Having spent the majority of 2011 in intense self-study to finish my transition from developer/project manager to UX engineer, I thought it would be useful for others out there to share my reading list and some brief thoughts. Steve Krug- Don’t make me think The best book for a quick introduction to user experience is [...]
I have just finished a wonderful book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, which ostensibly is about the origins and the neural underpinnings of the human ability to read. Dehaene not only takes on the conventional wisdom that reading is a sequential, letter by letter process, but he unwittingly sheds light on the foundations of many universally accepted usability practices.
Watchparty.tv is a site that allows users to host or join “watch parties” of popular television shows. During a watch party, users visit a webpage that aggregates their thoughts (blips), along with an opinion tracker and polls. The benefit of the watch party approach is allowing disparate users to watch TV shows “together”.
123exchanges.com is an eBay type listing site based on the concept of selling through videos instead of written descriptions. The site provides a way for sellers to register and upload videos of things for sale, and it provides browsing and searching functionality for potential buyers. They are a startup based in the Washington DC area that is approximately 6 months old.
SELECT AddGeometryColumn(‘public’, ‘table’,'column’, 4269, ‘POINT’, 2) This will add a new column to the table and add an entry to the metadata table (the 4269 specifies my reference system, more on that below). It will also add a column to “table” and several constraint checks on the new column. Next, you’ll need to know about [...]
My OS is CentOS, so I used yum to handle installs from the rpm database. The thing with CentOS is that it is purposefully one step behind the cutting edge, so the most recent version of certain applications are not available (PHP, Postgres, etc). To get around this limitation, you have to instruct CentOS to [...]
Step 2 – Construct the query Yahoo offers a REST interface to handle the conversion so we can use either a plain HTTP GET request, or if you want to do it inside of a script that is doing many other things you can use CURL, a set of very useful functions for querying and [...]
Troubleshooting I isolated the process into three components: the email builder (my code), the mailer application, and the sending application (in this case, smtp through postfix). I followed the below process to troubleshoot: Changed the mailer application to use the built in PHP mail() function, and I also tried sending using a completely different SMTP [...]
Background I’ll just link to the best places i’ve found to read up on the background. Read these first if you want to understand whats going on: Excellent intro to character encodings Joel On Software, on Unicode The Details In order to get your website working harmoniously with one character set, you first have to [...]
