#34. The Google combo box and usability: how to forget the user

This is an old post that I had on my Hubpages account criticising Google Reader, and with Reader's disappearance I want to re-post again here instead of Hubpages.

What's happening in Google? They have forgotten users? Gmail and other products have been famous for letting users be as fast as possible with keyboard shortcuts but recently I have noticed that in some pages they are using some kind of custom combo box that does not fulfill those parameters.

In Google Reader if you want to search for a post in just one of your subscriptions you have to scroll down until you find it, until now you could press a key where the combo entry was its initial and the combo would scroll down until it finds it, as almost any combo box in any website. Scrolling down almost a thousand subscriptions to find one is not funny. I thought maybe they starting to forget Google Reader in favour of other products.

But today found out the same problem in the advanced search, trying to filter by country, wait...that's Google Search, the king's jewel, how can this be happening too? Maybe they are starting to forget us, maybe they are becoming the next Microsoft?

As some partners have said to me, maybe this change is due to tactile devices, as you may have seen on your mobile or tablet when touch a combo box it opens in a dialog and you don't have a keyboard so you have to scroll. I don't really know the reason, you can check the image.

#23. Clear a complete list in your gamespot profile

With this you will get all combo boxes changed to delete, you can also use it to change to another value, the you only have to click the Save Changes button.

Use this piece of javascript code:

If you need help on how to execute it, please leave a comment! Thx

#22. Add Adsense in 3 simple steps to any blog that allows frames

The idea is to use a frame to show AdSense from another website so you can show them in your blog page, in wordpress.com even frames are limited so this solution won't work. Basically, we can achieve it in 3 simple steps:

1. Get the AdSense Javascript code If you know how to get the AdSense Javascript, just skip this step. Otherwise, you should enter the AdSense website, click in "My ads" tab, "Content", "Ad units", and create a new ad unit, configure the block as you wish, so it is compatible to your site layout and get the code to insert AdSense to your page.

2. Create a free page Searching in Google for a free hosting website service, you can use a page in for example a free blog service like Tumblr, where you can add simple web pages to your blog, this pages can be html so you can add anything, at least I tried with ads.

3. Insert an iFrame in your Blog, this might be the hardest part since it requires some basic HTML knowledge. You should access the manual theme customization and select where you want to insert the ads. Then you have to insert the following code snippet:



You should replace "http://youradaddres" with the address of the page you created in the previous step. The width and height parameters should be adjusted for your layout, add some extra space to the teoric size of the ad because if it's too adjusted it may create scrolling bars.

I tried adding to the left bar a Wide Skyscraper type and in each post a Medium Rectangle, we can customize when this ad appears if our template gives us any number to identify the post number. As normally Adsense will only show 3 ads per site.

Also if you want to add ads in your feed you can use feedburner to add it automagically :)

#21. Java generics, type erasure and lazyness

I've been doing a little personal app in Java, and recently found out that generics in Java erase type information so generics would have retro-compatibility (or at least it's what I learnt from reading this post). I can’t deny that I don’t understand the idea and the drawbacks aren’t much but what’s the meaning of doing something halfway. I was just trying to get the type of a generic variable. I don’t think that this was the only option but probably was the easiest.

#20. Sorry tumblr, ifttt rules

I’ve been thinking of changing the blog to try another blog management site, currently I don’t want to host it myself so one of my options was tumblr, it’s a simple and easy to manage blogging site but as I was going to try couldn’t use windows live writer with it, searching for a solution found out that they don’t use a standard API, so I won’t be using their site directly, I’ll probably use ifttt a service to post indirectly through conditions.

#19. loaded pc, granola and blue screen of death

Recently I posted about my current workstation config, also some days ago I tried to re-use an old audigy card, after installing it my system became unstable with random hangs and even some times a BSOD with a internal power error. Of course, I removed it.
After removing it the random hangs stopped, but the general speed of the system had been lowering in the recent months. But I thought it was a typical problem of windows getting bloated with software and updates.
Today my pc had the same problems, constant random hangings and even BSODs after some time. I thought it was a hardware problem, SPU or motherboard fail probably. Looked the voltages into HWMonitor and found lower than normal voltages. I was desperate so I went into failsafe mode, and found that the system was stable and found that granola wasn't running, eureka! Went to bios and looked in hardware monitor it was more or less ok. So finally granola got uninstalled, problem resolved.
This is my experience today, probably it won't affect everybody but be cautious, I don't recommend granola for a workstation (sorry environment) as it probably will waste more of your time that savings it will get you. I'm sorry but I won't use it again. Remember to prioritize everything and your working tools should be as speedy as it can be.

#14. My daily WTF

At work some days ago I received an incidence where a user complained about random crashes, doing some code review I found this:

#13. Are you proud of yourself today?

If the answer is "yes", you’ll probably get a good sleep tonight.

Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (1900-1988) first studied the phenomenon after her professor, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders. However, several thorough replication studies done later in other countries failed to replicate Zeigarniks results. In those studies no significant recall effects were found for completed and interrupted tasks . In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

How can you get a good sleep? Probably finishing these pending tasks and getting that feeling of completed work.

#9. W0t...Awww...

Why I need to cast this?¿ Awww...those are the frustrations of programming that sometimes I can’t understand.

If getItemList returns a List<I> why .get returns an object?