Last night Metrolink made this announcement on www.metrolinktrains.com

9/14/08
STATEMENT FROM RON ROBERTS, CHAIRMAN, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA REGIONAL RAIL AUTHORITY (METROLINK) REGARDING THE COLLISION BETWEEN A METROLINK COMMUTER TRAIN AND A UNION PACIFIC FREIGHT TRAIN ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2008 IN CHATSWORTH, CA.

Metrolink staff has recently made comments regarding the possible cause of the September 12, 2008 tragedy in Chatsworth. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has characterized these comments as premature and has ordered Metrolink to withhold further comments at this time, pending investigation, and we agree.

Apparently the NTSB felt like I did! It isn't right of them to blame the full wait of the accident on the engineer without the investigation being complete.

Let's just get the obvious out of the way, yes, I haven't blogged since July. I've had a lot going on with family issues that left very little time for outside interest. (i.e. this blog) with that out of the way, lets talk about something that happened Friday.

Friday September 12th, 2008 at 4:24pm Metrolink had the worst accident they've ever had in their 16 year history. 25 people have died.  The previous worst accident was in January 26th, 2005. This accident from 2005 is still with me. As I lost a friend in that accident.

I must also mention that I ride Metrolink everyday, and I have since August of 2002. So for over six years, almost everyday during the work week I've ridden the train. My total amount of time spend on trains each day is almost 4 hours with two train transfers. That is approximately 1000 hours on the train a year. Why do I mention this, to show that I know what it's like to be on the train. Unlike all the "reporters" that you've on the extend news cast all Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday.

I have real trouble with their coverage. Every single minute of coverage has tried to make it like the train is the unsafest form of transportation. KABC7 has a poll asking people "Does the Metrolink crash change your view of the safety of mass transit?" 52% said "yes", 41% said no and 6% "not sure". Well I took this little survey and afterward it made me mad, because I realized most of these people that took the "survey" have probably never taken public transportation and have no plans on every taking it. So why are they allowed to vote in this survey? Well they shouldn't be able to, this survey should have only been give to people who have actually taken the train.

Metrolink announced that it appears, I repeat "appears" that the engineer may have missed a red signal. Others have mentioned that he was "texting". I find this suspect. First it's really easy to blame an accident this big on someone that died in the accident. How is the engineer or his family going to be able to defend against this charge. Second the NSTB says that the investigation can take up to one year to complete.  So if NSTB isn't willing to commit to an answer, why is Metrolink announcing the "cause" less than 24 hours after the accident. However the Media jumped all over the announcement by Metrolink. Every 30 second news blurps has had this on for the past 48 hours. To add injury to insult , at approximately 5:11pm Friday, September 12th, 2008 on the Corona line a train hit a car killing the driver.  Most of the time these incidents aren't reported on the nightly news, but they were sure to mention it this time. 

So what is my point? I want to know why is the media demonizing Metrolink and Metrolink engineers so badly. These are the people I have learned to trust to get me to work everyday. I am on a first name basis with several of the conductors. Why are they making me question if I'll be taking the train to work tomorrow? The U.S. Transportation Department reported that in California alone there were 4,236 highway related fatalities in 2006. So why isn't the media demonizing the car? Ratings and Sponsors pure and simple. Their viewership would go in the toliet and all of there car sponsors would pull out. If they told you the statistics of how dangerous cars are compared to any other mode of transportation. Tomorrow morning when you watch the news as you eat your bowl of Wheaties, just count how many car commercials you see!  So they'll never go after the car, but there are big ratings to be had when there is a train accident.

So all that being said, I have nothing against cars. But I do have something against reporters who skew statistics and perceptions for ratings and sponsors. I'm reminded of what Don Henley said in his song Dirty Laundry:
"We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry"

In my career in the "Online world" as a Web Developer I've worked with more people that had "Art History" or "Fine Arts" degrees than people with "Computer Science" degrees. Go figure that one huh?

I just wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow is Shutdown Day. Get outside, enjoy the beauty of the outdoors, spend some time with the family and get away from those time vacuums! Enjoy the life "outside of the monitor"! For those of you not familar with "outside" here's a quick list of things you can do.

• Go for a nature hike
• Go to a local park
• Visit Family (Seriously guys, your grandparents miss you!)
• Garden (You could even make it a green garden
• Check out the Library stick with the books!

Happy Life

For a long time I've been a fan of Jakob Nielsen's work. His articles on paper prototyping are brilliant. At my work we've used these methods before when doing major website designs with overwhelming success.

However what about web forms. For the most part as web developers we just slap it together and worry more about the back-end functionality more then how it looks to the users, let alone how easy it is for them to use. How many of us have written some ultra cool little application that only we know how to use? I know that I have. We are so eager to get to the part we love (code)that we skip over the most important part, how users are going to interface with our code. This is what Manuel Clement calls "pouring concrete too early".

UI Design is more important to the user than our code. Why? Because the UI is what they see. It's what the feel, its how they interpret our application. It doesn't matter how great the application is, if the UI is bad the user will assume the rest of the application is bad too. How many users are going to care that we used serializable classes, or that we've written our error log to be an RSS feed? None! We need to take care of the users.

Why use PowerPoint for doing Prototyping. There are three simple reasons:

1. Almost everyone has it and can modify your prototype. Yes, let them change labels, something as simple as this makes the stakeholder feel more involved, there for you'll have more buy in on the project.
2. No coding is involved. This is very important, if you start trying to auto-fill dropdowns using dynamic form objects you're missing the point. This is not the time to be coding, we are defining the user interface. While this may seem like a very simple point you'll be amazed how often you keep reaching for you IDE to start coding.
3. You can give the user a feeling of how the application will behave. With PowerPoint you can link to other sides. In fact you can create clickable areas and disable Advance Slide "On Mouse Click". This allows you to create buttons, links, radio buttons, etc.

Why Webforms
The reasons for prototyping webforms in PowerPoint is it allows up the ability to make changes quickly to define what the user/customer wants. Again our goal here is not to do any coding yet. By prototyping we are actually extracting the customers requirements in a feedback loop much like agile programming methodology does.

There's nothing worst then a marathon programming session where you've killed yourself to get the webform done, to turn around and have all your labels changed and to find out you didn't have a clear understand of what the customer really wanted.

Here is the current PowerPoint Toolkit I'm using for Webforms. This is done in PowerPoint 2007, which is amazing. The drawing tools are more useful and complete then in previous versions of PowerPoint. As I do more and more prototyping I'm sure this will grow. This will give you a starting point for yours.

Web Form Toolkit.pptx (45.21 KB)

The best advice I can give you is to just try it. You'll be amazed how quickly you can create a simple prototype without writing one line of code.

Also here is a some helpful URLs I used started.

• Code Horror: UI First Software Development
• Wireframe Prototyping Using Powerpoint 2007 (Video)
• A List Apart Paper Prototyping
  

Happy UI Designing

The thing about gluten-free living is that it isn't something you can do alone. It's hard hard work, and you need someone to help you through the tough times. I'm very fortunate in that I have a very loving family that do their best to be supportive. My Beautiful Wife is amazing. She's basically had to relearn how to how to cook, because almost ever recipe calls for wheat. Things you don't think about like gravy or chicken. My Beautiful Wife has to read every label in the grocery store every time we shop because things that didn't have wheat in them last week, do this week. There is so much work that she has to put into each meal, and I greatly appreciate it.

My brother J actually ordered a burger wrapped in lettuce for me from In-N-Out and that's how we discovered protein style. My Mom when I lived at home had to learn what had wheat in it, and she also had to re-learn to cook family favorites.

It really isn't something you can do alone. I'm thankful to my family for wanting me to feel better and working so hard to do so.

I have a project at work coming up that will require some dynamic charts. As I don't feel the need to reinvent a wheel that others have perfected before me, I decided to take a look at Google Charts. The first thing I noticed was that this was extremely easy to use. It took me about 45 seconds to create the graphic used on this post. For a pie chart all you basically have to do is set the data and the labels and you're done.

Chart Type:cht=p3
Chart Size:chs=250x100
Data: chd=t:20,40,5,10,5
Labels: chl=muffin%7Ccoffee%7Cscone%7Cbagels%7Cdounut
So the URL to call the graph looks like this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3
&chd=t:20,40,5,10,5
&chs=250x100
&chl=muffin%7Ccoffee%7Cscone%7Cbagels%7Cdounut"

As you see this is a very simple example of what Google Charts can do.The documentation is fantastic. You can create just about any chart you'd like. The short list is: line charts, sparkline charts, bar charts, pie charts (2D and 3D), scatter plots, maps (yes maps), venn diagrams, radar charts and the google-o-meter.  Google Charts is a very nice full featured Chart API that I know I'll be using in the future.

Happy Coding