My Weblog

How do we determine the usability of a form? Do we design web forms with the user in mind or for the form's sake? Both these questions popped into my head while I was dealing with web forms extensively the last couple of weeks.

I have noticed a rather worrisome trend in the web industry lately, and that is hiding secondary form fields "until they are needed." I do acknowledge the value of such an approach in creating "pretty" form fields. But that's not really coding forms with the user in mind, now is it? Forms should not be coded to look pretty by themselves, forms should be coded with the user in mind.

So what exactly is the value of hiding form fields from the user? We live in a busy world, most of our lives revolve around one thing: <b>time</b>, or the lack thereof, so it is normal for us to allot units of time to our activities. Such as filling in an application form. If it's a paper form you might glance at it and be able to...

I got recently into a rather intellectual debate about what is the commonly agreed upon "standard" on expandable collapsible list behavior. Thought I should share the summary in the hope of offering some guidance about the complexity of the problem.

The question is rather simple: How are expandable /collapsible menus (+ / -) supposed to behave as a best practice? The answer is very simple for simple lists, where the heading expands or collapses a list of items. You got a plus sign if it's collapsed and a minus sign if it's expanded.

Real life collapsible lists are rarely that simple. First what happens if one heading does not contain any items. Do you display a plus or a minus? Do you let the user click on it and toggle between plus and minus with no effect because there is nothing to display? Or do you just not display neither a plus nor a minus.

Well from a usability and user friendliness perspective don't let the user click on it in the first...

It's been a while since I wrote something in this log, it wasn't intentional, but I really did not have the time.

Lots of things happened ever since, including this new website design (questions, comments, opinions on the new design are all welcome...). So let's start with all that is visible first.

I'm sure many have noticed the new design and probably a good chunk didn't notice it at all. I have re-evaluated my priorities in terms of this website and discovered I want to play with the latest toys in the sandbox, and some of the older ones might not fit in it anymore. As a result the current design is not backward compatible with anything lower, including, IE6. Yes IE6 still holds a good chunk of the market but hey... The reasons are PNG alpha blending and Ajax. Microsoft finally decided to implement the PNG graphics format properly in IE7 thus making it possible to work with transparencies and shadows across all major browser vendors. Ajax, wasn't so much of a...

I've been following the entire Microsoft/EU showdown for the last couple of months and got so sick and tired about all what has been written about it, that I decided to write something myself about it.

I'm not really a fan of either of them but and i cannot help noticing that about all the articles attempt to portray either of the two as the bad guy. Or better said: why do you all people out there writing about it have to tell the story in terms of good and evil? Let me be the first breaking y'all the news, neither are good nor evil. So stop putting the problem that way and start thinking how to deal with it effectively!

FACT 1. Microsoft's Windows Opsys is the defacto monopoly on the non-server, non-specialty computing market , partly because of the fact that it tried really hard to become a monopoly, and that's why it's evil. But also significantly because it spend billions of dollars (at this point, i suspect) to develop a GUI that is insanely user friendly, easy...

Let us be clear, i hate creating them and i hate using them... and by "D" i mean any of the following: dynamic, DHTML, drop down... call it as you wish it refers to the same general concept and i think it's a dinosaur.</p><p>It's not that i don't acknowledge their usefulness at some point in the distant past but i think they outlived it.

So what are drop down menus after all? Well a nifty idea in the PC era. When people started working on and with computers with GUI's they needed a way to organize the plethora of options available for a program, that previously were written down in manuals and the like. Anybody remember all the options of the 'ls' command? -- Thought not. So they invented the drop down menu, a program has a menu bar on the interface and when you click on a menu category, a drop down opens with all related options: hence "File", "Edit", "Help" and the like. So in the Internet era somebody had the wise idea,...

I spend the last two days reading various articles about the latest AOL screw-up. Making the several months of search history of several hundred thousand subscribers available publicy was indeed a big mistake, although arguably a mistake in the first place.

I'm more on the privacy side of the argument, meaning that I do not think any entity should keep records of any kind about me if it is not in whatever I deem to be in my interest. Sadly we live in times where people are more concerned about other things than their privacy, which seems to be very good news for entities that want to know as much as possible about an individual. At this rate our right to privacy will soon be reduced to not being watched when we go to the bathroom.

In reality any tiny speck of information about anyone is the hottest comodity on the Internet, because correlated to another speck of info about somebody else and so on it creates a bigger picture that enables web companies to tailor their...

Today's blog entry is dedicated entirely to my girlfriend Rose
Ever since I setup this blog, I have been hearing rather soft complaints about the fact that I never talk about her on my blog (you can guess the source of the complaints ...). I used the excuse of "only publishing professional stuff on the blog" for some time now, but obviously that really never happened, thus I decided it's time to rectify the problem

So, for those of you who don't already know, or didn't already meet her, I do have a girlfriend, her name is Rose and she's a wonderful girl, I love her dearly and I'm having the time of my life when we're together, which is now pretty much most of the time. We've been living together for the entire duration of the summer and now I am mortified at the thought of her having to go back to school, which incidentally means, her moving back to Waco of all places for senior year at Baylor.

I am not at all happy about that. But I guess I won't have any...

Amazing it works!
My very first somewhat usable Ruby on Rails application... it's a rather simplistic blog, but it does the basics very well... post blog entries, comment to the posts, complete with management interface, rather trivial, but it's my first venture into the unknown world of Ruby on Rails, I will keep working and expanding this application as time allows... until then

Goodbye!

Ok, so I know I didn't post on the website in a long while... actually the website hasn't been up and running for a good month, either.

Well lots of things happened lately. I did manage to roll out a new version of my website recently and I will try to take steps in keeping it up to date. The Linux server suffered an upgrade in the last month, I moved from SuSE 9.3 to SuSE 10.1 running PHP5 on Lighttpd and Ruby on Rails with Mongrel, everything neatly gated by Pound. Yeah was a big step, and i'm still touching up the details... but it's working.

At the same time I managed to start a new hobby... sort of... maybe... I did dream since I was a kid to have an electric train set. I finally moved my butt and purchased one from the local hobbytown... really worth it, went all crazy about it... and planning to get into making a model town. I did like building all kind of weird cardstock model since I was little (driving my folks crazy handling scissors at an early age) and...

Ok, last week I read an article on CNet according to which, some executive at RealNetworks warned at the LinuxWorld event, that if Linux wouldn`t incorporate DRM in the kernel it would risk being excluded from the consumer operating systems market...

My first reaction was: Are you freaking kidding me

First of all: Linux is and will be popular in the consumer op sys market BECAUSE it does not contain any kind of half backed ideas of DRM.

Second of all, if I remember correctly out of computers 101 (no it`s not a course, it`s a metaphor) any kind of legal and non-legal music or multimedia content needs to be downloaded in some form or another to your personal computer/gizmo... because that device needs to have the stream of bits and bytes that tell him what to play. So, if the end user has to have the generic file (whatever format it is) on his/her computer/gizmo to play it,...

After a rather long period of inactivity, my web log is back in action... so to speak

I know it`s been a long time, but much has changed since then, including me getting a full-time job, this site moving from being hosted somewhere on the net with various redirects, to being hosted on my own linux box!

Now, hosting my own linux web server was an entirely different and rather large trouble I got myself into. Last time i installed a linux box was about 8 years ago, Red Hat 4, didn`t really like the process then... no good memories... Getting a basic installation working was as easy as installing Windows (not that, that`s ever fun, but nevertheless), but configuring, streamlining and tuning the server is an entirely different story! I`m still working on that part.

Until next time!

I drive to Dallas way too often...
Ok today for a very happy occasion, but nevertheless I do not like Dallas. I do not like the fact that it takes a tank of gas to get from one end of the metroplex to the other... the traffic is horrible and the gas prices even more so... Now, I know that gas prices anywhere in Tx aren`t exactly pretty but the gas station near the airport was asking for $3.09 for 87 gas... this is insane! I had to fill up with $2.89, and I thought $2.69 in Austin was bad enough. Come to think about it I like Austin way better and at least I don`t have to waste a tank of gas running errands in town there...
So to sum up I hate Dallas, it's expensive, big and impersonal...

I miss the good old times of computers where you could simply pull out the battery off the mainboard to reset a BIOS password. But no these days if you forget your bios password you might as well buy a new computer, and this is especially true for laptops!

So... yes, in case you were asking, I lost the admin bios password on a laptop, and yes the laptop is set-up to boot from the internal harddisk directly, which is also the only internal storage device, everything else is USB connected.

So I set upon the task of reseting that stupid BIOS. Booting off a removable device is out of the question, so i tried the armada of programs available out there that crack the password, corrupt the BIOS forcing it to restore factory defaults and then some only to fail miserably. Since the passowrds are stored in NVRAM would be pretty pointless to take out the battery if there is one at all. And i am not going to get a new bios chip and / or try short circuiting connections on...