Adding Insight to Injury

The personal life is lacking lately. I’m just sitting around and lusting after items I have no business buying, anticipating going out on a boat this weekend, and missing my friends and family at home. I’ll be in KY in a week, though.

• 37svn talks about project estimates

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!” To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

• Jakob Nielsen talks about ecommerce usability

Menus of state abbreviations, such as for U.S. mailing addresses. It is much faster for users to simply type, say, “NY,” than to select a state from a scrolling drop-down menu. Free-form input into fields with restricted options does require data validation on the backend, but from a usability perspective it’s often the best way to go. (This is guideline #178 for e-commerce usability because of the many errors we observed in check-out forms with state drop-downs.)

• Wikipedia: Survivalism (Not too unrelated: Desert Eagle Mark XIX )

• FreeTDS enables a Linux server to connect to an external SQL server and perform queries.

• Drak’s Linux RAID Setup proves that Drak’s too smart for his own good.

• Apache Mod_Rewrite provides URLs that are easy to digest. The manual is not easy to digest.