Is the light on, on, or off?

This morning as Finley and I left the house for a cool and brisk morning walk, I noticed the cabin lights in our Honda Odyssey were on. I went back in for the keys, opened the front door, and looked for the cabin light switch. I wasn’t able to find one, so I figured the light itself must be the button. Yes, how clever, the light is the button! A toggle button: push it once and the light is on. Push it again and the light stays on. Push it again and the light stays on. HUH?

I figured the lights must remain on while the doors are open, one of those helpful features engineers force on you that are well-intentioned but somehow don’t survive daily use without revealing a few flaws in the idea or the implementation, so I closed and locked the doors. Of the six cabin roof lights, four of them turned off when I locked the car. I unlocked the car, opened the door, and pressed each of those lights exactly once, then closed the door and re-locked the car.

Finley and I finally left on our walk, but I realized this is an excellent example of a bad user interface, revealed by the interaction of two systems, the light/switch assembly, which probably works as intended, and the “convenience” feature of turning on the cabin lights when the doors are open: since the auto-on feature doesn’t turn the lights off until the car is locked, if you park the car and turn on one of the lights with the doors closed, then open the door, conveniently activating the cabin roof lights, you have no visual cues to remind you that one of the lights is ON, as opposed to just on.

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Sharkey’s

Imagine walking in to Sharkey’s in the early 1990’s and ordering a hamburger made with 6 ounces of certified-organic, locally-raised, grass-fed, free-range beef. I can’t, either, but it’s on the menu now, right above the bison burger.

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Happy with the maps, unhappy with the vehicle mount

A while back, we bought a Garmin Streetpilot c330 before a long car trip. We’ve been reasonably happy with the maps in the unit, though my ideal navigation product would include live updates to maps and points of interest when I plugged the unit in to my computer to charge it.

However, the vehicle mount adapter has been nothing but trouble since we bought the unit. The original windshield suction cup mount that came in the box was flaky; the contacts between the cradle and the unit were flaky, so the unit wouldn’t receive power from the vehicle mount cable. The sent me a new one without any trouble but a phone call, so again, Garmin support comes through.

Now the replacement cable they sent has started to fray at the mount end of the cable. It still powers the unit, but won’t charge it. Replacements cost between $30 and $50, depending on where you buy. I wonder if these windshield mounts are a flawed design, since this is the 2nd failure I’ve had in that part in a year and a half. I wonder if the power cable portion of the dashboard friction mount is better-designed?

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Loading data model with Fixtures in Rails

I’m putting together a smallish data model in Rails. Some of my data is pre-existing, including a bunch of Items, some of which have SubItems. I found some hints on how to represent the initial data with YAML and to piggy-back on the Fixture functionality to load it in a migration, all from Agile Web Development with Rails.

The mailing list pointed out I can use Ruby calls in the YAML mark-up to build the relationships.

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Economics of Cynicism

For some reason I thought Joel Spolsky was anti-Apple and pro-Microsoft. Now I realize he’s a cynical guy who used to write about software development, but who’s now busy running a small, successful software company, and who writes about talking about software.

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