Teamwork For The Win

Posted by illotus on April 3, 2010 0 comments

Lately I’ve been doing research for my thesis. The thing is, planning card sorting and heuristic evaluation alone without a lot of experience isn’t much fun. I’d extrapolate this to any kind of reasonable difficult pursuit. It’s always easier with a team or partner even if every one is inexperienced.

Of course this is parallel to all the stuff I’ve been doing for my thesis. In usability testing, card sorting and heuristic evaluation you do find usability problems with just one test subject, but with more patterns start to emerge and the data you get is more meaningful. Similarly I naturally believe that the research portion of my thesis would be better if I did as a part of a team or with a partner.

I definitely prefer working in teams even though I’ve worked mostly independently. It’s a general win-win, in a working team you generally improve every member in the two most important aspects: skill and motivation. Can’t for the life of me remember whether it was Rands or Scott Berkun who wrote about the skill and will as the aspects manager must massage.

Fileserver, part 3, setting up ACL permissions

Posted by illotus on February 14, 2010 0 comments

Finally I have nearly everything moved to the new server. I’ve ended up using ACL for handling permissions for the CIFS shares. ACL isn’t too difficult to understand, but there aren’t too many resources on the net on it. Finding Daz’s “OpenSolaris cifs/smb server – configuring ACL’s on shares” article really helped. For example for the media files I did the following:
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Cloning a Running Windows 2008 Server to a Virtual Machine

Posted by illotus on February 9, 2010 0 comments

I’m ready to migrate my 1½ year old Windows 2008 installation to a virtual machine and finding out about the options run into Disk2vhd. It’s made by the Sysinternals team at Microsoft and what it does is snapshot of any drive to a VHD, virtual hard disk. The cool thing is that you can clone running Windows system with it.

Windows 2008 server migrated to VirtualBox on top of Opensolaris

The cloning is as simple as:

  1. download Disk2vhd and extract it to some folder.
  2. Start the software and choose which partition you want to clone.
  3. Wait for the cloning to finish, in my case this took about 50 minutes
  4. Copy the resulting .vhd file to your virtual machine host.
  5. Start your virtual machine software and make a new VM.
  6. Mount the disk on the VM you just made and boot.
  7. If everything went right you should now have a clone of your Windows system running in a VM

I just tried this and just like that I have my old Windows 2008 running in a VirtualBox virtual machine on top of OpenSolaris.

If you are migrating a Windows installation to VirtualBox you might want to check out the how-to on on the VirtualBox website.

Fileserver, part 2 – taping raid card

Posted by illotus on February 6, 2010 0 comments

I have my server running now with the following hardware:

  • Asus P7F-X motherboard
  • Intel Xeon x3440 processor
  • 4GB Kingston ECC DDR3
  • 6 Western Digital 1,5TB drives, model nro WD15EARS
  • 2 Samsung F3 500GB drives
  • Dell SAS 5/i sata raid card
  • Nexus Edge case

The first problem I ran into was no boot, if the raid card was installed. Solution was taping two pins from the pci-e connector. Now I have the system running and OpenSolaris build 132 installed. I still have to setup the shares and stress test the system.

Most importantly everything works out of the box with the build 132.

I haven’t been exposed to Unix much so setting everything up is bit of a chore. A lot of things zfs makes really simple, but there is still lot to learn. If I still care in couple of weeks I might write a guide, though there isn’t much of a need as Simon Breden already has a very good guide.

Steve Krug’s new book on usability testing

Posted by illotus on January 26, 2010 0 comments

Great guide to low-cost usability testing. 168 pages, so reading it slowly takes 2 hours and those hours just fly by. Generally books on the practical part of testing are kinda boring, but this one is really easy to read.

Fileserver, part 1

Posted by illotus on January 24, 2010 2 comments

I have this AMD 4850e/4GB non-ECC RAM/2,6TB/WS2008 serving files and other needs around the apartment. No RAID, no formal backups etc. Some of the more important stuff is on couple of disks and in the cloud etc.

At first I intented to buy only 2 more hard drives, adding maybe 2-3TB. Then I got this idea wouldn’t it be fun to do away with all the separate disks and handle all the storage as one pool. This lead me to ZFS and this wonderful write-up about it.
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Webapp business

Posted by illotus on January 18, 2010 0 comments

I’ve been toying with Django for a week or so and started building a simple CRUD app. Essentially it is a todo list software. Mainly this is because it is suitably small project and it is also scratching my own itch. For the latter correct solution would be to be lazy and use Todoist or Remember the Milk.

If I get the software out and about within the next 6 months I might actually try to monetize it. I doubt there is a lot of money in it, though to my understanding the RTM guys do make a living with it. The price range for the extra features of Pro or Premium version is $3/month to $25/year. Even for a single developer you do need reasonable amount of subscribers to make a living. Anyways, we’ll see if anything comes out of this. There’s pretty much work involved in making everything ajaxy.

Still, this is interesting exercise, especially as both Django and Python are really new to me and so is the whole web framework world. Back when I worked on a .Net webapp using VB.Net pretty much everything had to be done by hand. Luckily these days I’m a lot better developer and much more interested in the whole field of sotfware development.

Usability Implications of Requiring Parameters in Objects’ Constructors

Posted by illotus on January 14, 2010 0 comments

Interesting finding from a research article by Jeffrey Stylos and Steven Clarke

A comparative study was
performed to assess how professional programmers
use APIs with required parameters in objects’
constructors as opposed to parameterless “default”
constructors. It was hypothesized that required
parameters would create more usable and selfdocumenting
APIs by guiding programmers toward the
correct use of objects and preventing errors. However,
in the study, it was found that, contrary to
expectations, programmers strongly preferred and
were more effective with APIs that did not require
constructor parameters.

So essentially the explicit approach of

1
2
3

var foo = new FooClass();
foo.Bar = barValue;
foo.Use();

was better than the denser

1
2

var foo = new FooClass(barValue);
foo.Use();

(code examples straight from the article.)

User experience

Posted by illotus on January 7, 2010 0 comments

I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns since late 90s and developed kind of usability nazi attitude. Not the worst characteristic to have as users rarely have enough advocates. However I’ve come to realize that there is a false dichotomy between usability and graphic design as there is only one user experience.

Both need to be taken into account when designing pretty much anything. Both actually are done for the user. Or should be. The usability evangelist in me does say that usability is in general more for the user than graphic design as the latter can more easily be warped to other goals than great user experience.

Schwaber on Scrum

Posted by illotus on January 4, 2010 0 comments

Scrum et al. – Ken Schwaber

Really good presentation about scrum and the philosophy behind it.

Great point about the implicit cutting of quality when it seems that project isn’t done at deadline. It’s a recurring theme in software project management literature, but bears repeating.