I'm just about to pack for holidays and while browsing my library for one or two books to take with me I spotted an old time favourite: The Design of Everyday Things.
This book is important for two reasons: (a) it makes you realize that software design is not much different than any other kind of design, and (b) when you find it difficult to operate some device, it's really the designer's fault -- not yours!
The same ideas that have been used for years now in the design of simple things (e.g. doors), to complex stuff (e.g. nuclear reactor control panels) or even more complex stuff (VCRs :), can be applied to User Interface design. Even the design of a good internal interface (API) shares many properties with the design of successful everyday objects: it should have a clear purpose, it should be obvious to use, difficult to abuse, indicative of how it works, informative about its status -- in other words it should look and feel simple!
Carried away by features, aesthetics, technological innovations and the fact that from a designer's point of view everything look reasonable, we end up with difficult to use, error prone devices and tools. Design for usability should be a primary goal for all everyday objects, and that includes computer software.
Reading this book in the beach is not only enjoyable but it could prove useful for improving your coding skills and help you realise the design genius (or stupidity) incorporated into everyday objects.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Searching for files on WinXP
Yes, I know, I know: I work for Redhat, but I'm actually both a Fedora 7 and a WinXP user.(JBossAS needs to be run and tested on many different platforms, not just Linux).
As a software engineer what I hate most is when my computer tries to be smart. I hate that. Computers need to be as dump as possible. They need to be doing exactly what they are told to and do it well. No more, no less.
An example of the computer trying to be smart is the file search facility of WinXP. Right-click on a folder, search, type in your filename pattern and/or a search string to look for inside the files and off you go. Simple, right?
Not so simple until you discover that the search facility won't find the files you expect to find.
Why? Because WinXP (and maybe Vista?) tries to be smart and only search for files that have a known extension (and a corresponding search plug in), in order to enhance the performance of searching and avoid extraneous results. In other words, WinXP makes a wrong assumption about the file types that are of interest to you.
That would probably be OK if that option was enabled consciously by the user, but certainly not OK if this is the default behaviour, different than how Win2k worked and certainly far off from the expected outcome of a 'find . -name "blah"' Unix/Linux type of search.
To get back to the dump (and safe) mode of search, fire off regedit and set the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
No more smart OSes, please!
Cheers
As a software engineer what I hate most is when my computer tries to be smart. I hate that. Computers need to be as dump as possible. They need to be doing exactly what they are told to and do it well. No more, no less.
An example of the computer trying to be smart is the file search facility of WinXP. Right-click on a folder, search, type in your filename pattern and/or a search string to look for inside the files and off you go. Simple, right?
Not so simple until you discover that the search facility won't find the files you expect to find.
Why? Because WinXP (and maybe Vista?) tries to be smart and only search for files that have a known extension (and a corresponding search plug in), in order to enhance the performance of searching and avoid extraneous results. In other words, WinXP makes a wrong assumption about the file types that are of interest to you.
That would probably be OK if that option was enabled consciously by the user, but certainly not OK if this is the default behaviour, different than how Win2k worked and certainly far off from the expected outcome of a 'find . -name "blah"' Unix/Linux type of search.
To get back to the dump (and safe) mode of search, fire off regedit and set the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
No more smart OSes, please!
Cheers
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
JBossAS 4.2.1.GA released!
I'm pleased to announce that JBoss Application Server 4.2.1.GA has been released on July 16th and is available on Sourceforge for downloading.
This is the first bug fixing release of the JBoss Application Server v4.2 series. The aim of this release is to fix the most important bugs reported by the community against JBossAS v4.2.0.GA. There are a few minor components upgrades (Hibernate, JacORB, JBoss TS, JBoss Remoting and Sun JSF) but we have taken extra care for any changes to be fully backwards compatible, so you should be able to switch from 4.2.0 to 4.2.1 without problems.
Detailed release notes can be viewed here.
Enjoy
Dimitris Andreadis
AS Project Lead
This is the first bug fixing release of the JBoss Application Server v4.2 series. The aim of this release is to fix the most important bugs reported by the community against JBossAS v4.2.0.GA. There are a few minor components upgrades (Hibernate, JacORB, JBoss TS, JBoss Remoting and Sun JSF) but we have taken extra care for any changes to be fully backwards compatible, so you should be able to switch from 4.2.0 to 4.2.1 without problems.
Detailed release notes can be viewed here.
Enjoy
Dimitris Andreadis
AS Project Lead
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