Giveup vs. catchup
May 28, 2008 at 22:58 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | Leave a CommentTags: buglabs, eurovision, Maps, mashed, mdm, morris dancing, secondlife, twitter
I haven’t read many blogs lately (I blame Technorati favourites going AWOL… erm, and I’ve been a tad busy). I could do the same as Kelly and declare blog bankruptcy but I thought I’d try something different. I’ve had a skim through and these look kind of interesting:
- My Favorite MDM-Related Web Sites (Part 1)
- A Lot of Tips for Second Life Learning
- BUGs I Like!
- 279 – The Eurovision Text Map 2008
- Mashed 2008 – tickets now available
- Intro to Twitter
- Twitter and responsibility
- Morris Dancers meet the Ug Girls
- Reading the FT: mapping as a turning point
Let me know if any of them are worth reading properly!
Nobody deliberately builds a product that’s hard to use
May 28, 2008 at 21:44 | In Ones and Zeros | 7 CommentsTags: design, developerWorks, IBM, UML, usability, user modeling
There are undoubtedly some pretty hard to use products about. Computers seem particularly troublesome when it comes to making things easy to use, whether a desktop PC or in the guise of some consumer electronics like a PVR. There might actually be people deliberately designing products that are difficult to use (don’t ever hire me to write software to control lifts because impatient button pressing would definitely be taken in to account… mwahahaha!) but the reality is that it’s tough to make something easy to use. It’s even harder to modify or extend an existing product consistently.
Visual design can actually be a distraction when it comes to making a system easy to use. Pixel perfect placement of a button might make a big difference to the look of a product, but it’s how the button fits with your conceptual model of that product that will dictate how easy it is to use. (The Psychology of Everyday Things has a wonderful description of a set of doors that look great, but are difficult to use. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to get doors right!) User modeling can help by focusing the design on the needs of users, rather than letting the design be dictated by the underlaying technology.
I’ve been having a go at creating a few simple user models since starting my new job and I’m starting to get the hang of it. Luckily help is at hand in the form of a user modeling series on developerWorks:
- Creating a system specification from the user’s point of view
- Building a user model
- Extend UML for user models
Is this the beginning of the end for products that are hard to use?
My mum, the seriously organised criminal
May 22, 2008 at 22:32 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | 1 CommentTags: Ban bullying at work, bullying, free speech, liberties, Mark Thomas, mum, protest, SOCPA, teachers, Westminster, Whitley
Just finished watching Taking Liberties and, apart from making my blood boil, it reminded me how proud I am of my mum. Here she is on 7th November 2005 standing up against bullying from her head teacher and the government at the same time:
(Since she didn’t have permission for a ‘protest’, so she was making a ‘request’, not protesting… Luckily we didn’t get arrested!)
Flashing light
May 17, 2008 at 20:18 | In Ones and Zeros | 1 CommentTags: arduino, doorbell, hacking, hacks, home, home automation
Roo’s been doing some open circuit board surgery on a doorbell so his house can twitter when it has visitors. By a stoke of luck (they were in the bargain bin when I needed one!) my doorbell flashes a light as well sounding a bell when it goes off:
Hopefully making it easy to hook up to one of these (when they’re available) with no chance of breaking the doorbell!
Is there any point to estate agents?
May 14, 2008 at 22:50 | In Grumpy Old Man | 4 CommentsTags: Enfields, estate agents, HIP, home information pack, house
Since taking our house off the market recently, I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that estate agents do. Maybe they:
- Arrange a HIP: ignoring the fact that HIPs are a completely pointless waste of time and money, I got mine sent to the agent in the first place.
- Market my house: we had one advert in the paper, and I think describing the leaflets as brochures is pushing it a bit. There is Rightmove, but I prefer alternatives like ononemap myself.
- Find me a buyer: I’m pretty sure I could have found a buyer last year on my own, but now the market is on hold none of the estate agents seem to be having much luck finding them.
- Communicate: it’s a long process and regular updates and clear communications are essential… I’m just not sure they manage it.
When the market has settled/sunk to rock bottom, we’ll be putting the house up for sale again (hopefully before the pointless HIP has expired and they have to make up the same rubbish again). Despite my doubts, I expect we will probably use an estate agent again: it was very useful to have them doing all the viewings, and while I might not think Rightmove is the best site in the world, a lot of people do use it. (If only I could add my own house.)
It will be tricky choosing a new agent though, mainly because most of them seem fairly hopeless. For example, one agent, who we were already registered with, sent a compliment slip asking us to call quoting reference ML1, yet didn’t seem to really know what ML1 meant when I phoned. They’ve been sending the same slip ever since… sometimes twice a day! We’ve got quite a collection now:
Another agent, who originally wildly over estimated the value of our house, phoned randomly to gloat about how many viewings he had for an almost identical house. Viewings don’t always mean sales though and it still hasn’t sold! Frustratingly, one of the best agents, who we found while looking for houses to buy, doesn’t sell houses in our area. Bother.
Still, the way the market’s going we won’t need a new estate agent for a while, and there could be less of them left to choose by then.
Bluetooth house
May 11, 2008 at 19:05 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | Leave a CommentTags: arduino, bluetooth, Cityware, Johnny Lee Chung, Wii, zigbee
Since starting to dabble with home automation I’ve had a few thoughts about how bluetooth might be useful in all sorts of ways. Any early candidate for inclusion was the astounding Wiimote which, as Johnny Chung Lee has shown, is one of the most versatile pieces of consumer gadgetry ever. Waving the Wiimote about to dim the lights might be fun, and I love this use to open a door! For more immediate results though, the Wii itself seems like an ideal interface to the tiny headless server I now have running.
As Gareth’s twittering laptop shows, bluetooth is also a nice way to tell when you’re home. (Plus, it might be interesting to hook the house up with Cityware to tell you who’s at the door.) A USB bluetooth dongle could be on my shopping list soon. I’m also very tempted to go completely wild and get an Arduino (there’s bluetooth for the Arduino… and Zigbee) – watching Nicholas’ progress before I decide though.
This is not just food…
May 6, 2008 at 20:58 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | 2 CommentsTags: buttons, cadbury, cake, chocolate, food
…this is chocolate cake with Cadbury Buttons on baked by Jo:
As you can see from the plate, that wasn’t my first slice!
House blogject/tweetject experiments
May 3, 2008 at 23:34 | In Ones and Zeros | 1 CommentTags: blog, blogject, curl, CurrentCost, google, graphs, house, mtsend, tweetject, twitter, wordpress
Now that I have my home server pretty much sorted, I’ve had a chance to start experimenting with a few ideas for what to actually do with it.
It’s already publishing CurrentCost data, along with several others, but it’d be nice to do a bit more. One thing that is definitely on my to do list is to hook it up to Twitter. Andy’s house uses Twitter to communicate, which is getting some interest. It’s easy to twitter something from a home server, although not quite so easy to make it interesting, or at least not way too talkative and repetitive. Plus Twitter is a fantastic way to get text message alerts from your house (and a million and one other uses).
The other thing I’d quite like is a nice web based dashboard to replicate some of the information on the CurrentCost screen, but it’s only a tiny home server and, while it does run XAMPP, there’s not much memory left afterwards. It would also be kind of nice to avoid any security holes by not running my own web server. I’ve done a few experiments and it looks like WordPress is the perfect answer: I’ve added a House page which I can update with Google graphs using mtsend.py. The alternative would be to use new posts each time, which would be great to keep a history but that would probably fill up my weblog with even less interesting stuff than is already here!
Quite pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to actually automate some of it!
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