Over the past few months, I've been noticing an interesting example of poor contingency design that I have yet to see handled well. Here's the situation:
I go to an e-commerce website I haven't visited in a while and I go to login to my account. I can't remember which of my normal five passwords I used and I just start with the most likely. That's not it. I enter the second most likely and I get the same error message... I think. Hold on, did the page reload or is this the same message I saw a second ago...
This sounds simple enough, but it can be pretty frustrating when you're not sure if something happened or not. I noticed this morning when I was working using some command line stuff that the problem is easily solved there because the screen moves down each time and all of the previous error messages are still visible. Perhaps it would help to keep updating a number on a website telling you how many times you've made the mistake. But... then people might think it's counting up to a maximum number of tries and then it will cut you off. Anyone have a better idea?
Driving into work today I noticed an interesting anomoly: a rally-ready Subaru WRX sitting auspiciously in the Kia parking lot. Hold on a second, that's not a WRX, that's a Sport-Pac Kia Rio! Upon googling "Kia WRX" I came across a hilarious article about the new Kia that describes the "non-functional bonnet scoop" and includes a lovely quote from a Subaru spokesperson who says "We are confident that people will be able to distinguish between this car and the WRX. For a start, there is a slight difference in the acceleration figures."
In the interests of full disclosure, at the time of this drive-by spotting I was majestically cruising along in a borrowed Chrysler Concord. It's almost like driving the real plane down the highway.
I followed one of Jason Kottke's links today to a Salon article and found a fantastic reworking of Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son. The version on Salon is taken from an advertisement in The Nation magazine and Saturn is replaced by George W. Bush. I've always admired Goya's original and this parody is striking. Also check out a recent cover from the same magazine.
It's been a depressing couple of weeks for me in a literary way. I've just finished reading Asimov's Foundation and HG Well's The Time Machine and I've just begun Jane Jacob's Dark Age Ahead. I started each book entirely without consciously choosing a common theme and I ended up reading three books about the bitter end of civilizations.
I highly recommend both books I've finished and, from what I've read so far, I'll likely be recommending Jane Jacob's latest soon too. If you're even slightly into science fiction, Asimov's Foundation is a classic and provides fascinating insight into what makes civilizations dominant, how knowledge can be maintained, and why empires rise and fall. Aside from them both having 'foundation' in their names, the book reminds me in a lot of ways of the Long Now Foundation which "seeks to promote 'slower/better' thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years."
In other Asimov related news, the writer is hardly buried in the ground and Hollywood is butchering I Robot. And, check out Design by Fire's apt comparison of Foundation with the current debate over web standards.
After completing Dark Age Ahead, I think I'll be up for something a little less, um, catastophic than crumbling civilizations. Any good recommendations?
I'll try to not get into the habit of posting on my weblog everytime silverorange launches a new site, but this one seems special. On Sunday night, the new Mozilla Store went live and we're pretty excited.
We designed this site from the ground up, including the front-end interface and a back-end management system. The front-end is the first entirely CSS-designed store we've developed. It's been pretty cool designing an interface entirely in CSS and even the entire checkout form is formatted using style sheets. The top menu is a styled bullet list using a combination of Doug Bowman's sliding doors technique and a variation on the flicker-free image rollover technique.
It's been really interesting designing what is essentially a straight-forward widget store. In many instances, we've been able to do things we've always wanted to do on other sites but have been prevented by added complexity of product structures and custom features. Aside from a few special circumstances, we've been able to do things very simply and cleanly. It's possible to arrive at the store and checkout in four clicks. Not bad.
Anyhow, go buy a stylin' Firefox t-shirt. Hope you like the site.
For the second year in a row, silverorange is organizing a frisbee golf tournament for charity! This year, our pals at GoodBasic are co-sponsoring the event and we appreciate their help.
The tournament is happening on July 10 at Strathgartney Provincial Park and is open to anyone. You honestly don't need any experience with frisbee golf to play. If you can toss a frisbee, and heck even if you only barely can, you can compete! Last year was a ton of fun and we raised over a thousand dollars for Habitat for Humanity.
You can either register a whole team (6 people), a few people, or just yourself and we'll put you on a team. To get in on the action, please register over on the tournament website where there is lots more information about the event. Also, feel free to email me or give me a call (902) 894-4533 if you have any questions. I look forward to seeing you at the tournament!
Also let me know if you'd like to volunteer at the tournament or if you'd like to donate a prize. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
A lot of people who know me might know this already, but I'm moving to Toronto in August. Mostly a case of itchy feet syndrome. I've visited Toronto on many occasions and I have family there, so I'm really looking forward to living in the city for a while.
From Toronto, I'll still be working for silverorange but from a home office. We already have several people who work from afar, including my twin brother, but it will certainly be interesting adjusting to living outside of physical shouting distance of the rest of my cohorts.
Anyhow, I just confirmed an apartment, so it seems much more certain all of a sudden and I thought it would make sense to mention it here. If you're in Toronto, like the Rudes, I look forward to maybe meeting you soon.
