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 🙂

Wooden anniversary

I’ve been at Sun in Dublin for five years now (well, as of last week or so)… which is actually the longest I’ve worked for any one company. (My previous record was four years with Logica, now LogicaCMG, in Cambridge, but much of that time was spent full time on-site at Reuters in London, and then at the NATS air traffic management R&D centre near Bournemouth, so that felt more like two or three separate jobs anyway.)

When I joined, Sun shares were trading at over $50. Now it’s an event in itself when they pop their head above $4. So what’s kept me here? Well, it’s certainly not the share options 🙂

Primarily it’s the work. Open source software usability still brings a new challenge practically every day, and I’ve been doing it for five years now. I’d also like to think that, along with the rest of the GNOME usability folks, we’ve blazed a bit of a trail… albeit one that’s wandered about a bit, and still isn’t quite sure where it’s headed.

Of course, you need smart and motivated people around and above you to achieve things anywhere, and Sun has more than its fair share of those. That’s not to say there isn’t as much politics, bureaucracy and (just occasionally) downright frustrating dithering as you’ll find at any other company, large or small, but for such a globally-distributed company (the JDS team alone has engineers in Ireland, the USA, Canada, Germany, China, India and New Zealand), we cut through it pretty well. And right now the whole software organisation is pulling in the same direction more strongly than at any other time I can remember.

Dublin is still a decent enough place to live too, even though the locals will tell you that the Celtic Tiger has turned it into a soulless shell of its oul’ self. And only in Ireland would they spend hundreds of millions of euro on a new tram system that has two lines that don’t join up, and a sub-city tunnel to take trucks out of the city centre that isn’t high enough to accommodate a lot of them. But that’s all part of its charm, I guess.

Oh, and we get to choose our own five year service award from a decent enough list– I’ve gone for one of these…

Licence to (not) print money

Heh… it’s probably old hat to most of you that newer scanners, printers and software will barf if you try to use them to forge a banknote, but I only found out today… not by trying to artificially inflate my beer fund, I hasten to add. I find it hard to believe that your average master forger is going to be relying on an inkjet and a copy of Photoshop anyway, but I suppose some people get away with it…

Distributed donut day

Sun Ireland is having a donut day today, to mark yesterday’s decent earnings results. There’s a bit of a flaw, though… I work at home on Wednesdays, and we weren’t given any warning that it would be today (although we knew one was coming). In fact, Sun positively encourages people to work at home as often as possible, so somehow, a donut day doesn’t seem like a very inclusive reward scheme any more. If anyone has any better ideas, let me know and I’ll pass them on to Scott 🙂

Two million and counting

Wow… apparently we reached two million Solaris 10 downloads this week! I think it’s safe to say that’s exceeded even the most optimistic expectations of anyone at Sun, so much so that we’re having a doughnut day next week to celebrate 🙂 What with that and the company almost literally buzzing with excitement about OpenSolaris, you can’t help but feel we could be on to something big. Here’s hoping.

We also had our 2006 financial year kick-off barbeque here today… despite the odd threatening cloud, the food was good, the beer was flowing, but as usual I didn’t get a sniff of winning anything in the raffle. Almost unbelievable that nobody wanted to go into town afterwards and make a night of it, though… is this really the same company I joined five years ago (almost) to the day?! :/