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I've been gearing up for new years by purchasing a bunch of stuff to make cocktails with. Currently this is what I have.
That site's not a bad one, it lets you register the ingredients you have and will tell you all the cocktails it knows about that can be made from those ingredients. (I might hook this up via my TV so people can browse the list of available cocktails on New Years Eve).
It also tells you which ingredients you should buy next to increase the number of cocktails you can make the fastest. Sadly it doesn't seem to expose either of these two functions to people browsing your ingredient list which is a shame....
Tomorrow I need to find some Grenadine.
More good news for football in Australia
It seems a team from the Oceania confederation will be invited to take part in the Asian championship. The draw for the 2004 championship has already taken place so 2008 is the earliest it can happen but it's a move that should help teams from both confederations gain international experience.
Browser wars
America, the worlds greatest producer of unintentional humour?
24 meg mpeg file, again via memepool
A fine line between stupid and clever
This Is Spinal Tap gets added to the American National Film Registry ensuring it get preserved for posterity.
A Quickie
Rijk has produced a replacement menu.ini for Opera which simplifies the interface.
An Early Christmas present
Opera 7 beta 2 has arrived and at first glance the user interface is a lot more complete. Probably the most obvious missing bit at is the new preferences dialogue. The view menu is even more crowded but I'm sure a lot of it will disappear into the preferences dialogue when it arrives.
A proper changelog will turn up tomorrow but so far I've noticed:
- Wand - a form field completion thingy.
- A links side bar which lists all links on the page.
- A
Nostalgia
user style sheet that makes a web page look like a Commodore 64. - More control over how mail is viewed.
- Ability to turn off some of the flashy UI effects.
- Menu headings use highlight rather than underline on mouse over.
- Ability to lock down toolbars.
I wonder if mpt will have any more comments on the UI, I think some of his issues may have been addressed.
Yowsers
I was perusing the contents of the fridge last night (I'm cooking Sally and Tamsin dinner tonight so I was stocktaking) and discovered that a bottle of tonic water at the back had exploded. We're talking hundreds of pieces here. The only amusing part of the whole thing was that according to the label it was low joule soda water
, I'd hate to see what would have happened if it was high joule soda water, the fridge door may have been blown clean off.
Heh
Flash. With sound. And rude words too.
and also
Well my name is Gimli
(via memepool).
I’m a fucking dwarf!
I been slaying mutherfuckers
from the south to the north
Stroke It Baby!
This little (122k download) application kicks some serious arse and is free (not Free). StrokeIt gives you mouse gestures in all your Windows apps. If you love the mouse gestures in the Opera web browser or you've spent time waving your mouse around in Black & White then you'll love this tiny app. A full list of preconfigured actions is here, but you can add your own to other apps, as well as exclude apps you don't want gesture support in.
Even if you've never used gestures before, give this piece of software a try. Wow your (easily impressed) friends as you control your computer as if by magic.
I love it when a plan comes together
With the ADSL working, today was wireless day. After a little bit of research I decided upon a D-Link DI-614+ for the router and a DWL-650+ for the laptop NIC. I have to say I'm impressed. Setup was trivially easy and so far everything has just worked. As soon as D-Link release Linux drivers for the DWL-520+ I'll be buying one of those to go in my desktop box. Until then I've still got a nasty cable trailing across the floor to it. The other thing I was worrying about was whether my cordless phone would interfere with the wireless networking, but that doesn't appear to be an issue.
While trawling the shops I stumbled across this cute little camera. It's a good job I already had something to spend my money on!
Next on the list is to get my Vaio and desktop to start talking effectively. I've set up VNC so I can manage one desktop from the other. Next stop Samba.....
Movie Time
I went to see Die Another Day last night and I think over all it was pretty good. A couple of things in the movie just struck me as a bit too silly and unneeded, but I don't want to mention them in case I spoil it for anyone.
Of all the press I'd heard about the movie most of it focused on the amount of product placement in it. I have to say that it didn't get in the way very much, and if I hadn't heard about it beforehand I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed it at all. I couldn't help going into the movie looking for all the product placement, but it wasn't long before the movie made me forget about all that.
My friends Tancred and Evelyn have gone to see a great movie called Crackerjack, possibly using the movie vouchers I gave them for Evelyn's birthday. If so (or even if not) I'm glad they enjoyed it.
ADSL a-go-go
My ADSL is now up, I'm kind of glad I had a few issues, if it had worked out of the box I wouldn't have had cause to read my ISP's support page:
Computers can be frustrating at the best of times, and it occasionally occurs that our customers become aggravated when an immediate solution is not forthcoming. The supervisor/manager reserves the right to terminate any call where a solution is not possible because the client is too upset at that time to continue.
In joke of the day
Sometimes you are reading Slashdot (I'm not afraid to admit it) and you think of a comment that seems so obvious that you can't believe nobody has posted it yet. You refresh a couple of times and it's still not there. So you post. And thus I bring you, in all it's glory is my contribution to making the world a funnier place. It's a start (or more of a continuation really, I've been following this aim for quite some time often using one assumed name or another).
Of course, if you don't read Slashdot, you probably won't know about the IN SOVIET RUSSIA
guy and will think that comment might possibly be the least funny thing you've ever had the misfortune to read.
Good news
My ADSL modem is on it's way and someone will be sorted to come and install the central splitter. The problem with the modem was a communications snafu that I'm partly to blame for. IHUG support were responsive and helpful and called me on my mobile this morning to ensure everything was being done to clear this up to my satisfaction.
Your Ultra ADSL account is now active!
Or at least that's what my ISP would apparently have me believe according to an email I just received.
So far they have managed to:
- Charge me.
- Send me a central splitter.
- Send anyone to check whether my line can actually carry an ADSL connection (I live in an apartment building).
- Send me the ethernet ADSL modem.
- Send anyone round to install the central splitter and modem (the one I don't have).
activeADSL connection disappointingly slow when I get home.
I hope it gets sorted out soon, then I can buy myself the wireless gear I've been promising myself for xmas. With summer here (though it's raining today) it'll be nice to be able to sit out on the balcony.
For a long time now I've been reading the weblog of Matthew Thomas, a habit I picked up when weblogs of various Mozilla contributors started turning up, though mpt himself no longer contributes to the Mozilla project, no doubt to the benefit of his sanity.
He recently made some comments on the usability of the beta version of the latest generation of the Opera web browser from Opera Software.
Before I address his specific comments it's worth pointing out that the user interface in Opera 7 beta 1 is very much a work in progress, some menu items are just missing, the preferences dialogue is a minor hack of the preferences from version 6 etc. etc. Of course you wouldn't be expected to know this if you didn't follow the opera.beta newsgroup. The primary reason for releasing the beta was to start giving other aspects of the browser (eg the new rendering engine) some wider testing.
But on to mpt's points, one by one.
- The menus aren't so much further
apart
as there is no space between them. The menus are instead wider. This makes me wonder whether slightly wider menus aren't actually a good idea in terms of usability as they give the user a slightly larger target area to hit with their mouse pointer. I've got a lot of spare horizontal space on my menu bar, giving two or three more pixels to each item doesn't seem a bad idea to me. - I agree that the underlining of the menu items when the mouse pointer is over them isn't particularly effective. On my PC I have Opera 7 beta 1 using underline, Mozilla doing (a near invisible) button styling and standard Windows apps changing the background and text colours. Of the three methods the standard Windows XP method is vastly better than the others in terms of obviousness.
- The File and View menus are indeed long. If there's a saving grace here it's in the knowledge that the UI is incomplete and that the menus are extremely easy to modify. In the Opera directory there is a menu.ini file which details the construction of all the menus. For example, if the omission of the cut and paste items from the url entry box context menu bothers you to the degree that you don't want to wait for the next beta to correct it a few lines added to the ini file will solve your problem. Naturally I'm not suggesting this as a solution appropriate for end users. I'm merely pointing out the existance of this ini file as a hint that Opera might have something cool in mind that hasn't been revealed just yet. Also when they finish the new Preferences dialogue it will hopefully contain many of the rarely used theme and interface options that currently reside in the View menu.
- I'll take mpt's word (as I'm sure he has the references to back it up) here. Again it's somewhat heartening that all the strings that need changing are in the menu.ini file so it should be an easy fix.
- Opera 7 doesn't so much
use mdi
as allow it. The seperate window modes of Opera 6 have been merged together. If the user wants MDI for some reason it is there for them but they aren't forced to use it. Again it's worth noting that the UI isn't finished and things don't work all that smoothly at the moment (mpt's point 7 is just one example of this). Hopefully as the UI matures the interface will just behave as the user wants it to (be it MDI, SDI or tabbed) and generally keep out of their way. While MDI may be generally regarded as bad, it's only truly bad if you are forced to use it. The indications are that if you don't want to see an MDI window you won't have to - Pages in Opera speak don't tend to refer to web pages. They call what Mozilla people would call the
Tab Bar
aPage bar
. I believe the analogy is similar to that of a book where individual pages are marked with tabs, like an address book or personal organiser (the old style non-electronic ones). So Opera really is creating a new page with that menu item, just not a new web page. - The lack of anything immediatly useful in a new window is just one of the bits of the UI that isn't finished in the beta.
- The default theme is indeed fairly...distinctive. There's some hope that it's more or less a demonstration of the capabilities of the theming engine and that something slightly less in your face might turn up by the time it leaves beta. Also possibly the View->Color Scheme->Use system color scheme (or equivalent in preferences somewhere) might work properly. It turns everything a strange brown here and I'm running the default XP theme which is blue.
- Opera does put mail an news in the same window, but if you want it in a seperate window there's nothing stopping you. I personally like being able to have my mail and news inbox in the sidebar while I'm browsing. But again, if you don't like working that way you don't have to.
- I agree that the Hotlist submenu doesn't warrant a shortcut key. However I certainly think the Quick Preferences menu warrants one. Informing the user that they can get at these prefs with a quick tap of the F12 key is a very valuable piece of information. I always use the key to bring it up but if it wasn't listed there in the menu I likely wouldn't know about it. I think it's important that a the UI can enable the user to learn how to improve their efficiency with a product (in an unintrusive manner, no Clippies!).
- That's insane. I generally close my browser at least once a day. Without an Exit item I'd have to close every window manually and sometimes there's a lot of them. I'd waste time every day. Also the
time wasted
in the unlikely and rare event that I accidently exitted it is at least fairly minimal in Opera, you can start it up again with all the old pages pretty fast. - Opera makes very effective use of drag and drop with individual buttons, I was amazed at the things that just worked when I dragged them. You cannot replace those menus entirely with drag and drop for the simple reason that it's not possible to drag a menu bar that isn't turned on...... I agree that something else is needed though, that menu is absurdly long
- Again I think this is another thing where the UI is educating the user. I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who want to get rid of the scroll bar in full screen mode.
- Indeed, the scroll wheel doesn't work on my work PC (with el-cheapo mouse), but it works fine with the jog dial on my Vaio. Hopefully a bug that can be fixed.
- Agreed.
- Agreed.
- Yeah, but it's difficult to imagine what else they could do. I haven't got an MDI app to look at here, but I think having the massive XP controls there would look wierd...
- Yes, the fading and stuff may be appreciated by some people, but I think it would be a good idea for Opera to come with a less flashy theme as default for the full release.
- Similarly a different default theme could solve this problem.
- I don't see this as a mistake. How is the user going to know what that box is going to do without that text there? That box can do multiple things and the user can have multiple different search boxes. Simply removing the text surely makes usability worse and I can't think of a better solution.
- Well, there's a big print icon which the user is likely to find first but the point is taken. It's difficult to think of a better icon. Perhaps that print preview button shouldn't be on the address bar by default. It's probably only used frequently by people developing pages and they could probably stand to drag it to the toolbar themselves.
So there you have it, my opinion, for what it's worth, on mpt's opinion.
Yes, I now have a blog. I believe it's somewhat traditional for your first blog entry be used to announce that you have a blog, so here it is.
