Amusing user interfaces

So PhilG's coffee table book has joined Alan Cooper's About Face 2.0 in the pile of books that make up my bedside table (you read that right, why get a table when the you can make one by arranging the books correctly?). They disagree on a few things, or at least Philip does; Alan seems to be oblivious of his work, but they do point out why Amazon.com and Google are successes, and the Baconizer wasn't -- the secret is when you present a search form to the public, give them one field they can pour their words or questions into, and have your computers do the rest.

Bugzilla is a well-known exception, but it's designed for programmers who have the time to figure out what to do at a page like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=advanced when they want to check to see if a problem they've run into in Thunderbird or Mozilla has been reported.

I wanted to see if the local library system has any books by a particular author. The local online catalog works very well. The search field contains two items -- one into which you put in some text, the other a dropdown where you select the kind of search, like Books, CDs, DVDs, etc. If you want to use the kind of boolean logic you'd learn in an MLS program you're welcome to, and the software will recognize it, but I've always found my simple-minded searches always get me to my goal.

Unfortunately the VPL catalog is closed due to the civic strike, which is now into its 11th week. I tried the Richmond library, but they didn't carry anything by that author. Rather than try each of the other 18 local municipalities, many of which were affected by the same labor issues Vancouver was this past July, and all of which were able to find a settlement with their local political resources (but I digress), I decided to try the Seattle catalog.

Seattle has a good library system, I guess. They managed to put up a new building designed by a brand-name architect with features like Plexiglas dividers that start half-way up the escalator, so if you're not paying attention to where the escalator is taking you and marveling at innovations like the passageway that looks like the inside of an esophageal passageway, you'll get your own esophagus chopped in two.

Also, Nancy Pearl is famous, at least for librarians. I forget how I heard of her, but when I saw her book at a book store I somehow knew she was the chief librarian of the Seattle library.

So I googled my way to http://www.spl.org/, and while I was impressed to see that there was a keyword search field to the catalog on the home page (most library web site designers apparently read Siegel instead of Greenspun or Cooper (or better still, Tufte) and so you have to click once or twice past a list of current events and remarks by members of the board of directors to get to the catalog. On the Seattle page you just ask for "More Catalog Search Options".

Which takes you to this 22-field search page. And when I finally figured out that the white arrow on the red circle was the "Search button", I got a friendly message "Unable to navigate!, Expected close parentheses. Got end of query instead.". Twice. Thanks, Nancy.

Today's Garage Sale Book Review

Garage sales don't do it for me like they used to. The girls are too old for most garage sale toy fodder, we have as many Berenstain Bear books as we're ever going to find, and my tastes are too esoteric to find things worth getting. But I had a few minutes to kill, there was a sale nearby, including a couple of boxes of high-tech books. For a buck each, I got a book on Flash that will fit on the shelf next to the other books I've bought on flash and web design that I never cracked open; a copy of Philip Greenspun's coffee-table rewrite of his awesome "Database Backed Web Site" book retail price $62.95, garage sale price $1.00; and a QUE book on XML from 2000 which I got only because I'm always curious how writers attempt to explain RDF. I'll just quote a bit:

In the following example, the members of the RDF triple are defined by descriptive names

<rdf:description about="resourceURI">
  <property>literal</property>
</rdf:Description>

Got that? No, me neither. The name of the object's property is "property", and its value is "literal". Why not an example like this:

<rdf:description about="editorPencilsAreUs">
  <color>red</color>
</rdf:Description>

At least I understand it. Which makes me think it's invalid.

So RDF is full of things called triples. Sort of like (subject, predicate, object) sets, like "the boy is drinking water" or "that spec confused the hell out of me".
So naturally the author spends a full page talking about Roman triumvirates for her next example. Just the kind of topic someone tackling RDF can relate to.

For a realistic RDF example, go read some install.rdf files from a Mozilla application like Thunderbird or a Firefox extension. Or fix this bug, which has only been open for four years, and from my understanding could be fixed in a few minutes with the right administering of RDF fu.

At least I can use the book to prop up my laptop screen while I write this review of it. And Phil's rewrite is still funny, and the kids liked the letraset stencils. The computer has 200 fonts or so, but there's still something very cool about creating a 36pt Helvetica stencil by rubbing pen over tracing paper. And I can't really complain about finding an RDF book at a sale. Maybe next time I'll find a 1989 Gel boom for five bucks.

"HTML is CICS with fonts."

From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html

"Microsoft Reveals Windows Vista SP1 Will Install XP"

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/09/microsoft-reveals-windows-vista-sp1-will-install-xp.html

It's on the web, must be true.

Civic Strike Month #3: An Open Letter to the Mayor of Vancouver

Mr. Sullivan,

This young century has seen at least two people win elections by questionable means. While one of them managed to rise above those suspicions during a national crisis (only to fall from grace later), it looks like you are shirking whatever opportunities this strike has afforded you to show the people of Vancouver that you are deserving of a post of leadership.

Politics is as much about image as it is about reality. The image you're conveying is one of a flake. It is clear that you have no intention of running for re-election, but we deserve better than that right now. Resign, sir, and hand the reins over to someone who can end this mess, or at least appears to care.

These boots were made for driving around the block

Today's local back-to-school feature in the Vancouver Sun, "Keeping Students Safe", quotes Surrey school trustee Laurae McNally admonishing parents that their kids are perfectly capable of a five-minute walk to get to school.

"We need to really emphasize to parents that if they only live a block or two from school, they should be letting their children walk," she said.

She's not saying that parents currently are driving their kids one block to school, right? One would hope, but then reporter Janet Steffenhagen quotes her "adding" that "she's dismayed to see parents drive children one block to school and then turn around and drive back."

Newsflash: find does printf

Maybe it's not news to you that find has a printf action, but I learned my Unix from a printed copy of an early version of AT&T's Programmers Workbench I bought at a flea market over <gulp> twenty years ago. "Bought for free" -- the seller didn't have a clue what it was and was happy to free up the four inches of shelf space. I read the commands for sections 1, 2, 3, and 8 practically from cover to cover. This came in very handy when I was transferring files between Suns and SCO boxes in the early 90s (way before SCO became vilified) using the venerable cpio command.

The hard copy was way better than reading man pages on 80x24 monochrome terminals. But the disadvantage of learning so much early on was that I rarely used man commands to look them up, and didn't discover new additions. So there was an email discussion going on at work on a build issue, and the sys admin mentioned a command along the lines of this:

find dir -name '*.foo' printf "mkdir -p ../../target/%h ; cp %p ../../other-dir/%h\n" | sh

Next time I'm about to write a command like

for i in `find` ; do
...
done

I'm going to try using the printf ... | sh combination instead. Not on OS X, you say? Pity.