Post edited to correct Ms. Wells’ title.

Interviewer: How would you define “usability,” and why is it important?

“I have no idea how you would define usability.” -Jane Wells, User Experience Designer

(Interview)

See, Jane Wells came from Ball State University — you know all that great software that came out of Ball State, right? — to bring the light of the High Raskin Church of User Interaction Design to the “people just hacking in their basements” who somehow managed to create WordPress, despite lacking access to the Ball State Interaction Lab, and the pliant user dummies used there for crash testing, and the sharks with lasers on their heads that track eyeball focus, and all the other Highly Technical advantages bestowed on the High Priests of the High Raskin Church of User Interaction Design like Ms. Wells. Thank goodness she’s arrived. I don’t know how our customers wrote 30,000+ posts and uploaded terabytes of photos and videos in 4 years on WordPress without her.

If you want to know why Firefox has only two states, “crash” or “allocate more memory, then crash,” this is why. If you want to know why WordPress’s admin panel has grown from “klunky” to “bewildering sin against god and nature,” this is why. Great software is not created by observing users, any more than great architecture is built by interviewing people who live in houses.

Whenever these (invariably self-proclaimed) “interaction experts” get hold of software, the core engine code grows shaggy 5-o’clock shadows of neglect, while the user interface breaks out in a rash of tiny confusing pictures. And Options! Options Everywhere! Customize everything! (So that the “usability experts” don’t have to make any decisions about that ineffable usability.) Do you want a red font or a blue font, monospace or sans-serif, line numbers to left? line wrapping or auto-indent? large or small? would you like fries with that?

What these huckster-hoaxers do is at best called Quality Assurance, and some form of it has a place. The problem is that few of these folks have, in an endless stream of papers and talks and theories and slides over 40 years, contributed a fraction of the clarity of thought about how things should be organized that can be found in a single page of Rob Pike’s The Hideous Name.

I’ve developed an addiction to Markdown after a few weeks using it here to write posts. So I want markdown for some chores on my main system, which is generally Plan 9. This means I need Perl to interpret the markdown.pl script.

There is a Perl for Plan 9, in sources/extra/perl.iso.bz2. These replica(1) ISO images are tricky, because they contain replica scripts for kfs(4) file systems, rather than the newer fossil(4). Editing the scripts for fossil is no big deal - but the iso is obviously a read-only mount, so putting the edited script back “in place” is a perfect job for name space manipulation - copy the perl replica script elsewhere, edit and put, then bind(1) the edited perl over the distributed script. Andrey Mirtchovski covered the gist of this procedure (for TeX) long ago on 9fans, but I was missing something:

% 9660srv
9660srv 33605: serving /srv/9660
% mount /srv/9660 /n/dist /tmp/perl.iso
% cp /n/dist/perl /usr/josh/tmp/perl
... [edit perl:12 to replace kfs call with " status '' " ...
% cd /n/dist
% bind /usr/josh/tmp/perl /n/dist/perl
% bind /root /n/kfs
% /n/dist/perl.setup
% replica/pull -v /n/dist/perl
no such replica /n/dist/perl

I eventually figured out that the replica script needs to be executable. If you bind an edited perl of mode 0664, you’ll see the error string above. So:

% chmod +x perl
% replica/pull -v /n/dist/perl
... much install noise ...
% perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.0 built for 386
...

Voila.

Side note: gabidiaz has Perl in his contrib(1) repo on sources, but missing read permission on some of the files.

Side note #2: steve has TeX (another of the “extra” ISOs) in his contrib(1) repo, but you get oodles of errors of the following ilk at the end of contrib/install steve/tex:

error: copying /sys/lib/texmf/tex/latex/base/gglo.ist: 
'/n/sources/contrib/steve/root/sys/lib/texmf/tex/latex/base/gglo.ist' does not exist

Neither really provides an alternative to the old sources/extra/*.iso.bz2 images and the procedure above.

I think I have hacked sp into a usable — and more importantly, releasable — condition. Of course, I’m new to Habari so there will certainly be some things I can improve.

Credits

Sp borrows everything it could find to steal:

• Sp takes the Simplish theme for WordPress as a visual style starting point. Simplish is itself a port — of Jeffrey Hardy’s venerable but popular Scribbish “theme for stuff”. Sp does not intend to reproduce Scribbish in every detail. It aims to be lighter, more terse, and simpler in code and presentation than either of its visual ancestors, befitting Habari.
  1. Hardy’s Scribbish is compatibly MIT-licensed. However, no actual Scribbish code is used in sp.
  2. I’m an author of Simplish. (And re-used Simplish code accounts for about 40-60 lines of sp’s CSS).
• From the Habari ‘foundation’ theme, Mzingi, I got the basic outline of Habari templates against RawPHPEngine;
• Fireyy’s (coincidentally-named) Simplus theme provided the initial way forward for dynamic and complete <title> elements, from whose implementation that in sp is derived.
  1. Mzingi and Simplus are both Apache Licensed, like Habari itself.
• The much-lighter-than-Blueprint CSS Boilerplate framework scaffolds the theme’s CSS, and should make it easier to modify.
  1. Boilerplate is by Nathan Borror and available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
• Draft post style (shown to logged-in users) inspired by Plan 9 rio(1)’s hold mode. ;-)
• Sp is Copyright © 2008 Utopian.net. All rights reserved. Sp is released with NO WARRANTY under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0. See the NOTICE and LICENSE* files in the distribution for details.

Features

• At the moment, sp is the theme on this site. Take a look. I’ve also rigged a simple sp demo for your pleasure.
• Microformatted: hAtom for entries, pages, archives; hCard for entry author(s).
• Valid HTML 4.01 Strict (as will your posts/pages need to be, should you want your live site to validate).
• Dynamic <title> elements on Tag, Search, Date archive pages. (I guess this is partially “built-in SEO.” More importantly, it improves navigation with clear signposting.)
• Coherent and highly modifiable CSS with Boilerplate framework base.
• Works with: Habari 0.5.2 (sp v0.5) and Habari 0.6-alpha from subversion (sp v0.6).
• More at the hasty labs page for sp, until we put a theme-demo/hosting Habari in place.

You can get the source from (see checksums):

For Habari 0.5.x:

sp-0.5.tgz

For Habari 0.6-alpha (svn):

sp-0.6.tgz

I’ll push the what-URL meta-drivel down the atom feed with a quick update on some work we’re doing around here:

• I incorporated Demetris’ and Martin’s suggestions in a version 2.1.2 of Simplish (for WordPress).
• Brianna released the rather-intensive jQuery code for her horizontal-scrolling work in another WordPress theme, WPlatformer. It has some rough edges, but the idea was to get the code in the sunlight where some smarter javascripters might have suggestions and patches. We have an alternate implementation of the text-dividing function in PHP/WordPress template code. It is more vulnerable to breaking under any user modification of font size/spacing or other style attributes.
• I will have a version of sp out by the weekend. Right now I have two distinct branches for the Habari 0.5.x and 0.6-alpha SVN versions (but the diff is minor — centered on the addition of the $post->pubdate->out() stuff).
• I voted, or filled in my card at least. I guess you should vote too. Unless you would consider marking a ballot anywhere in the vicinity of the name “Palin,” in which case you’re either incomprehensibly shallow or impenetrably stupid, and I hope you stay home.

… same as the old site. But only visually. Joshix.com is a new domain, so I can after a decade or so stop begging off my company for my home page. With it comes new software — an escape from the heavy code of WordPress into the lighter scaffold of Habari.

I’ve put together a Habari version of the Simplish from Utopian.net Labs theme for WordPress, which is itself a variant of the classic Scribbish “theme for stuff.” The Habari iteration is a little different again, and it’s called sp. Sp features the usual rash of h^(Atom Card) microformats support and HTML/CSS validity. Something packaged for a download coming soon.

As for joshix.com, expect most of the content from my old blog to be imported (where it will appear, back-dated, below), and for this to become my central site. (Updated — this is done and the link to labs/blogs was circular).