Cooking With Technology

Distinguishing Interactive Elements

When looking at a web page or some other piece of hypertext, the pieces of text that are interactive have historically been set apart by some style change. This really refers to links, which in the majority of pages, are the only pieces of text a user would click on and expect something to happen.

As a small tangent before I continue, I have a weird habit. When I read text on a computer screen, I rapidly highlight the lines I’m currently reading from top to bottom, then release and do the same from bottom to top. Repeating this action helps me track what I am reading, By interacting with the text ‘physically,’ I find I am better able to focus, retain information, and process text quickly.

Now with this behavior in mind, imagine a text interface where simply selecting text results in a behavior the user doesn’t expect. If you are having trouble thinking of an example, allow me to point you to a political article hosted by the New York Times, and another from the Free Dictionary on spectator ions. The common feature shared by these two websites is they both have a hidden feature. Selecting and clicking on words will open a new window containing their definition.

This behavior is unexpected, as there are no visual cues to hint that the above action will have that result. Surprising your users with behavior like this is an annoyance, but not having the ability to turn off this behavior results in blog posts (like this one!).

The lessons here are short, and barely warrant a full post as they should be common sense:

1. Your interfaces should behave as the user expects.
2. Separate your interactive elements visually.

If you ignore either, you risk frustrating the very same group of people you are trying to attract - a behavior that most developers try to avoid.

“qemu-img: error while writing”

When converting a raw image (such as an image created using dd) to a VMWare vmdk image in Windows using Qemu’s qemu-img utility, I came across an error. The command I used is as follows:

qemu-img convert -f raw L:\\VMtmp\\winImage.img -O vmdk D:\\vmtmp\\xp.vmdk

Which works fine until the output image reached 2GB in size, at which point it exits with this error:

qemu-img: error while writing


Yay for descriptive error messages! I hunted through the qemu-devel mailing lists, as this is an apparently undocumented feature. The cause behind the error is that the Qemu binaries were compiled for Windows with MinGW, which apparently doesn’t have large file support built in. So the solution to the problem is to either compile your own version of Qemu for Windows using Cygwin (which has had large file support for some time), or do what I do - use linux. The Qemu binaries in linux aren’t affected by this problem, and you can create files of whatever size you desire.

IT Filter

Along with the common acceptance of ‘lolspeak’ as a method of legitimate communication, IT websites are a scourge of the Internet.

I really enjoy reading their articles, I do. You can gauge an author’s technical competence by how well they describe the concepts they are covering, so I play a little game. I first read the article, taking note of all the areas they introduce then gloss over (exposing their lack of knowledge). For each occurrence, I tally a point on an invisible scrap of paper in my head. At the end, I read the author’s credentials. You’ll generally find that the number of points tallied equals the number of times ‘expert,’ ‘authority,’ and ’specialized’ appear in their biography, with any points left over being assigned to each of their degrees and certifications.

If I ever write for a website or paper, you know what my biography is going to say?

“Robert Peaslee is an author. If you have no idea how to verify whether everything he writes is made up, you probably shouldn’t be reading his articles.”

PS,

We need a firefox plugin to filter IT websites.

Jargon

Different fields provide entire vocabularies to make communicating ideas specific to that field easier. The necessity of the words these languages use is variable. Guess which language we’ll be using for examples?

Necessary: abbreviations like TCP, NTFS, SDK… etcetera. You don’t want to say the full thing every time it comes up in conversation.

Justifiable: OO, RTFM, and any file format used to describe a data entity (exe, jpeg, etc). It gets weird hearing “oh oh” (OO) when talking to a peer, but probably because I always think of Office Space when the abbreviation graces my ears.

Unjustifiable: Any word that has been bastardized and is now being applied in the war on the English language. Flikr, Digg, and Writely are all included. Maybe not jargon, but I hear them way too much to go ignored.

Management: Any of the above terms used inappropriately.

Jargon: use responsibly.

Converting a Relative Path to an Absolute Path in Bash

This really shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to figure this out, but it was a big enough of an annoyance that I decided to share it.

How to convert a relative path to an absolute path in linux/unix/bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# Assume parameter passed in is a relative path to a directory.

# For brevity, we won't do argument type or length checking.

echo "Absolute path: `cd $1; pwd`"

For those unaware, you don’t have to ‘cd -’ because the backticks perform command substitution and don’t modify the working directory of the script.

EDIT: Anonymous poster ‘foo’ left a comment mentioning that this only works if the path destination already exists, which is indeed the case. This isn’t at all elegant, but it is the ‘two minute hack’ version I could immediately come up with. The result only works if you have permission to write where the path should go, meaning *yes,* there will be a version three of this script when I have more time:

#!/bin/bash
# Alright, this time we'll do parameter checking.

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	echo "Usage: $0 "
	exit 1
fi

if [ -d $1 ]; then
	# Paramater is an existing directory. Print it using the method in the script above.
	echo "Absolute path: `cd $1; pwd`"

elif [[ -e $1 && ! -d $1 ]]; then
	# File already exists and isn't a directory. Be more safe with the conversion.
	mkdir $1$$ 2> /dev/null
	if[ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "We cannot conver this path without write permissions to the path's destination."
		exit 1
	fi
	# I don't want to escape the quotes. This is already ugly, anyway.
	dirName=`cd $1$$; pwd | awk -F"$$" {'print $1'}`
	echo "Absolute path: $dirName"
	rm -r $1$$
else
	# File doesn't exist, begin unelegant conversion
	mkdir $1 2> /dev/null
	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "We cannot convert this path without write permissions to the path's destination."
		exit 1
	fi
	echo "Absolute path: `cd $1; pwd`"
	rm -r $1
fi

Secondary notes: I really wrote this on the spot in a couple minutes, directly into this blog post. It is untested, and very ugly. I promise to post something better soon!

Reciprocal Traffic and the ‘Jump’

I use the StumbleUpon firefox plugin to try and find those ‘gold nugget’ webpages in things I am interested in. One of those things happens to be (surprise!) technology. Now, probably two out of every 5 sites is some ’search engine optimization’ or ‘how to improve your blog’ blog post that offers zero-science techniques for improving your pagerank and increasing traffic.

As far as I can tell, the only people these posts appeal to are other bloggers. So the traffic these sites are attracting are bloggers, who implement the changes, who then attract the bloggers they got the idea from. All I see here is a bunch of reciprocal traffic. Kudos, blogger. Your site is a raging success among other bloggers doing the exact same thing you are.

And as far as techniques used, who invented the ‘insert advertisement in the middle of an article’ technique? And furthermore, who was the idiot that decided to call it a ‘jump’? It is not a jump, it is an advertisement in the middle of your content. I strongly believe the concept was the result of a blogger angry that the blink tag they were so fond of is no longer supported in most browsers. “Hey, I can’t annoy people with blinking text. Time to come up with something new.” Viola, the ‘jump’ is born.  Bloggers: if I think your content is good, I’ll probably keep reading despite the annoyance (yay adblock). But if your content isn’t fantastic and I see the word ‘jump’ in your post, I’m leaving your site and am likely to never return.

Stop being silly.

All of you. I mean it. You are ruining my StumbleUpon experience.