A few weeks ago when I got home from out of town, I could not find the remote to my TiVo. On the third day, I ran to Best Buy to acquire a universal remote replacement. The replacement lacked critical usability features. Several buttons were simply missing: Select button to navigate the menus. Guide button…
Some of my previous blog posts about a little discovery have save me time in the past. I made a tar of some system integration scripts we wrote for Vista 3 and brought them over to a Vista 8 test box to work on updating them for this new version. A decision we made earlier…
I just read: Clients are receiving responses to and closures of long-outstanding tickets. In the past quarter we’ve reduced the number of outstanding tickets by 15% (1500 tickets). We closed several tickets because it was decided no resolution was ever going to be provided after the ticket was open for 6 months without the tier…
Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…
Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…
Are any of you readers out there familiar with Usablenet Mobile for Education, specifically with Blackboard/WebCT Vista? We have questions… How well it navigates with Vista’s frames and wide variety of views. How well it handles the sessions. The University of Florida has a good look at how Usablenet LIFT works and mentions Vista in…
In posting a comment to a friend’s WordPress blog, it came up with the error: Error: This file cannot be used on its own. I was responding to a comment, so I doubted that he broke his blog between making a comment and my response. So I went looking though my own install. Essentially, at…
Our Systems folks upgraded the code running Stats web site they let us use. This morning, was the first time I looked at it since the upgrade. Naturally, it was not working for me. Figuring it was my Mozilla Firefox’s fault, I tried the same web page in Flock. (Firefox with some other apps but…
So far I have either been oblivious or lucky. Some people like my pictures which could mean they are downloading them and even representing them as their own. No amount of HTML or JavaScript technology can prevent this. Even watermarks have questionable efficacy as people get better. Google’s Picasa is my current image editor. With…