Testing, 1,2,3…

It’s kind of ironic, not to mention ever-so-slightly depressing, that both the ‘rival’ UI testing suites du jour only mention Linux in their acronyms and descriptions, when a key part of the underlying technology on which they depend (the accessibility framework) was largely developed on Solaris boxes in the first place :) Presumably the suites themselves should also run equally happily on said ancestral platform, so it would be nice to see a bit of a mention at least…

Who are these… yoomans?

Got hold of Carl Sagan‘s Cosmos DVD boxed set today, which I managed to find on eBay a couple of weeks back for rather less than the $100+ that Amazon want for it.

When it was first aired in the 80s– and it’s never been repeated since in the UK, AFAIK, at least not on a terrestrial channel– I remember being blown away by the visual effects, the music (mostly from Vangelis’ Heaven & Hell album), and the suitably epic feel of the whole thing. I also remember missing the very last episode, about which I was rather upset at the time, so I’m looking forward to seeing it all again. (It should certainly help fill the pre-bedtime TV hole in our new house that’s still waiting for NTL to get off their cretinous arses and join two wires together in our living room.)

Calling Cantabrigian Logibods

The first place I ever worked (if you don’t count a crappy summer job typing in the size of graveyard plots), the Logica office in Cambridge, is closing at the end of this month. They’re planning a reunion dinner there on Friday October 21st (not sure if I’ll be going over for it myself yet), but so far they’ve only tracked down about half the people who’ve worked there… so if you know anyone who did and would like to be involved, please ask them to contact Clifton Hughes at logicacmg.com.

Moving House Wrecks Your Head

Packing and unpacking mountains of boxes is bad enough, but it’s not helped by the muppets who staff the utility companies.

BT Ireland need the Eircom account number at our new address before they can transfer our broadband connection, which will then take 14 working days (so, at least it’s not quite three weeks then). Eircom, though, despite having to log into their phone system with my existing account details, won’t tell me my new account number over the phone for “security reasons” (despite having done so every other time I’ve moved house), but offered to email it to any address I chose instead… which didn’t strike me as outstandingly secure either, until now, several hours later, when I’ve realise that they haven’t actually bothered sending it at all. Fair play to them, you can’t get much more secure than that, really.

Then there’s Bord Gais, whose skills clearly don’t quite extend to copying and pasting my name correctly from an email to wherever they have to type it in to open an account, and NTL who seem to be unable to make the cable TV point in our new house live without me taking a morning off work for an “appointment”, when they’ve managed to quite happily just flick a switch somewhere every other time I’ve moved.

Hopes of a full house are thus pinned squarely on ESB , who I have to phone at the end of this week with a closing meter reading for my old address. One can only imagine what inventive ways they’ll find to make that a miserable experience too.

A decade of usability

Yikes, it’s ten years today since the first real project I worked on (for money) produced its first real deliverable.

I was employed by Logica (now LogicaCMG) in Cambridge, but was working with a team of other usability folk from Logica, Admiral Consulting (now part of LogicaCMG themselves), Microsoft, GUI Designers and others at Reuters’ now-defunct Usability Group just off Fleet Street in London.

With insufficient funding to build their own in-house team, Reuters’ Greg Garrison decided to form a virtual team’ of usability consultants from various companies, who could be called upon as they were required. The rest of the time, they would be back in their own offices, being paid by their own companies. (In practice, it didn’t quite work like that; most of us were there 10 or 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, blowing the budget on a variety of wild ideas.)

And the deliverable? A multimedia extravaganza of usability examples, guidelines and icon libraries on CD-ROM, all produced in Macromedia Director, Microsoft Visual Basic, and Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop (all of which were at about Version 3 in those days). And burned on the office’s own CD burner– which cost about three grand, and took half an hour to burn a disc.

I can’t say that the work was always a whole lot of fun… long hours, personality clashes, artistic differences and inter-company rivalry were never too far from the surface, and because the virtual team thing was considered innovative at the time, Greg was always trailing all sorts of media and BPR types around the office (and particularly the usability lab that was part of it) while you were trying to get your work done. But most of the stuff we did, and the CD-ROM itself, still stands up pretty well, I learned a whole lot from the people I was working with, and made some good friends. (The occasional spot of wild partying in London was a bonus, too…)