So the US military shot down the satellite (apparently). But why is nobody talking about the real reason?

It's not because of worries about contamination, that's just standard military cover story #27.

It's not a cover for testing anti-satellite technology either, as the Russians are claiming.

It's because the satellite contains/contained tech the US military doesn't want China or Russia to recover from any bits that make it through the atmosphere.

I can understand why the US aren't giving the real reason (muslims under the beds etc), and why Russia and China are making fake claims (better to express outrage at an administration the world generally despises than to stoke more fears about an arms race).

But why aren't the media talking about it? I know they generally just reflect the spin the various parties put on any story, but surely someone understands what's actually going on. I've seen a couple of Newsnight stories on this and was expecting a full-on Paxman blast at various sweaty officials, but nothing.

I finally got round to trying to pay the 79p British Gas bill online. Note the word "trying".

The site let me fill in all my credit card details and helpfully put 79p in the payment field automatically. And then, when I submitted the form, it said:

There are problems in the form you submitted
The minimum amount that can be paid is £2.00.

Then why did you ask me to pay? Don't make me fill in all my credit card details first! Just put up a page telling me not to worry about such a low amount, it'll appear on the next bill. That would make me feel good about your site. And saying that "there are problems in the form you submitted" makes it sound like it was all my fault!

Interestingly, a couple of days ago I received an email from British Gas telling me that they'd launched a new web site. Shame they didn't send it two weeks earlier. Unlike the site emails apparently from the Brand Marketing Director, this one came from the Director of Customer Service, and from an (apparently) real, if generic, email address. Shame it was addressed "Dear Smith".

Older viewers may remember me remarking on the general rubbishness of the British Gas web site house.co.uk, which included picklists for credit card start and expiry dates allowing any year from 1900 to 2999.

They've just completely redesigned (and reimplemented, by the look of the URLs) their site. And what a grand job they've done (sarcasm).

I shall list the sins, in order of discovery, after the jump. If you don't want to know the result, look away now... ( Read more... )

Yesterday's post about the ORG report earned me two interesting comments from James Gilmour. They spurred me into more research, in particular the Cragg Ross Dawson report he referred to in the first comment. I decided another post on the subject was in order; normal nonsense will resume in due course.

I've found two reports by Cragg Ross Dawson; I believe James referred to the ballot paper design research report, but the later STV ballot paper report also makes interesting reading.

As he said, these might not have been "focus groups" in the sense of a bunch of people sitting round a table munching on biscuits, but neither were they proper usability tests.

Usability testing is about asking people to perform tasks in as close as possible to a realistic scenario (no prompting, no helping, no detailed instructions in advance) and observing what they do, and their success (or failure). It gives you objective results rather than the subjective feelings of the Cragg Ross Dawson reports.

Cragg Ross Dawson aren't usability professionals; they're a market research company. There's a huge difference.

Some of my problems with their approach:

• The 'Topic Guide' in the first report suggests that test users, after trying out a ballot, were asked questions such as "is it clear to them who and what they were voting for?" and "how clearly does it explain how to use the ballot paper?". A true usability test observes the test users to answer those questions - watch, don't ask. People are very bad at explaining this kind of thing, often to the point of self-delusion. They'll say things were easy when observation showed they had significant problems. When asked why they did something, they'll invent entirely spurious explanations (not maliciously, but because they were asked and a plausible answer just pops into their head).
• It appears in this case that every test user tried every design of ballot, and then explained which one they preferred and why. This was a bad idea: from the second ballot, they were more familiar with the process and thus biased. To get a fair view of which ballot design was easiest to use, each user should have tried only one design; the success rates of each design could be compared after the test was complete. (And then the best design could be modified and the test performed again with new test users to verify that the new design was better and not worse.)
• Look at section C, 'Outcome'. In a true usability test this section would summarise the success rates for each design of ballot. It doesn't; it just reports 'preferences' for one design over another. It's full of phrases like 'regarded as', 'felt that', 'thought that'. Which design was most successful - helped most people vote for the candidate(s) they wanted to vote for? It doesn't say!

I did dig out some actual usability data from the reports:

• First report, section 2.1, "Initial impressions": "on first sight of the ballot papers most voters looked initially at the list of parties and candidates; on the basis of observation by the moderators, few seemed to start at the top and read the instructions". And that's exactly what I would expect to see. It's been proven time and time again: people don't read instructions (there are always exceptions, but they are exceptions).
• Second report, Chapter 3: "despite the view that the designs were straightforward, some respondents made mistakes; 13 out of 100 ballot papers were unintentionally spoiled". Followed by "it is worth noting that of the 13 respondents who spoilt their initial ballot papers, 9 realised their mistakes and corrected subsequent papers - many admitted they had voted before reading instructions carefully".

That second point is damning. People said that the designs were straightforward, but the reality was different. That's why true usability tests are so important. The fact that people corrected subsequent papers just confirms my point above: from the second ballot design, they're biased. Not to mention that in a real election they don't get a second chance to vote.

The goal of a ballot paper design is to allow voters to vote for the candidate(s) of their choice, and for that vote to be counted, as efficiently as possible. This is easy to test objectively, and to retest with improved designs, until there is sufficient confidence in the results. This wasn't done. Market research isn't usability testing.

In the actual election, we know that voters made marks on the ballot paper that were mostly, but not always, valid. How many people successfully voted for the candidate(s) of their choice? We have no idea.

Oh, it's supposed to be so easy. And it is, until it doesn't work properly. At which point it becomes a Living Hell.

Yes, I know that's not narrowing it down in the slightest. Let me elaborate.

I decided it was about time to migrate my videos to the bandwagon that is YouTube. Their Internet tubes are gallons more voluminous than mine, and everyone's got a Flash player these days. Plus people can rate and comment and make video responses and make it a favourite and embed it and do all those wondrous things that don't actually make anyone more productive or useful but ooh, isn't it exciting! and please blog me and make me famous and so on and so forth.

First problem: you're limited to 10 minutes and 100 MB per video upload. Hmm... OK. I don't have many videos longer than that; I can split those. I'm sure by tickling the codecs I can limbo my way under the file size restriction. (By "I'm sure", I mean "I think/hope".)

Wearing my bestest geek hat I perform a test run. I'm not going to start with one of the manky WMVs currently available under the Avaragado Pictures banner, though - I'm returning to the source material, or as close as I can get without installing video editing software from the dark ages or resucking gigs of raw footage from DV tape. The test run is with the Alpe D'Huez 2001 trailer: 2 min 30, for which I have a DVD-quality MPEG.

YouTube recommends you upload at 320x240, MPEG4 (DivX or Xvid video, MP3 audio). Note that this has already confused 95% of the world, for whom that reads "wah wah wah wah MP3 wah". But anyway.

I am equipped with: sundry codecs (Xvid, DivX, etc); VirtualDub-MPEG2 (for transcoding the DVD MPEGs into AVIs with the codecs of your choice); and Adobe Premiere Pro (cos I is a professional amateur, innit).

Right. Raw MPEG into VirtualDub, deinterlaced, resized, DivX, MP3, save. OK, it's an AVI not YouTube's recommended MPEG4, but let's try it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

I upload via the crummy Flash-based uploader (it could really do with a makeover, but it works). Meh, metadata stupidity: I must enter a description and at least three tags, and it doesn't grok multi-word tags. It then processes the uploaded video, slicing and dicing into the correct format for playback, giving me no indication of progress but at least letting me do other things. Some time later...

I play it. The sound and video are out of sync. Not by much, but by enough: the video leads the audio by five or six frames. Well, this won't do. The file I uploaded is fine.

Casting the runes, Google leads me to a page that suggests manually shifting the audio track by my best guess and re-uploading. You've got to be kidding me. Nope, not doing that. Other sites tell me that this is a common problem, and suggest various combinations of codecs and container formats. ("It worked for me!")

This is nonsense, right? I've got free software here, there and in the other room that will happily transcode anything into anything inside any container format and preserve synchronisation between the audio and video. I've got a Quicktime player, a Real player and a Windows Media player that'll stream live feeds over the Internet to my desktop and preserve synchronisation.

Why can't YouTube do it? Is it the player? Their back-end? Their conversion process? Flash itself?

I know that most YouTube videos are in sync. But mine isn't. Anyway, this shouldn't be guesswork, or semi-random. And given the size of the videos I'll be uploading, trial and error is simply not practical.

For this test run, I try various combinations. The best I find - but still not perfectly in sync - is an AVI with Xvid and MP3. Bah.

I proceed to the smaller collection of videos - mostly short clips, some with a bit of editing. For these, the synchronisation doesn't matter much and it's often hard to notice when a video's out of sync anyway. Some of them I transcode as AVI/Xvid/MP3. In some cases I've got the original source videos handy - from my digital camera at the time - and the Premiere project file. So I generate bog-standard MPEG2 files from these, and they end up perfectly synchronised in YouTube. In one case I just upload the WMV I have handy, as it would take too much effort to recreate from source; again, this is acceptable quality.

A mental model begins to form. Maybe MPEG2 is the way to go. Tried, tested, etc.

On to the first "proper" video: one of the Ireland ones. With music and that (and therefore sensitive to synchronisation issues). AVI/Xvid/MP3: 45 MB upload, out of sync. No good.

I find and download a program called SUPER, with the UI sensibilities of a deformed cabbage (you pick something from a menu and the window moves around the screen) but with the ability to generate MPEG container files and much else besides, unlike VirtualDub. It's a hideous front-end to ffmpeg, MEncoder, etc, but at least it works.

I spend the best part of a day trying different combinations. MPEG2. MOV/H.264/AAC. WMV/MPEG4-v2/MP3. All no less than 30 MB. I even transcode to AVI/DV/WAV (880 MB), load into Premiere (it loves that combination) and get it to spit out MPEG2 (as the MPEG2 files I built from Premiere for the shorter clips worked fine). They're all out of sync. (I say all: at the time of writing, one upload is still processing. It has been for several hours now; I've given up on it.)

All out of sync, that is, except one. One magical upload works. Which one? The crummy low-quality WMV sitting on my web site.

My mental model now adjusts. Maybe I just need to lower the quality. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe when I wake up in the morning the sky will be blue, the birds will be a-twitter and the kid currently walloping his football noisily against a wire fence every five seconds will have been given a clip round the ear and told to pack it in.

Maybe I'll try Google Video or somewhere else.

Aha. Hang on. That WMV/MPEG4-v2/MP3 combo that's been processing for about four hours has finally finished. And guess what? It's in sync.

Mental model #3: WMV? WMV?

MENTAL MODEL DOES NOT COMPUTE. [Emits smoke, sparks, explodes despite containing no explosives]

It's mid-afternoon, and I'm merrily typing away in XP when it suddenly turns into treacle, and then a huge, blue, fierce BSOD bars my way. I haven't seen one of those in a long time. I don't really register the alleged reason - I'm thinking about what I was doing, and feeling happy that I was in VNC and consequently nothing's lost - before XP reboots.

And then it gets unhappier, muttering about "disk boot failure" and instructing me to insert a system disk.

Oh dear.

Um. I'm sure I had a boot disk somewhere, is that what I want? On a floppy? I can't find it anyway. If I could find it I'm not entirely sure what incantation I would need to invoke. I'm not a Windows weenie.

Luckily, and unlike normal people who at this point would be up the proverbial without the proverbial, I've got a network and a Mac and I can google for information.

Meanwhile I try some percussive maintenance: give it a well-deserved thump and reboot. Ooh, it does something different; it doesn't boot, but I get some other differently useless message. And again, something different still. A temperature/fan thing? A cable thing? I hate intermittent failures. I hate Windows.

Recovery Console. That seems to be a common thread on the net. Simply find your original XP CD... aha! Avaragado Packrat to the rescue.

Meanwhile, the PC magically boots! All the way into Windows, back to normality! For a couple of minutes anyway, and then it BSODs again. Hmm. What have I changed on the PC recently? I installed Google's Browser Sync extension for a testdrive, and installed all the very latest Windows updates. Ah. How very suspicious.

Anyway, problem not yet solved. Boot the XP CD, choose to Recover, choose a Windows installation to log in to, type the Administrator's password. The whatnow? I try the usual suspects. Three strikes and you reboot. I keep trying until I run out of ideas, yea even unto old Tarantella administrator passwords. I webscover that XP helpfully hides the Administrator account unless you boot into Safe Mode. The PC plays nicely and lets me do that. As expected (and already tried in the Recovery Console), there's no passsword. I set one, reboot into Recovery Console, and it promptly rejects it.

This makes no sense whatsoever. I soon discover a site that tells me that, yes, this can happen, mad isn't it, and points to a Microsoft download to fix the problem. A download that no longer exists: great.

I find a KB article describing the problem, in which Microsoft confesses its sins. The grandly named resolutions: create some new, bugfixed Setup disks, assuming you still live enough in the stone age to have six usable floppy disks (and a working PC that can write to them, which for me is somewhat in doubt); or install the Recovery Console on your hard disk (blah working computer blah) and then install this magic hotfix, that you have to ring up Microsoft and beg permission to download.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

And that's where I am now. The intermittent nature of the problem worries me. I might try rolling back the Windows updates tomorrow, assuming I can get it to boot, but I don't think that will solve it. My money's on a dodgy disk right now.

Unless the lazyweb has any better ideas...

I've got about 6000 photos squirrelled away — previously in Adobe Photoshop Album 1.0, now in Photoshop Elements 4.0 (well, the trial version anyhow).

My problem: I want to be able to do a simple thing. I want a subset of the gazillion tags I've added to those 6000 photos to appear automatically when I upload to Flickr. Please god, don't make me re-tag.

The solution: well, there's yer EXIF/IPTC/XMP nonsense, isn't there. Flickr speaks some or all of those. So All I Need To Do™ is to ensure that the tags I want Flickring are all IPTC'd in the photos I upload.

Simple.

Elements has a "Write Tags to File" command. Which is a true description: any tags on the image at that time are written to the file in both IPTC and XMP formats. But Adobe in its infinite wisdom made the oh-so-brain-dead decision to leave existing tags in the file alone, "just in case".

What does that mean? It means that if I add a tag, write the tags to the file, then remove the tag, and write the tags to the file again, then the tag I clearly don't want in the file appears in the file. It is not possible to remove that tag from the file in Elements. See how ranty I am by the inclusion of both bold and italic!

OK, I think. I can work around this. Never use that menu option, clearly, as it clobbers the file for all eternity. Instead there's an Export option that makes a copy of the file and writes the tags in the copy, not the original. Great, I'll use that. Slightly more pain, but it'll do.

Except... at certain not-very-well-understood-by-me times, Elements decides to write the tags to the file anyway. This seems to be when you do something outrageous like, you know, edit the image in Elements itself.

So woe betide you if you edit an image post-tagging, as you're lumbered with those tags (or a superset) until the sun goes pop or, less likely, Adobe discovers a clue.

Where does this leave me? I downloaded a free tool called PixVue that adds some Windows shell extensions to allow you to add/edit/remove the whole EXIF/IPTC/XMP smorgasbord, on one file or many at once. I can at the very least now strip unwanted tags from the files that Elements has clobbered, assuming I can find them.

I suspect I'll continue to use Elements, as most of the time it works pretty well. But, sigh, I'll prop it up using PixVue. Dumb, dumb, dumb.