This weekend Sooz and I flew to Dublin to see my brother and his family. We had a great time and we look forward to seeing them soon. It was nice to see my little nephew Jack again. He certainly gets his good looks from his uncle:

While in Ireland I was also pleased to see a real leprechaun walk past:

Although Jack is a lovely little kid (anyone remember Jacks Playing Ball now?), he actually stinks. It is amazing how such a small person can produce such a vile smell sometimes. Wind? You haven’t witnessed wind until Jack drops one:

(more photos available here).

While we are in photo mode, I also added some photos from my pal Jon’s stag do. We got all clobbered up that night:

As you may suspect, it ended up in this:

(more photos available here).
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I had an interesting discussion with Aq the other day regarding Fitts Law and how important it is. One of my cynicism’s with usability has been the real and tangible effect that a usability theory actually has on the audience. As much I agree that Fitts Law does have a positive effect on usability, I don’t really buy that it has that much of an effect.

My view is that usability people are typical scientists; they love coming up with all kinds of earth shaking theories, and they get a kick when that theory works within some kind of (typically artificial) environment. The problem with this is that if you have some kind of limited knowledge of usability (as do I), and within this limited knowledge you know of some usability techniques, you may believe too much that the techniques work, because you know of the techniques.

This can be demonstrated with Spatial Nautilus. If you how spatial mode works, and the muscle memory foundation behind it, it makes eminent sense; when you use the software, you feel like it is intelligently written and makes use of all your senses and mental facilities. Does it really work? I am not too sure. I think part of it certainly works, but I think if you never knew what spatial mode is, you may not feel the true benefit. It is, however, important to implement the spatial concept correctly. Recently, Canonical have decided to implement half of the theory in Hoary, and it doesn’t make all that much sense now. Aq and I believe (hope) that Matthew Thomas will be fixing this gaff.

I do actually have a longer usability essay in the works that will go on my O’Reilly Blog, but I still need to think about it some more. I should have it online relatively soon. 🙂

In other news, I have spent some playing with all kinds of web applications recently. This has included Mambo, OSCommerce, Gallery 2, Drupal and more. There is some really impressive work going into these tools, but I do have one slight issue with them. Many of these web applications include a simple to use web installer, which is fantastic, but the web installer often asks you to change permissions on certain files. Is anyone aware of a better way of automating this process? Surely we could develop some kind of system in which you can establish a users authenticity and then the server can change the permissions for you. You would naturally want to establish this and then restrict permissions within various document roots. The problem with this is that the regular Joe cannot install it. If they did not need to do the permissions parts though, they could certainly install it. The other problem is that many hosting provides do not provide you with access to change permissions other than FTP.

In other news, this week I had the OQO back from Colin Watson. Unfortunately, he was unable to get the various parts of it running under Hoary, but he has filed some bug reports (9092 and 9095) that really help move us in the right direction. Colin also includes a small kernel patch in bug 9095 to potentially fix the trackstick problem. Some other people have had some good results with this. Good work Colin!

Thanks for all the nice comments about Banger. He seems to be settling in now, and is becoming much more content with his new home and his lifestyle. He is a very playful little pup, and after some time darting around the place and playing with his toys, he cordially zonks out on the couch:

As I am sure you will all know, unfortunately, Seraphidian were not successful in getting through to the next round of the Snickers Unsigned competition. Nevermind. We had a good shot at the comp, and it was great fun to be a part of. We are still very pleased at beating over 2000 bands to be in the final 10.

In the last few days I have been consulting with a few companies who are making some strides to explore Open Source. It is always fascinating to explore the different challenges that they face on their different levels, and it is also satisfying to experience their excitement when they discover how Open Source can empower them in more ways. These kinds of cases are also the most challenging. Getting over what Open Source is and how it can help them is tough when you essentially have five minutes to discuss it. I say five minutes because if they don’t get it after five minutes, they are far more skeptical of it. Nevertheless, it is interesting as it challenges my ability to get over the Open Source message in the most applicable way. This is a challenge, but a challenge I love to experience – it is after all, what I do for living. 🙂

Tomorrow I head off to a school to do a talk about Open Source. Schools are always interesting places to spread the word as they offer the potential of kids getting exposed to Open Source early on and hence not developing a single-sided view of what computers are and what software they run. The challenge with education is that in most cases, there is a tremendous amount of lethargy and restriction in the choices they make. A number of schools have their IT typically run by rather unskilled and uninterested people. Luckily, the schools I have talked to have been very interested in what is best for the kids.

Ubuntu users should head over and read this post by mpt. As usual, his observations are detailed and expansive, and the most awesome aspect of the post is that he now works for Canonical. It is great to see some real usability work going on with Open Source. 🙂

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First of all, thanks to everyone who voted for Seraphidian in the Snickers Unsigned competition. Today is the final day of the vote and I have been informed that the three winning bands will be notified of the result tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed!

We have had a pretty expansive drive to get people from all around the world to listen to our music and spread the word about the vote. I am so pleased to see that people from a number of communities (including Seraphidian fans, Wolves LUG, LUGRadio and all of our family and friends) have spread the word about the band and the competition. I am pleased that so many new people have heard the band. If we don’t through, so be it, but irrespective of the result, thank you all so much. 🙂

In some other news, look at our new addition to the family:

Internet people, this is Banger, Banger, this is the Internet. Banger is a 7 1/2 week old miniature sausage dog, and he arrived on Sunday. We picked him up in the morning, and he is really settling in well. He is a lively, friendly little puppy, and we both adore him. More pictures of Banger are here.

Its been a busy week. In addition to the competition and Banger arriving, on Friday night we played at Dime Aid in memory of the mighty Dimebag Darrell, I got a parking ticket, Sooz and I got our green belt in Karate, Sooz went to a hen night, I went to a stag do and LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 13 will be released tomorrow. Phew!

OK folks, I really need your support here!

As I mentioned in a previous entry, my band Seraphidian have been finalised as one of the top 10 bands to play at the huge Download festival in the UK; a prize that also includes making a single, a music video and basically getting signed.

The winner is judged by a public Internet vote, and I really need EVERYONE to go and vote for Seraphidian. You can vote by clicking HERE – don’t forget to click on the red VOTE button!. Please don’t try to write a script that will bombard the site with votes; the site will only accept one vote per day from what I assume is each IP address.

If you could all also blog and encourage people to vote, I would be so personally grateful! This is a major thing for me and the band, and we really need all of your support with the voting!

Thanks very much folks!!

First of all, thanks so much for all the kind comments about the new book. Thanks so much! 🙂

Today has been interesting. Got into work and fixed up some loose ends with some work. I then started sorting out some bug reports that I have reported (this and this), and then I had lunch with Ade. This afternoon I fixed my server at work that seemed to go down, and then fiddled with Mambo.

I have a confession to make. Many of the usability ramblings about Mambo a few blog entries back seem to have been fixed in the newest version. It seems I was actually using a slightly older version, but why they don’t put the latest version at the top of the list on the download page is beyond me. This was one of those classic usability issues where prior experience affected my actions more than actually reading the page. So, I lose a point for not reading the page, but the page loses a point for not making any sense. 😛

Anyway, fiddled with Mambo this afternoon and they have fixed some of the usability problems I mentioned and it makes a bit more sense now. It still needs a bit of work to understand what the order of events is to achieve a task, but I am getting there. I will be using Mambo to set up the new Seraphidian website.

Incidentally, I have some pretty awesome news. A few weeks back, Kerrang magazine (the most popular rock/metal Metal magazine in the UK) opened up a competition to choose a band to play at the huge Downloadwe have been shortlisted in the top 10 bands! The thing is, we are going to really need your support, as there is going to be a public vote. This is likely to take place on the Internet, and I will be pleading to everyone I know to go and vote and to also blog about voting. This is a big deal for us, and it is incredibly important. I will let you know when the voting opens.

Oh, and at the request of the LUGRadio translators, there is now a LUGRadio Wiki! It can be used for anything, and a bunch of community members are going to translate some portions of the show. In other LUGRadio news, you can now pre-order tickets for the glorious day that will be LUGRadio Live 2005. As we build up the line-up of speakers and events, I will be updating a flyer with the details. Here is the latest incarnation:

We record the next episode on Wednesday and it should be a fun show.

Right now I am doing some writing and tomorrow I head down to London for a meeting with Microsoft’s PR firm.

I am a happy boy. Yes, yes, it is finally out – go and get Linux Desktop Hacks and enjoy an awfully cool book. 🙂

You know, I am gonna have to make a conscious effort to blog more. There is one problem with this – there are not enough hours in the day as it is to do my normal stuff, let alone blogging. I will make more of an effort though. I have written MUST TRY HARDER on my report card.

This week I have been doing a lot of LAMP hacking. My evenings and part of my days have consisted of hacking a bunch of PHP scripts for some projects I am working on. This has included some generic LAMP projects as well as customising things such as Sugar and Mambo. I think when you start advocating the use of Open Source web applications, the ‘Open Source’ factor really makes a difference. A big reason for this is undoubtedly that these programs are far easier to hack due to their use of higher level languages that are easier to get your head around.

As many of you will know, simplicity has always been close to my heart and one particular tool that I really do get on with is Bluefish. Don’t get me wrong; other tools (such as Quanta) can do a shitload more, but Bluefish is quick, simple and pleasant to use. The only criticism I have of all Open Source PHP editors that I have used is that they don’t really include much in the way of debugging and profiling. Most of the tools are run-of-the-mill web editors, and it would be great if a bit of intelligence was written into them. The real challenge is in implementing this intelligence in a way that makes sense and is usable.

Earlier in this blog entry I mentioned Mambo, and I have had an interesting experience with Mambo this week. Whenever I use software, I tend to have a little guy sat on shoulder who mutters in my ear criticism about how the software should work as opposed to how it actually works. These comments can range from tiny little quirks in the software to huge failings in how some tools work. As much as I truly respect the work the Mambo guys are doing, I have to confess that in terms of usability it is an utter nightmare.

So, why is it such a nightmare? Well, I installed Mambo on two machines (one a Linux box and the other is a Windows box). Susan wants to set up her own website, and I suggested she use a CMS. I suggested she try using Mambo as I assumed it was the best in class. The other installation was for me to use to create a new band website. The installation process is pretty straightforward and once installed, I could log into the admin interface. At this point, I wanted to do two main things; I want to add sections, and I want to add content. The problem was that I was left with a bunch of menu options for creating sections (this was easy enough), but it was not clear how to actually add content to a section. To make matters worse, there are loads of strange types of section that I can use, but it is entirely clear which of these sections satisfies the needs of a typical website. Sure, there are different modules and different types of Mambo content, but I just wanted to add regular pages. This was certainly not easy to do and the thorough lack of documentation made it virtually impossible to figure out.

I think Mambo shows great promise, but I fear that it has suffered the ails of a lot of web applications; it is designed by web developers who have not considered usability from their users perspective. When I say usability, I don’t mean making it pretty – Mambo is a very attractive CMS, but if I can’t figure out how to use it (as a web developer and someone who uses Open Source and computers all day, every day) how on earth are regular people such as Susan supposed to figure it out?

I think the Mambo guys just need to sit back, run some test cases, observe the results and try to make pragmatic changes. As the most promising Open Source CMS out there, I am sure this is no problem for them.

Yes folks, I am still alive and kicking. Last week was a busy mother and aside from my normal chunk of work that I needed to get done, I also suffered from a pretty bad return of the flu. I was quite concerned this was going to bring my back my previous bronchial nastyness. I got the flu on Wednesday and I have pretty much kicked it now. What was even more nerve wracking was that I had two gigs scheduled for the weekend. Screaming down a Mic in Wolverhampton and Wakefield when you have flu is never easy without showering your audience in lung butter. Luckily, no such butter was produced. 🙂

It will be no great news now that the mystery Microsoft company was the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and my report on it can be located here. There has been little press about this. I didn’t expect it to be as earth shattering as Microsoft may hope.

I haven’t got much time as it is 12.30am and I have a stack of mail to chew through and things to fix, so here is a summary of other things that caught my eye this week or otherwise distracted me:

• LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 12 was recorded on Tuesday and it out tomorrow!
• Seth Nickel showcased some cracktastic crack in creating next-gen desktop effects and rendering
• We did a gig in Wolverhampton at The Giffard. It went well.
• We did a gig last night in Wakefield at The Snooty Fox. We got a DVD out of it from this amazing seven camera setup thing. It was just a shame that our drummers triggers did not work 100%, I snapped a guitar string, our guitarist’s guitar had a fault and our bassist developed nasty blisters throughout the set. We still got a decent DVD though. 😛
• Linux Desktop Hacks should be out really soon!
• I am currently working on another (secret) book project
• This week I also met up with my old lecturer Vince Robbins who came in for some Open Source advice
• We had a meeting for the OpenAdvantage summer events calendar. This includes a stack of FastTrack training courses. More details on this are on our website.
• I wrote some new content for the OpenAdvantage site
• I wrote some copy for the Birmingham Post
• I wrote parts on Blogging and Content Management for PC Plus
• I finished off another article for a site I cannot confirm yet
• My mum is featured in the latest issue of Yorkshire Life magazine. She is a master ceramic restorer and there is a feature on the work my mum and dad have been doing in this area.

This took longer than I expected as Aq and Ade just came online in Gaim. Fingers crossed, there will be no more illness this week… 🙂

On Friday I headed down to London to see Nick McGrath at Microsoft and this mystery organisation who they have struck a deal with. It was a good meeting and it was good to hook up with Nick again. There is an embargo on who this organisation is until Monday, but on Monday I will let you know the score and the details. It is not really that ground shattering to be honest, but I will fill you in on Monday.

On Friday evening we went to see the mighty Nevermore play at Camden Underworld. It was a fantastic gig and I got some photos that I may stick in the gallery. After the gig, we headed back to Bedford to visit Sooz’s parents and we got back to Wolves at about 11pm tonight. We came up to bed and as Sooz fell asleep I decided to hack on some PHP. One task that I needed to approach was writing a simple little script to automate updating the Wolves LUG site when there is a new meeting date. I will be using the same chunk of PHP on the LUGRadio to indicate when the next episode is out.

Speaking of LUGRadio, we record Season 2 Episode 12 on Tuesday evening and we have a great guest lined up. I will keep it under wraps for now, but it should prove to be a fascinating interview.