As a developer, very few things irk me more than seeing software that was designed by people who either don’t know or don’t care about how the users will interact with the software. This can be seen in many programs, from useless or confusing error messages (Eg. BSoD) or unintuitive interfaces that have no consistent tab-index and confusing labels. It annoys me especially because it makes us all look stupid & generally reinforces the image of the computer nerd as being someone who has little or no contact with The Real World™.

Taking the time to look at your software/website from the user’s perspective is absolutely critical if you want people who use your software to praise your name, rather than issuing a plague o’ both you & your company’s houses. This issue was brought up to me again recently while I was trialling a copy of Microsoft SQL Server. The trial version has a (fairly impressive) 120-day trial period. This is fine. However I get in to work one morning & the site that I’ve been developing to try out the software won’t load, complaining about the database connection failing. I check the SQL Server Agent & the server is in fact not running. I attempt to start it again, but it won’t. No error message, the agent just tries to start the program then reports that the server isn’t running.

Really helpful.

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Niel Bornstein on the O’Reilly Weblog has posted about using Skype

I downloaded the Mac OS X client last night. It installed
easily, in true Mac fashion. Within minutes I received a call from my
friend and colleague Edd Dumbill — the first time we’ve actually ever heard each others’ voices.

He came through loud and clear, even on the iBook’s tiny built-in
speakers. And although the iBook has no audio in port, Edd reports that
the built-in mic produced decent sound on his end of the connection
across the pond.

We use this at work too, as we regularly communicate with our UK office. It’s brilliant, totally free and the windows installer works as easily as the Mac one (don’t look so shocked). The only problem comes about with itthe transmission breaking up a bit if you’ve got a low-bandwidth pipe & you (or someone on your network) starts downloading something big. But this will soon be fixed, as we’re hopefully changing to a 2MB SDSL link. Joy!

Skype also has the added ability to do instant messaging as well as voice, so you could conceivably replace messenger with Skype, but that would require all your contacts to move over too & the interface for organising contacts needs a bit of work - there’s just one list, no ability to sort into categories. But this is a small complaint about what is a very good, stable piece of software.

Firefox 1.0 has been released! Finally, after so long, the final wait is over. So go get Firefox now.

Great things about the new version:

1. Numerous bug fixes
2. The view source window now uses the search toolbar
3. Built in options for forcing external links into a new tab (Kudos to the author of the Tabbedbrowser Preferences plugin for doing it 1st)

Not so great:

1. Copy as plain text plugin doesn’t work with this version
2. Ditto Firesomething
3. Edit CSS plugin doesn’t work either.

Plugins will soon be updated, I imagine.

Other reports around the web:

• Blogzilla
• C|Net
• Gadgetopia
• Chinwags from Abu Dhabi

Joel Blain has turned 22. Go wish him happy birthday.

As I mentioned earlier, Bible Gateway has released a beta for its new site. At the time, the only RSS feed that was working was the NIV, but they have recently updated that and it appears that the different versions are now working.

(From my earlier post)

The version seems to be selected by a numeric query string variable on the feed url. The NIV is 31, so the URL for it is http://www.biblegateway.com/usage/votd/rss/votd.rdf?31.

To change which version you want, change the default version on the settings page. But to simplify I’ve made a list of all the English language versions VOTD feeds.

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Mea Culpa: This is a re-post of something I set up on my old Typepad blog ‘News of the Day’. When I set it up, the script was running on a server that I did not control, and due to circumstances beyond my control, it was taken down.

However, what was in my control was the ability to contact those who were affected, and I didn’t. Now, I could blame that on my changing from full-time employment to uni and back again, while my wife had our second child and became pregnant with our third. But that’s all lame excuse making, it would have taken me all of 20 minutes to email everyone and let them know what happened, but I didn’t. Rank laziness. My apologies.

So to rectify the situation, I re-post the offer, slightly updated & running on my own server (or at least a server I have control of). I have emailed those people who used to use the service & who’s email addresses I could find. If you used to use this & I didn’t email you, my additional apologies, I simply couldn’t find your address.

When I moved over from my Movable Type blog, to Typepad, there was one main thing that I missed, and that was the ability to have the bible verse of the day on the site.  This was pulled from the ESV Verse of the Day RSS feed, and then included on the site. Since Typepad doesn’t have server-side scripting I wasn’t able to do this.

Borrowing from the system I came up with to create a daily quote , I’ve now got a script that creates a post containing the verse of the day.  The script runs at midnight Sydney time (which is currently GMT+11 hours thanks to daylight savings) every day.

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