error as possible on their new BSOD screen.
Hmm... scary (but potentially useful) hexidecimal-laden error messages or …
Amazon Glacier and CloudBerry Online Backup
Offsite backup for critical files
This task has been lingering undone on my to-do list for months. I imagined that I'd figure out some way to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Sky Drive, or something to keep my data safe in case something catastrophic happened at the house. All those solutions …
Write Your Code for Humans
Sometimes when I bring up the subject of coding standards, I get an eye-rolling, aren't-we-all-adults-here kind of reaction from my fellow programmers -- or a fearful look anticipating endless debates about where the braces should go. Of course, "coding standards" can cover a gamut of subjects -- from techniques to avoid shooting …
Time to Think
With time drawing short before a major deployment at work, we ran into a problem. Some people testing our application reported it timing-out on an important function. It quickly became a high priority that I was assigned to solve.
Since most of the people on our team work remotely, a …
Python Packaging Demystified
IMPORTANT: Some of the information in this post is now obsolete. Please see here.
Randomly take a couple of words from the following list, put them together, and there's a decent chance you'll come up with something real involving Python packaging.
The …
Three Suggestions for the Android Calendar App
I want a reminder at the specified reminder time, and another one at the appointment start time. This is how it typically goes for me:
PHONE: Ding!\ ME: Oh yeah, I've got that meeting in 10 minutes. Let me just finish this little bit of code in …
UI Horror: Untrimmed Validation
Hmm... this zip code looks pretty good to me.
This was on the Discount Tire mobile site. It's awesome that you can schedule a service appointment on the web using your mobile phone. It's not so awesome that the form validation doesn't compensate for the trailing space that my phone's …
Google Voice Search Multiple Personality Disorder
I was using my Galaxy Nexus for some turn-by-turn navigation today and it was an odd experience. Half the instructions spoken by the Navigation app were in a typical synthesized voice, while the other half were in a chipper, natural sounding voice.
"In five hundred feet, turn right. Then YOUR …
Clean HTML from Microsoft Word: Rube Goldberg Method
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to save nice clean HTML from Microsoft Word? Here's a way that is only slightly convoluted.
If you use the "Web Page, Filtered" option from Word, you get buried in piles of CSS cruft, but as noted here, you can use the Publish …