just keep tryin' ta get a little better

Working with users and their problems on a daily basis and developing new features for them to use, I’m becoming more and more envious of their ignorance regarding computers. I simply, for a long time, couldn’t wrap my mind around some of the issues they ware having, and I failed to understand how they couldn’t use a feature that was painfully obvious for me to take advantage off. But then I figured out that the problem was not in the users, but in me.

I have all this knowledge (no self indulgence intended here) about user interfaces, how they work and how you can use them most effortlessly. I learned all this while learning how to program, how the computer works, etc. Where normal users just want to see the dancing bunny, I want to know how is it that I can see it.

Users are mostly unaware of keyboard shortcuts, tabing between form elements and alt tabing between windows, to give a few examples of what I’m on about. A regular user hasn’t got a clue what a “cookie” is and why he can’t login because he has them disabled.

Ok, so now to the point of this. I was wondering the other day, if it wouldn’t be better to learn the ins and outs of a computer after being a normal user for a couple of years first. That way I would experience all the difficulties of UI’s and then later on, when I would learn my computer skills and I would be designing a new UI, I would remember what bothered me then, what kind of problems I had and I could make the UI more efficient.

It’s too late now, obviously, and I doubt one would have much luck convincing me to stop learning something I love when I first started taking interest in computers. As far as I can see, the best way to understand regular users is to listen to them, observe them, and treat them with respect and not being arrogant to them. That is what I do now, I always seek opportunities to observe someone while he use a UI (may it be mine or somebody else’s) and I always try to solve a problem one is having, hoping to learn something new along the way. A long learning process, but someday I hope it will make a better programmer out of me.

I’ve written a simple PHP5 class for fetching information about YouTube’s videos (nothing fancy). You can fetch title, description, key words, author, thumbnail URL, flv URL and you can save the flv file (like keepvid.com). You can grab the source code here. You can use it freely, just remember that I can’t guarantee anything.

You use the class like so:

$yt = new YouTubeFetcher ();
$yt->Fetch ( 'youtube url' ); // you can pass the URL to the constructor, and save a line

Then you have various getter methods you can use:

$yt->GetTitle ();
$yt->GetFlvUrl ();
...

And finally you can access the flv video file:

$flvVideo = $yt->GetVideoAsString (); // this will fetch the flv video into the $flvVideo variable
$yt->SaveVideo ( '/path/to/your/video.flv' ); // and this will save the flv video file to the local file system

“Generate static HTML content pages”, should never, ever, ever be an answer to any question. Ever. Unless you replace “generate” with “cache” and there’s a “database” somewhere in there too. This is probably painfully obvious to most of you, but, annoyingly, it isn’t to all software developers out there.

I’m working on converting one of our big web sites, which uses the “bake HTML pages” “technique”, to a database driven web site (using PHP). Now, I don’t know who was originally responsible for the way this web site was build. But, unless it was my boss who is not a programmer (in which case kudos to him, for making the site all by himself), I would like to burn his hands, so he (or she) will not be able to use the keyboard ever again.

What all this means that there almost 1000 pages with content that I now have to trough one by one and store the data to a database. I would, off course, write a script that would do that for me and save me from hours of work. The problem is, that almost every page is just a little bit different and there are no standard image (or flash or anything for that matter) paths that would allow me to write an effective parser to grab the content. So imagine the fun I’m having this days. “Happy days” is not on my playlist right now, “Poor twisted me”, oddly, keeps popping up…

I started working in the software industry in the summer between my first and second high school year. I worked during my school holidays in a company called K&S Consulting d.o.o.

It was all very exciting; I learned new things, worked on web pages, had a lunch breaks, poped out for a fag every now and then and didn’t think much about the work environment I was in. That went on for about 4 years and then I went to collage, which brought me more time to work there and with that, bigger projects. I also started reading Joel on software about then.

That changed everything. I learned I am not productive in a room full of people. And with this new discovery I went to the bosses, which gave me funny looks and didn’t do a thing about it. Projects I was working on ware getting boring and so I decided that what would be best, is to work from home, where there would be peace and quite, and nobody to look at my high score in solitaire.

Luckily for me, my current boss contacted me if I wanted to work for him at Popcom. I would be working on mojvideo.com, with the tools I liked, I would work at home, have a bigger salary and work on something that is actually fun and people like to use.

That was about a year and a half ago. And now I realize that working from home is quite actually killing me. Yes it is fun to wake up anytime I want and just move from my bed to the computer, but that also means that I can wake up at 12am and then don’t do a thing that day. Which means I can’t go on a holiday because I don’t have any money. It also means that I spend most of my time at home, I don’t meet new people and I have to write a email if I have a new idea and so on.

Fortunately my boss has come to the same conclusion and he is now actively looking for a office (and offices are apparently so rare, you have a better chance to be eaten by a shark, than find one). When he finds one, I will be forced to wake up at the same hour every day, drive to work, chat a little and then be productive and get work done. And because I won’t be at home all day, I will meet new people when I go for lunch or a fag (the next time I start smoking again), I will be able to have a car crash on the way to work and other exciting things will happen to me, which just don’t if you sit at home all day.

But the thing I look forward the most, is the time I will have for myself in my car, while driving to and from work. That is when I will have the time to think, find solutions to my problems and brainstorm new ideas. Because when I’m at home, I feel stupid if I just sit around doing nothing so I always waste time with things like tv shows and playing solitaire.

This is my fourth first blog post. I had my old page here before (which you can see here). Now there is this one, and knowing me this will probably the only thing written here for a long time. Unless, of course, it won’t be. I shall see. And this “new” page is not a result of some new year’s resolution. That would be silly.

Anyway, in the meantime you can see what I have done and who I am.