Who crashed my windows ?

Who crashed my windows ?

My laptop has a pre-installed version of Vista and is often crashing because of Blue screen of death. It's not easy to find the crash reason unless one muddle through reading crash dump data.

I found an handy tool which helps to decipher the BSOD (Blue screen of death) problems in Windows. It's called WhoCrashed. It relies on windbg.exe-which is part of Debugging Tools for Windows (x86). It means that it's good to install windbg.exe before installing WhoCrashed

WhoCrashed shows the drivers which have been crashing your computer with a single click. In most cases it can pinpoint the offending drivers which have been causing misery on your computer system in the past. It does post-mortem crashdump analysis and presents all gathered information in a comprehensible way.

>> Link to download whocrashed freeware

Pixlr Editor - Online photo editing

Pixlr Editor - Online photo editing

{* offline image loaded into pixlr }

There seems to be a huge surge of on-line photo editing tools to compete with Adobe's Photoshop Express. Online Adobe Photoshop express editing is in infancy compared to robust feature set of offline version. With the recent update, Adobe has updated light room features to it.

I found an interesting online photo editing tool pixlr.com's Image editor.

The UI looks so crisp and nicely rendered. It's pretty quick too in all aspects. Interestingly it's done in flash and the whole scripting is done inside single flash file.

Surprisingly UI and presentaton looks more like Adobe native UI. Adobe's Photoshop Express's suppose to have the offline photoshop UI, which is not the case.But pixlr.com's Image editor has very similar layout as Photoshop CS4. That's the big plus in identifying itself with offline photoshop UI.

Interestingly 'Undo' feature works as Ctrl+Z in pixlr and also many other keyboard shortcuts works too. Loaded image can be edited and saved to offline unlike Express.

>> Checkout pixlr online image editor

Bangalore, mango and election

Bangalore, mango and election

(Mango next to my bedroom window !)

It's hot summer beating anvil of heat. To give instant relaxation to mood and swiveling heat wave on the heads, it rains randomly in Bangalore. Life just rolls on with more recession news, Overclocking design at my notebook, hot coffees, lovely raspuri mangos, jog on thread mill, long walk on the wet pavements of randomly drizzling days, and of-course with my favorite movie session a-now-and-then. And it's a election time again. First time in my life my left hand index finger's tip is oddly dirt ;) in this Lokhasabha election !

A fresh feeling lingers inside me while driving on lovely, greenery clad streets of drizzling Bangalore. When it rains in Bangalore I love to get out of my seat and drive slowly, listening to my favo music playing in stereo. City is just sexy when it rains ! My favorite driving stretch is Laxman rao park double road near south end. I love the pleasure of driving slowly and my streched out hand feeling the cool wind. A song move gently inside me like a wafer carved out of mango, I hum to myself :

This is the springtime of my loving-
The second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing-
So little warmth Ive felt before.
It isnt hard to feel me glowing-
I watched the fire that grew so low. | The Rain Song

"Paradise Now"

"Paradise Now"

{My movie of the week}
I got a chance to watch an amazing movie "Paradise Now" in UTV world movies, recently.

It's the biggest example how great movies can make you feel for the character who is nowhere near you, and you don’t know about them and you still feel about them. That’s the magic of “Paradise Now”

It's a 2005 film directed by Hany Abu-Assad about two Palestinian men preparing for a suicide attack in Israel. It focuses on what would be their last days together. story of two young Palestinian men as they embark upon what may be the last 48 hours of their lives. On a typical day in the West Bank city of Nablus, where daily life grinds. Having a bomb strapped to your waist would raise doubts in anyone--and once doubts have arisen, they respond in very different ways.

It's a penultimate message conveyed to any terrorist, to any brain conspiring behind peaceful nation. Everyone talks about terrorism and its aftermaths. Hardly one gets a time to peak into the soul of terrorist, and glance into his insight about world, love and people. Movie is quite special because of the characters chosen, the director, the story line where it takes place. I suggest any movie buff to watch this Arabic genre Paradise Now.

one of the wonderful lines of director Abu-Assad about movie: "The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing."

Most of the time movies are made out of inspiration or adaptation. This movie is made in the place, where the terror has stuck time and again. In the pauses of movie's pace, lot of finer points to unravel and feel. The silence of the characters makes u utter the words they couldn't.Since terrorism is spreading like a octopus around us, it's the time to watch and also I suggest this one to a terrorist before embarking on erasing thousand smiles somewhere.

Reviewing User Interfaces

Reviewing User Interfaces

Designing a user interface based proven usability principles or based on product requirement guidelines may be an easier task. But reviewing the nitty-gritties of user interface is a very intelligent task, as this process can also be attributed to 'user interface holistic testing'. It can be layered technique of reviewing user interface components of in depth testing and reviewing of them. Normally what we call expert review could be done even before the design implementation to weed out the redundancies of the interface.

Has your boss or a client ever asked you to review a user interface for a Web or desktop application? Perhaps the request went something like this: Can you just look over these new screens for us? Oh, and can you check the error messages, too? It won’t take long! And, by the way, we ship next month. Whether you are an interaction designer, usability professional, technical communicator, quality assurance engineer, or developer, reviewing a user interface typically means identifying :

• usability problems related to
• - the layout, logical flow, and structure of the interface
• - inconsistencies in the design
• non-compliance with standards
• ambiguous wording in labels, dialog boxes, error messages, and onscreen user assistance
• functional errors

While user interface (UI) reviews often occur at the end of the development cycle, I recommend that you get involved early in the process, preferably when the designers create the initial wireframes or paper prototypes. Why? Making changes early in the process reduces development costs. Plus, if you identify usability issues early, it’s much more likely the team can remedy them before launch, preventing bad reviews like that shown in Figure 1, negative word-of-mouth, and the lost sales that result from them.

>> Read more about 'Reviewing User Interfaces'

Babels of slum and Rahman

Babels of slum and Rahman

Today, my morning started with Oscar awards show in TV. It was the triumph moments for Indian movie fraternity. Slumdog Millionaire won many awards . I am sure that's what the pinnacle minute for director and everyone. Awards came to most of movie departments except except for acting department, I am sure acting part was not nominated ! 

Personally I liked the movie for its technical enrichment. Story & acting wise it's just another ordinary weaving. I was sure editing would win the award as movie's asli strength is in its tight editing.

Though Rahman won award for background score, he was 'the best' in Lagaan and I'm sure he missed academy award for it, though he was nominated for it or not. Certainly music in Slumdog Millionaire was not top notch v/s his other compositions. May be sound engineering has given a special attraction for the background score. You should listen to his Azaadi song in netaji subhash chandra bose -movie, that's the best rendering than jai ho.

But again it's proved. you do gods-own-quality movie, unless it's marketed well to International audience with much fan fare, no movie is going to win academy awards. I was quite curious about what Indian netizens think about it. I am sure there's a better place to record their voices and chaos in rediff discussion

The $300 Million "Continue" Button

The $300 Million "Continue" Button

Do usability analysis and implementation still holds a profitable edge for corporations ? Certainly. And it mattes a most when co can earn $300 million just by renaming the button :) !

Seems exaggerating at first glance, but this is the true facet of effective and usable design if much forethought is put into practice while designing a user experience. I am sure, not only intelligent interface design matters but also, usability analyst should have good foresight business needs and comparative analysis of design implementation. This is about registering process in a website where registering and entering valid email ID is very much needed to continue in the site.

Given a scenario of fast business trend and bursting competitive edge, I am sure this is one niche example of usability-school-of-thought:

UIE studied people actually using the site, and it turns out that the prospect of registering was enough to turn some users away; meanwhile, even return users had problems logging in because they didn't remember the email address or password they signed up with. (45% of users apparently had multiple registrations—a few had up to 10.) Granted, these represented a small portion of users. But for a retailer with $25 billion, even small portions signify huge lost profits.

So UIE redesigned the site, replacing the "register" button with "continue." They also added a message, saying that registering wasn't required to checkout, but was optional and might be helpful if you returned.

Sales went up 45%—$15 million in the first month, and $300 million in the first year.

Given UIE's success, it's a wonder how often you still see byzantine registration forms on websites. But there's a bigger lesson: That empirical research into how people actually behave matters far more than the intuitions of any designer, no matter how experienced that designer might be.

More at: The $300 Million "Continue" Button
and also at uie.com

Corporate Accessibility

Corporate Accessibility

Good web development and standards based development, which one is right or wrong ? If a web application is compliant to web standards based development, will that be fine to call it as a good web development ?Do corporations really put time and money in making the website fully accessible web app ? And what point is called 'accessibly compliant' web app ? Ensuring if it's achieved AA or AAA ? I found a interesting article about these details:

One problem with corporate accessibility is that while corporations generally care about accessibility in the abstract. which can lead to a grudging attempt to be accessible, because a corporate lawyer will naturally try to do the minimum required to stay in compliance; minimizing risk while minimizing costs.

The way to overcome this is to focus on the customer. I find the following arguments successful in getting accessibility discussed in a positive, “good-to-have” way rather than in a legal compliance “oh-well-if-we-must” way:

• Accessibility is good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Accessibility enhances usability for everyone. An April 2004 formal investigation into UK web accessibility (PDF) reported "all users, not just disabled people, would benefit greatly from the measures required to make sites accessible and usable by blind people".
• Accessibility has many quantifiable business benefits (PDF). Legal and General, a British financial services company, redesigned its site with accessibility in mind and found:
  • 40% traffic increase
  • Doubled conversion rates
  • Doubled online revenue
  • 100% ROI in 5 months

Find more in Think Vitamin > accessibility