26 Apr 12

Google as a BBS

Some of you may know that in the early 90s, before I was introduced to “The Internet”, I ran a Bulletin Board System (BBS) in Ottawa called SMH Online. These systems were text-based (or ASCII art!) services that you would dial into to send mail, download files, play games, etc.

Fast forward to 2012. The minds at mass:werk media environments in Austria thought it would be funny to develop a BBS-inspired interface for the Google search engine. It’s hilarious, and fully functional! (make sure you have your computer speakers turned on)

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21 Feb 12

New WordPress Plugin – Pinterest NoPIN Support

Just wrote a new plugin for WordPress.  It makes use of the new “nopin” feature of the Pinterest social media site, that prevents users of the very popular service from being able to “pin” (link to) items from your WordPress powered site.

Download the Plug-In

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6 Nov 11

Recommended Reading from UXCamp Ottawa 2011

UXCamp Ottawa is “a one-day conference focusing on the topic of user experience”.  It was held in on the University of Ottawa campus on November 5th, 2011.

During the sessions, several of the speakers and participants recommended books on the topic they were speaking about.   Here are the ones that I noted:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for brining cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This revised and updated edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It’s essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world’s most exciting marketplace.
 
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink
Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. (from danpink.com)
 
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug
This book was recommended reading for anyone looking at getting into usability testing
 
Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research By Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte
Remote studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop. (from rosenfeldmedia.com)
 

If you have any other additions to this list, comment below.

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2 Nov 11

eBooks: A Price Comparison Test

Yesterday, Google opened the Google eBookstore to Canadians.   I already have the Amazon Kindle application and the Apple iBooks application installed on my iPad.  Do I really need to start another eBook library?

I thought I’d do a quick price comparison, to see if there was an advantage to using one store over the other, and here’s what I found.

Book Title Amazon Price Apple Price Google Price
Persuasion: A New Approach to Changing Minds by Arlene Dickinson  $ 16.96  $ 14.99  $ 14.99
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson  $ 20.72  $ 17.99  $ 17.99
The Litigators by John Grisham  $ 13.49  N/A  $ 13.49
The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks  $ 12.99  $ 12.99  $ 12.99

So a quick look at four book titles would seem to show that prices are quite similar on the three eBook stores in question, although Amazon can be  a little higher.

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17 Oct 11

SOLUTION: Moving NeatWorks NeatReceipts data directory

I recently purchased a new computer with a solid-state hard drive as the operating system/applications drive.   It isn’t a great idea to store your data on these drives, so with each application install, I make sure that it stores its data to my secondary (SATA) hard drive.  When I got to configuring my NeatWorks NeatReceipts scanner software, it turns out there is no way to change the default data directory through the application’s preferences.  (Rumours have it that version 5 of the NeatWorks will allow this).

I’ve found a workaround to this problem.  You can create a directory junction (type of symbolic link) in Windows that will make the Neat software look in its default location (C:\ProgramData\The Neat Company\NeatWorks) but access files in a new location.  Please note that this fix will only work on Windows Vista, Windows 2008, or Windows 7 and newer. Older version of the operating system did not include this functionality.

To set this up:

  1. Move your NeatWorks data folder to it’s new location (for this example, I’m moving ito to D:\NeatWorks)
  2. Go to your command prompt (Start Button, Run…, “cmd”)
  3. Change Directories to The Neat Company folder:

    cd "C:\ProgramData\The Neat Company"

  4. Create the symbolic link to your new data location:

    mklink /J "NeatWorks" "D:\NeatWorks"

Start NeatWorks and you should see all your data.

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26 Sep 11

Bell Sympatico SMTP Server modifies outgoing e-mail headers

Just discovered what looks like a change to Bell Sympatico‘s outgoing e-mail servers. 

My parents both use their own domain name’s for their e-mail.  Their internet connection is with Sympatico, which forces them to use Sympatico’s authenticated SMTP server for their outgoing mail.  This type of setup is common (in fact, probably the standard now) with service providers, and has worked fine for a long time.  

Last week, out of the blue, all messages being sent out from either of their computers started showing up as being from <theirnamehere>@sympatico.ca instead of <username>@<theirdomain>.com and the from name (which gets displayed in the recipient’s e-mail client) is getting changed to the name that is on the account with Sympatico.  The subsequent problem to this is that if an e-mail client ignores the reply-to header, replies go back to the @sympatico.ca address, which they don’t use.

This is the second time I’ve seen Sympatico change their outgoing SMTP.  The first time, and I can’t remember when it started, outgoing e-mail had an On Behalf Of header attached to it with the @sympatico.ca e-mail address.  

Obviously the ISP is trying really hard to prevent abuse of their e-mail network.  But have they gone too far?

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25 Jun 11

UX Tip Of The Day: How Not To Disable Menu Items (Boston Pizza)

Every once and a while you come across a functionality on a website that was meant to help, but just really poorly implemented. Tonight I found one of those while attempting to order my dinner.

I was clicking through their online ordering menu deciding what I felt like eating. I was thinking a pizza would sound good. The problem was that every time I clicked on the “gourmet pizzas” category in the left-hand navigation menu, I would get the menu page for “Salads and more”.

When I called the store, it turns out that the breaker on their pizza ovens was blown, and they are unable to make pizzas right now. Because of this, they had disabled option on the website. Aha! Everything made sense.

This was a bad user experience during the ordering process.

It would have been much better to link the “Gourmet Pizzas” menu to a notice page telling the user that they were unable to make pizzas this evening, and apologizing for the inconvenience.

NOTE: Removing the link from the menu would have been a bad choice, and it would leave the user just as confused. “Where’d the pizzas go?!”

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2 Jun 11

O Canada!

Last night’s performance of O Canada during the first game of the 2011 Stanley Cup finals was a great performance. Love that the singer lets the crowd carry the anthem for a while.

Go Canucks Go!

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31 May 11

2011-2012 Garbage Collection Calendar iCalendar Files Released

The 2011-2012 Garbage Collection Calendar iCal files are ready for download!

As my contribution to 2010′s Open Data Ottawa Hackfest, I converted the City of Ottawa’s Garbage Collection Calendar into a open format (iCalendar) so that the schedule could be used for purposes like being imported into your favourite calendaring application such as MS Outlook, Google Calendar, or even your smartphone.

Developers Willem van Bergen and Edward Ocampo-Gooding then took these files and built them into their application, OttawaTrash.ca.  Another great example of the flexibility offered by this open format.

Today, the iCal files have been updated with the collection dates from the 2011-2012 Calendar released by the City.

I hope you enjoy!

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21 Apr 11

Amazon EC2 Outage: No Need to Panic

(To see the status of the Amazon data center, see their Service Health Dashboard)

If you spend any time online, it should not come as a surprise to you that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data center in North Virginia has been experiencing serious technical difficulties since this morning.  This has affected the availability of many major online web applications including: Hootsuite, Foursquare, Quora, Heroku, Reddit, parts of Shopify, Formspring, about.me and many more.

A list of sites affected by the disabled EC2 data center

To quote the temporary new homepage of Hootsuite, “It seems much of the Internet is struggling today due to widespread outage problems.”

Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere have been abuzz with comments from cloud computing’s naysayers proudly announcing “I told you so” to those affected services and users; an opinion I don’t agree with.

What makes this outage significant is the size and number of services that have been affected.  If these companies had chosen to host their services with another web/database/server hosting company, and that company ran into issues, the end result would be the same.

In fact, I would argue that smaller hosting companies are more susceptible to this than large cloud service providers like Amazon (EC2), Google (AppEngine), and Microsoft (Azure).  They are more likely to have less backbone redundancy, less geographic distribution of their infrastructure and have less resources to (money and expertise) to assign to dealing with an outage.

I think the lesson here is for services that cannot afford downtime to mirror their web applications in more than one data center, located in different geographic regions.  Services like Microsoft’s SQL Azure Data Sync, for example, will help make this an easier process.

As of the time of posting this entry, the EC2 servers are still having problems.  This is a bad day for Amazon, and for those who reply on its North Virginia data centre.  I just hope it doesn’t scare away potential users of cloud computing.

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