Nielsen pulling percentages out of his hat again "If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion and reduced ability to navigate smoothly."

El Reg reader competition - black helicopters all over the place

Classic essay by Vannevar Bush - shared bookmarks predicted in 1945 Oddly prescient, this essay by the father of the U.S. National Science Foundation is deservedly a classic. He speculates about a yet-to-be-invented machine which he calls a "memex" and describes it in a way which sounds a lot like a personal computer. Missing from the picture, but easy to imagine, is the Internet. But the image of scientists making "trails" of annotations and sharing them with each other is closely matched by ... surfers collecting bookmarks, tagging them using ad hoc tags, and sharing them via the internet. The stuff about the "memex" is only towards the end - skip to section 5 if you find the first pages boring. As is my habit, I have linked to the "printer friendly" version of the article. The authoritative location is . There are also various more or less legitimate copies all over the net. Oh, he misspelled "Hollerith". Sorry, couldn't resist noticing.

Sheesh, people just DO NOT GET password security '"Our policy is that employees safeguard their passwords and access codes so we can ensure privacy and confidentiality for our patients. A violation of that policy can result in termination." Nelson said she knew the policy but says that workers sharing log-ins isn't uncommon.' The woman still wants to appeal her termination.

"The browser should use several easy to collect kinds of data to improve the user's ability to get value out of bookmarks."

"this wasn't a matter of hacking into her phone at all, [instead, they used] a well-known security flaw on T-Mobile's Web site, with which the phone is synchronized" (Sic, the link is to a ".htm" file. The "print friendly" link seems to be broken, otherwise I'd have linked to that as usual.)

Usability guru Jef Raskin died in February of 2005 You'd think THEY would have thought of giving the page a sensible title, but nooo.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." "Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."

Concrete Template Toolkit examples from real life

Accessible introduction to entropy (code samples in PHP) Other than that, useful and enjoyable.