Real Estate 101

So, I spent one day this weekend doing the real estate hunt thing. As usual, the hunt went something like, go to umpteenzillion houses and try to keep them straight somehow-someway. I tend to do that by taking my own pictures of the house as the pictures on the listing somehow, nearly without fail, just SUCK (Don't believe me? http://lovelylisting.com). Not that mine are really great pictures, but if I take enough of them, I can remember the floorplan and the size of the rooms.

Today, I get a call from my real estate agent sounding all sheepish. I'm trying to figure out what is going on and then he tells me that one of the houses we saw didn't want pictures taken of their house and asked they be deleted! They were there when we were with the dog out back, so umm, wtf didn't they say something then? And who won't let you take pictures of the house they are trying to sell?!

People are nuts.

At least it wasn't 202 tries...

Confronting Your Addiction... To Solar Power

A friend of mine writes:

Over lunch, something was mentioned about gas prices, etc. Leading to alternative fuels discussion, etc. So Alfred says, "John, have you seen the latest interventions in solar panels?" As Alfred talked on I realized he meant "INventions", not "INTERventions" (something about being the size of a thumbnail?) but I had this mental image of a bunch of solar panels standing around one poor solar panel, having an intervention, and it was all I could do to keep a straight face. Although you know I can't draw, I had to try to share my mental "cartoon" with you...

rm -rf /* Windows Style

As geeks, we've all heard the horror stories of some n00b killing a Unix box with a single command run as root:

rm -rf /*

But surely such things don't happen in the real world, right?

Today a coworker, Bob, asked me what a certain "clean.bat" DOS script was supposed to do. Imagine my surprise (and horror) when I opened the script in an editor:

del /S *.pdb
del /S *.ilk
del /S *.exe
del /S *.obj
del /S *.dll
del /S *.lib
del /S *.exp
del /S *.dep
del /S *.idb
del /S *.manifest
del /S *.res
del /S *.htm
del /S *.tlh
del /S *.tli

It turned out that another developer on my team, Derrik, had managed to slip this little devil into CM amongst the header files we ship with our product. When run from Derrik's sandbox the script helpfully deletes all of the intermediate files left behind by Visual Studio, thus allowing Derrik to do a nice clean recompile.

If the script is accidentally double clicked, however, the little beast runs on the C: drive and deletes all of those pesky applications you have installed. Then it deletes a good portion of Windows itself. Eventually it deletes something it depends on and dies. So does your PC.

Bob found this out the hard way. :(

WYSIWTF - the Inspiration

To understand WYSIWTF, one must first understand WYSIWYG - more here.

WYSIWTF was first used, as far as I know, here.

After showing this to a number of friends and co-workers, we decided we needed to create a blog by this very acronym. We instantly knew, too, that it would be dedicated to presenting and discussing the wealth and dearth of user interfaces, with a sure to be too large hall of shame and a not large enough hall of fame.

Seeing as how we're all engineering types, we'll probably be coming from a more technical slant than some other usability/interaction design discussions. But we're still discussing what we actually want to do ... so check back regularly while collect our thoughts about how to move forward. Hopefully good (and bad) things are to come to soon.