Computers & Technology: November 2004 Archives

Now I'm testing to see if TinyMCE is working. Hmm. So far, there's a bug with the popup link dialog box... it keeps asking me to give the target a name. That's annoying, because even when I typed in the name, it didn't work. Anyway, the link to TinyMCE is http://tinymce.moxiecode.com. Ah, I've got it working now. Neat! Now what's with the weird line breaks?

I'm upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type. Is this thing working? Tap, tap. I hosed HTMLArea, but maybe that's OK — I might want to see if there's a more recent version or try TinyMCE or whatever it's called. Does anyone really care? Probably not, but hey! At least I'm not blogging about politics!

The New York Times reports that San Jose bought its police officers a Windows-based system that has been installed in each squad car.

With the system, officers in the field can receive orders, send messages, write reports, call up maps of the city and, using the Global Positioning System, see not only where they are but where other patrol cars are at any given time.

Sounds good, right? But...

When first installed, the system was unstable. A day or two after the new system went into operation, it crashed, and for several days it was periodically down. "That didn't engender a lot of trust," said Sergeant DeMers of the police union.

Ms. Dilbeck acknowledged, "That was a really bad start."

When the system was running again, a number of bugs were discovered, said Aaron Marcus, president of Aaron Marcus & Associates, a user-interface design consulting firm in Berkeley, Calif., that studied the new system at the request of the union.

Some of the map information, it turned out, was inaccurate, screens were cluttered with unnecessary information, the on-screen type was difficult to read and officers could not easily perform one of the most basic tasks - the license-plate check.

"This is almost a casebook study of what not to do and how to do it wrong," Mr. Marcus said.

Perhaps the biggest misstep of all, Mr. Marcus said, was that the officers themselves were not consulted beforehand, especially when it came to the design of the interface. [Italics mine]

No kidding.

For more examples of things which seem designed to fail, see This Is Broken.

Sigh. I love the Mambo content management system so far, because it's powerful and it's free... but the documentation could still use a little work. On page 75 of their manual (which is still in draft mode, to be fair...) we have this masterpiece of circular reasoning:

• Menu Type: This is the menu type as defined in the module.
• Module Name: This is the name of the Module displaying this menu type.

None of which answers my question: how the heck do I rejigger the top menu so it lists links horizontally instead of vertically? Ah well.