The June 2009 Houston Python Meetup is at 19:00 tonight at the Stag’s Head Pub. I’m giving a short presentation on PyQt. Meeting notes are available here.
Jun 162009
May 042009
Apr 272009
Just posted a brief article on my current tagging guidelines here.
Mar 032009
Here are some titles on my recommended reading list for good web applications user interface design:
- Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
, by Jennifer Tidwell
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
, by Robert Hoekman Jr.
- Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions
, by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil
- Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone
, by Wendy Chisholm
- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
, by Steve Krug
- Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
, by Leon Shklar
And if you find any treasures, please consider adding updates to this post with your recommendations.
Mar 032009
I love this quote from Robert Hoekman:
Great Web-based software…has some or all of the following qualities:
- It conforms to the way users interact with the Web, but focuses on the activity instead of a specific audience.
- It has only those features that are absolutely necessary for users to complete the activity the application is meant to support.
- It supports the user’s mental model of what it does.
- It helps users get started quickly so they can become intermediate users as soon as possible.
- It makes it easy to recover from mistakes and difficult to make them in the first place.
- It has uniformly designed interface elements, but leverages irregularity to create meaning and importance.
- It reduces clutter to a minimum.
Each of these qualities has been documented as the result of studies in human-computer interaction, usability testing, and user-satisfaction surveys. The interesting part is that these qualities usually go unnoticed. Why? Because good software makes itself invisible. It enables the users to do what they need to do and gets its behind-the-scenes operations out of the way so they can do it well.
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
Dec 082008
For anyone who is interested in Python programming, there is a monthly Houston Python Meet-up tomorrow evening. Here are the details:
Date/Time: Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 7:00 PM Location: The Sauté Bistro, 2303 Richmond Avenue, Houston, TX 77098 (713-522-2106)
I will be giving a presentation about using Python with Amazon Web Services.
Here are various URLs from the presentation:
Oct 312008
Check out this new page in my wiki that gives and example of the use of the setdefault method of Python dictionaries.
Sep 232008
There is a Houston Python Meetup tonight at 19:00 at the Stag’s Head Pub.
Anyone interested in learning more about Python programming is welcome to join us!
Sep 202008
The WebKit folks have been busy. I just read this fascinating post on the Surfin’ Safari blog.
SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX) is the newest Javascript Engine from the WebKit folks. And it is fast. I downloaded version r36685 on my MacBook Pro and ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. The SFX engine was 3.69 times faster than the engine in Safari 3.1.2!
TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS
=============================================================================
** TOTAL **: 3.69x as fast 3527.6ms +/- 1.6% 956.6ms +/- 1.8% significant
=============================================================================
3d: 2.92x as fast 451.8ms +/- 5.0% 154.6ms +/- 4.5% significant
cube: 3.11x as fast 164.8ms +/- 11.9% 53.0ms +/- 7.0% significant
morph: 2.57x as fast 149.2ms +/- 6.2% 58.0ms +/- 5.0% significant
raytrace: 3.16x as fast 137.8ms +/- 4.7% 43.6ms +/- 12.5% significant
access: 4.90x as fast 546.4ms +/- 2.1% 111.4ms +/- 8.6% significant
binary-trees: 4.20x as fast 76.4ms +/- 7.4% 18.2ms +/- 28.3% significant
fannkuch: 10.5x as fast 235.4ms +/- 2.8% 22.4ms +/- 14.5% significant
nbody: 2.97x as fast 174.4ms +/- 2.6% 58.8ms +/- 5.7% significant
nsieve: 5.02x as fast 60.2ms +/- 10.5% 12.0ms +/- 12.7% significant
bitops: 7.01x as fast 457.0ms +/- 3.3% 65.2ms +/- 5.9% significant
3bit-bits-in-byte: 5.10x as fast 68.4ms +/- 6.5% 13.4ms +/- 14.1% significant
bits-in-byte: 6.02x as fast 98.8ms +/- 4.4% 16.4ms +/- 15.7% significant
bitwise-and: 17.2x as fast 171.6ms +/- 5.6% 10.0ms +/- 24.9% significant
nsieve-bits: 4.65x as fast 118.2ms +/- 0.9% 25.4ms +/- 8.2% significant
controlflow: 5.68x as fast 86.4ms +/- 4.4% 15.2ms +/- 24.8% significant
recursive: 5.68x as fast 86.4ms +/- 4.4% 15.2ms +/- 24.8% significant
crypto: 4.29x as fast 249.4ms +/- 3.6% 58.2ms +/- 6.7% significant
aes: 4.78x as fast 79.4ms +/- 2.6% 16.6ms +/- 29.8% significant
md5: 4.18x as fast 85.2ms +/- 9.8% 20.4ms +/- 11.1% significant
sha1: 4.00x as fast 84.8ms +/- 3.9% 21.2ms +/- 15.2% significant
date: 3.47x as fast 309.8ms +/- 1.0% 89.4ms +/- 5.3% significant
format-tofte: 3.52x as fast 142.8ms +/- 3.2% 40.6ms +/- 6.0% significant
format-xparb: 3.42x as fast 167.0ms +/- 1.7% 48.8ms +/- 6.8% significant
math: 3.76x as fast 499.8ms +/- 0.6% 133.0ms +/- 5.8% significant
cordic: 4.59x as fast 191.0ms +/- 1.0% 41.6ms +/- 13.8% significant
partial-sums: 3.34x as fast 212.8ms +/- 1.5% 63.8ms +/- 5.6% significant
spectral-norm: 3.48x as fast 96.0ms +/- 3.3% 27.6ms +/- 17.6% significant
regexp: 5.07x as fast 211.8ms +/- 1.6% 41.8ms +/- 5.7% significant
dna: 5.07x as fast 211.8ms +/- 1.6% 41.8ms +/- 5.7% significant
string: 2.49x as fast 715.2ms +/- 2.6% 287.8ms +/- 2.1% significant
base64: 4.99x as fast 109.8ms +/- 5.9% 22.0ms +/- 12.6% significant
fasta: 3.16x as fast 183.4ms +/- 1.7% 58.0ms +/- 7.4% significant
tagcloud: 1.54x as fast 143.6ms +/- 1.8% 93.4ms +/- 3.1% significant
unpack-code: 2.23x as fast 140.8ms +/- 1.5% 63.2ms +/- 2.6% significant
validate-input: 2.69x as fast 137.6ms +/- 11.2% 51.2ms +/- 7.2% significant
Sep 192008
The great TextMate text editor has a bundle called “TextMate” that lets you install an “Edit in TextMate…” item to the Edit menu of all Mac applications that support alternate input managers. This is really handy.
For applications like Safari and Mail, etc., this works perfectly. However Firefox (my favorite browser) doesn’t recognize these extra input managers (yet). So what do you do?
Not to worry! There is a free FireFox extension called It’s all Text!. Just install it and, in the preferences, set it up as follows:
Notice the Hot Key setting? This is Command-CTRL-E, which is the ”same” hot key used to invoke the ”Edit in TextMate” function for applications that support the alternate input managers.
This gives identical functionality to Firefox as to what you would get in Safari, et al.