That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday, yet it can have a huge impact on your productivity and well-being overall. Yes, that’s a big fat claim.
And by the way, this article is not just about coders or programmers. It’s about any smart people working with computers. And there will be pictures! Let’s rock and roll -"
Thanks to RWW...
You probably have never heard of Dieter Rams (pictured at left) but certainly know of his work. For many years he was a product designer for Braun and other German companies. Back before Frog and Apple put the "i" in many of its products Braun was selling very elegant items that were well designed, such as calculators, shavers and household appliances. Many of these items can be found in museum collections all over the world today. Rams has had several design shows over the years and is known for his ten principles of "good design," and I thought if we substitute the word "code" for "design" that there is a lot software developers could learn from his principles too. Here they are, with some of my comments.
- Dieter Rams, 1993
Around the time of the Kargil war in July 1999, this is what Atanu Dey wrote in an article entitled “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games“:
One enlightening model of human behavior is the so-called “Dollar Auction” which illustrates the sort of trap that conflicts can lead to with costly consequences. This auction proceeds much as a normal auction except that while the highest bidder gets to keep the $1 bill bid upon, the second highest bidder has to pay the auctioneer the amount of the second highest bid.
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The only way to win at a dollar auction therefore is either to not participate or if one does begin, then to either reach a compromise with one’s opponent or to exit as early in the game as possible.
Wars too have the peculiar characteristic that both parties, winner as well as the loser, pay. The dollar auction game illustrates the trap that nations fall into in a process of conflict escalation given the structure of strategic games.
The dollar auction is a perfect model of the conflict that India faces against Pakistan, with Kashmir being the dollar being auctioned. The bids in this auction are the military expenditure of each nation and the auctioneer is the one who collects the spoils of the military expenditures of the two nations. Since advanced industrialized countries are the major suppliers of arms, they play the role of the auctioneer quite well.
If the long drawn-out India-Pakistan conflict is seen as a dollar auction game with the US as the auctioneer, it is easy to understand why it is in America’s interest to keep India engaged in a perpetual conflict with Pakistan that is costly for India but very profitable for the US. Read in that context, the Headley story starts to make sense as well. The plan has been executed to perfection. As they say, it’s all about Money, Honey!
Here is what I think..
Like any other business, arms dealers and manufacterers are a business as well. If their “customers” were to disappear (i.e. no conflict) how will they survive. Hence it is correct to surmise that there are business interests behind this.
What I often wonder is that after arms, sports & entertainment is the 2nd largest business worldwide. Coincidentally, India and US are both big on sports & entertainment as well.
Is there an opportunity to move the $$ away from arms to these industries that have less strife and blood to shed?
What holds India back: by Atanu Dey. “Hubris and ignorance among the powerful is a potently destructive mix and a sure recipe for disaster. The outcome is the disaster we see today. They set up the command-control-license-permit-quota raj. It is the best way known to humanity to retard economic development.”
6 Tips for Building Coherent Site Navigation
Thanks to RWW
When building a website, getting the navigation right is absolutely critical. A poorly conceived approach to site navigation will confuse and frustrate users, and this isn't the way to get a lot of people using your site.
A big part of this challenge is that you don't always start with a lot of links, but more may be added as the site develops. This means that the original navigation concept may not work as well as it once did.
To help you address these issues and prevent some others from occurring, here are 6 tips for building a site with coherent navigation.
1. Use Colour Coding
Make sure your navigational areas are easily distinguished and/or separated from your content. If everything seems to mix together - think of the content and navigation bar sitting alongside each other on a white background - it'll look a bit messy. A messy navigation bar isn't much fun to use.
2. Group Related Links Together
To avoid link overload, consider having multiple navigation bars, separated into logical groups. For instance, on one of the sites I run, I have core links (home, blog, about) at the top, functional links (dashboard, account history, settings) down the side, and legal/privacy links across the bottom. This allows you to keep each set of links relatively tidy, and it'll be easier to find the links you need.
3. Use Icons to Aid Navigation
Graphical aids can really bring your navigation bar to life, making it both visually pleasing and easy to use. FamFamFam has some good icons - and there are plenty more on Google if you want to look for something else.
4. Handle Hierarchy Consistently
Whether you have collapsible menus that appear as you navigate to a section, pop-out menus that reveal themselves when the mouse cursor hovers over them, or sub-pages with links to more pages, try to be consistent as much as you can. Mixing too many techniques can result in an uncoordinated mess.
5. Separate Non-Navigational Elements
If your navigation is getting quite busy, it may be time to remove things such as the search box from your navigation bar, along with any other features that get in the way of the site navigation. While it's possible to achieve a slick, streamlined site by condensing several core elements into the header and/or the sidebar, this doesn't work so well as you add more and more links. Don't feel the need to use every available bit of white space. And don't put ads in the way of the navigation.
6. Make it Flexible
If the design of your site makes it almost impossible to add any new navigation links, it won't be long before you start to hit the limits of the design. Where possible, future-proof your site by ensuring the design is as fluid as it can be. While a horizontal navigation bar doesn't leave a huge amount of scope, it could wrap onto additional lines. A vertical navigation bar shouldn't break once you add more than 10 links to it. If you build with long-term growth in mind, you'll have an easier time if you do add more links at a later date.