Firefox extension incorporating Nick Wolff's Password Generator bookmarklet

Guess how many of these guidelines de.lirio.us violates ...?

Why not to mess with fonts and links, use gratuitous pop-ups, Flash, or IE-only design, etc I'm generally vaguely skeptical of Nielsen's "Alert Box" columns, but this is very focused and to the point, and based on a survey of his readers. Must read for anyone who has or plans to have a web site.

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."

For a change , some do's instead of dont't from Nielsen

The mistakes all the big sites continue to make

For once, Jakob Nielsen gets it spot-on "For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon." -- Jakob Nielsen

If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win --- I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts

From an on-line Interactive Fiction magazine issue from 2001 ... Dunno how I stumbled over this "If you're writing a story-game, the code should automatically unlock and open doors you walk through if you have the key; it's just tedious if it doesn't. But if you're writing a puzzle game, then the code definitely shouldn't - if a player has had to work like fury to get that key then let them have the satisfaction of getting to unlock the damn door with it. Otherwise it plays like the game is tapping its watch saying 'I've grown grey hairs waiting for you to get on and solve that! Can we hurry up, please?'"

McAfee's GUI makeover

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.

On how the command line is to a Unix weenie like the keyboard to a pianist "I call this class of interface 'mastery interfaces', and they are curious because they are amazingly unusable to beginners and effortlessly usable to 'experts'. This characteristic creates something of an odd social dynamic amongst the userbase. The experts can barely (if at all) re-acquaint themselves with the frustrations that newbies face, and thus have very few (and skewed) insights on how to make the system more broadly usable."

Common-sense newbie hints for assessing the credibility of a site (UC Berkeley library Internet workshop)

"I've been saturated with Unix-peanut-gallery effluvia for so long that it no longer even surprises me when every question -- no matter how simple -- results in someone suggesting that you either A) patch your kernel or B) change distros. It's inevitable and inescapable, like Hitler."

Why is it that the "printer-friendly" page always looks better than the "real" page?

I typed in "http;//ubuntulinux.com" by mistake, and had a hard time figuring out how I ended up where I did This is all Knoppix' fault. It supplied me with a choice of US, German, or French keyboard, all of which suck for me. (Serves me right for not getting Gnoppix instead. Or, welp, the Ubuntu Live CD, which is what I am downloading now.) ... And partially Firefox's, for having the "I'm feeling lucky" button as the default for Google keywords.

A companion to The Art of Unix Programming, by ESR et al.

Sheesh, you need some Adware Player for their tutorial

"Some design elements on this Web site may render awkwardly if font sizes are changed in browser preferences or if viewed through Internet Explorer, because of its cavalier treatment of HTML and CSS standards"

"You don’t realize it’s happening until your 'About Us' page begins to smell bad and try to bite your face."

Use case methodologies for threat modelling I thought I was clever but this guy was first. The same author has written other articles about this concept; see CiteSeer and/or Google for more.

Peter Seebach on how users resist change

Ooo, user tags for the Debian BTS. How ... folksonomic Now that's inspired. And I like the security model. Now if I could only find the time to tag all the bugs I've submitted ...

Encode hex into a sequence of words (kind of like SSH "bubble babble")

Firefox / Mozilla extension to display "alt" attributes as tooltips, even multi-line ones I'm hesitant to install this based on the site's being in Japan (cf. tab browsing extension) and having a rather flimsy description, but not having multi-line tooltips is a grand nuisance (my webmail provider uses them extensively).

On how to write "proper" HTML for use in the real world "So if you want to use bold or italics, and HTML doesn’t have a semantic element for what you mean, use b or i. If you’re not sure which semantic element to use, use b or i. And if you’re creating an authoring tool for people who won’t know or care about semantics, please leave the semantic markup alone, and just stick to b and i. Thankyou." (Quotation actually from a linked, earlier posting.)

If it looks like an input form, people will use it to formulate input "It’s not so much of a problem when Bugzilla is used by a small or professional team, because participants have social or disciplinary incentives (or both) to ensure everything they do in the system is productive. But when Bugzilla is used by a large mostly-volunteer team, as it is with the Mozilla Project, you get problems. People argue about whether something is a bug or not. They argue about its severity. They argue about its schedule. They plead for the bug to be fixed soon. They throw tantrums. They make long tedious comments no-one can understand. In short, they treat Bugzilla as a discussion forum."

Post from 1999, oddly topical still I've been meaning to compose a detailed bug report for Ubuntu about the session manager in Gnome; obviously it's not Ubuntu's fault that the upstream is finicky but they might be better motivated to actually do something about it :-/ I'd really like to be able to change the saved session without messing up the current session. It's not possible to have perfect sync anyhow, what with all kinds of clients which depend on other stuff being there before they will run, and which often can't save their session in a meaningful way anyhow (think remote xterm, and/or anything which connects to a tunneled ssh port). By extension, when launching a client, indicate that it's not supposed to be session managed (or vice versa -- indicate that it is, and make the default be to not manage). When I run gnome-session-save, it saves all the current clients; fair enough, but that is also the only way to save a session. What if I just want to make a minor modification to the previously saved session? Would I need to launch a separate session just for that? Log out and then back in again, tweak, save session, relaunch all the stuff which I don't want to run via the session manager? Sorry, I won't. Or start a second X server and tweak the session in there, then log out again? Precarious, and then how do I import the change to my main session?

Jef Raskin on how the Macintosh project's history is weirdly biased in the media Ironically: "it’s not as if this is ancient history and all the principals and their relatives are long dead (though time is running short in this regard)." (Jef Raskin died in February 2005.)

Matthew Thomas' analysis of the current text encoding GUI in Mozilla/Firefox

Visions for X11 and Linux development by one of the original X11 authors Too bad the "editor" didn't actually "edit" the text; it's not very professionally written. But many good insights and principles here. (I picked this up from The Art of Unix Programming, which recommends it even more heartily than I would dare. It's not +that+ insightful.)

Adopt Firefox's / Mozilla's feed icon as a standard Not a terrible idea, but the site and the hype is clearly overblown for such a minor thing. Ironical, too, that the site only has a mailing list, no feed!

The guy is not clueless. He (justly) cares about those who are I'm glad Ubuntu has somebody who is thinking about what the system is like for a real, live, first-time Linux convert wannabe. Sure, a few of the points are probably there just so he could make the list longer ... The only two items I take exception with are #20 ("technical gibberish" displayed during startup and shutdown -- it doesn't hurt, IMHO) and #30 (display of time "for no apparent reason" in XScreensaver ... yes, maybe it should actually display the temperature too!) Among the things I particularly agree about are -- #32 -- no way to put the laptop to sleep. This is one of the major problems with using Linux on laptops right now -- each model has its own oddities and you can't know for sure until you've tried whether any particular set of kernel and userland utilities will work. (I'm mentioning this one out of sequence because I think it's the #1 killer issue on the list.) #3 -- buttons with both text and an icon are Just Wrong. I simply have to quote this: "As well as making the interface more cluttered, this slows people down by misleading them into thinking that they can decipher a transient control's icon faster than they can read its text, which is rarely if ever true." #14 -- you never know which of "Cancel", "Close", "Apply", "Revert", and/or "OK" will get you back to where you were before you opened up a dialog box which had one or more of these buttons. Many times even ostensibly modal dialog boxes have a stealth close button because the window manager supplies one. (All of this may be specific to Gnome; I could imagine that it's less haphazard in KDE or XFce.) #15 -- being able to leave open a "save as ..." dialog for a document even when it no longer exists is just stupid. #21 -- utilities don't know when the network cable is disconnected, and act stupid in various ways when they can't access the network (this example is the NTP client but this is a recurring theme). #31 -- fuel gauge in XScreensaver doesn't care whether you're typing or not (I'm about to file a bug on this one!) (Update: http://bugs.debian.org/305528 -- finally got around to actually doing it ...) #38 -- stupid static default location of newly created folders #66 -- incredulous online help (so what else is new ...) About the "mile wide high" item (#2) -- who ever wants to use the "show desktop" icon? I have never found much use for it. I don't particularly want my things on my desktop in any event. I wish the "mile high" feature were reserved for something useful instead. Just in case the comment I link to would disappear, the actual blog entry is at http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/04/11/ubuntu

I hadn't noticed that ESR is writing a companion to TAOUP This looks like even more essential than TAOUP, which I've so far only read snippets of on the web while it was still in writing. I need to get involved.

Is too.

Submit links to, or photos of, brokenness (as in, designed for computers, not people)

Yet another password hash generator for Firefox (or at least a proposal) See also http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/7856

JavaScript-based MD5 password generator; input is the master password plus site URL Pretty nifty -- this means you get a reasonably secure password which you can calculate again if you forget it, but others who do not know how it was calculated will not be able to. Just make sure your master password is not compromised :^) See also http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/14380