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.

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?

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’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 »

I recently returned from vacation (peeling and cranky, but several delayed flights and Pepsi-only terminals will do that to me) to my lovely home computing devices. I’d been “roughing” it with an iPhone (soon to go away, boo hoo) and a quick dollar spin on a public internet terminal (because I was having a devilish time locating my flight information – date, time, airline, destination …).

I’ve had this theory for a while about Gmail and Facebook, but I didn’t know how to test it, short of how I did: go away for a few days and refuse to upgrade my Firefox. Continue using Gmail and Facebook as usual until they stop. Reboot everything a few times, follow semi-explicit troubleshooting methods, and then give in: Upgrade Firefox.

And tonight, it happened. Gmail and Facebook worked fine in Chrome, Opera, Safari, and even a really old version of AOL’s version of Internet Explorer (yes, I am looking into finally retiring all versions of AOL software from my systems, but I have to negotiate with the Octos to do so).

Firefox? No.

Facebook was fine, but I suspect they don’t have as many brilliant awesome and handsome developers as Google does (or will have had, come a few more weeks – scroll to number five).

But I expect that if I wait long enough, Facebook will stop working, too.

So my theory is thus:

1. Despite the popularity and availability of Chrome, a lot of people use Firefox for their Gmailering.
2. Google, Facebook, and other sites have a vested interest in their users using up-to-date browsers, especially if security patches are involved.
3. While other Google functions probably work during this “code strike”, I haven’t bothered verifying it for a number of reasons ¹.

Therefore, when something really (or somewhat) important is updated in Firefox, Google, Facebook and possibly other sites put up a bit of code that is roughly:

Browser out of date? If yes, block all cool stuff (AJAX, JSON, COMET). If no, let them read their stuff without hindrance or let.

Google doesn’t care if I use their search or any of their other bazillion programs, or maybe they limit those, too. But they know if I care about the cool stuff, like chat, menu bar email counts, and those cute mountainscape backgrounds, I’ll upgrade my darn Firefox to get them working again. Which is fine by them.

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I’m sticking to it. Because honestly? I’d do it, too. Now if only I could turn off certain “pushed” upgrades (I’m looking at you, iPhone!) …

Anyway, I need to go upgrade half a dozen WordPress installs – version 2.8.4 is out …

_{1. Gmail is convenient, Google Docs is not bad, Google Voice has sent me a total of three calls but that’s all I really use. If they blocked their search engine from us slacker updaters, they’d likely have a riot ….}

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ETA: I could not publish this from a non-updated Firefox and non-updated WordPress without some fiddling … I really do need to go through and update all the biddly bits on my bit boxes here. Sigh …

We finally plugged the Wii back in the other night to play our new game – Wii Sports Resort. Pretty fun; I like the improved control given with the game controller add-on.

But one thing that amazed and amused me was the warning we received. The software and possibly hardware configurations and programming were updated when we booted up and started fiddling. The unit informed us an update was about to take place, and politely informed us that if we’d made any modifications to the system, such as making it play DVDs, or other end-user kiss-your-warranty-goodbye changes, those changes would be overwritten and your device might come to some harm.

I loved it. We were late to buy a Wii (weighing the consoles before it won out), so this was the first time we’d seen the warning.

If there’s one thing the game companies have learned, and to some extent, embraced, is that we’re going to hack their stuff. And min max it, and play it, and keep buying it. We might not pay for it if we don’t have to, but we will pay for it in some way, and sometimes the game companies will be the ones getting the money .

But to see that warning was heartening. Too often there are scary details buried in the minutia of End User License Agreements (EULAs) that are written quite badly and can be interpreted quite badly (Google owns all content in your gMail, beta software that can be deleted at any time, the OMG The Government OWNS YOUR COMPUTERS!!!111). This was a simply a friendly warning that hey – we know what you might do, and this might break it, because we don’t necessarily like you modding our stuff …. Or not – mod at your own risk.

Not everyone has this approach, but I do see DirectTV’s point of view* as well. If I’m creating or selling something, I want to be compensated. But virtual (or actual) monopolization of media is steadily eroding as home technology and people who just want to hack continue to do so – the trick is finding something that mostly works for mostly everyone.

We’ll see where that middle muddle is … and in the mean time, happy hacking, do so at your own risks, and so on, and so on!

^{* While this “Game Over” report is dated Dec 08, it refers to events in 2001 and is not annotated as clearly as I’d like. This did lead me to a link to an interview with the creator of the countermeasure that is a great read.}

I’ve been using my iPhone to browse a lot more – looking for retail locations, checking business hours, and amusing myself during down time. Recent searches sent me after articles about local technology companies at a local news site, looking for a blog post about “Cash for Clunkers”, and trying to manage some administrivia on Facebook.

Facebook redirected me straight to their mobile site; I’d followed a “take action” link from their email but the mobile site gave no indication if I took the action, or if I could take the action. All I had was a simple screen with shortcuts. I should have checked my Facebook application instead (which has its own issues) – maybe the administrivia can be done that way. But I was faced with a generic screen of little value.

The “Cash for Clunkers” blog post was something a quick Google search had found for me. I followed the link to Edmunds, and again, dropped straight to a mobile site. Eventually, I was able to find the blog trail I was looking for (the main site of the blog) but I never found the exact article.

The local paper was worse than the rest; a simple page not found message. I clicked the link while on a standard computer later, and was taken straight to the article.

It’s 2009. Why are large sites still using generic web error pages (if any?)?  Is it that expensive, complicated, or cost-prohibitive to come up with a script that generates an error message that tells you something:

• What the site thinks you wanted to do
• What URL you were attempting to access
• Offer alternatives, such as mailing yourself and support the error data

And why do we have generic mobile sites? Yes, not all pages can be designed for all sizes of browser screens. However, sticking the mobile users with limited to no data, and no way to navigate where they intended (such as the URL you were trying to access) without giving them any opportunity to get off of a dumbed-down mobile site is pretty useless.

Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, for example, have done a good job of stripping down their sites while retaining useful information. Searching for a book? The site will take you to an information page about the book, but in usable mobile-friendly format. Certainly, they have a large incentive to do this, considering we’re revenue, but they also make it easy for you to use the full site – just click their respective “PC Site” links.

At the least, it’s making me aware of should and should nots next time I’ve got a large site to create or provide input for. Constructive and useful error pages, decent redirects, and options for more powerful mobile browsers to access a full “PC” site.