Today I went down to look at our Digital Vision web site being used by a couple of users in a usability lab hosted by flow interactive. I watched 2 users, both experienced with looking at royalty free stock photography, but one had heard about us and one hadn’t. It was extremely interesting seeing at which points they found it hard to decide where to go, but there where some similarities in the way that they wanted to use the site.

Both users wanted to have the site centered around search, making the other items on the pages, particularly the home page, rather secondary. Once they entered the search it seemed that they took different paths to finding the results that they wanted. One user couldn’t find exactly what he was looking for in the first tests so expanded the results by entering a broader search term and putting more results on to the screen. The other just kept searching over and over again until he found something that he liked the look of.

Moving through the purchase path also returned some interesting results, with uses making natural assumptions to what buttons and links do what jobs, but the more experienced of the two users often corrected themselves when realising the pre-made conception in their head was wrong, which was very interesting.

Feed back about the site was overall positive, but it will be really interesting to see all the results, as I won’t be able to sit in on all the tests going on, so luckly they will be available on video for us. And I really like this image btw!:

The question of how is the best way to hire “artists to provide graphics, music, and other artwork for Open Source projects?” was posed the other day on http://slashdot.org well one was is to hunt them down on http://rentacoder.com or http://www.newstoday.com but very likely you will get all sorts, I would recommend nicely hunting down talent through online communities, artists blogs and websites

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/22/217250&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=152&tid=185&tid=188

Just put up the images on the share.timc3.com site from the other weekend when I went down to Eric birthday. There are a couple more of the car, plus some good ones of the farm and friends.. Go check it out at: http://share.timc3.com/index.php?view=thumb&dir=thefarm2

At work this week I got hold of one of the latest HP iPaq’s to come out, the rx3715 model. This was my first iPaq (I have had a Palm a while ago, but it still didn’t have the features I needed), so it was interesting to get involved with some technology that I didn’t have much experience with

The primary reason for getting it is to basically get myself organised, put in task lists, track projects and use a project management system and have wireless access to be able to get in to our systems in case of an emergency from anywhere

The rx3715 has alot more features for a multimedia system that perhaps at first glance I needed, being loaded with a 1.3M pixel camera, and being able to play music and videos, but it does have the advantage of being able to use bluetooth and wireless out of the box

Setting up wireless to the 802.11G capable Linksys Router was fairly painless after we set a static DNS address in the box, and bluetooth was even easier – in Windows XP I bridged the connection from my Lan to the bluetooth so my DHCP server was able to supply an IP to the iPaq. All in all very successful.

Sync’ing with Outlook 2003 was easy, and in seconds I had all my tasks and calender across, and dragging files fine.

I have pretty much started using Debian full time as my main OS at work, and it is going quite well, I am using it with the Gnome GUI, and half the time Terminal Served into a windows box, but still I am love being back to use /bin/bash.
At home I am still using Windows XP, but I install a 64Bit Athlon with a Gigabyte motherboard. All seems well, apart from the CD writer playing up, but I think that it might have been in cable select mode. I have also built my Dad a nice little SFF (Small Form Factor) computer, in a rather smart Aopen XC cube, with a flat screen. Its a nice little system and photos are to follow.

Haven’t posted for a while, which is becoming a bad habit, but one of the reasons being getting over this beauty:

As you can see it visually stunning, but the first thing that hits you is the smell of expensive Italian leather as you enter, then its how solid everything is as you pull off, the whole car feels like it is hewn out of lightweight metals, but really it is quite a heavy car, which is all the more amazing for the hit that the front engined V12 gives when it keeps accelerating, and accelerating, and accelerating. It just doesn’t stop..

Fantastic.

This is a really nice link that was posted up on humhum the other day, and adds to the other branding sites that I have put the other day: http://blog.timc3.com/item.php?entry=195

http://giam.typepad.com/the_branding_of_polaroid_/

So I have started to use Linux as my main desktop at work. Well sort of, I have got MS Remote Desktop setup on my windows box so I can still access the applications that I NEED to run for work, namely – Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SourceSafe, Microsoft Visual Basic Studio, .Net Studio, and a couple of other bits and pieces. But running terminal services in t his way is actually quite good, and for the majority of the time its all I need. I do prefer the TSClient (apt-get install tsclient) to rdesktop at the moment

As for the Linux box, its a fairly standard Debian install from sarge (Debian testing release), then updated to Sid (Debian unstable release) using Apt. I am running the 2.6 Kernel which at the moment has proved very stable, and on top of that I have Gnome installed which is not half bad.

If you are running Gnome, I would say spend a couple of minutes configuring it to your liking, setting up mouse, environment, windowing, display (in particular fonts) and you will be much happier for it.

Standard with Gnome on Debian is Ximian Evolution, and excellent mail package – but not standard was the exchange connector. This is available as an APT package, but I couldn’t get it to install so I reverted to source and installed that, and so far so good.

The latest iMac has been announced and I think it looks quite lovely (and I wasn’t a big fan of either of the other versions). The specifications are very good, with G5 chip, 17″ or 20″ screens and the usual compliment of USB2, Firewire and digital audio connections. All in all, I think this makes it an excellent proposition for making music, particularly in keeping the number of wires down in the studio!