Technology – Page 26

Label Placement in Forms… I was wrong.

In the process of designing “forms” in applications (both web based and rich client), I’ve had several discussions about where field labels should be located on the screen relative to the labeled fields. I’ve usually pushed hard for left-aligned labels, to the left of the fields, because this looks most tidy to me; I assumed that usability would be good also.

Ooops, it turns out that I was wrong. Matteo Penzo found, in an eye-tracking usability study (at UXMatters), that the best arrangement is to put labels above the fields, second best is right-aligned labels to the left of the fields; and of the arrangements studied, my favorite left-aligned arrangement is worst. Bold labels should be avoided… at least I was already doing that right. In the future, I will favor labels-on-top or right-aligned also.

Java Scripting talk, Nov. 9 at the St. Louis Java User Group

This Thursday, I will give a talk at the St. Louis Java User Group on “Scripting your Java Application”, Thursday Nov. 9. Here is the blurb:

First, this talk will show how to plug in scripting capability to your application, using common scripting mechanisms, including those from the scripting related JSRs (223, 274, etc), and point out the tradeoffs in selecting a scripting mechanism and/or language. Then the bulk of the talk will focus on the questions of Why and Where: the motivations for scripting support, areas of an application that warrant such support, and placement of scripting plug-points across client/server application tiers. Lastly, it will address script/application API design and plugability, including the ideal of an end-to-end script plugin.

My current plan is to use no slides, only a 1-page handout and code on the screen. (Yes, I’ve been to an Edward Tufte class…)

Heading to AYE

I’m heading to the AYE conference shortly, as I did last year. My strategy then was to attend many Weinberg sessions, which has turned out to be wise in retrospect, as Jerry won’t be there this year, he is home recovering from illness. I am eager to see how the rest of the AYE team divvies up the load of his sessions.

If you work in software development and haven’t read Jerry’s books (The Secrets of Consulting, Becoming a Technical Leader, The Psychology of Computer Programming, etc.), I heartily recommend doing so.

Fresh Windows Install, Ouch

A few hours ago I started with a fresh Windows XP Home install for a computer for my family.

I’m still going. I have lost count of how many times I have had to reboot the machine then get a new round of updates to install. It is ludicrous.

Modern Linux distributions are far superior to this. I recently installed Ubuntu on a several machines; the installer downloaded updates during the install process, so the machine was fully updated, on the first boot.

Dreamhost Out, TextDrive In

You might have noticed that this site is much faster than it used to be. The reason? I moved it from DreamHost to TextDrive.

TextDrive costs more, its “control panel” is not as good as DreamHost’s, and its bandwidth/storage limits are lower. But my site is far faster, hasn’t had any downtime or email downtime since the switch (during which DreamHost had an email outage), and TextDrive support responds much sooner.

I have a few TextDrive nitpicks though: there is no built in web-stats system (I’ll need to install one), and they apparently don’t have a backup system working at the moment (!). I’ve set up a nightly rsync to a machine here for backup purposes, but I sure hope they don’t intend this as a long term situation.

Update: Jason at Joyent/Textdrive noticed this post, and added a comment that the backup problem is long fixed.

Update: A complaint without data risks sounding like a whine. So I’ll add some data. Today I noticed that sites I still have on DreamHost are slow. Why? let’s look:

$ date
Fri Sep 8 15:56:14 PDT 2006
$ uptime
15:56:18 up 5:31, 3 users, load average: 103.41, 95.54, 181.86

Update: Some months later, TextDrive has turned out to have approximately at much, or more, downtime as DreamHost. It’s still fast when it’s up, and the TextDrive guys are helpful, friendly, and responsive. But the shared hosting they offer has frequent downtime.

Aiming for Mainstream

Over on defmacro today, a new article appeared: defmacro – Why Exotic Languages Are Not Mainstream in which the author laments that while there appear to be various choices to use Haskell on Windows, it turns out that all of them are, in some way, not ready for prime time… or even for effective hobbiest use.

I’ve noticed this myself, in my last few forays in to esoteric languages: the illusion of plenty of choices, runs in the the reality of no good choices. This is not a universal problem; I’ve had great results with Ruby, Python, and Lua, all of which are to some extent esoteric. The thing that those languages have in common is that there is at least one (and generally, only one) robust, production grade implementation with a community actively supporting it.

If you want to see your favorite language gain acceptance, spend your time creating / maintaining / vigorously supporting a production-ready implementation.