jeff's WebLog : computers

the windows style guide

jeffdav — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 02:41:00 GMT

I am a UI programmer. I work on the BrowserUI team. Of course, very little of my time is spent actually making UI--the buttons and toolbars and such. Adding a button takes a few minutes out of my week. Writing the code to implement whatever the button does takes most of my time. When I do write new UI, though, such as dialogs, etc, you can be sure I have a copy of Microsoft Windows User Experience open to page 451. In the class I have been taking at the UW I have had to install a lot of free applications to do various mathy things, and the horridness of some of the UI has really made me sad. I am not going to name names; all I ask is, please, put some thought into your UI design!

The following is a list of things I have seen these last few months that really bothered me:

If you have an edit box to enter values, make it usable--do not require me to move a slider or use up/down arrows.
Do not put up modal dialogs that require information that I may want to cut and paste from the parent of the modal dialog.
Please make all of your controls keyboard accessible and please bother to check the tab order makes some sort of sense.
Do not allow me to enter values in two different controls that conflict. When informing me of the conflict, please describe it clearly.
If you know what a given setting needs to be, just do it.
Please use color schemes that are reasonable: black text on white backgrounds; good. Black text on green backgrounds; bad.

All of this and more can be found in the book; ranting about bad UI is not novel. Even if you do not program for Windows, much of the content in the book is useful in making your app usable and making it look professional.

I am sure we can find plenty of Microsoft UI that violates guidelines in the book, with and without excuses for doing so. I am embarrassed to admit I checked in a truly terrible dialog as an intern, but I promise I have learned from the mistakes of my youth. I have seen the light; I have become a member of the Pixels-Matter school.

I just needed to get that off my chest. Thank you for indulging me.

chess

jeffdav — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:06:00 GMT

I am currently taking an AI class in the evenings. I am posting this link for my own reference. This is a chess program that draws its thinking for you. It is really pretty.

Chess program.

oppressive fork clarinet

jeffdav — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:32:00 GMT

Raymond's eagerly awaited spam-graph post went live today. Since he works downstairs I got a sneak peak at it earlier this week. Since then I have been thinking about spam a bit. Spam used to really annoy me. I have an old university account that does nothing but accumulate spam now, but I login and delete the 40 or so new spams everyday. They fall into several catagories:

Unreadable - I use mutt to read my university mail and it does not support any strange character sets. This is the catagory the majority of e-mails fall into.

Creatively Formatted - These are the ones that do stupid tricks to get through filters but in doing so give themselves away as spam. For example; V/i/a/g/r/* !?!!, [M | 0 | r | t | g | a | g | 3 |] a.p.p.r.0.v.ed!!, etc.

Creatively Subjected - These are the insidious ones that put things in the title like "Our meeting on tuesday..." and come from cs-admin@<myuniversity>.com. I can usually spot them.

Randomly Subjected - These are my absolute favorites. These are the mails that have a few random words in the title. These things make great rock band names. This is the reason for this post. Everything up until here was merely context. I got one today that was perfect: "oppressive fork clarinet."

Anyone want to play drums in OFC ??

how to cleanly start and stop explorer.exe

jeffdav — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 22:01:00 GMT

If you are running Windows XP and want a cmd prompt with no strange environment variables set, do the following: CTRL+SHIFT+ESC->File->CTRL+New Task (Run...)
This will open a cmd window with only the basics. This is useful if you have killed Explorer and need to restart it. Explorer will keep the environment of the cmd window that started it.

If you want to cleanly shutdown Explorer without having it automatically restart: Start->Shutdown->CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Cancel.

the black ink blot

jeffdav — Thu, 13 May 2004 18:01:00 GMT

Saw this today on metafilter. A CS grad student in Dublin has found a way to figure out what is under those black ink blots in classified documents. I was just wondering last night if there was some way to do this. We had been discussing censoring soldier's letters at lunch yesterday. I wonder how this will effect declassification of documents. Perhaps they will start converting declassified documents to random fonts and sizing, like the cliched ransom notes. Maybe they will start censoring random words or entire paragraphs, a la Yossarian.

the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Thu, 06 May 2004 21:10:00 GMT

This question comes up frequently and generally the asker really means, “How can I prevent people from stealing the [content | script] from my Web site?” And there are a few things you can do to make it more difficult. You can add onContextMenu handlers (to prevent the default context menu from displaying). You can obfuscate your script and have your html reference the script from a file (to make the script harder to read/understand). You can cancel onDragStart (to prevent drag-and-drop of images to the desktop). You can instruct the browser not to cache the data using http-equiv (to prevent clever people from simply copying the file from the cache directory).

There are probably a few more things along these lines, but they are all in the same catagory. None of these will ultimately prevent someone from using source or content from your site. The reason for this is all of the above things require the client to behave correctly. You cannot control the client. For example, Internet Explorer always has the View Source option on the menu. There are other products which provide tools to visually inspect the DOM.

A site's intellectual property is protected (in the US) by US Copyright Law. However, there seem to be a large number of people who want their site to be viewable for free by the masses and at the same time they want to be 100 per cent sure people save or copy the data on their pages. This is unrealistic. If the data is coming down the wire to a computer, the user of said computer will always be able to find a way to get the data. An analogy would be FM radio. You can broadcast all you want, but you cannot prevent someone from recording the broadcast. You can raise the bar with your Web site by obfuscating, disabling, not caching, etc. You can make it more difficult; you cannot make it impossible. The correct way to protect your data is to require authentication with the server and then encrypt the subsequent communication.

gee, that is a nice mouse

jeffdav — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 21:19:00 GMT

I inadvertently won a new Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer with Tilt Wheel Technology, the Look and Feel of Leather, and Three Times Longer Battery Life. So I plugged it in. It is actually a really nice mouse. They finally made it so the scroll wheel does not click. I am all about the firm, smooth-rolling scrolling. The sideways scrolling is kind of useless, and I was miffed that I had to install IntelliPoint 5 to get it to work, but I am hoping I will be able to assign some other functionality to the sideways scroll in Halo. I have only had it for two days, so the jury is still out on the battery life. I was also annoyed that the default action for pusing the wheel button was Next App instead of AutoScroll, but that was easy to change in the cpl. The cpl is very pretty.

Overall this is the best mouse I have ever used. I would recommend it.

channel 9

jeffdav — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:07:00 GMT

If you have not had a chance to check out channel 9, click on over.

direct to my wrist

jeffdav — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 23:29:00 GMT

I got one of these. It was given to me by a coworker. I have been wearing it. It entertains me in meetings and such, but it does not update as often as I would like. It seems I do not get reception for it inside the building where I work. <snif/>

television security and msn security

jeffdav — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 22:49:00 GMT

A news channel in North Carolina made a classic security mistake.

This is similar to a mistake that MSN made a while back. There was a web page that verified your username/password before allowing you to make account changes, but the subsequent pages did not check the authentication-- the account name to use was simply passed along in the url. So you could login with your account, then change the account name to someone elses once you had been authenticated. The moral of this story: whenever something changes, you must insure you still have a valid context or require re-authentication!

There are screen shots of the results of the news channel's failure to approve changes to already approved announcements. Some may be offensive, but nothing too bad.

tuesday update

jeffdav — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:10:00 GMT

Well, the Cracker/Camper show last night was really good. I always find it interesting to see who else from works shows up at rock shows. Interestingly enough, there was a large overlap in attendence between this show and G3. Anyway, we staked out good spots near the stage. This is important because I like to be able to see the player's fingers on their instruments. I knew about fifty per cent of the songs played. I think I can play every bass line from watching their bass player. While watching Camper Van the thought occured to me that they were a bunch of slightly above average musicians who came together to form one heck of a band.

Question: What is the (current) difference between Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven?
Answer: A guitar player.

It is amazing the difference a guitar player makes. The Cracker songs were much more intense. It was a good set, but the encore was... well... annoying. They played three songs in some wierd medly jam-band style. The violin player had a gameboy (original) to keep him occupied, but we had to just stand there. Bleh.

Cracker played a song off their new disc called Duty Free. This is strikingly similar to a song by Ike Reilly of the same title. I assume they both derived from the same source. Does anybody know what that source would be?

In other news, the team is working very hard to drive to zero bugs. To help unwind on fridays I have set up a dedicated Halo PC server. Well, it helps with my stress levels.

of cars and computers

jeffdav — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 04:11:00 GMT

Often I see or hear people comparing computers and cars to make a point. One such argument goes something like this: "If a car manufacturer builds a vehicle that is flawed and causes physical or economical damage to people or businesses, then the car manufacturer is liable. So why is it that a software company can write really buggy code and not be held liable for damages?" Recently Raymond compared computers and cars, arguing that he can drive without knowing how a car works, so he should be able to send e-mail without knowing how a computer works.

While I do not necessarily agree or disagree with these arguments, I do think that the computer-car analogy is inherently flawed:

1. Computers are general purpose machines, cars have a few very specific purposes. Look at the number of features in Word vs the number of features in the average car. Office has a feature that hides features!

2. You never know what someone will plug into a computer. Users expect to be able to plug any random hardware into their computer and have it work.

3. Cars do not have to be backwards compatabile. Nobody is disappointed if the radiator from their 1985 Thunderbird does not work in their new 2004 Thunderbird.

4. Components are much more isolated in cars. Changing the radio in a car generally does not effect the transmission. Upgrading the tires never causes the engine to completely stop working. Upgrading your sound card might cause all sorts of problems.

5. We know how to build cars that do not explode. Nobody knows how to build perfect software. I know of no useful software that has zero bugs. Operating systems, browsers, editors, compilers... they all have bugs.

Now to be fair, there is a certain car-computer analogy that I like to use. To help realize the potential of the web, Internet Explorer supports a technology known as ActiveX. But automatically downloading and running these executables is a dangerous security risk, so IE displays a big, nasty dialog saying, "Are you sure you want to install and run this... ?" Well, my family has no idea what ActiveX controls are, and they have no idea what the implications of installing and running one might be, so they follow the established behavior of trying to get rid of the dialog as quickly as possible and still have the web page do what it is allegedly supposed to do. So when I fly home to visit, I have to spend hours excising evil software from their computers. So I explained it like this: "There are places in town where you would think twice about parking because it is very probable that someone will attempt to break-in to the car, and if you did park there you would certainly lock the doors. Likewise, there are places on the internet where you should think twice about going, and if you do go there you should definitely not let them install anything on your computer!"

I do not know if that will save anyone... we still have a ways to go make the web safe and usable. But I think the analogy holds up... it is not so much comparing cars and computers as comparing how malicious people interact with cars and computers.