Technology — No comments
09
Mar 10
I remember, as if it were yesterday.
I was sitting in the ground station laboratory at the European Space Agency, needing to setup a test configuration using the “Monitoring & Control Module,” and staring at a grey screen full of mis-aligned, inconsistently-sized tabs on top of three-dimensional squares, on top of more squares on top of more tabs. The feeling was one of hopelessness and nausea. Who designed this thing? What were they thinking? Was the UI simply given to the most available “resource,” or perhaps the summer intern?
It was at that moment that I decided to start a company—MakaluMedia—in which “user experience” would drive everything we do.
Understanding user experience in terms of user interface, interaction design and visual design, although challenging to articulate concisely, is still at least somewhat intuitive to most of us. Understanding and articulating it in terms of software engineering—which can be just as important to the overall experience of a software product—has always been (for me, at least) particularly challenging.
I read an article today, however, from Matt Gemmel, that really nails it. I’d recommend this as important reading for any teams and engineers involved in the creation of software products, and who care deeply about user experience.
http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/09/engineer-thinking
Sports — No comments
18
Feb 10
On Saturday, January 30, 2010, I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal to compete with my team-mates at Gracie-Barra Marbella in the brown-belt, lightweight, Senior 2 category of the European Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championship. Despite an unfortunate previous evening (having eaten something obviously bad), I managed to win my category — making this the third time I’ve won gold in this competition.
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Business / General — No comments
20
Jan 10
When possible, I try to spend my money in the local economy. For that reason, I decided to try buying my nutritional supplements from a Spanish provider — masmusculo.com — instead of the UK provider I habitually use. (You’d think it’d be cheaper to order in Spain, but it’s not; even including shipping from England to Spain, it’s cheaper to buy in the United Kingdom.)
Well, my order arrived today, and I’ve attached a photo of the packaging and the status of the contents.
I’ve emailed the photos to the company, asking if they consider this to be acceptable quality, and am waiting for a reply.
Mac / Technology — No comments
17
Jan 10
Inspired by Steven Frank’s description of his own system, I thought I’d take a moment to document how I store and backup our important data.
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Posterous / Technology — 3 comments
11
Jan 10
Isn’t it about time that companies that provide paperless electronic statements begin helping us out by giving those electronic documents meaningful names? Here’s the names of two bank statements I just downloaded.
Fixed — No comments
10
Jan 10
Testing my blog after upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, I noticed that blank pages were being returned after posting comments. Some Googling and further testing revealed that the Akismet anti-spam plugin was at fault, although the reason for it (at the present time) remains a mystery.
I did find a solution, however, involving a small modification to the comments.php file in the theme.
General — No comments
25
Sep 09
Recently, I’ve been unable to use the Banc of America brokerage site. The site logs me out whenever I navigate from one section to the next. I emailed them, and got this response:
We are aware of a recent issue whereby the wallst.com cookie is now required on the Account Overview page. If the cookie is not accepted, you are logged off of the website. The issue appears to be the result of recent changes to the site, and the appropriate technology partners have been engaged. You can correct this issue by going to Safari – Preferences, then press the Security icon. Please press the radio button next to ‘Always’ and press the red button in the upper left corner to close the window.
Oh, the irony. While, on the one hand, Bank of America continually makes doing business with them increasingly cumbersome in the name of ’security’ (e.g. the recent requirement to setup ‘SafePass’), they are now telling me that in order to use their website, I’ve got to configure my own browser as insecurely as possible.
Posted via email from Matt Henderson’s Posterous
General / Uncategorized — No comments
16
Sep 09
Obviously not a perfect analogy, but I found it cute nonetheless. A simplified exercise in Socialism, translated from http://tinyurl.com/kl7fuz Continue reading →
Uncategorized — 2 comments
09
Sep 09
I’ve recently noticed poor 3G network speeds when using my iPhone, and wanted to conduct some tests to identify which of the following could be the potential culprit:
Could it be the new 3.0 version of the iPhone operating system?
Could it be the new 3GS model of the iPhone?
Could it be a problem with my 3G provider, Vodafone España?
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Uncategorized — 2 comments
03
Sep 09
In the Mac OS X operating system, when you copy content from one application, and paste into another, the source styles, in addition to the content, is copied into the destination. Unless you’re expecting or desire this behavior, your workflow is interrupted and you’re left with a bit of a mess to clean up (the effort of which relates to how quickly you discover what happened).
Most style-aware applications support a “Paste and Match Style” option, but some don’t (like “sidenote”, the application in which I’m writing this post.) For those, we’re kind of stuck.
Based on how I work (mostly in plain text), as well as most people I know, a preferred approach would be:
“Paste and Match Style” should be the default behavior of the basic “Paste” function.
The current “Paste and Match Style” option should be renamed and re-functioned “Paste with styles”.
Applications that are particularly interested in styles (page layout applications, graphic design applications, etc.), could, on pastes which include styles, simply prompt the user, “Include styles with this paste?”
Trips — No comments
14
Aug 09
The Rio Grande river begins its journey at the mouth of a cave near Yunquera, Spain, and makes its way down through the mountains and just by the Tolox venta where we like to have lunch on the weekends.
For quite some time, we’ve been wanting to visit the river source (“nacimiento,” in Spanish), having heard that it’s a particularly beautiful place. Unfortunately, however, neither the routes we’ve found in books, nor the ones we found on the web have accurately described how to find the place. On our first attempt, two weeks ago, we simply couldn’t find it.
This past weekend, we tried again, and this time we did find it. In this blog article, we’ll describe how to get there, and point you to the trip page we created at EveryTrail.com, where you can download the GPS track file, to ensure your own ability to find it.
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Sports — No comments
14
Aug 09
In the sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I’ve been fortunate (having trained under some great coaches) to have won gold medals two times at the European BJJ championships. On both occasions, I fought in the lightweight division, 76 kg (including the gi/kimono). Generally walking around at 76 kg, I would need to only lose about 2 kg a couple days before the event (to compensate for the weight of the gi), and would generally be one of the bigger and stronger participants in the division (being at the very top of the weight range).
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General — No comments
14
Aug 09
I recently contacted Bank of America regarding the refinancing of my home. (I’m hoping to take advantage of the relatively low rates currently available.) Refinancing involves speaking with a loan officer. Loan officers generally are compensated, at least in part, through commissions.
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Business — No comments
13
Aug 09
The following resume, verbatim, just landed in my inbox. Seriously, how could we not hire this guy!? The only thing he’s not, is concise. Continue reading →
General — 1 comment
13
Aug 09
CapitalOne could have emailed me with the following short note:
Due to forthcoming changes in our online banking, please visit the following URL if you access Bill Pay via Quicken: capitalonebank.com/betteronlinebanking . If you don’t do Bill Pay via Quicken, you can safely ignore this email.
I don’t do Bill Pay at CapitalOne via Quicken, and so I could have immediately got on with my day. Instead, CapitalOne chose a process which unnecessarily cost me about five to seven minutes of my time.
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Technology — No comments
11
Aug 09
Unfortunately, Google Voice doesn’t yet support forwarding to international numbers, which, for someone like me, living in Spain but with considerable interests in the US, is quite a bummer. (What I particularly like about Google Voice is its call screening facilities.)
To work around this limitation, I have Google Voice forwarding to my US SkypeIn number.
This works well when I’m at the computer, as I can answer my Google Voice calls directly in Skype. But what about when I’m not at the computer?
One of Skype’s preferences is forwarding, and I have it configured to forward unanswered calls to my iPhone. While this works fairly well, a parameter I’m still fiddling with is the time after which Skype considers the call “unanswered” and does its forwarding.
If you set this value too small (like “1 second”), then you don’t have enough time to answer Skype calls when at the computer. If you set it too large (like “10 seconds”), then your Google Voice call will timeout and get dropped long before Skype has time to forward to the iPhone.
Presently I have this value set at “4 seconds”, which seems to be a good trade-off.
Technology — No comments
19
Jul 09
In case you missed it, TechCrunch received some 300+ confidential documents related to Twitter (the company), which were attained by a hacker. These documents contained minutes of meetings, business plans, talks with companies like Google and Microsoft. In short, a disaster for Twitter.
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