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March 31, 2005

Print Gocco - Customized Notebooks

I have a fun little plan for work, but I'll just have to see how it works out.

It's going to involve this notebook from staples. Once I a test one I'll be able to see if I can silkscreen the front of it. It was very difficult to find a blank notebook! This one is called a "Chemistry Notebook" but i would just say it's an attractive notebook.

Posted by brandy at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

Head First Java: Issues

Well I got very frustrated by the variables chapter in the book. I found their naming of the variables to just confused what I was supposed to be learning. When Jesse explained it to me it was like duh, yeah I knew that stuff!

So then polymorphism I read a bit on and kind of got it but I would say I didn't totally grasp it but that's okay because it's the first time I ever read about it. Inheritance was pretty easy to grasp.

Next it has a "sink a battleship" type games it wasn't you to create. I was just totally turned off by the tutorial (if you can call it that). I didn't like it at all. So I ordered a book from Amazon and I'll write about it when i get it. There are also those other two Java books I posted about but they aren’t published yet which is frustrating. I think once I get through some tutorials and get to some real world coding, I'm going to make my own tutorials. Most of the ones I found online were a mess or extremely outdated.

I'm skipping ahead to the GUI chapter and hoping I can learn some stuff from that part.

Posted by brandy at 04:09 PM | Comments (1)

Card Sorting

Today at work I got to do some more Card Sorting exercises. Those are one of my favorite pieces of usability work.

For this situation we used the top 100 search keywords entered into a knowledge base type tool, the purpose was to come up with a "browsing" type navigation that would be optional to the keyword search. So to see how users group the content we wrote all the top searches on the cards. The hard thing about naming groups in web design is you want to keep the names relatively short, but most of the time people like to call a group of things a fairly long name.

Another thing that is hard is picking good Card Sorting candidates. It's really bad to get anyone inside the design group to do it because we are all biased web designers who think inside the standards that we know, sometimes this is not a good thing when your trying to think like a "user" and not a web designer. Also if your actually working on the project your going to have lots of biases towards the current or planned navigational groupings.

I was able to get two people in our group who are not on the project but I won't feel good about it until I get people who can give me less biased feedback.

Posted by brandy at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

Jesse's face, all over the place

A continued venture into the Japanese Print Goco;

I got some blank postcards from the craft store on the way home, and a few t-shirts. Jesse requested blue ink on the postcards, and I already had planned to have his t-shirts match his website.

Postcards

t-shirts

I'm fairly please considering it's my first time trying to print on cloth. I have lots of inprovments in mind for next time, the print was to dark near the bottom and it didn't burn the screen correctly, but it lends itself to a nice rustic feel, heh.

Update: I got Jesse to put it on, don't know if I can get him to wear it in public haha...

Here is the image I used to create the design from;

Posted by brandy at 09:36 PM | Comments (3)

March 29, 2005

Don't look if you're Jesse

A few months ago I had been readin about this really cool Japanese toy called a "Print Gocco" which is basically a proffesional screen printing kit for anyone and everyone. My mom sent me $200 for my birthday/xmas so I got the Print Goko, the book, the print stamping kit and some extra cloth printing inks.

Tonight was the first time I actually tried using it. I was going to make some t-shirts for Jesse or a cool business card for his website for when we went to Australia, but he never got around to giving me the "content" ehem...

So tonight I tested it on a fun little geeky birthday card for him (His b-day is april 19th btw if your wondering, hehehe).

So here are the fruits of my labor;

I was extremly impressed by the prints. It was a horrible hand drawn sketching and it's amazing how much each print looks hand drawn but much better then my drawing (cleaner because of the inks). The original is the all black one, it's messed up because it got some ink on it. It was hand drawn with a pen the kit comes with.

In the bottom left of the photo is the printing mechanism, and the master is up agains the top of it. To the top right is the "lamp" thing which you use to expose and create the "master" from.

I purchased all of the supplies from Think Ink and was VERY happy with their customer service. It wasn't able to ship right away and so they actual waited a few days once they got it before it was mailed so it would arrive right when I got back from XMAS in VA and not sit outside in the cold on our front porch.

So being so pleased, I just ordered more bulbs and masters and some yellow cloth ink.

If you have ever wanted to make your own business cards and be in complete control of the design, this looks like it would be FAB. I have a project in mind for work that I think will be lots of fun, I'm all about the cloth printing kit!

I found a cool looking t-shirt website. I'll sleep on it while I come up with my plan!

Posted by brandy at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2005

Beautiful Buttons AKA Beautiful Buttons *without* images!

First lets start out by saying this is for a company intranet that supports IE only. They don't look horrible in firefox, but they don't look as nice.

What happned was the developers needed to be able to "disabled" input buttons, and when we had a static image it would have required creating disabled states of all the buttons… That would be a lot of work, and on top of that coding it on the developer’s side is just too much effort for the time allowed right now.

So I was all sad, but then a co-worker of mine, Shelley Kennon, found some awesome code that looks F-A-B in IE.

link so you can view the source

There is also an option to have a repeating background image within the button as well, but I won't go into that here.

Microsoft's Documentation - this is a great page detailing the filter code. It also shows how you can make a DIV with a filtered background.

I am really excited about this because we have a side navigation bar that has a slight gradient running behind it. I of course can't wait till Shelley comes in so I can tell her about using the filter in a div, even better you can place a div BEHIND it so if a person does not have IE you can just have a static colored background for Firefox etc.

Posted by brandy at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

Java & CF Books: Coming Soon

Ben Forta posted about his new book "Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit" and after a conversation with Geoff and a co-worker I thought it might not be a bad idea to maybe read up on CF and learn about how it works and it's benefits and at least be educated about the technology the way I am with Perl/PHP/JSP/.NET etc.

So yeah, I was looking at Ben's book and saw it was on the "Amazon Early Adopter Product in Computers & Internet" list.

The top 25 books (accourding to purchase patterns) include 4 Java Books, 2 Cold Fusion, 2 PHP and one .NET book. It's an interesting representation of the popular technologies being learned and used by people today.

Two of the Java books look like a lot of fun. "Java After Hours : 10 Projects You'll Never Do at Work"

• Create graphics interactively on Web servers
• Send images to Web browsers
• Tinker with Java's Swing package to make it do seemingly impossible things
• Search websites and send e-mail from Java programs
• Use multithreading, Ant and more!

I love real world examples so I can't wait to see this book. Of course I'll want to see it before I buy it :)

"Code First : Java", this one has a great description;

• Introduce a useful, interesting class complete with screen shots or output example.
• Show the program's source code, annotated with descriptions.
• Describe in detail what the code is doing.

I hope once they are to print that it offers the look inside feature.

Posted by brandy at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2005

Waiting on Jesse...

So I am sitting here waiting on Jesse to finish ironing his shirt (it is 9:56pm) and Fat Boy Slim probably will start his set around 11 or midnight. Here I sit, the girl, waiting on the boy. He can do OOP but he can't operate an iron!!

(of course he refuses my help... let me do it! he says)

He has been ironing for about 5 minutes now, that's an awful long time to iron one shirt!!

Posted by brandy at 09:56 PM | Comments (4)

CSS: Oh my freakin gosh!

Have you ever been working with some serious CSS-P and found for some wacked out reason the text in your div actually duplicates itself twice on the page. You have no idea why this is happening and you try to clear it out by inserting a clear:both; and a few other tricks you have hidden up your sleeves.

I don't even remember how I have gotten around this problem in the past, but wow, I would have never thought to blame it on my comments! So sad to be punished for writting useful comments!!

CSS bugs in IE > 5.

Posted by brandy at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2005

XHTML - Using tables wisely

A gem of an article about using tables correctly in XHTML and it also considers accessibility.

Posted by brandy at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

AJAX & Usability: Let the user be in control

View this login demo

I'll start off by saying this is not my trying to knock this most awesome example. I think it's so great that people are experimenting with AJAX. It's waking a lot of us up who have been asleep for a while, and I also think it's going to improve the design of a lot of applications.

With that said I thought I would express some of my concerns with it's use. Just because the form now doesn't need a login button, doesn't mean we should take it away from the user. It's an important concept that the user feel in control, and even more so that an action has a reaction. If they submit their info, then the system will come back with a reaction and let them know how it worked. It also adds a feeling of security.

By removing the submit button you are relying on the fact that the user will know to click outside of the text field to find out if they logged in correctly, and for gosh sakes if they have to click OUTSIDE the field to get the system to tell them they are logged, why the heck not give them a button to click on! It's the same amount of energy and time required by the user and a lot more clear. Or if you have it set on a timer that they will wait, or if your timer is to fast that they won't get annoyed by it when they arn't done thinking. If you are going to rely on ANY form of action from the user to confirm that they are finished, you might as well provide a submit button.

One example that has been mentioned is when a user is installing a program and they have to input a serial number and they get the nice green checkbox over to the right that lets them know they can continue. If this was to be used properly in the context of a login module, then when the users moved their cursor from the username field, to the password field, you could have a checkmark or message appear beside that field, letting the user know if that username exists in the system at all.

If you include a submit button and the password is incorrect then your message can appear. The page still doesn't have to reload, and the user is still in control.

Here is an excellent example of an AJAX module that I think has very good usability.

View the graffiti wall example

Also another point if your still reading, it's not very helpful to have a page with two login fields disabled. From a purely esthetic perspective it wouldn't lend much to the design. You could of course have it update on any other pages in the application, but the user may think they actually didn't login till they went to another page because they think seeing the "logged in" module without the fields means they are actually logged in. Now I'm getting fairly convoluted here but the designer in me just had to say something!

Posted by brandy at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

The Acid2 challenge to Microsoft

The first beta of IE 7.0 isn't expected for a few more months. But information on Microsoft's security, standards and interface plans are trickling out now.

"To the Web community I want to say: Microsoft has now been challenged. They will respond, if enough people remind them of the challenge. Please remind them. And, when IE 7 is released, make sure this is the first thing you type into it."

The Acid2 challenge to Microsoft

Posted by brandy at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

CSS: Rounded corners without images

"Rounded Corners with CSS are a hot topic in web design: I think that there are hundreds of articles on them. This page is intended to present the solution I came up, that doesn't requires images, extra markup nor CSS. Let's start."

Posted by brandy at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

Head First Java: Objectville

Page 41 ("Head First Java"), this one took me a bit longer then the others, I think 20 minutes or so.I also references page 37 to see how they had structured the code in an earlier example and used that as a guide.

All the "//" represents a snippet of code, the code was all jumbled up and I had to put it together.

Output:
bang bang ba-bang
ding ding da-ding

My first approach had nearly everything in the right "class" excluding that I had the if up in the first class. I peaked in the back to see my first mistake so I could atleast start to head in the right direction. I was excited to see it was the only thing that didn't belong in the first class. So I moved it below and ran it and wow I was suprised it complied, only it compiled backwards. So I just swapped the position of d.playSnare(); and d.playTopHat(); and boo-ya it worked! Lovely!

Posted by brandy at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

Shuffle Replication

This is just crazy - a total and complete rip-off of the iPod Shuffle, and they even have the nerve to put the word shuffle in the title.

I hope apple sue's the heck out of them.

Posted by brandy at 01:11 PM | Comments (2)

March 14, 2005

Do you design stuff?

Fantastic article, I reccomend you read it.

During a trip to visit ODMs in Asia, one executive told securities analyst Jim Grossman of Thrivent Investment Management about Steve Jobs's insistence that no screws be visible on the laptop his company was manufacturing for Apple. The executive said his company had no idea how to handle the job and had to invent a new tooling process for the job. "They had to learn new ways to do things just to meet Apple's design," says Grossman.

Posted by brandy at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)

FLEX & Java - AJUG Atlanta Tuesday Night

Round Box Media is presenting (which includes Jesse!);

The World Wide Web has spurred the creation of many large and small scale applications. These applications all have one thing in common, they are accessible from a browser. The problem is the universal language of browsers is HTML. Although the simplicity of HTML has aided in the proliferation of web technologies users are now demanding more features than the creators of HTML ever thought possible. Macromedia has an excellent answer to this problem with Flash and FLEX. These technologies offer the ability to create rich, maintainable graphical user interfaces.

This is a presentation and discussion on how to use some of the latest, best of breed technologies for web development. If you are interested in writing rich, robust, easy to maintain and and pleasant to use software delivered over the web then this presentation is for you.

Holiday Inn Select Atlanta Perimeter Dunwoody
4386 Chamblee-Dunwoody Road
Atlanta, GA 30341
Phone: (770) 457-6363
Fax: (770) 458-5282

Traveling I-85 South
Take I-285 Westbound and proceed to Exit-30 (Chamblee-Dunwoody Road) When exiting, continue straight to the third traffic light. Turn left The Holiday Inn Select will be on your right.

Traveling I-85 North
Take 1-85 North to Interstates 75 & 85 (joint to come to downtown district) and then separate again. Stay on I-85 North until you find Georgia Highway 400 (signs). Exit onto Georgia 400 Northbound (.50 cents toll). Pass the tollbooth and exit onto I-285 Eastbound. Go to Exit 30, Chamblee-Dunwoody Road and turn right off the exit ramp; The Holiday Inn Select will be on your right.

Traveling I-75 South
Take I-285 Eastbound to exit 30 (Chamblee-Dunwoody Road). Turn Right off the exit ramp. The Holiday Inn Select will be on your right.

Traveling I-75 North
Travel I-75 North until you find 285 Eastbound. Take 285 East to exit 30 (Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd). Turn right off the exit ramp. The Holiday Inn Select will be on your immediate right.

Traveling I-20 East
Travel I-20 East, until you find I-285 North. Take 285 North to exit 30 (Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd) and turn right from the exit ramp The Holiday Inn Select will be on your right.

Traveling I-20 West
Take I-285 North to Exit 30 (Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd). Go to the third traffic light and turn left. The Holiday Inn Select will be on your right.

Posted by brandy at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2005

Tic Tac's and iPod Shiffle's

So I woke up at a wonderful 11am (been a while sense I was able to sleep in that late) and of course Jesse is moaning and groaning because if he could he would sleep till 3pm. I come into my office to check email and I have a little container of Tic Tac's on my desk. They are warm from sitting next to the computer. So I put a few in my hand an go to eat them when I realize they are white.

You see the container is actually colored a bright orange, thats how they were in australia, so you can't see the true color of the candy. So I'm thinking, wow did the computer heat somehow react with the color?

So then I read the back and it says "Artificial orange flavor added, without colourings. Of course it also says "Made in Australia".

Pretty wild huh? Australia seems to be a lot "healthier" then the states on a few levels, so I wonder if not putting dyes in the Tic Tac's is another level into the cultural differences.

Onto the iPod, the other night after getting my shuffle I went to the CD store, and I had in my hands $80 in CD's. Right when I got into line, after spending like half an hour picking which ones I wanted I realized, um duh I could get this on itunes for less. I walked out feeling weird. I went home and bought that $80 in CD's and only spent around $40 or $50. It was such a strange feeling, knowing I will probably never buy a CD again. Paradigm shift. So weird.

Posted by brandy at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Head First Java: Code magnets

My next assignment is on page 20 and I had to shuffle some peices of code around to make them work. Basically three of the if statments needed to be inside the while loop. Took about 10 minutes. It was easy to know where the first one went because I needed A to print out first.

Output needed to be:
a-b c-d

The trick is it's counting down and though the output looks like 2 things, it's really three things; "a" (x = 3) "b c" (x = 2) & d (x = 1). Kinda tricky the way they made it "look" even thought it's clear to see once you see the line that says to print "b c".

The next thing I get to do is fill is like a matching game. I have to figure out which bits of code go with which output. Its one Java file, and then there is 1 line in it where i have to try swaping in about 5 different variations, then I have to sit there in my head and run them all. I could of course put them in the computer and let it run them but then I wouldn't actually learn anything!! It's meant to be done with a pencil, I havn't done algebra with a pencil in l ike 4 years lol.

Posted by brandy at 04:21 PM | Comments (3)

Why Women Leave I.T.

This article is silly.

For male workers, the challenges inherent in I.T. jobs create a feedback loop -- a balance that must be maintained and managed, but that has basically one dimension. For women, however, the very job qualities that strong I.T. employees crave -- challenging projects and rapid, successive skill acquisition -- are causing even more stress.

A woman wrote this article, I'm not sure what she means by the above. If she means it is "more stressful" for a women to keep up with the latest technology then she is very mistaken. I was using XHTML before most people were, and Cingular Wireless was one of the FIRST websites using a CSS-P driven design. Why did I get this opportunity? Because it just worked out that way. I happen to have a project that I got to work on, where someone had decided to do it in XHTML and it worked out well and I got to learn something cutting edge that most people had still not started using. To me what she is saying is very circumstantial.

"But those very characteristics of I.T. jobs may be the ones that finally push them out of the field -- and they are leaving, voluntarily, in droves."

Excuse me? I don't think so, not this girl. I have left jobs in the past BECAUSE I wasn't getting to learn new things, and moved onto new jobs that would let me learn new things. Again it's all about the circumstances. If you want to keep growing you would need to work somewhere that allows you to.

"For example, women tend to take maternity leaves when their children are born. Even if that leave is only a couple of months long, much could have changed by the time the woman returns to her desk. Imagine the increased stress for her if an enterprise software update occurs in her absence, for instance."

This is true of ANY profession, if your a plastic surgeon and take a year off to have a baby and you miss learning and training on the newest type of breast implants (yeah I watch Dr. 90210 and they change those surgeries about as often as Macromedia releases new versions of flash) or a new type of surgery for it. It's all the same; as SO MANY jobs are relying more heavily on computers (including non-IT related jobs) there is a need to keep up. The WORLD is changing, and I think a lot more women are opting to stay at home with their children then in the last 10 years or so.

When I have a child I would like to stay at home with it as well. Women have babies, it affects their career path, it always had, it always will until men can give birth. Get over it!

Posted by brandy at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2005

Head First Java: Bug Fix 101

I have gotten bored and decided to play with Java in my spare time. I have been amusing myself with the "Head First Java" book as it seems to have people like me in mind when it was written. It's a fun book with lots of visuals. It also reminds me of Jesse who is famous for naming his classes and variables funny names like mooCow and moreCheese.

Here is the sample code they give you:

Output: (counting down from 99)
3 bottles of beer on the wall
3 bottles of beer on the wall
3 bottles of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
2 bottles of beer on the wall
2 bottles of beer on the wall
2 bottles of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
1 bottles of beer on the wall // Here is the flaw I need to fix!
1 bottle of beer on the wall
1 bottle of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
No more bottles of beer on the wall

I of course immediatly had to add a line to improve the formatting, it took me about 5 or 10 minutes to trouble shoot it the actual problem which was an IF that needed to be moved.

Output:
3 bottles of beer on the wall
3 bottles of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
2 bottles of beer on the wall

2 bottles of beer on the wall
2 bottles of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
1 bottle of beer on the wall

1 bottle of beer on the wall
1 bottle of beer.
Take one down.
Pass it around.
No more bottles of beer on the wall

The first things I tried where changing the 0's in some of the equations to 1, and in one situation it almost seemed to fix it but it still had problems. It's so scarey to bug fix in a new language. For several months at work all I did was bug fix XHTML and CSS for browser problems IE/Netscape/MAC/Firefox. I used to hate debugging, but after I got good at it I really started enjoying it.

This week at work I have been listening to tapes/video's of Customer Service Reps using some of our system and making notes about the success and failures they may have. It's interesting, but it's great to get a break and do some code. Flex's the brain.

Not to bad for my first time I guess.

Posted by brandy at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

We Need Spy Blogs

Durring lunch I went surfing (eating a lovely bean burrito from our awsume cafeteria - though overpriced) and I visited an old favorite, wired.com, I also realized wow ya know I've been visiting this site for like 5 years and it still delivers!

So yeah, onto the article - We Need Spy Blogs;

Unfortunately, the intelligence community has not kept up with the Army. The 15 agencies of the community - ranging from the armed services to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - maintain separate portals, separate data, and separate people. The bad guys exploit the gaps, and your safety is on the line. So if all us knuckle-draggers in the Army can use technology to make ourselves better, why can't all the big brains at Langley and Foggy Bottom do the same?

Posted by brandy at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2005

Australia MXDU Pix

Blue Mountains

Chafic, Guy Watson, Peter Joel hall, Jesse Warden

Jesse & Brandy

Silly Boys

Featherdale Wildlife Park

Sydney Operah House

Kai and his lovely wife

Star City Hotel

Sydney - The Gap (Geoff and Julie took us to The Gap on our last day in Australia

Geoff and the boys

Vivian (hope I spelled that right) who went shopping with me in Sydney and who is just the coolest

Posted by brandy at 03:10 PM | Comments (1)