2008 Mar 3, 3:32Research paper on progress bar UI improvements counters my thoughts on progress bar demanded for case where we only know when we're done: set progress as function of time where function has asymptote
at %100. Zeno's progress bar.
design gui hci interface paper progress progress-bar usability research 2008 Feb 3, 11:01FTA: "Like Klein, EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston had spent much of the previous December reading press accounts of the administration's secret surveillance program. "It was all I thought
about over the holiday," he remembers. In fact, at his bos
via:boingboing eff article law privacy government history 2008 Feb 1, 8:08Its the Song of the Count with some unnecessary censorship.
humor youtube video sesame-street count the-count unnecessary-censorship 2008 Jan 31, 10:47
![[Many books in large bookcase. Photo creator http://flickr.com/people/babblingdweeb/]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/23816128_d4acb70b2d_m_d.jpg)
I use my recently added
books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added
books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in
LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who
had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.
Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly
differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.
tim-spalding librarything rss homepage 2008 Jan 22, 9:56
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
stolen-thoughts windows search mce windows traffic closed captions four-way-stop windows-media-center 2008 Jan 2, 2:13FTA: "Seems that a number of villages in the English countryside are being overrun by errant trans-European trucks which are regularly misdirected by their GPS satnav systems onto roads that were
better suited for horse-drawn carriages than big, long-dist
gps humor article metadata blog england 2007 Nov 19, 12:35
Two weekends ago I went down to California for Angie and Kane's
going away party. It was fun despite going to a country western club. It was a very large place with plenty of space for line dancing, a dentist chair turned into a make-margaritas-in-your-mouth
chair, and of course a mechanical bull. Surprisingly, I did not fit in.
This past weekend Sarah and I went to the
EMP and SciFi Museum. The last time I was there was for the Star Trek convention (I'm cool) and Sarah hadn't been before. We also ate in the attached diner which
was acceptable.
emp seattle nontechnical 2007 Nov 9, 2:38Jon's leaving for Germany today which of course is sad. On Wednesday, Jon came over and we watched
Hackers. There's a few things you probably wouldn't
notice without repeated viewings of the film:
- Phantom Phreak is arrested and you never hear what happens to him. This is unlike Joey who is arrested but appears in the final hacking scene.
- Marc Anthony appears in the movie as a secret service agent.
- Everyone in the movie loves Coke.
- Hackers is the greatest movie of all time: it represents the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.
In similar ex college roommate news, I'm going to California over the weekend for Angie and Kane's goodbye party. They're heading for Australia for like a year or something. Angie's got a
blog about her travels but rarely seems to update it. I'll get to see Carissa and Elijah there too, almost completing the ex college roommate
experience. To avoid confusion I should mention that unlike everyone else I know, Carissa and Elijah aren't leaving the country.
personal nontechnical 2007 Nov 7, 5:19My Many Eyes account page. Adding this to delicious so that I don't lose track of it. Associated IBMID: dave@deletethis.net
proldfile many-eyes statistics visualization me 2007 Nov 7, 4:28Out of date W3C document containing stats on frequency of use of various charsets in HTML pages (in 1997)
charset encoding i18n language reference w3c statistics 2007 Oct 30, 12:29DisneyLand is updating the Small World ride to support fatter passengers. That is so sad.
humor health article disney obesity 2007 Oct 29, 7:07Two brief updates to previous posts:
- I noted that I had a new entry on the IE blog. Some comments on the IE blog have recently been rude in their request for information
on future versions of IE. For example see the first two comments responding to my post. Feeling bad about that
I looked at my posts entry on delicious and saw the following:
"This is the first blog from the IE team that I have found rigorous and informative. I skipped to the bottom to find it was written by one of the TA's from my first class at Cal
Poly."
That made me feel a bit better and I was able to catch up with someone from college. Thanks Kris!
- I previously had my GPS set with an Australian accent. When it encountered 'WA', as in the abbreviation for Washington in freeway
exits, it pronounced it 'Western Australia'. Now I've got it with a British accent and WA is just 'W.A.' but when I tell it to drive to 'MS', the name of my saved location for work, it pronounces
it 'Manuscript'.
microsoft blog gps personal nontechnical 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 4, 8:54Angie's blog for her near future travels in other countries.|Angie Sommer
angie-sommer travel blog friend 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss 2007 Sep 20, 12:20Article on the fall, division, and name changes of countries affecting top level domain names and vice versa.
dns internet domain icann blog article politics 2007 Sep 18, 2:16Sarah got me the
Garmin StreetPilot c580 for my birthday last month. I really like this because its a small device that makes my
life easier without me having to learn anything new. Just the way tech. should be.
The device gets current weather, traffic, and movie times. The information is sent via FM and received via the FM receiver in the cigarette lighter power adapter of the GPS device. MSN sends out this
info and I get a free one year subscription. In addition to taking traffic info into account when planning my route it will estimate the number of minutes I'm going to spend in traffic. Just knowing
how long I might be in traffic somehow makes it more bareable.
The other day while driving for dinner I got a call. I got my phone out of my pocket and answered it. I heard Jon's saying 'Hello' under my passenger seat. After a moment of confusion I remembered
that the GPS device also acts as a bluetooth hands free phone adapter and that it was under my seat.
gps garmin personal traffic nontechnical 2007 Jun 11, 3:36This past weekend I was invited to two BBQs. Consequently, the weather took a break from the heat to drizzle.
The first was a lunch BBQ in celebration of Sarah's mom getting her Masters degree. Sarah and I went to her sister's house on the East-side where we had traditional foods you might associate with a
BBQ including some enjoyable sausage. There was a bit of Wii to be had and Sarah's mom killed at bowling. Sarah seemed a bit dismayed at this. I guess Sarah didn't expect it since she's had more
experience compared to her mom who was playing for the first time.
For dinner we drove over to Seattle to have a BBQ at Jeannie's house. Jeannie's family and my family became friends through our church when I was born and Jeannie even babysat me. The second bit
about the babysitting is how Jeannie would introduce me at the BBQ. I met her boyfriend who seems like a cool guy. He works for Microsoft as a consultant and has traveled to various countries for his
job. Guests had been instructed to bring side dishes and so there was quite a spread which was eclectic as well. We brought red potatoes, humus, and pita bread. As it turns out, one of the other
guests had produced humus in bulk as a supplier and apparently had a grudge against the big humus chains. We played it cool and she didn't say anything so we can only assume she didn't know it was
us. Jeannie was a great hostess and I had a fun time.
bbq washington personal nontechnical 2007 Jun 5, 4:07Pie-charts of the colors in country flags.
art chart visualization statistics flag graph 2007 May 22, 10:12Digg RSS extension that includes submitter, digg count, and comment count.
digg rss extension xml feed
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
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