Revivification, again

It’s been a long time since I last posted anything here.  Too long.  I’ve had lots of things I’ve wanted to post, but no real ambition to clean up this site and make it useful again.  I’m going to make an attempt to change that, and at least post something once a month from now on.

To that end, I’ve gone through and cleaned up the comment spam.  Until I can get a CAPTCHA or something similar installed to block spam, comments will be prohibited.  Sorry.  If you have something to say to me, you can always send me an e-mail, or find me on Google+ or Facebook.

In an effort to prevent the deluge of spambots, I’ve added some minor security tweaks to the comment system. You should see nothing different at all, assuming you’re posting from something normal like a web browser, but this change will hopefully kill the spambots, at least until somebody decides to smarten them up a little.

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In other news, I updated NBBC today with a number of bug fixes I’ve been slowly working on. If you’ve been using NBBC on your site, go download a copy of v1.4.4; you won’t be sorry you did.

That’s it, folks. Nothing too spectacular. I am still alive, but work’s keeping me pretty well buried.

Almost exactly one year ago — April 6, 2009 — I started work at my current job, where I’ve been building a very, very large ASP.NET application in C# and JavaScript with a team that’s grown to more than 50 people.  I went from the lowest guy on the totem pole (with no formal experience coding in industry) to the head UI guy and, to quote one of our architectural leads, “arguably the person here with the strongest computer science background.”  (Thanks for the compliment, Ben!) And after a year of working in industry, I’ve learned a few things:

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One of the reasons I restarted this blog is that I’m passionate about user-interfaces.  I drooled over the Mac when I first saw it as a little kid, and I’ve written more user-interface and graphics code than most professional programmers have written code.  2-D graphics engines, 3-D graphics engines, window systems, GUI frameworks (several!), I’ve written them all, and some are even still in production today.  My college “thesis project” back in 1996 was a C++ GUI framework for X-Windows that had all the fundamentals:  Text boxes, buttons, scrollbars, all easy-to-program against, efficient, and very pretty for their day.

When I saw Al Cooper’s About Face when it first came out in 1995, it was a watershed moment for me.  It was brilliant, and I was an overnight convert, having already spent years in a summer job teaching secretaries who could barely find the buttons on a mouse how to use incredibly-badly-designed Windows 3.1 applications.  I knew what wrong was on a very personal level, and to see right spelled out so effectively to the people who could actually fix it — the programmers — changed my opinion of user-interfaces forever.  I’ve since read dozens of books and articles on the subject from a wide variety of authors, and while I disagree with Cooper’s latest assessment that only “professional user-interaction designers” (whatever that means) ought to be allowed to design user-interfaces, I still take to heart many of the core tenets of his original seminal work.

So it pains me to no end when, in my current job, I see people doin’ it wrong.

Not just a little wrong, but epically wrong, the same kind of fail that I battled in all those summers with those crappy, crappy Windows 3.1 applications.  Here we are, fifteen years later, and developers still haven’t learned a thing.  They’re still making the same mistakes I saw all those years ago, and in some cases the mistakes are even worse today.

One afternoon, after a particularly irritating day of dealing with developers building UIs that lay between awkward and nightmarish to use, I tried to summarize everything I’d learned over the years in the shortest possible form.  No big fat tomes for them to read.  No fuzzy “make the user feel good” aphorisms that had no connection to real life.  Just a handful of simple one-line rules that developers could easily learn and follow.  Simple rules that I was already telling our developers every day, just written down, and short enough that they would fit on the back of an envelope.  Simple enough that once learned, they could never be forgotten.

From this pain and frustration was born my “Ten Commandments.”  Ten rules that, if a developer followed them, would result in Good Software.  Ten rules that could be learned quickly and applied easily.  Ten rules that would guarantee a Happy User.

And so, without further ado, here they are.

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It’s been a long time since I put anything meaningful on my website, which is a shame since I’ve done a lot in the last couple of years and had a lot worth saying.  So I’m rebuilding this site to be something meaningful again:  A blog, somewhat again, only this time with more general content, some personal, some professional, and ideally mostly useful.

I’ll soon re-import all the old postings from the blog I used to have on this site, and move in content from some of the other blogs I’ve maintained over the years, and hopefully, finally, I’ll have all the stuff I say in one place.  I’ll also re-add links to some of the other content I’ve had here so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle.  They’re broken right now, but they’re not gone for good.

Stay tuned, folks.  More’s comin’.

This is an angry rant about something that is simply plainly stupid. Be forewarned.

Bye bye, NVIDIA

This computer has an NVIDIA GeForce 9600GSO video card in it.

I bought this card last August (or thereabouts) to replace another NVIDIA card that was dying (sometimes it wouldn’t display anything at all, at random). I had purchased that card only a year before that to replace another video card that was dying (the picture would occasionally fritz out or jump around the screen, until one day it simply displayed no picture at all). I had gotten that card as a replacement for another card that was dying that was less than a year old.

In total, in the last ten years I’ve owned twelve cards with NVIDIA chipsets on them. And if you do the math on that, the average card lasted less than a year. In fact, there were three years in the early 2000s that I had a card with ATI chips instead, so that means the average NVIDIA card has lasted less than eight months.

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It’s time for the second article in my occasional series on the ProColor color-picker. Last time, I gave a rough overview of what ProColor is and why it’s designed the way it is. In this article, I’m going to cover some the topics in reverse and discuss capturing the mouse on a web page.

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I’d like to talk a little bit about web coding, specifically client-side Javascript and DOM coding.

For CMXpress, I needed a good drop-down/pop-up color-picker for use with Prototype, and it seemed to me like such a thing ought to be an easy thing to find, but in reality, it turned out to be as rare as a blue moon. There are some basic controls out there, some with irritating popups, some with tolerable design but ugly licensing, and I couldn’t have any of that. CMXpress is open-source, under the BSD license, and I needed something that would play nice with that. I also needed something that would play nice with Prototype, and that ideally would be friendly to your garden-variety end-user and that would also ideally look like a control that was native to the browser.

So, since nothing fit the bill, I built ProColor. You can see a screenshot below, or you can visit ProColor’s website and download yourself a copy.

In a future posting, I’ll talk about how ProColor works internally. And if you want to learn how to use it, that’s well-documented on ProColor’s own website. Here, I’d just like to spend a little time elaborating on what it is, why it is that way, and what it can do for you.

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I’ve been hunting for a new job since the start of October.

It started out as a light search two months ago, but I’m now searching really hard, and I’m starting to be worried.  The economy’s bad, and it’s not a good time to be hunting for jobs.  In theory, I’m in the one sector that has growth potential — computers, especially web programming — and I’m highly skilled and well-educated, but those facts don’t seem to be helping much.

My current employment consists of a lot of consulting work, and some sales of some software I wrote.  That was fine when I was a bachelor, but now that I’m married, I’m earning for two, because my wife got laid off in July and hasn’t successfully found full-time work yet.

It’s not like I’m asking for much; I’m a talented, skilled professional, darn it, but I’m willing to work for peanuts just to get off my feet:  Several folks in the industry think I’m worth about $75K/year, so I started out hoping for $70K/year with benefits, and I’ve watched my price point slide from $65K to $60K to $50K and now I’m getting close to being willing to settle for anything over minimum wage.  (Okay, I’m not <i>quite</i> that desperate yet, but ask me again in a month…)

We’re already not buying Christmas gifts this year, and we’ve cut back on everything.  We don’t waste money:  I’m half Dutch and half Jewish!  We haven’t bought electronics of any kind in over a year, we haven’t bought clothes, we have a small 900-square-foot apartment — we’ve been thrifty.  But even so, thanks to my wife’s lack of income, her (large) student loan payments, the rising cost of everything (including our depressingly large health-insurance premiums), and my current meager income, about a week ago we hit negative for the first time:  We owe more money than we actually have.  I don’t know how I’ll pay December’s bills when they come around, much less my $1000 quarterly tax bill in January.

So the upshot is that lately I’m highly unambitious about art and writing and life in general.  I’m doing little else lately but job-searching and hearing “You’re a great candidate” but never hearing anything beyond that, and I’m feeling generally pummeled by the world.  Maybe this’ll seem like nothing in a few months, but right now, I’m at the bottom of a pit, and the narrow shaft of sunlight that’s sustained me is thinning by the day, soon to vanish altogether.

lj-music: Ikimono-gakari

Well, folks, the election’s done, and I wish to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Barack Obama. He won soundly, and earned his new job. Let’s now all cross our fingers and hope that he really is as good as we all think he is. It’s gonna be an interesting four years, folks.

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I’d like to conclude the series of journals I’ve been writing on politics here with a commentary on something I read in the news today. It probably comes as no surprise that the Republican Party is doing some soul-searching right now, demonstrated well by this AP interview with RNC Chairman Mike Duncan:

Republicans, Duncan said, “are going to take a deep breath and listen to the American people.” The party is creating a new online forum that will allow people to explain “how we let them down” and “what we can do to restore confidence in our party,” he said.

I’m a registered Republican, a moderate centrist. I voted for Obama.

Why? I voted for Obama not because he himself was a centrist — he’s definitely not — but because the modern Republican Party and its platform moved so far away from the center that it didn’t include me anymore, and Obama at least tried. There is no “big-tent GOP;” if anything, the GOP’s tent shrank remarkably over the last few years to exclude nearly everyone who’s not a hardcore evangelical Christian.

So, GOP, when you get your forum up, here’s what I’d suggest if you want my vote again:

• No more dumb wars. You can wage a war if you want, but focus on the target and have an end-game. If you can’t explain from the outset in exacting terms precisely what victory looks like, you shouldn’t be involved in the war in the first place. I know people who voted against you because they lost friends in Iraq — but you dishonored those losses by never giving them meaning, by never showing how they could add up to victory. Iraq’s a loser because it has no end-game; Afghanistan’s tolerable to the American public because there’s an exacting target: If we kill or capture bin Laden, the war’s over.
• Curb your evangelicals. I know the Christian Coalition is a respectable chunk of the Republican base, but there are a lot of us out here who see the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world as cut from the same cloth as the Ayatollah. The more influence they have over you, the less I want to be anywhere near you.
• Prioritize wisely. Guns, God, and gays are fine topics, but when there’s a war on and the economy’s in the toilet, most of the public doesn’t care whether gays are marrying or teenagers are getting abortions because we have bigger problems to deal with. All politics is local, and you lost because you didn’t pay attention to the highest local priorities.
• Litmus tests scare people away. In the same vein, if you want a bigger tent, you’d better be willing to let moderates back into it. I don’t cast my vote based on which candidate shouts loudest about abortion, pro or con: I’m more concerned with fiscal issues than social ones, so when you play up the social ones, I tune out, with good reason.
• Remember your platform. You’re the party of small government and fiscal conservatism — or at least you used to be. For eight years now, you’ve wasted money like a drunken teenager on spring break. When you were actually conservative, people voted for you, but right now, you’re more liberal than your opponents, and the voters can see that.

So there you go, GOP. You have four years to reform yourself and show me why I should be voting for you again. Good luck; you’ll need it.