Gordaen's Blog » Tech-Rambling

Disable My Touchpad

Ian Clifton — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:32:46 +0000

One thing that’s always bothered me about touchpads is that they can be accidentally pressed while typing. In the past, I’ve used a mouse with my notebooks and just disabled the touchpad; however, I am now making more use out of having the notebook actually be mobile (and Splashtop, which allows me to nearly instantly boot into a mini-Linux environment for quick use of the notebook, is extra useful), so I’m not even using my small mouse very much. I just don’t understand why something so trivial as “I’m typing on the keyboard, so I want the touchpad to be disabled” hasn’t been done yet (that I know of). If I’ve pressed a key in the last half second, ignore my wrist and/or palm that lightly tap the touchpad.

Now, who’s going to implement this and make millions? …Not it!

Average Users With Microsoft Word

Ian Clifton — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:35:24 +0000

The more technically inclined a person is, the harder it is for that person to realize what an “average” user knows or doesn’t know. Having worked one-on-one with many high school seniors in the past month or so, I’ve had an interesting insight into their knowledge and habits regarding MS Word. The following is a brief list of some of the things I have noticed.

The most commonly known keyboard shortcuts are for copy and paste. Maybe 2/3 of users know and use those two shortcuts. Most users do not use any other keyboard shortcuts.
Most users do not know how to create a page break and simply rely on pressing enter until their cursor has moved to a new page.
About half of users do not use the delete key (instead relying on the right arrow and backspace keys).
Many users type in a number (e.g., “1″) directly into the header for the page number without realizing that it will show that number on every page.
A few users do not know how to center text (instead relying on several presses of the tab key)
Almost no users know how to fix Word’s auto-formatting. For instance, when completing an MLA citation, Word automatically removes the less-than, greater-than, and period from the URL, then it links, colors, and underlines the URL. When a user doesn’t want this to happen, s/he becomes very agitated but has no idea how to fix it.
Users do not pay any attention to the file extension or file format when saving (which is a major issue when working with the newest version of Word on some computers but not others).
When a dialog comes up with only one choice (e.g., “Okay”), nearly all users click that choice without reading the dialog.
The ribbon interface in Word 2007 confuses the hell out of most users.

In general, users want to get the work done as soon as possible, which means doing whatever they already know or whatever makes the most sense to them. They rarely look through menu choices to try to figure out how to do something such as how to format a paragraph. They don’t pay any attention to anything that they don’t need to pay attention to (e.g., the ruler). They commonly feel as though they are “fighting” the computer to get it to do what they want. The thought that there are alternative programs almost never occurs.

Overall, I’d say the biggest difference between an “average” user and someone who is truly technically literate is that the former never considers how his/her actions will be interpreted by the computer (assuming the computer should think in the same way as s/he does); the latter acts based on how the computer will interpret the action. Essentially, it’s the difference between talking to someone and talking at someone.

Content Owners Don’t Know

Ian Clifton — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:30 +0000

There is quite a bit that content owners (these are the people saying, “Put X on the site”) don’t know, which web developers (used in a very broad sense) often assume is common knowledge. This represents the difference in knowledge that developers have compared to normal users. In some cases, the users really should know these things; in other cases, it’s really beyond them. In all cases, web developers have to be careful when making any assumptions.

They don’t know…

they can increase/decrease font size (by a means other than leaning closer to the monitor)
it is acceptable to say “link” (rather than hyperlink, hot link, live link, etc.)
“because I saw it on another site” is not a good reason for anything
people don’t like to read
everything needs a specific purpose (e.g., font colors, images, etc.)
users ignore most pictures, especially when in the shape or position of a banner
websites are often viewed far more frequently than publications, especially when the audience is younger
typical marketting hype turns on the user’s skim mode
they should talk about goals and let developers determine the means
terms of use for a website is guaranteed to be one of the least viewed pages
if a viewer (who isn’t affiliated with the site) finds something wrong on the site, s/he will most likely not report it
text should rarely, if ever, be placed over a distracting background image (e.g., a soft gradient is fine, but a tree is not)
uncontrollable animation is evil
print designs rarely work online
sites have to be tested for functionality and display in multiple browsers, so it’s rarely as simple as “just move it over a little”
“flashy” is not synonymous with “better”
creating new accounts is irritating (more so with some of the ridiculous password requirements out there…)
the terms used in your business/field are not common knowledge
changing requirements near the end of a project kills developers’ morale
just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done

Sadly, all of these come from actual experiences. Feel free to add your own in a comment.

Suicidal, Homicidal, or Web Developer?

Ian Clifton — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:53:16 +0000

You may want to think twice when you hear these said around the office. Feel free to contribute any you’ve heard.

Suicidal or Web Developer?

No one cares
No one will notice the absence
Everything seems to be going wrong
I don’t need this any more
Sometimes you just have to give up

Homicidal or Web Developer?

Whoever wrote this deserves to die
I really like to tear into a new project
Hack Hack Hack

Guido On Django In 2006

Ian Clifton — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:23:06 +0000

Having to work with Django the past few weeks has been quite the… adventure. My prior experience has primarily been with PHP with only a little Python exposure, so I am largely learning the programming language and the framework at the same time. Today, I had a typical “what the heck is going on” moment and jumped into the Django documentation and then to other sites leading farther and farther from the original search. I stumbled across the opinion(s) of Guido van Rossum (Python’s creator and “Benevolent Dictator for Life”) about Django (a Python-based web framework) from 2006.

The first instance I saw of Guido van Rossum’s opinion comes from January 27, 2006:

…I’m not keen on the particular tools they provide (it doesn’t help that they begin every example with “from mumble.something import *”). For example, Django’s templating language is rich and powerful, but it doesn’t look very Pythonic to me — in fact, it’s so rich and powerful that it might as well be PHP. Similarly, I’m not keen on their object-relational mapping approach. There’s too much magic based on name correspondence, and the automatically generated APIs feel a bit unpythonic (e.g. lots of getter and setter methods where a normal Python object would use public attributes and perhaps properties).

The next reference was just a few days later on January 30, 2006:

Maybe the current crop of Python web frameworks (as well as Rails BTW) have it all wrong.

The next day, Van Rossum’s opinion seemed to start shifting:

Django definitely feels more “modern” than Cheetah. The templating languages are fairly similar, with Django writing {{foo.bar}} where Cheetah writes $foo.bar or ${foo.bar} for variable interpolation (== substitution). The biggest difference is that Cheetah allows pretty much arbitrary Python call syntax…

Django’s template compilation is much simpler and IMO more elegant than Cheetah: Django parses the template text into nodes of various types using a big regular expression, and each node has an appropriate render() method. Rendering the template in a given context simply concatenates the results of rendering each node in that context.

Van Rossum made it pretty clear that his feelings were different on August 4, 2006 than they were in January:

My personal favorite and I expect that will remain personal favorite for a long time is something named Django.

And on August 17, 2006, Van Rossum said:

Django is the web framework

This is by no means a “comprehensive” list as these are simply the links that I stumbled upon that were related to his opinion of Django. I chuckled at the PHP reference. That’s one of the good (depending on your perspective) things about PHP: It is easily used as a templating language. Though I’ve found it funny that I’ve come across complaints about PHP “silently” ignoring use of undeclared variables on the Python mailing list even though that’s what Django does with its templates (though you can obviously change the error reporting level in PHP and even log the notices; I would suspect there is a way to turn on “notices” for Django templates, but it doesn’t have its own logging module). I also thought it was a bit curious that Django’s templates were declared to be like PHP but Cheetah’s allow “pretty much arbitrary Python call syntax.”

I’ve found that Django templates are too limiting in some regards (I don’t know how much they have changed since Guido’s comments). For instance, trying to do something like “if blah_date < other_date" throws an exception. I suppose this is meant to keep the templates "simple," but I wouldn't say something that requires 118K+ of HTML to explain is simple anyway.

Features A Blog Should Have

Ian Clifton — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:03:53 +0000

I’ve been developing my own blog software based on CodeIgniter in order to fill my few free minutes (though I’m also painting and taking on a lot of other projects; not unusual for me). I spent more than a week up front just brainstorming, thinking about what I want it to do. After that, I thought about how the database should be organized. It wasn’t until a while later that I started to look at the way other blogs did things and I realized how different my expectations were than what many blogging platforms offered. Some of the smaller names were closer, but I was not entirely willing to trust a new name to be going strong in two years.

First, blogging software needs to effectively combat spam. There are two issues here: 1) users don’t want that crap on their blogs, 2) when blogs are easy to spam, it encourages more spamming. The whole nofollow issue saddens me. Spammers aren’t going to avoid spamming just because it doesn’t directly help them with Google PageRank and similar systems. If spamming is easy, they’ll do it regardless and net a few suckers. Maybe a few of those suckers will even buy whatever it is or even link to it.

A blog’s approach to stopping spam doesn’t have to be as complex as what I’ve previous talked about, but it should do something. At the very least, generate IDs that require spammers to at least LOAD the page they are going to spam. I am amazed that so many blogging systems have little or no spam protection built in.

It should be extremely easy to upload media, especially images. There’s no excuse for making the user pre-size his/her image when the GD library, ImageMagick, and so many other tools out there. At the very least, a user should be able to set a default thumbnail size, whether full-size images should be resized (and to what size), easily upload a large number of images, and override any of the defaults (“This thumbnail would be so much better at 200×200 instead of 100×100…”). A blogging system that goes beyond the minimum would allow custom cropping and maybe even basic touch ups.

All blogging systems should be “self advertising” in the sense that they generate RSS feeds, create sitemaps, ping appropriate services and other blog posts, show post relationships (i.e., X post is related to Y post or the “If you like X, you might also like…”), and give the ability to subscribe to the comments on a post. It’s frustrating to find an interesting new blog, make a comment, and then forget to ever go back. One of the cool things about blogs is that they are more community-focused than a magazine article, so let’s work on that communication!

One has to be able to preview posts and comments, show code snippets, create excerpts, tag posts (I hate categories), customize links, search, cache, etc. Some of these absolutely basic features are still missing from major blogging software. Sure, they can be plugins, but in that case there need to be “official” plugins for these features pre-installed (with the ability to easy replace them with community-contributed alternatives).

What features do you find missing from blogging software?

Sneaky Safari Install

Ian Clifton — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:22:01 +0000

I noticed a few headlines lately about Apple receiving flak, particularly from Mozilla, for slipping an install of Safari onto people’s Windows machines. Personally, I find that Apple products work well with Apple products, but they rarely work as well on Windows. I wanted to give Safari a quick try on my laptop, which can boot into Windows XP for that once a month that it is needed, so I thought this would be a good chance to test out what this “sneaky Safari install” is all about and give Safari for Windows an initial spin.

I downloaded, installed, and ran Quicktime. Wait, I almost forgot. Thing, from Fantastic Four, was in a screenshot and looked depressed as hell to be viewed in Quicktime. Anyway…

From Quicktime, I went to the help menu and picked Update Existing Software… The dialog box that came up looked like this:

I clicked “OK” and then saw this:

Both of the options that came up were really to install software that I did not have (not exactly an “update [of] existing software…”); it’s worth noting that I specifically downloaded Quicktime without iTunes. I unchecked both and quit the dialog box. When I brought it back up, both were checked again, leading me to believe the same behavior would be expected when the dialog came up automatically. In other words, it doesn’t remember that you do not want to install new software so you have to manually tell it every time not to install the software.

I saw comments online where people essentially said, “So what, it’s just a checkbox.” So what? First, this is not an update. If it was, then having it checked by default would make sense. Second, there were two checkboxes for me; at what point is it too many? If there were fifty checkboxes every time, would that be ridiculous? Another comment I saw more than once was along the lines of “big deal, it’s just 20MB.” Well, it was 60MB for me and “it’s small” doesn’t really seem justified if every single program you download starts installing additional stuff unnecessarily. I think Apple could have easily split the update tool into two sections, one of which would be “Install free new software” and include iTunes, Safari, and whatever else Apple wants people to download.

That being said, I did actually install Safari (but not iTunes) to give it a try for a few minutes.

Initial good impressions: Safari is snappy. Pages loaded very quickly. It remembers form data fairly intelligently (so you can browse back to a form and maintain what you had typed). It has a grammar checker… which appears to be absolutely terrible, but it’s a start and it’s disabled by default.

Initial bad impressions: I have to turn on the status bar? I hovered over a link to see which post ID it had and… I realized I didn’t have anywhere to look to see where the link actually takes me! I guess this supports that same blind jumping that is encouraged in the software update/install windows. I picked to upload an image to my blog and the starting point was the Safari folder (rather than a reasonable default like the desktop); that’s not a big deal, but when I clicked back on the main window and tried to type something in (before selecting a file), I found the page mostly disabled. Basically, clicking was disabled, but the cursor still changed to a hand when over a link and :hover effects were activated. If a sub-window removes the functionality of the main window, shouldn’t the sub window stay on top? To be fair, a similar problem happened to me in GIMP on Linux when a dialog box opened on the wrong monitor, making GIMP appear to be unresponsive. The strange thing was that after I picked the file and the dialog closed, focus didn’t return to the Safari window. I had to click the window twice to return focus. I’m not sure if this is a Windows or Safari issue, but it sure isn’t expected behavior.

In Firefox I have various keywords set so that I can use the main location bar to do all kinds of searching. Doing “wiki planck units” will jump to Wikipedia’s article on Planck units. Similarly, “gi crazy people” does a Google Images search for crazy people. That feature is awesome, but sometimes I use a computer that doesn’t have that setup and Firefox intelligently does a search, returning either the obvious domain or Google search results. You can type “Mozilla Firefox” into the location bar and get where you want to go. What’s it do in Safari? It tries a few domains and then fails to open the page http://mozilla%20firefox/ because it canâ€™t find the server “mozilla firefox”.

Overall, it looks better than IE (obviously) and is quite possibly a good choice for people who just need a good browser, but I think it would supplement—not replace—Firefox for developers due to all the invaluable extensions. Of course, if they make a Linux version, I’ll give it a more thorough rundown *hint hint* …

IE8 “Super” Standards Meta Tag

Ian Clifton — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:12:23 +0000

Update: According to the IE blog, the IE team has changed its stance from what it was (as described in this post) to a more logical one. I intended to do another blog post about it, but other things in life have been more interesting (like getting sleep since I’ve been a bit ill). They also have a beta version available, but I am not going to bother with it this time around.

Internet Explorer has been hated by web developers for quite some time. It is terrible in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest problems is that it has always been quite far from following standards, causing developers to spend a significant amount of extra time making webpages work in Internet Explorer. Microsoft claimed that IE7 would fix these problems and I even thought they might do a decent job for a while. I gave time to test the beta and even submit a bug (that was ignored). When I saw how poor of a product IE7 was, I lost all faith that Microsoft would ever develop a good browser.

At that point, I decided that I would quit testing my personal pages in Internet Explorer and I have since paid as little attention to the browser as possible. My exposure has been limited to hours of CSS “fixes” to get both versions of IE to look right (no easy feat since they screw up in different ways) at work only. Then, today, I came across an IE blog post from a month ago about “Compatibility and IE.” How can they continue to make such terrible choices? Their idea is to add a meta tag that ties the rendering of a webpage to a specific browser (not even to a specific rendering engine). In other words, you have to set a meta tag that specifies exactly which browser version the page looks best in for every single browser (of course they don’t acknowledge the number of browsers out there). You can also have the server send the info in the header, which is an even worse idea (just imagine downloading a webpage to read at a later time and having it render terribly because the header information was not included not to mention the pain this creates for mirroring).

To give people an idea of how stupid this idea is, I thought I’d start off the meta tag, showing what it might look like if other browsers adopt this idea:

Of course, a web developer would have to change “edge” to the current version of each of these browsers (and this list of 70+ is by no means a complete list) to ensure it renders correctly. WTF?

Why can’t we just keep “quirks” mode so that users aren’t alienated from old content (as much as I’d like to get rid of it); any page that does not have a DOCTYPE declaration should render in quirks mode. Any page that does have one should render in the best, most standards-compliant way available for the specified type. That means the page might look a little different as browsers are updated to comply more correctly to the standards, but developers should be developing to the standards not to the browser (obviously, you have to make adjustments for browsers, but those should be minimal and should not ever make the page look bad when viewed with full compliance of standards).

The way it works now in good browsers is that they follow the standards as closely as possible (though non-Trident browsers aren’t perfect either). If they encounter something like drop shadows that they do not yet support, no big deal; the shadows simply don’t show. When an updated version comes along, the shadows show up and the page is improved with no additional work from the developer. The Internet Explorer method prevents a page from ever being rendered more correctly. A web developer would have to manually tell IE to start following the standards as each feature starts to be supported (or use “edge” and hope IE does not get worse…).

The other awesome thing about this idea is that every future version of IE has to support every previous version’s mistakes! If an ignorant developer relies on an IE8 bug to make the page render a particular way, s/he’ll use that meta tag to specify IE8. IE9 comes along and has to be able to render it. IE10 comes along…. Eventually terabyte hard drives will be useful as storage devices for the billion rendering modes IE will support.

Linux Dual Screen ATI Issue

Ian Clifton — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:37:15 +0000

I recently bought two new 19″ monitors (with a nice 1680×1050 resolution each). I was surprised that I simply plugged them both in and started the computer and Gnome was correctly displaying a cloned image (i.e., the same thing on both screens) at the correct resolution on both monitors. Unfortunately, getting them to work as one (a virtual 3360×1050 resolution) was quite a bit trickier.

I tried the easy method of “BigDesktop” and came up with a core dump. Google revealed nothing so I moved onto the “MergedFB” method. Long story short, I had no success after 2-3 hours. Essentially, it took that amount of time before I stopped trusting online sources and started looking at the logs. MergedFB is no longer supported… I moved on to “XRandR.” And had immediate success… sort of.

Within five minutes, I had dual screens working as I wanted, like one large, virtual desktop. making it easy to move windows back and forth across the two screens. Just one problem: It was slow! It was painfully slow! 486 slow! If I switched workspaces, it could take 15-30 seconds to repaint the desktop. When I really got going, the computer would not keep up with my typing and when the letters eventually came out, they were scrambled.

Fortunately, this is another case of the right solution being fairly simple. In the xorg.conf file, I had to change “AccelMethod” from “EXA” to “XAA” (learned from this link). I restarted X and everything is fast again. Ah, wonderful high resolution… *drools*

Synthetic Life Forms

Ian Clifton — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:08:53 +0000

I’ve always been intrigued by the similarities between a computer and a human brain. I also find it fascinating that DNA is essentially a program for saying how our cells should develop. However, more interesting than either of those is the possibility of completely creating a synthetic life form by essentially building DNA the way we want to. We’re quite a ways from making something as complex as a human, obviously, but there are plenty of uses for much simpler organisms. For instance, we could create a strain of bacteria that could fight off an illness-causing microorganism. We could create bacteria that generate an alternative fuel source.

Scientists have recently created the longest synthetic strand of DNA ever. It is nearly 600,000 base pairs. That sounds like a lot, but chromosome number 1 in humans is 220 million base pairs (see: Wikipedia’s DNA article). Regardless, it’s an amazing accomplishment. Perhaps we will be worrying about genetic issues sooner than we thought. Is it right to alter the DNA of a human? Is it right to create a complex living organism from scratch? Can we use synthetic organisms to create an organic processor? Is a team of scientists going to accidentally create a life-ending microorganism by accident, outdoing the biggest scientific “oops” currently held by NASA (i.e., the metric/standard mix up)?