Tag: user interface


  • One of the reasons my photos sets are more full of flowers than buildings is people don’t call the FBI over pictures of flowers. While it is perfectly legal to take pictures of buildings from public spaces, it makes “victims” nervous. No one cares about flowers. I can take all the pictures I want without…

  • I saw a CompSci.ca blog post for If a programming language was a boat… (through WIRED) and laughed at the descriptions of C, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Java is a cargo ship. It’s very bulky. It’s very enterprise~y. Though it can also carry a lot of weight. Will carry a project, but not…

  • Kentucky’s Bill HB775 would require those operating web sites or blogs or message boards in the state to enforce a policy to collect legal names, postal addresses, and email addresses to use the service. The legal name would, of course, be posted on the web site. Should the poster cross someone else, then the operators…

  • First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • Yesterday a Blackboard Vista node went unresponsive but recovered. Then a second and third did the same. This was odd as only the test which logs into the node reported a failure. Normally, in severe unresponsive cases the Weblogic monitor either reports either one of the parameters we watch is very high or fails because…

  • Do ultimatums really work? The recent Screen Writers’ Guild delivered an ultimatum that all their members would stop work unless the production studios met their demands. Months of non-work before both sides… What? Compromised…. Apparently the “kids” on Facebook has a ton of ideas about what ultimatums ought to be issued.

  • Tier1 support was contacted by a student to report a problem with a quiz. Some sort of anti-malware software complained about code in the quiz. Tier1 support replicated the issue. Their software identified it as belonging to MyWebSearch. Very bad news. Tier2 support suggested the student remove the MyWebSearch toolbar. Tier1 escalated to Tier3 who…

  • Quick Enough?

    Overheard in cube land… Analyst: Quick question which I think will have a quick answer. DBA: Okay. Analyst: Can we– DBA: No! Is that quick enough? It was humor. Both laughed.