10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

Here is an article a friend at work forwarded to me. They are worth remembering.

Holy Handywoman!

or "My Breakthrough in Handymanliness"

I have serious issues about not being an adequate handyman. Often I get frustrated and/or overwhelmed and then avoid it.

Last summer, our clothes washer (Whirlpool Model #LSQ9544KQ0) would stop in the spin cycle. We figured out that we could put a detergent bottle on the lid and it would continue. The number of bottles and people required to make it finish mounted until it refused to work a few days ago.

I first thought of how much money we would have to spend on buying a new one. I completely avoided the thought of repairing it. It is over 7 years old and I thought it may just be time. Stephanie remembered that we had the same problem some time ago and had a repairman out to fix it. She found the part that he used to fix it. This encouraged me. Thursday evening I researched where to buy it and yesterday morning I stopped by Appliance Parts Co and bought a lid switch assembly for $42.64.

This morning I planned on fixing it together. I am more confident when she is there to support (show me) me. I got our tools out and started looking for things to take apart. Steph looked up instructions and diagrams on how to open up the washer. We found an illuminating video that gave us an idea of how to get it open. Steph figured out I had taken out the wrong screws.

Once we took the correct screws out we were able to flip up the control panel, pop off the clamps and open the front of the washer following the great how-to video we found. It was relatively simple to take off the switch assembly and put in the new one.

It turned out that Steph was the one doing all the handy-work and I handed her tools. It reminded me of when I was a boy helping out my dad. It is kind of like when we are explaining the rules of a game. She doesn't want to start. I get going and then she finishes.

The whole experience was small on frustration and large on satisfaction. We saved several hundred dollars and my handy-ego has been boosted. I am going to do all my handy-work with her from now on. (Like I ever do it at all).

TortoiseSVN ignore-on-commit

I wanted to be able to have my web.config in the repository but not have certain working copies commit. I found "ignore-on-commit" at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/tsvn_1.5_releasenotes.html. I think this will work best for me.

I have also used the strategy at http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#ignore-commit. It ensures all working copy web.config files never get committed. You have to manually copy the contents of the renamed, unversioned web.config to the versioned template.

** Update 2009-03-26 **

I tried to use this again and forgot how to do it. The change list help page clearly states that you do a context menu on the file you want to add to a change list within the commit or check-for-modifications dialog box. I kept trying to see it in the window folder context menu for the file I wanted to add to a change list.