The cat is officially out of the bag. After a healthy amount of collective anguishing, Candice has accepted the position of Associate Chaplain at Yale University. We're dreading leaving Durham, excited to explore New Haven, and thrilled that Yale and Duke share similar color schemes.
To this end, if you know of great places to live in New Haven, interesting places to work, or people who enjoy eating pizza as much as I do – please let me know.
May 16 2012After reading Mark O'Connor's post about swapping his MacBook for an iPad+Linode, I decided to give the setup a whirl. For reasons that probably defy logic (what can I say, I'm a slave to fashion), I substituted Panic's Prompt for the recommended iSSH and have yet to feel any pain from the decision.
Mark covers a lot of the setup for a Linode server in his follow-up post. For now, I am just SSHing to my home machine via no-ip.com, and the only real fiddly bit that I needed to add was the following in my vimrc:
if has('gui_running')
set background=light
else
let g:solarized_termcolors=256
set background=dark
endif
The key thing here is to force solarized to use the let g:solarized_termcolors=256 even if vim is running in a terminal. Panic's Prompt by default will register itself as a 16 color terminal, to get 256 colors working (and the beautiful Solarized color scheme), I added export TERM=xterm-256color to the login script which can be configured in Prompt's individual machine settings.
We'll see how the setup works out, for now it is nice to just be traveling around with only an iPad.
December 07 2011While reading the HCD Toolkit, I've noticed that each section is roughly the same size. Don't get me wrong, each section has been a small wonder-world of information, but I couldn't help wonder if the Deliver section had been hardest of all to trim down. It covers a lot of ground and not a word was wasted. To summarize it would be to re-write it, but the pieces of the section which really resonated with me were:
Page 97 of the IDEO Toolkit
As you can tell, I am a big fan of the upfront work and the continual learning presented. I think companies all too often equate a customer's final product with their final product. A great product doesn't end with ending up in the customer's hands. Putting a product in a customers hands is an opportunity to learn more about the product, evolve the product (see the product lines here), and recognize the new opportunities a strong product creates.
November 17 2011I'm scared. You're scared. We're all scared.
Listen to the whole thing, but know that (I felt) it was around the 15 minute mark Merlin hit stride. Given at Webstock 11.
November 01 2011While I can't do the toolkit justice in my notes, I fount the Create section to be a real gem. The goal of the Create phase is to synthesize the research of the Hear phase, identify opportunities, brainstorm solutions, and create prototypes with the purpose of eliciting feedback. Through the create process, don't focus on feasibility and viability, instead focus on desirability.
Page 70 of the IDEO Toolkit
As the toolkit is meant to, the Hear section is very focused on working with folks in under resourced areas of the world, but I found a few principles which are easily extended to a process working with a broader group. The goal of the Hear phase is to gain a strong understanding of an audience's needs, barriers, and constraints.
The toolkit goes in to excellent detail on how to identifying a challenge, recognizing existing knowledge, research, interview, immerse, and document.
October 17 2011The toolkit was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, targeting organizations that work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I am not going to lie, while traveling to Asia would be wonderful, I am reading the toolkit hoping to draw out some more general lessons of the human centered design process.
The HCD process examines starts with the people being designed for, examining thier needs, dreams, and behaviors. The process steps through the following 'lenses':
In summation:
Page 6 of the IDEO Toolkit
October 12 2011
There are three critical ideas within Murray's two sentences:
- Are you positioning yourself so that one day, you do not have to work?
- When you no longer have a financial need to work in the role you occupy, would you still continue to occupy that role?
- Do you define your own standards of career excellence?
There are three phases in a professional life:
- Learning the "Game."
- Winning the "Game."
- Defining the "Game."
Where are you? Where do you want to be?
More at HBR's Murray's Law For Success.
I'll keep the cheap and preachy to a minimum the next few weeks, but wanted to record this.
October 07 2011"The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements." - http://960.gs/
What the hey? Sounds good enough to me, lets give it a whirl. Since this site is heavily gridded, I decided to convert it.
For starters I added the following a wrapping div <div class="container_12">, you could go with 16 column grid: <div class="container_16"> and was in business.
Basically, moving items about the grid, is dead simple, above is my introduction:
<h1 class="grid_5 prefix_7 clearfix">Hello, my name is ... and technology.</h1>.
The class grid_5 places the element across 5 elements of the grid. I added a class of prefix_7, which shifts the element to the right by 7 grid columns.
By using the grid, prefix suffix, classes you can position elements about the grid. The last bit to remember is that if a continer has a grid within it, attach a class of alpha and omega to the last.
There is a lot of fun to be had here, but I am just going to cover the stuff that is relevant now.
One of the wonderful ways that HTML5 makes life easier is adding the placeholder attribute to input and textarea fields:
<input type="text" placeholder="sender@example.com" /><textarea placeholder="Email body" ></textarea>
While browsers don't actually respect this, this is a handy semantic way to hook in for your own javascript validation. Like many attributes if the required exists it is considered to be true, if not false.
<input type="text" placeholder="sender@example.com" required /><textarea placeholder="Email body" required ></textarea>
You could use this, but honestly really? It either doesn't help or confuses regular users, and pisses off your power users. Trust me, your site search probably sucks.
Finally the type attribute gets a little loving, and how exciting that is:
<input type="text" placeholder="text type"><input type="search" placeholder="search type"><input type="email" placeholder="email type"><input type="url" placeholder="url type"><input type="tel" placeholder="tel type">These may not look different in a desktop browser, but by specifying the proper types, phones will change their keyboard styles to make input easy for the user.
November 20 2010They have been a long time coming, but HTML5 will finally introduce native, standardized playback with all the accompanying JavaScript support.
<audio src="happyhappyjoyjoy.mp3" controls></audio> — Like many HTML5 tag attributes, by simply being there, controls is true. Something like controls="false" would still display controls (we're looking at if the attribute exists, not what it is set to). If you don't want them, just leave controls out.
The preload attribute can be set to one of the following:
none — don't preload until specifically asked,auto — preload as much as possible,metadata — (default) load metadata and first frame of video.Other attributes are autoplay and loop. For obvious reasons, never tell anyone that either of those exist.
<audio> also has a long form for specifying fallbacks when an audio format is not supported:
<audio controls preload="none">
<source src="happyhappyjoyjoy.mp3">
<source src="happyhappyjoyjoy.ogg">
</audio>
At this point in the discussion, HTML5 For Web Designers author, Jeremy Keith, has a cheeky little bit about OGG not being "crippled" by software patents, so I'll add a cheeky little link here. Good luck finding the comments section!
Video is very similar with a few extra helpful attributes:<video src="happyhappyjoyjoy.mp4" controls width="300" height="200" poster="placeholder.png"></video> — all those should be self explanatory, poster is what allows you to specify a placeholder image.
In long form to allow specification of fallbacks:
<video controls width="300" height="200" poster="placeholder.png">
<source src="happyhappyjoyjoy.mp3">
<source src="happyhappyjoyjoy.ogg">
</video>
October 19 2010
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this Heroku Pro Tip. If you're getting errors caused by Heroku installing your dev or test groups from bundler, run: heroku config:add BUNDLE_WITHOUT="test development" --app app_name
Short and sweet:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd" OMG this/goes //ON//FOREVER//EN> is now simply: <!DOCTYPE html>type="text/css" from your CSS tags: <link rel="stylesheet" href="/stylesheets/master.css">type="text/javascript" in your script tag. The HTML5-ized version would simply be: <script src="javascripts/modernizr-1.5.min.js"></script>All of those are good to use now, so with all the time you just saved, I think you can treat yourself to a little WHAM...
October 13 2010To get ready for writing today's post, I polished up this blog's source code. If you're like me, you're probably looking to jump into code as soon as possible. To that end, head over to Paul Irish's excellent HTML5 Boilerplate, download the commented template and start reading through while building.
I'll try to keep this list updated as I find other useful resources. For now have fun with HTML5 Boilerplate.
October 12 2010
$ git gc — Internally optimizes the way Git stores its history, the --aggressive parameter takes things one step further by recalculating the deltas from scratch.
$ git archive --format=<zip or tar> --prefix=<prefix>/ HEAD > filename.zip — Valid format types are tar and zip.
$ git archive --format=tar --prefix=<prefix>/ <HEAD, commit hash, branch, or tag> | gzip > filename.tar.gz — Pipe into gzip
Twitter: @renprovey
LinkedIn: Ren Provey
GitHub: ren
Work: CityBits, the guide to all the bits of your trip that you'll rave about to your friends.