Author name: S Anand

Inline form validation

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A List Apart’s article on Inline Validation is one of the most informative I’ve read in a while — and it’s backed by solid data.

Some useful lessons:

  1. Inline validation can reduce form completion time by 40%
  2. Use inline validations where the user doesn’t know if they’ll get it wrong (e.g. is a username available?). Don’t use them if user knows the answer (e.g. their name)
  3. Validate on blur, not on keypress (it’s distracting, and users can’t multitask)

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A flaw in rationality

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I found this piece from “The Happiness Hypothesis” pretty interesting:

In the 1990s, Damasio found that when certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex are damaged, patients lose most of their emotional lives. They report that when they ought to feel emotion, they feel nothing, and studies of their autonomic reactions (such as those used in lie detector tests) confirm that they lack the normal flashes of bodily reaction that the rest of us experience when observing scenes of horror or beauty. Yet their reasoning and logical abilities are intact. They perform normally on tests of intelligence and knowledge of social rules and moral principles.

So what happens when these people go out into the world? Now that they are free of the distractions of emotion, do they become hyperlogical, able to see through the haze of feelings that blinds the rest of us to the path of perfect rationality? Just the opposite. They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other. When the rest of us look out at the world, our emotional brains have instantly and automatically appraised the possibilities. One possibility usually jumps out at us as the obvious best one. We need only use reason to weigh the pros and cons when two or three possibilities seem equally good.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality.

Guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that models based on rationality fail.

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IE6 in Corporates

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PPK’s State of the Browser – IE Edition mentions one reason why IE6 will probably stay on for a while.

Now why do I expect IE6 to stick around while IE7 goes down? The answer is simple: Intranets… many office workers will continue to be condemned to IE6.

At work, that is. It’s quite likely that on their private computer at home they run another browser — IE7 or 8, Firefox, or maybe one of the smaller ones.

… Basically, most of the IE6 market share comes from office-hour surfing, while it drops significantly in the after-hours period.

I checked the numbers on my site. It’s bang on. Last month, the percentage of IE6 users around noon was a little over 40%. At midnight, the percentage was 20%.

Percentage of IE6 users over a 24-hour windowGraph: Twice as many IE6 users at noon compared to midnight

Given that the bulk of my audience is from India, I would assume that these statistics are probably representative of Indian corporates. But I guess it means that there’s a fair bit of music listening happening at work. Probably a good thing.

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Round buttons with Python Image Library

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After much hunting, I finally settled on Hedger Wang’s simple round CSS links as the most acceptable cross-browser round button implementation. The minified CSS is about 2.5KB, and the syntax is very simple. To make an input button into a round button, just wrap it within a <span class="button">:

<span class="button"><input type="submit"></span>

… and it’s just as easy to convert a link into a rounded button:

<a class="button" href=”/”><span>Home</span></a>

It works by using a transparent PNG / GIF that looks like this:

The first button is the default button. The second appears on hover. The bottom two are for disabled buttons.

Can we easily create buttons in different colours?

That’s what this post is about: creating that image with round buttons and gradients.

When I tried creating these rounded buttons myself (and trying to do it in an automated was as usual), I saw 3 possible approaches:

  1. Create it using PowerPoint via Python and export as a PNG.
    So we make a curved box, put in the appropriate gradients and borders, and export it as a PNG. But the problem is I couldn’t figure out how to get transparent PNGs.
  2. Create it in GIMP using script-fu plugin.
    The problem is, I don’t know scheme or GIMP’s API. So I gave up on this as well.
  3. Create it using Python Image Library.
    This was inspired by Nadia’s PIL Tutorial: How to Create a Button Generator. Let me explain how this works.

The first step is to create a ‘button-mask.png’ like this one:

  1. Create a transparent 300 x 120 image in GIMP
  2. Selecting a box from (0,0) to (300,30)
  3. Shrink it by 2 pixels
  4. Convert it to a rounded rectangle with a radius of 80%
  5. Fill this in white
  6. Copy it to 60 pixels below

Now, we need code to create a gradient:

start, end = (192, 192, 224), (255, 255, 255)
grad = Image.new('RGBA', (300, 120))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(grad)
for y in range(0, 30):
    draw.line(((0,y),(300,y)), fill=rgb(start, end, y/30.0))
    draw.line(((0,y+60),(300,y+60)), fill=rgb(start, end, 1.0-y/30.0))

Now that the gradient is created, convert that into a round button by loading button-mask.png’s alpha layer onto the gradient:

mask = Image.open('button-mask.png').convert('RGBA').split()[3]
border = Image.open('button-border.png').convert('RGBA')
grad.putalpha(mask)
grad.save('button.png')

There it is: a simple round button generator. You can see a sample of these buttons at my Dilbert search site.

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Error logging with Google Analytics

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A quick note: I blogged earlier about Javascript error logging, saying that you can wrap every function in your code (automatically) in a try{} catch{} block, and log the error message in the catch{} block.

I used to write the error message to a Perl script. But now I use Google’s event tracking. 

var s = [];
for (var i in err) { s.push(i + '=' + err[i]); }
s = s.join(' ').substr(0,500)
pageTracker._trackEvent("Error", function_name, s);

The good part is that it makes error monitoring a whole lot easier. Within a day of implementing this, I managed to get a couple of errors fixed that had been pending for months.

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15 years of Dilbert searchable

/ How I do things / 1 Comment

The Dilbert search index now carries 15 years worth of Dilbert comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of BFMartin (over 6 years worth of strips) and Paul Dorman (over 3 years worth of strips), myself (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors.

You can search the strips here. While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because geek.nl (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at dilbert.com/1991-02-03/ and see the strip.

Dilbert started around 20 years ago. So we’ve covered 75% of all the strips, and this is in just 8 months after starting this collaborative effort. A couple of lessons I learnt from this:

  1. Crowd sourcing beats going solo if you’re building content. It’s a no-brainer. There will always be only one or two people more passionate about something than you.
  2. The long tail is not very big. There will only be one or two people more passionate than something about you. Don’t expect the long tail contribution to be the significant. The value comes from being able to attract “the big fish”.

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Short notes

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I’m quite busy on a project right now, and don’t get time to write long articles. So for a while, I’m going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff.

  1. Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on Why You Should Encourage Weakness. It boils down to a choice: do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses? Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. The weakness isn’t why you hired the person! Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths.
  2. Google Analytics has a fairly interesting API that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode()
  3. The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a Checkout sandbox, an AJAX API playground, an AdWords sandbox, an AdSense API sandbox, the Mapstraction API sandbox, even an event called Developer Sandbox. (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)

 

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Organisational amnesia

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It’s amazing how much of a dependency there is on individuals writing IT systems. Reminds me of that Dilbert strip:

19940610

A few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out in what happens when there are multiple promotions. (Our client is a retailer.) I mean, if there’s a phone that costs £100 and there are 2 promotions: 10% off on phones and £10 off on phones. Do you apply the 10% off first and pay £80 or the £10 off and pay £81?

Funnily enough, the organisational answer is, “I don’t know.” The person who determined the logic is no longer with the firm. The person who wrote the code was a contractor and moved on to another project. The vendor hadn’t gotten around to documenting the code. Sure, the code’s there, and you just had to read it to figure out what it does. But no human knew what it was supposed to do.

Last week, there was a decision to rewrite some code that was 10 years old. A colleague who wasn’t quite involved in this work said, “I’m going to have to set aside 2-3 weeks for this. I wrote this stuff when I was a developer. The docs have vanished. The business owners have vanished. I’m the only one who has any clue on what it’s supposed to do.”

This week, we were trying to figure out how their store locator system works. After fiddling around with Fiddler, and seeing that it used Microsoft Virtual Earth, I was able to figure out that it identified stores near a location using a simple JSON API. But can we get the documentation around that? Nope. Tough luck. Nobody knows how it works any longer.

Personally, I don’t think this is unusual. We forget. Companies forget. But it’s usually good if what we forget is derivable. That’s how I got through my high-school physics exams: not by remembering stuff, but by being able to derive the stuff from a few principles.

Organisations can do the same. But to be able to do that, you need to have commonly understood principles. As Fred Brooks put it in The Mythical Man Month,

I contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.

One of the biggest enemies of conceptual integrity is growth. Too many people too soon, and the important decisions are taken by people who’ve never had a long chat about things. There’s another reason not to grow too fast.

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Short URLs

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With all the discussion around URL shorteners, Diggbar, blocking it, and the rev=canonical proposal, I decided to implement a URL shortening service on this blog with the least effort possible. This probably won’t impact you just yet, but when tools become more popular and sophisticated, it would hopefully eliminate the need for tinyurl, bit.ly, etc.

Since the blog runs on WordPress, every post has an ID. The short URL for any post will simply be http://www.s-anand.net/the_ID. For example, http://s-anand.net/17 is a link to post on Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude D420. At 21 characters, it’s roughly the same size as most URL shorteners could make it.

The code is easy: just one line added to index.php:

<link rev="canonical" href="http://s-anand.net/<?php the_ID(); ?>">

… and one line in my .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)$ blog/?p=$1 [L,R=301,QSA]

Hopefully someone will come up with a WordPress plugin some time soon that does this. Until then, this should work for you.

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