My iPhoto library with 6000+ family photos was running slow on my macbook. So I looked for performance tuning tips on the net. Here are the adjusted tip, which works for me. This Apple support thread mentioned 3 tips: Upgrade RAM Turn off visual bling in overview pages Vacuum iPhoto database file Could not do […]
Recently i worked on a project, which had to use flag icons for all flags in the world. The implementation looked like this: css file: . In order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, I wanted to change it to using CSS sprites instead. CSS file now has changed to lines […]
I had to repair a flawed Subversion repository recently (not all files were committed). I had my local repository checked out. This was the flawed part, containing only parts of the folders and files it should. Then, I got a zip file from the machine where it was working. Problem: It contained .svn folders from […]
The company I work for has negotiated a new phone deal with another tele provider, which meant everybody had to change phones and numbers. I have been using Zyb.com for syncing phones and it has helped me out great every time the old Nokia 6500 has been handed in for repair. The new Nokia E52 […]
I had to clean up a public Trac ticket db where anonymous tickets are allowed. I had to issue commands like this: trac-admin . ticket remove 58 I keep forgetting the shell syntax for doing a loop over numbers. But actually a ruby script was just right for the task: ruby -e “(49..75).each{|i| %x(sudo -u […]
Thanks to one of our dear readers we just discovered a bug in our commenting system that basically meant that you could not leave a comment on any of our posts. This has now been fixed and you can now again tell us your thoughts. Of cause we should have noticed, since the amount of […]
In variation of Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics, Jef Raskin writes the first law of interface design: “Any system shall not harm your content or, through inaction, allow your content to come to harm.” In other words: Let’s say you enter this in an email field: jesperrr#gmail.com and you get this error message: “not […]
I had some issues with Ruby on my macbook after upgrading Ruby from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. This was a problem in Textmate as it still picked up the old version and ignored $PATH i set in my .profile. Thanks to fast and excellent help from Allan Odgaard and others in the ##Textmate IRC channel. The […]
My problem this week: I wanted to share some work with a colleague. Unfortunately we have not yet setup our caplab environment with git server. Nor did i want to push this particular project to GitHub or Unfuddle. My alternative was a file-based setup: Each developer’s machine has it’s own Git repository. On my machine […]
My Norwegian friend Eidar from NetLife Research pointed out that the 2009 version of the bad usability calendar is now online. Learning by bad examples is often a good way in discussing usability with people that are not hardcore usability people. I’m currently wrapping a couple of A3 calendars in plastic to use as posters […]
Our experiment Spam Filter Free Day had one year anniversary yesterday. We won’t repeat the experiment as it gave us a tremendous amount of comments to administer. Since then we decided to remove the “nofollow” constraint on all comment links. At that time we wanted to give credit to our friends and other people that […]
Justaddwater.dk has suffered very infrequent updates for a long period of time. Actually a lot is going on both for Thomas and me — but our activities seldom make it to this blog. Here is an update of what has been keeping us busy. Thomas and his new company Since Thomas Watson quit Capgemini nearly […]
Workaround needed for this annoying bug: Background-image is 1px away from border on buttons. I have buttons that are styled with border and background-image. Must work in IE7. But there is a small 1px gap between border and the background-image. Look at this screenshot from IE7: ie7css-flaw-background-image-on-buttons Problem is that I have no idea if […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
1111 spam comments in the last 24 hours have been published on Justaddwater.dk. Just for the record, all of them are now deleted.
137 new conversations in my mailbox telling me that 137 articles I wrote were hit by spam comments the last 24 hours.
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. […]
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 […]
Frank Spillers from Experiencedynamics wrote me this morning, and promted us to bring an exclusive pre-release of his new poster.
It’s no secret that we will keep this blog spam filter free on December 15th. For some strange reason we only had 127 spam comments in the last 27 hours. This is a drop to just above 100 a day (as opposed to the previous level 2,000-3,000 per day), which translates to a 95% drop […]
Note that our spam experiment scheduled for December 15th got mentioned by the Akismet Blog, Blogherald, and many other blogs. Akismet Blog: Letting Spam In For A Day Blogherald: Will you turn off Akismet? Follow along in Technorati blog reactions for Justaddwater.dk Also to answer some of the comments we got: Binh Nguyen: How about […]
Get ready for a suicide mission: On this blog, we will remove our spam filter completely for one day, December 15th. Today we got our spam comment number 500,000. Pretty scary to think how much energy, computer power, network traffic is wasted on a completely useless activity: To spoil the content with irrelevant comments. Currently […]
The non-technical version: Last Thursday we unfortunately had an intruder on Justaddwater.dk. The cracker used a flaw in our blogging software to gain administrative access to it. With this access the cracker placed a secret backdoor on the server. It seems that the intention of the cracker where to use our server to host illegal […]
I have recently been working with usability an internal timereporting system in Capgemini. Due to time and scope limitations, there has been focus on the “low hanging fruit”.
Here are some of the lessons learned.
On some computers, Amazon are preparing for the final steps of rolling out their new redesign… Just in time for Christmas shopping. (click to see full length screenshot) Amazon is often called the most intensely tested website in the world. Much of the design decisions and prioritations of content are based on automatic algorithms. So […]
I gladly admit that I’m a usability geek, which means that sometimes, the most important things for me may be small and insignificant for others. I encounter this every day. Here are two examples from today. Our new dvd recorder at home is not very intuitive to use so normally I control it when our […]
Today is a great day. At least if you ask Jesper and my self. I just got a call from Jesper who was out shopping with his family, wishing me a happy birthday. Today it’s exactly two years ago that we postet our first post on Justaddwater.dk and we are still going strong. We would […]
When asking a user about personal details you should also tell what you are going to use it for. Basically it’s always good practice to have a privacy policy available on your website so users can see what data is being collected about them, how it is uses etc. Many cooperate websites have privacy policies. […]
Links should change colors when visited to assist the user in navigation. This may be common knowledge to you. Nevertheless, from time to time I run into graphical designers that are not aware of this web convention and why it should be so. Excerpt from Jakob Nielsen‘s book “Prioritizing Web Usability” [via webmonkey] Links That […]
I am back from vacation and saw that Akismet has caught more than 22,000 spam comments over a two week period. That is roughly one spam comment every minute (65 comments each hour). Since February when we passed 100,000 spam comments, we have now passed a quarter million spam comments. (277,421 when I made the […]
Lou Rosenfeld wrote that google analytics is redesigned and has short notes from the demo that Jeff Veen and his team gave at Emetrics yesterday. There is a cool demo on the google analytics website. Jeffs words: Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics is launching, bringing a lot of the simplicity and data […]
After 9 days away from ordinary work, then suddently Microsoft Word snug back on the list of most used programs:
Despite the fact that I try to avoid it, using Word as specification is still an important part of my work :)
We just got a trackback link from a spam blog linking to Thomas’ latest blog post. At first sight, the trackback looked fairly real. Se screenshot below. Just one thing caught my eye: Who’s Jeremy? I went to the site — it looked reasonable at a glance. A look at the categories (oh, it’s called […]
It’s been 9 days since the last blog post. Both Thomas and I are extremely busy with projects at the moment. As you probably know, Thomas started up for himself recently, and I am hunting new possibilities at our clients (along with the project I’m already assigned to). Normally, we tend to post 2-5 times […]
My company is looking for skilled colleagues with rare combination of being both a web developer and usability specialist. The job is in Copenhagen, Denmark. But if the profile is just right, it could be somebody working in other parts of Denmark as well (We also have offices in Århus, Odense). Please let me know […]
Jesper and I were invited yesterday to speak for the Danish IT usability network (link in Danish) about prototyping and our experience with prototypes. In short, the presentation touched Prototyping, how and when to get up to speed Cases from the public and financial sectors where we have been prototyping Experience with different tools, such […]
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