Posted on by lhl

I took off a bit early to get back in town to hear Richard Edlund (he’s currently talking about Thomson’s upcoming digital film camera (Viper FilmStream). I’ll be doing some ETECH braindumping tonight/his weekend. I lost about 15 unsaved Omnioutliner files w/ a freak power loss, but I’ve started rewriting what I’ve been processing.

  • Cory’s public domained his e-book presentation. It definitely had the slide with the best title of the conference (‘WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS’).
Posted on by lhl

ETECH meta-thoughts:

  • It’d be interesting to count notebooks (win/*nix/os x/paper), do breakdowns; there’s much more that could be done w/ this, but a lot are probably pretty invasive, privacy wise
  • Conference Tools
    • Traffic Shaping – understandable that bandwidth is limited, but for the love of god, a T1 is more than good enough to guarantee everyone at least 1Kbps of decent QoS
    • Squid proxy – wow, this would really reduce traffic, right?
    • SSH Tunnels – while you have your busybox installed doing traffic shaping, it might be nice to provide stunnels or VPN as a courtesy
    • Password Sniffer/Alert – even w/ providing encryption, there should be sniffing bot that will sniff for unencrypted passwords, and then alert (via private email would probably be the best way, along w/ a blurb on how to use the stunnel; registering MAC address of your machine and your email ddress at registration; public posting would probably not be a good idea)
    • local EtherPEG – would be interesting to project somewhere; also, you can do analytics like tracking traffic per room to figure out which sessions are boring
    • local wiki – probably also a distinction between internal/external authors, possibly even spaces, like an internal notes session
    • local IRC – there should be a separate channel for each room/session. there should also be logged and notlogged rooms; you can be sure the former will have less noise (also, the logbot should probably respont to a per/line !log prepend); there should be a chumpbot. hecklebot or other way of using back/side-channels, maybe. possibly make rooms to track presence, but that’s probably confusing – and there’s a better way:
    • RFID conference pass – a way to track presence, and here’s a way to do it while maintaining privacy. Stick on a random RFID tag at registration (from a single large bowl) at registration. Now, have a kiosk where they can register the tag w/ their preferences (say linking their name/contact info, and then whether they want to make their location known, and in what contexts). Put scanners at the doorways to track ins/outs. collect interesting stats
    • Session whuffie – this may be as simple as a ++/– to a votebot; alternatively a web button on the wiki; one vote per person of course
Posted on by lhl

Wow, so Firefox 0.8 for OS X rocks. Pinstripe is amazing. (more about renaming)

Also, I’m definitely digging both the new icon and the streamlined product homepage. An especially nice touch is that the first download button auto-detects your OS by UA to offer the appropriate d/l in one click.

That being said, there’s still clean-up to do, I noticed a bunch of FB references in popups, etc (OTOH, there are still Phoenix refs, so it may be a while…), and of course there needs to be a new page in the book.

Ok, laundry/packing, one hour nap, then a two hour drive to ETCON.

Posted on by lhl

Not going to blog incessantly from etech, looks like there’s going to be copious coverage, see etech04 wiki.

Some notes:

  • Connection is slow. Lots of uncapped users fighting for bandwidth. WonderShaper would definitely be a good thing. Good quote: “it’s only a T1”
  • Dav talks about conference scheduling tools – a while back when I was at OSCON I was thinking about what kind of tools would be useful for conferences… along those lines
Posted on by lhl

UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation: Shape Computation [PDF]

Generative grammars provide the necessary theoretical foundation for design studies, as they do language theory. The sceptic may go far along this path but hesitate over the imponderables of design. Granting that formal and functional aspects of design may be subject to grammatical rules, the sceptic may nevertheless wish to claim immunity for the aesthetic dimension. This is the final stand of the spontaneous heart against the scheming mind.

Posted on by lhl

I downloaded Mulberry to take it for a spin. At first the interface complexity really is a shock, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll be paying money for it, despite how well it does IMAP. Mail.app isn’t unusably bad in that respect. Some thoughts:

  • No support for AppleScript or other alternative scripting language
  • keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to be arbitrarily (re)assignable
  • Tabs/rest of interface can’t be navigated fully by keyboard (my biggest problem w/ Mail.app)
  • No mailbox list filterings (a la Mozilla – or even better, the ability to create complex filters as views), also option to hide deleted/but not expunged messages, etc

Related: the CMU HCII actually did a usability study on improving Mulberry’s interface last year.

Posted on by lhl

Ken Hemenway writes about life-style automation in a new O’Reilly article Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively. Definitely interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my daily routine for better efficiency… some thoughts.

  • I spent a couple hours earlier this week automating my billing. It’s still a little bubble-gum sticky, but it *does* export my hours directly from iCal to our in-house hour tracking system and generate and send out a weekly status report directly. In general, that should save me about 5/min of utter frustration every single day for the rest of the time I’m working at my current position
  • Most of these things aren’t that hard to do, but it just requires getting around to it. There are a couple things over the course of my day that probably could still be streamlined:
    • Email reading
    • Web-reading
    • Blogging/Link-logging
  • While some of this can be gotten around technically: better blogrolling/feed-reader, better mail-list archiving, better blogging tools, a lot of it is also behaviorial and will take a concerted effort to fix. While I’m now averaging only about 1 piece of spam every day or two now (CRM114 is still training, I expect this to improve), I still check my email way too often. I definitely have an info-consumption problem; I’ve been weening myself off bit by bit…
  • Lists are definitely good. What I’ve realized is that because I have way too many projects going on, the best thing to do is to create a linear checklist so that anytime I’m twiddling my thumbs I don’t need to make a decision on what to do, just do it. This is something else can be improved with technology; ie, being able to automatically change priority based on due-date/milestone markers, etc.