Book Review: The Human Factor

I just finished reading Kim Vicente’s The Human Factor, and it’s a pretty good read.



It is a great companion read to Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. Where Norman’s book focuses on physical design, Vicente’s book focuses on the processes and structures relating to how humans grapple with technology. Vicente effectively uses many life and death situations to cement his arguments in your mind. Using examples from the airline and health care industries, you are given a clear understanding of why human factors extends beyond physical technology. Hitting closer to home, Vicente also provides an insightful summary of the Walkerton tragedy and the procedural failures that allowed it to happen.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Slimmy Wallet

For as long as I’ve ever carried a wallet, I’ve had George Costanza wallet syndrome. The cost to being able to have all that extra “just-in-case” cruft has been premature pocket wear in my pants, and more recently, poor circulation in the leg on my wallet side.

After hearing about the Slimmy wallet several times, I noticed that the not-so-stylish tan coloured wallet was on sale (and still is) for $20. After a couple of shipping snafus and four weeks, I finally received my Slimmy wallet last week.

It’s a three slotted “pleather” wallet, and as advertised, it’s thin. Being thin, it has very limited storage capacity. This has pluses and minuses. It forced me to identify what I really needed to carry with me, and even then, I am carrying 9 cards. With those 9 cards and a few bills, it has the thickness equivalent to a Blackberry. It is thin enough for me to put in my front pocket without looking like a total idiot, and it’s been a strange sensation adjusting to my OCD habit of checking my back pocket for my wallet, only to find emptiness.

Since your cards are kept in open slots, I would say that you have to be a little more cautious to make sure you don’t stretch out the wallet by stuffing in too many cards, otherwise, it will get to a state where your cards could fall out at times.

So, is it worth it? For me, I would say yes. It’s not uncomfortable to sit down with the wallet in my front pocket, although it’s best to carry it in a pocket that also isn’t carrying keys or change. Change had a tendency to pop into the wallet’s slits. If you carry a cell phone in your front pocket, this could leave you with a hard choice, since you don’t want keys and coins scraping your phone, yet you also don’t want a giant bulge in your pocket because your wallet and phone are sharing the same home.

If you’re looking to go even slimmer, All-Ett seems to have a nice selection of thin and reasonably priced wallets as well.

Netbook Competition Heating Up

Is “netbook” the new moniker for the class of cheap and small notebooks popularized by the Asus Eee?

Well, it seems to be sticking with the major gadget blogs. In any case, some big news out of Computex in Taiwan this week...

AMD is jumping into the market, Ubuntu’s specialized distro is announced, and the MSI Wind has been touted as a legitimate competitor to the Asus Eee.

Ars: From Win32 to Cocoa, Part III

The third part of Ars’ four-part series on a programmer’s migration from Win32 to Cocoa is now out. It’s a little meatier than the two previous installments, and actually has a couple of interesting nuggets, especially in the explanation of how Obj-C differs from Java and C++.

RapidWeaver 4 Quibbles

While the publishing feature works a little more nicely than its predecessor, I’m wondering if the GUI improvements are improvements at all. In many ways, the “Delicious Generation” moniker that was intended to be a pejorative is actually brought to life with unnecessary animated fluff.

Example: Ripping out a page of the “less is more” UI design book, some genius at RealMac decided that an coverflow style animation would make a great progress bar. Wrong. As a habitual Command-S presser, I get to see the wonderfully annoying animation every 3-5 minutes when working with the app.

Still missing from the app are automagically generated permalink titles. Come on guys, I’d have rather you spent the 3 hours developing that lame progress bar on using a simple regular expression to autopopulate the permalink field so that I wouldn’t have a giant hexadecimal hash as my permalink instead.

Some other annoyances: Positioning and default icons on the toolbar and the bizarre positioning of the Title/Category pane on the right side of the application window (wtf!?).

I would have preferred to see the functional improvements of 4 in the 3.x interface. But that’s just me talking. I can definitely see why 4.0 is not a paid upgrade over 3.6.

SEO Cheat Sheet

SEOmoz has an excellent printable cheatsheet for web developers.