Due to its recent popularity, I’ve dabbled over the years with PHP as well, and found it great for the tasks for which it was specifically designed and less than great in some other areas. The quality and consistency of its documentation is patchy and its OOP model has only recently fully evolved.

However, I’ve taken the plunge and I’m moving across to using PHP for all my web programming. I want to do more in the way of mobile devices; this made the previous mix of HTML, CSS, Perl, PHP and Javascript untenable. I could not readily achieve fully conforming mobile device web pages with this mix, so I’m in the process of replacing my Perl modules with PHP versions and, in the process, eliminating as much Javascript as possible. This will enable me to tailor the pages rendered from my website to the particular device and user agent, desktop or mobile, requesting the page. So far, the experience has been quite enjoyable and I have not found any insurmountable problems.

The modules which I’ve already fully ported include the locations.module, sitesearch.module, guestbook.module and validlinks.module, with more of them to come shortly.

Print the RACI cheat sheet and put it on your desk; you’ll find it an effective reminder of the RACI section in Identifying, Documenting and Analysing Business Processes.

As an aide memoire, I’ve created a KPI cheat sheet. It’s a one-page PDF file which you can download and print, to guide you
through the creation of KPIs and KPI sets.
It leads you through all of the key principles of selecting KPIs and KPI sets, including Kaplan & norton “Balanced Scorecard” reminders, as well as KPI system rollout steps.

Print the KPI cheat sheet and put it on your desk; you’ll be surpised how effective a remider of the principles of Generating & Selecting KPI Sets it is.

The formalisation of a service level agreement tends to take the emotive content out of service provision; by clear, concise agreement on the scope of services to be delivered, the quality of those services and the compensation for provision of those services, each party to the SLA is relieved of the emotional baggage of service provision and freed to concentrate on the efficient provision and consumption of those services. Of course, a service level agreement is no panacea for problems arising in the provision of services. However, when tribulations do arise, they can be dealt with within the framework of the service level agreement, even when this means that the agreement needs to be varied.

Service which are suitable for management by Service Level Agreement include:

• well understood, established services
• services which are delivered in small lots, fequently
• repeatable, definable services
• relatively stable demand for the services
• existence of a capable labour pool to fulfill the service level agreement.

This is not to say that service level agreements cannot be constructed for larger, more complex services or that the realm of service level agreements ios limited to blue collar labour, but it does mean they are unlikely to be a good fit for original intellectual property deliver, e.g. a service level agreement for the delivery of poetry is likely to yield doggerel rather than consistently high quality verse.

To find further information about implementing service level agreements, look at our e-book at: e-Book – Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements. This e-book includes a complete template for the construction of SLAs, enabling you to get a well-constructed agreement in place in minimum time.

The car manufacturers spend millions of dollars searching for model names, and even then they generate some stinkers. The largest company in the world, General Electric, named one of its Chevrolet cars the “Nova”, which in Spanish means “does not go”. They are seeking brand recognition and to convey some sense of the qualities of the car they are flogging and sometimes they achieve that. When a car model is called a “Statesman”, “Diplomat” or a “Senator”, you can be reasonably sure it will be an over-long, over-weight luxury lard-arse which guzzles small oilfields while delivering its silver-haired cargo to the gentlemen’s club. On the other hand a “Mica”, “Pica”, “Smart”, “Swift” or similar will be a pint-sized one-point-something-litre built-to-a-price plastic runabout, easily turned into a milk crate by argument with a 4-wheel-drive. These latter tend to have something of the “terra” (and sometimes the “terror”) in their names. Thus the “Land Cruiser” takes off from where the “Land Rover” left off, or was that the “Range Rover”; anyway, it’s not too far removed from the “Desert Runner” or the “Bush Buggerer”. But these semi-innocent, World-War-II-derived devices cannot hold a candle (nor a jack-handle) to the American Sports Utility Vehicle. The SUV as it’s known to its friends, is not so much a vehicle class as an ongoing competition to float the biggest, brashest, bluffest, thirstiest, post-Gulf-War-1 refutation of ecological sensibility as possible. Witness the High-Mobility-Multi-Purpose-Wheeled-Vehicle-derived “Hummer”, which only its mother (the afore-mentioned High-Mobility-Multi-Purpose-Wheeled-Vehicle) could love¹. Or take the Ford “F-series” truck which, from modest beginnings in the 1950′s is now, in its latest incarnation, something like an armed houseboat with air horns. At the leading edge (for certain values of the word “leading”) of this class is the Dodge “Ram”; now there’s an evocative name in only three letters, but up to 10 cylinders of grunt. Specifically, you can buy the “Dodge Ram 3500 dual-rear-wheel 4-wheel-drive quad-cab-with-suicide-doors 8.0-litre Magnum petrol V-10″. You’ll be wanting a step-ladder with that, sir.

Naming people (at least in Western society) has been easy; we choose from a limited list of names which wax and wane in their popularity. Only the artists amongst us seem to have any imagination, and Frank Zappa deserves special posthumous praise for naming his progeny “Ahmet Rodan”, “Diva”, “Dweezil” and “Moon Unit”.

But back to naming your dog. There are certain goals you want to achieve in naming your dog, some of which are purely practical, others more abstract.

Like the car manufacturers, you want brand recognition, but by an audience of one, i.e. your dog. To achieve this you should aim for a name of one or two syllables; the first syllable should preferably be of the consonant-vowel-consonant form, the second (if any) can be of any type. Thus “Rex”, “Max”, “Jake”, “Buddy”, “Bailey”, “Sam”, “Rocky”, “Buster”, “Fido” for the boys and “Molly”, “Lady”, “Sadie”, “Sasha”, “Jessie” et al for the girls are easy for the dogs to hear and recognise. Although you might like the idea of having a faithful hound called “Santa’s Little Helper”, “Shostakovitch” or “Schickelgruber”, you would be asking your dog to perform an extra-ordinary memorisation feat as its first puppy task. “Alowishus” is worse still, since the first syllable is of the vowel-consonant form, harder for dogs to recognise.

A second consideration is that you should probably not give your dog a name which is also a common command. Naming your dog “Sit” or “Heel” can only lead to confusion. Naming your dog “Attack” may also cause some contextual difficulty, especially with Pomeranians.

Thirdly, dogs’ names should be, broadly speaking, people-friendly. Imagine that you’re at the picnic park, and your dog wanders over to the Coffin Cheaters Motorcycle Club barbeque; you have to call you dog back in full voice. Suddenly, the fact that he liked tennis balls as a puppy just doesn’t seem to support your choice of “mr. ball-licker”. Equally, when you’re at the church picnic, your dog starts humping the
leg of the organist and you have to call him off, you may regret having called him “mother f*cker”, whether or not you used an asterisk.

Lastly, the dog’s name should be kid-friendly. Kids are like people but less so. If you call your dog “Alejandrina” (a popular Spanish name for bitches), you might find it sophisticated, but the kids would probably prefer “Bum-drag”, and might even teach it appropriate tricks.

1. since I initially wrote this, the Hummer has become a victim of the global financial crisis and its passing will be greatly lamented by….. hardly anyone.

Even worse, “for example” often is not all that I wish to say; often I’m trying to say something of the style “that is, for example”, so I wind up doubting whether I’m really wanting to “i.e.” or “e.g.”

I’ve decided to cut the Gordian knot; from this day hence, when appropriate I will use the newly coined T.L.A.* “i.e.g.”, meaning “that is, for example,”. I’m sure you will find i.e.g. a perfectly cromulent T.L.A.

* T.L.A. = Three Letter Abbreviation.

I can go to various newspapers and when you scroll down to the bottom, what do you do next? There were related stories and related videos but those were up on the top. So now the most committed user – the one that reads through the entire piece – is now looking at the bottom of the page with nothing to do.

It is well worth while looking at each of your web pages with the specific aim of ensuring that there is something engaging to reward your most committed site visitors, at the end of each article, at the bottom of each page. This is especially true for longer articles or pages.

I visited 40 randomly-selected websites and checked each for compliance with requests from the web browser to increase or decrease the text size (note that this is not the “zoom” function present in some browsers, it should affect text only. The results are as follows:

“Full” means that all text on the site resizes as requested by the browser, and that the end result is still legible.

“Partial” compliance means that while much of the text might resize as requested, some of it does not (or the site becomes illegible due to text overlaps); the most common symptom here is menu text which stays at the same fixed size.

“None” means that, apart from some minor and accidental spacing changes, none of the text responds to requests for size changes.

ingredients

• 550 gm tomatoes
• 400 gm brown onions
• 80 gm jalapeño peppers
• 20 gm red chilis
• 1 lime
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 cup brown vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt

method

Dice the tomatoes, onions, peppers, chilis and garlic. Add the zest and juice of the lime and other ingredients, bring to the boil in a heavy
saucepan and then slowly simmer for 30 minutes. Blend with a stick blender. Makes about 1.5 litres.

After some trial and error, I have ended up with the following design in my text processor, Weblex:


The synoym list uses a Windows Tree-view; when you select a synonym by clicking on it, synonyms for that synonym are presented, as is the case for “modernism” displayed above.

There are two input boxes and three buttons, one label. One of the buttons is additional to the Word fuctionality (“Find on WWW”), so the net reduction in clutter is quite significant.

The moral of this story is that, despite the owerwhelming number of designers, software engineers, ergonomists, hair-dressers and spin doctors in the larger software development firms, it is still not only possible but indeed feasible realistic practical workable viable to compete with them on good design.