Xarg blog Archive

CBC News: Spiders weave huge natural wonder in B.C.

PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. - A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders. Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

I would have loved to see this. When I went to New Zealand there were places that were just covered in spiderwebs but this is even more extreme. I really like the idea of giant spiderwebs.

There is an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon.com up at goodexperience.com about usability and customer centered design.

I particularly liked this since it captures what I think is exciting about building things on the web:

For us, it's a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the "similarities" feature - the one that says "people who bought this also bought that." In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That's an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.

She also mentions some of their in jokes like the butterfly ballot joke and the current Customers who wear clothes also shop for: clean underwear bit which shows up promoting clothes purchases in the books section. I had seen the tag line before and wondered if it was intentional or just another microcontent mistake...

I tried out AmphetaDesk...It's cool and was trivial to install on redhat 7.3. Sort of a light weight version of radio userland's aggregator. Since it's in perl I can add a "post" button to the stories I think it would be really work the same (less some intelligence about when to pull files down).

Also, I wrote a bookmarklet for submitting stories to Lars-Blogger as well (a good idea from MovableType), it take the page title, url and selection (if there is one) and sends it to the entry page. I had to change the code a little to make it work but it works great (under mozilla anyway).

I am not sure how I found myself there but It turns out that Edward Tufte's website actually uses ACS (it looks like acs 3.x).

One thing I found was a nice essay on Gantt charts in his Ask E.T. forum. He has some suggestions for improvement but I found the indictment of current practices the most interesting:

The design of project charts appears to have regressed to Microsoft mediocrity; that is, nothing excellent and nothing completely useless. (Is the reduction of variance around a modest average the consequence of monopoly?) Most of the charts in Google look the same or make the same mistakes: analytically thin, bureaucratic grid prison, not annotated, little quantitative data. The computer Gantt charts, so lightweight and tinker toy, do not appear to have been designed for serious project management.

One thing I noticed though was that he used the same background as me (which I thought was nice), although I think he makes a mistake in using #f00 for visited links and #c00 for unvisited links which is the reverse of the usual suggestion to use a less saturated color for visited links.

The OSTA has released the MultiPhoto/Video Spec which I think is inteded to be the interchange format for CPXe. It would be pretty exciting if this catches on. I was pleased to find that there is an LGPL'd MPV SDK which it looks like HP has contributed. I am going to take a look at it and see if it makes sense to have photo-album be able to generate MPV data sets.

Here is a something from the MPV Overview

Executive Summary

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) has developed an open specification available at no cost that enables the playback and exchange of collections of photo-video content. The format, called MultiPhoto/Video (MPV), allows users to create and exchange multimedia albums and playlists of content from today's consumer digital cameras, such as still images, stills with audio, still burst sequences, and video clips. The goal is for MPV to be widely produced and consumed by digital cameras, retail picture disc services, imaging software, internet services, DVD players, and other devices.

MPV is also a part of the Common Picture Exchange Initiative (CPXe) that is underway within the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A). CPXe will enable easy transmission and printing of digital images between digital cameras, PCs, desktop software, Internet services, photo kiosks, digital minilabs and photofinishers.

It's on /. so everyone has probably seen it but Microsoft suggests you should not trust them. The relevant bit:

What steps could I follow to prevent the control from being silently re-introduced onto my system?

The simplest way is to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft.

I don't hate Microsoft (well, maybe a little...) but I do hate a lot of the web technology they backed. ActiveX was and is evil and this makes it pretty clear why. Also, it's cool there is a word for what I feel :)

I think anyone who works on bug-tracker should read Call Center: Profit or Loss? by Bruce Tognazzini in his AskTog column. It's a funny article and he makes the very good point that call center support can be a real material expense and that properly handled can be both much cheaper and improve the companies products and support.

You have to believe that most call centers have a support DB to help field calls (and the ones that don't probably cost companies even more money) and it is a small step to turn tie that into a ticketing system and generate real dollar figure costs for helping people resolve problems with your products. Which should ultimately direct you to how to resolve the problems at the source: your product's design and documentation.

I think the improvements in consumer class PC hardware installation documents are the product of this feedback loop (the simple install poster for hard-drives certainly has that feel).

I found the report How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility? Results from a Large Study to be pretty interesting. The headline result, "design matters more than anything else" should not be a huge surprise. I guess the question in my mind is does credibility matter?

It reminds me of the article I read (which sadly I can no longer find) about how a large site tested various different banner ads and found the most grotesque ones had the highest click through rates. The designers were horrified by it and ads like that certainly can't do much for credibility but that was what drove revenues at the time. Maybe now that people are increasingly blind to banners it is credibility and brand awareness that matter more than simply screaming for attention.

I put both packages on the code page for download. I wanted to clean them up some more but realistically I don't have the time to do it right now and maybe they will catch someone else's fancy and they will fix them for me (which is not to say they don't work since both are running on this site, they just could do a lot more).

I would like both to produce rss files, the photo album clipboarding could be better, it would be nice if they were searchable, it would be nice if the cvs log browser updated incrementally to the DB rather than storing all state on the server, and the list goes on.

I switched the site to use the CSS version of lars-blogger that I worked up. You can see the style switching in action on my blog homepage where there are some different styles to choose from. Just so you know the lars style is just a pale shadow of the Lars-ian original.

I installed Movable Type and played with it some. I liked it a lot and I think if all I was going to do was run a blog I would use it. The templates are nice, the UI straightforward, and it's fast. I really liked the bookmarklet for creating a blog entry.

I installed it under AOLserver running OpenACS and it was pretty easy to get working (although I had to hack the request processor a little to keep rp from hijacking the cgi requests).

This is being discussed on the AOLServer list with some fervor so I thought I would put up the coding standards excerpts from various projects that I had collected when I looked into what other large scale projects did.

the CVS log browser I wrote is up and running...take a look. The colors for the last update were snarfed from sourceforge's bug tracker. It's a little bit of a hog though. My aolserver process now takes 180mb instead of 40 (and as far as I can tell, only 25mb of the 140 are really data, not sure what happened to the rest).

I put up some butterfly pictures that I took at the London Butterfly House in Syon Park. I did not manage to get a picture of a blue morpho (there was one fluttering around) but I did get a few I liked. The pictures were all taken hand-held with flash and would have turned out a lot better if I had a diffuser and flash bracket. All in all, though, I was pretty happy with them. Compared to taking film based pictures with the same lens, no focal length multiplier, and a flash sync of 1/250s this was much easier.

I added a clipboard for users to collect images up for printing and tied to in to the shutterfly.com C4P system. It was actually pretty easy to do and the photo-album stuff is almost to the point where it's usable. I still have to do some "over the shoulder" usability testing and there are some shortcomings with the print ordering that I would like to correct but all in all I am pretty happy with it.

People talk about web services as being great things and it seems like publishig a web interface for places like shutterfly would have a great ROI for them but remarkably very few photo fullfillment vendors seem to have a usable web fullfillment interface. I only found out about C4P from the gallery source code, and I think without knowing it was there you would never find it.

I found fotango here in the UK actually lets you email your images in as attachments which might be an option as well but it seems a little clunky. C4P (which is simply a HTTP POST interface) seems to be a very simple workable answer.

I wrote a something to parse the cvs log file and let you browse the the changes. The neat bit is that it breaks things up into "change sets" which means that you can see the whole set of files modified by a given commit command. It's not foolproof but it does seem to work pretty well.

It links back to SDM patches and bugs and also generates the commands that you would need to rollback a given change set. I will also probably add some statistics and per module browsing and then put it up at http://openacs.org/cvs/