Category: Services & Products

Brand yourself

Just finished a book “The Dip” and one of the key ideas evangelize by the author is about making yourself as the best in your own industry, such that you can develop your desired career – a little bit easier. I am sure it is right and nothing is impossible – but nothing is easy as well. The very first difficult thing is how to tell other people you are one of the best in your industry.

In the world of Internet, one way to advertise yourself naturally is to brand yourself in the popular social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. All these social networks have a profile page that you can dress it up with good information about yourself. For example, you can include your friends’ recommendations in Linkedin and your interests / groups in Facebook. Both will let your friends or potential employers understand more about you.

And for Twitter, looks like not much you can do with its simple profile page. However, inspired by Twitterbacks.com, you can actually beautify the background image of your Twitter profile and include some important information about your twits.

And, here is mine … how’s that ?

Twitter Profile

WordPress 2.7.1 upgrade

WordPress 2.7 is not new but I just managed to upgrade it two weeks ago. I have delayed this major upgrade for quite some time because you know making a major upgrade is quite a pain. You need to disable all the plug-ins, back up the database, download the software, unzip the new software, transfer to the host, then upgrade the database and software … of course, with a hope that everything runs fine. It is not a pleasant one hour, you know.

However, one major selling point to me about version 2.7 is you can now upgrade the software easily (after the above tedious step for version 2.7), that’s why I made the jump two weeks ago.

Then a couple of days ago, WordPress released the vesion 2.7.1 … oh, perfect time to test the automatically upgrade utility. Just backup the database as usual, then go to the Tools menu of the 2.7 dashboard, click upgrade option and confirm the upgrade.

15 seconds later, the upgrade is done !! Perrrrrrfect.

Wordpress 2.7

User Experience – Fare Conversion Table Part 2

One year ago I blogged about how stupid the taxi fare conversion table was designed. Just around end 2008, there was another taxi fare adjustment and therefore our clever Government officials published another fare conversion table and it looks pretty much like that:

So every time after the taxi journey, the driver and you need to find the adjusted taxi fare from this table. And I can tell you, it is a tough job as your eyes need to keep hunting the correct numbers. And the problem is about how the table was designed.

Can you see how this table is designed ? Every 5 fare amount figures are grouped together, but it is not grouped based on the fare amount (e.g. ~$20, ~$30, ~$40 etc.). You may wonder why it is designed that way … and then I found out the reason. The amount figures are grouped per kilometer !! So the first group is the fare amount within the first extra one kilometer, the second group is about the second extra kilometer.

So, why it is designed that way ? Who will search the correct fare amount this way, other than the super smart Government officials ? And here is my design of this new fare amount conversion table. Is it a lot easier to use ? Of course ๐Ÿ™‚

Installing Windows 7 beta in Macbook

One of the beauty of using virtual machine software (like VMware) is you can install a new system without affecting the existing ones. So in my Macbook with an XP VM installed, the followings are the steps for installing a Windows 7 beta in the Macbook:

  1. Download the Windows 7 beta ISO file from Microsoft website, the version I downloaded was Windows 7 beta 64 bit.
  2. The ISO file is quite big (3.15 GB) … somehow I failed the download with Firefox in my Macbook. I therefore upgraded the Firefox to version 3.0.5 first, and then the download was ok (it took an hour or two).
  3. Start the VMware, create a new VM, and select “Windows Server 2008 64 bit” as the version. I also did not choose the “Use Easy Install” option as I am not sure VMware can cope with the new Windows 7 or not.
  4. The software will then install the new OS from the ISO file. When asked for Upgrade or Install a new system, I picked the latter one.
  5. The install was smooth and completed in around 30 minutes. I then wrap up the task with installation of VMware tools.
  6. That’s it !! And what others said were true – Windows 7 beta is better than Vista and as fast as the XP.
  7. Following is the picture of running XP, Windows 7 and OSX at the same time … Cool !!

User Experience : Keypad

I am puzzled with one question for years … have you ever wondered “Why calculator and phone number layouts differ ?”. Check your desk calculator and desktop / mobile phone to find out; or here are two pictures:

As you can see, the calculator keypads start from 7, 8 and 9, line up from upper left corner. The phone number keypads, however,ย start from 1, 2 and 3, also line up from upper left corner. So the question – why the difference ?

I searched, searched and searched again … finally found the plausible answer to that.

Decades ago in last century, the first calculators were actually resembled old cash registers. Those cash registers had columns of keys numbering 9 on top down to 0 on the bottom. The next column had another set of keys with 90 on top and 10 on the bottom, the next row to the right had 900 on top, 100 on the bottom, and so on. As you can see from the pictures of an old cash register below.

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Therefore, it is logical to design a hand-held calculators with the number 9 on the top row, and 0 in the bottom row. Well then, the next question – “why did we place 7-8-9 in the top row, instead of 9-8-7 ?” Sorry, I don’t have the answer, so please leave your comments if you know.

For the phone … there are two theories. One is about the rotary phones – before the touch-tone phone, of course, rotary dials were the rule. This theory states that the touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the “1” on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom; as in the following picture.

Another theory is that the design is from Human Factors Engineering Studies in Bell Laboratories. See below for the layout designs in the study. And turned out the one with 1-2-3 on top role was the selected design.

To me both are good answers, don’t you think ?