Fir Park for Thrills

Mortifed as I am by Motherwell‘s current schoolboyish defensive frailties, there’s no doubt that if you’re a neutral, Fir Park is the best place to spend your Saturday afternoon cash at the moment. In our last five games (four SPL matches plus our final pre-season friendly against Queen of the South), Motherwell have lost at least four goals on four occasions (and past three different goalkeepers). Even more remarkably, we’ve scored four goals ourselves in two of those games as well– in a 4-4 draw with Celtic, and yesterday’s unbelievable 5-4 defeat to Dundee United. A massive early-season injury list hasn’t helped, but at least the coaching staff of Terry Butcher and Maurice Malpas must be feeling it worse than any of us long-suffering fans, having been two of the best defenders in Europe in the early 90’s. They could probably do worse than pulling on the claret and amber themselves for our midweek cup tie with local Lanarkshire rivals Hamilton Accies…

You have flown so high and so well

(I apologise for how suckily this gets laid out if you’re reading on Planet GNOME, but it’s 1am and I’m too tired to do anything about it… visit my blog if you want to see how it’s supposed to look.)

Julie and I did something a bit different yesterday… we took a balloon ride over the self-proclaimed garden of Ireland, County Wicklow. Neither of us had been anywhere near a balloon before, and truth be told we were both a tad nervous, but flying conditions were perfect, and the hour-long, 2000ft ride (and landing) couldn’t have been any smoother if we’d taken a lift1. All topped off in true Irish style with a plastic cup of warm champagne served from the back of a Land Rover in the random field where we happened to land, but we were still feeling so buzzed by then that pretty much anything would have gone down well.


Post script: rather stupidly, I lost my credit card wallet at some point during the “help us drag everything off the trailer and get it inflated” stage. Luckily, on phoning the launch site hotel when I got home and discovered my mishap, somebody had found it and handed it in, but that meant another two hour round trip this afternoon to pick them up. Needless to say, Julie wasn’t too impressed, but by way of compensation I bought dinner up the road at Hunan‘s tonight. We’d never been there before, but it turned out to be an excellent choice– which, with the best will in the world, isn’t something you can often say about dining out in Finglas.

1 Or an elevator, depending on where you’re reading this.

Subjective behaviour

If you’ve been getting “I don’t think you meant to enter that as your title” messages from NewsBruiser/b.g.o recently, bolsh has the answer:

[18:31] 	bolsh	There's something that is intended to prevent you from 
                        setting your password as a blog title by accident
[18:31] 	bolsh	But if you've never set your password, it always returns true
[18:31] 	bolsh	Don't know why
[18:32] 	bolsh	You should blog about it :)

So, just reset your password, and everything will be hunky dory.

What page in yonder window loads?

Actually, I occasionally find the IE feature to which Havoc refers vaguely useful… he’s right that it never opens the page you want to go to next, but particularly if it’s a portal, it might well contain a link to one that you do1, and it’s harmless enough if it doesn’t, provided the page load is quickly interruptible. Admittedly you could just Shift-Click the link in the original window to achieve the same effect, but I usually find shortcuts more convenient than modified clicks.

It also reinforces the fact that your browsing history has been carried forward from the previous window– a trick that Firefox would do well to learn.

1The Macintosh version of IE made portal browsing even easier by providing a Page Holder tab in its sidebar that could hold all the links on a page for you, so you didn’t have to keep navigating back and forward… would be nice to see something like that in some other browsers too.

Applet shock

Eew, just updated my Breezy box and was confronted with this unhappy sight when I tried to add a new applet to my panel:




Don’t do it, I beg you :) I presume it’s early work in progress, but it always seems so much harder to find what I’m looking for in these 2-D categorised list things (especially with no typeahead working yet). And just look how much space it’s wasting… by default, it doesn’t even fit on an 800×600 screen, and more than half the window is empty.

A Bench in Soho Square



I happened to mention the knackered state of one of my Kirsty MacColl CDs in the pub last night, and whilst trawling the web later for possible replacements, I was inspired to have a bit of a poke around to find out a bit more about her. Like many people, I guess, all I really knew was that she was the legendary Ewan MacColl‘s daughter, was married to renowned producer Steve Lillywhite for a while, worked with Billy Bragg and The Pogues amongst others, and was killed in a diving accident off the coast of Mexico in December 2000.

I was surprised to find out she’d collaborated with a lot more people in my CD collection than I’d imagined… Simple Minds, Eddi Reader, Brian Kennedy (okay, he’s not in my CD collection, but Julie likes him!) and Roddy Frame amongst others. The reports of her memorial concert read like a who’s who of intelligent pop from the 80’s… and no, I don’t believe that’s an oxymoron :)

Sadly, it seems there’s no imminent sign of justice for Kirsty, despite an eponymous campaign led by her 81-year-old mother Jean. The owner of the boat that caused her death, Guillermo Gonzalez Nova (a wealthy Mexican businessman, who has business interests in the UK in the form of CostCo), was on board at the time, and some eyewitness accounts place him at the helm as it powered through waters from which such craft were banned. Instead, however, an illiterate boathand was charged with negligent homicide and fined all of £61, and attempts to have Gonzalez Nova himself charged as the senior crewmember on board have failed because authorities “couldn’t find him”. Er, right.

In the past year or so, the case has at least been re-opened. Watch this space.

So much for a quiet weekend…

Wow… haven’t seen my name bandied around these parts in a while, let alone by luminaries like Havoc and Jeff :) Guess that means I ought to throw in my €0.02…

Should GNOME have a “design team”? Well, I don’t think there should be any elite group of folks locked in a room who design every window we see on our screens. I do think it would be cool to have a core group of experienced usability folks whose primary role was to act as consultants to individual projects, from start to finish, responsible for whatever task analysis, requirements gathering, design and usability testing is needed along the way. And then maintaining the HIG in their copious spare time :) But that’s not too far from what the GUP originally set out to do, and the UI Improvement Project before it, and neither really gained any traction in that particular area. (Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have any other big open source projects had any more success– I’d love to hear about any that have.)

FWIW, I do think there’s sometimes a downside to having two of our most experienced usability folks work for the same company, because especially with the creative sort of work those guys do, it’s always tempting (and, frankly, a lot easier) to bounce ideas around and work together face-to-face, than to seek approval and feedback from the community at every step along the way. That’s not a personal criticism of Seth, Bryan or anyone else… at the end of the day, those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to work on open source software have a duty to our employers as well as to our community, and occasionally that means not being able to do things exactly how we’d like. Unfortunately that can lead to accusations of closed-ness from time to time.

(I’d also love to see the Novell usability folks participating more… we all know they do great work from their GUADEC presentation, but personally I miss their regular input elsewhere in the community.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that HCI work is as subjective as Joe says, either, although nobody could claim it’s a science. But there are certainly recognised methodologies for measuring usability, both quantitavely and qualitatively, provided you know your users. That’s where we still have a bit of an issue, I think, and despite Havoc and Jeff’s pleas in the past to develop personas for the GNOME project, we still haven’t got around to it.

Finally, as for Jeff’s “haranguing” me to lead the GUP… well yes, it’s true I don’t really have the time, and I doubt I’d live up to the expectations set by Seth anyway. But as Sun are moving more towards shipping less-customised versions of GNOME in OpenSolaris and as the basis of JDS, I certainly hope to be channelling a lot more of my energies directly upstream in the not too distant future. So maybe one day :)