I went for a ride on my CBR and the idle is behaving itself. I think the carburetor cleaner is doing the trick. It’s still a little touchy, but hopefully by the end of the tank it will be all cleared out.

Since I wrote my own blogging tool in PHP (not very elaborate) I usually just write down thoughts I have during the day and include links if they are relevant. I wrote myself a little PERL script that takes a link and text to be linked and creates the link for me. Like I said, it’s quite simple, but it saves me from having to type <a href=””> for every link.

Software usability – Being a developer myself, I have to admit that it’s not that fun using the software to test how usable it is. The fun is in creating the code, not necessarily using it. I find it very fulfilling when other people use a program that I wrote, but it leads to a rather interesting dilemma. If you don’t use your own software, how do you know that it would be usable for someone else? You can engineer it to be usable to a certain extent, but there are some things you can only discover through using it, which is why testing becomes so important. Beta testing can be very helpful because users can familiarize themselves with a piece of software. Often times the user will become more adept than the developer, and be able to provide valuable insight into how to improve it. It also helps to have someone using it that didn’t write it, because they have no preconceived notions as to how it’s supposed to work.