Entries in category “Usability”
Batteries sold separately
Published April 8, 2008
At first glance, Google’s App Engine looks like a great way to build the next big web application; you get access to a massively scalable infrastructure, you get access to a huge existing authentication system, you get baked-in stats, you get all sorts of cool goodies.
Oh, and you get Python, which is a great language for writing web applications, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t take some pleasure in Django ...
Dependencies.
Published March 3, 2008
Once upon a time, I was doing a server setup at work, installing all the various prerequisites and utilities to support the things we use. One part of that involves installing Jing, which we use for XML validation; Jing is written in Java, and so we use gcj (the GNU Java compiler) to compile it for use, ending up with a nice little binary we can call from anywhere.
Now, we’ve standardized on Ubuntu ...
iPod touch
Published September 30, 2007
When Steve Jobs announced the iPod touch at the beginning of the month, I knew I wanted one: it looked like the perfect little device for my assorted mobile needs. I spent a week or so thinking it over, then placed an order, and Friday morning as I was stepping out of the shower a FedEx delivery guy rang my doorbell to deliver it. I’ve spent the last couple of days playing with it ...
Sniffle
Published December 18, 2006
The other day, the Dojo blog announced the public beta of Renkoo, an “evite killer” which relies heavily on the asynchronous features of Dojo and “Comet”, the name that’s been given to the use of long-lived HTTP connections to provide instant updates of state in event-driven web applications.
Except I can’t check out Renkoo in my browser of choice — Safari — because I get automatically redirected to their “unsupported browser” page. They have a ...
The Rules
Published August 29, 2006
So today I got to wade through the joyful experience of cancelling my account with a business which shall remain nameless (unless, of course, they didn’t actually cancel the account — in which case they shall be named and shamed and several other things as well).
The experience was less then pleasant both for me and the poor customer-service rep who had to take my call, so I’d like to suggest some general guidelines ...
Trying something new
Published August 20, 2006
Following up on yesterday’s feed subscription housecleaning, today I noticed that, if you buy a NewsFire license before day’s end you’ll get a nice bonus: Inquisitor thrown in free of charge.
Well, hot damn!
Inquisitor is really the big win for me here; I’m trying to get into the habit of using Safari as my day-to-day browser, since I’m doing lots of JavaScript stuff and — though this is in no ...
Installing the GIMP
Published June 8, 2006
Anil Dash has written up some complaints about installing the GIMP on Windows.
Special care should be used while reading that, because he does go through several very valid points:
- The GIMP should bundle the GTK libraries it requires, and install them if they’re not present.
- The process of choosing a mirror from which to download a package, while extremely common for software which doesn’t come from companies with multi-billion-dollar market caps, could ...
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