A Week in August

 Conference, Food and Wine, Technology, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jul 242008
 

It seems that August is con­fer­ence sea­son, at least for me. More pre­cisely, one week in August. First Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal (for which the online regis­tra­tion is clos­ing next Fri­day) August 12–15, and then Vinocamp here in Van­couver, at the UBC Botan­ic­al Garden, on August 16th. I’m speak­ing at the former, and help­ing organ­ise the lat­ter (for which num­bers are lim­ited to 120, so don’t wait too long to register). The premise for Vinocamp is a friendly con­fer­ence about wine, put on by a bunch of tech­ies; this is its first year. Both con­fer­ences should be fun! Enter­tain­ing as well as edu­ca­tion­al, and a cer­tain amount of good food and wine in both loc­a­tions. I can cer­tainly think of worse ways to spend a week in August.

UE/UR/UI

 Technology  No Responses »
Jul 222008
 

It’s not often that I have a blog title that’s only acronyms (in fact, I think this is a first), and it’s also a first in that I’m post­ing look­ing for someone to join the team and pro­ject I’m on. I can­’t write much about the pro­ject itself here, since we’re still in stealth mode, but I can write quite a bit about who we’re look­ing for. Experts in the above acronyms is the short ver­sion (the mean­ings in this con­text being user exper­i­ence, user research, and user inter­face design); for the longer ver­sion you’ll need to jump past the break.

The pro­ject I’m work­ing on (actu­ally, I’m pro­gram man­ager for it), is a lot of fun. It’s a research pro­ject, so the work we’re doing may or may not end up in one or more of Sun­’s products at some stage. We will be releas­ing the code to open source, how­ever, so your work will even­tu­ally be out in the pub­lic view no mat­ter what. One of the focus points for this pro­ject is usab­il­ity, coupled with rad­ic­ally innov­at­ive design. To com­bine rad­ic­al design with usab­il­ity requires user research, which means talk­ing to real people, con­duct­ing focus groups, ask­ing people what they want, watch­ing them as they use the pro­to­types. In oth­er words, it requires test­ing your design ideas to ensure that being rad­ic­al has­n’t detrac­ted from being usable. You’d be expec­ted to take the lead on writ­ing the screen­ers and run­ning the focus groups, eval­u­at­ing the responses, and chan­ging the UI designs to make them even more usable.

We’re look­ing for design­ers, not developers, although if you can design and code that would be wel­come. The loc­a­tion is flex­ible as long as you can keep the same core work­ing hours as most of the team, roughly 9 am to 2 pm Pacific time. You need to be able to work effi­ciently with oth­er team mem­bers using phone, email, and IM, as we’re spread across four coun­tries and 9 timezones and typ­ic­ally only meet face to face as a team once a year for a couple of days.

For more inform­a­tion, send me an email. This is a fun pro­ject, the most fun in a pro­ject that I’ve had for some years now, and all we need right now is to find the right UI/UE/UR expert to add to the team.

Using Wikis

 Technology  3 Responses »
Jul 162008
 

The idea of wikis, the whole concept of col­lab­or­at­ive author­ing, is so enti­cing that it seems like it should be the default (at least if you don’t need more struc­tured markup behind it), even in the enter­prise. At least, that’s what I thought some years ago. People still like to send around office doc­u­ments with revi­sion mark­ing turned on, how­ever, rather than fully embrace the Brave New World. 

I tweeted that one prob­lem is likely the off­line issues (can­’t read the doc­u­ment on the air­plane unless I’ve saved a copy first); Edd added the “lost doc­u­ment” prob­lem where you can eas­ily lose a doc­u­ment when someone deletes the link to it, and you nev­er find it again. Spam, as Norm poin­ted out, is anoth­er issue on the inter­net, though it should­n’t be on the intranet.

And then there’s the issue of wiki markup, which some people detest. One pro­ject I’m work­ing on for Sun is using Medi­aWiki, for which you can export a doc­u­ment from Open­Of­fice, so that helps with at least get­ting the first draft of the doc­u­ment into the sys­tem. There’s still the update prob­lem; I gath­er that is slated for a future release of the wiki pub­lish­er exten­sion. When that works, I hope it will make it easi­er to talk cer­tain mem­bers of my team at Sun into using the sys­tem will­ingly <grin>.

Meditation by another name?

 General  1 Response »
Jul 152008
 

Every now and then I think I should med­it­ate for a few minutes a day. Some­how I sel­dom do, although I find listen­ing to a med­it­a­tion track when fly­ing is a good way to tune out the stand­ard air­plane unpleas­ant­ness. Hav­ing read When Dis­trac­tion is Good, it seems to me as if med­it­a­tion and “recept­ive dis­trac­tion” are prob­ably related. Maybe you can think of going for a quiet walk, or sit­ting in the garden breath­ing in the fresh air, as some sort of med­it­a­tion. As long as you don’t then start think­ing about the weed­ing, of course.

Maybe I’ll find that easi­er to fit into my day.

Reworking the network

 Technology  5 Responses »
Jul 102008
 

Up till now I’ve been run­ning the home fire­wall and a couple of minor web­sites from an old (1996 or there­abouts) Pen­ti­um 3 box in the base­ment, that uses Debi­an. It seems to work reas­on­ably well, and has been fend­ing off bots and oth­er threats with adequate fero­city. There seems no reas­on, how­ever, to think that the num­ber of attacks will decrease in the next little while, and every reas­on to sus­pect that one of these days the hard disk will fail, leav­ing me without a fire­wall. The web­sites are backed up and eas­ily restor­able, the time to set up a fire­wall and get it work­ing with a PPPoE con­nec­tion to an ISP that does­n’t under­stand Linux is what will take the time.

So I’ve been won­der­ing about rejig­ging the whole net­work, get­ting an off-the-shelf hard­ware firewall/router that can feed into the wire­less router. I’m a little para­noid about get­ting some­thing that is secure but not intend­ing to spend thou­sands. We’ve blocked all ports except the neces­sary ones on the sys­tem right now, except for allow­ing SSH access in and out, and, of course, port 80 for the web sites. Secur­ity will be par­tic­u­larly import­ant as the kids move into the teen­age years and start want­ing to down­load stuff.

I’m look­ing for some advice here. Do I need any­thing more than NAT, DMZ, and for­ward­ing appro­pri­ate ports to intern­al serv­ers, which I can get from stand­ard con­sumer-level router/firewalls? Any par­tic­u­larly good brands and mod­els I should look for?

/* ]]> */