http://www.abbett.org Dispatches from the world of interaction design Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:33:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My site got hacked -- fortunately in a way that wasn't visible to visitors -- so I upgraded my site to the latest WordPress release. This is the first time in my long relationship with WordPress that I've been unhappy with an upgrade: the dashboard is really hard to ... http://www.abbett.org/2008/06/04/reactions-to-the-new-wordpress-dashboard/ During a panel discussion at the UPA Boston miniconference on Wednesday -- humorously dubbed by Chauncey Wilson as "Cranky Geeks Complain About the Field" -- the audience was encouraged to voice their own concerns about user-centered design for consideration by the three panelists. One comment that stirred up some ... http://www.abbett.org/2008/05/30/the-role-of-art-in-ucd/ Below, find a link to download my revision of Niklas Wolkert's "sketchy" Visio prototyping shapes that are included in Henrik Olsen's GUUUI Web Prototyping Tool. These shapes have made mocking up a web UI much easier, and the hand-drawn style makes it very clear to stakeholders that "this is ... http://www.abbett.org/2008/05/27/updated-sketch-gui-shapes-for-visio/ I was fortunate to find Jesse James Garrett's article, "A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design," on his website yesterday. Flowcharting is not a skill I've been privileged to learn formally, and I've been hesitant to get into it for fear of doing it wrong, since ... http://www.abbett.org/2008/05/20/a-visual-vocabulary-for-information-architecture/ I can't wait for an opportunity to use this commercial theme from Quommunication: News. It's probably one of the cleanest, most air-tight WordPress themes I've come across. True to its name, News is for magazine-style sites, so it might be a long wait. http://www.abbett.org/2008/05/19/theme-in-search-of-project/ I had never been completely comfortable with the previous theme I set up for abbett.org, even though I had modified it extensively, so upon discovering a list of "minimalist" WordPress themes last week, I started trying new looks. I'm still not settled on a new theme, and I'm discovering ... http://www.abbett.org/2008/05/19/under-the-hood-minimalist-wordpress-themes-are-anything-but/ It's been a rough couple weeks getting used to Oracle, but I'm finally getting my development environment smoothed out. One important configuration change I've had to do on two instances of Oracle Express is upping the maximum number of connections the database server will accept. As usual, I ... http://www.abbett.org/2007/12/12/configuring-oracle-express-for-development/ Configuring PHP My first mistake when configuring PHP to support Oracle was to assume that it would be as easy as MySQL; that is to say, on Windows, simply enabling the Oracle DLL that ships with PHP. No such luck, and the error message you see -- when you finally ... http://www.abbett.org/2007/12/02/using-oracle-with-php-and-codeigniter/ At work, I've been evaluating the Zend Java Bridge (part of the commercial Zend Platform) as an alternative to the open-source PHP/Java Bridge. Our theory is that the Zend version may be more production-class (i.e. stable, secure, supported, and such), but we still want to make our code operable ... http://www.abbett.org/2007/10/01/migrating-from-the-phpjava-bridge-to-the-zend-java-bridge/ This is my first post at the new abbett.org. I'm generally not a fan of personal blogs, so I don't expect to post very frequently here. I'll mainly use this digital outcropping to keep visitors up to date on material elsewhere on the site, and to keep my links list ... http://www.abbett.org/2007/04/24/chanukat-hablog/