Understanding the mind of a computer programmer can be quite difficult and sometimes I forget to ask the right questions. Yesterday, I asked one of the programmers to set me up an account on a Unix machine for a new designer. This was done promptly and I sent the designer details of the account. What the programmer hadn’t done was given the designer the required permissions to change the design! Now I thought this was self evident. What was the point of setting up an account on a machine for a designer if they can’t change the design? The programmer told me that I hadn’t asked him to set up file permissions.

It happened again this afternoon. I was printing a large document which died in the middle with a stack error. I asked a programmer to help me. What I wanted was to be told how to print specific pages of the document from the command line. What I was told was “You can’t fix a stack error – you need a new postscript interpreter”.

Michael Schwern is in Belfast to talk to the Perl Mongers tonight. The title of his talk is “Sufficiently Encapsulated Magic Is Indistinguishable From Technology”. Not quite sure what this will entail but I’m sure it will be fun!

Mark-Jason Dominus will be giving his Perl Hardware Store talk to Belfast.pm on Monday 31st March. Whilst he is in Belfast he will also be teaching some commercial training courses.

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there’s a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. …In English, in short, there are words for almost everything.

– Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue

Lately, I have spent quite a few evenings playing Boggle. I haven’t managed to win a single game. There are so many words that I have never heard of. And I’m not talking about long words (words with more than seven letters) rather words of three or four letters. I never knew that a ree was a female Eurasian sandpiper, that feh is a Hebrew letter (pe) or that ose is a ridge of sand (esker). There are also lots of valid three letter words such as oot, ens, dah, and ern which I use all the time without having any idea as to what they mean.

I have been trying to find ways to learn new words. I’ve been reading word lists, scrabble anagram lists, dictionaries, books about words etc. So far, the best thing I have come across is a program that Tony wrote which analyses the boggle games we have played and produces a list of all the words it was possible to find in a game.

I’ve started to dream about boggle. Maybe it’s time to find something new to play like scrabble.

Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.

The Web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouseclick away

– Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability

The simplest things are often the hardest to understand – because our minds keep racing off in the wrong directions

– Edward de Bono, Simplicity

buoy. Though this book does not normally address matters of pronunciation, and though it is intended primarily for users of British English, I cannot resist pointing out to my fellow Americans, and any who may be influenced by them, that the increasing tendency to pronounce this word boo-ee is mistaken and misguided. Unless you would say boo-ee-ant for buoyant, please return to pronouncing it boy.

– Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.

Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.” Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: “When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigour.” Or these instructions gracing a packet of fast food from Italy: “Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.”

– Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue

The oscar nominations are finally out. I wonder if Eminem will perform his song “Lose Yourself” at the ceremony?

I have spent a large part of the day working with CSS. Thanks to the excellent examples at glish.com and bluerobot I was able to get the site looking how I wanted. However, some time last week, I had removed the footer because it wasn’t appearing at the bottom of the page. After I had completed the work I was doing today it occurred to me that I might be able to put the footer back in (I had moved the footer information to a menu in the header which I didn’t really like). I couldn’t get it working. All because I had to use absolute positioning for one of my columns. Maybe tomorrow, when I’m more awake, I’ll be able to understand this and make my footer work the way I want it to.