Adding Deprecation Warning in JavaScript Console by Jesper Jul 17

I used this quick trick today to help me clean up and refactor some javascript functions today: if (“console” in window) console.warn(‘DEPRECATED function call to ‘+ arguments.callee +’\nCalled by:\n’+ arguments.callee.caller ); Which results in a fine deprecation warning in the console: There is plenty of space for improvement here. Feel free to use or tamper […]

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IE CSS Bug: Limited @include Statements by Jesper Jul 1

I found out that Internet explorer only interprets 32 @include statements in CSS for a webpage. The rest is silently ignored. Tested with IE7. Has anybody tried this with IE8? For more info see: Internet Explorer issue – maximum of 32 CSS @import PS. Silent ignorance is just about the worst form for ignorance when […]

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Ten Principles Of Google User Experience by Jesper Jun 26

Jungle drums pointed me to the brilliant usability principles posted by Google. I decided to quote them below here, because it would be interesting to see what changes will be applied over time. Furthermore, the principles are really, really good and deserve attention. I like that there is room for performance specific measurements (“every millisecond […]

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Don’t Repeat Yourself (Unless Reading Book) by Jesper Jun 23

After reading Pragmatic Programmer at my recent vacation, I immediately found an urge to repeat myself and read it again.

Ironic that one of the most popular tips from it is “Don’t repeat yourself”.

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Not Ready For Agile by Jesper Jun 19

Pragmatic programmer Andy Hunt’s “Stage 0: Not Ready For Agile” is a brilliant blog post where he ponders over counter-indicators for an agile organization. So if you see these, your organization is probably not agile. You’re not ready for agile if you: are inflexible. You’ve got a policy for everything. If it’s not in the […]

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The Dark Side of Information Architecture by Jesper Jun 18

Dark side of IA

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Find Occurences of Text String in Files by Jesper Jun 17

I had to search for occurences of string in particular files, and using Cygwin i did the following: find all files that ends on .js, .html or .ascx: $ find -regextype posix-extended -regex “.+\.(js|html?|ascx)$” Then search for lines that contain the following javascript construction for( var x in object) I ended up with this regular […]

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Fixes to Common CSS Problems by Jesper Jun 16

Just home again from two weeks vacation, I found this in my delicious popular feed (i usually scan the delicious popular feed for links others find interesting). Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes Good explanations to some of the usual I run into. For instance, the double margin float bug in […]

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Spam Comment One Million by Jesper May 29

We just passed spam comment number 1,000,000 today. It has been only 16 months since we passed 100,000 and six months since spam comment number 500,000. Amazing amount of network traffic and computer power is wasted on spam. Technorati Tags: akismet, spam, comments, justaddwater, blogging

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Public Danish Data REST Interface by Jesper May 28

Christian Dalager and I did an internal Capgemini SmartLunch presentation about REST interfaces in the public Danish sector. REST interface is great news for those in favor of easy-to-integrate, scalable SOA interfaces, and REST services is actually used more than SOAP, XMLRPC, etc. in companies offering multiple interfaces to their data (Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Ebay, […]

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JQuery Rounded Corners (Technorati Style) by Jesper May 26

If you ever use rounded corners the Technorati way, here is some additional code I created recently. Usually I add four non-semantic elements to each corner of a div box to round: HTML for the box: [code lang=”html”] .. .. .. [/code] Well, what if you could just write: [code lang=”html”] … [/code] So that […]

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Invited to Expert Workshop: Future of Internet by Jesper May 20

This Friday I’m invited to attend a workshop on the future of Internet (usage) hosted by Innovation Lab — a Danish company that has a lot of experience in searching and analyzing future trends. Skilled people from Wemind and Creuna will also attend. Although it’s a so-called expert workshop, I definitely don’t consider myself as […]

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Webdesign Tutorial by Rap Video by Jesper May 8

Learning web design by a hiphop video is really neat. Four years ago we had the usability rap (along with the excellent gangsta-style cartoons from the OK/Cancel guys): (the mp3 file with the actual rap seems to have disappeared… could anybody point me to a working link?) Now there is this even cooler rap. Web […]

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Internal or External Company Blog? by Jesper May 6

Roughly 2 years ago we started an international User Experience network in Capgemini. And everybody aggreed that we should have a blog. After a short period of time, the blog became stale and I have not visited it since then. A colleague of mine wrote me today and that reminded me of that old, stale […]

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How to make a dry-run with svn update by Jesper Apr 29

Quick Subversion trick: I asked at the office today if anyone could figure out a method for doing a dry-run to see what files would be updated if you do an “svn update” from repository. My colleague Mads came up with this: jesper:test_project jesper$ svn merge –dry-run -r BASE:HEAD . U app/helpers/application_helper.rb U app/controllers/reports_controller.rb A […]

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Capgemini website article: Prototyping and Ruby on Rails by Jesper Apr 24

Capgemini officially adds Ruby to it’s service offerings

Jesper and Mads building bricks as a symbol of ruby prototyping

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Free Beer for RubyFools Attendees by Jesper Mar 31

I thought I’d better post this before April Fools day tomorrow. My employer, Capgemini has accepted to sponsor the Copenhagen RubyFools conference from today and till Wendesday. The sponsorship involves that Capgemini will sponsor free beer for one hour at the Ruby Cave (social event) tomorrow evening. As far as i know, it starts at […]

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Scrum vs CMMI Level 5 by Jesper Mar 30

A final quote from Jeff Sutherlands presentation: Agile and Scrum Tuning I wrote about recently. The question is if there is anything else that can bring an organization to the same level of performance as Scrum. Right now I’m working with a CMM level 5 organisation. It took them seven years to get to level […]

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Scrum Presentation Edit by Jesper Mar 27

Jakob Scmidt Sørensen made an edited boiled down of his Internal Capgemini Scrum Presentation. Thanks Jakob! The entire 38 minutes presentation is in Danish As a side note, we had quite some traffic from the Danish blog “Version 2” where Rasmus Knippel (an ex capgemini colleague) wrote about the video. Rasmus found it quite unique […]

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Where to find a giant, affordable touch screen? by Jesper Mar 14

Time for a Lazyweb request. Mads, a colleague of mine did a fast prototype of a new application that we probably want to use as a tool in our agile projects. We’ll do a fast, digital version of a Scrum board (see image below) For the digital version, we’d like to project the scrum board […]

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The Design of Internal Enterprise Applications by Jesper Mar 11

I really fell in spontaneous love with this drawing, that shows the relation between the simplest and the most complex of all known products and websites. Apple and Google representing the first. Internal Enterpricey applications representing the latter. Thanks a lot Eric Burke for that fantastic visualisation! A great quote that fits for this situation: […]

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Internal Capgemini Scrum Presentation by Jesper Mar 8

If you understand Danish, then this internal presentation might be something for you. Capgemini Denmark lunchbag session explaining “What is Scrum”, “how to Scrum”, “Why Scrum”, recorded Friday March 7th. Presenter is my colleague Jakob Schmidt Sørensen, Capgemini Denmark. He asked me to help him out keep track of time and draw the burndown chart […]

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Scrum vs Outsourcing by Jesper Mar 7

More from Jeff Sutherland (the video presentation i posted about yesterday). This time on outsourcing (sending to India) vs implementing Scrum locally. Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google (example starts around 42 minutes into the presentation) Outsource $2million development Outsourcing costs $1.6M (industry data show 20% cost savings on average) Alternative: Introduce […]

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Video: Agile and Scrum Tuning by Jeff Sutherland by Jesper Mar 6

Scrum video presentation from Jeff Sutherland (speech from December 2006 but highly relevant). The presentation is really packet with great quotes and inspiration. I wonder if I ever will be motivated to work in traditional big waterfall projects again… Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google Working software is really the only measure […]

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Great Quotes For The Agile Project Wall by Jesper Feb 24

At a recent internal Capgemini tradeshow, we had the pleasure of using some great quotes that really benefit working the way I like the best: Small agile teams where we can show and tell — make working software and prototypes very fast in close collaboration with clients. Mads and I decided to add a few […]

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How I keep Informed Without My RSS Reader Killing Me by Jesper Feb 15

I got this question today from Lars Pind, who is a brilliant former developer now coaching other software developers: 6. Which blogs or websites do you read to keep up-to-date at work? And i realized that i have just had more than 6 months of RSS reader boycot (inspired by Peter Krantz). Until recently, my […]

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3 Simple Usability Tips For Developers by Jesper Feb 11

It takes a lifetime to become an expert on the usability field. Many developers may be interested in creating usable, successful applications. But the entry barrier is sometimes too high — it’s easier to rely on the usability experts than to know about usable applications themselves. Although I’m really passionate about usability, I really understand […]

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Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide by Jesper Feb 8

At a recent project, there was a requirement to describe the CSS used on a site, as a documentation, other developers could use. We decided to go a bit further — not only documenting the CSS classes — but making a guide that developers could find easy to use. Also we wanted developers with little […]

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Data Visualisation by Jesper Feb 5

What a treasury of old and new maps, images, graphs — all you can imagine. www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/ (found via wikipedia: information graphics) Actually, I’m in the middle of preparing a workshop where some of these visualizations can serve as background inspiration material. Update later same day: Add to this the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods: Just […]

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Selling Ruby, Rails, and Agile Project Management by Jesper Feb 2

My colleague Mads and myself made an internal “sales show” for the way we use Ruby on Rails to deliver web projects that are fast, small, agile prototypes in close collaboration with clients. Here are a few photos from our internal Capgemini kickoff: The sign says “Test yourself: Project manager — can you handle it”. […]

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Interaction Design: Send To a Friend by Jesper Jan 21

For a work project I had to make a “send email to a friend”, and looked for inspiration the following places. I’m not commenting it here, these are just the raw examples I found. If you like feel free to comment on what you like or don’t like, and please add links to research that […]

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Sharepoint 2007, Accessibility, and Impossible UI Customization by Jesper Jan 20

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Emil Stenström’s recent “Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view” is definitely worth reading if you care about webstandards, accessibility and decent frontend code in general. Here are some of the quotes that really stand out in an excellent article that i really recommend you read before picking your web development platform. One major problem […]

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Bad Usability Calendar 2008 by Jesper Jan 17

My Norwegian friend Eidar just wrote to inform me that their company (Netlife Research) has finally released Bad Usability Calendar 2008. Last year, the calendar got quite popular and even Jakob Nielsen mentioned it in one of his newsletters. This year, I’m more than ever looking forward to use it. The calendar has — as […]

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Rails Localization Plugin Release Version 0.9 by Jesper Jan 13

Just a quick note to tell that I released version 0.9 of the L10n-simplified plugin. It has been a year since last release, but I had nohurry since the last version already fit for Rails 2.0. One of the nice changes for this release is that you can now set your localized language in the […]

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Dilemma — Updated Numbers or Long Response Times by Jesper Jan 11

Paypal showed me this splash screen when logging in: I think this is a useful design pattern that can be valuable to most of our clients dealing with time-sensitive data. It is time-consuming for an application to check if there are new payments on every request. This check is better off being uncoupled from the […]

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Lean Software Development Video Mary Poppendieck by Jesper Jan 8

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Here are some great examples i jotted down when watching Mary Poppendieck’s presentation at Google: “Competing on the basis of speed“. See my notes below. Complexity kills speed: Windows 95 took 350 developers, Vista took 3500 developers Make sure your project anticipates change: 60-80% of all software is developed after first release to production Defer […]

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Make WordPress Editor Less Evil by Thomas Jan 6

This Friday, Jesper and I had a chat about things we don’t like about the current WordPress WYSIWYG editor. In particular when trying to write code examples in our posts: Jesper: One change I really would appreciate in the next WordPress would be the ability to shift wysiwyg/code editor directly on the edit page (Now […]

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Usability of Pagination Links by Jesper Jan 3

In case you missed the thorough pagination gallery that was published in November: Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices There are really some good (and bad) examples collected at the page, including these written “best practices”: Provide large clickable areas Don’t use underlines Identify the current page Space out page links Provide Previous and Next […]

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Make Logo Bigger Cream by Jesper Jan 3

Via Francois, I saw this funny video TV-Shop style: Make my logo bigger. Technorati Tags: humour, logo, humor, webdesign

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Speed House Building Video, Teamwork and Collaboration by Jesper Jan 2

You may know this video, where American construction workers compete to build a house as fast as possible. Colleagues of mine showed this video at a 50-60 people workshop for inspiration to teamwork and collaboration. I was really amazed when I first saw this video. It seems chaotic but is of course well prepared down […]

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Avoid Innovation (The Word) — Use Better Words Instead by Jesper Jan 1

Scott Berkun brilliantly notes that the word “innovation” has lost it’s meaning. Stop saying innovation – here’s why Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any of […]

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Textmate Snippet: Convert HTML entities for viewing code by Jesper Jan 1

Happy New Year everybody. Here is a tiny Textmate or E-Texteditor Snippet: Convert HTML entities for viewing code. I created this recently for a HTML cookbook on a project, where we made HTML pages showing HTML example code. It converts & to &amp; < to &lt; > to &gt; That’s it. Basically, I made a […]

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Usability of Map With Positions in CSS by Jesper Dec 21

These days I’m working on the HTML and CSS for this map, but I want to hear your opinions as what to recommend from a usability point of view: The top map where the cities are placed on the map directly (it’s a HTML list) The bottom map where the list is to the right […]

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Rubygems: Rails 2.0, Mongrel, Windows, solved by Jesper Dec 20

Now is the time to revoke the install warning Rails 2.0, gem install, Windows => Mongrel Trouble I wrote about December 9th as Rails 2.0 was released. Rubygems 1.0 was released 10 hours ago and solves the Win32 problems mentioned in the previous post. So for now, back to: [code lang=”ruby”]> gem update –system > […]

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50 Reasons Why It Won’t Work by Jesper Dec 19

I ran into this that we use internally in Capgemini to help people open up for new ideas. Out of curiosity: Which one of these did you hear yesterday? Post a comment, and I’ll make an updated version of the ones you hear the most. We tried that before Our systems are different It costs […]

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Cleanup Time — Spam Filter Free Day by Jesper Dec 18

1111 spam comments in the last 24 hours have been published on Justaddwater.dk. Just for the record, all of them are now deleted.

spam-filter-free-day-gmail-inbox-tiny.png

137 new conversations in my mailbox telling me that 137 articles I wrote were hit by spam comments the last 24 hours.

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Today is Spam Filter Free Day by Thomas Dec 15

Saturday the 15th is Spam Filter Free Day here at justaddwater.dk. Why would we ever want to do something like that you ask? Well up until recently we received about 2-3000 spam comments each day so we thought we would draw attention to the wasted bandwidth, time and energy that all these spam comments consume. […]

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My First Rant Discussion — Ever by Jesper Dec 13

How do you manage to help discussions being constructive and treating people with mutual respect? I just had this strange experience. You pay $34.95 for a text editor, and suddenly you’re allowed to yell and swear aththe developers. WHAT? I’m an eager follower on the E-texteditor forum as it is a good place to follow […]

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Spam Comment With Link To Its Article by Jesper Dec 12

We got this spam comment yesterday with link to the article itself: It points to the very article it tries to comment. Some questions pop up instantly: Will marking this as spam give our Justaddwater blog bad karma in Akismet? Why would spammers do this? What are they trying to achieve? Has this anything to […]

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Rails 2.0, gem install, Windows => Mongrel Trouble by Jesper Dec 9

UPDATE December 20th: Problems are history with new Rubygems 1.0 release. See: Rubygems: Rails 2.0, Mongrel, Windows, solved. UPDATE December 19th: Rails changeset 8438 fixes the Rails part of this bug but no release 2.0.3 available yet. Rubygems 1.0 is on the way. Wait for the 1.0 release that contains a bugfix. See my comment […]

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