Explorer Street

An authoritative source of current scientific opinion woud be useful

2012-02-01T02:09:00.000+10:00

I was talking to someone the other day who believed that Quantum Mechanics (QM) basically equated to the Copenhagen interpretation of it -- you know, the one where an observation collapses the quantum wave.

As far as I know, this interpretation is not very popular among working physicists. But I can't recall anymore where I got this detail from. No doubt it was from books I've read or things I've read in discussion forums, but I just can't remember.

I would have liked to have been able to point the person towards something online that showed that in fact most physicists don't believe the Copenhagen interpretation, but it's just not easy to find something that will tell you the current scientific opinion on a particular topic.

And if I can't reference some sort of reputable source, the person I'm talking to has no particular reason to believe what I'm saying.

Being able to easily find out, and link to, the current scientific opinion on topics would make it easier to address common misconceptions. A better informed public can on-the-whole only be a good thing, and surely this would also be helpful for matters of public policy where scientific opinion is relevant.

.

I'll explain what I mean by a source outlining current scientific opinion.

Imagine that a high status journal like Nature did a biannual survey of working scientists to gather their opinions about various topics, such as which interpretation of QM they believe. They could survey scientists in different fields, asking them about topics specific to their field. For example, Cosmologists could be asked whether they believe the big bang theory is true. Biologists could be asked whether they believe evolution is true. And so on.

Obviously a lot of thought would have to go into the questions they asked. Since the results of the survey would be for the general public, the media and the government to use, you'd want it to cover the sorts of questions these people might have a use for.

They could put the survey results up on a web-site that you could search and find answers such as (to make up a statistic) "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution".

.

The goal would be to have an authoritative source of such information. First, a reasonable proportion of practicing scientists would need to respond to the survey, so you know that the statistics it provides are representative. Hopefully scientists would be willing to respond to the survey, as a kind of public service.

Second, it would need to be a "brand" that was known to be reputable. So that if you presented a fact like "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution", linking to this source, the people seeing it would recognise that site and know what it's about and believe that it is reputable. (obviously this is just an ideal. It couldn't just start out with that reputation, and it could never have that reputation for everyone in the population).

There's learned philosophers but not philosophical experts

2012-01-28T15:04:00.000+10:00

I posted the following to reddit/r/philosophy:

It seems to me that the notion of expertise can only apply to fields in which there is an established body of knowledge. By that I mean fields in which we have (empirical) grounds for believing our knowledge is at least an approximation or heading in the right direction. Physics or genetics or how to fix cars are examples of such fields. You can be an expert in physics.

Philosophy seems different. What makes philosophy interesting is that it's about things we don't understand well. In philosophy we're not even sure that existing approaches to problems are heading in the right direction.

Philosophy is pretty much by definition about things we don't understand well. Once a philosophical topic is understood it ceases to be part of philosophy, and becomes part of another field like physics, biology, economics, etc. (or alternatively, the problem may be dissolved and seen as a kind of misunderstanding.)

I would say the kind of knowledge that exists in the field of philosophy is more of ways of describing problems, or particular arguments for or against a view of problems. It's more like a discussion.

You can be an expert in the different positions about a philosophical problem, but I would distinguish this from the idea that someone can be an expert on a philosophical subject.

For example, someone can be an expert on the various problems and arguments associated with consciousness, but I don't think anyone can claim to be an expert on consciousness (at least the hard problem of consciousness) because we just don't understand it.

So rather than saying there are experts in philosophy I would say that there are people who are very learned in philosophy.

Why does this distinction matter?

When there isn't established knowledge, we're less certain that existing approaches are correct. The fact that an existing approach hasn't been able to solve a problem for long time may mean that it's the wrong approach. It is more likely in philosophy that someone who comes from outside of the field, who isn't well versed in the existing approaches, can add something of use to the table. The fact that they aren't familiar with existing arguments may even be a virtue.

If there aren't philosophical experts, then there aren't experts to challenge.

Yet it seems to me that philosophy seems to hold greater reverence for 'experts' than most other fields.

Improving 'use by' labelling on food

2012-01-20T00:23:00.000+10:00

Here's a pretty basic suggestion for improving 'use by' labelling on food.

Even food that's properly packaged and uncontaminated can still go bad well before its use by date.

For example, once a tub of tomato paste has been opened it needs to be used within a few weeks at most, even if its use by date is still more than a year away. And of course, it needs to be stored properly, in the fridge.

'use by' labelling unfortunately suggests that the food is ok to consume as long as that date hasn't passed, regardless of any other details. (the same applies for 'best before' dates).

Here's my suggestion for how the labels could look:

Use by: 7 days after opening and before 31 Mar 2012 Refrigerate after opening.

Packaging does often show 'time after opening' information and storage info, but they're usually in some fine-print separated from the (much more prominent) use by date. I think all this information should be shown right next to each other, as in the labelling suggested above.

With the way it currently is, you can easily just see the use by date by itself and draw the conclusion that if today's date is before then the food is ok.

.

You might think it'd be obvious how food needs to be stored, but people often put condiments that according to the labelling should be refrigerated in the pantry.

And even if you have stored it properly, the sight of the use by date being still months or years off can make it feel like the food must still be ok. I've seen someone who has, for this reason, used tomato paste that's been put in the fridge but since gone mouldy (first scraping the mould off).

Of course labelling is never going to *stop* people from doing anything, but that's not the point. It's to try and help reduce the chances of it happening, even if only by a relatively small amount.

Keep in mind, also, that it's not just about the one-off effects of eating unsafe foods, but whatever the cumulative effects of this may be.

.

Warning: the following is a bit rambly... where I try to think through some of the issues to do with human perception and psychology that underly labelling.

Labelling concerns human perception and psychology. It's not a matter of what information is, strictly speaking, available. It's about what information we'll notice and how we'll perceive it and how it can effect our actions.

The thing is that people aren't going to devote much time or effort to checking food safety info on labels.

The amount of time and effort and concentration we devote to a task tends to be proportional to how important it is to us at that point in time (and this is not usually the result of a conscious choice).

We don't fully consciously process the smaller things. To some extent we're always handling certain tasks on automatic, rather than giving them full conscious deliberation. We're creatures of habit, as they say.

While we're doing the little tasks we usually have our concentration focused more on the bigger tasks and concerns on our minds.

We're unlikely to ever devote that much time or effort or conscious thought to food labelling info.

As soon as a person finds something that seems like its telling them the whole story (the "use by" date) they're likely to stop their search.

.

Think what it'd actually take to actually find and process the other food safety information in addition to the use by date.

We'd have to think to look for it. We'd have to find it on the packet, then take the effort to read it. And then we'd have to reconcile that information with the use by date information. The latter is harder than it sounds. It took me a fair while to get clear how the use by date relates to the 'time after opening' info.

And we'd have to overcome our natural inclination to stop our search once we have found an answer (you can find a description of some research on this here. I can't recall where I had first heard about this, but I do remember that Dan Airely describes it in his book Predictably Irrational). We make swift, relatively sub-conscious judgements.

Where's the motivation in a normal situation to do these things? There doesn't seem to be one. There's always heaps of things you could be doing, but unless they're relevant to what you are doing or want to do they don't come to mind.

It may seem so "obvious" as something to focus upon because that's what we're doing right now in this bit of writing. Which is the 'paradox' of discussing aspects of tasks that you wouldn't think of when you were actually doing the task - when you're discussing it you're making yourself to focus on it.

Future scenario: personal AI drone cameraman

2011-12-22T18:24:00.001+10:00

Here's a possible future scenario.

There's really cheap, light, compact drones (mini helicopter things) with good AI, an on-board camera, and really good battery life. They're quiet, too.

You and a friend go on a hike together, and take one of these with you.

At the start of the hike you take it out and tell it to follow you. (it's got voice control, so you just tell it what to do).

You tell it to take shots every once in a while. Its AI is good enough to compose reasonable shots, ensuring it gets one or both of you in the frame.

Perhaps it can even spot things of interest on the side of the track (e.g a big mushroom nestled in a rotting log on the side of the track) you might have missed.

You come to nice waterfall beside the track so you ask the drone to fly out so it can get a shot of both of you with the waterfall in the background.

It flies out to where it thinks it might get a good shot. It's transmitting the image to your phone so you can see what it looks like. You want it to move more to the left and get a little lower so you tell it that.

At the end of the walk you sit down on a picnic blanket and have lunch together. You figure it'd be nice to get a shot of both of you having the picnic so you instruct the drone to take one.

(and of course that's just one of many possible scenarios, many no doubt with a sinister edge, that such technology might make possible).

Reframing how digital content is sold

2011-11-10T23:44:00.001+10:00

Perhaps we could change how digital content (e-books, MP3s etc) is offered for sale. Instead of "buy a copy of this item", offer it as "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Buying a copy means buying some bits, and since bits sound insubstantial and making copies of bits is effortless, it doesn't sound like it should be worth much money.

But when you frame it as paying the content creator for their effort, that sounds (to me) like something that's worth more.

This is about changing how people view what it means to purchase digital content. There's obviously a big question about how that could be achieved and I'm not sure of the answer.

One component of that is the user-interface in online-stores. I wonder if you could replace the 'buy' button with something else? Replace it with something that suggests you are giving money to pay for the effort that went into creating that content.

Perhaps it could be a 'pay' button, with hover-text saying "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Obviously you'd want it to be something pretty short and sweet.

--

update: I wonder if the visual "branding" used by Creative Commons might serve as a model for this. There are a range of buttons that represent particular Creative Commons licences (see the image to the right of this paragraph for an example). Perhaps you could have something analogous to this and by, instead of a 'buy' button, having a special button that represents this notion of paying for the creation of the content instead of for the content itself.

Idea: hold-and-swipe touch-screen gesture

2011-09-10T13:53:00.000+10:00

An idea for a type of touch-screen gesture for phones: the user places their left-thumb anywhere on the screen and keeps it in the same place, and at the same time they swipe across with their right-thumb.

You can think of the left-thumb as acting like a modifier, like the shift-key. A left-handed person could keep their right thumb stationary and swipe their left thumb - it'd have the same effect.

Each different swipe direction (up, down, left or right) could be recognised as a distinct gesture with its own distinct meaning.

I don't know if anyone has used this type of gesture before, but the benefit of it is that it's quite easy to perform. Which is one of the challenges with gestures: finding ones that are really quick and easy to do.

On distinctions made between 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge'

2011-09-07T21:30:00.000+10:00

Someone recently asked me what I thought about the distinction between data, information and knowledge. I emailed them a response, and I thought I might as well turn that response into a blog post.

I think that it's good to recognise that not all "information" is the same, and that there is a kind of spectrum between 'raw data' and 'deep knowledge'.

But I'm not that keen on all the arguments about how you distinguish between these three concepts. I just don't think we have a clear enough picture of what *any* of them are to draw sharp lines between them. I also doubt there are any *sharp* lines to be drawn along that spectrum.

But aren't these sorts of arguments what is required to get a clearer understanding of the concept? I don't think so. I think our current understanding of these concepts is a "pre-scientific" one, and that what these arguments are doing is trying to find some set of criteria within these concepts that sharply distinguishes each from the other.

I think that task is doomed to failure. Here's an analogy: when philosophers had a "pre-scientific" understanding of matter, they could get into all sorts of arguments about what was the difference was between liquids, solids and gasses (this is a thought-experiment, I don't know the historical details well enough to know specifically what happened). But they were never going to solve the problem just trying to find some criteria to sharply distinguish these concepts from each other.

We now know that what was required was to get an understanding that we'd now label with terms like 'chemistry' and 'physics' -- an understanding in terms of molecules, atoms, etc. What was required was to go deeper than their phenomenal concepts of 'liquid', 'solid' and 'gas'. To have an understanding of what each of those things actually are, rather than just how to distinguish between them.

So, in the case of data, information and knowledge we need to go beyond our phenomenal notions of them and get at their "underlying physics", so to speak. And when we do so we may find that -- like with 'liquids', 'solids' and 'gasses' -- there is an underlying unity there.

Nassim Taleb on the lack of respect for those not doing steady and predictable work

2011-09-07T14:13:00.000+10:00

Our society doesn't really understand work that doesn't deliver steady and predictable results. People working away on this kind of work tend not to get much respect. This is a real problem, because such work is essential to society. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb nicely describes what it's like for people having to deal with this lack of respect:

Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan's East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your "found nothing" as information and publish it.

Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. "He is doing very well," you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one.Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first impulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family reunions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone with a less "successful" brother?

Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped.

You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony.

(pg 86)

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

(pg 87)

This touches a nerve with me, as my research is definitely a long way from the steady and predictable, though I would say that I've been pretty fortunate in that I have had support and understanding from people.

The sound of things just out of reach

2011-08-25T17:57:00.004+10:00

#music. Songs that evoke a sense of things just out of reach, whether hazy childhood memories or something ethereal. All the songs here share a family resemblance that is best exemplified by Boards of Canada's music.

Memories of times past.

The bittersweet beauty found in desolate isolation

Ethereal

Subtle Euphoria

Also somewhat similarly evocative

iPhone app idea: "flow forms"

2011-07-17T15:39:00.004+10:00

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

"Flow forms"

This idea is for a novel (at least as far as I know) type of UI for tasks like adding new expenses in an expenses app, where each time you do it you choose from the same set of options and you frequently perform the task.

The point of it is to make doing the task as fast and fluid as possible.

It aims at doing this by removing two sources of friction that you find in the existing form-like UIs normally used to perform these sorts of tasks.

How the normal UIs work. There's a screen for the form, showing the different fields. You tap a field to be taken to a screen for the various options for that field. After you've chosen a value for the field, you're returned back to the main screen for the form.

Friction 1: you have to complete a task before you can see the screen for the next task. A task is either tapping a field to select it, or tapping a value for the field. So you have to tap a field's name before you can see the screen for choosing the value for that field. So when you go to perform that next task you have to take a little bit of time to survey the layout of the screen and find the item you want. Even if you're familiar with the screen's layout and roughly where the item you want is located on it, it still takes a little bit of time to find that item.

Fiction 2: a lot of finger movement. You have to move your finger around a bit - to tap a field here, to tap a field-value there, and so on. This doesn't sound like adding friction, but I think it is something that can be reduced.

These might not sound like much, but if you're frequently using the same form these things start to feel tedious.

The basic idea of the proposed technique.

The form would be just one long page, which would continuously scroll up the screen. Below each field name would be one or more horizontal bands, each divided into equal-sized cells. Each of those cells would represent a different value for the field. To fill out the form the user just needs to slide their finger to the left or right as the form scrolled by.

Essentially the user only needs to move their finger along one dimension, thus simplifying the task. And all they need to do is select field values. They don't have to tap to go to the next field. And the hope is that if the next field is visible on the screen while they're entering the current one, they will have some sense of where the items of a field are located before they come to select them.

Here's some more specific details of one way it could work:

the line for selecting a field's value would be divided into N equally-sized segments, where N is the number of different options. (if there were too many options I'd be split up over multiple lines).

probably have these lines fairly thick - like 2.5 cm, so that the user has a fair bit of time to select the item as it scrolls past.

each segment would contain an icon (or short-description, if there is one) representing the particular value.

when the user has their finger on a segment, it would show a label describing the value.

the user could swipe their finger across a line to see the descriptions of all the items.

if the user made a mistake or missed entering a value for a field, they could scroll the screen back down just like they do in other applications.

perhaps they could also be a way to pause the scrolling.

perhaps the user could flick their finger up (just like they do in documents on the iPhone to scroll down) to quickly move down to the next field, once they've selected a value in the current field.

the user may not want to enter the values for all of the fields. if they've only entered a couple of fields and want to save the record, they could click a save button (or perhaps a two-finger sideways swipe).

Questions

how to handle the input of numbers? Would it just scroll a keypad into view and then pause the scrolling while you enter in the value? Or could number-entry also be handled in a similar fashion to the rest of the form entry?
- it could show eleven choices across two rows: one for each of the ten digits and one for the decimal point.
- if after you selected on of those you moved your finger over to a 'gutter' area on the side of the screen it would assume you'd finished entering in the numeric value.
- but if you instead kept your finger within those gutters it would add another two rows for selecting another digit or decimal place.
- the above process would continue on until you'd finished entering the number in.
of course the question is whether this, or some alternative, would be convenient and fast enough.

similarly, how to handle the input of textual values (such as for a 'note' field for an expense item)? Would it just scroll up a keypad and a text area and pause the scrolling while you enter in the value? Or might there be useful way of entering it in a 'flowing' fashion, like I described concerning entering in numbers?

Notes

ideally it would show the fields in an order such that the most commonly used fields come first. I typically just enter two field values, and if these were the first two that came up I could just save the record after I'd selected values for them.

since the user is likely to buy the same item a number of times (e.g. I buy the same coffee everyday, or I might get a packet of chips every day) their muscle memory may be able to learn the path their finger traces out to enter the expense for that item.

to make entry even faster, you have an option to control the speed it scrolls at. As you got more familiar with it you could increase the speed. Perhaps there could be a speed-control slider that sat at the top of the screen next to the save button. It could even have a setting to automatically -- but gradually -- increase the speed over time. For example, it could get gradually faster every month.

Another question I have is: are there any other sorts of tasks or apps that this kind of UI technique might be useful for?

And finally, obviously it'd require a lot of experimentation to figure out how best to have the UI work. There's lots of different ways the basic idea could be done. Hopefully there would be one that is workable and which would make the task quicker and easier to perform.

iPhone app idea: "battlechat"

2011-07-17T15:33:00.002+10:00

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

"battlechat"

An app for a kind of verbal battle amongst friends.

I'm thinking of like the verbal battles rappers do. I'm also drawing on my own experience when I used to be bored at work I used to have a lot of email conversations with a friend that basically came down to creative ways of insulting each other.

So this'd be an app that was like a mix between real-time (textual) chat between a bunch of friends, but with some compeditive elements thrown in, to make it a bit game-like.

There'd be lots of different ways you could do this kind of thing, and getting it right would probably involve a lot of experimentation.

Here's one possibility.

The game is played in rounds. Each round lasts a set amount of time (e.g. 15 seconds). Players can type in whatever they want to say. And obviously they can make comments on what the others say.

At the end of the round, the players anonomously vote on who said the 'best' stuff.

The more 'votes' you get, the more "ammunition" you can use and you can choose who to expend it on. Players would start off with some amount of health and when they're 'fired on' they loose health. They get knocked out when their health reaches zero, and have to sit on the sidelines, so to speak.

Last person standing wins.

-

I can imagine the players being represented by their twitter or facebook picture, but with cartoon facial expressions and arms and legs attached to them (the facial expressions wouldn't have to be matched up with the face in the picture, or wouldn't even require a face in the picture, for the effect to work, I suspect... the idea is to do it for comic effect). Then when they're hit with some ammo, the cartoony facial expression shows an expression of pain, falls over, etc.

After thinking of this idea I came across Turntable.fm which while very different also works on the idea of adding game-like elements to more socially-oriented activities. That's a general area that could be explored.

iPhone app idea: 'ground control' side-scrolling car game

2011-07-17T15:29:00.004+10:00

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

'ground control' 2D side-scrolling car game

In this game the player doesn't control the car, but the ground level. Sliding their finger up raises the height of the ground at that point, and also increases the slope of the ground leading up to that point. Sliding their finger down lowers the ground level.

The screen is constantly scrolling across with the car always moving forwards. The car might always sit about 1/3 in from the left of the screen.

Steeper uphill makes the car move slower. Steeper downhill makes it go faster. A small uphil can be used as a jump, making the car fly through the air.

These techniques could be used to make the car avoid static and moving obstacles, jump over crevices, etc.

---

update, 02 Aug 2011: I just heard about the game 'Bumpy Road' which works using this kind of mechanic (see the video on the linked page). It seems to use the mechanic in a different way, though. It seems it as effectively like an alternative to having a 'jump' button. I was thinking more of it as a way of changing the landscape ahead of the car, to speed it up or slow it down or to create ramp-like jumps.

Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake

2011-06-19T23:29:00.002+10:00

Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake

This simple cake is mildly sweet, and has a mild, slightly eggy flavour. It also has a somewhat unique texture.

My mum used to make it sometimes when I was growing up, and I've always liked it. I haven't seen it in Chinese restaurants or bakeries, so many people would probably have never seen it before.

I'm afraid I don't know what recipe book this recipe was originally from. I've just got a photocopied page of this recipe.

eggs, 4

sugar, 1 cup. brown sugar is probably better for this

oil, 6 dessertspoons

milk, 6 dessertspoons

plain flour, 1 ½ cups

baking powder, 1 tsp

Beat the eggs and sugar together until thick.

Add the oil and milk.

Sift the flour and baking powder.

Stir it into the egg mixture till smooth.

Pour this mixture into a 9 inch sponge tin
- (or you multiple smaller containers, like small ramekins).
Leave the tin uncovered.

Steam it for 25 minutes
- e.g. put the tin into a large saucepan and let it stand on a small rack above the water.

It seems to be a bit tricky to steam the cake long enough that it is cooked inside (and not sticky) yet not too long and have it dry out too much. You might have to experiment a bit with the timing. Also, if you cook it in multiple smaller containers, like small ramekins, it obviously will cook the center of the cakes more quickly.

Other versions of this recipe

Making Vim copy all yanked text to the system clipboard

2011-04-11T18:14:00.004+10:00

In addition to the usual cut and paste operations found in most other editors, Vim has a 'yank' command that can be followed by a motion operator.

So you can type yw to copy a word to the clipboard, or y3w to copy three words, or yip to copy the current paragraph to the clipboard, and so on.

Which is useful. But by default the text copied by the yank command is only accessible from within that same instance of Vim.

So if you've opened another instance of Vim in a new window^[1] and you want to paste the text into that, or you want to paste it into another program, you can't.

An IMO problematic solution is to set 'unnamed' in the 'clipboard' option in your .vimrc / _vimrc, like so

set clipboard+=unnamed

this works but it has a downside - it also means all deleted text gets sent to the system clipboard.

Most of the time I delete text because I just want to get rid of it. When I tried setting this option I kept overwriting the clipboard contents (that I did want) with the deleted text that I didn't want.

And if you do actually want to delete text _and_ copy it to the clipboard you can use a cut command - i.e. C-x. So set clipboard+=unnamed doesn't seem like a good idea.

Here's a better solution, that just ensures yanked text is copied to the system clipboard. Just add the following line to your .vimrc / _vimrc:

nnoremap y "+y

The "+ tells Vim to yank into the + register, which is the system register.

[1] I know many people like to work within one Vim instance and use splits/buffers and tabs to arrange their files, and may want to suggest this as an alternative, but I find it very useful to work with multiple Vim instances. It's a long story, but I like to be able to spatially arrange the (OS)windows in a certain way that reflects the relationship between the files in them, and you can't achieve what I want with a single Vim instance.

idea: personal subject-lines for emails.

2011-02-15T00:31:00.003+10:00

#gmail. Some emails you just read the once and never come back to them. Other emails contain information you'll want to reference in the future, which means you'll need to be able to find them again down the line.

There's lots of things that help in your search for an email - like knowing roughly when it was sent, so you can scroll down to that point in your inbox, or knowing terms mentioned in its body, so you can search on them. Sometimes you scan the subject-lines of the emails in your inbox or search results.

But sometimes those subject-lines are aren't very informative.

Some are just too generic (like "hi"). Or they may just not be specific enough for what you're looking for.

At the times when you know you'll want to find an email again later on, and it's obvious to you that the current subject-line isn't going to be that helpful, it'd be handy if you could stick a 'custom subject-line' over the top of the existing one.

After you'd added this custom subject-line in your inbox, that's the subject-line you'd see for that email, but it'd be clearly distinguished to show that it wasn't the original subject-line, and there'd be a way to find out what that original subject-line was.

As with any possible feature addition, the question is whether its benefits exceed its costs. This feature would be handy in some situations, but is the additional overhead in the UI and effort to come up with and type the new subject-lines worth it, for example? I doubt you could really tell if it's worth it for a feature like this unless you tried it out. You might get some idea from thinking through, in a lot of detail, scenarios of what the UI and usage-experience would be like if it existed.

Idea: drag'n'drop merge of gmail conversations

2011-02-06T15:04:00.006+10:00

#Gmail allows you to drag and drop the conversations in your inbox (for example, you can drag a conversation to a label, to apply that label to it). It'd be great if you could drop one conversation onto another in order to combine them.

Recently I've been planning a holiday with some friends and this planning, and the associated details, like confirmations of flight bookings, spans several separate email conversations.

If I could put them all together in one place it would make it so much easier to deal with the information. (I've submitted this idea as a feature suggestion to the gmail team).

(for interest's sake, the planning is for a trip to South Australia).

Song: "Nuclear Fusion" by Mat Zo

2010-08-15T08:35:00.004+10:00

The odd bit of trance music I'd heard in the past hadn't grabbed me that much, but I've been trying out a lot more of it recently and some tracks I really like.. like this one "Nuclear Fusion" by Mat Zo

nice smooth sound, and nicely layered beats and rhythms that really pump along.

Rex Mundi Remix:

Songs with energy/intensity that keeps on building

2010-08-14T02:02:00.006+10:00

I love it where songs have an energy or intensity that just keeps on building and building and building, like something is going to burst but doesn't. Here's my favourite examples:

Escape Velocity, The Chemical Brothers. Pretty much the whole song is like this.

FML, Deadmau5. Love the crazy rising intensity in the intro to this. [*edit: changed video to a version that sounds like album version]

Come with us, The Chemical Brothers. Pretty awesome for the first 1:15
mins or so, but falls a bit flat after that.

The suggestion I sent to @TransLinkSEQ

2010-06-24T01:57:00.002+10:00

#bnept. I sent the following suggestion to Translink regarding their tweets about service disruptions. Their @TransLinkSEQ account sends out tweets like:

Airport Line train service disruption. Visit
http://translink.com.au for more.

To find out the details you have to go to http://translink.com.au,
find the bit with the link to more info. E.g. for that item, there's
a bit of info on the site

Passenger alert
Airport Line train service disruption from Wednesday 23 June

then you have to click the link on that alert which takes you to the page with
the actual details of it, which is located at
http://translink.com.au/servicechange.php?1277271606

Things would be much more direct and simpler if the original tweet
just referred directly to that page, as in:

Airport Line train service disruption.
http://translink.com.au/servicechange.php?1277271606

(or of course the URL could be shortened by a URL shortner like bit.ly).

Promoting conversations to more heavyweight communication mediums

2010-04-11T17:54:00.003+10:00

There's all these different communication mediums -- IM, twitter, email, wave etc -- each of which have their own place because they have different affordances making them suited to different sorts of purposes.

But I wonder whether we can have better integration between them.

One dimension on which these mediums differ is their 'weight' - Twitter is quite lightweight, wheras email is more heavyweight, and wave appears to be weightier still.

Sometimes it would be useful to 'promote' a conversation from a lighterweight medium to a heavierweight one. What might start out as a twitter conversation might end up being better served by a wave.

Perhaps communication tools could support this conversation 'promotion'. For example, by supporting a full history of the conversation, spanning any changes in medium. The tools could also have knowledge of peoples' different identities across the different mediums, so that if you went from an email to certain recipients to a wave, all those people could be automatically added to the wave.

(and along with the notion of 'promoting' conversations, you could also have the inverse - demoting conversations).

Mangalam's Sothy Recipe

2010-03-08T23:20:00.002+10:00

Mangalam's Sothy Recipe

Soothy (pronouced like "soo-dy") is a South-Indian dish featuring coconut cream or milk and fenugreek that you can eat with rice or string hoppers (if you can get them).

The dish is quite liquidy from all the coconut milk. The idea is to drown the rice in it a bit, and the rice will soak up some of it.

oil, 1 tbsp
fenugreek, 1 tsp
brown onion, 1 medium, diced
yellow capsicum, 1, diced
curry leaves, 1 strand of (optional)
red chili, 1 (more if you want it spicy)
tumeric, 1/4 tsp
coconut milk, 100ml
water, 100ml
tomatoes, 2 medium
salt, for seasoning

Heat the oil in a pan in low heat. Fry the fenugreek until lightly brown.

Be careful not to burn - the fenugreek as it becomes bitter if it is burned.

Add the onion and fry until its soft.

Add the capsicum and saute for about 2 minutes.

Add the water, chili, tumeric, tomatoes, curry leaves (optional) and bring to boil.

Then add coconut milk and season with salt.

Remove from heat once it boils.

A goal for education: giving people confidence in their learning ability

2010-03-02T13:54:00.007+10:00

Too many adults fear learning. They think they can't do it. I think a lot of this comes from their school experience.

I think education should have the explicit goal of preventing this fear. Of course, this shouldn't be the only goal of education, but I think it should be there to instill people with confidence that they actually can learn about things, so that they will feel able to learn new things on their own later in life.

This doesn't mean having some lame attempt to simply tell students they can learn things, nor does it mean just getting them to believe they can. (I'm thinking of the lame way that self-esteem seems to be taught - or at least how it was taught in my school). Just telling people how they should feel doesn't do anything.

People actually need to successfully learn things. Only then will be able to build confidence. Then they'll genuinely know that they can do it.

I'm not saying it's practical to do a perfect job at this, I'm just saying it is an area we should target and try and do better at. From my experience of schooling, I don't think this was a terribly high priority. It seemed to be more about grading people.

People also need to appreciate that learning things can be difficult, that there can be extended periods of pain with no apparent progress before finally getting over the hump. That's probably a separate matter, and perhaps one that is harder to get people to appreciate. It's one that is especially applicable to when people head out into the "real world".

My Vim setup

2010-02-22T13:15:00.002+10:00

[updated: 11.4.10; 23.2.10; 17.1.10; 29.8.09; 31.8.09]

A description of my Vim setup, mainly for my own future reference, though could be of use for others. Intending to update this post when I make changes to the setup.

$VIM/_gvimrc file


" The commands in this are executed when the GUI is started.
"
" To use it, copy it to
"     for Unix and OS/2:  ~/.gvimrc
"       for Amiga:  s:.gvimrc
"  for MS-DOS and Win32:  $VIM\_gvimrc
"     for OpenVMS:  sys$login:.gvimrc

" Make external commands work through a pipe instead of a pseudo-tty
"set noguipty

" set the X11 font to use
" set guifont=-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1

set ch=2  " Make command line two lines high

set mousehide  " Hide the mouse when typing text

" Make shift-insert work like in Xterm
map <S-Insert> <MiddleMouse>
map! <S-Insert> <MiddleMouse>

" Only do this for Vim version 5.0 and later.
if version >= 500

 " I like highlighting strings inside C comments
 let c_comment_strings=1

 " Switch on syntax highlighting if it wasn't on yet.
 if !exists("syntax_on")
   syntax on
 endif

 " Switch on search pattern highlighting.
 set hlsearch

 " For Win32 version, have "K" lookup the keyword in a help file
 "if has("win32")
 "  let winhelpfile='windows.hlp'
 "  map K :execute "!start winhlp32 -k <cword> " . winhelpfile <CR>
 "endif

 " Set nice colors
 " background for normal text is light grey
 " Text below the last line is darker grey
 " Cursor is green, Cyan when ":lmap" mappings are active
 " Constants are not underlined but have a slightly lighter background
 " highlight Normal guibg=grey90
 "   highlight Cursor guibg=Green guifg=NONE
 "   highlight lCursor guibg=Cyan guifg=NONE
 "   highlight NonText guibg=grey80
 "   highlight Constant gui=NONE guibg=grey95
 "   highlight Special gui=NONE guibg=grey95

endif

set scrolloff=6
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab
set linebreak                               " so it won't linebreak in the middle of a word
set ignorecase smartcase
set columns=75
set lines=36
set backup                                  " turn on backup
set backupdir=C:\james\Data\vimTempFiles    " Set where to store backups
set dir=c:\temp                             " Set where to store swap files
set autoindent
set path+=c:\james\PhD\sources\notes\
set browsedir=current                       " open file browser in current dir

iabbrev nad and
iabbrev adn and
iabbrev teh the
iabbrev hte the
iabbrev taht that
iabbrev htose those
iabbrev waht what
iabbrev htings things
iabbrev somethign something
iabbrev somehting something
iabbrev followign following
iabbrev thigns things
iabbrev scuh such
iabbrev everythign everything
iabbrev htink think
iabbrev thign thing

" the following is so the XML escaping/URL encoding mappings
" in allml.vim are available globally

let g:allml_global_maps = 1

" for snipMate - set it so snippets can automatically use it
let g:snips_author = "James Cole"


set selectmode=key



" jump to start of next section (but dont wrap around past end of file)

function! NextSection()
   call search("^:", "W")
endfunction

map <C-j> :call NextSection()<CR>




" jump to end of previous section (but dont wrap around past start of file)

function! PrevSection()
   call search("^:", "bW")
endfunction


map <C-k> :call PrevSection()<CR>


" jump to start of this sections parent section

function! ParentSection()
   let currHeadingLine = getline(search("^:", "bnW"))
   let currHeadingLvl = strlen( matchstr( currHeadingLine, "^:\\+") )
   let parentHeadingLvl = repeat(":", currHeadingLvl - 1)
   let parentHeadingSearchPat = "^" . parentHeadingLvl . "[^:]"
   call search(parentHeadingSearchPat, "bW")
endfunction

map <C-h> :call ParentSection()<CR>




set laststatus=2
highlight statusline guibg=LightGray guifg=DarkGray gui=none

set statusline=
set statusline+=%{getline(search(\"^:\",\ \"bnW\"))}   " show curr heading
set statusline+=%=                                     " show rest right justified.
set statusline+=\ \ %c\,\ %l\ (%L)                     " col, line (tot lines)



function! NoHLSearch(pat)
  call search(a:pat)
  set nohls
  set hls
endfunction
command -nargs=1 S :call NoHLSearch(<f-args>)

" F4 - show list of headings in document
map <F4> :g/^:/<CR>

" F5 - toggle highlight search
map <F5> :set hls!<bar>set hls?<CR>

" F6 - change all the non-displayed chars to plain-text equivs
"    (note how have to escape pipes between commands, and
"     double escape pipes within replace commands)
map <F6> :%s/—/--/ge \| %s/…/.../ge  \| %s/“\\|”/"/ge  \|  %s/‘\\|’/'/ge<CR>


" F7 - to condense selected lines
" very quick a dirty way to do it, should put all the words in a datastructure
" and handle words and their variants ending with s better
map <silent> <F7> :s/\<and\>/\&/ge  \| '<,'>s/\<that\>/tt/ge \| '<,'>s/\<between\>/b\/ween/ge \| '<,'>s/\<with\>/w\//ge \| '<,'>s/\<information\>/info/ge \| '<,'>s/\<computation\>/compu/ge \| '<,'>s/\<are\>/r/ge \| '<,'>s/\<picture\>/pic/ge \| '<,'>s/\<to\>/2/ge \| '<,'>s/\<into\>/in2/ge \| '<,'>s/\<be\>/b/ge \| '<,'>s/\<defined\>/defn'd/ge \| '<,'>s/\<for\>/4/ge \| '<,'>s/\<However\>/Howevr/ge \| '<,'>s/\<definition\>/defn /ge \| '<,'>s/\<particular\>/partic/ge \| '<,'>s/\<thing\>/thng/ge \| '<,'>s/\<things\>/thngs/ge \| '<,'>s/\<which\>/whch/ge \| '<,'>s/\<part\>/prt/ge \| '<,'>s/\<argument\>/arg/ge \| '<,'>s/\<you\>/u/ge\| '<,'>s/\<want\>/wnt/ge \| '<,'>s/\<other\>/othr/ge \| '<,'>s/\<correspond\>/corresp/ge \| '<,'>s/\<for\>/4/ge\| '<,'>s/\<represents\>/reps/ge \| '<,'>s/\<above\>/abve/ge \| '<,'>s/\<character\>/char/ge \| '<,'>s/\<characters\>/chars/ge \| '<,'>s/\<required\>/req'd/ge \| '<,'>s/\<undefined\>/undef'd/ge \| '<,'>s/\<replacement\>/replacemnt/ge \| '<,'>s/\<destination\>/dest/ge \| '<,'>s/\<source\>/src/ge \| '<,'>s/\<your\>/ure/ge \| '<,'>s/\<languages\>/langs/ge \| '<,'>s/\<from\>/frm/ge \| '<,'>s/\<original\>/orig/ge \| '<,'>s/\<about\>/abt/ge \| '<,'>s/\<property\>/prop/ge \| '<,'>s/\<attribute\>/attrib/ge \| '<,'>s/\<question\>/qu/ge \| '<,'>s/\<different\>/diff/ge \| '<,'>s/\<philosophy\>/philos/ge \| '<,'>s/\<implementation\>/impl/ge \| '<,'>s/\<required\>/req'd/ge \| '<,'>s/\<elements\>/elems/ge \| '<,'>s/\<element\>/elem/ge<CR>

" F11 - to current phd writing directory
map <F11> :cd c:\james\phd\working\2010-1<CR>

" F12 - to phd sources notes directory
map <F12> :cd c:\james\phd\sources\notes<CR>


set splitbelow


" coz align.vim tells me i need to do this
" (it also says to set nocp, but im not sure if should)
filetype plugin on


set gfn=Lucida_Sans_Typewriter:h10:cANSI

" unicode so will display chars pasted from web-pages, PDFs etc (see usr_45.txt)
set encoding=utf-8


colorscheme morning

" insert '.x' at the start of the line - i've got syntax highlighting so
" that this line is 'crossed off' (as a plain text equiv so strikethrough)
" i use it for my planning docs and the 'to do' sorts of items in it
map <F8> <ESC>I.x <ESC>


set textwidth=75
set formatoptions+=a


let g:Tlist_Auto_Open=1
set updatetime=100
let tlist_txt_settings  = 'txt;h:headings'
nnoremap <silent> <F9> :TlistToggle<CR>
" to update tagslist whenever saving
nnoremap <C-s> :w<CR> <BAR>:TlistUpdate<CR>
inoremap <C-s> <C-o>:w<CR><ESC>:TlistUpdate<CR>
" To not display the Vim fold column in the taglist window
let g:Tlist_Enable_Fold_Column = 0
" only show contents of the current file in current tab
let g:Tlist_Show_One_File = 1



cd c:\james\phd\working\2010-1


set guitablabel=%m\ %t

" 'frozen cursor' scrolling
unmap <C-y>
" ^ give C-Y its 'orig' behavior of scrolling down 1 line
map <A-k> <C-Y>
noremap <A-k> <C-Y>k
map <C-Y> <C-R>       " this makes C-Y redo again,
noremap <A-j> <C-E>j




function! JamesTabLabel()
   let label = ''
   let bufnrlist = tabpagebuflist(v:lnum)

   " Add '+' if one of the buffers in the tab page is modified
   for bufnr in bufnrlist
     if getbufvar(bufnr, "&modified")
       let label = '+'
       break
     endif
   endfor

   " Append the number of windows in the tab page if more than one
   " let wincount = tabpagewinnr(v:lnum, '$')
   " if wincount > 1
   "   let label .= wincount
   " endif
   " if label != ''
   "   let label .= ' '
   " endif
   " ^ commented out because it includes taglist window in count
   "   an enhancement would be to filter it out

   let fileName = bufname(bufnrlist[tabpagewinnr(v:lnum) - 1])

   " show only the filename (get rid of all the path details)
   let fileName = substitute(fileName, ".*\\", "", "")

   " 'escape' ampersands, so they 1) aren't hidden
   "  & 2) make character following them underlined
   let fileName = substitute(fileName, "&", "&&", "g")

   " don't show '.txt' extensions
   let fileName = substitute(fileName, "\.txt$", "", "")

   let label = label . fileName

   return label
endfunction

set guitablabel=%{JamesTabLabel()}

set guioptions-=T    " no toolbar


" pump out lines below the cursor
nnoremap <C-i> o<ESC>k

$VIM/vimfiles/ftdetect/txt.vim


au BufNewFile,BufRead *.txt                     setf txt

$HOME/ctags.cnf (unix/mac: $HOME/.ctags. ctags website).


--langdef=txt
--langmap=txt:.txt
--txt-kinds=+h
--regex-txt=/^(:.*)$/\1/h,headings/

($HOME is an environment variable ctags uses; that's where it looks for the configuration file - I've set mine to same dir as $VIM)

$VIM/vimfiles/syntax/txt.vim


syntax match lvl1Heading /^:[^:].*$/
syntax match lvl2Heading /^::[^:].*$/
syntax match lvl3Heading /^:::[^:].*$/
syntax match lvl4Heading /^::::[^:].*$/
syntax match lvl5Heading /^:::::.*$/

highlight lvl1Heading guifg=#0000FF
highlight lvl2Heading guifg=#0075FF
highlight lvl3Heading guifg=#0095FF
highlight lvl4Heading guifg=#60B9FF
highlight lvl5Heading guifg=#90DCFF


syntax match crossedOutLine /^\s*\.x.*$/
highlight crossedOutLine guifg=#AAAAAA

Add-on scripts

matchit
three related ones by Tim Pope

snipMate - TextMate-style snippets for Vim
- though i haven't used this one much yet

taglist

for this i've installed ctags, and put it in my PATH environment variable (in my case in c:\programs\ctags58)

to get it to work properly with tabs (the 'tabs' for selecting different files, not the 'tabs' for indenting) apply the following patch

--- plugin/taglist.vim 2008-08-13 19:04:48 +0000
+++ plugin/taglist.vim 2008-08-27 19:24:49 +0000
@@ -4097,6 +4097,12 @@
" window. Used after entering a tab. If this is not done, then the folds
" are not properly created for taglist windows displayed in multiple
tabs.
function! s:Tlist_Refresh_Folds()
+
+ " Not needed when one file is displayed.
+ if g:Tlist_Show_One_File
+ return
+ endif
+
let winnum = bufwinnr(g:TagList_title)
if winnum == -1
return

How I've dealt with Vim's temp files

Details here.

Thought: virtual iPhone for cut and paste between phone and computer

2010-01-28T14:27:00.003+10:00

I'd like a 'virtual iphone' program on my computer that would open when I connected my iPhone. The program would emulate my iphone, including all of the data and applications on it.

The virtual and actual phones would be synched in real time. If I did anything on either my virtual iPhone or my actual iPhone, the other one would act in exactly the same way. (to get the most out of some apps you'd need some way to emulate multi-touch).

Why? So when u copied text or images in the virtual iPhone it'd appear on the windows clipboard. And items in the windows clipboard would be pastable into the virtual iPhone and thus directly into my actual iPhone.

Say I had some text in my iPhone notes app that I wanted to put into a text file I'm editing on my computer - i think this cut and paste between the virtual iPhone and the text editor would be the most convenient way of doing it.

(and it'd be even better if the phone could _wirelessly_ connect up with the computer...)

On language documentation for experienced programmers

2010-01-19T17:19:00.001+10:00

For someone familiar with programming it's pretty easy to get going with a new language. The new language will likely contain many familiar concepts, just perhaps done a bit differently. There are stylistic differences between languages, but I'm talking about the basics here.

What is the most efficient way to present these programmers with what they need to know to get going with a new language?

I tend to find most documentation isn't that good for this task. What I find useful is concrete examples of the features, directly showing the syntax and the results you get for particular inputs.

Like if I already know how to do regular expressions and want to see how they're done in Python, I just want to see what a call looks like in Phython and see things like what sort of value is returned if there is no match.

So perhaps you could have documentation that was essentially a representative bunch of simple examples showing the exact inputs and exact outputs.

You'd have clusters of examples showing the different variations on a particular construct or function. Eg those showing the syntax for doing diffferent things with regular expressions. They'd come with brief descriptions of what is being illustrated. Eg 'non-greedy matches'.

It'd be even better of you could edit the examples then and there to modify the input values and see how it effected the results.

The idea would be to have the information in a format that is concise and easy to scan, to make it as quick as possible to lookup what you want to do.

Amon Tobin's update about forthcoming album

2010-01-19T00:54:00.002+10:00

Amon Tobin talks about progress towards his next album. This is the first time I've heard any mention of it

as far as a new album, well I know I've been quiet lately but hopefully it will be worth it. I've been building the studio and my own new tools (software) specifically for it which in itself takes time. I have something quite particular in mind but it requires allot of learning and preparation. necessary steps for evolution if you will.. I'm more impatient than anyone though, swear I feel like a kid when I think about it. but yes will be a while yet.. in the meantime please check the new site when it's up for updates and thank you all as always for your support and curiosity in this thing I love.

idea: using 'photo sequences' in photo viewing apps

2010-01-18T23:33:00.004+10:00

Say you've got a bunch of pics in a directory or in your iPhone photo roll and amongst those there's a set of consecutive pics that form a grouping. You might have looked at a unit to rent and taken several pictures of the place - these photos would be in a consecutive sequence, bounded at both ends by photos taken at other times and places.

A photo viewing app might be able to automatically determine such groupings. It could use the photo metadata about when and where the photos were taken, and form groups of photos where each successive photo was not taken too far away from, and not too long after the one prior to it. Perhaps some AI techniques could help out as well (though I'm a bit doubtful of any of the existing techniques being good enough to do a sufficiently useful job).

It's hard to know how well these groupings could be automated without actually trying it. Lets consider the possibility that the software could do a reasonable job.

The iPhone photo roll is just a flat sequence of photos. Each photo you take gets appended to the end of it. As people have pointed out, the iPhone tends to eschew hierarchial storage of information within folders and sub-folders, instead using flat storage like this. Storing information in a flat structure in chronological order seems a reasonable solution that meshes reasonably well with human memory. One problem with it, though is that you can end up with a huge number of items -- in this case photos -- all lumped in together.

An app that could detect the photo groupings could have ways to browse the photos in terms of them.

Perhaps each grouping would be displayed as a line of thumbnails, with the groupings shown one after the other as you go down the screen. You'd scroll down to view more of the groupings. If there were more photos in a grouping than you could fit in a line of the screen (a likely possibility) it could continue the line off to the right - requiring a horizontal scroll to see them. Or maybe it would just only show as many as would fit on the screen, and use an icon to show there were more. You could click on that to view the first unshown photo.

I think it mightn't matter so much if you only see some of the photos in each group - hopefully the ones you would see would be enough to remind you of the subjectmatter of those photos and know if any one you were after was in that group or not. And since only a single line is shown for each group, it means that you could (i'd think) be able to scroll more quickly through all of your photos.

Of course it might not be as efficient if a lot of groupings only contained a one, two or a handful of photos.

There are other possibilities for displaying based on groupings. The screen could show one grouping at a time, where you swipe to the right to see the next group. And if too many photos in the group to display at once, scroll down to see the others (like how he iPhone photo roll works).

The general idea is that using photo groupings would be a way to give a lightweight, automatic structure to the sequence of photos -- without having hierarchies, thus preserving the benefits of 'flat' layouts iPhone uses.

notes

When viewing the photos one by one and you got to the first image in a photo group, it could do the following. Instead of viewing that first photo, it could show thumbnails for all the photos in the group. You click on one of them to jump straight to it. Of if you just scrolled across to the next photo it would _then_ show you the first photo in the group.

Alternatively, when you hit the first photo in the group it could show it, but then underneath it show a line of thumbnails for the other photos in the group (and perhaps it would do the same when you were viewing any of the other photos in the group).

Regarding the automatic determining of the groups, perhaps the software could let you manually adjust its auto-groupings. It could also let you create your own groupings and give the groupings names. I suspect though that for a device like the iPhone, this'd be getting too complicated.

A practical way to compensate musicians?

2010-01-03T13:57:00.003+10:00

These days purchasing music is pretty much a voluntary act of charity. The listener decides if they'll pay.

I think a number of ppl would like to pay some amount to the artists but not the amount the music's sold for. Which means they end up just pirating it for free.

They might pay something if it was an amount they were comfortable with and doing so was super low friction.

Since they'd only pay what they're comfortable with they'd have to set the price.

I'm not talking about how things should be in an ideal world. But trying to see what is the best that can be done in the world as it is.

You could incorporate a new feature into music playing programs like WinAmp and iTunes. When they installed they'd ask the user if they want to make a monthly contribution amount that'd be distributed amongst the artists whose songs the person plays. The user could enter in an amount they were comfortable with - eg $5. Obviously this'd have to be connected with something like pay pal or a credit card.

The user would of course be able to later change this amount or stop the payments all together.

The programs can track which songs by which artists the person plays (like plugins for things like last.fm currently do - in fact the scheme I'm describing could alternatively be done via a site like that).

It'd then divide the monthly amount appropriately between those artists. Obviously there'd need to be infrastructure to get all these paymets to them. That'd probably be the hard bit to do.

This seems pretty low friction Once it's set up the user doesnt need to think about it or think about how the amount of music they're playing is going to cost them. The amount they pay is known in advance and is a flat amount that's the same no matter how few or many songs they listen to in the month.

It could be set up so a verified display of their contribution amount could, if they wanted, be shown on their facebook profile or whatnot, which might apply a little social pressure to others to contribute.

Making these contributions the default on music players could harness the power of defaults.

And of course there's the potential to apply such a model to other media such as movies or newspapers.

The iPhone analogue of Vim-like editing?

2010-01-02T19:00:00.002+10:00

What'd b the iPhone/touchscreen analogue of Vim-like editing?

The most obvious thing would b to have modes.

This might not seem that useful. After all a lot of the benefit of having modes is being able to explicitly specify positions in the text or blocks of text, such as 'the end of this sentence' or 'this paragraph', whih is less of a benefit with a touchscreen coz u can directly point at and select things.

Still I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to b easier to specify certain text positions/ranges in a vim-like way.

Another benefit of modal editing is dealing with structure such as markup or code.

Coz the iPhone has a virtual keyboard it could have different virtual keyboards for each mode. At least it'd be interesting to see if this made things better.

You could poss also use gestures (or maybe even phone movements) to specify certain commands.

And I wonder if such an editor could help w/ coding on phone ala Y-Combinator's RFS 5: Development on Handhelds.

Thought: iPhone 'slush pool' for making small payments practical

2010-01-02T15:42:00.003+10:00

Just some quick notes. iPhone 'slush pool'
For small, fairly frequent payment amounts to work it needs to be low friction
No putting in ure iTunes password for each payment
The idea:
You have a 'slush pool'. A max amount put in at a time - a small amount like $5. You enter your password when u do this.
And you can use this to make small quick payments. Like paying 4 media content.
Coz u don't enter password it's not as safe. Someone could grab your phone and buy stuff w/ it. But that's ok. The idea is tt this is a reasonable tradeoff of risk vs convenience.

"Re-thinking WYSIWYG editors for Web CMS"

2009-12-04T09:48:00.003+10:00

Some thoughts from the Amaxus people on keyboard-only ways to add formatting and html links in rich-text editors or text-areas using just the keyboard.

They consider these options: Automatic Markdown Conversion, and Inline Formatting (introduce a keyboard shortcut that initiates ‘inline formatting’ - basically shows what the shortcut keys are for different types of formatting and which gives you an easy way to set which text the formatting will apply to).

Also, some Hacker News comments on that post.

My interest in this is how we can have editors that can handle structure (the formatting and link information requires structured information. but also stuff like the structure of code and XML) in a fluid fashion. I think there's a lot of room for improvement there.

"Early-stage theories"

2009-11-11T14:02:00.000+10:00

Trevor Blackwell of Y Combinator has a nice post on how start-up founders need to be like people developing early-stage theories. Kinda hard to explain, but it's quite good.

'Simplicity is Complicated'

2009-11-01T22:12:00.000+10:00

As I've mentioned before, I think most discussions of simplicity are, well, major oversimplifications.

When people say the problem with certain systems is 'complexity' and that the solution is 'simplicity' what they really mean is actually specific sorts of complexity are the problem, and specific sorts of simplicity are the solution. I don't even think the issue is really best understood as a matter of of 'complexity' or 'simplicity', but that's another matter.

In 'Simplicity is Complicated', Avdi Grimm tries to tease out various different sorts of simplicity. He also talks about the tradeoffs that can be involved in each type.

These are the types he talks about

Minimizing unnecessary effort.

Hiding complexity.

Avoiding difficult-to-understand features.

Avoiding formal architecture.

Elegance of design.

Staying close to the domain.

An idea for a multi-touch rhythm game

2009-10-25T22:18:00.003+10:00

Here's an idea for a rhythm game for the iPhone that exploits the phone's multi-touch capabilities.

Most rhythm games involve pressing or tapping on one of a fixed set of positions. In Guitar Hero those positions are button positions, in Dance-Dance Revolution they're floor tiles, and so on.

Touch-screens let the taps be anywhere on the screen. Like in Elite Beat Agents on the DS where circular markers pop up on the screen showing you where to tap. The sequence of places to tap usually follow a spatial pattern - eg in a line or an arc. Following these patterns around adds some interest to the game. It's more dynamic. Rhythm and movement work well together.

On a multi-touch screen you could have a different style of game. It could have the user make multiple touches at once, where the had to simutaneiusly tap points in a particular spatial pattern. It might get them to simultaneously tap three points arranged in a line, then simultaneously tap four points arranged like the end points of a cross. The focus would be on the progression of spatial configurations.

And just like how Elite Beat Agents also sometimes made the player slide the stylus along a path, this game could make the use simultaneously slide fingers accross multiple paths. For example, where their fingers start out at like the four corners of a box and have to simultaneously slide towards the box's center.

I'm imagining something where it's like the players fingers are performing a dance. Something a bit like twister for your fingers, but rhythm elements to it. Maybe you could call it Finger Dance.

(this is the first time I've composed a post on my iPhone - nice use of a bus trip)

Microsoft's 'Courier' tablet actually looks quite cool (video)

2009-10-02T16:35:00.001+10:00

See this video:

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

"Ten IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get"

2009-10-01T17:29:00.006+10:00

update, 25.8.10: here is a related blog post by Andy Brice, "10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software": 1. Copy and paste, 2. The difference between web and native applications, 3. Data storage, 4. The jargon you use, 5. Right click, 6. Concurrency, 7. What changes can be reversed, 8. The need for backups, 9. That they should read the documentation, 10. Problem exists between keyboard and chair" (discussion on Hacker News)

Stu Smith writes about Ten IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get.

It's easy to take things for granted when you're familiar with them. The ten items he describes are:

1. When to Click and When to Double-Click
2. Hierarchical Folders
3. Using Add/Remove Programs
4. Installing Bundled Software Hurts
5. That There Is A Choice Of Software
6. What Updates Do
7. Software Licensing
8. What Memory (RAM) Is For
9. How To Use Networking
10. The Display Is Not The Computer

Some additional ones from the comments:

"selecting vs highlighting"

"selecting vs highlighting": This one is really technical for the layperson because it isn’t what they first think. I often make the mistake of telling people to "select" a piece of text instead of "highlight" it. To them, "select" has to do with tangible objects on the screen like pictures whereas "highlight" has to do with text selection. I probably say "select" because on Mac OS X (the OS I use) text really does act like any other object. It can be dragged and manipulated like everything else, and this behaviour is much more obvious than on Windows. I might also say it because I understand some of the mechanics behind the way applications are made and, of course, the primary language of Mac apps is (Object)ive-C.

The scrollbar:

"Why do I pull it down to make the screen go up?"

being able to run multiple simultaneous tasks, and the relationship between opened-windows and the desktop:

Many users don’t understand that computers can run multiple simultaneous tasks. Users tend to see programs (from opening to use to closing them) as a linear process they must step through properly, forward and backward. i.e. Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Word > now I need to get "on the Internet" > Close ("X out of") Word > Start > All Programs > Internet Explorer. Rinse and repeat.

Many people don’t realize that programs are opened in a Window on top of their desktop. I can’t recount how many times I had a small web browser window open on a 30? display only to have people say "Wow your screen is very small," only to have them change to "WOW! That is a big screen!" once I’ve pressed the maximize button.<

I find both of these concepts tie nicely together in showing that users are somehow trained to have a sort of "tunnel vision" when using programs. I think the classic desktop GUI was originally centered around completing tasks in a modal or linear fashion, discouraging people from unlocking the true powers of multitasking. I find this helps to explain why multiple (physical) monitors/displays is a great way to improve efficiency in the workplace versus concepts like "spaces" on Mac not being as effective (in a mainstream sense) as they could be.

See also the discussion on that post on Hacker News.

I'd also add
– file extensions
– why you can only have certain characters in file names
(both of which are quite understandable)

The interesting question is: what are the best ways to teach these concepts to Non-IT people?

"Pesuade xor Discover"

2009-09-23T17:30:00.003+10:00

Paul Graham considers the following issue: When writing, the plain truth (as you see it) will often be offensive to people. You can try and avoid this, but it doing so means being less concise, because you have to add disclaimers and write more indirectly. Is this worth it?

Maybe not. Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness. I write code the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. But I have a legitimate reason for doing this. You don't know what the ideas are until you get them down to the fewest words. The danger of the second paragraph is not merely that it's longer. It's that you start to lie to yourself. The ideas start to get mixed together with the spin you've added to get them past the readers' misconceptions. [4]

That's not even the worst danger. I think the goal of an essay should be to discover surprising things. That's my goal, at least. And most surprising means most different from what people currently believe. So writing to persuade and writing to discover are diametrically opposed. The more your conclusions disagree with readers' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any faster.

(my emphasis).

I fully agree about the dangers there. I think it's important to treat writing as a means to figure out your view and that only at the very end should you be concerned with issues to do with communicating it to others. I think that to do otherwise is to limit yourself - a kind of premature optimisation, and from what I know of other's writing I think they most people get into those concerns far too early - either right at the start or early on in the process. This also seems to be the way writing is taught.

Don't purchase any music from Bleep.com

2009-09-16T16:59:00.004+10:00

[update: 15.10.09: four and a half weeks after I originally purchased the music they finally managed to make the download available to me.]
[update: 4.10.09: over three weeks since I purchased the music and I still can't access it. I've had more correspondence with Bleep: twice they've wrongly said the problem was fixed when in fact nothing had changed. Then they said there was a bug in their system. They refunded me the money then. But since I still own the copy I purchased from them, it'd be throwing my money away to go purchase it elsewhere, so I'm still effectively prevented from being able to listen to the music until they get their act together. And refunding me the money doesn't address all the wasted time and frustration I've had to go through. It was a week ago when they told me about the bug in their system, and I haven't heard from them since. If they had any decent customer service, they could easily find an alternative way to get the music to me].

I was really keen to get the Autechre album "Draft 7.30" but I couldn't find it at the shops. When I got home and looked on the internet I discovered, through the music publisher's (Warp Records) site, that you could buy it online as MP3s at Bleep.com.

So I purchase it and went to download it. Because my internet connection at home is flaky, the download failed and failed four more times. Each time i was only able to get a tiny fragment of the entire file before it failed - the most it ever got on an attempt was 2.75MB. I went to try again and found that the download link was disabled. It didn't actually say why, but I presume this was an anti-piracy measure.

I didn't see any mention of a limit to the number of times you can download it. Maybe there was in the fine-print of the terms and conditions, but there was certainly nothing made obvious about it, and nothing mentioning it on the download page. I never saw anything there saying how many download attempts I had left, or saying that now I'd used up the number of attempts. The download button just stopped being clickable (I tried other browsers to see if it was some problem at my end, but it wasn't). There was no explanation at all.

If this is an anti-piracy measure, then it should stop people after five successful downloads. I wasn't able download the music once, I just had five quickly-failed attempts.

But then why is there a limit at all? If someone can download it once, then if they wanted to give copies to their friends they could still easily do that. If someone gave out or published their Bleep login details, so anyone could just log into the account and download the music, then this would also allow anyone to purchase more music on their credit card, so that's hardly going to happen.

So I don't see any point to a download limit anyway. All think it does is send out a message to a legitimate purchaser that Bleep.com does not trust them.

I then used their feedback form to send them a message explaining the situation. They say they'll try to get back to you within one working day. I bought the music on a Saturday, so that means I'd have to wait till around Tuesday morning (their time). I think this is pretty slack. Online stores are always open. If the store can take your money anytime, 24/7, then it seems a bit slack for them to only deal with customers' problems on week days.

The next day I sent them a rather more annoyed message. It's ridiculous that you can hand over money for something and be prevented from actually obtaining it. It's crazy that it is far easier to pirate music than to buy a legitimate copy.

It's now Wednesday -- four days after I purchase the music and sent them my first message explaining the problem -- and I still haven't gotten any response at all. After being screwed around like this, my advice is: don't buy music from Bleep.com. I certainly won't be.

How long till we can buy everything with our phones?

2009-09-10T22:45:00.002+10:00

When will we be able to pay for everything with our mobile phones?

I'd love to be able to do that. The store person would tell you the cost, that'd flash up on your phone's screen, you could accept it and it'd all be done. You'd get an electronic recipt, and you could automatically feed the purchase into whatever software you like to keep track of your expenses, which could streamline the process of budgeting.

The potential benefits are pretty obvious, and I know there must be a lot of people working on this kind of thing, so I'm wondering what sorts of barriers there are to getting it out there. It might involve technical issues, though I suspect it might have more to do with things like cost and business models. And given that, how long might it take until the technology is out there?

Three recent 'personal transportation' inventions

2009-09-07T17:52:00.005+10:00

YikeBike

A compact electric bike that can be folded up quite small. Looks like they're intending to sell them in 2010. website here

Being ridden

Being folded up

The Enicycle

A Segway-like electric unicycle - and despite what that sounds like, it actually seems quite functional.

The Contortionist

Dominic Hargreave's concept bike that can be folded up so it's not much bigger than one of its wheels

(though the process of folding it up seems a bit involved).

Here's why stuff in this space is of interest to me. So much of how we live, or can live, whether in cities, the suburbs or the countryside, is defined by the transport options available to us.

I think in cities, in particular, it could be great to have a form of transport that was quick -- something more in the scale of buses, trains, cabs and bikes, than on the scale of walking -- yet was much more ad-hoc like walking, in that you could just pick up and go, when you wanted (no waiting for it, no having to go to the place to get it), and you can go pretty directly to where you want to go (unlike a train), and once you're there there's nothing to do (no having to lock up a bike) or no big thing to lug around.

I don't think any of these things here are idea in this regard, but they're heading in that direction.

.

2009-09-02T09:32:00.002+10:00

Demnstrating the premises of an argument is more important than demonstrating their link to the conclusion

2009-08-31T21:52:00.006+10:00

Quick sketching....

Here's a major criticism that I think can be applied to how most arguments are made. If we say the structure of the argument is like

if A, B and C then X

my criticism is that people primarily try to justify the argument by justifying the then part.

They may make some efforts to justify the if part - to justify A, B and C, but I think mostly this is more about giving the appearance of having checked that task off than a genuine attempt to ensure they're true.

Having taken A, B and C to be the case, they argue why X should follow, and try and back that up other reasons why we should take X to be true.

The problem with this is, I think, is that A, B and C actually being the case is far more important to X being true than the line of reasoning that allows you to go from A, B and C to X.

A, B and C define a terms of reference, a picture of the world. The arguments for then X are really along the lines of "in a world where it is such that you have A, B and C, it would follow that X". And I don't think it's that hard to have distorting simplifications in your terms of reference that allow you to derive X, even if X isn't actually true.

Justifying the if part is the major task in showing that the world actually has the certain properties, and works in the particular way that, when you work out the consequences, you see that X is the case.

.

I think we usually think of the premises of an argument as simply facts, but really the bulk of the premise is an outlook, a framing, a kind of model of the world and the kinds of ways you can reason from facts to conclusions. Kuhn's insight about paradigms is about this kind of thing.

.

This is a major reason why in most arguments the parties end up talking past each other. Of course the other person's view seems wrong - they're working from different sorts of premises. If you really want to get somewhere, examine the premises.

.

I can't think of a forum (the popular media, books, academic papers, discussion forums, etc) where it is really considered acceptable to really look into premises, or even to look into the premises behind other people's work. Philosophy is an area where you might expect to see it, though from the stuff that I've seen it doesn't seem to happen.

I suppose blogs are one medium where, in the first place, you can get it out there, and get away with it unscathed, though I kinda doubt anyone would be that interested in reading it.

Copy-editing marks and annotations

2009-08-31T17:41:00.005+10:00

Signal vs Noise looks at why traditional copy-editing marks are more effective than how revision changes are shown in Word's Track Changes feature.

I think Track Changes is symptomatic of a more general shortcoming of all existing software: they’re hopeless when it comes to annotations.

Most software simply has no support for adding annotations to bits of your information (in your address book, your image files, your calendar, email, etc etc.). There might be a separate ‘note’ field, but that’s nothing like being able to add real annotations, like you can do on paper.

As the linked post points out, annotations should stand out as separate from what they are annotating, but I don’t know of any existing software that gets this aspect of annotations right.

Also, with hand-written annotations you can use subtle details, like the positioning of the annotation in relation to what it applies to or the size of the annotation text, to convey information, and software annotations are poor in this regard (though it'd definitely be worth investigating how to make it better). Certainly this is one area where pen input would be useful.

The internet is good for Vim

2009-08-09T13:52:00.005+10:00

I think Vim is a great text editor and one that's well worth learning. But it's certainly a bit of effort to learn all the commands and get used to working in different modes. A lot of people seem to be put off by that initial frustration.

You're editing a file and there'll be something, often fairly simple, that you want to do but don't know how. And while the Vim help is quite good it can be hard to find info on the specific thing you want to do, so it’s easy to get stuck. At least that was the situation 10-15 years ago. But these days you can just put details of what you’re trying to do into Google and you’ll likely get a good answer. And the net contains a number of Vim cheatsheets.

Of all the editors, Vim probably has the largest initial hump to get over before getting to proficiency, but also one of the largest payoffs for doing so, and the internet is making it a lot easier to get over that hump. And for that reason we might see a resurgence in its use.

Mangalam's Vegetarian Moussaka

2009-08-03T14:27:00.006+10:00

Mangalam's Vegetarian Moussaka

Tastes very nice.

Ingredients

cooking oil, 5 tablespoons
eggplant, 1 medium
onions, medium, 1, peeled and sliced
potatoes, 2
medium tomatoes, 2
brown lentils, 400g can
tomato paste, 2 tablespoons
mixed herbs, 1 teaspoon
vegetable stock powder, 1 teaspoon
salt and pepper to taste
For the sauce
- butter, 2 tablespoons
- plain flour, 2 tablespoons
- mozzarella, grated, 3 tablespoons
- milk, 1½ cups

Method

Peel and cook the potatoes

Slice the eggplant and spread on a plate.
Sprinkle eggplant with salt and leave for 15 minutes.
Rinse and pat dry.

Fry the eggplant in a little oil until brown on both sides and set aside.

Heat the remaining oil and cook the onion until soft.
Add the brown lentils (with the liquid from the can).
Stir in the tomato paste, stock, herbs and seasonings.
Bring to the boil.
Cover and simmer for 5 minutes.

Slice the cooked potatoes and tomatoes.

Line the bottom of an oven proof dish with half the eggplant.
Pour over half the lentil mixture and top with sliced tomatoes.

Add the rest of the eggplant, lentil mixture and layer with the potatoes.

Making and adding the sauce
1. Melt the margarine, stir in the flour and gradually blend in the milk.
  Bring the sauce to the boil, stirring constantly.
  Beat in the cheese.
2. Pour the sauce over the moussaka
Bake in a moderate (180) oven for 45 minutes or until golden brown.

How to backup Winamp song ratings and playcounts, and media library playlists

2009-07-23T13:27:00.004+10:00

If you want to backup your Winamp song ratings and playcounts, as well as the playlists you create within the Media Library, this is how you can do it. You can back it up so you don't lose the information when you get a new computer and reinstall Winamp onto it.

I got this information from here and here

The files are in this directory:

%appdata%\Winamp\Plugins\ml
(On Win2k/XP, %appdata% is
C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\
On Vista, it is
C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\)

The files are:

main.dat       # ratings and play counts
main.idx       # ratings and play counts index file
recent.dat     # play history
recent.idx     # play history index file
*.m3u8         # playlists stored in the media library
playlists.xml  # list of the playlists stored in the media library

The first of the source pages also suggests some alternative strategies for saving this information.

Using a game to teach regular expressions

2009-07-06T14:47:00.005+10:00

Quick sketching....

You could have a game to teach people regular expressions. It might even actually be fun. I don't know if anything like this has already been done (a very quick look doesn't seem to show anything like it), but here's one way it could be done.

It might be a war between alien forces. You are commanding one side.

The enemy march in a single line in from the right side of the screen, and as the commander of your side your goal is to stop their troops reaching the left side of the screen. You can send out troops from the left side to attack the right side.

There are some number of diff types of enemy troops, and at your disposal you have specialist troops, each one of which can pick of a particular type of enemy troop.

So if the front of their line of troops is a 'green' alien, you send out a 'green' soldier. your troops will always win, as long as you send out the right type.

So you could just play by sending out the right sequence of troop colours...

But then their troops start moving faster and it gets harder to take our their troops one by one.

Luckily there are patterns in the troops... the front of their line might be one green soldier, followed by five blue soldiers, ending with a red soldier

So if you can set up a single command for 'one green', 'one or more blue', 'one red'.

What i'm talking about so far is like a regular expression where you are matching specific characters; they can also match classes of characters, like 'whitespace' or 'word characters' or you can have character classes...

And the game could gently introduce the ability for the player to have such higher-level control... e.g. some of the enemy might be carrying shields... blue ones with shields, red ones with shields and so on... so your 'attack specification' could allow the player to deal with more abstract classes like this.

Ideally, the game would give the player a gentle ramp up to the sort of abstraction regular expressions afford. the player could handle things fully manually... by manually specifying the pattern to meet... and then they would appreciate the ability to handle it in a higher-level way.

The player should be rewarded by being able to take out as many enemy as possible in the one command (the one reg-ex)... the more they take out, the more spectacular it should look, and perhaps the more points they would get (if there were points).

Here's some other ideas.

I can even imagine building a 'search and replace' mechanism into the game... perhaps the 'search' pattern could be use to specify what to target and the 'replace' pattern what weapons to use on each of those targets.

In addition to the idea of a game based around the idea of regular expressions, I might be actually use them to provide powerful input mechanisms in existing sorts of games... real-time strategy games strike me as a possibility.

Switching between windows with a directional mouse-gesture (or a map)

2009-06-14T11:35:00.003+10:00

Here’s an idea for how a computer operating system could enable you to quickly switch between windows. The idea is that you could press a some key or key combination to indicate you wanted to switch windows, and then you could specify which window simply by shifting the mouse pointer from its current position just a little bit in the direction of the window you wanted to switch to.

The operating system would guess which window you wanted to switch to and make it flash or something. If it had the one you wanted, you could press the mouse key and that window would get the focus. I think the system would have to figure out which window was, overall, most in the direction you've gestured.

If it didn't select the one you wanted, you’d move the mouse again to try to make it clearer which window you wanted. How would this work? Imagine that you’d moved the mouse to the right to indicate a window to the right, but you the one you actually wanted was further to the right of the one the system guessed.

To indicate that other one, you could just move the mouse a bit more to the right and it’d figure out you meant the window more to the right. Whatever the subtleties an actual implementation would have to deal with, I think there’s a good chance you could figure out a workable solution.

(On windows, instead of simply pressing a key, you could press and hold down the Windows Key and move the mouse pointer and then release the key once it has seleted the one you want).

As different approach, instead of gesturing direction, pressing the ‘switch windows’ could bring up, at the place where the mouse pointer was, a small schematic map of the desktop indicating all of the windows’ locations. Mousing over a window on that map would highlight the actual window it corresponds to; clicking it would switch to that window.

More birds-with-arms (pics)

2009-06-12T16:06:00.005+10:00

Some more photoshopped pictures of birds with added arms, thanks to the good people on the Something Awful forums.

When I see a picture of a bird now without arms, like this one, my brain is thinking "amputee":

Here they are:

"Photoshop Arms Onto Birds!" (pics)

2009-06-10T16:59:00.004+10:00

Over on the Something Awful forums, Paradox86 said "It's pretty simple. A friend and I agreed that birds are pretty pissed that they don't have arms. We decided this should be fixed."

Yes, this is what the world has been needing. Pictures of birds with arms. Yet it is somehow strangely compelling - there's some pretty brilliant stuff there... here's a handful of them:

Rough notes on getting things done

2009-06-07T23:00:00.003+10:00

Doing an assignment, writing a book, losing weight -- whatever the task is, there's no doubt that it can be hard to get things done. Here's some rough notes -- that I'd like to clean up sometime -- on ideas to make it a bit easier.

Build habits. Habits have momentum, and they can suck you into a task without you trying.
Associate a place with a task (if you can). That's one good way to build a habit. I go to a local coffeeshop to do PhD writing. That's all I do there, and I don't go there otherwise. I find it quite useful. If it's a place you don't do any other tasks at, it's less likely to trigger habits associated with them.
Make the habits generic, so you can always invoke them. If you make the initial task "start writing" (start writing anything - it doesn't matter what), then this applies regardless of what you are writing or what you are writing it for.
Minimised the (perceived) next task. Make it easy to start.
Doing has momentum. Make the initial task very simple. Simply by continuing to work on it, it can gather momentum and snowball and if that happens you don't have to even think about trying to do next thing.
Impose non-negotiable constraints (where possible). The coffeeshop I do my PhD writing at doesn't have any internet access, so I can't stuff around on the net even if I wanted to. (I understand that many tasks require internet access - this is just an example of the general principle). I also don't have Freecell or Solitare etc installed on my computer.
Have others around who can see you. That's another thing I suspect is an benefit of writing in a public place... it feels harder to slack off. May not work for some sorts of tasks.
Be prepared for initial Suck when getting into any new sort of task / setup. Basically it’s like developing a skill - it's going to take a while to get into it.
Learn to recognise and acknowledge when you’re refusing to consider doing something or how to do it, and just pushing it back. and that if you can do this, this could be all that’s required to actually get your major goals done.
We seem to have a tendancy to try to figure things out in our heads before starting. This tends to make the task seem to big, and you just end up staring at a blank page or screen. So learn to recognise when you’re doing this.
Related to this, there's a tendancy to want to go into a ‘perceptual response’ mode of thinking – you get stuck. (need to do more work to explain this).
As a longer-term proposition, try building up desire to achieve what you want to achieve.
Try to have “definite critiera” (I need to do more work here to explain what I mean) -– like writing something that reads from start to finish, rather than just a bunch of notes.

Some interesting-looking loft-style bedroom/desk/storage units

2009-04-08T00:32:00.003+10:00

Some interesting-looking loft-style bedroom/desk/storage units (via dornob):

Interesting persuasive technique in anti-smoking ad

2009-04-06T22:41:00.009+10:00

The latest anti-smoking ad being shown on tv here:

As a means of persuasion, it employs an interesting technique, one that I think is pretty effective.

It tries to take on trite kind-of 'excuses'. It doesn't try to counter them by dealing directly what their content. It doesn't explicitly respond to them at all. Each one is followed by a totally separate slice of conversation from a totally separate situation.

That next slice of conversation 'responds' to the triteness by highlighting the seriousness of what is really at stake. What's interesting is how it does this. It takes the syntactical form of the trite statement "I don't think I can quit" and 'responds' with another one with a parallel form "I don't think I can operate".

Something about that parallelism makes the response a powerful smackdown. I think it must be that our brains take that similar structure as meaning the response's content consititutes a very complete and definitive response.

I'm on Twitter now

2009-04-06T11:17:00.001+10:00

I thought I'd have a go at Twitter. I'm jamesrcole.

What does it mean to be open-minded? (video)

2009-04-04T12:30:00.003+10:00

What does it mean to be open-minded? I think there's a lot of confusion about this. The following animated video (10 mins) does a lot to clarify.

The video author's criticisms are perhaps a bit too direct, but I think his points are good and the graphics and animation are used well.

Antipodies map

2009-04-03T15:28:00.005+10:00

If you dug a hole through to the other side of the earth, where would you end up? The web-based Antipodies map lets you find out.

Just locate your present location and it'll show exactly where the opposite side of the world is.

Articles on some effective newer UI techniques

2009-03-24T19:58:00.006+10:00

Mega Drop-Down Menus - which get a big thumbs-up from Jakob Nielsen. He likens them to the ribbon found in the latest version of MS-Office.

Contextual User-Interfaces. Chris Mahon gives some examples. They let the user perform relevant actions without having to shift context. And as the user performs actions, the UI is dynamically modified to take this new context into account, so the user can perform tasks more quickly and easily.

And while I'm here I'll give another plug to Bret Victor's visionary -- and still very relevant -- paper Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface.

"It’s easy to make something incredible."

2009-03-24T18:00:00.002+10:00

I believe that having high standards is probably the most important thing required for becoming good at anything.

Rory thinks so too

It’s easy to make something incredible. All you do is, don’t let what you’re doing be shit.
...
It baffles me that people think making really, really brilliant, stupendous, worldshocking pieces of work is a particular challenge. It’s mainly a battle of endurance. The longer you try and deshit something, the less shit it is.

Minatur Wunderland - world's largest model railway

2009-03-23T10:25:00.002+10:00

5 min video of Miniatur Wudnerland, in Hamburg, Germany -- the world’s largest model railway, and actually quite impressive.

14kms of track, 6 meter high mountains, and highly detailed scenery that also includes moving cars and boats. The whole thing cycles through day and night every 15 mins.

British man Sean Hodgson 27 years in jail for crime he didn't commit

2009-03-19T00:01:00.003+10:00

Recent DNA tests have shown that a British man, Sean Hodgson, spent the last 27 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, the Times Online reports.

Programming is always a team activity

2009-03-18T20:39:00.003+10:00

So you've written a bit of code. As time passes and you haven't touched parts of it for a while, they'll start to fade from memory, and if you need to know them again, you'll need to refresh yourself on them.

A week after you wrote a function, you may be a bit hazy on how it works. Six months down the line you might've forgotten all of the function's details. Three years later, you might have forgotten about the existence of the entire module.

Down the line you're no longer that person who knew the details of the code. The more time since you looked at a piece of code, the more it is like you're reading someone else's code.

So the entirety of your work on that code is more like a team effort than an individual one - your current self writing code for, and collaborating with, your future selves.

With the exception of simple, throwaway programs -- this is why you should always write code for others to read, even if you're writing something that no one else will ever need to touch.

Coworking spaces

2009-03-15T10:59:00.004+10:00

I just came across the notion of "coworking spaces"

“Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents. Or, it's like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture.”

I'd never heard of it before - it sounds interesting. These places provide facilities like wi-fi, printing, lockers, coffee and meeting rooms.

It seems like they've sprung up all over the place (at least in the US). Here's a smattering of examples: Office Nomads (Seattle), StartPad (Seattle), CubeSpace (Portland), The Network Hub (Vancouver), thinkspace (Redmond), Work Space (Vancouver).

There's one in Melbourne - OpenHub. Didn't see any others in Australia, though apparently this (Monash Enterprise Center and Business Center) works along similar lines.

There's even some general coworking resources: a wiki and associated blog, and a group on Google Groups.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

2009-03-15T10:47:00.003+10:00

Clay Shirky has an excellent post on the future (or lack thereof) of newspapers. Newspapers are going away, and it'll take us some time to invent alternative venues for journalism.

What Eisenstein focused on [in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change], though, was how many historians ignored the effects of the [printing] press circa 1500. To describe life before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to be told how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Not needing to name or save documents - 'Untitled Document Syndrome' & OLPC

2009-03-11T16:03:00.005+10:00

When I'm working with a document in a text editor or word processor, I don't want to be forced to give it a filename, nor do I want to have to manually save it.

It shouldn't need a filename - it should be saved anyway. And if I'd prefer to not give it a name, I should still be able to locate it based on when it was created, last modified, and by searching for terms that I know are contained within it (and perhaps by tags I've given it).

I shouldn't have to manually save it. It should automatically save the content as I type. I don't want it to automate periodic saves, I want it to be like paper - once a change has been made it's recorded and can't accidentally be lost. The user shouldn't even need the concept of 'saving' the document.

Related to this, John Gruber has written a post Untitled Document Syndrome that argues similar points.

Also, the OLPC system seems to work in such a fashion.

"More Americans say they have no religion"

2009-03-10T23:48:00.002+10:00

Yahoo news, reporting on a recent study of religion in America (other reporting):

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

Richard Baraniuk's TED talk on the Connexions open-source textbooks system

2009-03-09T20:52:00.003+10:00

18 mins

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

Jokey insults and threats

2009-03-08T12:08:00.005+10:00

A joke is something that is funny.

But then there's things that are presented in a jokey fashion but which are not really intended to be funny.

For example, you can have insults or threats presented in a jokey manner that are really statements of solidarity or respect. E.g. a lowly business person saying the following to a superior"if you could look at that brief that'd be good, otherwise I'd have to do you in", where the last bit is said in an ironic fashion. That's really a statement of respect to indicate that they're well aware of their relative positions.

The case I want to talk about, though, is statements that are presented as if they were jokes but are really just insults or threats presented in a jokey manner. That is, insults or threats passed off as jokey statements.

The jokey manner may include a wink appended to the end of a written statement -- not that you guys are likely to understand what i'm talking about ;-). Or a chuckle or giggle appended to a verbal statement. Or they might be in the form of over the top threats like "...or we'll beat you to a bloody pulp - ha ha".

These aren't actually funny and aren't intended to make the person laugh -- even if social forces may compel them to do so.

As you may have guessed, I quite dislike these sorts of statements. Even if they're only carrying a quite minor barb, there's something dishonest there. Though I don't like this term much, childish comes to mind.

Thought: program hibernation

2009-03-08T10:38:00.004+10:00

I can hibernate my laptop so it doesn't drain the battery when I'm not using it. What if I could hibernate individual programs, like my web-browser?

I usually have scores of web-pages open in my browser, and just having it open, even if I'm not actually using it, uses the processor -- often quite a lot of it -- and drains the battery.

So I might leave the house in the afternoon to go out and do some PhD writing at a coffee shop. I won't be using the browser there, and I don't want it to drain the battery, so it'd be nice if I could hibernate it.

That'd be quicker and easier for me than manually closing it down and then manually reloading it all, and guarantee that when I bring it back up everything is in the exact same state.

Current operating systems may have quirks that wouldn't make this feasible, but of course that doesn't mean there's anything inherently impossible about the idea.

Information hiding for flyweight code units

2009-03-05T22:03:00.010+10:00

To make code more readable we divide it into units like functions, objects and modules. Following the principles of information hiding we give these units meaningful names that express what their function is, and supplement that with comments providing additional details.

Once a person reading the code is satisfied that those statements do what the name or description says, they can skim the code by paying attention to the names/comments but skimming the details how how the named functionality is implemented. It helps conserve precious mental resources.

There are units of code smaller than a function –- a number of lines of code within a function that togther perform a fairly coherent function like reading a file -– that you want to be able to apply the principles of information hiding to.

I’m talking about cases where separating the lines of code out into a separate function would be too heavyweight a solution – doing so wouldn’t be worth the effort and would actually decrease the code’s readability.

One difference between these and the other units of functionality is that they don’t have some sort of explicit delimiter to indicate their start and end, and this makes the task more difficult. If you put the comment at the start of the lines, does it apply only to the first line or to all of them? If there’s uncertainty you have to look at the code to resolve it, thus destroying the good information hiding properties.

If you have a convention –- that it always applies to all the lines of code till the next blank line, for example -– then you have to learn and remember the convention, and other programmers can always break it by accident or forgetfulness or from simply not knowing it. And if you want to be able to have blank lines within that set of lines of code -– which is often useful to do -– then you have to have an even more complex convention.

Here’s a code formatting idiom that provides a solution to the problem. Write a comment at the start of those lines of code that names/describes the functionality they implement, and then indent all of the lines implementing the functionality:

function X()

   statement before task

   // comment describing task

      statement implementing task
      statement implementing task

      statement implementing task
      statement implementing task

   statement following task
   statement following task

A language could go a step further and have a way to use an explicit label instead of the comment, as in:

function X()
   statement before task

   readFile:

      statement implementing task
      statement implementing task

      statement implementing task
      statement implementing task

   statement following task
   statement following task

This could

encourage a concise description of the function being performed
be used for documentation purposes
make it easier for an editor to collapse/expand sections -- i.e. collapse the code 'contained' in the label, so it just shows the label.
support refactoring by having operations turn one of those sections into a full-blown function.

I don't know whether such labels would be better to have or not.

Thought: A Stack Overflow for finding research material in a subject area

2009-03-03T22:55:00.007+10:00

Quick sketching:

Here's an idea for a website.

If you wanted to do some research that touches on a field you didn't know that well and wanted to find out what material -- previous research and so forth -- was relevant to your topic, it'd be useful if there was a dedicated website for asking such questions, where you could get responses from people with expertise in the field.

I'm thinking of a site designed like Stack Overflow, which can build up a refined body of knowledge.

Ideally, it'd be a exchange of information between disciplines, and between those with expertise and newcomers. It'd help research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. It could also help out students that are new to an area, or people undertaking amateur research (which I think is important). It could help academia open up a bit more. These are of course just lofty possibilities.

I imagine some people would not want to make such things easier - seeing it as somehow cheating. I don't see it that way. The idea is to help reduce the friction in undetaking research, and give people more time to focus on the more central aspects of research - finding patterns, synthesising new ideas, etc.

If there were something like this, it'd probably be good if students / academics got some amount of institutional recognition for contributing answers. Like they do for for writing papers (not saying it should be the same amount of recognition of course).

It wouldn't have to be a website, it could be the name of a tag -- like existingMaterialReq -- used in blogposts and/or Twitter to get help from the lazyweb. Probably the most important thing is simply to name and communicate this notion of a request for relevant material in an a subject area.

'The Minute Glass' alarm clock

2009-03-03T22:43:00.003+10:00

The Minute Glass is a design concept for an alarm clock that forces you to shake it vigourously for around 30 seconds – and hopefully thus properly wake up – in order to turn the alarm off.

"Syntax highlighting" for diff

2009-03-02T22:36:00.005+10:00

I just saw a reference to Sentdiff -- take a diff by sentence, not just by line -- over on Hacker News. I'd like to see a diff program that allows you to customise how it shows changes. Is there anything like this?

What are alternative ways to show changes? Consider Word's track changes feature, for example:

The best way to show changes, including what you want to consider as the 'units' that are being changed -- sentences, lines, etc -- really depends upon what the information in the document represents.

Perhaps you might want to show changes to a datafile with tabular or CSV structure differently to a file containing C code, for example. Or perhaps you might want to handle two different tabular-data files differently, because the types of entities they are describing are different - you parse them differently when you read them, or you think of them in some sort of different way... I feel pretty sure there's examples out there.

Think of it as like how text editors allow you to specify different syntax highlighting schemes, that colour different aspects of the documents in different ways, reflecting what the information in the document represents.

For that matter, it'd be good if a diff program could highlight syntax in exactly the same fashion as a text editor does - so if you're viewing a diff of a Java program, the document fragments it shows are shown with Java syntax highlighting.

Jorn Barger on what Twitter is useful for

2009-03-01T22:47:00.003+10:00

For someone who (like me) has never used Twitter, this summary of what it's useful for seems pretty insightful.

Idea: defining functions within functions

2009-02-27T13:02:00.003+10:00

Are there any programming languages where you can define functions within other functions? I think it'd be useful - in situations like this:

function X is used, and only used, within function A. X is really just a part of A that has been broken away to better structure the code.


function A() 
{
    function X() 
    {
        blah blah
    }

    blah blah
    X()
    blah blah
}

If you defined X within A -- like at the start or end of it -- this would make the structure of the code more explicit. When you came across X you'd know straight away, and for certain, that A was the only place it was used.

The motivation for this is pretty similar to that of defining functions within objects or within modules.

On having lots of choices

2009-02-25T22:02:00.002+10:00

A post on Signal vs Noise quotes Eknath Easwaran's Take Your Time—Finding Balance in a Hurried World (chapter 5):

People are subject to trifling likes and dislikes every day. There seems to be no end to the division and subdivision of taste. In India, in those days, if I wanted ice cream after a meal, I simply ordered ice cream. At most there might have been two or three flavors; often there was only one. Today I have one hundred and forty-seven varieties to choose from, and it’s not enough to want chocolate; I have to decide between possibilities like Dutch, Bittersweet, Super Fudge Wonder, and Chewy White Chocolate Macadamia. (Often I just tell the clerk, “Give me the one you like best.”) And for coffee I have to specify French Roast, Colombian, Kona, or one of a dozen other varieties. I know people whose whole day is affected when they can’t get the coffee they like, made just the way they like it. As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit—in everything, because this is a habit of the mind.

To which I added a comment

I think that’s a bit muddled.

It makes the reasonable point that you don’t always want to be presented with a bazillion choices, especially where there’s only small differences between them.

But it comes across a complaint about choice, as if it was all bad. Lots of choices is, itself, not a problem. It’s when you’re forced to deal with them at once.

Would you prefer to live in a city where there’s only three different meals you can ever have for dinner, or would you prefer to live in a city where there’s a large variety of different ethnic cuisines available?

The quote also suggests that having fine-grained preferences - wanting White Chocolate Macadamia - means inflexibility: only being satisfied by that. “As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit”.

But that’s not necessarily so. At particular times, at particular places, in particular moods, I might feel like that flavor, and at other times and places, I might want something else. We get bored and want to try new things.

And if you’ve only got a few options available, isn’t it easy to develop prejudices? We probably all know people who grew up eating one type of food and won’t dare touch food of an unfamiliar cuisine.

If you’re beyond a certain age, you’ve probably gone from growing up in a world with fewer choices to a world with many more choices. Perhaps this means we didn’t develop very good skills for handling choice. Perhaps the kids of today will manage much better? I don’t know, but this possibility seems to get overlooked.

The Immobolised Pefectionist and the Persistent Perfectionist

2009-02-08T12:53:00.006+10:00

Perfectionists are often portrayed as overly finicky people who can't produce anything if it isn't perfect, who thus can't get started and never get anywhere. We can call these people immobilised perfectionists.

But I think there's another meaning for 'perfectionist' that tends to get overlooked. This is the persistent perfectionist, who has really high standards - and is persistent in trying to meet them.

They appreciate that perfection is not immediate and that they won't be particularly good initially. They appreciate that it'll take a lot of practise to get really good. Because they're persistent, they won't stop trying trying to improve until they’ve met their really high standards.

Here's an example of an (otherwise good) post that treats 'perfectionism' as if it could only mean immobilised perfectionism.

Another e.g. of seeing software only in functional terms: the claim that choice of impl language doesn't matter

2009-02-07T19:00:00.007+10:00

I've written that IT people have a tendancy to look at software only in functionl terms: 1, 2 and 3

Recently I came across a post about this (but not described in these terms) The "Any Competent Programmer" BS

In it, the author comments on the claim that "A professional team can develop quality software whatever the chosen implementation language and toolset."

He says

The claim, though, begs the question of how much it costs, in time and money, to develop that quality software using a chosen language and toolset. And whether a different choice could lead to quality software being developed faster and more cheaply, thereby encouraging the creation of even more quality software.

And he also points out that that claim is analogous to the "Any competent programmer can write good code in any language" trope.

Anand Agarawala's BumpTop desktop user-interface (video)

2009-01-13T00:38:00.006+10:00

I think this has promise

Here's what it looks like:

And here's a 4 1/2 min video demonstration:

TED page for this demonstration

"closer view of the piedra" (pic)

2009-01-11T10:48:00.001+10:00

from here via reddit.

Time management and balancing energy levels

2009-01-05T14:35:00.004+10:00

Time management is a big issue for many of us. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to get better at it.

I read Covey and Merrill's First Things First, which I thought was pretty solid, if perhaps a bit abstract and heavyweight. Probably it's main point is that you have to focus on what counts rather than what is urgent.

(I've also heard quite good things about David Allen's Getting Things Done, though I haven't read it.)

I'd say I'm not bad at it now, but I realised that I'm lacking a good understanding of something that is crucial to time management - balancing your energy levels. You can easily get worn out and not be very productive. So you need to take time out to refresh and recuperate.

That's pretty obvious. But isn't so obvious how to, in practice, actually do it effectively. So yes, if you rush through things that can drain your energy, but then if you're totally relaxed and take as much time as you want, you won't be so productive - so the question is, where is the sweet spot?

Or take exercise as an example. They say that exercise gives you more energy. But how much exercise should you do? (And are some types of exercise more effective in this regard than others?) What is the sweet spot, so you end up having the most amount of productive time for getting things done?

The key point is that you really need to have a good understanding of the factors that effect your energy levels, and how they do so, and how much they do so, so that you can effectively manage them.

Of course, the details would vary from person to person but I suspect there's enough common ground there to at least weed out common, and ineffective, misconceptions about balancing energy levels. If there's not a book on this already -- and I haven't seen one -- there's an opportunity for one to be written. Ditto for personal consultants on this -- like a type of personal trainer for managing your energy levels.

Ideas for 'weather forecasts 2.0'

2008-12-15T11:17:00.006+10:00

Sometimes I’ll go to check the weather, and end up at sites like these.

One gives me info for each day of the current week for the city I live near. For example, it tells me that Friday has a forecast of ‘Isolated Thunderstorms. Mostly Cloudy. Warm. Humid.’ Wind ‘16 km/h NNE’, Rain ‘3mm (42%)’, humidity of ‘69%’ and a min and max temp of ’20 and 30’.

On the other I can see a radar image of any storms moving in – which is useful if you’re leaving work and wondering whether you’ll beat the storm home.

Here's a quick sketch of some ideas for extending such services.

Make them more finely-grained
- Instead of just the forcast for today, what is the forecast for the evening, or for 10pm?
- What is the forecast for 10pm for the specific place I live (rather than just the general city area). Is it likely, from the cloud coverage and movements, that it'll be raining at my place then?
Longer-term predictions
Visualisation of weather trends.
Integration with calendars.
Customisable email/RSS alerts
Photos of what things look like -- from different places, in different directions -- so you could actually see what an approaching storm looks like, for example.

These are just some quick thoughts - it's not really a topic I have a strong interest in, and I don't know whether there's presently (or in the works) anything out there that does any of these. Here's a place you could start.

Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions

2008-12-14T14:33:00.004+10:00

Wikipedia's long list of common misconceptions (along with details of the truth of the matter in each case). Misconceptions such as that

Napoleon Bonaparte was especially short.
searing meat "seals in the juices"
seasons are caused by the Earth being closer to the sun in summer than in winter.
shaving causes hair to grow back thicker or coarser.
earthworms become two worms when cut in half.
Inuits have a large number of words for snow.

...and many many more (though the list is far from complete).

.

2008-12-07T12:34:00.006+10:00

"That perfume, my dear, is delightful. It has the most wonderful nose flavour"

i thought that term sounded funny.

Magic/Replace - an interesting 'show by example' way to clean up data

2008-11-30T11:40:00.007+10:00

Magic/Replace looks pretty good – going by their screencast demo (2 mins). It allows you to simply and intuitively clean up spreadsheet data.

Once you've pasted (or uploaded) your data into their webform, you can make changes to a cell, and the system will intelligently apply the same kind of change to all the other cells in the same column.

For example, if you changed a cell containing the phone number 0987123532 by putting in some spaces so it became 0987 123 532, the system will put the same spaces into all of the other phone numbers.

It can handle quite complicated changes, like combining three separate fields ‘firstname’, ‘middlename’, ‘surname’ into a single name field with the format ‘surname, firstname middle-initial’. See the screencast for some other examples.

It looks like the system is available to use for free - you can try it out now. I haven't played with it much, so I don't know how well it works in general, but I think that at the very least they’re onto something with the way the system works – the principle behind it.

It’s great that the user doesn’t have to explicitly describe the changes they want to make – like by writing some sort of code. They can just do it; and the system can work out the analogous changes for the other instances of that field. I say ‘analogous changes’ because the other instances of the field will contain different data, so the system has to look deeper than just the superficial details of the changes the user made.

(Douglas Hofstadter argues that the ability to make analogies is a central aspect of intelligence. He’s got a book on this Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. I haven’t read it, but the idea that ability to analogise is important sounds sensible to me).

'Chemicals' per se, are entirely natural

2008-11-27T16:27:00.003+10:00

In marketing and advertising, 'chemicals' equate to 'harmful' and 'dangerous'. Companies like to parade the lack of 'chemicals' in their products. Can things be 100% chemical free? The public seems to think so.

But the Royal Society of Chemistry is offering a £1 million prize to the first member of the public who can provide a sample of any material whatsoever that is 100% chemical free.

The truth, as any right-minded person will say, is that everything we eat, drink, drive, play with and live in is made of chemicals - both natural and synthetic chemicals are essential for life as we know it.
[...]
"Should anyone [be able to claim the prize], we will see thousands of years' worth of knowledge evaporate before our eyes. We would have to tear up the textbooks, burn the degree certificates and retrain the teachers."
[...]
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently defended an advert which perpetuated the myth that natural compounds are free of chemicals. [...] The manufacturers of a popular "organic" fertiliser recently [claimed] in promotional materials the product contained no chemicals whatsoever.

Of course there are harmful chemicals, but the reason they're harmful isn't because they're chemicals. When most people use the term 'chemicals' they're really referring to something else - but what exactly that category is not something I'll try to get into here.

Google Maps Street View as a historical record

2008-11-26T23:24:00.002+10:00

I heard today that the street view in Google Maps has been upgraded (the improvements are pretty good too).

I was checking it out and looking at a place that I know is going to be demolished (not the place that link is to), and it made me think that the street view data could, in the future, be used as a (pretty comprehensive) historical record of what a place looked at a particular point in time.

A lot of the places I've lived in have changed quite a lot over the years, and I always think it's a shame that there's probably no comprehensive record of what they used to look like (even though there's probably scattered coverage from people's private photo collections).

It's a shame from the standpoint that your memories are linked to what the place was like then, and once the place has changed, part of your past is gone. A visual record can help you connect back to it.

How to save SMSs from a Sony-Ericsson w7000i phone to your computer

2008-11-25T21:43:00.003+10:00

Just as you might want to save letters or emails you send and receive, I like to save my SMSs to my computer.

But that didn't seem possible with my Sony-Ericsson w7000i phone. You can't with the software the comes with it, and I seem to remember talking to a phone guy a few years ago who said you couldn't do it.

But I discovered today that you can use the My Phone Explorer software (Softpedia, Wikipedia). Works great. It's freely downloadable.

(found via this page, via this forum discussion page, via this google search).

Using Wikipedia as a source of canonical tagnames

2008-11-23T12:07:00.006+10:00

Say you want to tag a blogpost as being about ten pin bowling. What name do you give the tag? Here's some possibilities:

tenpinbowling
bowling
ten_pin_bowling

As a convention, you could try to find a Wikipedia article for that subject, and use the name used in the article's URL.

In this case it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-pin_bowling

so you'd use the tagname

Ten-pin_bowling

a potential bonus is that you could have it create an automatic link to the Wikipedia article.

The idea of this Wikipedia tagname convention is to have a canonical source for tagnames. (and I suppose it would also help make the Wikipedia article the canonical source of basic information about a topic).

Having fewer different names for referring to the same thing ought to be useful, and make it easier to find all the different bits of information talking about the same thing.

By the way, you could also have tools that automatically suggest these tagnames. E.g. you could select the text in your blogpost that mentins ten pin bowling, and the tool could automatically search wikipedia, get the URLs of the articles matching, and present you with a list of potential tagnames.

Alien-looking ants nest - filled with concrete then excavated (video)

2008-11-18T21:00:00.005+10:00

Want to see what an ants nest looks like? First, fill it with concrete, then excavate.

Unfortunately the video only shows what it looked like when they were part of the way through the excavation, and doesn't give a really good sense of its overall shape.

Vid-caps

'Technique' by Amon Tobin

2008-11-18T00:26:00.001+10:00

Since June, Amon Tobin has been releasing a new track on his website at the start of each month (for a US $1.99 download). I think the latest one 'Technique' is pretty awesome.

You can hear a sample of it here. Under the picture it says '$1.99', and just below that there's an arrow pointing at a short green line - click that arrow.

(My next favourite one -- which took a while to grow on me -- is 'Shut Down').

Images from Burning Man

2008-11-09T23:26:00.002+10:00

Funtasticus has a bunch of images from Burning Man. These are my favourites:

US election result videos, etc

2008-11-06T00:16:00.004+10:00

Obama's acceptance speech is pretty impressive. McCain's concession speech is quite good too. I've embedded youtube versions of them below.

Another thing about today’s historic events is that from now on, little boys and girls all over the world will know that being a ‘white man’ is not an absolute necessity for attaining even the most powerful position in the world. It makes me wonder what greatness that knowledge will help unlock.

Obama's acceptance speech

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

McCain's concession speech

I am quite curious to know the opinions of people around the world on these election results, especially people in places like the Middle East. Surely this must change the "person in the street"'s opion of America? But how much and in what ways?

I don't know. I thought it might be interesting to have a look at how some international news sources were reporting it, but it seems too hard (unless perhaps you had a lot of time to spare) to really get much of a sense.

I also found it interesting to see how much those sites (or at least the English versions of them...) used the Reuters or AP stories about the electon rather than ones of their own. (and I should say that I have no idea how representative any of these papers are of the media in their respective countries).

If you're curious, here are some of the sites I looked at: Al Jazeera, The Star (Malaysia), Times of India, Xinhua (China).

"Fan menus" for user-interfaces

2008-10-30T23:15:00.008+10:00

I just had a look on this page on pie-menus as an alternative to the usual 'vertical list' menus in most user-interfaces. I also had a quick skim of the comments, where there was some discussion about the pros and cons of both types of menus. E.g. while pie menus can be faster, the radial layout makes it harder to scan the available options.

And it made me wonder if there was a middle ground between the two. I have no idea whether this idea has been suggested before, but here goes... you might call these "Fan menus" (I'm thinking here of the asian foldable paper fans).

In this first picture, the user has clicked the mouse and the fan menu appears. Note that the main body of the menu itself appears to the side of where the mouse is clicked.

In this second image, the user has moved the mouse into the fanned out element for the third menu item. The selection process is similar to in a pie menu.

In this picture, the user has moved the mouse down to select the fourth item.

Naturally, there's potential issues with such a design, but I thought it'd be interesting to think about.

Unseen practice is easily mistaken for brilliance

2008-10-30T20:36:00.005+10:00

as the title says

Unseen practice is easily mistaken for brilliance

This applies to sport, intellectual endeavours, etc

How to get rid of Vim's temp files

2008-10-27T20:00:00.008+10:00

The default behavior in Vim when you save a file is to also put temporary files in the save directory. I'll explain how you can stop it from doing this. (I don't know Vim that well, but the following works).

What happens is that if you save a file called 'weeklyReport.txt' it also stores a temporary file with the same name appended with a tilde 'weeklyReport.txt~'. It also stores a swapfile there.

I found this really annoying, as it makes it awkward to scan the list of files in the directory (and the files were getting into my version control system - and yes, I'm sure I could find a way to avoid them getting in there, but I think the better solution is to not have them in the directory in the first place).

Here's a solution I found (I'm using it on Windows, but the only difference on other systems should be the file system syntax for specifying directories).

Open or create your settings file.

Here's some deails if you're not familiar with doing this.

When you install Vim, you've effectively installed two programs: Vim (the terminal version), and gVim (the GUI version), and each has its own settings file. For Vim, it's <VimDirectory>/_vimrc. For gVim it's <VimDirectory>/_gvimrc.

A note on what I mean by <VimDirectory>: the actual exectuable files are stored in a directory containing the vim version number - on my computer it is C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72. This is not the <VimDirectory> I'm referring to - the one I'm referring to is the parent directory of that, in my case C:\Program Files\Vim

Add the following lines to it (it shouldn't matter where):

" turn on backup set backup " Set where to store backups set backupdir=c:\temp " Set where to store swap files set dir=c:\temp

This will store the tilde and swap files in c:\temp - you can change the directory location to wherever you want.

I found this soultion here, via this, and that via a google search.

Apple's design lesson

2008-10-25T09:44:00.007+10:00

It used to seem that plain, unadorned design

had to mean dull looks and boxy shapes.

But Apple have shown us that plain, unadorned design

can mean sleek and sexy.

I'm sure Apple aren't the first or only people to do this, but has anyone else made the point so strongly?

Moving the cursor around in the vi text editor

2008-10-21T23:54:00.006+10:00

Moving the cursor around in the vi text editor

Note: so far, this is an incomplete list, and I'm experimenting with the way of presenting the keystrokes - the keys to press are specified in superscript text. Hopefully it's not too hard to work out.

There’s the usual options

left^h or right^l, up^k or down^j
start/end of: ⁰line^$, ^{paragraph^} or ^[[document^]]

But also more powerful control

start/end of: ^bprevious-word^ge or ^wnext-word^e
where a ‘word’ is anything delimited by non alphanumeric chars.
There’s a parallel set of commands for which a ‘words’ delimited
by whitespace:
- start/end of ^Bprevious-word^E or ^Wnext-word^E
first non-whitespace char^{^} on line
end of the nth line down^n$ from the current one
next^f<char> or previous^F<char> occurrence of char on the line
- or the character before the next^t<char> or previous^T<char> occurrence
- the nth next occurrence of char on the line^nf<char>

Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama (video)

2008-10-21T21:27:00.004+10:00

Coconut milk, garlic and chilli dahl

2008-10-12T22:45:00.008+10:00

updated, 9.4.09

Garlic, green chillis and coconut milk against the subtle background of the lentils. The overal flavour is more subtle than bold, but it's still quite flavoursome.

The chilli is there more as a flavouring than for the heat. You often don’t notice the flavour of chillis in a dish, but it really comes out in this one, and goes well with the garlic and coconut milk.

This dish is also quick and easy to prepare -- no need to fry garlic and onion or any spices, basically just throw the ingredients together with some water and simmer it. It takes about ½ an hour in total, but that's mostly it simmering.

Thanks goes to Mangalam for the recipe.

Red lentils, 1 cup
Garlic, 5 cloves, finely chopped
Onion, a small amount – like a wedge ½ a cm thick at thickest edge, finely chopped
Tumeric, ½ tsp
Green chillis, 1 or 2
Coconut milk, about 100ml.
- for a richer flavour you can add more, or use coconut cream instead
Salt
Black pepper

Notes: if you want to add some vegetables, cauliflower goes well with it - add some chopped cauliflower a couple of minutes before the end. Make sure you use green chillis rather than red chillis. The recipe needs the stronger flavour of the green chillis. The red ones don't have much flavour. Also, you don't want to chop the chilli up into smaller pieces because the skin on chillis is a bit tough, and against the smooth texture of the dahl it isn't very pleasant.

Start off the lentils
- Wash the lentils
- Put in a saucepan and add enough water to cover top of lentils by about 1cm.
  - The idea is to have enough to cook the lentils, but if you’ve put in too little you can always add more later, and if you’ve put in too much you can just cook it longer to evaporate them.
- Put it on a high heat
Onion, garlic, tumeric
- Meanwhile, chop the onion and garlic and add it to the pan.
- Also add the tumeric.
Bring to a boil then turn the heat down to a brisk simmer
- Stir occasionally so it doesn’t stick to the bottom.
Chillis.
- Slice them in half and take the seeds out.
- Once the lentils looks cooked – about 20 – 25 mins (the lentils should have broken down so you have a fairly smooth mixture), add the chillis and then cook for 3-5 mins.
Then add the coconut milk, stir and cook gently for another couple of minutes.
Add salt and pepper to taste, then it’s ready to serve. Take out the pieces of chilli if you want.

SvN: 'Do it yourself first'

2008-10-10T12:01:00.003+10:00

Do it yourself first

You should never hire anyone for something you haven’t first struggled to do on your own. It’ll teach you most of what you need to know to actually interview candidates, it’ll allow you to understand the nature of the work better (do I even need to hire or can we outsource?), and you’ll know exactly what a job well done will look like. It’ll also give you a sense of whether the job is big enough for a full-time hire yet or if you can skimp by on your own (the latter is preferable if possible).

Sounds quite sensible. He also talks about the benefits for managing the roles and being able to empathise when the going gets tough.