Kurt Leucht’s Blog

I recently read an online article written by Jeff Atwood, a popular software & human factors blogger, titled “Crash Responsibly“. The gist of his article was basically that we as software developers need to protect the users of our software from unknown errors and even from catastrophic crashes. I agree wholeheartedly.

Everyone who writes software should make sure that their application is self-reporting of it’s own problems. Never depend on the user to tell you that your software is misbehaving. Of course, you should also have a means for the user to manually report problems, but that should be a secondary means that you find out about your software’s bugs, issues, and crashes.

Software developers should also hide the gory details of their errors from their users by default. There are always some software savvy or curious users who will want to know exactly what went wrong, but most users just want to know that something bad happened and the software developers have been notified and they are on the case and working diligently to correct it. There should probably be a means for the savvy or curious user to see more details and also a means for the user to report the problem, but again, these are both secondary. The primary error screen should be simple and easily understandable by the general public and no gory implementation details nor debugging details should be exposed to the user by default.

I performed a search on the blockbuster.com site just now for VeggieTales movies to add to my online Blockbuster queue, when I received the following error screen:

Wow. I’m a full time software designer and I don’t think I can fully understand what this error message is trying to tell the user. I understand the “no server available” and the “timed out after 10 seconds” parts, but I’ll admit I had to look up the word “idempotent”. That’s not a word your typical user needs to be exposed to. Most users will probably even laugh at you when they see this error message because it looks like you completely made up a word.

So blockbuster.com, please crash responsibly!

Kurt

A buddy and I were talking the other day about how much litter we see all the time laying on the side of the roads. Whether we’re in town or on the Interstate highway or somewhere in-between, there is always somebody out there who thinks it’s okay to throw their trash out onto the ground. Why are people so rude? Didn’t their parents teach them about good manners and picking up after themselves?

Okay, in town maybe there are people who need to get better trash cans that are less able to be spilled or turned over by dogs and raccoons and the like. Before I got switched over to the city’s large automatic bin garbage collection system, I had a regular old 33 gallon can that had handles that locked down onto the lid. People who use cans without lid locks may unknowingly be creating litter in their neighborhood while their can sits out unattended overnight or during the morning hours while they’re away at work.

Your neighborhood or town or county or state could very well have an organized litter prevention program. That’s great, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to reduce the occurrence of littering unless we all get involved. My county has a program called Keep Brevard Beautiful. They’ve actually set up a litter hotline, where you can call in as soon as you witness someone throwing trash out of their vehicle or whatever. The number is *KBB on your Cingular cell phone or 321-537-6801.

Okay, so the only way this sort of program is going to do any good is if we all put these numbers into our cell phones contact lists where we can easily find them when we need them! So stop reading this right now and go find out how you can report littering in your area and go put the numbers into your cell phones!

Don’t even get me started on cigarette butts. I mean, just because cigarette butts are tiny little things, does that mean they’re not trash? No! They are trash! Get yourself an ashtray. I see so many people tossing cigarette butts out their car windows while I’m driving around town or to and from work it makes me sick. Everybody around here knows it’s a fire hazard too because they talk about it on the news a lot, but even that doesn’t stop people from tossing out their butts. It’s ridiculous.

Of course a reporting system is a good idea, but enforcement and giving out fines is hard when there is no tangible proof of the offense. But hey, with the popularity of cell phones with cameras these days, maybe that tangible proof is now easy to acquire! My local KBB program actually has an email address that we can send information to. So if I take a photo or video of someone littering, I can call in the offense or I can email the photo or video to my local program. That’s great! Of course, technically the offender cannot be charged unless the offense is witnessed directly by an officer. But I still like the idea of sending in a photo or video of the offense in order to solidify the case.

So please do your part by not littering in the first place, but also by reporting littering when you witness it.

Kurt

I did this weekend project a long long time ago, but just recently cleaned out my messy garage, got the Ranger back in and finally took some photos of the project.

I built a pool lift for the toddler swimming pool. This pool is too big to deflate and blow up every other day or even every other week, so we keep it inflated all the time. But we had no place to store it when it was fully inflated. So I built the pool lift.

It has pulleys and a block-and-tackle and you just tie the rope off at the wall anchors. I tried it without the b&t, and it was way too hard to lift. It’s light as a feather with the b&t, though. My wife gets the pool down all the time while I’m at work and puts it back up. When the kids outgrow the toddler pool I can think of all kinds of things that I can store up there.

One word of warning, though: the bottoms of your garage ceiling joists are not designed to hold the weight of heavy objects! Attic joists are designed to carry a heavy roof load only on the topmost spans. The lower spans are only designed for compression or tension.

Kurt

I stumbled across a pretty cool web application today. It won’t have as many users as Google Docs, but I can see an occasional need for something like this. It’s called Awesome Highlighter, and it is an online web tool that lets you highlight a website, then share that highlighted website with others.

Check it out. Here is a screen shot of what one of my blog entries looks like normally when you first look at it:

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So you go to awesomehighlighter.com and put in the URL that you want to highlight, it takes you there, but it gives you a set of tools, like a highlighter that has color choices, and sticky notes. You highlight and add sticky notes and then click Done. Then it gives you a tiny URL that you can visit and share, and the highlighted version of the web page is there at that tiny URL. Here’s what the above blog entry looked like at the tiny URL after I highlighted a few words and added a couple sticky notes:

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Pretty cool, huh? I could see how this could come in handy every once in a while when you’re trying to show someone something, but you’re not right there face to face to point to it and you’re not necessarily in a position to do desktop sharing or something like that. Nice job, Awesome Highlighter!

Kurt

Just in case anyone has actually been reading this Blog … I upgraded to a new Wordpress version this evening, but don’t quite have all the bugs worked out yet so the site looks a bit off right now. All the content is there, it’s just that the sidebar is not always displaying up where it should be. It’s way past bed time, so I’ll have to work on it a bit more on another day.

Kurt

Ive been a Woot (woot.com, what is Woot) customer since May of 2006, buying cheap electronics here and there whenever I saw Woot offering something that I really needed. When I subscribed to the Woot RSS feeds (so I wouldnt forget to check the daily sale) I noticed that they were holding weekly Photo-chopping contests there. And they were actually giving away monetary prizes too, or at least monetary credit for purchases on Woot! Ive got a little bit of Photo-chopping experience, so I started keeping my eyes open for a contest theme that I would enjoy working on. Then Woot Contest 174 caught my eye.

The Challenge: Show us how we can get rid of thousands of unsold Sandisk Sansa Media Players.

The idea that immediately came to mind was to use thousands of these cheap little electronic devices to build a supercomputer … or actually a not-so-super-computer.

Here is the Sansa image I used from Woot:

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And here is the super computer image I used from Mississippi State University:

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And here is my contest entry (http://www.woot.com/Forums/ViewPost.aspx?PostID=2265560):

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I spent probably 2 hours on this entry. A pro could have probably done it in 20 minutes, but I’m not that experienced … plus the TV was on while I was working on it. It was fun, though. I especially enjoyed turning the SUN microsystems logo on the side of the rack into Sandisk. I think it turned out rather well.

I didn’t win a monetary prize, but I was honored with an “Honorable Mention” which is worth free shipping on my next Woot purchase. Here are the complete results for Woot Contest 174.

Kurt