• Fog Creek’s excellent Copilot remote assistance tool has gone to Version 2 and is now available for Mac OS X. The Windows version works in almost all circumstances – there’s no fiddling with firewall settings, ports etc. Provided that the person you’re trying to help doesn’t have a totally screwed computer, it works fine.
• On 31 January Vodafone is going to launch a Mobile Web Portal, named Betavine. Users will be able to download and test applications, interact in forums and blogs. Developers will be able to create projects and host applications. Sounds interesting, but I fear that the evolution of the mobile web – which I just like to call ‘the internet’ – will make this venture obsolete in, oh, about 9 months.

The new Boxes and Arrows site has launched. This premier on-line resource for information architecture is now a premier resource for how not to design a website. Khoi Vinh has an executive “huh?” on the new design – his team pitched and lost in August 2004’s redesign contest. Comments on his posting are also well worth a read.

I’m not even going to try analysing this new design, because it’s so wrong in all areas. Please, just delve into the site a little and then take a nice long bath.

• Duane Johnson has released v1.0 of Condition Builder, his Ruby on Rails plugin for building conditions, e.g. for parameterised queries in ActiveRecord. If you have complex queries that need constructing, or queries that cannot easily be described non-programmatically, this may be worth considering.
• Dialogue-Driven Development is an evolving set of principles launched in August 2006 that aims to formalise the collaboration value of the Agile Manifesto.
• Why The Lucky Stiff has posted up some scans and artwork for his Poignant Guide to Ruby. Check them out on Flickr.

• Here’s an interview with Mario Garcia, about the recent redesign of The Wall Street Journal. Logic+Emotion has a photo. Not very radical, but major US and Canadian newspapers are very conservative.
• Brad Neuberg has announced kick off of the development of the Dojo Offline Toolkit, a small, cross-platform download which will allow Dojo-based web sites to work off-line. Find out more about the Dojo Javascript toolkit here.
• Photos of naked finger puppets still get taken.

That’s Power, Control and Responsibility. When I worked as a software manager I was always an advocate of giving people both responsibility and power, much to the surprise of those working with (and for) me. This reduces stress by allowing people to affect what they do and how they do it. However, this means not always running to Daddy when things go wrong; but Daddy will be around if he feels you need help.

Zed Shaw writes about another correlation: Control and Responsibility, a slightly subtle difference, that is:

By “control” I mean the authority to make decisions. The person in a situation making the decisions is the one in control, not the person doing the work.

and

By responsibility I mean the rewards or punishments for the outcomes.

Be sure to read the Strippers And Steaks story, which is eerily familiar to me, and may be familiar to you to – especially if you’ve ever been involved in software or systems development.

Now that this blog has been redesigned – more on that in a future post – there’s a new CSS book which looks like a keeper: Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design. So that’s going on my Amazon wishlist.

Matt Heusser writes about the problems of designing systems – modeling system effects is hard and everything gets harder according to the complexity and number of interactions that a system has. ISO 9000 and the CMM are necessarily prescriptive and work against the need for more flexible approaches to design. I recall the time when I read about some companies reaching CMM Level 5, but who seemed to be incapable of delivering working systems. However CMM does permit you to be flexible – agile, even – you just need to document, measure, correct and improve.

Some of these issues cropped up when I was designing air traffic control systems. Kathy Sierra suggests that demos shouldn’t look done. Trouble is, that without demos looking done, it’s rare that you’ll win large development contracts. This is part of the No!Spec issue.

People store personal information with Google Notebook, including passwords and social security numbers, then go and accidentally publish them.

Shelfari is another entry to the book tagging social network thing.