Duffbert's Random Musings

06/30/2008

It amazes me that Forbes lets Daniel Lyons get away with this trash under the Forbes banner...

Category blogs

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs - A Lesson In Badges

Never mind that my opinion of Daniel Lyons can't get any lower than it already is. And never mind that I never quite saw the appeal of the Fake Steve Jobs blog either.

But this entry crosses *well* over the border of vulgar, crude, and completely unprofessional.

But what *really* amazes me is that Forbes lets him do this under their banner:

A picture named M2

They actually condone this stuff?

Lyons must have some really nasty dirt on his editor or the CEO of Forbes, because I'd have tossed him *long* before this.

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:29 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/29/2008

Book Review - Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach

Category Book Review James Kalbach Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience

The ability to navigate a web site can make or break your user's experience. I learned far more than I thought even existed in the book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach. It's obviously more than just putting a list of links down the left side of the screen...

Contents:
Part 1 - Foundations of Web Navigation: Introducing Web Navigation; Understanding Navigation; Mechanisms of Navigation; Types of Navigation; Labeling Navigation
Part 2 - A Framework for Navigation Design: Evaluation; Analysis; Architecture; Layout; Presentation
Part 3 - Navigation in Special Contexts: Navigation and Search; Navigation and Social Tagging Systems; Navigation and Rich Web Applications
References; Index

If you tend to think more like a developer than a designer, then you pretty much think that a list of navigation links are all you need. Uh, no... Kalbach has compiled a wealth of information here that spans both the theory and the practice of web navigation. Rather than just say "do this, this, and this", he starts off with the foundational theory behind how people think about getting around a web site. Once that's presented, you have the proper grounding to start looking at particular types. The chapter on navigation mechanisms lays out all the different options, such as step-type navigation, paging-type navigation, tree navigation, and more. Classifying the different types in your mind helps to figure out when you might want to consider options like tabbed navigation over breadcrumb trails. By the time you've gone through the book, there's little you haven't covered on the topic.

I also appreciated the way the book is designed. O'Reilly went with a full-color layout, which means that all the websites Kalbach uses for examples accurately reflect his points. Black and white just wouldn't cut it here. Also, the edges of the pages are color-coded by chapter, so it makes it very easy to find the particular chapter you're looking for. I always have a better feeling about a design book when the book's design is high quality. In this case, I felt very good...

This really should be on the reading list of anyone who designs websites that go more than one page deep. Not only will you design better sites, but your users will thank you.

Posted by Tom Duff At 3:34 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/29/2008

Book Review - Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action By Robert Hoekman, Jr.

Category Book Review Robert Hoekman Jr. Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action

Since I'm starting to pay more attention to user-interface concepts and design, I felt this book was required reading for me... Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action by Robert Hoekman, Jr. Besides offering a number of excellent concepts, he does so in a manner not often seen in other books. He tells you what he was thinking and how he got to that decision point. That's the kind of insight I need to improve my skills.

Contents:
Part 1 - Getting Oriented: Designing the First Impression; Showing Your Personality; Zen and the Art of Navigation; All Links Are Not Created Equal; Getting Your Head Out of the Tag Cloud
Part 2 - Learning: Surfacing the Trigger Words; Labeling the Interface; Beyond Words and Onto Video
Part 3 - Searching: Making Suggestions; Getting Through the Results; Refining Your Search
Part 4 - Diving In: Standardizing Playback Controls; Nailing Form Layout; Conquering the Wizard; Going the Extra Mile with Inline Validation; Simplifying Long Forms; Getting Them Signed In; Counting Characters
Part 5 - Participating: Building Profiles; Editing; Making Social Connections; Designing the Obvious Blog; Inviting Discussion; Getting a Good Rating
Part 6 - Managing Information: Making RSS Meaningful; Tagging It; Getting Reorganized with Drag-and-Drop; Managing Interruptions with System Notifications
Part 7 - Moving On: Signing Off; Dusting Off Dusty Users; Letting Them Go
Conclusion: The Keys to Great Design

Hoekman is well-known for design concepts, and I tend to like what he comes up with. The difference here over other books is that he starts off with a request or issue to solve, and then takes you through his mental process that got him to the resulting solution. For instance, All Links Are Not Created Equal... The need was to create a list of links for a call-center intranet page. The idea was to somehow communicate the current issues affecting the users, in chronological order, maximum five links. I would take the normal route (which is where he started) of just putting the last five links out there. But to communicate chronological order, that wouldn't work. Then he placed numbers in front of each link (1 to 5). OK, but still "flat" as he termed it. He started trying to incorporate a concept he learned about called "ambient signifiers", or ways to communicate information based on the way it's displayed. This led him to drop the numbers and use decreasing font sizes to show order and importance. Much better, but he still wanted more. He then stumbled on an "aging" technique whereby he would not only decrease the font size, but also lighten the text color the further down you went. This combination communicated both importance and age, and was exactly the solution he was looking for. Notice that he didn't go into it with a preconceived "spec" as to how it would work. But through his mental conversation, you see both how he got there and why he made the designs that he did.

I'm perfectly happy admitting I don't know it all when it comes to design concepts. But what I don't like is to read "do it this way because I said so" material that doesn't explain why. Hoekman makes that rare jump beyond "why" and reveals the imperfections and dead-ends before you get there. As such, this is one of the most valuable design books I've read.

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:55 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/28/2008

Book Review - The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam

Category Book Review Dan Roam The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Most business presentations rely on fancy graphs, professional graphics, and slick tools to get their point across. But sometimes, the most effective way to make your case is to whip out a napkin and start drawing. Dan Roam covers that subject in the book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This opened my eyes to many different concepts that I somewhat took for granted, as well as giving me a framework for getting better at the whiteboard...

Contents:
Part 1 - Introductions - Anytime, Anyone, Anywhere - Solving Problems with Pictures: A Whole New Way of Looking at Business; Which Problems, Which Pictures, and Who is "We"?; A Gamble We Can't Lose - The Four Steps of Visual Speaking
Part 2 - Discovering Ideas - Looking Better, Seeing Sharper, Imagining Further - Tools and Rules for Good Visual Thinking: No Thanks, Just Looking; The Six Ways of Seeing; The SQVID - A Practical Lesson in Applied Imagination; Frameworks for Showing
Part 3 - Developing Ideas - The Visual Thinking MBA - Putting Visual Thinking to Work: Showing and The Visual Thinking MBA; Who Are Our Customers? - Pictures That Solve a Who/What Problem; How Many Are Buying? - Pictures That Solve a How Much Problem; Where Is Our Business? - Pictures That Solve a Where Problem; When Can We Fix Things? - Pictures That Solve a When Problem; How Can We Improve Our Business? - Pictures That Solve a How Problem; Why Should We Even Bother? - Pictures That Solve a Why Problem
Part 4 - Selling Ideas - It's Showtime; Everything I Know About Business I Learned In Show-And-Tell; Drawing Conclusions
Acknowledgments; Appendix A - The Science of Visual Thinking; Appendix B - Resources for Visual Thinkers

Probably the most famous example of this type of learning is the Southwest Airlines story. Herb Kelleher and Rollin King were discussing a failed airline of King's. King took a napkin, drew a triangle on it, and labeled each corner Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston. This flight plan for a small regional airline broke a number of "rules", and the result of this simple drawing became Southwest Airlines four years later. It would have been "normal" to present an idea like this with PowerPoint slides, full color documents, and endless spreadsheets showing the numbers. But the most effective way of illustrating the concept was a simple napkin and pen. Roam has studied the science behind this deceptively simple idea and shows how nearly any idea can not only be communicated in this fashion, but most often can be communicated more succinctly than any other method. The act of drawing and simplifying concepts draws people in and puts life behind your message in a way that sterile professional graphics can't do.

Rather than just say "draw more", Roam creates a framework that allows you to figure out what type of picture applies. The problem is one of the following: who/what (portrait), how much (chart), where (map), when (timeline), how (flowchart), and why (plot). Within each of those frameworks, you have five options of what to show (the SQVID method): S (simple > elaborate), Q (quality > quantity), V (vision > execution), I (individual > comparison), and D (change > as-is). Once you understand these different conditions, the type of picture becomes clear, and then it's a matter of drawing the information. Keep in mind we're not talking about elaborate illustrations... stick figures and simple shapes will do. And that's a good thing, as "art" is not my forte... :)

This is another one of those books that will forever change the way you think about sharing information with others in a business or professional setting. This doesn't replace high-end, quality proposals or presentations... Instead, it simplifies and clarifies the message you have, and allows you to share it in a fraction of the time you might need for a formal, text/picture/word-laden meeting. This ranks right up with Presentation Zen in terms of books that change the way I work, and did so immediately.

Posted by Tom Duff At 1:01 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/28/2008

Show this to your kids as an example of why they shouldn't do drugs...

Category Humor

Classic...

Posted by Tom Duff At 9:11 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/28/2008

Glad to see .docx formats taking over... NOT! :)

Category Microsoft

I received an email yesterday from a coordinator of a program that Susan and I were participating in. In the email was an attachment of the course evaluations. Apparently the leader is running the latest and greatest version of Word, and sent the attachment out in the .docx format. I tried opening it in the version of Word I have running on this machine (2002), and no luck. Every option it gave me produced unreadable text. Granted, I didn't try very hard to get around it either. :)

This morning we get a follow-up email... Apparently everyone was having problems reading his attachment, so he just embedded the results in the email.

All hail OOXML! :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:59 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/28/2008

Book Review - Declassified: 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History by Thomas B. Allen

Category Book Review Thomas B. Allen Declassified: 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History

Secrets are the currency by which countries maintain control of their borders and war with other nations. In the book Declassified: 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History, Thomas B. Allen lists 50 documents, once secret but now declassified, that had large impacts on people, countries, and the world. Throughout, I kept wondering how many more documents are hidden that would have the same effect these days. My guess is plenty...

Contents:
Part 1 - Secrets of War: Spying on the Armada; Washington Finds a Spy; Benedict Arnold Becomes a Spy; The Lady Is a Spy; A Golden Export to Canada; T.R. Remembers the Maine; A Telegram's Special Delivery; The Man Who Started a War; Eavesdropping on Roosevelt and Churchill; Planning the "Final Solution"; Seeking Justice for Saboteurs; Stalin Approves a War; The Pentagon Papers' Legacy; 16 Troublesome Words
Part 2 - Double Agents, Turncoats, and Traitors: Captain Henry's $50,000 Letters; Lincoln's Double Agent; Whose Ace of Spies?; The Double Agent's Dog; The Spy in the Tunnel; The Pumpkin Papers
Part 3 - Counterintelligence - Spy vs. Spy; The Knight Was a Spy; The Million-Document Spy; The Soviets' Key Man; The Spy Drove a Jaguar; The FBI Mole
Part 4 - A Bodyguard of Lies: George Washington's Lies; The Trick That Won Midway; The Star of Double-Cross; "A Diversionary Maneuver"; "Mincemeat Swallowed Whole"; Broadcasting Believable Lies; The Game Against England
Part 5 - Espionage Incidents: Lee's Lost Order; Papers from a Corpse; The Hollow Nickel
Part 6 - In Defense of the Realm: The Beer Barrel Letters; A Map for the Mideast; An Ambassador's Doubts; Secret Notes at Yalta; A Package in the Snow
Part 7 - The Secret State: A Secret Request to Congress; An Enduring Lie; The Dreyfus Affair; The FBI and Trotsky; Tap, Tap, Tap; Bombs of a New Type; The Magic Messages; The Golden Age of Soviet Espionage; The Family Jewels; For the President's Eyes Only
Acknowledgments; Bibliography; Selected Internet Sites; Illustrations Credits; Index

Rather than try and restrict himself to a particular country or timeframe, Allen selects documents from a wide number of sources and time periods. Two of the selections (Spying on the Armada and The Beer Barrel Letters) date from 1586 and center around the rule of Queen Elizabeth I. On the other end of the spectrum, we have entries for 2000 and 2001 related to the forged Niger-Iraq uranium sale document (which started the Iraq war) and the 2001 briefing about Osama Bin Laden operatives planning a plane attack (fulfilled on 09/11/2001). Reading through the chapters, you realize that information is a valuable commodity, and that it normally costs quite a bit to get it. Perhaps it's monetary in nature to pay off the informant, or it could even be the life of the spy if they are caught in the act. Whether driven by ideology or greed, there's always someone out there who is willing to trade information to "the other side".

Each chapter tens to be around 3 to 5 pages long, starting off with a picture of the document/information being passed, a brief date/subject line to place it in context, and then a concise discussion of what transpired to produce the material as well as what impact it had on future events. You could make a whole book out of most of these incidents, but this format is great for giving you an overview of why certain events in history may have transpired as they did. I think my favorites were related to World War II and the efforts to break codes of the other side. England had broken Germany's Enigma codes, and could in many cases anticipate the next action Germany would take. The problem there is that if Germany thinks the codes are broken, they'll switch keys and England would be without their advantage any longer. This dichotomy caused anguish, as England had to let some losses take place so as to keep Germany thinking that their communication encryption was still secure. That's a hard decision to have to make time after time...

If you're at all interested in espionage, you'll likely enjoy this read...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:48 AM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/26/2008

Book Review - Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield

Category Book Review Steven Pressfield Killing Rommel

Looking for some recreational reading, I pulled out one of the review book I've gotten lately. The one I chose was Steven Pressfield's Killing Rommel. This is the first novel of Pressfield's that I've read, but I don't think it'll be the last. He does war novels grounded in historical facts, so the books have a real "first person account" feel (or at least Killing Rommel did). I thoroughly enjoyed this book set in the African desert campaigns of World War II...

The story is told in a manuscript written by R. Lawrence Chapman. Chapman, or "Chap" as he's known by, signed up in England to fight against the Nazis who were closing in on conquering Europe and Mother England. He ends up on assignment with the Long Range Desert Group, a real-life British special forces unit that is sent out on a primary mission... stay mobile, stay hidden, find Rommel, and kill him. This means that they are behind enemy lines, often with little to no support, almost always with equipment that's seen better days, and constantly in danger of being spotted and attacked by Panzer divisions. These days you expect that aerial recon and satellite communication would make coordination easy. But back then, radios involved major setup of antennas (with the associated risk of being spotted or heard), and maps of the terrain were non-existent. Chap and his unit endure horrid weather (both stifling hot and freezing cold), little sleep, and constant injuries following the ever-changing orders from central command. They spend more time fixing their trucks than they do driving them, and that driving usually has to be done at night in pitch dark conditions to avoid German patrols who know they are in the area. Through it all, Chap goes from a volunteer soldier who is unsure of his abilities to a solid leader who pulls his men through conditions that would have caused most men to give up. He also learns the honor and chivalry of combat, and ultimately has to make a choice over what's right and moral versus what's easy and safe.

Not having read any other of his books, I don't know if this one is indicative of the level of action you'd find in one of his novels. While he brings a sense of realism to the ugly side of war, the driving force of the story is Chap's transformation. I was impressed that he pulled off that amount of introspection without bogging down the action part of the story. Once I got started with Killing Rommel, it became the only book I was reading at lunch, on the bus, and in bed. It didn't last very long. :) I think I'll be hitting the library to check out his other books...

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:35 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (4)

06/25/2008

Hey! Want to get an early jump on the latest version of SuperNTF from Kevin Pettitt?

Category LotusUserGroup.org

Head on over to LotusUserGroup.org where he's giving members a jump on the download competition. :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:55 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/25/2008

I stumbled across the transcript for Unify's financial conference call today...

Category IBM/Lotus Microsoft

Unify is that "wonderful" company that kept advertising in SearchDomino offering to migrate you off of that creaky old Notes infrastructure... NOT!

Here's the conference call transcript...

And proving that Microsoft can have a million #1 priorities, here's proof that killing off Notes is still one of them:

Don McKernan – Landoak Securities

And then in your prepared comments you said that Microsoft designated this Notes issues as one of their top three priorities or something like that. Can you clarify what you mean by that?

Todd E. Wille

Well, just what it means is that over the last year, and continuing this upcoming fiscal year, they’ve got two, three or four key initiatives that really the whole company focuses on in addition to their normal goal setting. And one of those key initiatives is this whole Lotus Notes initiatives because SharePoint and Exchange and a lot of their products that are all on a collaborative environment, (a) and (b) IBM identified as one of their major competitors, those two reasons have led this to be one of the key initiatives for them as a company last year and this going forward year.

So, obviously, the point to us is that it’s great news for us to have that exposure. And it goes all the way to the top of Microsoft and all the way down, is that this initiative is important and it’s funded and that bodes well for us.

Don McKernan – Landoak Securities

You’re the only answer for them, basically, on the complex end.

Todd E. Wille

That’s correct.

I guess we can assume we're still on Microsoft's radar. :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:03 PM Location Portland, Oregon | Permalink | Comments (0)

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06/30/2008

It amazes me that Forbes lets Daniel Lyons get away with this trash under the Forbes banner...

06/29/2008

Book Review - Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach

06/29/2008

Book Review - Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action By Robert Hoekman, Jr.

06/28/2008

Book Review - The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam

06/28/2008

Show this to your kids as an example of why they shouldn't do drugs...

06/28/2008

Glad to see .docx formats taking over... NOT! :)

06/28/2008

Book Review - Declassified: 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History by Thomas B. Allen

06/26/2008

Book Review - Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield

06/25/2008

Hey! Want to get an early jump on the latest version of SuperNTF from Kevin Pettitt?

06/25/2008

I stumbled across the transcript for Unify's financial conference call today...

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