Why does 'cd' work differently for drives and paths?

This has been a frustrating pet peeve of mine for a while.

When I hope my Windows command line, it starts me out on a network drive, specifically "H:", which of course I rarely have a need to be in. My first instinct, which is always wrong, is to type:

• H:>cd c:

in an attempt to get to "C:" drive. I may even have include a path like this: "c:\path\to\my\folder".

This always fails, because what Windows expects you to do is this:

• H:>c:

which will nicely give you the C:> prompt from which you can then navigate.

Why? Is there a way around this? My main problem is that I don't use the Windows command line that often, so I forget the nuance of switching between drives as opposed to switching paths. and why do I have to type the colon?

Unix flavors don't do this. The notion of naming something after an arbitrary letter of the alphabet doesn't even enter into the equation. Everything has a name, and accessing something, be it a file, a folder, or a hard drive, all happens the same way: $cd /This/Is/My/Path (where $ is the command prompt).

[Re-posted from Code Fog]

Titles in Web Pages

This is an interesting topic for me; I can think of multiple arguments for why people choose the titles of their websites like they do. But really, I wonder how many people even really think about it at all.

When I find a site I like or need, I often bookmark it, but also often find that I have to rename it so that when I'm glancing through my bookmarks, it's easy to find.

Starting the title of a site with the name of a company or the division, or the website itself is no good (unless it's the main page). Take this example from Qualcomm:


After saving it as a link, I end up with this in my bookmarks:


It's the highlighted one, if it wasn't obvious. And that's my point. Notice the other two Qualcomm links near the bottom. The only difference between them is capitalization (which violates the Consistency pattern). I can't tell what they actually link to. The bookmark titled "Customer ..." is actually the renamed version of the highlighted one above. Just by the fav icon (denoting Brew, Qualcomm's mobile software platform) and the word "Customer" I know that it's the customer support portal website for Brew. But I had to take action to get that to happen; it wasn't as simple as if Qualcomm had simply rearranged the title to be "Customer Support Portal | Qualcomm Brew" instead.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]

Password Requirement Clarifications

This is from QUALCOMM's BREW MP website, after having attempted to input a new password. It says: "Please enter a password with at least 6 character, including three distinct characters and at least one number."

What is a distinct character? 'a', 'b', and 'c' are all distinct characters. Perhaps they meant at least one alphabetic, one numeric, and one non-alphanumeric character. Or does capitalization also make a character distinct?

What led up to this is even more interesting. When I registered for the site, it didn't ask me for a password, just an e-mail address (and lamely, an alias for the forums, which I obviously hadn't gotten to seeing yet, since I had to register first; don't make me determine a unique alias until I actually need it and understand the context). I couldn't log in (because of the lack of password) until I clicked on the "Forgot password?" link, which then brought me to the issue I started this article with.

QC seems to have issues with password and account registration... not the first time I've had to run through hoops to get a registration working, especially with the original BREW website.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]

Searching by name

Here's a suggestion for website developers. If you're going to offer an alphabetical listing on a large or wildly varying set of data, give the user a alphabetical bread crumb trail and not a numerical one. That is, if you have a 1000 listings, don't give the user this:

"1 2 3 4 5 >>" where clicking on the brackets jumps you ahead 5 units and your users have no idea where the end is.

instead, give them something like this:

"A-AF AG-AZ B-BL BM-BZ ... J ... N ... Z >>" where clicking on the brackets jumps ahead to the next logical grouping (in this case, the "J" grouping") or a user can simply click on the nearby letter of choice. Clicking on the '>>' will jump the the grouping forward (or back if clicking on '<<') such as "B ... C ... D ... J-JF JG-JZ K-KF KG-KZ ... N ... Z >>" (after a couple of clicks, for example; effectively, the window that shows the specific letter range slides up and down as the user clicks on the brackets).

This would be overkill for a small data set and not very useful at all for something arranged numerically (which isn't helpful to begin with). But a user would know exactly where he or she was in data set and could easily get to the end of the data set (if he or she was looking for "Zoom" for example) instead of clicking on '>>' until an end was reached.

I've seen some other better variations of the numerical bread crumb trail before (compared to my example), but even then, numbers typically don't match very well with information that is arranged alphabetically. The letter J is the tenth letter of the alphabet; but that does not mean it's the tenth category in data consisting of thousands of entries.

The main point is matching your navigation with your set of data points to help the user get around that much more easy.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]