Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Interfaces

  • Tufekci on Twitter, Chilean miners, wikileaks, ipad, etc.

    I am still behind on blogging, but here’s some nuggets from  Technosociety blog, a  fresh blog about the relationship between technology and society by Zeynep Tufekci. Lots of deep thinking here. Here’s her take on the Nobel Peace prize announcement and Twitter: The Internet is not a game-changer in the sense of a cat-and-mouse game…

  • Tutorial: How to control the crap which appears on your Facebook wall

    Screencapture courtesy of the wonderful SnagIt software. That said, I have to admit that I am not telling half the story here. First, you can use the dropdown menu to fine-tune who can see these wall posts. You can even create customized groups that can’t view your wall. Facebook is adept at hiding  options and…

  • Software Bugs are invading my dreams!

    TX blogger Robert Nagle tells a scary story about how browser issues are waking him up at night (literally!)

  • What’s bugging me about Firefox

    Oops. Firefox seems to have deleted my Bookmarks Toolbar folder but not my bookmarks. (See the exciting details here). I suspect there’s no easy way to fix it, and I’m trying to avoid creating a new Firefox profile. Hopefully some developer will read my problem and come up with a brilliant solution. While stumbling through…

  • Random Lists

    Elearningpost has long been one of the more interesting weblogs out there. I’ve been reading it off and on for — gosh, 7 years! It’s run by Maish R Nichani (who is much much smarter than I) and has lots of useful information in the field of information design, instructional technology and even web design.…

  • Why Users Don’t Read Documentation: Technical Writing Secrets

    Peter Morville’s subject of findability comes up all the time in looking for information on the web. Yesterday I was seeking a driver for an old scanner. Should be easy. I had a serial number but not the model number. Unfortunately, the website contained no information about how to determine the model number. To access…

  • Presentation (August 25): Optimizing for Reading: The Art and Science of Presenting Content

    This Saturday I’ll be giving a presentation with Gerry Manacsa at Barcamp Houston. (See my post-presentation wrapup here) Subject Optimize for Reading: the art (and science) of presenting content Date: August 25, 2007. Probably 10:00 AM. (There is no set schedule, but we’ll probably be presenting before noon). Location: Houston Technology Center Cost: Free! (as…

  • Why Facebook will be the world’s biggest spammer

    So far, I’ve been indifferent to Facebook (I joined it reluctantly, as I do all other social networking sites). I’ve been accepting invitations (and that sort of thing), but lately it’s been getting on my nerves. It’s beginning to seem that I’m doing a lot of housekeeping here. (Dwight Silverman had already pointed this out…

  • Presentation (August 25): Optimizing for Reading: The Art and Science of Presenting Content

    On Saturday August 25 I’ll be attending Barcamp Houston. . It’s located at the Houston Technology Center near midtown. I was going to give a presentation on ebooks, but instead, I’ve decided to give a presentation on a more general topic: Optimizing for Reading: The Art and Science of Presenting Content. Subjects covered will include:…

  • Geekend coming Up!

    Since I’m officially looking for work, it may seem a little curious to redouble my efforts to master more technical skills. But after reading this Oreilly article on an xml editor for documentation, I’m tempted to download XMLMind this weekend. Partially to learn the tool, but partially to produce some DITA and Docbook documents quickly…

  • Incomplete Web Views

    Here’s the panel listing of SXSW Interactive. Pretty typical. Most other conferences do basically the same thing.  But it’s totally wrong. It doesn’t list speakers or more importantly, the room number for each panel. Is this too much information? Sure! But the loss in usability is outweighed by its sheer convenience of having all the…

  • Open Usability Projects

    Strange I haven’t seen this before: openusability, a group of folks who do user testing of open source projects. Lots of linux-based projects, so I guess it goes with the territory. Here’s a ruby-based book collection desktop application, Alexandria. YAML, a data serialization method for data structures that can’t use tabs (python for example). I…

  • Good Experience

    Audobon Society Seafood Lover’s Wallet Card. From this is broken: Why is it that when making what I perceive to be a long distance call and input the 1 plus the area code, I get a recording back saying that I don’t need to input those numbers. “The 1 and the area code are not…

  • More Complaints about PDF

    Bruce Eckel complains about PDF Another thing that makes me worry about Adobe: Acrobat has always been very slow to start up; it’s one of the painful things about using the product. But Adobe has never, apparently, felt the need to speed it up, even when there has been (apparently for several years) at least…

  • Getting Past Target=_blank

    Abe Fettig writes: I’m interested in switching away from Cingular wireless, so today I went to verizon.com to look for some info on their wireless plans. Clicking the Wireless link on the home page brought me to this page, which tells me to go to www.verizonwireless.com to learn about Verizon’s wireless offerings. But when I…

  • Do 3 hour long classes really work?

    At college, do once-a-week 3 hour classes actually work? Should our Students Study chinese? A trick. If you have Firefox and if you have the Web Developer extension installed (and you should, it is indispensable), you can disable the css and not have to be bothered with that wretched absolutely positioned graphic.