Dan Q

Category: Personal

Digest for June 2017

Summary

This month I talked about a roleplaying campaign that I’d been running, found a geocache near our holiday accomodation, and shared research on user testing, subpixel rendering in CSS, and one of the first of what would ultimately turn out to be several plans Theresa May came up with by which to attempt to fuck everything up.

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Dan Q found GLR9ZHJJ T’drath #5

This checkin to GLR9ZHJJ T'drath #5 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Our second holiday in Newport and a chance to hunt for a handful of the caches we’d missed last time around. A short walk by my partner fleeblewidget and I yesterday evening brought us to an easy find here on a road we’ve walked several times before. TFTC.

Dan Q found GLR9ZJ3Z T’drath #4

This checkin to GLR9ZJ3Z T'drath #4 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A gentle walk yesterday evening brought us here (although we briefly overshot, engaged as we were deep in conversation and having forgotten to enable the proximity beeper on my GPSr). Spent a little time hunting in a convincing-looking place that turned out to be wrong before the hint gave us a clue and – after the peeling back of some branches to be able to see the thing that the hint referred to – sent us in the right direction. Lovely night for it, and we managed to get back to our accommodation in good time to avoid the start of the rain.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

His nuclear research helped a judge determine that former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko had been assassinated – likely on Putin’s orders. Just months after the verdict, the scientist himself was found stabbed to death with two knives. Police deemed it a suicide, but US intelligence officials suspect it was murder…

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Dan Q found GLR8Y7C0 Road to Parrog

This checkin to GLR8Y7C0 Road to Parrog reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An easy find while taking my nephew out for a morning walk in his pushchair. Poor little fella fell asleep before we got to the GZ, though, knocked out perhaps by this morning’s early heat! Nice and quiet this early on a Sunday: not a muggle in sight.

Me and mine are staying just down the road for a holiday – not part of last night’s noisy wedding party, though!

Dan Q found GLR8CM1D The Lone Singer

This checkin to GLR8CM1D The Lone Singer reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A quick and easy find on a walk to the shops while visiting my partner’s husband’s grandmother (who lives just around the corner)! Lovely day for it!

Suspect that the vague coordinates plus the description would probably be enough for a non-premium member to find this, by the way! Just so you know!

Dan with a geocache.

Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Something that jumped at me, recently, was a rendering dilemma that browsers have to encounter, and gracefully handle, on a day-by-day basis with little, to no, standardization.

Take the following page for example. You have 4 floated divs, each with a width of 25%, contained within a parent div of width 50px. Here’s the question: How wide are each of the divs?

The problem lies in the fact that each div should be, approximately, 12.5px wide and since technology isn’t at a level where we can start rendering at the sub-pixel level we tend to have to round off the number. The problem then becomes: Which way do you round the number? Up, down, or a mixture of the two? I think the results will surprise you, as they did me…

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Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

In earlier research, Tom Landauer and I showed that the number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users is:

N (1-(1- L ) n )

where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user. The typical value of L is 31%, averaged across a large number of projects we studied. Plotting the curve for L =31% gives the following result…

Diminishing returns for usability testing, as more and more users are tested. The curve bends around 5 users, which is the recommended number of test participants.

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You Are Not Google – Bradfield

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float helplessly toward the brightest light and lay prone in front of it, oblivious to what we were looking for in the first place.

This is not how rational people make decisions, but it is how software engineers decide to use MapReduce…

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