Rob Wilkerson

From Joel Spolsky’s post with the same name:

Don’t do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

I’m going to have to beg to differ with Joel on this. Or at least with his seemingly all-or-nothing stand on it. Of the myriad of problems that exist in all of the user interfaces that are so prevalent in our world, I don’t think this problem is really a problem. I’m not arguing that disabling menu items is right, necessarily, but maybe that it’s not bad. And certainly that it’s not so bad that we should “outlaw” it. A minor distinction, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s simply splitting hairs.

Continue Reading »

This is another call for help. In all my years of computing, browsing and generally keeping up with the times (or trying to), I’ve never – seriously, never – found a way of organizing and accessing my browser bookmarks that doesn’t quickly devolve into utter madness. Madness, I tell you.

I’ve tried the entry-level folder structuring, centralized solutions like Delicious and Google Bookmarks and am beginning down the path of a synchronized solution in Mozilla Weave (true, not a purely organizational metaphor, but synchronization will facilitate maintained organization). I’m also vaguely aware of new bookmarking features in Mozilla 3, but must confess my total ignorance of the details and to how to use those features effectively.

So to those of you out there who actually like how your bookmarks are organized, what the hell are you doing right that I’m doing so freakishly wrong?

I’m a sucker for a good utility application. That’s hardly news, but for new readers it seemed like a logical introduction. I can’t get enough of those tiny little applications that do one thing (or a few small things) that really makes my life better in some way and does it really well.

Today’s gem: iStat menus

Continue Reading »

Over the course of the last, oh, I don’t know, year or so, I’ve signed up for a few social networks that looked interesting, useful or otherwise worth checking out. In case anyone’s wondering, MySpace didn’t make that cut. With respect to those that did make the cut, I didn’t go in with high expectations of any of them. C’mon, I’m a developer. Per the stereotype, I’m not supposed to be social, right?

One that I find extraordinarily useful on a regular basis is Flickr. I use it so often that I sprung for the pro account. Lest I appear disingenuous, I should state that I signed on as a paying customer because they forced me to do so. No one showed up at my house wearing a dark fedora and a shoulder holster, but they cut my free account off once my inventory reached 200 photos. It’s a hell of a service, though, so $30 a year is money well spent, I think.

Continue Reading »

So I’m in the process of modeling a few applications that will include a fairly rich set of APIs and I had some time to spend really thinking through how I want to design the authentication model. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that, well, I can’t decide. As a result, I thought I’d call on any collective wisdom I can gather and see what others are doing and, perhaps more importantly, why.

First, let me state that these applications are not DoD(Department of Defense)-grade applications. We need something stronger than security through obscurity and something (significantly) less than national security cryptography.

Continue Reading »

I’ve had two big problems with Spaces up to and including 10.5.2:

1. When Command-Tab’ing to an application, Spaces would shift me to a different Space that already included a window of that application rather than allow me to open a new window in my current space. More »
2. When I had multiple windows of an application open in multiple desktops, Command-Tab’ing didn’t, by default, place the focus on the window of that app that was open in the same desktop I was already in. It didn’t do anything, really. It’s like that action confused the OS. More »

After a while, I was able to track down a fix – and by fix, I really mean glorified hack – for the first problem (which seems to have a real fix in 10.5.3 via a System Preference, by the way) and 10.5.3 seems to have addressed the second quite nicely.

Zang.

Normally I try to post solutions here, but today I have a question and I’m hoping that someone else can provide a solution. For months now, I’ve had this rather intermittent problem with VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Maybe someone else has seen it too.

It seems that every once in a great while I do something (or my system does something) that locks up the keyboard in my WinXP virtual machine. I can type to my heart’s content and all I get for my trouble is an annoying series of clicks from the virtual machine telling me that it has no clue what I’m doing. I’ve tried restarting the virtual machine, logging off, suspending the machine, mucking about with the preferences and just about everything else with no luck.

About the only thing that has worked is to reboot the Mac itself. That, however, seems awfully ham-fisted and I find it particularly annoying that I’m rebooting my Mac just to satisfy some sort of whimsical dalliance of Windows. I’ve Googled my arse off, but haven’t found any solution (and only one relevant result) that works for me.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Update 5/28/2008: A colleague just pointed me to these links that, for me, indicated that it was the Last.fm client causing my problem. He also pointed me to this message in the Last.fm forums indicating that they know about it.

Well said and well evidenced:

PHP isn’t so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

I develop a lot of stuff with PHP these days, but I tend to agree that the language design is a massive suckfest. It’s the inconsistencies that drive me mad some days.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Classmates. For example, I don’t like the obscene quantity of (unnecessary) email that I get from them and I don’t like that they make me seem rude by not allowing me access to my guestbook unless I pay for the service. That said, I signed up a while back out of sheer curiosity and filled out my profile. Today I clicked a link in their latest mailing and saw this on my profile homepage:

Hmmm. Nope. I’m almost certainly not.

Seems their personalization “feature” is somewhat flawed.

Or not.

On the long flight back from Bangalore, I settled in to do some work. The work was local and I use Eclipse as my IDE so I was ready to rock.

Or not.

For a while now, I’ve been trying Pulse to manage my Eclipse installs across multiple computers. I’ve had significant, but not critical, issues in other areas that I won’t go into here, but because I’ve got a few active projects on my plate, I didn’t want to take the time to rebuild my entire Eclipse installation. On the flight, though, the camel’s back was broken.

Continue Reading »

So, as many of you already know, I’m in India this week to work with my company’s Bangalore team. It’s my first international travel experience, so I had – and since today’s my first day in the office, still have – no idea what to expect from the week. Nonetheless, here’s a quick list of first impressions in (roughly) chronological order:

1. That’s a long time to spend on a plane.
2. Flying business class is a big improvement over coach and essential for long flights, I think.
3. The boarding “process” in Frankfurt (my connecting flight) was a complete gagglef***.
4. I need to figure out how to sleep on planes.
5. The culinary options on flights aren’t so bad. I was well-fed and most of it was really pretty good.
6. The aesthetics of the airport in Frankfurt look frighteningly similar to those of an IKEA store.
7. I was less impressed with Lufthansa than I expected. My United flight out of Dulles offered better service than did Lufthansa.
8. I couldn’t use my laptop on the flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore (the Lufthansa flight). The power plug was there, but I couldn’t maintain a connection for more than a minute before I’d lose juice and switch over to battery. That sucked. I had planned to get some work done.
9. Deboarding in India was a breeze. They did a really nice job of getting us through everything very quickly.
10. My hotel room has two single beds. I’m traveling alone, so it’s fine, but I can’t remember the last time I slept in a single bed (not counting last night, of course).
11. My hotel has free wireless access. I say again, free wireless access. Wish hotels in the US would offer that.
12. Traffic in Bangalore is beyond insane. Quite.
13. Bangalore’s population is ~10 million. Evidently they were all driving to work this morning at the same time we were.
14. Bangalore appears to offer the same mish-mash of wealth and squalor you might see in any big city. The squalor is a bit more visible and maybe a bit more pronounced, but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
15. There’s more green (in the way of vegetation) here than I’d have imagined. And palm trees. I didn’t expect that.

Continue Reading »

From time to time, I find the need to start Caffeine on my Mac, but my use is infrequent enough that it’s not something I like to keep open and available all the time. Invariably, once it’s running, I forget how to quit the application to get it off of my menu bar. It’s not an easy thing to Google so, for the sake of my own sanity, I give you:

1. Cmd+Click the menu bar icon (the coffee cup)
2. Select the Quit option

It’s a simple enough process, but I guess it’s just different enough from that of other menu bar icons that I can never seem to remember it.

Although I’ve stretched my response to the conversation I had with the folks from Wesabe over far more days – and by “days”, I mean “weeks” – than I’d intended, I wanted to touch on one other turn taken in the conversation that I’m fairly passionate about.

The topic, of course, is transparency. I’m a firm believer that transparency is, in general, a very good thing and engenders loyalty, trust and a lot of other positive feelings. It’s been my experience, as both a developer and a consumer, that organizations can make an awful lot of mistakes as long as they’re accountable for those mistakes and make them right.

Continue Reading »

Being a long-time (and still part-time) Windows user, I’ve spent many a not-so-happy second typing the following:

> ipconfig /release
> ipconfig /renew

Today, though, I made a few changes to secure my network and needed to renew the DHCP lease of my Mac. Usually, I’m sitting in front of the laptop so I can just use the System Preferences GUI, but not today. Today I had to remote in so I only had the command line available and I realized that I had no idea how to map the Windows commands above to the Mac terminal. Mostly for the sake of posterity:

$ sudo ipconfig set en0 BOOTP
$ sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP

In typical Unix fashion, there’s no output to indicate that succeeded or did anything at all, for that matter, but it seems to do the trick.

Oh please, please let this be true.

There are very few rules on microblogging platform Twitter. But if you use it for unsolicited “tweets” about male enhancement products, watch out: Twitter has started to shut down accounts that it has flagged as “spam,” reported blogger Jesse Stay.

Part of my conversation with the guys from Wesabe (now going on two weeks ago because I haven’t been feeling the urge to write much lately) revolved around their search feature. There’s been much ado about search in the Wesabe groups lately and rightfully so. It’s one of the mistakes that I think they made.

The gist of the aforementioned ado was that the search box simply didn’t work. The search box existed in the site header which I understood to mean that I could search the entire site, or at least the site’s public data and my own private data. No matter what I tried to search for, though, no results were ever found. And, to be clear, I wasn’t searching for “portuguese fur trade” or “yachting”. I was searching for content that I knew existed.

Continue Reading »

Like many folks, I have separate computers for work and home. To make life even more complicated, my work system is a PC while my personal computer is a Mac. Over the last few years, I feel like I’ve been constantly prowling about for a good solution to sync files between those two systems and also the Windows XP virtual machine that is a guest on the Mac. I’ve tried a myriad of solutions that range from manual to automated, commercial to cobbled and just plain hacked. Most worked to one degree or another, but I found most to be more trouble than they were worth.

Yesterday, though, Sam Larbi, via Twitter, turned me on to Dropbox. I was absolutely stunned by the introductory video and asked Sam for one of his invites. He hooked me up and I started playing with the tool last night.

Continue Reading »

For some reason that I can’t even begin to guess, I always thought that Wesabe was headquartered in Seattle. “Assumed” is probably a more accurate description of what I was doing. Anyway, they’re not. They’re in San Francisco. And last week, so was I.

I’ve been a Wesabe user, fan, community participant and cornerstore evangelist for a little over a year now and, while in town for the Web 2.0 Expo conference, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have a beer (or two) with Marc Hedlund, Wesabe’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Gabe Griego, the VP of Marketing, and Brad Greenlee, one of the principal engineers of the Wesabe ecosystem. I’ve spent so much time conversing with Marc in the groups and in email that actually sitting down with him, in particular, felt a little like meeting an old friend for the first time.

Continue Reading »

Looks like Carlo Zottman is feeling my pain. The difference, though, makes all the difference. See, Carlos actually did something about it. Check out his aptly named tool, Twitter Twerp Scan.

Looks like my co-worker’s secure feed proxy service – the one that I mentioned a few days ago – is starting to get noticed in places with a much wider readership that I can offer. That’s a good thing (the fact that it’s getting noticed, I mean, not the fact that my readership is anemic); it’s a pretty kick ass service worthy of notice.

I’m quoted in both posts. Does that mean that I’m right on the cusp of achieving vicarious celebrity? Yeah, didn’t think so…