There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

“The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive,” one of the boys’ parents told the paper.

If by any chance you happen to be trying to get a Ubuntu system (or probably any Linux system) to talk to an Apple Airport (in my case the original 802.11b UFO style), don’t try to use the plain ASCII password for the WEP key – Linux and Apple seem to have different algorithms for converting the password to the actual HEX key.

Instead, open the Airport Admin Utility, double click on the base station in the list to open its configuration interface and then choose “Network Equivalent Password…” from the “Base Station” menu. Enter the hex key it gives you into the Ubuntu networking dialog as a Hexadcimal key type.

Jensen Harris: Help Is For Experts

One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts.

How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Jonathan Boutelle talks about how he made a wiki work with his software developers:

• Start off maintaining existing documents
• Make it easy to login
• Insist on Wysiwyg

So, so true. The first two could be a little more generalized: Start with a reason to use the wiki and make it easy. Making it easy encompasses insisting on Wysiwyg but the editor is the most important touch-point of a wiki that it’s worth stating separately.

Interesting argument between Tim Bray and Robert Scoble about what benefit standardizing Office 12’s XML format will provide.  Tim Bray suggests that Microsoft should use the open document format as the basis for its XML format with custom extensions when required.  Scoble argues that documents are more complex than Tim believes and that it would be impossible to create a compatible version of Office around the open document format. Maybe Tim Bray has done a lot of work with Word documents and office documents in general that I’m not familiar with – I know he’s done a lot with XML but that’s not enough to comment on the needs of a office-style document format¹.

Though everyone should already know about this, there is a survey out on what features to add to Swing’s text packages for Java 7. While that’s still a fair time away, and a long, long time away before you can count on everyone having it, now is definitely the time to make yourself heard about what features are required if you want to get them in.

Most of what’s on the list is possible to do today but takes a heck of a lot of effort to achieve, as well as a lot of very specialist knowledge. Making it easier would be a pretty big plus.

Dear lazyweb,

Do you happen to know if the scripting engine stuff that will be part of Java 1.6 is available for previous versions anywhere? I know there’s things like bean scripting framework, rhino etc but would like to use the one standardized API to drive things if possible. I haven’t seen much information come through about the scripting APIs which is a bit surprising actually.

Thanks!

Too many companies make the mistake of promoting programmers to management despite the fact that they are awful managers. I’ve long thought Linux suffered from that problem and Torvalds threatening to laugh in the face of contributors who submit new features after the 2 week window at the start of each new version’s development.

Linus Torvalds has threatened that if developers add ’last-minute things’ to the next version of the Linux kernel he will ‘refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively’ Laughing in people’s faces is never acceptable behavior and threatening to do so is childish and demoralizing. It definitely doesn’t help to build community which is what opensource lives on. It might be a very good idea to limit new features to the first 2 weeks of development (though fixing known bugs before adding new features also has a lot of merit), and being very strict about it might be the best thing. Regardless, childish tantrums are not appropriate in software development.

It seems like noone has managed to invent a bug tracking system that can do search well.  Bugzilla’s famous for having a lousy search interface but its not just interface – I’m yet to find a bug tracking system that can search for a find bugs I’m looking for consistently.

This becomes particularly annoying when you are trying to avoid logging duplicate bugs as you have to spend ages crafting search queries to try and identify whether or not the bug has previously been reported.

I know I’m way behind on this but there’s one thing I noticed at the end of Macword’s “Close-up on Aperture”:

• By the way, there’s no Save command in Aperture. As you make changes, those changes are recorded in a SQL database.

Expect to see a lot more of that as applications take better advantage of CoreData and/or provide built-in versioning systems for their files. When you think about it, why should you have to remember to save instead of just having the ability to undo as far back as you like?

For the past month or so I’ve been organizing my work life with Remember The Milk, another in the growing line of AJAX todo list implementations. It’s “in beta” (what isn’t?) and shows it at times with the odd glitch. Generally though it’s very nice to use, is free and allows you to set due dates on items.

It’s idea of being able to send you an instant message on any of the networks, email or SMS to notify you when a task is nearly due is great, but unfortunately completely undependable so not yet useful in practice.

There was a time when the word of Jacob Nielson was undoubtable right and everyone must bow down before it. Fortunately it appears that time is well and truly over. His latest article on blog usability completely misses the point of blogs, the target audience of most blogs and often passes a simple reality check.

1. No Author Biographies
   • Let’s face it, no one really cares about you. Unless your an A or B list blogger the vast majority of your traffic comes from search engines. Most of the time your readers are just looking for the solution to their problem. They don’t need to know whether or not your reliable or intelligent, they just check to see if your proposed solution works.
2. No Author Photo

   • You’re a geek – no one wants to see your photo. Also, see item 1.