drewp for 2008 February

[link] 2008-02-10T14:10:21 Firefox 3 recommendation:

I have evaluated this firefox 3 recommendation for correctness, and found it to be accurate. Fox3 is running really well. This Littlefox theme is nice for little laptop screens too. A Firebug beta is available.

[link] 2008-02-12T23:14:51 Notes from BayCHI talk:

I saw the BayCHI talks tonight. Here are my notes:

erika hall, mule design

dopplr has data viz of feeds (Later, I compared dopplr.com's tour with tripit.com's front page)

to make users develop a habit of using your app, consider that the first thing they find is a verbal description of it

using language well: authentic, engaging, specific, appropriate, polite

come from a strong desire to do something useful. What is the use of ffg? to show who wins? to make sure you stay on top of the news?

consumating.com says "Join the Bored-at-Work Generation!"

hates "Submit" button. figure out what your action is

create rapport with your users on the site-broken page. twitter's has nice copy

maybe the new-to-site users should be competing against us, on the site

virgin-atlantic says "Hello gorgeous!" at the top of their page

likes novelty that also shows insight into users as people. pownce has 10 silly gender choices; citibank has security questions about your "arch rival as a child"

concerned about my/your. amazon says [ "Where's My Stuff" ] in quotes

mule design has a blog

feedburner "activate feed" vs "cancel and do not activate"

bad: vague, passive, oblivious, unnatural, too clever, rude,

"your account has been created." <- too passive

myspace "you must be logged-in to do that!" <- rude

ebay mixes up "you have 1 alert" and "my messages: i have 1 alert"

amex "our new navigaion is here > _click here for details_"

you're holding a conversation with the people coming to your site. be at least as pleasant as you are in person. emphasize the value of your site.

mike kuniavsky, 'sketching smart things'

ThingM company to do ubiquitous computing

ubicomp 'applianceness' measures devices that exploit potential of embedded info in everyday things

real objects have "information shadows" that you can work with sans touching the real obj

wine has a great shadow. ppl talk about it and collect it possibly more than they atually drink it

design metaphor: magic. can make user experiences easier to explain sometimes. wiimote = magic wand. ambient orb = crystal ball.

always have something that works, even if it's a paper mockup that fakes the functionality

museum using wiimotes to let audience point at objects to learn about them

blinkm takes I2C to pixels



Q: how do you keep your sketchers from getting stuck on existing ideas?
"what happens if there are 10x as many?"
"what happens if it becomes 10x cheaper?"
what does your demographic think?

[link] 2008-02-15T22:02:50 OpenCV in python:

Here's a tiny demo of using the opencv face finder on a PIL image and displaying the result with pygame:

Source code

That's using the SWIG opencv interface (available on ubuntu from the python-opencv package), not the recently-released pycv (which I know nothing about).

My headtrack project is an attempt at something like Johnny Chung Lee's head tracking project. I tried opencv since I don't have a wiimote yet. My goal is to move my desktop windows according to my head position, so I can peek around a window or lean in to look at windows that are outside the normally-visible screen.

Meanwhile, the compiz hackers started a similar project.

[link] (1) 2008-02-22T00:38:14 Goals for a wiki system:

Some goals for a better wiki system:

• HTML markup only! No restructured text, ad-hoc formats, etc. The lock-in is so awful in all of today's wikis. WYSIWYG editors are mature now- users should be able to pick WYSIWYG or full html.
  
• no training or external docs should be required to use all the features
• don't lose my scroll position when I want to edit some text I'm looking at
• encourage linking and creation of RDF data, probably with rdfa
• immediately exploit those links and metadata with easy searching/filtering/etc. Use FOAF data to limit my search to pages written by people I know, etc.
  
• keep the ownership clear (this is the opposite of some wiki philosophies). Spam cleanup should be very simple.
• encourage edits and especially annotations

A common case seems to be "add a new page and list it in some existing TOC section". Another one is "add a new section (paragraph or more) to this page". Editing words within an existing section that you didn't write, that might be rare.

I still like tinymce, although nelix_ isn't a fan.

Wikis that I use (that I'm trying to be better than) are: twiki, zwiki, confluence.

Related: rdf blog engine ideas

[link] 2008-02-28T00:38:30 ZFS compression surprise:

server1% wc *
...
   8484374   56684310 2050292731 total

server1% du .
2007440	.

server1% du -h .
2.0G	.

I rsynced that dir to another server and did a quick check to make sure I had all the data:

server2% wc *
...
   8484374   56684310 2050292731 total

server2% du .
660872	.

server2% du -h .
646M	.

It took a quite bunch of digging and checking before I remembered server2 has a ZFS disk with compression turned on.

[link] 2008-02-28T01:27:23 Giant computer room photo:

I took and annotated a 20-megapixel photo of my computer room.

Unless otherwise noted, all content licensed by Drew Perttula under a Creative Commons License.