Anyone who’s listened to music in the last 20 years or so has heard a Moog Synthesizer. They’ve been used on countless records, from rap to pop and back again.

That being said, what the fuck is going on with the new ad campaign from Moog? It features audio patch cords impaling various objects and living creatures.

Is this telling me I can make aggressive music if I buy a moog? That poor dog…

Pop music?

Uhhhhh?

Anyone care to guess?

What are we calling ourselves this month? UI designer, information architect, usability specialist? I’m not sure the correct term anymore.

Regardless of title, tonight I’ve come to terms with one of the tasks I dread usually…creating usage scenarios.

In the past after coming up with my personas and getting into their heads I would write out a little story as suggested in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.

One of the problems I’ve found with that approach is that it doesn’t break down the process into nice chunks that are easy to digest when designing or coding.

Full blown process diagrams are equally dreadful, and only useful mostly to programmers, which I only play a third of the time (the other 2/3 being shared equally between entrepreneur and designer).

Doing a little searching I came across this interaction modeling article which I found pretty interesting and easy to understand. (Definitely a plus when running on a few hours of sleep…)

Unfortunately I didn’t have a program like Visio on my laptop to craft such a diagram as described in the article…Not like I’m a huge fan of the program in the first place.

Enter OmniGraffle...For me, this is definitely the way to go when faced with the challenge of diagramming something. (OS X only, sorry XP people…)

Everything seems to be laid out logically and nothing is too complicated, as I’ve complained Visio can be at times.

Yes, I relentlessly bit their demo style for my Cashboard scenario diagram, complete with gradients and all. But look it’s so shiny, so easy on the eyes.

For me, looking at something like this engages me more than a boring black and white diagram or a page full of text. On top of that, it’s extremely easy to pick out items I need to take action on during the design and coding phases of a project.

• Actions by a user (blue gradient rectangles)
• Actions that map to another diagram (green rectangles)
• Actions the system takes (aqua rectangles with white text)
• Decisions (diamonds)
• Thought processes or actions that don’t happen in the system (rounded rectangles)

If I’m wearing my designer or coder hat it’s easy to pick out the things that matter to me, while still maintaining an overall view of the process in question.

Of course this isn’t as detailed as it could be, but I use this to create larger task lists later on. Just going through the process of creating a document like this always seems to crystallize my thoughts on a specific part of an application’s design.

Take that user stories…

Staying up entirely too late working on a project tonight I was sent a link for this really interesting way to generate dynamic CSS files using Ruby on Rails.

If you ever longed to use variables for repetitive things like color or background images you will love this too.

Most likely this will be powering a portion of our user-customizable interface in Cashboard.

Just stumbled across this cool DHTML color picker. I haven’t jumped into the source yet, but the functionality is insane for a web control.

Hrm….might be useful for an upcoming project or two.

We need more power!

I just completed a major upgrade to our main production web host box.

Apache 2.0 / FCGI just wasn’t cutting it any more. I wanted speed, I wanted the new hotness…I wanted to run Mongrel. I was one of the first to sign onto Rimu Hosting, who originally set everything up.

Unfortunately I was also one of those who couldn’t install Ruby 1.8.4 / Mongrel / etc the preferred way for Debian Sarge as outlined here.

The backport way looked a little scary, and the ‘gotchas’ about having to install rubygems and zlib seemed too much to handle.

In the end I got it all done, but not without some problems. Good thing I didn’t have anything to do today…

From Debian Sarge to Etch (aka Debian Testing)

Being completely ignorant about what could happen I bit the bullet and started the upgrade to Debian Etch. (Well not completely ignorant, I backed up all my mail, sites, and databases first :)

What could it be, what could it be? The promo site for our newest release just went live.

Click the logo to check it out.

Substruct, the e-commerce/cms/do it all rails engine has been updated.

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct

Thanks to my friends in #substruct on FreeNode IRC we fixed the mysterious installation issues some people have been having. If you have been having problems installing check out the new download/install instructions on the wiki.

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/wiki/GettingTheCode http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/wiki/InstallingSubstruct

Version 0.8

Fixed:

• Made sure questions require title.
  • This makes sure you can actually click on all questions from the UI (whoops!)

• DB setup was flawed, see migrations note.

  Migrations Note

  Loading db from the schema.rb file was seriously fucked, causing problems with duplicate columns and other nonsense.

  I've relabeled the migrations, adding the initial DB state as 001. Every other migration has been bumped up 1 version.

  Upgraders might have to change your engineschemainfo table....just an alert.

New pages for eDeals.com and AMS have been added to our portfolio.

Apologies for the downtime. The Sublog is back in business.

We’ve been hard at work on a new Rails site for eDeals.com. Expect a writeup soon with information about how we go about processing over 2 gigs of external data daily with Ruby.

PS: Is anyone excited that us poor GSM users finally get a new Treo? My 600 collects more scratches every day. Oh yeah, and the new Google Maps program for Treos isn’t too shabby either.

It’s finally here….

I’m talking about the Substruct open source Ruby on Rails e-commerce platform.

Substruct is the foundation for your web project

• A cleanly designed, simple platform for you to run your site
• The first and only Ruby on Rails open source e-commerce project.

  READ MORE