RLP #2
- Amazing sidewalk-chalk drawings, 2, 3 (via schmack)
- Once upon a time, there was a SPC Schwarz stationed with the Army in the Balkans. SPC Schwarz was either very clever or very bored; but probably both, since he managed to attempt or be warned about 213 things he wasn't allowed to do. (via schmack)
- Vote for the next US president (via jcurious)
- Caitlin Silberman: Matholicism
- David Shrigley's signs and other interventions (via caitlin)
- mpt: customer service
- The great aluminum foil prank
- KoL forum: Traffic tickets are inherently sexist
- KoL: Top 45 Signs Your Workplace Productivity Could Improve (3 items are mine)
- KoL: Top 82 Rules Of Military Combat (6 items are mine)
3-hour UI review of Expedia
I signed up to interview with Expedia on Monday. I figured I should look at their site for a few minutes before interviewing with them, but I ended up playing with their basic search feature for over an hour.
Should I spend my 30-minute interview pointing out how their site sucks* or trying to get a job?
The form on the front page
- "Search for flight" (for submitting the form) looks like a link, not a button. IE users are used to losing form data randomly when they click on links, so they'll spend a lot of time looking for something that looks like a button before clicking the link.
- The return date textbox is prefilled with "mm/dd/yy". Prefilling textboxes like that is usually frowned upon, in part because it makes people like me skip the textbox. But I think I understand why Expedia prefills it.
- If the return date textbox is prefilled, it should clear itself onmousedown!
- Why make it look like I have to enter a year? I'm very unlikely to book a flight more than a year in advance. And I'm still typing the year as "03" out of habit, even though it's been 2004 for a month.
- The single-digit date for February in the "Depart" textbox makes it look less like a date.
- Why can't I get a flight and a car without a hotel? I can get every other combination of flight, car, and hotel.
- I think the form should use 3 checkboxes (flight, car, hotel) rather than 7 radio buttons (each nonempty subset of {flight, car, hotel}). Using checkboxes would make the UI simpler but would require more clicking.
- "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": What times does Expedia consider "morning"? More importantly, what times are "noon"?
- "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": Where's the "middle of the night" option?
- The DHTML calendar does not work in Firebird.
- In the DHTML calendar, double-clicking the right button only goes forward one month. This is a bug in IE, but Expedia should work around it because it affects almost everyone who books a flight two or more months in advance.
You know the economy is down when...
there are no free t-shirts at the Harvey Mudd College career fair.
What's new in Mozilla Firebird 0.8
Firebird 0.8 should be out soon on Monday, Feb 9.
Update: Firefox 0.8 (note the new name) was released on Feb 9.
Here's some of what's new:
New features
- Windows installer
- New download manager
- Work Offline
- Add Bookmark dialog: recent-folders dropdown and folder-selection tree (replacing a single dropdown listing all folders)
- DOM Inspector is now included in zip builds
- IDN support
- IPv6 support on Windows 2000/XP/2003
Major improvements
- 220807 - prompt user about invalid text/plain content. (Solves most problems like "Firebird tries to display some .rar files instead of downloading them.")
- 214266 - Find should wrap by default
- 217286 - Cookie whitelist should override session cookie option.
- 142459(?) - Shift+click and middle-click on scroll bar should jump to that location
- 214260 - XPInstall UI improvements
- 33282 - enable external scheme handlers (like aim: and telnet:) in Linux
- 6% faster page loading (comparing December to September on a Tp (pageloader time) graph)
Important bug fixes
- 210910 - Right-clicking a file within a bookmarks folder in the bookmarks menu or toolbar makes that folder inaccessible.
- 203102 - URL typed into address bar lost after switching tabs; "Open in new tab" should prefill URI in address bar.
- 222157 - View Source: Find and Save don't work.
- 213250 - Autoscroll prevents middle clicking on links in XML (XHTML) documents.
- 224416 - Tabs don't remember focused element.
- 216170 - Send Page (as Link) omits query string
- 98564 - caret overlaps the last character in textfield (if positioned after the last char).
- 212366 - Make -moz-opacity apply to descendants as a group, as required by CSS3 opacity
- 219705 - Linux: Blackdown Java crashes, saying "Internal error on browser end".
- 102578 - Linux: Clicking wrongfully fires onmouseout (breaks some dhtml menus, css/edge menus)
- 201209 - GTK2: -moz-opacity makes things invisible.
Google "for president"
Howard Dean leads in a Google search for "for president". He is followed by Bush, Kucinich, Clark, Kerry, Nader (2000), Edwards, Lieberman, Gephardt, Braun, Cthulhu, Bradley (2000), a hamster named Potus, Cusack, nobody, and Tony Blair.
Simple JS learning environment
Leonard Lin is teaching animation students basic programming so they'll be able to use Maya's MELScript and Flash's ActionScript. He chose JavaScript as the first language for his students because JavaScript and ActionScript are both variants of ECMAScript.
I made a simple JS learning environment to cut out the save-switch-reload cycle and the "magic" HTML that surrounds a short JS program. If an error occurs, it highlights the line.
I reused a lot of code and UI ideas to make it. The overall UI comes from the Real-time HTML editor, the print() function comes from the JavaScript Shell, and the error-selecting idea and code come from the "blogidate XML well-formedness" bookmarklet. If you want to look at the code for the JS env, most of it is in the "buttons" frame.
Classes
I'm taking 6 5 classes this semester:
- Math 171 - Abstract Algebra (mostly groups, some rings and fields)
- Econ 179S - Economics of Strategy
- Psych 160 - Perception and Cognition
- CS 141 - Advanced Topics in Algorithms (advanced data structures and their amortized analysis, on-line algorithms, matroids and the theory of greedy algorithms, parallel and distributed algorithms, and about 6 weeks of student presentations)
CS 133 - Databases- CS Clinic (counts as a class)
- CS Colloquium (required, doesn't count as a class)
On both MW and TTh, I have 15 minutes between a Pomona class and a Mudd class. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from Pomona to Mudd. That means I won't be able to hang out after Perception and Cognition or Abstract Algebra to chat with the profs.
Most of my classes this semester will have presentations. Economics of Strategy will have some kind of presentation-centered project. (The first time Prag taught the class, he had each student pick a failed dot-com and present about it.) Clinic has two big presentations. In Algorithms, I get to give half a lecture on a topic of my choice, or pair with someone to give a full lecture on a topic of our choice. Perception and Cognition has "convention-style" presentations on the last day of class. Only Abstract Algebra has no presentation.
I'm sad that this is my last semester here.
JavaScript Shell 0.8
I uploaded a new version of the JavaScript Shell today, along with a new version of the shell bookmarklet. In the new version, print() no longer returns its input. I added a new function, pr(), that acts like print() used to.
Dog on the Moon MP3
Garry Novikoff's amazing "Dog on the Moon" is available for free as an MP3 until the end of Wednesday: http://www.prometheus-music.com/bush/onthemoon.mp3.
"Dog on the Moon" is from the CD To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration, produced by Kristoph Klover and Eli Goldberg. You can download 6 more MP3s from the CD from that site.
What should be fixed in Firebird 0.8
Update Jan 30: see also What's new in Firebird 0.8.
alanjstr listed 11 bugs he thinks should be fixed before Firebird 0.8 is released. I agree with him on 3 bugs:
- 229600 - Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions. (regression)
- 228988 - XPInstall - "Installation complete / restart" message always shown. (regression)
- 230271 - Form autocomplete only works in the first tab. (regression)
I have 2 more bugs that I think should be fixed before 0.8:
- 217410 - bump skin version. (This would prevent "no scrollbars after upgrade" problem.)
- 228672 - Installer deletes unrelated folders. (Dataloss. New because Firebird 0.7 didn't have an installer.)
The installer bug is particularly scary because of the potential PR impact. The Firebird installer deletes all files in the installation directory if you check the "Safe Upgrade" box. A few users who installed nightlies into "C:\Program Files\" lost that entire directory. I don't know if any users have lost data since the Dec 23 change to make the "Safe Upgrade" box unchecked by default, but if Firebird 0.8 is released with the bug, I'd expect at least a few users who install to weird directories to check the box.
A bug in the iTunes installer that wiped hard disks earned a Slashdot story. If Firebird 0.8 is released with this bug, I would expect it to lead to an even bigger backlash on Slashdot because:
- The iTunes installer tried to delete iTunes.app (a specific application folder), while the Firebird installer tries to delete whatever directory you were installing to. "Nuke from orbit" upgrades are inherently dangerous, but they're even more dangerous when the user gets to choose the target directory.
- The iTunes installer deleted more than it intended because of what is arguably a misfeature of the Bash shell: if you don't use quotes carefully, a script's behavior can change unexpectedly when a parameter contains a space. The Firebird installer deletes more than it intends because its developers didn't anticipate users installing Firebird directly to "C:\Program Files\". Firebird has nobody else to share the blame.
- Firebird's development process is open enough that anyone can see that we knew about the problem since at least December 30.
- "Safe Upgrade" is the worst possible name for a misbehaving nuke-from-orbit feature.
My preferred solution for 0.8 is to relabel the checkbox from "Safe Upgrade" to "Delete all files in [installation directory]". (cf bug 197274, which changed "Enable Automatic Image Resizing" to "Resize large images to fit in the browser window".) I looked at some code but couldn't tell how hard it would be to change the checkbox label to include the installation directory.
I'm not sure what the installer "should" do. It would be nice if installing on top of an old build didn't cause random-seeming problems. Then nuking the installation directory from orbit would not be necessary. If fixing those problems is not feasible, maybe the installer should have a list of files or subfolders to delete, and only delete those.
Flag queries: blocking0.8+ (blocking), blocking0.8? (nominated), blocking0.8- (not blocking). Anyone may nominate bugs, but only a few people may plus or minus. Bugs that are plussed are usually recent regressions or newly discovered security holes. Don't renominate a minused bug unless you're sure you've added something the minuser didn't know.
The Devil's Dictionary of the Internet
From Greg Knauss' Devil's Dictionary (via Simon Willison):
- command line, noun
- The most efficient method available for accidentally deleting data.
- journalism, noun
- A form of information distribution widely acknowledge to be unethical, corrupt and amoral; also, what blogging is, God dammit!
- p2p, noun
- A class of computer network, designed to allow people to remain safely anonymous while they trade public domain documents and songs to which they own the copyright.
- Semantic Web, proper noun
- An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy.
The original Devil's Dictionary (1911) by Ambrose Bierce is also available online.
What month is "JN"?
My Crest toothpaste tube says "LOT318412EXPJN05". Is JN January or June? (This guy has another Procter & Gamble product and wonders the same thing.)
Netscape.com e-mail addresses for sale
"Netscape" (the new ISP) is auctioning off 200 netscape.com e-mail addresses. I found out by clicking on this ad. The ISP is auctioning jess@netscape.com, jessica@netscape.com, and jessie@netscape.com, but not my old address, jesse@netscape.com.
I searched eBay to find out what names have the highest bids. So far, "john" ($112.50) is beating "michael" ($105.50) and "mark" ($102.50). Most of the names are still at the opening bid of $9.95.
1) Report bug. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
Track the popularity of the Busniess Plan meme over time by searching for Mozilla bug reports that say "3. Profit".
So far, 27 bugs have been reported with the phrase. The first report was in December 2001, and the meme's popularity seems to have peaked around March 2003. Its popularity is now declining slowly.
Spellcheck and strife
Asa, it looks like your spell-checker replaced all instances of the word "gonna" with "gonad".
-- Joe's comment on Asa's blog.
(Microsoft Word corrects "gonna" to "going to". ispell corrects it to "Donna". I don't know what spell-checker Asa uses.)
