Lars Pind

I picked up a copy of Designing Visual Interfaces on Jason Fried’s recommendation, and despite the fact that it’s about desktop software, not web software, it is really the best interface design book I’ve come across.

And don’t let the steep price tag scare you, it is well worth it. In fact, it is taking me a long time to read, because it is so packed with information. I’m only about halfway through, but still ready to declare it a winner.

Each chapter is structured the same way, with theory, principles, common errors, and techniques, and it really gives you the timelesse tools you need to see and think about interface design.

It’s like Tufte, but for software.

Update: Christina Wodtke read it 4 years ago, and liked it, too.

I bought my admission ticket for the Carson Workshops Summit, but not the plane ticket yet. Who else is coming? Want to catch the same flight if you’re flying from Copenhagen?

I have a project where I need to create output in HTML, plaintext, Word doc, RTF, and PDF formats. The Word doc options seems particularly annoying.

A clean solution would be something that allowed these different outputs from the same source in XML, Markdown, or something like that.

The requirements are that it must run on UNIX, it must work with Word 2000 and forward, so the 2003 WordprocessingML format won’t cut it, and I prefer free and open source solutions. Something that has a good API in Ruby is nice, but not required.

Do you have any pointers to help me get started?

In case you’ve missed it, I’m moblogging over at 23. My RSS feed is here.

Nu prøvede vi det så, og jeg må konstatere, at jeg foretrækker at køre frem for at tage færgen fra Odden til Århus, når man skal mellem København og Århus.

Fordelene er ellers indlysende: Der er mindre tid bag rettet, og man kan i stedet slappe af, læse, gå rundt, spise lidt mad. Og prisen og tiden er cirka den samme.

Men ulemperne opvejer alligevel nemt fordelene:

• Man skal tilpasse sig færgens sejlplan, så man ender tit med at køre lidt for stærkt eller vente lidt for længe i færgehavnen. Vil man være sikker skal man oven i købet reservere i forvejen.
• Tiden bliver hakket i stykker: Man skal holde i kø til billetter og mens man venter på færgen, man skal køre ombord, pakke ting, skynde sig for at få anstændige pladser, pakke ned, vente på at køre ombord, osv. Det ender alligevel med at blive til meget spildtid.
• Turen fra motorvejen slutter til Odden er ensporet og træls. Motorveje er mere behagelige, og vel også mere sikre at køre på.
• Hvis færgen er forsinket, hvilket den var for os begge veje, er det hurtigere at køre.
• Hvis færgen gynger meget, som den gjorde for os begge veje, kan man alligevel ikke læse og bruge tiden til noget, særligt hvis man som jeg ikke er særlig søstærk.
• Maden er alligevel dårlig og alt for dyr.

Alt i alt vil jeg hellere køre hele vejen. Så langt er det jo heller ikke sammenlignet med en tur ned gennem Europa, som de fleste af os vel har prøvet nogle gange.

I found this icon posted inside an elevator, above the door. What is it trying to say? Don’t kick your suitcase so it slams into the doors? Or don’t be mad at your suitcase, it’s not its fault that the elevator is slow?

I like the very lively depiction of a person.

Richard Hamming: “I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.”

Awesome talk from almost 20 years ago about doing important work. Not much to add, just go read it if that’s your kind of thing. I love the “Great Thoughts” Fridays.

If you find yourself revisiting decisions over and over again, or just being unsure of decisions you have made, it might be because you’ve short-circuited the decision making process.

When this happens, it’s good to step back and follow a decision making process very explicitly. It doesn’t have to take a long time, but it’s important to be disciplined about it. Here’s one that works for me. It works for anything from decisions about software features or interface details, to where to go on your next vacation.

1. Define the problem.
2. Define the criteria to evaluate solutions by. Criteria can be performance, simplicity, completeness, memorable, understandable, fun, etc. All decisions are trade-offs, and you need to know what to trade. Together, step 1 and 2 defines what you want to achieve. It’s half the job. Really.
3. Brainstorm. Generate as many options as you can think of. A surgeon told me to always find at least 17. That’s pretty challenging, but it’s important to get past the obvious ones. Suspend judgment, and list as many as you can think of.
4. Evaluate. For each option, list the pros and cons, and evaluate them against the criteria you set forth in step 2.
5. Choose. After you’ve done the above, making the actual decision is easy.

The great thing about the process is that making the actual decision becomes the easiest part. And if you still find that you need to revisit the decision, you can go back to your lists and find out exactly what went wrong: Was it the problem, the criteria, options or pros/cons that didn’t come to mind? Where does the new information put you? Then just make a new decision and move on.

Like I said, it doesn’t have to take long. Usually half an hour does wonders, though it could be much shorter or much longer. Whatever time it takes, the good news is that the effort you put in here will save you from bad decisions and from second thoughts about good decisions.

Shortly after my first child was born, my friend Branimir gave me a copy of Unconditional Parenting because, as he said, there should not be another child growing up without his parents having read this book. I’m glad he did.

When you pace, manipulate, punish, and reward your child into living up to certain expectations, to go in a certain direction, to be good at whatever it is you reward them for being good at, your child will lose his own compass. Whether it’s eating, sports, or business, the child will have a hard time telling whether he or she wants to do something because he really wants to, or because he wants the reward that comes with it. Even if the parents aren’t doling out rewards anymore.

I know it from first-hand experience, of course. In a few areas, I simply can’t tell whether it’s me wanting to do something in a certain way, or whether it’s me wanting to please my father or my mother. Sometimes all three of us get tangled up, and I get paralyzed trying to figure out which is which.

It’s an interesting, if not terribly unique, challenge. Reading the book made me understand what was really going on in those situations. It also made me want to not do the same to my own children.

It’s an odd effect when the bread crumb metaphor is taken too literally, as it is on meyersmad.dk.

It says something like “Coffee > Pickles > Vinegar > Oil”, which clearly isn’t a hierarchical taxonomy. Instead, it’s the list of pages I’ve visited in chronological order. I’ve never seen anyone do it this way before, and it took me a minute to realize this was what was going on.

Overall, the web site has clearly been designed with some care and attention, yet I find it very hard to navigate and to get an overview of what’s on offer from the company. Hey, Claus Meyer, let me know if you want me to do your site ;->

Trackback has always bothered me as a solution. Why would I have to ping your site to tell you I’m linking to you, when search engines can easily tell you who is linking to your site? When I look at the trackbacks I get, almost all of them are spam. And even when trackbacks are working as intended, the excerpts include tend to be irrelevant, so you still have to click through to find out what’s going on in this conversation.

What’s your experience? Are trackbacks helping or are they just a dated technology made obsolete by Technorati, memeorandum and their ilk? If you were to implement a new lean blog engine, would you include trackback support?

Christmas eve, where we danes throw the big celebration, is over and everything went well. The children were happy, including ours. What more can you ask for?

We bought the Philips SC479 DECT baby monitor, and while the feature set is great (there are many we don’t use, but it has everything we need), it’s the physical features that kills its utility. Here’s what’s wrong with it:

• It drains the batteries even while switched off, so you have to physically remove the batteries. If you don’t, it won’t have power when you need it to.
• The batteries are very hard to remove. The compartment is a little too tight for the batteries to be removed without cracking your nails.
• The battery clip on the parent unit needs to be removed to get to the batteries, but it is so tight you have to use a screwdriver to clip it off. Breaking it completely is all too easy.

The clerk told us it was a well-known problem, when we complained. We’ve had ours exchanged once, but the problem remains. Oh, did I mention it’s butt-ugly, too?

It’s quite fascinating how a product that makes pretty good use of all that digital offers fumbles the basic physical properties. Philips has been making battery driven products for how long again?

Check out this awesome interface at the toilet on the train in Switzerland. The flush button is nowhere near the toilet, it’s above the sink. And the button for the dryer is on the right, but the air comes out at the left. I bet the designers had tons of fun with that one ;->

It reminds me of the bathrooms at Bankeråt, where turning the knob at one sink makes the water flow at the next one. A must-pee experience!

Og glædelig jul til dig, Pollas.

Comments on this site have been fixed. I had a hunch it had to do with some of my stats, and now I found out what it was: I had installed MeasureMap wrong.

We were stranded for a night in Amsterdam, an were put up in a standard, basic airport hotel. The elevator had a pitch for the hotel restaurant, claiming it was basically a gourmet place. It wasn’t.

How refreshing it would be to read something like this instead: “We know you wouldn’t believe us if we hyped our restaurant, so we won’t. You and we both know how hard it is to get a great chef to work at a place like this. Our fare is fairly standard, nothing grand or exciting, but it will satisfy your hunger, and we do try our best to make it worth your appetite. Enjoy!”

The hotel did have a nice mini-bar concept: An empty fridge, which you could stock from a large fridge at the reception with exactly what you wanted, at regular street prices. Very refreshing. No more overpriced 20cl coke bottles, and tiny bottles of Bailey’s when what you really want is many large bottles of water.

As a courtesy to the next passenger, please wipe the sink after you’re done.

That’s roughly the text in airline bathrooms. But it’s always confused me: Is that really the primary concern? From some of the bathrooms I’ve seen, it would be more prudent to ask people to wipe the toilet seat, or to try not to piss on the floor.

Our server, which runs this site and Boxes and Arrows, got hacked last night while I was at the christmas lunch party at DR, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. It happened at 8 PM CEST, 11 AM PST, and it took me about 14 hours to get everything back up and running. The backups were from around noon, so we’ve lost 8 hours worth of data. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like there was any user-contributed content among that, fingers crossed.

The bad news, of course, is that it happened. The good news is that it gave us, shall we say, a very realistic disaster recovery drill. I’ve definitely learnt something from the experience.

I had my hosting provider reinstall the OS from scratch on the server. Once you’re 0wn3d, there’s no saving the software on it. It took a few hours, and so around 11 PM it was ready for me to dive into again. And I took some extra time to make sure the server isn’t running anything it doesn’t need.

One thing I’ve changed is have backups run every hour, in addition to every day. The daily backup goes to a backup server where I can retrieve old versions. The hourly backup goes to another server via rsync.

It was a pretty weird night and morning. The president of DR lost his jacket with his wallet and everything during the christmas lunch party, and when we got up this morning, Caroline couldn’t find hers. Also, I’d just demoed PublicSquare to someone there when it went down. Normally I’d have a few beers at an occasion like that, but this particular night, I didn’t feel like it. Lucky, given that I ended up working till 7.30 in the morning.

So we’re up again, and I’ve learned quite a bit from the experience. Should this ever happen again, knock on wood, I’d be even better prepared to get everything back in place quickly. And no, I’m not daring you.

UPDATE: Friday keeps getting weirder. John Spencer, AKA Leo McGarry, died that night. And I just got a call from Ekstra Bladet who wanted to know more details about the jacket. I declined.

I’m waiting for a delayed flight at Copenhagen Airport, and they have flight information on the front page of their web site, and they can send an SMS when there are updates to the information. At no cost. Very clever. That means I can sit quietly and work, and not have to run over to check the monitors all the time. Thank you!

It’s wicked how easy it is to forget to think.

When we had our baby about 5 months ago now, I suddenly found myself with plenty of time to think, but less time to work than I was used to. I couldn’t sit down at the keyboard, but I could stand up at the whiteboard and think and sketch with Flora in the babybjorn.

It turned out that I did some great thinking. And when I did sit down at the computer I was more productive because I knew exactly what I needed to do, and the details were already thought through, so there were no dead ends and U-turns.

But recently I found that I had again gotten out of the habit of thinking.

I think it’s probably a heavy computer user syndrome. You get so used to doing everything with the computer - reading, writing, listening to music, watching TV and movies, talking to your friends - that you forget that it pays to have time, away from the computer, even for work.

So the other day, I was reminded once again, when I this Aristotle quote (thanks to Jason Fried):

Thinking requires leisure time.

It’s really quite simple. Thinking is an activity. Thinking takes time. It doesn’t just happen by itself. It only happens when you actively do it, or at least, when you have the time for it.

The upside is that it’s easier than you might think. At least I find that problems that have been lurking in the back of my mind and seemed a bit scary often have a simple, easy, and painless solution once I take the time to think them up.

So I’m going to take some time to think this holidays season. And I should probably put a reminder in my calendar for mid-January when I’ll have forgotten to think again.

This site is running Rails 1.0.0. And so is Boxes and Arrows.

Major congratulations to David for this important milestone. It’s impressive indeed what this young man has accomplished. I’m in awe.

You deserve it: Congratulations!

I too have a link to Technorati showing who’s linking to me, just like Dave Winer. I found some posts I hadn’t seen, too.

My dad, Torben, turns 70 today. Congratulations!

Now we have the publicsquarehq.com site up, where you can read a bit more about what we’re trying to do, and sign up to be notified when we launch.

We also want to get the blog up in a bit. I’ll let you know when that happens.

Since the new Boxes and Arrows platform is designed to make it easy for readers to become authors, I’m quite happy to see that we got our first story suggestion in just a few hours after launch. This’ll be fun.

Also, we’re constantly tweaking things. I’ve deployed 14 changes so far today. With automated testing and Switchtower, it’s easy.

I’ve seen some requests to boxesandarrows.com with HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST=myweb2.search.yahoo.com. They go to the right virtual server just fine, but Rails, and most other web app frameworks that I’ve seen, have decided that when HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST is present, it trumps HTTP_HOST.

I haven’t been able to find a good resource to tell me how it’s intended to be used, so I can determine whether Yahoo is mistaken, and what the best way to handle it is. It would seem to be used with proxies, but that’s about all I dare guess.

It seems to happen when people save a search for a B&A story to their My Web 2.0 Search, in which case Yahoo sends this weird request from a proxy server of theirs, proxy2.search.scd.yahoo.net.

Can anyone help clarify?

We have flipped the switch and launched Boxes and Arrows on our new “we media” product, PublicSquare. (If you’re not seeing “Under the Boxes-and-Arrows hood” as the top story, you’re still seeing the old site - be patient with the DNS.)

The product is designed specifically for we media, or peer-produced online publishing. No more trying to shoehorn your site into software designed for blogs or generic online communities (whatever that is).

Boxes and Arrows is a prime example of a peer-produced publication, so it’s quite a thrill to have them as the first publication to go live.

We’re expecting to open the doors to the general public very soon indeed.

Now it would’ve been nice to have the PublicSquare site ready now, but we don’t - we wanted to get Boxes and Arrows up while it was still weekend. I’ll post an update here with the URL as soon as that site is up.

1 del Hellmans mayo (Iso eller Irma) og 1 del Piccalilly remo puré (Mad & Vin), lidt salt og lidt peber, og du har en hjemmelavet remo, der er klasser over hvad du køber som hjemmelavet hos slagteren eller fiskehandleren. Det er da nyttigt at vide, ik’?