Ruth Stalker-Firth

I set up a second wordpress installation in a directory named /jasmine so that Neil and I could blog about our daughter Jasmine who has chronic renal failure. However, because I fiddled with the .htaccess this technical blog kept serving up Error 404 pages instead of the blogs I have written.

There are ways of running two wordpress blogs with one installation, but if you decide to run two completely separate installations of wordpress like I have then you will need to make sure you have two .htaccess files. One in each directory. So, in the home directory my .htaccess (or the relevant lines) looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

And, in the /jasmine directory the .htaccess file looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /jasmine/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /jasmine/index.php [L]

I imagined myself as a bit of an earth mother and did the whole yoga and practising for a natural birth thing like the true hippy I am, albeit one with a great interest in technology. However, due to complications which were anticipated by the medical teams who were looking after me, I had our baby on Monday 11th February at 1.23pm by emergency caesarian section. I cannot thank them enough. Because of the skill of everyone involved and a great deal of technology, Jasmine survived birth and her first night. She is currently in Great Ormond St Hospital.

We have set up a blog here to share our news:
http://www.ruthstalkerfirth.com/jasmine/

Thank you to everyone who has contacted us to say they care. It means so much.

Steve Mann, inventor of wearable computing, came to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in the 1990s when I was PhD student there. He had some difficulty getting on the metro as his head-mounted aerial added several inches to his height.

Watching him struggle to get through the door, I was inspired and excited by a researcher who wore and lived his work. Related MIT websites, where Mann was based, showed me how I could augment my reality by turning a gameboy into a wearable computer. The instructions came with a warning that it would affect my vision, though I would soon adapt to the constant red line. After all, the wearable was a lot smaller than Mann’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I found myself exploring an early Iron Age home at The Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. The Crannog was cosy, as its focal point was the Iron Age hearth - a large open fire. During the day the inhabitants would peel back wicker shutters to let in fresh air whilst they tended to their animals, making food and clothing and ground spelt for bread.

Today, wearing a woolly jumper and eating spelt pasta, with my back to the radiator, it seems to me that our needs and motivations have changed little since the Iron Age. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many usability consultants I have spent hours locked in rooms with strangers saying: “What do you think about this web page?” It is boring way to earn a living especially as you often know the answers and could tell clients without asking the questions.

Alas, most clients only believe opinions about their websites when it comes from random users - not you, the expert. Luckily the industry takes Jakob Nielson’s advice on testing: five users only to establish a pattern of responses (and because it’s cheap). Although, if we were really serious, we would need 30 users to talk about the statistical significance of our results.

Some of this boredom could be avoided (and client money saved) if everyone employed the patterns which already exist in users’ heads to create more intuitive webpages and GUIs. Cognitive science, the study of mind and intelligence, enables us to understand what makes our users tick. Read the rest of this entry »