Since understanding the context is so important when designing interfaces, I wanted to point out one of those things that caused me to shake my head at.

When logging into our Basecamp account this afternoon (via openid)… I was presented the following helpful notice.

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What’s amusing in this scenario… is that I’m sure that Basecamp knows that I’m logged in via openid and it is, in fact, displaying the OpenBar across the top of the page. Yet, it’s making this helpful recommendation that I’m obviously already aware of.

What harm is there? Well, in this scenario, I caught it and thought, “wow, this isn’t helpful or informative.” Over time, it’s these short-lived experiences that affect our overall perceptions of the product.

When we’re designing and developing applications, we must be very consistent with how we communicate with our audience. We don’t need to provide them information that isn’t relevant to them.

I’m not picking on Basecamp here, I’m sure that they have great intentions with this, but as a developer, I know that it doesn’t take a whole lot of extra work to avoid small problems like this, which could lead your people to feel like you’re not being respectful of their time.

Saving customers 15-30 seconds is something that we can quantify.

• 100 customers = 25-50 minutes
• 1,000 customers = ~4-8 hours
• 10,000 customers = 40-80 hours
• etc…

Just a little reminder that it’s easy for us to overlook things like that can make a difference.

Over the past few years, I’ve helped you walk through the process of getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Mac OS X. The last version has been getting a lot of comments related to issues with the new Apple Leopard, so I’m going this post will expand on previous installation guides with what’s working for me as of January 2008.

The following guide is how our development team at Planet Argon prefers to setup our development workstations

::: warning [WARNING]{.caps}: This post contains some outdated instructions. Please read Installing Ruby on Rails, Passenger, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oh My Zsh on Snow Leopard, Fourth Edition , which is focused on Installing Ruby on Rails on Snow Leopard. :::

During this installation, we’ll have what we feel is the optimal development stack for building Ruby on Rails applications with our favorite database server, PostgreSQL.

Ready? Let’s get started…

Just when you think that you’re sneaking through Fall/Winter without getting sick… it hits you. Been sick the last week and am finally coming up for air. :-)

Anyhow, I’m going to be traveling a few times over the coming weeks/months and wanted to reach out…

Dear Londoners,

A few of us from the Planet Argon team, (Andy, Paige, and myself) are heading to London in just over a week to visit one of our big clients. We’ll also be staying for a few more days to explore. If you’re interested in grabbing a few pints and/or interested in meeting up, drop me an email we’ll try to coordinate something when we’re over there. =)

Earlier today, Vincent Foley was kind enough to hand over maitenance of the the ShortURL project on RubyForge to me. He first released it back in 2005, which I blogged about as RubyURL was the first shortening service that it supported (and is the default). Unfortunately, the release of RubyURL 2.0 broke backwards compatibility and Vincent wasn’t maintaining it anymore. So, earlier, I decided to patch this and got a new version released that now works with the current RubyURL site.

While working on the code, I decided to extend the compatible services to include moourl and urlTea.

These updates are available in ShortURL version 0.8.4.

Install the ShortURL gem

Installation is a snap… (like 99.7% of rubygems…)

When Chris Griffin saw this post, he wanted to do the same with RubyURL. Since the ShortURL gem was broken, I didn’t get a chance to dive into it. However, with the shorturl command now working again with RubyURL, we get QuickSilver and RubyURL working together really quickly.

First, you’ll need a recent version of the ShortURL gem installed.

sudo gem install shorturl

Then you will want to add the following to ~/Library/Scripts/rubyurl.scpt. You will need to create this file.

Today, I thought that I’d give FogBugz a quick trial. A few of our Rails consulting clients use it and I’m hearing that others are as well.

Along the way, I’m bringing one of my favorite tools so that I can share some things thoughts (visually) along the way.

Signing up for a free trial

My first impression of FogBugz was, “nice homepage design… but what is that screenshot of?”

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I’m not a designer, but the interface in the screenshot isn’t jumping out to me as something that you’d expect to see in a modern web application. While I appreciate the default browser colors for links (this is really important)… I think they could have found a better way to distinguish which bug links you’ve previously viewed. It’s very likely that you’ll most bugs many times, so having the color be different might not make sense in the same way it would when reading content on a web site. Again, I’m not a designer and I’d be curious to hear from a designer on this. Just something that I initially thought.

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Okay, this sign up form seems really easy to start with. I’m used to free trials being really simple to get going. So, I enter in my sub-domain selection and provide my email address on the following page so that they can confirm that I’m legit.

(several minutes later…)

Okay, this process required me to jump from my browser to my email to my browser back to my email and then back again to my browser. It’s really frustrating for an application to force me to go back and forth between my browser and email client. I think the initial email is something I can cope with, but I found it a bit silly to have to wait for another email to receive a link to login to my new account, especially considering I already knew the URL as that was the first thing that I provided. The application could have provided the link (or redirected me) to the following form, which I had a few things to comment on.

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At first glance, this might not seem like much… but I’m becoming more and more disappointed by the choice of language that we’re using in applications. First of all, this is the first time that I’ve seen this page. I’m not changing my password… what you’re really asking me to do is, “Create (or set) a password.” There are other verbs that you could use here, but change really isn’t appropriate. Also, choose doesn’t work here either.

First of all, Happy New Year!

The other day I received an email from a friend where she asked me if I thought that having excellent math skills were important in a programmers career. I’ve heard this question asked before and while I thought that might have been the case when I was a lot younger (when I had zero plans to go into the IT world)… I’ve not seen this to be true. My response to her was that it really depended on the types of programming work that one might want to go into. There are definitely programming jobs that require extremely advanced mathematical skills, but I’d guess that many, if not most, don’t really have that sort of prerequisite.

So, as I was saying. I think it really depends. It depends on what sort of programming you’re interested in pursuing. In general, when we’re looking to hire someone at Planet Argon, we’re looking for people with good research and problem solving skills. Programming languages are tools to help solve problems and build things. So, while math skills are useful, they aren’t likely going to make or break a developer.

Like any career, it should be something that you’re passionate about.

I’m curious. As programmers… how would you respond to the following question?

“Should an advanced knowledge of mathematics be a prerequisite in pursuing a career in programming?”

I can only answer the question from my own perspective and would like to share some others. Thanks!

Are you using PostgreSQL (the world’s most awesome open-source database server) with Ruby on Rails Do you have any interesting experiences that you might want to share with an audience? Well, you might consider submitting a talk proposal for PGCon 2008, which is taking place in Ottawa, Canada.

Details follow…

PGCon 2008

PGCon 2008 will be held 22-23 May 2008, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 20-21 May
2008.

We are now requesting proposals for presentations.

If you are doing something interesting with PostgreSQL, please submit
a proposal. You might be one of the backend hackers or work on a
PostgreSQL related project and want to share your know-how with
others. You might be developing an interesting system using
PostgreSQL as the foundation. Perhaps you migrated from another
database to PostgreSQL and would like to share details. These, and
other stories are welcome. Both users and developers are encouraged
to share their experiences.

Here are a few ideas to jump start your proposal process:

• novel, unique or complex ways in which PostgreSQL are used
• migration of production systems to PostgreSQL
• data warehousing with PostgreSQL
• tuning PostgreSQL for different work loads
• replicating data on top of PostgreSQL

Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.

The schedule is:

• 19 Dec 2007 Proposal acceptance begins
• 19 Jan 2008 Proposal acceptance ends
• 19 Feb 2008 Confirmation of accepted proposals
• 19 Apr 2008 Final papers/slides must arrive no later than this date

See also http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

Instructions for submitting a proposal to PGCon 2008 are available
from: http://www.pgcon.org/2008/submissions.php

This

Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2007 has gone by really fast. I’ve been fairly busy wrapping up projects and getting ready to start new ones at Planet Argon. I’m sure that when many of you start a new project… you look back at what you’ve learned from previous ones. Even throughout iterations in a project, we try our best to have retrospectives to be sure that we’re all learning from what has and hasn’t worked. A few weeks ago, I decided to drop a note to the members of the Business of Rails community to ask people to share some of their lessons from the year. My goal was to get people to share their experiences from over the year with other members of the community and see where the dialogue takes us into 2008.

As expected… I got some great responses, which I encourage you to read for yourself. You might even participate in the conversation(s) and share your experiences. We’d love to hear them.

Side note… I’d like to thank all of you who have participated in the Business of Rails community over the year. It was an idea that came to me during RailsConf 2007 after I participated on a panel with other business leaders in the Ruby on Rails community. We now have over 800 members on the mailing list! I’ve learned a lot from the community and hope more of you decide to join. :-)

I’ve been using Tumblr off and on since early April. I tend to neglect it because I’ve found the interface a bit clumsy. The recent redesign hasn’t improved on the things that I consider obstacles in getting things quickly added to my tumblr. Since the concept behind the tumblr is to quickly share things with people, the interface doesn’t facilitate this workflow as quickly as I think it could.

In any event, I tend to not login to my dashboard very often (few times a week?), which means that I don’t post as often as I’d like.

A few months ago, I finally started to use the Feeds feature in tumblr, which will automatically add things to your tumblr from an RSS feed.

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The first feed that I started to use was my Flickr account.

Flickr to Tumblr

This solution for this was to tag photos that I want Tumblr to automatically with ‘to:tumblr’.

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Next, you just need to grab the URL for the Flickr RSS feed for photos tagged with to:tumblr.

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Next, you’ll want to add this feed to Tumblr.

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Voila… in a little while, your photos tagged with to:tumblr will start to show up on your Tumblr.

Del.icio.us to Tumblr

Links to blog articles, web sites, etc… are things that I generally use Deli.cio.us for… so doing it once for each was taking too much. So, I’m now using the same tagging formula with Del.icio.us to get Tumblr to automatically add links to my Tumblr.

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Now, I can use the RSS feed for items tagged with to:tumblr on my del.icio.us account with Tumblr.

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Pretty simple. :-)

Google Reader to Tumblr

Another place that I find myself wanting to post to Tumblr is from within Google Reader. Well, it’s actually really easy to do this by taking advantage of the RSS feed that Google Reader provides for your Shared Items.

Just grab the RSS feed from here…

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Then add this RSS feed to Tumblr like the examples above.

Putting Tumblr to work for You!

I’m hoping to continue using this pattern with other sites as well. I’d be interested in hearing how other people are using Tumblr to aggregate focused content in an easy to browse way.

Update

It appears that Tumblr currently only allows you to use five feeds to import. Until they upgrade this limit, you can use Yahoo! Pipes to do some of the heavy lifting.

After reading my post on how we’re using Skitch at Planet Argon for adding some life to bug submissions and feedback, Ana Nelson came up with an ingenious idea for taking a collection of Skitch images and creating a slideshow an alternative to screencasts.

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In her post, Screencasts are so 2005, Ana walks you through her process of finding a useful slideshow tool for her Skitch slideshow.

I’ll take this a step further and call this… SkitchCasting! ;-)

It’s really great to see that people are finding all sorts of uses for Skitch.

For more information on Skitch, visit http://plasq.com/skitch or read my post, Skitch… my favorite desktop application of 2007?

For more examples on how our team is using Skitch… here are a few recent blog posts by my colleagues where Skitch was used.

• [The Sign In

Metaphor](http://allisbe.com/2007/12/13/the-sign-in-metaphor), by
[Allison Beckwith](http://allisbe.com)
```text
-   [Google vs
```text
Yahoo](http://andy.delcambre.com/2007/12/17/google-vs-yahoo), by
[Andy Delcambre](http://andy.delcambre.com)
```text
-   [Google Street View for Portland,
```text
Oregon](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/10/10/google-street-view-for-portland-oregon)
on the [Planet Argon Blog](http://blog.planetargon.com)

Btw, I still have a few invites left. ;-)

Consider this part one of several posts on my thoughts of the art of embracing chaos.

Don’t let the books fool you. The construction of custom software is an unmastered and volatile cesspool of chaos. I don’t adhere to the belief that there is a perfect methodology or process that will work for every project… as I’m sure many of you don’t.

Unlike bowling, you’ll never achieve a perfect score. Even in bowling, It’s unlikely that anybody will learn how to bowl a perfect score and do so on every game for the rest of their career.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a client has on every project.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a user has when they interact with your application.

Expectations are an interesting thing.

Your project might get widely adopted and embraced, but you’re still trying to control chaos.

{width=”500” height=”333”}

It’s chaos. Pure chaos[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1 .footnote-ref role=”doc-noteref”}.

So, why do we bother? Why do we try so hard when the odds aren’t in our favor?

To be continued…

Related Posts:

• [Embracing

Failure](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/04/10/embracing-failure-part-1)
```text
-   [Don't Over
```text
Promise](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/11/18/dont-over-promise)
```ruby
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.  ::: {#fn1}
```yaml
[Chaos Theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory),
Wikipedia[↩︎](#fnref1){.footnote-back role="doc-backlink"}
:::