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Slash7 with Amy Hoy - Home

Two excellent, free, design ebooksToday

Whoa. There must be something in the water.

The Vignelli Canon

Major "whoa" on this one. It oozes quality & love for the subject. Broken into two parts, The Intangibles (semantics, syntactics, pragmatics—philosophical design nerdy) and The Tangibles (paper sizes, grids, type sizes, texture, etc.), it totals a whopping 96 pages.

It's one to savor.

Word to the wise: the (one-man?) firm that produced this beautiful book is not the firm you want to go to for web advice. Their work is great, except for the web. Here's the Vignelli site and you can see for yourself (I skipped the intro for you—yes, there's an intro.)

How do you design? Beta book

Design approaches and models from Dubberly Design Office. Won't leave you drooling on your keyboard like the Vignelli book, but will definitely make you think.

Pricing your consulting: You're doing it wrongJanuary 7

I've been consulting for almost 11 years. Yeah, that long! I made every damn mistake in the book, but I'm also an obsessive research-and-testin' fool and I know I've become a better consultant than almost anyone else. Since 2009 is allegedly the year of the world's biggest economic clusterfuck, I thought it'd be a perfect time to share my hard-won knowledge.

Go anywhere online, read any book on consulting, and you'll find people talking about how to determine your costs, and people comparing their rates, worrying if they're charging too much... or, if they're unhappy with their earnings, if they can dare to charge more.

And yet, for all the talking and debating and calculating, just about everyone messes this one thing thing up.

Change your perspective on charging by the hour

Consider what you're doing when you consult for somebody (or even when you have a job): you're trading your time today, for money for tomorrow.

By not using your time to do things purely for yourself, you're losing an opportunity to invest that time for greater return for you in the future — hunting up new work, working on your own projects, learning new things, spending time with your kids, and so on.

You're literally spending your future, in exchange for money now. Just as surely as if you spent money which can no longer earn interest for you in the bank.

This is an opportunity cost that you have to

Are you human? How CAPTCHA asks the wrong question & solves nothingJanuary 6

I hate spam. I also hate CAPTCHAs.

Spam's not just an issue for web site / app / email consumers, although it's a major annoyance. It's a huge problem for developers and those who run the services. While you might get 50 spams a day, say, the problem is that the servers used in the process of sending & transferring are getting hit a million times harder.

So, what's a body to do?

Test for other bodies, right?

CAPTCHA catches on

CAPTCHA was a term that we began to become familiar with in 2001 and 2002. It was invented in 2000, by a couple of folks from CMU and IBM, in response to problems with Y! chatroom spam. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (I, personally, think they worked too hard on that one.)

Since then, it's transitioned from a bizarre, nigh unpronounceable oddity to an everyday annoyance that we accept with a sigh.

We now see CAPTCHA everywhere a service provider is afraid of losing resources to spambots.

And a number of places where there's no such likelihood, just because CAPTCHA has become a reflexive action—just like the black velvet dots for disguising smallpox scars became a fashion statement for the unafflicted.

The grand goal?

The whole point of CAPTCHA is to stop spammers in their tracks.

The method?

Stupid Human Tricks.

Do "interesting details" really hurt learning?January 3

Overcoming Bias has a little post that, for the most part, quotes the findings of a study on how "interesting details" affect learning.

The researchers found that "interesting details" decreased the student's understanding (transfer), while not affecting the student's memory (retention) of what they read/watched.

Case 1 was video trying to teach about how a cold virus infects the body.

Case 2 was a slide deck on digestion (the students read the presentation, there was no presenter).

Their Conclusion

The money quote (from the study):

Results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, in which highly interesting details sap processing capacity away from deeper cognitive processing of the core material during learning.

Huh. Interesting, right?

And now, some interesting details I've chosen for you:

• the "interesting details" for Case 1 were not directly related to the matter at hand; they were about virii's "role in sex and death," not spiffy facts about the main topic, how a virus infects the body
• the "interesting details" for Case 2 go unrecorded

This paper isn't showing up in any of the research libraries I have subscriptions to, or I'd dig deeper.

Probable Flaws

But based on this snippety snip, I'd wager that the fol

New Cheat Sheet: Jump Start EcommerceDecember 29 2008

I asked y'all what you'd like to see a cheat sheet on for Ruby Advent; Lakshan, Ruby Advent Guy, started off a number of requests for ActiveMerchant.

You ask, I deliver.

Well, maybe over-deliver is more accurate. To the tune of 7 pages of content, ranging from the overall CC processing "life cycle" (cue Lion King music—thanks, that's perfect) in general to getting started with ActiveMerchant in the specific. Yikes. At the end of this sucker, my right wrist was seriously aching.

So, my dear and wonderful readers, my Giftmas present to you:

Jump Start Credit Card Processing v1.0 (download)

But wait, there's more! To finish this sucker on the deadline, I had to put even more content aside for later!

I have been so very frustrated by the lack of quality info out there about setting up Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, I'm very much in the mood to kick its ass.

And, heck, if I can help & teach people at the same time as promoting freckle time tracking, the reason I had to learn this stuff, well, so much the better. Right?

I'll post here when I've shipped v2.0, and I'll upd