Moving innovations

One of the major annoyances in being the financial guy in our office is the accounting software we use. I would normally use something like GnuCash if it was just about keeping the books, and in fact I do for my personal finances, but with a company things are more complicated and it makes sense to use the same software as our accountant so that files can be swapped easily. This works fairly well in general, but the accounting software is really the laughing stock of usability in our office.

Let’s put the blame where it belongs: we are using Unit 4 Multiverse Lite. They kindly offered us a year-long free license, so perhaps I should not look a gift horse in the mouth, but really… In a way it is a shame I don’t teach usability classes anymore, this software alone would have made wonders for course material. Normally I would just rant and bother my co-workers, but since I’m working at home I’ll do it here. We just got a new version of the software which does some things a bit differently, and some a bit better, but let me tell you about two things I ran into today.

First of all I had to import an electronic bank statement and process it. It was the usual mix of bills we paid, bills other people paid to us, and some transactions from our debit card. After handling all this I clicked on the save icon, and nothing happened. I tried to close the window, but no, there are unsaved edits, and would I like to save? Yes. Nothing happens. Would I like to save. YES! … Anyway, with some careful debugging, walking step-by-step through the procedure and saving each step, I finally found that in one of the sub-windows I did not enter an amount, which it provided by itself in the previous version. It let me happily close that window, and it did not tell me that anything was wrong during saving, let alone tell me what. I wonder how normal people, i.e. without an IT background, solve these problems.

So than the next thing on my list was to pay some more bills. Not a fun thing to have to do in the first place, but at least this time it got interesting. Paying bills is a two step process. First you enter them and then in a separate step you can actually pay them. So I entered a bill, went to the second step, and clicked the bill to pay it. Happily the application informed me that this was going to be a foreign payment, and how would I like to handle this. Except it wasn’t a foreign payment. Again some careful debugging and manual reading let me to the solution. The way bank account details are entered got changed a bit, and I entered all the data I assumed the application expected, including the country code. “Aha!”, the application though, “This bank account has a country code, so it must be foreign.” Well, no, because I’m in the same country, dummy. After removing the country code things worked fine again.

Don’t worry, there are plenty more stories like this, but I’ll keep the other good usability horror stories about Unit 4 Multiverse LIte for another time.

This weekend I finally got to work on Gentoo after getting my access all set up last weekend. So, after two days of committing a lot of changes, most of the 118 XEmacs packages are now up-to-date again in portage. Not everything is done yet: some new packages still need to be added, and I have some minor keywording issues to be resolved with some of the other packages. But it is a good start towards getting XEmacs back in shape in Gentoo.

Finally my recruitment process has been finished and I am now an official Gentoo developer. Today I’ve started by setting up common stuff such as email, herd, bugzilla searches, etc. Next on the list is updating xemacs and related packages. I’ve begun to remove some old xemacs packages from the tree to get a better understanding of how things work. Especially repoman is a tool that can’t really be practised with, as is true for some of the special portage features. I’ve only seem to have messed up once, checking in the wrong metadata file, but that was easily fixed.

Next step is a mega-update for xemacs, consisting of most of the fixes that have been sitting in my overlay for quite a while. I’m currently sorting all of it out, so that all the associated bugs can also be closed.

I figured it would be nice today to spend an hour or so to add an ICS calendar to the HCI Index listing all the events in the HCI Index. This allows you to easily import HCI events into your own calendar. Each event also contains the conference URL so that it is easy to get additional information quickly. The calender is in standard iCalendar format (or so I hope), so it should work with most calendar applications.

I haven’t added deadlines yet and I’m not sure whether that is useful or not, so feel free to leave comments about that.

Every fall I try to plan a hike so that I get to walk on a carpet of fallen leaves, kicking them up on occasion, and listening to the sounds that makes. Yesterday was such a day. It would have been even better with a bit more sunshine and some dramatic dark-grey clouds in the sky being swept by by a stormy wind, but at least it didn’t rain.

We hiked in the Gooi area, just north of Hilversum, about half forest and half parkland belonging to some estates, with some smithereens of moorland. The forest was varied and especially on the way back had some really nice leaf-covered paths. The parkland was varied with open fields, water features and beech-lined lanes. Recommended.

8 months ago I dislocated my shoulder while skiing. During the last two months I finally got full motion back in my shoulder, so today I figured that skiing would be a good idea to test this. Actually full motion in the shoulder isn’t really needed for skiing, but anyway… Testing my new ski boots was another good reason to go skiing, or so I told myself, so I’ve been to the indoor ski track. The girl at the ticket counter warned that it was icy, and boy was she right. No problem, though, as I got back into the movements really quickly, and even at the first run I was flying confidently on top of the snow.

Even though it’s just an indoor track it made me realize how I missed out last holiday, and it reaffirmed my idea to go skiing in the Alps for a long weekend in December, provided a decent amount of snow falls before that time. I did try to make a picture while in the lift, but it wasn’t that good. Actually, it was so bad I’m not showing it here in the blog.

Last Friday was the first time I attended a talk at a university in a long time. After regular visiting of conferences in the past I had not had much time and opportunity to go, and so I did not attend talks or conferences for a few years. But with Mary Czerwinski from Microsoft Research being in the Netherlands and talking about worker attention I had to find time to attend. I know Mary from a joint term in the SIGCHI committee, but at that time we never really talked about work interest because the committee meetings were usually fully booked anyway. Besides, at that time I was not so much interested in information workers, at least not professionally.

I’m not going to summarize the talk here (which would be somewhat hard to do due to the fact that she was highlighting a number of different projects from her research group at Microsoft Research), but two things that stood out for me at the end were logging and context.

A number of the projects had user logging at its basis, and I completely understand the utility of the idea. There is so much information in what we are doing that can be useful later that it really is a waste to let all that information just disappear. On the other hand the amount of data can be vast, so some kind of filtering strategy is needed at the source to keep things manageable. Obviously this is not a new idea, I remember using a predictive unix shell in the early 90’s, for example, but today’s processing power and memory make it much more feasible to do this at a grander level. I will certainly raise the idea at work to see if we can add logging to our Wat vinden wij over Service or incorporate it in one of our future projects.

This would also be a nice challenge for the GNOME desktop I’m using. What can you log on my behalf, and how can you help me with that information later. Sounds like a big but interesting project, but due to the size not something I’ll be able to explore at the moment. I’ve mentioned this on the GNOME 3.0 wiki.

The other interesting concept was, as I mentioned, context. (Just putting you back into that context). A nice visual example of this is Scalable Fabric, where you pile up windows on the side of the screen when not in active use, and group them into clusters. A single window or pile can be restored easily. A more down-to-earth but immediately useful tool is Groupbar, which allows the taskbar to be manually grouped and clustered in meaningful sections, instead of clustering many open windows by application type as is the default in Windows and GNOME. I’ve opened a bug/feature request for that.

But the use of context goes beyond simply piling some windows together and hoping for the best. It also has to do with the documents, to do items, etc. that all make up the context of what you are working on right now, just before being interrupted by that phone call, and what was I doing again? Providing better support for maintaining and switching context can still use a lot of improvement, and will mean a major step forward in making computers truly usable.

Glorious sunny late-summer weather is always a good excuse to get out of the house. This morning I explored the Kaapse Bossen near Doorn. This time not one of the long-distance hiking tracks, but a GPS route of my own creation. While the route didn’t always work out very well it was fun to just wander around the forest without paying notice to the painted signs.

I got up really early to be in the forest at daybreak. Unfortunately I didn’t spot any animals, but the forest is always beautiful in the early morning light. The Kaapse Bossen also have the added attraction of a watch tower with a panoramic view of the whole area. Especially nice with the morning light striking the crowns of the trees.

Last week finally allowed for some hiking again. With rain almost every day for the last weeks and not much free time I had not been able to do much hiking, but last Sunday we hiked from Postel abbey in Belgium to the town of Eersel.

The abbey was a bit of a surprise as it turned out to be the local magnet for daytrippers. We counted 6 ‘frietkot’ places near the parking lot and at the end of the afternoon all of them were busy. So much for the peace and quiet, but they do have a great selection of cheese.

The main attraction of the trip was the heather on the moors which is blooming at this time of year. Surely we saw enough of the stuff on the Cartierheide.

Things are progressing with my goal to become a Gentoo Developer so that my XEmacs overlay can be put into portage for the benefit of all Gentoo users.

I now have a mentor, and I've already turned in the first of two quizes which are part of the Gentoo training program. With the weather so hot in The Netherlands I don't have much energy to work on new things, but doing the quiz and browsing through all the Gentoo documentation for the right answers was a good alternative.

I also noticed a few changes that need to be made in the xemacs ebuild to make it conform to the latest insights. I try to look in to fixing this in the next week.