GordyBlog

I’ve encountered unrecoverable hard drive errors on my MacBook Pro twice now in the last month. Both times I was lucky enough to have had up-to-date Time Machine backups.

To recover each time I had to wipe the drive and restore from Time Machine. On the way back to Humble yesterday from an interview, I stopped by Fry’s on I-45 (Houston) and picked up a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 16MB cache, 320GB drive.

I swapped drives this morning and took pictures of the entire process.

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I just receive my most recent American Express bill. Anytime I receive a credit card bill I go over every line and make sure that I can account for every charge. I found two unexpected items: a late fee and an interest charge. This was really odd because I make it a policy to never carry over a balance on a credit card and I schedule all of my payments electronically via Bank of America and they are extremely reliable.

I did some further investigation and found that the problem was that I had never received last months bill (and so didn’t send them a payment for it).

They probably did issue the statement. I’m sure AMEX is very good about that. And the likely scenario is that the post office just failed to deliver it. No big surprise there (although our local postman is pretty good normally). What bothers me is that AMEX never bothered to let me know that they were expecting money from me. They have my email address. They have my phone number. Instead they just start slapping on charges. And this is to a customer who has never made a late payment, ever!

So I sent in a lengthy complaint via the AMEX web site. And then I went over the last several statements and found every company that billed services to me via American Express. I logged into my account for every one of those companies and changed the billing method to my Amazon Visa card. And after next month’s AMEX bill clears and I pay it, I shall cancel my American Express card and never do business with this company again.

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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.

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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, by Robert Hoekman Jr.

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I have two new posts that detail the steps of installing and configuring Apache2 and mod_python on Mac OS X:

• Install/Build Apache2 and mod_python
• Configure and test mod_python / psp / SQLite

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PHP has seven datatypes: string, integer, float, boolean, array, object, and resource. I was looking for a simple word whose letters worked out to be the first letter of each of those seven types. So in bash:

$ for w in permute "sifbaor"; do grep $w /usr/share/dict/words; done

This was the output:

fibrosarcoma myxofibrosarcoma boarfish

Hmmm, no exact match, but boarfish ain’t bad:

b = boolean o = object a = array r = resource f = float i = integer s = string h = .... well, just forget about h

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Yojimbo is a great new application from Bare Bones Software. I purchased and installed it yesterday and spent several hours getting things set up. I love this software. So, what is it? What does it do?

Yojimbo is an information organizer. You can use it to store all kinds of information. Anything from the very small, like the URL of a web site, to the very large, like a big PDF document, is fair game. I have used many other applications in the past for this task, including:

• Discrete files. This is actually pretty doable now, since Apple has provided the wonderful Spotlight capabilities. But the three biggest problems with this route are:
  1. It wastes space on your hard drive. The minimum amount of space that a single file takes up is based upon the way your hard drive is formatted, but for small chunks of information, you definitely waste space.
  2. It’s a hassle to have to create a file, decide where to put it and what to name it, for small chunks of information.
  3. There is not a hassle-free way to synchronize this information, safely and securely, among an arbitrary number of computers. For me, I like to keep information on my laptop, my big Mac at home, and my big Mac at work, all synchronized.
• StickyBrain, version 4. I have used several version of StickyBrain. Don’t get me wrong. It is good software. It’s a bit sluggish, but basically sound enough. It does not allow you to synch information between multiple computers. Yes you can backup notes to your .Mac storage and restore from the same. But the discipline required to make sure you don’t accidentally lose information is far more trouble than it is worth.. Chronos does have an upgraded version of this software, called SOHO Notes, that supports synching between multiple computers and I did some research before deciding which product to go with. But information that I read in the user forums has led me to conclude that the sync capabilities are buggy and slow.
• I have used various Wiki applications. But you have to either keep the information stored online, which requires Internet access to read or update it, or hand-roll some kind of sync solution. Plus the mechanisms for entering information, as well as the ability to easily enter or store styled text with graphics, is limited.

There are other applications that I have tried as well, but I’m getting tired of typing. Suffice it to say that Yojimbo is some bad-ass software and I like it very much.

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I have a bunch of photos that were taken at the Yale Street Art Market on March 4, 2006. This is the first time that the market was held at its new location on 19′th Street in the Historic Heights of Houston, Texas, next to Wind Water Gallery.

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