The year in cities

Following the lead of lots of other people, here's my 2005 in cities, and then 2006 so far.

2005

• Geneva, Switzerland
• Glasgow, Scotland
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• Dundee, Scotland
• London, England
• Budapest, Hungary
• Dubrovnik, Croatia
• Savannah, US
• Washington D.C., US
• Charleston, U.S.

(Probably a number of others I can't remember)

2006

• Geneva, Switzerland
• Glasgow, Scotland
• London, England

Ethnography...sitting and watching

I realy liked the following comment from a colleague recently. I had been along to Microsoft in SOHO to see Louise Ferguson speak on "Ethnography and how it can inform design", and was asked:

"What's ethnography?...Isn't it just a posh word for sitting around watching people do things?"

Well, that's my pomposity well and truly pricked!

Technorati tags: ethnography | usability | london

ASP and valid XHTML output

I hadn't realised until the other day that there are issues with ASP outputting valid XHTML strict. Apparently ASP 2.0 can do it, but 1.0 has a couple of interesting quirks that can cause issues that are rather tough to work around. Owing to time constraints, I'm considering switching our doctype to Transitional just to allow for the fact that ASP is throwing up a input of type hidden, and giving a form element a name attribute owing to our use of viewstate - a real kluge, but easier than the full-blown solution (extending the HtmlForm Control), or trying to find another way to maintain the viewstate. Ho-hum.

Another cool Flickr mashup

Check out Retrievr - it works best if you draw blocks of colour rather than trying to draw "things". Great fun, and a nice way of thinking about object recognition and visual search.