UXCamp Ottawa is “a one-day conference focusing on the topic of user experience”.  It was held in on the University of Ottawa campus on November 5th, 2011.

During the sessions, several of the speakers and participants recommended books on the topic they were speaking about.   Here are the ones that I noted:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for brining cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This revised and updated edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It’s essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world’s most exciting marketplace.
 

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. (from danpink.com)
 

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug

This book was recommended reading for anyone looking at getting into usability testing
 

Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research By Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte

Remote studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop. (from rosenfeldmedia.com)
 

If you have any other additions to this list, comment below.

Yesterday, Google opened the Google eBookstore to Canadians.   I already have the Amazon Kindle application and the Apple iBooks application installed on my iPad.  Do I really need to start another eBook library?

I thought I’d do a quick price comparison, to see if there was an advantage to using one store over the other, and here’s what I found.

So a quick look at four book titles would seem to show that prices are quite similar on the three eBook stores in question, although Amazon can be  a little higher.

I recently purchased a new computer with a solid-state hard drive as the operating system/applications drive.   It isn’t a great idea to store your data on these drives, so with each application install, I make sure that it stores its data to my secondary (SATA) hard drive.  When I got to configuring my NeatWorks NeatReceipts scanner software, it turns out there is no way to change the default data directory through the application’s preferences.  (Rumours have it that version 5 of the NeatWorks will allow this).

I’ve found a workaround to this problem.  You can create a directory junction (type of symbolic link) in Windows that will make the Neat software look in its default location (C:\ProgramData\The Neat Company\NeatWorks) but access files in a new location.  Please note that this fix will only work on Windows Vista, Windows 2008, or Windows 7 and newer. Older version of the operating system did not include this functionality.

To set this up:

1. Move your NeatWorks data folder to it’s new location (for this example, I’m moving ito to D:\NeatWorks)
2. Go to your command prompt (Start Button, Run…, “cmd”)
3. Change Directories to The Neat Company folder:

   cd "C:\ProgramData\The Neat Company"


4. Create the symbolic link to your new data location:

   mklink /J "NeatWorks" "D:\NeatWorks"

Start NeatWorks and you should see all your data.

Just discovered what looks like a change to Bell Sympatico‘s outgoing e-mail servers. 

My parents both use their own domain name’s for their e-mail.  Their internet connection is with Sympatico, which forces them to use Sympatico’s authenticated SMTP server for their outgoing mail.  This type of setup is common (in fact, probably the standard now) with service providers, and has worked fine for a long time.  

Last week, out of the blue, all messages being sent out from either of their computers started showing up as being from <theirnamehere>@sympatico.ca instead of <username>@<theirdomain>.com and the from name (which gets displayed in the recipient’s e-mail client) is getting changed to the name that is on the account with Sympatico.  The subsequent problem to this is that if an e-mail client ignores the reply-to header, replies go back to the @sympatico.ca address, which they don’t use.

This is the second time I’ve seen Sympatico change their outgoing SMTP.  The first time, and I can’t remember when it started, outgoing e-mail had an On Behalf Of header attached to it with the @sympatico.ca e-mail address.  

Obviously the ISP is trying really hard to prevent abuse of their e-mail network.  But have they gone too far?

Every once and a while you come across a functionality on a website that was meant to help, but just really poorly implemented. Tonight I found one of those while attempting to order my dinner.

I was clicking through their online ordering menu deciding what I felt like eating. I was thinking a pizza would sound good. The problem was that every time I clicked on the “gourmet pizzas” category in the left-hand navigation menu, I would get the menu page for “Salads and more”.

When I called the store, it turns out that the breaker on their pizza ovens was blown, and they are unable to make pizzas right now. Because of this, they had disabled option on the website. Aha! Everything made sense.

This was a bad user experience during the ordering process.

It would have been much better to link the “Gourmet Pizzas” menu to a notice page telling the user that they were unable to make pizzas this evening, and apologizing for the inconvenience.

NOTE: Removing the link from the menu would have been a bad choice, and it would leave the user just as confused. “Where’d the pizzas go?!”

Last night’s performance of O Canada during the first game of the 2011 Stanley Cup finals was a great performance. Love that the singer lets the crowd carry the anthem for a while.

Go Canucks Go!

The 2011-2012 Garbage Collection Calendar iCal files are ready for download!

As my contribution to 2010′s Open Data Ottawa Hackfest, I converted the City of Ottawa’s Garbage Collection Calendar into a open format (iCalendar) so that the schedule could be used for purposes like being imported into your favourite calendaring application such as MS Outlook, Google Calendar, or even your smartphone.

Developers Willem van Bergen and Edward Ocampo-Gooding then took these files and built them into their application, OttawaTrash.ca.  Another great example of the flexibility offered by this open format.

Today, the iCal files have been updated with the collection dates from the 2011-2012 Calendar released by the City.

I hope you enjoy!

(To see the status of the Amazon data center, see their Service Health Dashboard)

If you spend any time online, it should not come as a surprise to you that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data center in North Virginia has been experiencing serious technical difficulties since this morning.  This has affected the availability of many major online web applications including: Hootsuite, Foursquare, Quora, Heroku, Reddit, parts of Shopify, Formspring, about.me and many more.

A list of sites affected by the disabled EC2 data center

To quote the temporary new homepage of Hootsuite, “It seems much of the Internet is struggling today due to widespread outage problems.”

Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere have been abuzz with comments from cloud computing’s naysayers proudly announcing “I told you so” to those affected services and users; an opinion I don’t agree with.

What makes this outage significant is the size and number of services that have been affected.  If these companies had chosen to host their services with another web/database/server hosting company, and that company ran into issues, the end result would be the same.

In fact, I would argue that smaller hosting companies are more susceptible to this than large cloud service providers like Amazon (EC2), Google (AppEngine), and Microsoft (Azure).  They are more likely to have less backbone redundancy, less geographic distribution of their infrastructure and have less resources to (money and expertise) to assign to dealing with an outage.

I think the lesson here is for services that cannot afford downtime to mirror their web applications in more than one data center, located in different geographic regions.  Services like Microsoft’s SQL Azure Data Sync, for example, will help make this an easier process.

As of the time of posting this entry, the EC2 servers are still having problems.  This is a bad day for Amazon, and for those who reply on its North Virginia data centre.  I just hope it doesn’t scare away potential users of cloud computing.

A client recently decided to let an old domain name of theirs expire.  It was not the domain name they were using on the e-mail, print materiel, etc. any longer, and saw no reason to keep paying the registration fee.

A few weeks later, this decision would turn out to be a big mistake.  Their old domain name was purchased by a company selling adult products

When a domain name expires, there is a 30 day grace period during which nobody can register the domain, except for the original registrant (just in case you forgot to renew!)  Your domain name will stop resolving (it can’t be used), but you can still renew the domain through your registrar.

After this period, the domain name is made available for registration by anyone who wants it.  In the case of .ca domains, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) posts a list in advance of “to be released domains”, making the discovery of these soon to be available gems even easier.  There are also many services online to discover expired domains.

In my client’s case, there were many websites out there containing links to their old website, which now, embarrassingly, took visitors to this adult content.

What To Do?!

There are several things that you should do before letting an old domain name expire that can help avoid embarrassment like this, or potential loss of business if, for example, a competitor were to register your old domain!

1. Keep the domain nameDomain name registrations are (usually) cheap – anywhere from about $5 a year, to $30 a year, depending on your registrar.  Some TLDs for foreign countries charge higher fees, the price range quoted here is for domains in Canada or the US.   An expense of $150 over 5 years to keep your rights to an old domain may be worth it!
2. Configure your domain to redirect users properly
   
   If you’re planning on no longer using a domain name because you’re replacing it with a new one (maybe your company changed names?) then make sure users visiting the old domain are redirected to the new domain!There are tools that scan websites looking for links that don’t work, or that have changed.  This is done by automatically visiting each link on the page and checking for the HTTP Response Code that comes back. There are many types of responses, but the important ones for this discussion are:

   200 – OK.  This link works, and it returned
   301 – Permanent Redirect
   404 – File Not Found

   If you simply add your new domain name to your web server’s configuration, and don’t setup your old website to redirect to the new address (Response Code 301), tools that check links will see a response code of 200, everything OK.  The owners of the sites will never be altered that they should update their links.

   You could also notify users of your website that the address has changed so that they can update their bookmarks (favorites) in their browser.
   
   

3. Use Google’s link: search to find websites that link to your domainThere’s a little known feature in the Google search engine that allows you to find web pages that link to your domain name.  Simply Google for “link:<your domain>” to get the list.
   
   Click here for a list of sites that link to my blog’s domain.

   With this list, you can then work on contacting the owner of each website to request they update their links with the new domain name.
   
   

4. Update content within your own siteHow many documents on your own website contain links to the old domain name?  Don’t forget to check in files such as PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word Documents, etc.   These could be links to web pages, to staff e-mail addresses, etc.
5. E-Mail SignaturesMake sure the staff in your organization have updated their e-mail signature files to include the new link, and new e-mail addresses if appropriate. The same would be true for their business cards!

As you can see, there are steps you can take to help minimize the risk while changing domain names and letting the original one expire.  It just requires a little planning beforehand.

If your domain name does get taken, the other possible route you could go is to dispute the domain name registration with the governing body for the domain name in question.   For .com, .net and .org domain names, this would be the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  For .ca domain names, this would be the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).  They both have domain name dispute resolution policies.   I have never tried fighting a registration using these policies, but it may be worth a try.  The policies can be found here:

• ICANN Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (.com, .net, .org)
• CIRA Dispute Resolution Policy (.ca domains)

Best of luck!

OC Transpo is in the news again today.  Ottawa’s mainstream media has picked up the story about the pilot of the OC Transpo GPS data feed being pulled offline in January.  It seems that a chance for the transit service to make a profit from mobile applications is taking precedence over the availability of open data to the citizens of Ottawa.

Check out two articles here.

The open-data battle continues with OC Transpo (Ottawa Citizen)
http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/greaterottawa/archive/2011/02/14/the-open-data-battle-continues-with-oc-transpo.aspx

City mulls making money off bus-tracking data (CBC)
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2011/02/14/ottawa-oc-transpo-gps.html