It rained last night. This morning, when I checked my butt, it was about half full! This evening, I reckon there’s about 40-50 litres of water in there!

I installed it on Wednesday. Hopefully, it will rain this weekend.

I’m now the butt of Tony’s jokes: “hello, do you like Laura’s butt?” hahaha “Oh Laura, what a big butt you have!” hehehe “Come and see Laura’s big green butt…”
*sigh*

This morning, I attended a demo and discussion on the latest and greatest version of Task Modeler, a software application developed at IBM Warwick to help user interface designers and technical writers to model users’ goals using electronic sticky notes.*

The earliest incarnation (aptly known as ‘V1′) was a Java application that had the sole purpose of supporting human factors people (a.k.a. user-centred designers) to represent the hierarchical breakdown of tasks that a user performs when trying to achieve a goal. The best-loved/loathed example of Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) is that of making a cup of tea and the steps that you must perform to achieve that goal. A nice but slightly more complex example of HTA that I found online is in the design docs of the Dance-O-Matic.

So, anyway, at some point during the subsequent V2/V3, it was discovered that it might be useful for structuring the navigation tree in hypertext-style software documentation (a la much of IBM’s software documentation now). Bringing us neatly to V4 (the aforementioned ‘latest and greatest’) which is closely tied in with IBM’s Open Source XML documentation format, DITA. You can, for example, use Task Modeler to develop ditamaps (navigation trees) and relationship tables (something clever to do with managing links between topics) in DITA. You can also, of course, still use Task Modeler for doing HTA work if you’re more interested in HCI (human-computer interaction), user interface design, and human factors.

Despite having successfully installed Task Modeler V4 on my Thinkpad in time for this morning’s session, I have not yet had chance to play with it. I will say, though, having seen a demo, that the new Eclipse interface and funky icons that it has acquired are really rather pretty and it all looks much nicer to interact with than V1. When I’ve done some playing, I’ll hopefully be able to report more.

If you’re into human factors work or technical writing (especially with DITA), you can now download Task Modeler from IBM’s Alphaworks website.

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* At this point, I must admit that I have had no hand in developing Task Modeler. I do, however, work as a Technical Writer for IBM United Kingdom Ltd at the Hursley Software Laboratories so I’m not an entirely independent observer but I should point out that the views in this post, in this whole website in fact, are entirely mine and are in no way intended to represent IBM.

We went to visit Chris, Heidi, and Sammy yesterday. It’s less than a month since we saw them last but Sammy’s looking more and more like a little boy instead of a baby. He’s so interested in everything and even let me feed him his ‘solid’ food (mushy rice).

We took some photos as usual but the best one that we didn’t take was of his Mummy teaching him to tip the bowl up to suck out the last bits of rice – soooo looking forward to going to restaurants with them (visions of tomato soup going the same way…).

As always, it was lovely to see them again. We’ve made a date to go back for Eurovision night…. )

Today, I finally emailed Tech Wench (who designed the Red Stripes theme of my blog) with the two fixes I made to minor bugs in the PHP and CSS that control the red tabs in the theme. She replied to say ‘thanks’.

My first bug fix…

…I’m practically a developer!

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Originally, when you clicked a tab, the tab appeared to grow. So, in style.css, I replaced the ‘bottom’ padding of the “#menu li.page_item a” style with 10px instead of 20px, which seemed to fix the problem:

 

#menu li.page_item a { float: left; width: 90px;
margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px 0px;
background-color: #660000; text-decoration: none; }

I also added a ‘maximum depth’ parameter to the wp_list_pages PHP in header.php to prevent sub-pages in the blog being displayed in among the tabs (the sub-page entries kind of hid themselves behind/below the tabs):

<ul id="menu">
< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
</ul>

Both of these seem to work in both Firefox and IE.