running with paper

It’s been quiet around here lately; busy with family and year-end, and pulling together freelance work out in the wilds of the internet.

Today I started, again, installing Drupal on a customer site. I’d installed it a few times before, but this was a planned total new installation. Moving to 6.15, getting the site out of beta into release shape, the whole nine yards.

Usually I check drupal.org first, looking for updates – this time I knew from a friend that 6.15 was out and included a number of security updates. Fine by me: most of what I’d done shouldn’t be affected by any changes. Install, move the content over to the new database, then get the final touches, such as hiding the User Login fields, live.

Installation – smooth. Modules – uploaded. Themes – migrated. Content – moved and updated. User Login fields – not doing what I want. Okay, fine. Dr Google to the rescue. Most sites say the same thing as drupal.org – turn off the block and access it by typing in sitename.com/username. Not my first choice on a site that is publishing user names right and left, but I’ll try it. After all, it is in the official documentation, it must be right!

Not really. I don’t know if it was this fix or an earlier fix, but you can’t do that in Drupal 6 any more, I think. As of this writing, drupal.org is down for maintenance. So I fiddled in another direction, and that seems to have solved the issue.

1. First, make sure you are logged in to your site as an administrator. I have no idea how to do this if you’ve lost your login fields already – sorry.
2. Create a new Page, name it something you can remember, such as yourspecialPage. Publish it, but do not put it on the front page.
3. Edit the visibility of the login block such that it appears only on that new Page by selecting the page visibility option to show the page only on yourspecialPage (no leading or trailing slashes).

Now your login block only appears on sitename.com/yourspecialPage/.

It might not be a code bug, but rather a security feature – so, then simply a doc bug. Either way, nice to exercise those muscles again.

Back in my customer service days, we had a trophy the office manager had made up of an old sports trophy, a nice red triangular rock, and googly eyes from the craft store. It was a silly award, given for good ideas in later or mockingly to mind-numbingly clueless customers, vendors, or ourselves …

I’ve been going through my papers for year-end, and came across a notebook I kept in my corporate days, listing the bug reports and software improvements I’d recommended over the previous year. I was aiming for one a week for a year but didn’t quite make my goal. I wonder if they took up any of the suggestions, or if any were in the pipeline and are now out there (even if I didn’t come up with it first).

And it’s funny; that’s why I started in this business – not liking some of the bugs and usability annoyances of software. Wanting to do something about it, and getting there by suggesting fixes and writing down what needed to be worked around, teaching my co-workers back in the day to use *NIX based software on terminals and in emulation environments.

Happy New Year, happy bug and feature hunting!

If you search for tips on improving slide decks and presentations, you usually find the same sort of tips. Keep it short. Keep it uncluttered. Stick with a palette from the company/software/package. Have your notes ready, know your deck cold, be able to do without it.

Very few seem to focus on a couple of problems I see over and over again, and I thought I’d try to address them here.

Lose the pastels. Light, bright colors that are in the same range are rather useless on screen. They print great in your color hand outs, they look nice on your screen, but across the room, they won’t show up well. And as a black and white print out, they’ll be useless shades of grey.

Don’t assume your audience has 100% color vision. A number of colleagues, including a few at recent classes and seminars, are color blind in some way. Use more than color to show your varied items: numbers, letters, arrows, or other keying information. Not sure how your colors look? Try this tool I found while searching for the answer to another client problem. (I’ve spoken to the creator about making it a more user-friendly tool – stay tuned.)

Double, even triple decking. Yes, it can be a lot of work – especially if you’re making changes up until the last minute. But you likely need to have more than one set of slides for your presentation.

One black and white set that will photocopy and distribute well.

One dark-room deck, usually with a white background.

One reversed deck a dark background with white text. One set of classes I took had lovely west facing windows along one side of the room, with no blinds. Morning classes were difficult, afternoon classes were blindingly painful. Other multi-purpose rooms and hey-let’s-make-it-a-lecture room rooms don’t have dimming capabilities, and you’re faced with a choice: complete dark or complete bright. Not ideal if your audience needs to take notes and weren’t prepared for a dark room.

Parallelism. Don’t make your audience remember. They can’t think that far back to twelve slides ago when you showed them Brand X and your wonderful idea. Show a before and after. Yes, it means duplication of slides in your deck because you can’t program a deck to show alternative threads, but seeing comparisons side by side is a powerful tool.

Repeat the question. Whether you’re live, recording, in a small group or large, repeat the question. This ensures you understand the question, the questioner knows you understand it, and that embarrassed guy in the back who had to silence ABBA right in the middle of Dancing Queen gets the question, as well.

Record yourself. Do this for yourself, with a test audience, and, if it won’t interfere with the final presentation, during the final presentation. Some times, despite the best efforts of a part-time cobbled-together A/V system, some of the information on the video will be dropped on the audio. Use these to remove uhs, uhms, and buts, or to capture questions from the test audiences to incorporate into later drafts. Or to provide transcripts (value-add!) to your presentation clients. Don’t record yourself using the presentation laptop – unless you’ve tested it to ensure you’re not overloading your system.

Most of the lectures, classes, and seminars I’ve attended lately were stellar. Great information, well laid out, but with a few problems beyond and within their control. It’s not just about giving information people can use, it’s about giving it in a usable, relatable, retainable format.

Happy presenting!

Gah. I don’t even want to get into it. The “update” of Lexulous downgraded me to 1.2 from 1.3.

Still crashes. Still requires multiple clicks to play:

1. Place tiles.
2. Click Play.
3. Click to get rid of the “ensure you are connected to the internet” message.
4. Click Play. Hope the application doesn’t crash.

I’m not particularly happy about it, but I should have been watching during the download to avoid getting downgraded.

Lexulous as a service has been having troubles, lately, too. I’ve had several of my friends’ names disappear from the Facebook site – they are changed to “Facebook User” and their user numbers are displayed in-game.

Sure, it’s annoying. But the problem that’s worse is that these “blank” names cause the software to crash on the iPhone. The application simply closes. While playing a string of games, I can’t play my tiles and click Next – the application exits if it hits a blank player. So I’ve got to go backwards to the game list, and skip my neglected “blank” friends.

I hope Lexulous 1.4 is coming soon. I’ve written them offering to be a beta tester and asking about the expected release date of 1.4, but they don’t have information to give me, nor do they seem to require outside beta testers.

I do like the more sensible layout of Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone. I’ve not yet made any “shortcuts”. It sounds sensible, but I can’t quite think of what I’d need to shortcut.

On my old phones, before I inherited this iPhone (which it looks as if I will keep, yippee!), I would shortcut two things: a calculator and the “ringtone adjuster”. My two most popular non-calling functions. The calculator to calculate price breaks or percentages, the ringtone adjuster to turn the darn things to vibrate. None of the cheap phones I used to carry ever had an easy way to pop into silent mode on the way in and out of meetings.

I’ve had a few problems with keeping up with people, but Facebook has not suffered any problems with updates to the phone that weren’t reflected on the site proper.

And I love the built-in browser and the more sensible notifications. And I might be mistaken, but I think it’s respecting my wishes with regards to (sorry!) frivolous updates. I don’t need six thousand MafiaWars updates, especially on my phone.

Just one more thing – let me play Lexulous without needing their iPhone application! Maybe Facebook for the iPhone 3.1?

But if my spam filter kept statistics, I bet you dollars for doughnuts that this post would be at the top of the list of spammed posts.

Why? Keywords? Links? A puzzle.

I hear there’s Facebook 3.0! I’ve been avoiding lists of features, but I hope:

1. I can “like” things
2. I will actually get relevant updates in News and Status Updates instead of a few random ones
3. Hiding preferences carry over – I don’t want to see a thousand FarmVille updates (sorry friends) ever, especially my phone
4. I no longer have to break my friends, family, and colleagues into individual groups to see their updates
5. Ridding of having to scroll horizontally past Mafia, FarmVille, InaneQuiz 3283, and more, just to get over to the special collection updates
6. Ability to suppress things which I cannot access – game updates – via the mobile interface
7. Ability to include things I want priority access to – pictures, notes – via the mobile interface

Lexulous 1.4

• Stop terminating unexpectedly
• Handle errors better – I should not have to be reminded to ensure I’m connected to the net every time I click an action button
• If you can’t fix that, and I do have to hit PLAY | YES I’M CONNECTED | PLAY all the time, make the word lookup tool hold the word so I don’t have to type it twice
• Make the board “bigger” – I am quite impressed by the tile offset when I move (if I happen to be a right handed player) but it gets a little iffy at the edges of the boards – make a border

The error correction is what drives me the most batty. But I usually play Lexulous on the iPhone when I am stuck in an otherwise completely dead zone of time, space, and reality. So I put up with three clicks to play a tile set instead of one. And it may not be completely Lexulous’ fault. I’ve reported the errors and asked to beta test the next version – no soap. So we’ll see how 1.4 handles the situation.

I’m assuming there’s some kind of low level communication going on without any decent return packets for the game. And it might be that AT&T service is so horrendous here in South Florida (and I spend far too much time with an “E” on my screen rather than a “3G” to prove it) that Lexulous can’t help but error out. So it might need more flexibility in waiting for acks back, or taking a bit longer to punch through. I know I’ve played a move, gone to my next game, played that move, clicked for my next game and ended back up with my first, my tiles unplayed.

Not sure what else is getting upgraded besides the 3.0 iPhone interface, but can I have a folder, please? Or more? I would love to nest my applications. Between the applications I have and others have (the hub, the kids) I am drowning in pages and pages of apps I don’t want to use! Maybe even a profile. One for him, one for me. Please.

It was bound to happen, and it has. ITunes, designed for simple users. A computer, a device, maybe two.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

Six computers in this house. Two Windows desktops (XP and 2000). A Windows Laptop (XP). Another Windows Laptop (Vista or 7, I forget). Two Macs – soon to be three.

Between us we have a dying 30GB 2nd Gen iPod, a wonky 10GB 3rd Gen Mini, one iPhone, and the newest addition to the family, an iPod shuffle for workouts and music-on the go. We are smart, educated computer professionals, well versed in the Way Things Should Be Done.

However, we do them the way they happen to fit. Our reality grew organically. One device, then another, add some, take some away. The upshot of it is that all of the devices currently sync to 1 of the Macs and none of the other devices.

Since ITunes doesn’t really care what device you have, iPod or not, this can lead to several kinds of trouble. Our most recent and poignant example was sleepy time music. We’ve got several gigs full of kid pop on the iPhone, and when we’re on one of our many road trips, we plug it in and the kids listen as they drop off for naps on said long rides (we have racked up 80,000 miles in the last three years if that tells you anything).

So the next time the iPhone sync’d, and then the Shuffle sync’d, guess what the Shuffle had as its top 25 list? Kid music.

Granted – you want to make the user experience easy for users – but to force them into planning elaborate structures (and yes, more than one iTunes account or machine is elaborate) to keep their family’s music from cross-pollution of preferences is just … not right. At least identify the devices – both by your internal mechanisms (read the device codes and profiles) and external mechanisms (device name – friendly or TRY to identify the millions of other media players that aren’t from Apple). Allow users to create device profiles, and fine tune further if they like. So iPhone preferences and ratings don’t leak into the Shuffle.

At the very least, ITunes, ask me before you start synching something simply because I plug it in. Or make me set a setting to ask you to ask me before synching when I plug in. Desperate for a charge, I plugged my iPhone into my sister’s computer the other day and it started synching. She warned me (I’m not the usual updater, I leave it to the Hub for the movement) so I stopped it. But if one of the kids had decided to help me by plugging in my phone? Not necessarily the best thing to just start synching willy-nilly. And yes, they’re allowed to touch the technology; we try to guide rather than hide, even when it results in a few mishaps.

And please, get a make over, ITunes. You don’t seem to handle interfacing with the Photo app very well, according to Tog (I can’t find the darn article now). So how about a rebuild? IMood, IGroove, IMedia …. IVibe?

I’m fan enough of computer graphics that I once spent at least half of a first day with a guy talking about it and viewing clips back at his place (the modern equivalent of etchings?).

No, really! On his suggestion, I attended my first SIGGRAPH conference in 1997. FUN! Even the behind the scenes stuff is very cool.

But even before computer graphics I was a fan of visual effects; sleight of hand magic tricks, things that change from one sort to another, old movies pioneered by Harry Hausen himself.

Another fan has put this together; a compendium of visual effects in the movies over the years:

Very nice. While he limits himself to a five minute span, I could see a series of these emphasizing the other pioneering techniques – maybe a series of themes to bring the “cool” and “this is what you can do if you stay in school/work on it as a hobby” to VFX.

I was a little disappointed that the Lord of the Rings series were excluded; that table scene with the Gandalf and Frodo! Ohhh! But again, only five minutes!

But happy to see the effects behind Benjamin Button: I haven’t seen the movie, but will keep my eye out to rent it if a full director’s cut and/or effects track is provided. It gives me faith that they can bring my favorite Bilbo instead of this Doctory fellow or the choice Gandalf hinted at (though I must argue that Tom Baker is my Doctor!).

Between the strides made with Andy/Gollum/Sméagol and what I see of Benjamin Button, I think we can get Ian Holm in for the Hobbit(ses) … please?

I’ve already griped about Facebook’s utter scary of a mobile site. I actually have been planning to review the Facebook iPhone 2.0 software I’m running, but life keeps getting in the way, and every time I sit down with the device and software, it starts “behaving” nicely and I figure the errant behavior was just a quirk of my imagination and everything else I could simply ignore.

However, I’m finally going to review 2.0 very shortly (I’m writing the post now) and put in my wish list for 3.0 (so far I’ve completely neglected to research it avoided the spoilers, yeah, that’s it).

While I was in the process of researching the history of iPhone and Facebook, I found out why it especially sucks to be me and other clueless iPhone-Facebookers.

Facebook has a SPECIAL web page for iPhone users only.

I hardly ever use the word incensed to describe my reaction to software, even when faced with certain nameless OS/hardware configuration difficulties but, yeah, I’m incensed. And I don’t mean that I smell like a house of worship. Continue Reading »