Category Archives: Software

Gliffy makes diagrams easy

Software

Sometimes the best way to say it is with a picture. My experience has been that a picture is worth 900 or so words.

For drawing work diagrams, Visio is typically the king.

  1. It is made by Microsoft and big corporations typically have a volume license deal.
  2. It is pretty decent desktop software and fits most uses.

I was frustrated at Visio diagrams in our wiki when I was doing some user experience articles and creating lots of wireframes. I’d have to make a change, export to jpg, upload to wiki, reference the picture.

I’m way too lazy for that. I just want to make the change one time, and see it everywhere. I don’t like to repeat myself.

Since our wiki at work is running off of the excellent (but not free) Confluence Wiki from Atlassian, I was able to convince our architecture group to buy us a license for the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. After some initial slowness issues, which the Gliffy folks fixed, it’s a dream.

You create a diagram, you reference it in the wiki – if you need to change it, it’s easy. Change it back – no problem. Gliffy has versioning.

All told, it took much longer to get through the paperwork to buy the software than to install the software, but it’s well worth it so far!

Alienware’s m5550 laptop: Vista Unready

Software, User Experience

There is an undocumented problem with their m5550 laptop. When the laptop goes to sleep – a feature that’s materially important to a modern laptop – wifi is disabled. When the laptop wakes up, the wifi doesn’t work. There is no way to bring it back but to reboot the laptop. Alienware’s position on this is that it is Microsoft’s problem, not theirs, and that there is no remedy available to you except to wait till Microsoft fixes the problem.

I was trying to do a nice thing for my partner Sam and buy her a new laptop. I got her an m5550 laptop from Alienware, and was excited to recieve it. When we discovered that the wifi doesn’t work on Alienware’s m5550 laptop, it was disappointing, but I was confident that we could find a patch or other solution. I went onto Alienware’s customer and tech support forums to find a solution. These forums are private, so potential customers can’t find them. This is the only place where Alienware admits the problem. I contacted Alienware tech support and they confirmed there is no technical solution to the problem. The earliest posting on it is from November 2006.

I’ve spoken with three different people from Alienware including Supervisor Kate. All confirm that Alienware’s position is that this is not their problem.

  • I bought the hardware from Alienware.
  • I bought the operating system from Alienware.
  • Alienware advertises the wifi card on the ordering page of their anti-wifi laptop.
  • Alienware doesn’t disclose the problem to potential customers.
  • Alienware’s promotional copy promotes their quality.

Also, from their promotional copy:

With every Alienware system, you are assured to receive components guaranteed to work optimally with each other, thus minimizing the possibility of technical issues and allowing you to start using your system immediately.

This sucks. I would like them to offer either a switch to XP, to take the laptop back without the 15% restocking fee, or to offer some other solution. Perhaps throw in a wifi PCMCIA card that they know works with the laptop and operating system?

Just about anything would be better than hearing that it isn’t Alienware’s problem and that I should just wait for a patch from Microsoft. They’ve known about the problem since November and it isn’t fair to treat their customers this way.

Please let your computer buying friend’s know about this problem and their response. I’d hate for other folks to be take for a ride…

Error Messages: “We Dunno”

Dev, Software

When you write software, you try to make the error messages as informative as possible. You want troubleshooting to be easy – you’ll probably have to troubleshoot the problems! However, you always end up with the misc bucket. The “This error couldn’t possibly arise” error. The “We Dunno” error.

I’ve been working with SqlServerCE on a project at work. (I’m impressed with it so far – it’s a tiny relational DB in a very small footprint.) I hit the SQLCE “We Dunno” error. First sign was the informative message: “An internal error occurred. [ ID = 2034 ]”. Native Error 28574.
My SQLCEResultSet was behaving very strangely: A call to results.GetName(0) gives me the expected name of “Apples”, results.GetName(1) gives me “Oranges”.
Calling results.GetString(0) throws the error, and results.GetString(1) gives me “Granny Smith”. Odd!

A little digging on the MS SQLCe Books online gave me this:

If you experience any errors with the prefix “Internal error” while you use SQL Server Compact Edition, try the operation again as the error might not reproduce. If the error appears again, you should immediately contact Microsoft Product Support Services. The internal errors cannot be resolved by common troubleshooting techniques.

In other words, “We Dunno” – but we’re sure interested in how you got there….

Link your computers with Synergy

Software

I just read the Lifehacker article on Synergy and decided to give it a try with my laptop and desktop.  Five minutes later, including downloading time, I’m writing this.

It’s so dead simple.

Synergy is a virtual kvm.  It links your keyboard and mouse from one pc to any other pc you want to use it on.  So instead of having my desktop keyboard and mouse and then my laptop keyboard and mouse, I have one.  And this makes it easy to switch between projects.  If you’ve got two computers you use near each other, I highly recommend combining them with Synergy.

Best Screensaver Ever

Art, Pals, Software

About a year ago I bought a huge monster flat screen TV. It’s nice for watching movies on and a heck of a lot less trouble than setting up the projector. It sucks a lot of power so I try to leave it turned off most of the time, but I’ve got a great reason to leave it on. That reason is Slickr. It downloads the most interesting pictures from Flickr and gracefully fades them in and out and about on your screen.

If you are staring at it and a really good picture comes up, you can hit “d” on your keyboard to make it your wallpaper. Hit the spacebar to launch the picture behind the scenes in your browser.

DD-WRT Router Slowdown solved

Dev, Pals, Software

My apartment is wireless. Really wireless. No cable, no phone. But I live in the future, where the internet is involved in anything you do. So my neighbor has a wifi router that we’ve put DD-WRT on. It’s really much better than the original firmware that comes with your router, for a number of reasons. We’d been noticing a slowdown though. The router would, over the course of a few days, get slower and slower. The key symptom was that DNS lookups would be really spotty.

Turns out that bittorrent clients open up a lot of ports, especially if they are using dynamic hash tracking (DHT). The limited number of ports the router was allocating were being filled up by DHT and not released.

Router slowdown solution, from the dd-wrt wiki: increase the max number of ports and then decrease the timeout delay for those ports. I put this solution in on Tuesday night, and it’s been fine since then.

UI Design

Design, Dev, Software, User Experience

I’ve been assigned to do the User Interface design mock-ups for our settings by my boss because I’m the guy who gets all excited by well designed things and starts talking about user experiences and such. I’m the guy who reads Passionate Users, Infosthetics, Alex Barnett, Etc. I get hot for sparklines.

Most applications are capable of great things, but never get a workout from their users because they are difficult or scary to configure. It isn’t obvious to users how to do the things they want to do, so they just learn the minimum and stay with that.

Well designed things are easy joys to use. The best known thing like that right now is the iPod. People who don’t know technology are not afraid of the iPod because it works the way they expect it to. In the area that I work in, users are so involved in their business that they can’t afford to waste time learning the complexities of their applications. Things that are hard to understand just don’t get explored, the users call up the help desk and get someone to do it for them.

Every call like that is wasted money for users and for the development/support teams. The user isn’t doing their job and the developers aren’t doing their job.

My task is to make sure that our newest application will be iPod easy to use and configure, no small feat when you are doing a hell of a lot more than playing music.

In the beginning I was writing a little sample application that would be a sort of be a dummy with dummy data. Of course, I spent too much time digging into the programming and produced a close-to-working-shell with databinding to object collections. Too much for a mockup. To keep myself thinking about just the design I’m doing the rest as drawings to be implemented. We’ve got visio somewhere but it’s overkill for what I need. I got through just fine using the free web application Gliffy. It’s handy and fast, exports to JPG so I can stick it in our freshly minted wiki.

I’m writing up a user experience design guide for my team as well, most of which I’m getting from what I’ve read in Jensen Harris’s UI writings and Creating Passionate Users.

when I think of the past, the twitches come back

Dev, Software

The Daily WTF – MAKEing Fools’ GOLD:

“Paul’s company develops financial software that’s used by major stock markets. In his brief tenure, Paul was witness to millions of dollars in loss as a direct result of their software. “

I am proud to claim Paul as a friend and former coworker. He was one of the lights in an otherwise Kafkaesque experience. I’m pleased to see in the comments shoutouts from other former coworkers, one of whom I’m guessing was Eric.

I still talk to folks who work there. They are a working hard against a very discouraging culture, and I’ve heard recent reports of progress.

That said, I still tell stories about what went down there.
It’s the only place I’ve worked at where multiple people put holes in the walls in anger without getting let go.

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Atlassian Developer Blog: Good Fences Make Aloof Neighbours

Dev, Software

Atlassian Developer Blog: Good Fences Make Aloof Neighbours:

“In an enterprise environment, where every contributor to the wiki is identifiable, and every change reversible, what value remains in restricting edit rights a priori?”

I stumbled on this on the atlassian site. My group is trying out Jira and the Confluence wiki. This article from an atlassian developer expresses some of the core oversights enterprise wikis face. Rights management, like any security measure, is a balancing act. How much does rights management cost you in terms of lost good and effort spent managing the management? How much benefit do you gain?

My default setting for behind-the-firewall social software is full rights with authentication, with security imposed as needed, and only the amount of security needed to protect from specific probably problems.

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