racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

July of 2005, I wrote a brief post about IBM OS/2, and the news back then was IBM had announced it will be ending support for the operating system. In its time, OS/2 had potential, and was supposed to have been a strong alternative to MS Windows, which was just starting to gain ground.

An old friend of mine, Michael Balcos, had just emailed me recently to tell me he’s now blogging. Mike was my batchmate and classmate back at elementary in Claret and at the Ateneo High School. He was the one who introduced me to Bulletin Board Systems, and I can pretty much credit him for helping start my fascination with all things online. You see, it was Mike who inspired me to set up my own BBS back in 1995, when email and the Web were still not widely and commercially available here in the Philippines. He ran the Student Union BBS, and I ran the Cyber County BBS. We were members of our respective BBS networks (he was part of Fidonet, and I was part of smaller, loca-based networks).

Balky was such an OS/2 enthusiast. And while he has decided to move on to other things (particularly Slackware), he still has fond memories of being “warped” (reference to OS/2 Warp, of course).

That friend of mine showed me a little of OS/2 Warp 3’s capabilities. He formatted a diskette, executed several recursive “dir” commands in different OS/2 command shell windows, played an audio file, opened Windows 3.1(yes, it can run that!), and did a host of other things. The OS did all of that smoothly at the same time! When I got my own copy of OS/2 Warp 3, I crossed my fingers that it could give what I wanted in an OS. During that time, I wanted my OS to smoothly multitask between my BBS(I used Maximus for OS/2 for the software), word processor(MS Word 6 for Windows 3.1), DTP software (Aldus PageMaker 5 for Windows 3.1) and other applications. And it did so with flying colors!

IBM has ended support for OS/2 effective end of 2006, and apparently there are no plans to open-source the code. Balky thinks there might still be hope for OS/2, if IBM were to open-source the OS. I believe a lot of financial institutions and banks still use OS/2 to date, because of the security and perhaps because of the cost of migrating to a different system. Time to move on to other things, too, I guess.

When you close your laptop lid, you’d expect your computer to go to sleep, and perhaps after a few minutes of inactivity go to hibernate mode. This is a default with Apple notebooks—the sleep functionality is so efficient that the computer goes into suspended state in a couple of seconds and wakes up as quickly.

I can’t say the same about Windows, though. Sleep takes about 5 to 10 seconds on my machine. Waking up takes about twice as long. And hibernate? Depending on how large your system RAM is and the speed of your hard drive, you could be looking at a 30 second wait for hibernation and a couple of minutes for waking up.

I’ve assigned the power button on my Presario to be the shortcut for hibernate. I rarely shut down since I prefer to have all my work still open when I turn on the computer—opening up everything after a fresh restart seems too tedious. I only shut down completely when I really have to reboot the system (i.e., after installing applications).

But a few days ago, my laptop almost got burned because of crappy hibernation sequences. So as it was approaching noon—the time I’m supposed to pick up my wife and daughter from work and school, respectively—I hit the power button, closed the lid and stuffed the laptop into my backpack, thinking it had already started with the hibernate sequence.

This time, it did not.

It turns out that there was a glitch with the wireless connection and Windows displayed a prompt that the computer could not go into hibernate mode at that time. Stupid as Windows was, the prompt stayed on, and somehow managed to prevent the computer from sleeping or hibernating. By default, the laptop was supposed to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity and hibernate after 10 more minutes, if on battery mode.

So as we had a quick lunch, the laptop was still running inside the backpack, which I left inside the car. As I was carrying the bag on my back upon arriving home, I kept wondering whether the heat was coming from inside the backpack or just the noontime sun. Boy was I surprised when I opened the bag. I almost panicked because the computer had been so hot I could smell something almost burning inside (the same smell when you’re using soldering lead).

It’s good the laptop survived without problems. I think that incident might have accelerated the laptop’s aging by a few months, though.

And this is one of the reasons I’m not too happy with Windows. If I had brought the PoewrBook, none of this would have happened. Thing is, the work I was currently doing was on the Windows machine, and among the two, it’s the smaller and lighter one, so it’s easier to carry around in quick trips.

The last year has come and gone, and if you’re still in that holiday mood, I can sympathize with you. I hardly got any rest during the holidays because of all the traveling to and fro, and the events/parties here and there. It’s the second week of January and I feel like I still have a hangover. And I didn’t even drink that much!

I think a good waker-upper would be a good spring cleaning—and for those of us whose work (and personal lives) revolves around the computer and getting online, that means starting fresh. Here are some things I’ll be doing to clean up that pile of mess on my desk, so to speak.

1. Restart the computer. I’m a sucker for hibernate and sleep whether for laptops or desktops. Both my PowerBook and Windows laptops have been up since late November (only sleeping or hibernating in between use), and my ongoing work is still cluttered across the machines’ respective screens. I wonder which is more productive—not having to reopen each and every document you need to work on every power cycle, or having too much stuff open it becomes information overload.
2. Clean up my email inbox. Gmail says I have 19,000 unread items on my inbox. Of course many of these are spam mail I just ignored over the course of two years since I got a Gmail account (too lazy to hit the “Report Spam” button!). I could probably just leave them in Inbox view and keep using my “For Reply” and “To Do” labels for those messages for urgent action. After all, that’s what Gmail’s threaded interface and almost-unlimited capacity are supposed to be about, right? On the other hand, it might be more sensible to send these all to Archive so I won’t have to feel overwhelmed everytime I look at a very full inbox view.
3. Work on those draft blog entries. My blog drafts area consists of unfinished blog posts, duplicate entries (WordPress saves renamed drafts as new entries altogether) and posts I finished but had second thoughts about publishing (due to various reasons). These are most likely to be outdated a few weeks or even days after being saved to drafts, so it’s time to purge the draft folder and start fresh.
4. Backup important files and delete unnecessary ones. It’s time to save those digital photos and iTunes libraries onto CD or some online-backup facility. You never know when things can screw up and you end up with a dead hard drive—arguably, the data is more valuable than the hardware itself. As for deleting unnecessary ones, files and documents tend to build up in the course of time, and these can fill up your hard drive pretty quickly. I usually fall victim to my own disorganized-ness, which usually leads to shortages in space and even virtual memory.
5. Run maintenance software on my computers. I recommend doing a virus-scan and spyware-scan, and all those other performance-enhancing clean-ups like clearing of caches, defragmenting (if that’s still applicable) and the like. I recommend Mac Janitor for OS X, which lets you manually start maintenance tasks that your Mac is supposed to do daily, weekly, and monthly.
6. Actually go clean up that pile of mess on my desk. Being online most of the time doesn’t mean my physical surroundings don’t affect my productivity. I have a ton of books, tools, wires and gadgetry on my desk that I can probably do without. The still-to-be-used stuff should go to the drawers (which need cleaning up themselves). And those for disposal go straight to the trash or recycling bin.

Of course, this mostly applies to me, and I’d appreciate a little help if you have something to pitch in.

Image source

Here’s what I think about designing for usability. Design your product / service / software / website with the stupid person in mind. I assure you then, that your site will be the ultimate in usability!

Of course by design, I do not mean only style, which only pertains to the aesthetic aspects of design. Design is everything about the functionality, aesthetics, and concept behind any creation.

Make things as simple as possble. Make things as usable, intuitive, and uncluttered as possible, with the stupidest of people possible in your mind. That’s unless you’re designing an aircraft control panel–but still, you have to remember that your pilot should be comfortable with controls lest you want him to crash the plane.
…
It takes more effort to design with usability in mind than just putting in all the bells and whistles in one place. For one, you may have to trim down your work reasonably–in some cases, you may have to hold off on that cool feature you’d been working on for months. And in most cases, it boils down to only keeping the basic stuff (or at least reserving/hiding the snazzy stuff only for advanced users to explore). What’s important, after all, is that your creation works the way it’s intended to, and that your user won’t have to read hundreds of pages of instructions to learn how to work things.

I’m of the opinion that if something is well-designed (hopefully elegantly-designed, too), then there should be no reason for the user to RTFM.

Check it out at ForeverGeek. I do hope you usability advocates out there would agree with me on this one!

Blogs are so cluttered! This is one realization you’ll end up with when you’re in the business of reading (and writing) blogs. Most blogs around are simply too cluttered to be any useful. Many bloggers, quite unfortunately, fall under the mistaken assumption that more information is better. Well, in most cases, it is my opinion that less is more.

Fact is, most users won’t give a damn about most stuff on your blog, anyway. What matters is that you lead them to where they would most likely find the information they might want.