funky-star

Network Fail

I’m at yet another university that has locked down their network so far that it gets in the way of doing simple things — like IM. For some reason the firewall and/or routers are not routing those ports. Great, thanks.

This is one of the reasons I like Google, they do everything in a web browser over port 80.

Source: Brandon/AIM Express

AIM Express - AIM in a Web Browser

(I really wish I could have my friends that can break through these network blocks in my bag when I travel to other universities to show folks how silly all this unnecessary security is…)

Turns out, I had to put the Microsoft Office 2008 folder directly in the Mac OS’ named “Applications” folder and not a sub-folder. Why?

Why do I have to put the folder in a specific location–and why now? I’ve been able to successfully upgrade through 12.2.2 with the “Microsoft Office” folder in a sub-folder within the “Applications” folder.

I really hate programs that require a specific folder/path location. It’s my computer and I’d rather have short listings of files in folders, than crazy long listings.

Consider the case of the 12.2.3 updater, it searches on other drives for a copy that’s upgradeable and given how slow it is, it must be searching in more than just the “Drive:Applications” folder. Ok I suppose it could be really inefficient, but that just makes things worse I think.

Thanks Again, Microsoft

Source: Brandon/BrowserShots.org

BrowswerShots.org

You can submit the web page that you’d like to check and have it rendered in a number of different browser. A whole lot of different browsers (just no Mac-based browsers). The site is scripted to launch a virtual machine, open the webpage in the browser you’ve selected, create a screen shot and move on to the next browser.

Pro Tip: There’s a 30 minute timer on your requests. So if you’ve selected a lot of browsers and/or their servers are busy, your job may time out. So check back in 29 minutes after you’ve started your job. You’ll be able to extend the job if it’s not complete, but you have to click something on the website to do that. (Or you could purchase a month of “priority processing”, but if you’re like me, you’re just doing a one time test of a site.)

1. Open the “root level” view of the disk image – for me, it always opens in icon view. Then, select “Show View Options” from the View menu.

2. Check the “Always Open in Icon View” box. While leaving this dialog open, select “as List” from the View menu.

3. Uncheck the “Always Open in Icon View” box. It will instantly turn into “Always Open In List View”. Recheck this box immediately, then close dialog. This will make the setting stick.

DKH47. (2009, September 21). Re: “Always Open In…” View Options for Root Level of a Disk Image File. Retrieved on November 21, 2009 from Apple Support Web site: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10588157

The Energy Detective (TED) is a current measuring device that you connect in your electrical service panel and can be used to monitor energy usage in real time.

When I owned my house, I started a high-level tracking of my energy usage (comparing overall kWh usage for each month) to start to understand how my use of air conditioning in the summer, or say my computers and A/V equipment impacted my overall use of energy. With TED, I really could have fine tuned that.

Source: O’Reilly

Used Under Terms of Use

TED Dashboard and Energy Usage

I’m using Google Viewer to embed a readable version of my Master’s thesis in my website. Google Viewer will let you embed a readable version of a Microsoft Word document, PowerPoint slideshow or TIFF file in a web page.

There is a plugin for WordPress but it doesn’t seem to place nice with the iNove theme that I use.

WebWorkerDaily has an article about Clixpy. And another tool I found recently is Loop11. I haven’t had the chance to test either of them recently, but I’m filing them away for future reference.

Also, I found an interesting article at A List Apart about the Myth of Usability Testing:

First, usability testing has high shock value. Teams invariably conclude their initial sessions surprised to learn they had not noticed glaringly obvious design problems.

[W]hile testing alone is not a good indicator of where a team’s priorities should lie, it is most certainly part of the triangulation process. When put in context of other data, such as project goals, user goals, user feedback, and usage metrics, testing helps establish a complete picture. Without this context, however, testing can be misleading or misunderstood at best, and outright damaging at worst.

When using any of these methods, it’s important to try to find participants who actually want to complete the very tasks you wish to evaluate.

Hoekman Jr., R. (2009, October 20). The Myth of Usability Testing. Retrieved November 11, 2009 from A List Apart Website: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-myth-of-usability-testing/

A recent LifeHacker article pointed me at LiveBrush.

Source: Brandon

Drawn in 2 Seconds!

OMG this is really cool.

Now mere mortals (ok computer geeks) can do some really spiffy design work. (I never got good at doing artwork like this in Illustrator.)

tintii is a smart selective colour photo filter, highlighting the striking colours of a photo while desaturating the rest to greyscale. Also known as colour popping…

If you know what you’re doing, you can do this all in Photoshop without tintii. Depending how talented you are this may take very little time, or you may not do it because it takes too long. Enter tintii.

Using either the stand alone software (free; it proved to have some stability problems for me), or a Photoshop plugin ($16; I didn’t buy it), you can make the colors pop.

Of course you have to have the right photo…

Here are the before and after images.

Hrm, I’m using WordPress’ built in gallery feature to display them. That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it works pretty well. (I’d like to focus on the center part of the image, with the flower.)

In a recent post on WebWorkerDaily, I read about another Adobe Air-based rapid mockup tool: MockFlow. One of the interesting things about MockFlow is its multi-user capabilities. And one of the ways it differs from Mockups is that it assumes multiple pages from the start and has a method of linking them together. With Mockups, it’s mostly just one screen/page at a time. Certainly worth looking into.

(And just because it’s an interesting idea, you may want to check out Mockup Magnets, for doing the same thing on a whiteboard.)