Two things are happening on my computer now. First, I'm running my daily Fedora Core 3 up2date, which tells me a new version of Firefox, Firefox 1.0.2 is available. Second, my Firefox 1.0.1 browser is showing me the corresponding Slashdot story, titled "IT: Mozilla Firefox 1.02 Released."

A visit to the Mozilla homepage confirmed that the version number is 1.0.2. Slashdot is definitely wrong.

But, Slashdot is not the only one to blame. The version number itself shares at least half the responsibility. It has a usability issue. It is too similar to a number, yet is not a number. The human brain will do its best at trying to make it a number. And dropping that extra dot is a perfect way of achieving it.

Thnik abuot all the msesaegs with trasnposed charatcers that you might have receievd in the psat few yaers.

Now read the last sentence again. This time pay attention to the spelling. Isn't it any wonder that a normal person would try to read 1.0.2 into 1.02?

We as software developers talk about usabilities all the time, yet we can't even make our software version numbers usable!

It's just sad.

Responses[6]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 23, 2005 10:17:32 PM CST #

On my current project, we use MPC to generate Visual Studio .NET 2003 solution files. It's a set of Perl scripts. Earlier this month, MPC started to fail under Cygwin Perl, and I have to uninstall it and start using ActiveState Perl. To keep on doing what I do, running the Perl scripts from the Cygwin bash shell, I wrote a little bash script, named it perl and put its directory in the PATH in front of the ActiveState Perl's directory:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Call ActiveState Perl with path-like parameters converted from
# Cygwin format to Windows format.
#
ACTIVESTATE_PERL=C:/Perl/bin/perl.exe

declare -a args
declare -i index

until [ -z "$1" ]
do
  if echo $1 | egrep -q '^/|^\.'
  then
    args[index]=`cygpath -a -w $1`
  else
    args[index]=$1
  fi
  ((index++))
  shift
done

$ACTIVESTATE_PERL ${args[@]}

Responses[2]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 23, 2005 2:40:27 PM CST #

I saw it mentioned in Lambda the Ultimate yesterday. Google has added the Google Print (Beta) service which offers scanned books online. You can browse the book online, search for words within the book, get the metadata about the book, or buy the book from online booksellers.

The books come from publishers and libraries.

Just do a regular Google search. If there is a book that matches, it will be shown near the top of the search results, the same way Google Desktop Search results are displayed.

When I tried it, only one book is ever shown. And you pretty much have to type in the exact title to get it. I tried "War and Peace", "The Wealth of Nations", and "Tom Sawyer."

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 23, 2005 7:16:14 AM CST #