Brian Jamison

Saw these amusing treats at a pastry shop in Szeged last night.

Geography may not be my strong suit but geolocation in Hungary on my iPhone seems a little off. The iPhone believes I an on Liverpool.

I had a little snag with an “invalid post id mismatch” but once I erased the messed up post in my iphone everything worked fine. Seems that the app sent the post to my server but wasn’t able to update itself.

This is a hungarian streetcar!

Judging solely from the airport Hungary has not come nearly as far as the Czech Republic post-EU integration. But there is a good energy here and a positive spirit unlike my last visit to East Europe.

Budapest’s airport reminds me of the last time I was in Prague (which was before the wall came down). Okay, BUD is way more modern and plastered with ads from Ford and Tmobile. But it has a quaint, small city kind of feeling to it. I was hoping Hungary would be cheaper than the rest of the EU but a half liter bottle of water just cost me $2.50. Maybe absurdly high prices for water in airports are simply a planet-wide phenomenon.

I was psyched to find a free wifi hotspot on the lower level in terminal 2a but it stopped working for me after 5 minutes; just enough time to dash off a quick VoIP call home with my Iphone using Truphone, which works great. Oh well.

Taking off from Prague we had a groovy full power run up with the brakes on and flaps at 100%. Not surprising given the plane was packed and it was summertime.

I snapped this picture for Alexander of a neat shuttle bus at Budapest airport.

My theme, indexnet 1.0, was displaying non-UTF8 characters in the index.php file, specifically the offending characters are next to the next page and previous page. Posted from the iPhone wordpress app!

If you live in Oregon and are unfortunate enough to have Qwest as a “service provider” for your landline, there is a very special game you get to play when you make a call to the 503 area code. Sort of a landline landmine.

Some numbers in the 503 area code require that you dial a 1 first. Most do not. You’re supposed to know that a given number lies outside of some imaginary geographic boundary around Portland. Apparently Qwest thinks we have telephonic geolocating chips embedded in our heads.

This shameful tactic was attempted years ago in Los Angeles where the population quickly rioted and a technical fix was just as quickly produced. My mobile phone dials all 503 area codes (in fact all area codes) without a 1 first and so should my landline. And I don’t want to hear about the difficulty of programming physical switches or the upgrade costs. This just shows a complete and utter disregard for the value of their customer’s time. VoIP here I come.

The Qwest managers responsible should have their phone service “enhanced” so that every time they dial someone a randomly generated number is required to make it go through. For the rest of their lives. If the managers guess wrong they will be informed of the correct number by a piercing three-tone bell and a garbled voice remarkably similar to the cassette tape-based system Qwest uses today to inform their customers when they blunder into the 1+503 landline landmine.

I just had to scan 19 pages of a paper application. Problem was, I saved each file as a JPG, leaving me 19 different files. Not nice to email that. So I just stitched them all together into a single PDF called “app.pdf” using this command:

I call that power and simplicity.

“Accidental Configuration Syndrome” (ACS) is what I’m calling the act of repeatedly and accidentally altering the configuration of an application and/or operating system. ACS leads to unnecessary confusion, frustration, and technical support calls. ACS primarily afflicts older people or those with average or less than average mouse and keyboard manipulation skills.

I’ve been providing technical support for my Dad and in-laws’ desktop Linux machines for years now. Linux on the desktop is an excellent fit for them, but they all suffer from ACS.

Just yesterday I restored OpenOffice’s primary toolbars on my father’s machine. These toolbars are his primary interface to OpenOffice – they’re critical tools, and to him they just went missing one day. Of course he had accidentally dragged them off of the primary interface, but I found that this is surprisingly easy to do. Try it; start OpenOffice and aim just two pixels below File on the primary File – Edit – View interface. Hold down the left mouse button and drag down as you might expect to do if the File menu were to appear. Did you just pull the main toolbar off of the interface? I did. Now try and put the toolbar back without screwing things up. I wasn’t able to, and it took me a few minutes to get it back to “normal.” Should the default action of a click and drag be to remove the toolbar? No. Should a mistake in a common usage action (pulling down the FIle menu) cause a major configuration action? Of course not.

Another example — at my in-laws, the main application bar in Gnome seems (to them) to change in mysterious ways. Application launch icons move around, appear and disappear without any apparent reason. What’s happening is that instead of left clicking to start an application, they accidentally right-click and select move, or accidentally click and drag. Once the damage is done, there is no easy way for them to set it right, because they weren’t intentionally making the change – they literally don’t know what they’ve done. Similarly, their desktop is periodically littered with multiple launch icons for solitaire in a failed attempt to simply start the program, again, a right-click presented a configuration option and literally in the blink of an eye they accidentally make a configuration change. To them it appears as if the program simply didn’t start – they don’t notice the new icon on the desktop.

Configuration states should also not be activated by keystrokes – the chance for ACS here is just as great.

The fix for all of this is simple, and it has nothing to do with educating people using computers. This is a user interface problem. We need to build applications and operating systems that assume people will primarily be using them instead of configuring them, and require explicit, deliberate action from a person to enable any configuration changes. Use, not configuration, must be the default state.

From Wattzon, an even more improved product label along the lines of the nutrition facts labels found on food products. The entire slideset is worth the time and puts a solution to our global energy dilemma in a practical, attainable (albeit challenging) light.

On the left, today’s required nutrition label. On the right, a proposed label containing the energy used to create the product and how much it would add to your energy consumption footprint. Click the image for the full-size version on the Wattzon site. Someday this sort of labeling will be required on all products sold.