IT
Computers are great, except when they are the cause of frustration and despair, as they often are.
Better living through bookmarklets; or, one-click switch between UW dev and production servers
Bookmarklets are small scripts that live in your browser's bookmark bar and make life easier. If you're a UW developer who often needs to switch between the development and production versions of files living on the www.washington.edu servers, your life just got a bit easier. I'm pleased to introduce "www2udev," a bookmarklet I wrote to simplify that task. Drag it to your bookmark bar and start saving time and keystrokes.
Read MoreIgnite presentation on a UW room availability web service
Attending journalism conventions in high school (and afterward), I'd always go see presentations based on the recommendation of the journalism adviser. "You've gotta go to this one," he'd say, "even if you don't care about sports"—I sure didn't—"because the guy just lights himself on fire and gets into it." I wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but the presentations sure were energetic and fun. Well, despite their name, "Ignite" presentations don't actually light anyone on fire. So what are they? A distillation of a topic into its most salient points, and I'll be giving my first one later today; it's on the topic of a room availability web service at the University of Washington.
Read MoreHow .htaccess, PHP & PEAR, and PDFs saved the day (and thousands of dollars)
PHP, .htaccess, PDFs, Acrobat, Word, Exchange... that's quite an alphabet soup of software and tools. In this post, I outline the approaches I took to solve a real-world problem: switching the University of Washington's Dean's list notification process from postal mail to e-mail. Doing so saved the University a lot of money in material and postage (not to mention man-hours). It was a big project (and this post is, too!), but if you're looking to accomplish a similar switch, I hope you'll find something useful in it.
Read MoreAdobe's PDF-generation (and customer service-) FAIL
Recently I worked on a problem at my job whose solution involved creating PDF files. Unfortunately, this process exposed me to some poor software design and horrible customer-service issues from Adobe, a company I usually like and whose products I respect. First, I had to deal with Acrobat Pro 9's handling of names when generating a lot of PDFs from a mail merge in Microsoft Word. Then, my error report to Adobe's own forum was snubbed.
Read MoreATM interface improvement, or "Yo no hablo español"
ATMs certainly revolutionized banking for both the banks and customers. I'm a big fan of ATMs, but there is one glaring user experience oversight that I sure wish they'd correct: my language preference. My preferred language is English; why can't my bank remember that? While it's certainly true that a single click or button press is not gravely important issue, it is worth discussing from a user-experience standpoint. This post outlines why this should be fixed and presents a few ways it could be done.
Read MoreSignal-to-noise ratios in e-mail signatures
Eight percent. How’s that for a ratio of useful content versus other text in an e-mail? Many e-mails I receive have extremely involved signature blocks (the content automatically appended to each message). When these same messages only contain brief statements or questions, the “signal-to-noise” ratio becomes very low. The eight percent figure I cited is from a message today...
Read MoreNow Reading
Planned books:
None
Current books:
The Player of Games (Culture) by Iain M. Banks
Recent books:
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
- House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
- The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman