I _Really_ Don't Know

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project has releases Human Interface Guidelines for the machine.

This is a great piece of thinking and is, aongst other things, the first really good application of Fitts Law that I've seen.

Rest for Toddlers

:-)

I just read over this report:

Sound Output Levels of the iPod and Other MP3 Players: Is There Potential Risk to Hearing?

I've been using FeedReader for a while (I prefer email style new to river of news) and it works really well. The interface is calm and it fits the way I work. But a few months back I upgraded my laptop to a higher res one, 1920x1200 in just 15.4". This looks great, but I do end up making text larger in a few of my apps. I wanted to change that text size in FeedReader and I couldn't find it anywhere. Then I remembered that the preview pane in FeedReader is just an embedded browser - I wonder... Sure enough, C:\Program Files\FeedReader30\stylesheet contains atom.xsl, emailstyle.xsl and custom(delicious.xml); a quick tweak from

body {
font-family: verdana, tahoma;
font-size: 0.7em;
line-height: 1.3em;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}

to

Yesterday at work I was having a pleasant few minutes chat with Nadeem over coffee - a break from refactoring our acceptance test suite and we go talking about Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. A subject close to my heart as a when Ramsay first started doing Kitchen Nightmares a colleague compared him to me, while reviewing code.

Like Ramsay I am passionately against over complicated things and that sometimes means I come across a little strong.

The Pondering Primate has been chattering away about PWHs, or Physical World Hyperlinks for ages. The potential is obvious.

In my world, many of our customers use RFID on their books and self-service terminals from intellident, 3M or other partners. This is the same thing as a PWH in many ways, apart from one key thing. They're local, proprietary and constrained in purpose.

How things got that way

Andy Hunt's (Pragmatic Programmer) blogs a quick post about how "things are always the way they are because they got that way".

Warren Ellis posts a colourful description of his drop into Second Life. This is an extreme position. I'm a non-paying user of SL and have managed to avoid being harangued in any of these ways.

At work we've looked at opportunities for SL, we've even sponsored some initiatives and we even have our own office there.

My colleague Ian Davis pointed at a great post by Nelson Minar.

The deeper problem with SOAP is strong typing. WSDL accomplishes its magic via XML Schema and strongly typed messages. But strong typing is a bad choice for loosely coupled distributed systems. The moment you need to change anything, the type signature changes and all the clients that were built to your earlier protocol spec break. And I don’t just mean major semantic changes break things, but cosmetic things like accepting a 64 bit int where you use used to only accept 32 bit ints, or making a parameter optional. SOAP, in practice, is incredibly brittle. If you’re building a web service for the world to use, you need to make it flexible and loose and a bit sloppy. Strong typing is the wrong choice.

At work we have a geek book club, a little while ago we all read Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmer's, which is a longer, printed version of this earlier online work. Joel does a great job of explaining the basic of use interaction, provides a few rules-of-thumb and some well-written anecdotes.

What's struck me back in the office, though, is that the phrase can be read two ways, as teaching programmer's how to design interfaces or about how to design interface that programmers will use.