Archive for May, 2007

Agile vs agile

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Agile software development, with a capital A, is a collection of software processes geared towards minimizing the risk of changing requirements. Typically this is accomplished with short timelines, an emphasis on delivering something rather than large up-front design, a tendency to eschew large and lengthy meetings, and so on.
This type of software process has gained […]

Livejournal Has Massive Usability Problems

Monday, May 21st, 2007

I wanted to post a comment on a friend’s Livejournal blog, but I had forgotten my password (I don’t use LJ very often). So I tried to send myself the automated password reset e-mail. I got an error:
[Error: Database handle unavailable at /home/lj/cgi-bin/LJ/User.pm line 364. @ w72]
This is problem number one. Why can’t they create […]

Thinking in DFS vs BFS

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The concepts of depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS) are usually used to describe an algorithm for visiting nodes in a graph or a tree structure. The key difference is whether you visit all of the nodes nearest to you first, then begin radiating outward from there, or whether you continue as deep as […]

Seadragon and Zooming Interfaces

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Jeff Atwood has written a blog entry about Zoomable interfaces, including an image of Microsoft’s Seadragon product as an example. The other examples in his post are mostly concerned with the ability to zoom in and out for finer grained control or higher-level operations.

I think Seadragon is the most intriguing example, and has the potential […]

Sony Understands Packaging

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

I recently ordered another pair of the Sony MDR-V6 Headphones for listening to music at work, since I was pleased with the quality of the first pair I bought to use at home.
As I was unpacking the headphones, I noticed that Sony has taken a lot of care to make the packaging of the headphones […]

Graphics Editing

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Jeff Atwood made a post today about the importance of a developer having the skills and tools to do basic image and graphics manipulation.
I highly agree, and I cringe every time I see a 2MB attachment on a mailing list because the taker of the screenshot was not aware that even Paint can save as […]