a general complaint that the UX stinks is not actionable. if you can collect information documenting the pain points - tech support had to spend a whole hour with a customer because of a misunderstanding about this button, end users are making 10 clicks to do a common action when it could be reduced to 6, and so on - those issues can and should be filed in a tracker where they can get attention and be prioritized alongside the company's other concerns.
the relevant quote is: "quality is a feature, too." (-caskey dickson)
you might want a tool storing claims in the form of RDF triples; these can be used as the basis for deductive reasoning. one standard in this area is the Web Ontology Language. several software reasoners are named in the wikipedia article. also, for existing knowledge bases, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language#Public_ontologies
as you work, collect lists of everything you think went wrong in your programs and programming practices (both practical and academic). you will then be prepared to sit down with your notes from the last quarter and identify broader themes. once you can frame issues in common terms - e.g. your web API mangles UTF-8 input, or you find that you are creating new bugs at an unpleasant rate, or your users aren't understanding your documentation well - you can look up how others have addressed these problems. then the action items will become apparent (eliminate operations that assume input is 8859-1, or adopt a unit testing framework, or work with a technical writer to clarify the text).
calling aztec images "prehistoric" is racist. would a society without recorded history have one of the most advanced calendars of all time, still being reproduced on coffee mugs?
while working on my B.S. at johns hopkins, i spent the year 98-99 at the engineering college ("beaucheff") of the university of chile in santiago. this is the country's premier technical school. the curriculum was quite rigorous, and i studied with some very serious professors including the current head of yahoo! research in spain and the director of the chilean council on nuclear power. lectures and projects are in spanish, textbooks are in english. like anywhere, the bureaucracy was a challenge. it comes recommended because i had a hell of a year.
non-windows users hate microsoft. non-US citizens hate the US. coincidence? i think it's impossible for a sole superpower to be well-liked. their actions are extra scrutinized and they are held to higher standards. so both microsoft and the US suck, according to best practices. they are doing pretty well according to looser "good" practices.
yes, it is possible to use a single regulated supply for all devices that run on the same voltage. in the case of my portable electronics, it's almost universally 5VDC, which is also what is used for power over USB. if you are handy enough with a soldering iron to put the various output plugs (barrel connectors and so on) in parallel, one sufficiently robust supply can power them all. to calculate the output wattage needed, add the maximum power draws of the loads you expect to plug in at once. if not listed, the latter can be measured with the DC ammeter portion of any multimeter. for reasons of weight you will probably want a switching supply rather than linear (which includes a large transformer). many supplies are prewired to accept (say) 100-240VAC, 50/60 Hz, so they are useful worldwide as long as you can get it into the wall. one possible variation is a more complex supply with multiple output voltages (e.g. 3.3v, 12v, etc.). NB, regulating a small amount of 3.3V power out of 5V is close to trivial with a regulator IC. hope this helps.
i won't comment on the software appropriate for your needs, because many people already have. however, i would like to elaborate on the usefulness of a meaningful physical ordering. yes, databases can answer arbitrary queries and find you subsets that will never appear together on the shelf: a one-dimensional list of books, what the shelf holds, can exhibit at most one top-level order. what you have probably noticed in practice if not theory is that a single order, say by the surname of the author/editor, does in fact suffice for many library accesses. i would by no means suggest that it supplants a database, but to avoid having a top-level ordering is to sacrifice the possibility of finding a book without referring to the computer, as you have found. i highly recommend that you implement a simple ordering scheme for the physical artifacts. many well-known sort algorithms are documented in knuth and elsewhere!
has anyone noticed that apple is still selling 128 kbps constant bitrate files as if they were authoritative? i love the practicality of lossy encodings, but (a) variable bitrates are hugely more effective for a given filesize and (b) 128 kbps is not enough information in any encoding for high-fidelity reproduction. apple and bose, et al, are propagating the idea that plugging an iPod with such tunes into a stereo docking station will yield good sound. you don't have to be an audiophile or know anything about the amplifier circuitry or speakers involved to disagree with their premise.
what i found was that all my devices ran on 5VDC or 12VDC. some had regulated and some unregulated power, so i figured that they could all be run on two regulated rails, one at each voltage. a sola dual-output regulated supply was available on ebay. i added the AC jack, fusing, and power indicator; the eight DC outputs are to be installed. i chose RCA jacks because there is no risk of shorts and they are cheap and easy to wire. the idea is to make a series of short RCA plug to DC coax barrel connector cables, one per device. the unit will be covered against spills and mounted underneath my desk.
check it out.
you can see the four output terminals, each of which is a little wire bridge, in front. the chassis is grounded. each bi-phase AC conductor is fused at 2A.
next step is a single regulated supply for travel (5VDC only in this case) so i have to bring only a single wall-wart on trips.
i would go for the el cheapo CD players. open them up and wire the play and stop buttons, say, with just one button on front. you'll have to build that anyway. then distributing the content to them will be a little tedious but very easy: burn the 3-minute CDs and leave them in there. if one dies the parts are trivially cheap.
i used to work there myself and the monosyllabic "sco" was a fully normal way to call the place. now, it still is a little weird that he's inconsistent....
musicXML's own web site describes it as useful for "common Western musical notation from the 17th century onwards." well, great. so i can't annotate unusual Western classical music, or popular Western music, or classical Japanese music, or even Gregorian chants? perhaps this will truly be useful for some people, but those of us looking for an abstract solution (!) cannot be satisfied.
technically, the schema is heavily dependent on then nuances of specific classical instruments and the 12-tone scale. i think that any *modern* scheme will represent other tunings and timbres.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly, Dr. Ink. the arcade version of Asteroids will be much more missed than Duck Hunt.
cheers -- aaron.
a general complaint that the UX stinks is not actionable. if you can collect information documenting the pain points - tech support had to spend a whole hour with a customer because of a misunderstanding about this button, end users are making 10 clicks to do a common action when it could be reduced to 6, and so on - those issues can and should be filed in a tracker where they can get attention and be prioritized alongside the company's other concerns.
the relevant quote is: "quality is a feature, too." (-caskey dickson)
you might want a tool storing claims in the form of RDF triples; these can be used as the basis for deductive reasoning. one standard in this area is the Web Ontology Language. several software reasoners are named in the wikipedia article. also, for existing knowledge bases, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language#Public_ontologies
go read "peopleware" by demarco and lister. this classic addresses what makes a productive workplace in creative technical work. indispensable.
i frequently have the same pulsation problem with the stock android, so perhaps it is a hardware failure.
one case in which reverse engineering will not succeed is if the program is obfuscated in order to conceal a newly developed algorithm.
... i pace in front of a whiteboard during work hours. not to mention all the walking across campus. in my case this required a master's degree.
as you work, collect lists of everything you think went wrong in your programs and programming practices (both practical and academic). you will then be prepared to sit down with your notes from the last quarter and identify broader themes. once you can frame issues in common terms - e.g. your web API mangles UTF-8 input, or you find that you are creating new bugs at an unpleasant rate, or your users aren't understanding your documentation well - you can look up how others have addressed these problems. then the action items will become apparent (eliminate operations that assume input is 8859-1, or adopt a unit testing framework, or work with a technical writer to clarify the text).
do consider placing the computer you choose farther away. in many cases, putting it in the next room or attic or a cabinet will resolve this problem.
calling aztec images "prehistoric" is racist. would a society without recorded history have one of the most advanced calendars of all time, still being reproduced on coffee mugs?
while working on my B.S. at johns hopkins, i spent the year 98-99 at the engineering college ("beaucheff") of the university of chile in santiago. this is the country's premier technical school. the curriculum was quite rigorous, and i studied with some very serious professors including the current head of yahoo! research in spain and the director of the chilean council on nuclear power. lectures and projects are in spanish, textbooks are in english. like anywhere, the bureaucracy was a challenge. it comes recommended because i had a hell of a year.
non-windows users hate microsoft. non-US citizens hate the US. coincidence? i think it's impossible for a sole superpower to be well-liked. their actions are extra scrutinized and they are held to higher standards. so both microsoft and the US suck, according to best practices. they are doing pretty well according to looser "good" practices.
check out my unusual work desk installation, inspired by hoodless muscle cars.
yes, it is possible to use a single regulated supply for all devices that run on the same voltage. in the case of my portable electronics, it's almost universally 5VDC, which is also what is used for power over USB. if you are handy enough with a soldering iron to put the various output plugs (barrel connectors and so on) in parallel, one sufficiently robust supply can power them all. to calculate the output wattage needed, add the maximum power draws of the loads you expect to plug in at once. if not listed, the latter can be measured with the DC ammeter portion of any multimeter. for reasons of weight you will probably want a switching supply rather than linear (which includes a large transformer). many supplies are prewired to accept (say) 100-240VAC, 50/60 Hz, so they are useful worldwide as long as you can get it into the wall. one possible variation is a more complex supply with multiple output voltages (e.g. 3.3v, 12v, etc.). NB, regulating a small amount of 3.3V power out of 5V is close to trivial with a regulator IC. hope this helps.
i won't comment on the software appropriate for your needs, because many people already have. however, i would like to elaborate on the usefulness of a meaningful physical ordering. yes, databases can answer arbitrary queries and find you subsets that will never appear together on the shelf: a one-dimensional list of books, what the shelf holds, can exhibit at most one top-level order. what you have probably noticed in practice if not theory is that a single order, say by the surname of the author/editor, does in fact suffice for many library accesses. i would by no means suggest that it supplants a database, but to avoid having a top-level ordering is to sacrifice the possibility of finding a book without referring to the computer, as you have found. i highly recommend that you implement a simple ordering scheme for the physical artifacts. many well-known sort algorithms are documented in knuth and elsewhere!
cheers,
aaron.
has anyone noticed that apple is still selling 128 kbps constant bitrate files as if they were authoritative? i love the practicality of lossy encodings, but (a) variable bitrates are hugely more effective for a given filesize and (b) 128 kbps is not enough information in any encoding for high-fidelity reproduction. apple and bose, et al, are propagating the idea that plugging an iPod with such tunes into a stereo docking station will yield good sound. you don't have to be an audiophile or know anything about the amplifier circuitry or speakers involved to disagree with their premise.
check it out. you can see the four output terminals, each of which is a little wire bridge, in front. the chassis is grounded. each bi-phase AC conductor is fused at 2A.
next step is a single regulated supply for travel (5VDC only in this case) so i have to bring only a single wall-wart on trips.
real designers can work without canned templates. nuff said
60'! damn!
yep, the lizard is the one i miss.
exactly. this has to be the worst-categorized story i've seen on here in a long time.
try something not 'tailored for nerds'!! geez...
i would go for the el cheapo CD players. open them up and wire the play and stop buttons, say, with just one button on front. you'll have to build that anyway. then distributing the content to them will be a little tedious but very easy: burn the 3-minute CDs and leave them in there. if one dies the parts are trivially cheap.
i used to work there myself and the monosyllabic "sco" was a fully normal way to call the place. now, it still is a little weird that he's inconsistent....
musicXML's own web site describes it as useful for "common Western musical notation from the 17th century onwards." well, great. so i can't annotate unusual Western classical music, or popular Western music, or classical Japanese music, or even Gregorian chants? perhaps this will truly be useful for some people, but those of us looking for an abstract solution (!) cannot be satisfied.
technically, the schema is heavily dependent on then nuances of specific classical instruments and the 12-tone scale. i think that any *modern* scheme will represent other tunings and timbres.