flow|state has a great pair of articles that summarize well the problems a web application will face with too many obstacles for new users. First, in Hurdles at the entrance to a site: It’s not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site… The list that follows isn’t much of an exaggeration. So many sites require signup and verification before you can figure out what they do, let alone start…
Well, it looks like my problems yesterday weren’t special at all. Everyone was having trouble according to the Mercury News story this morning: For Intuit’s customers, Tax Day turned out to be even more stressful than they’d feared – and the company faced quite a challenge, too. The Mountain View financial software company’s servers couldn’t cope with the massive Web traffic from last-minute electronic filers. So when some Intuit TurboTax customers logged on to e-file their taxes, they saw error messages and weren’t able to file. Being one of the “last possible minute” crowd myself, I have no problem believing…
The passing away of John Backus — leader of the team that invented the Fortran programming language — has been making the rounds yesterday and today. I didn’t recognize the name immediately, but it’s been interesting reading up on the history of Fortran and how it was created: Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers…
I know there’s no shortage of bad or weird error dialogs for software these days, but I’m still surprised when I encounter one in real life. Tonight I had to use my daughter’s HP Photosmart printer on our main Windows PC, so we dutifully installed the CD first to pick up all the appropriate drivers. Sure enough, about half way through a maze of several different installation wizards, this beauty showed up, trying to warn us of “issues blocking installation”. Luckily, it seemed to be a red herring, because clicking Continue let the wizard(s) finish, then we were up and…
Amazon’s new web services have been gathering a lot of momentum recently, in particular the Simple Storage Service (S3). I can wrap my head around S3 pretty easily and there’s no shortage of the canonical example of “remote backups“. For me, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was a bit more puzzling and I didn’t really understand what it would be used for. That all changed now that I listed to a recent Technometria episode on IT Conversations with Jeff Barr and Doug Kaye. This is a great show which includes Jeff reviewing the Amazon web services and Doug explaining how…