Fitzgerald Steele

From Eric Florenzano…

Rules:

1. Implement a program that takes in a user’s name and their age, and prints hello to them once for every year that they have been alive.
2. Post these rules, the source code for your solution, and the following list (with you included) on your blog.
3. Bonus points if you implement it in a language not yet seen on the following list!

I’ve seen solutions in python, ruby, Java, C, lisp, and TCL.  I haven’t seen PHP, and I’ve never really done PHP…so without further ado…

<?php

for ($i = 0; $i < $age; $i++) {
    print “$i. Hello, $name”;
}
?>

And the output…

What is your name: Jerry Steele
What is your age: 33
0. Hello, Jerry Steele
1. Hello, Jerry Steele
2. Hello, Jerry Steele
3. Hello, Jerry Steele
4. Hello, Jerry Steele
5. Hello, Jerry Steele
6. Hello, Jerry Steele
7. Hello, Jerry Steele
8. Hello, Jerry Steele
9. Hello, Jerry Steele
10. Hello, Jerry Steele
11. Hello, Jerry Steele
12. Hello, Jerry Steele
13. Hello, Jerry Steele
14. Hello, Jerry Steele
15. Hello, Jerry Steele
16. Hello, Jerry Steele
17. Hello, Jerry Steele
18. Hello, Jerry Steele
19. Hello, Jerry Steele
20. Hello, Jerry Steele
21. Hello, Jerry Steele
22. Hello, Jerry Steele
23. Hello, Jerry Steele
24. Hello, Jerry Steele
25. Hello, Jerry Steele
26. Hello, Jerry Steele
27. Hello, Jerry Steele
28. Hello, Jerry Steele
29. Hello, Jerry Steele
30. Hello, Jerry Steele
31. Hello, Jerry Steele
32. Hello, Jerry Steele

[UPDATE: I've decided to go with TextMate]

I’m looking for a new Mac text editor, which will be primarily used for web coding (HTML, Python, PHP if they make me).  I want an editor that simple when I need it to be simple, helps me complete routine/repetitive tasks more efficiently, and lets me script/customize when I need advanced functionality. Here’s what I’ve tried so far…

vim
Oldie but goodie.  Sometimes its nice to quickly open a file in the terminal, but I have a hard time seeing how to use it as a full-time text edit environment.  I know beneath the simple terminal screen lies multi-buffers, regex search/replace, and keyboard based editing nirvana, but I haven’t been able to fulfill its promises. I would need to take some time to recall all the keystroke commands, and then configure it and customize it to my liking.

Coda
Did the 15 day trial, and I really thought it was a nice web development environment.  Text Editor, Terminal, FTP, Version Control, Reference Books all in one window, with some sexy page transition animations that make your Windows-using co-workers jealous.  I also liked the Find/Replace functionality which allows placeholder/token expressions.  Much simpler than having to mess with regular expressions.  But I’m not sure if this is the best text editor for general text files.  For example, I’m also experimenting with Sphinx and reStructuredText…Coda has no love for reStructuredText (love=syntax highlighting, auto complete, etc).  The latest version of Coda supports user-defined plugins, so maybe reStructuredText is coming.  Finally, I had trouble getting Coda to work with a svn repository I set up, although it might be more of a problem with my svnadmin skills, than Coda.

My Coda trial has expired, so now I’m looking at:

TextMate
I’ve watched some screencasts…seems pretty sexy.  All the cool kids seem to be using it.  It seems like there’s a lot of configuration/customization possibilities.  Maybe too many?   I’m interested in seeing if I use the snippets, which Bundles I’ll use, etc.  I’ve just downloaded the 30 day trial, and I’ll use it as my primary editor until it ends, or I get sick of it.

BBEdit
The granddaddy of Mac text editors.  All my co-workers use it.  Because it has been popular for so long, I imagine it is pretty solid.  Reminds me of Ultraedit on Windows.

I probably won’t try Emacs.  I gave up on that in 1994.

Anything else I should be looking at?

As part of my new job as ACT’s User Experience Designer, one of my jobs will be to do some usability testing of the websites we develop.  This is a brand new position to ACT, so in addition to educating people about what goes into User Experience Design/User Centered Design/Usability Engineering (the buzzwords change about every 5 years, it seems), I’m looking for a set of usability testing tools that I can use on projects.  This week, I’m playing with Silverback, a Mac-only usability testing tool from Clearleft.

Silverback has two things going for it.  Silverback itself is pretty simple.  It uses the computer’s webcam to record the user’s face, records all the screen activity (highlighting mouse clicks with a pleasing graphic), combines the two and exports a video of the test session into a Quicktime .mov file.  Second, at $50, it is crazy affordable.

So here’s how I set up my computer to do usability testing of a web site with Silverback.  I have a G5 Mac Pro with 2 monitors, and an old-school external iSight.

• Turned off the second monitor
• I reset the monitor resolution to 1024×768, which is what our weblogs show to be the most common aspect ratio.
• I wanted to hide my desktop image, and all the cluttered documents on my desktop, so as not to distract participants.  A nifty donationware app called Camouflage took care of that.
• I used Firefox as the browser for this usability study.  I created a new, blank Firefox profile specifically for this usability study.  To do this, you have to open the Terminal and invoke firefox with the commandline option –profilemanager.  I set the home page of this new profile to the page under study.  I added a couple bookmarks to the bookmark bar for a couple other pages I would ask participants to look at during the course of the study.
• Start Silverback.  When participants arrived, I had them situate themselves in front of the computer and webcam, and started the Silverback recording session.  Participants performed the tasks I asked them to do, and Silverback records audio, video, and on-screen activity.
• When they were done with the tasks, I stopped Silverback recording.  I then asked them to fill out a post-test questionnaire, which I was able to quickly set up using a Google Spreadsheet Form.
• After the participant leaves, you can export the video file to .mov.  This can take awhile — about 2-3 hours for the 1/2 test sessions I ran.  File sizes range from 1-2GB per half/hour session (you can customize video sizes and other options that affect both size and speed of the export).

That’s basically it.  And that’s the point.  Silverback is designed to be a quick, inexpensive, fast, unobtrusive way to do usability testing, and I’d say they’ve made an excellent start.  I’ve gone from zero to a fully-functioning usability testing workstation in the time it takes to download the software.  If you’ve got a mac laptop with Apple Remote, you get to add bookmarks to the video so you can mark interesting events during the study.

I tried adding some feedback to their product customer service page, but I couldn’t get the site to work.  Some things I hope to see in future versions:

• A preview of the audio levels…some way to make sure the user is speaking loudly enough, and that there isn’t too much background noise
• It would be nice to have some facility for pre- and post-test questionnaires, demographics, etc.   Maybe keep a database of questions so that they can be resued in subsequent tests.

Anyway, congratulations to the staff at Clearleft.  They’ve got my $50, and I look forward to future iterations of Silverback.