InVisible

Jef Raskin was the man responsible for the Macintosh. I stumbled on his website a couple of days ago and read about his explorations on Interface Design. Intrigued about THE (The Humane Environment), a new paradigm for interaction with the computer. Interestingly enough, I haven’t been able to see THE yet - the screenshot image is not showing, and THE only runs on Mac’s. But I was intrigued and ordered the book. It came, I read and I learned. Raskin talks about consciousness and non-consciousness when using interfaces, locus and focus, modality and so on. He has a deep understanding and knowledge of the subject, his theses are supported by empiric studies. And he’s able to bring across so many important points in interface design in an easy to grasp manner. ...

I’ve been chasing a bug for a couple of hours now…. “Entry not found in index” seems to be a classical @DbLookup that fails… Well, wading through the form, removing blocks of fields, testing again, and again and again and never getting rid of the error on one specific document (but on other everything’s fine). The Domino developers know the drill - it’s frustrating. The I looked at the URL - I was opening a doc by it’s UNID. I searched for that doc in the database but couldn’t find it by that UNID. So I looked at the code that creates the URL. It takes the UNID from a computed field that contains @Text(@DocumentUniqueID). ...

MESS An emulator of old, old computers. They emulate almost every computer I ever owned (ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Oric1, C-64) or used (the “ur” commodore and the TRS-80) SmartSpace - SyncML for the P800 SyncML Reference Toolkit (Sourceforge) Implementations of the SyncML protocol Synchronisation von Terminplanern mittels XML PHP Implementation of SyncML

The friendly people over on Joi’s IRC channel #joiito helped me by having me look at the Task Manager “Show Kernel Process” option. Then I wandered through the options and saw that the update frequence of the graph display was set to to “stopped”. Still wondering why it continued to show 100% CPU even when there was nothing going on. Setting the graph to update regularly, showed me that my system is in a normal state… Pheeew ...

In preparation for the project ahead I decided to install IIS and the latest fixes on this Windows XP SP1 machine. Then I got ActiveState Python to work as a handler to .py files (something that Microsoft Knowledgebase helps you with. I was rewarded with a working IIS con Python server and an unbelievable slow machine. Bringing up the Task Manager shows my CPU pegged at 100% - but none of the processes running seem to be responsible for it. Firing up ProcessExplorer by SysInternals shows a lot more information about the running processes, but no culprit. ...

I have a “filler project” coming up and I need to choose the right tools to get the job done. There’s a bit of infrastructure in place: MS SQL Server, IIS and a couple of databases on the SQL server. I need to write a web enabled front end for those, containing two forms to enter information. Also I need to be able to create reports from the database (also in HTML). ...