AISLiverpool - Watching the boats go by.
This link is quite cool - a real time plot of where a lot of big ships are around the cost of the UK. makes you want to do something with ( animate ? ) the data. nice example of a cool use of google maps too.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
Don Norman's jnd.org / in praise of good design
Don Norman's jnd.org / in praise of good design
Found Don Norman (He of design of everyday things) home page. Oh he is so cool we like him.
Found Don Norman (He of design of everyday things) home page. Oh he is so cool we like him.
getting some exposure.
British R&D Show sounds good but a bit early for me this year.
Applications are invited by Dr Brian Iddon MP (Sponsoring Member and Member of the Commons' Select Committee for Science and Technology) and SET for BRITAIN from *Early-Stage and *Early-Career Researchers in the UK to participate in the Annual Receptions for them at the House of Commons on Monday, 19 March 2007 (Lunchtime and Evening Presentations).
2007 is the ninth year for this highly successful and popular annual initiative where Britain's researchers present posters at Westminster on "frontier" science, engineering, medicine and technology research and compete for prestigious national medals, awards and prizes.
Applications are invited by Dr Brian Iddon MP (Sponsoring Member and Member of the Commons' Select Committee for Science and Technology) and SET for BRITAIN from *Early-Stage and *Early-Career Researchers in the UK to participate in the Annual Receptions for them at the House of Commons on Monday, 19 March 2007 (Lunchtime and Evening Presentations).
2007 is the ninth year for this highly successful and popular annual initiative where Britain's researchers present posters at Westminster on "frontier" science, engineering, medicine and technology research and compete for prestigious national medals, awards and prizes.
Function Point Analysis - Function Points - Web Counting
Function Point Analysis Consultancy - Function Points FAQs - Web Based Applications,
Training,Counting, Estimating , Productivity and Auditing
I had an email over my desk about function point analysis. I tried to remember as much as I could but decided to google it. I get the impression FPA onyl has a general view of HCI - making HCI a late add on rather than a fundermental aspect of a computing project.
A little bit of examination later and I dug up this link to FPA an websites. I wonder if anything doing on UBIcomp and FPA or is that too close to Ubicomp as engineering?
Training,Counting, Estimating , Productivity and Auditing
I had an email over my desk about function point analysis. I tried to remember as much as I could but decided to google it. I get the impression FPA onyl has a general view of HCI - making HCI a late add on rather than a fundermental aspect of a computing project.
A little bit of examination later and I dug up this link to FPA an websites. I wonder if anything doing on UBIcomp and FPA or is that too close to Ubicomp as engineering?
video conferencing doesn't work
By strange coinicdence I was exposed to a number of people saying how video conferencing doesn't work - well enough to consider using them over flying even for people who think global warming is important.
It made me wonder what happened to all the research in to video conferanceing and multimedia over IP. Either they found out how to make it work and havn't managed to get the right stuff out. Or they found out how to make it work and know they can't make it work. Or they havent managed to figure out what went wrong. My vote is for the last option, its an interesting example of how everyone one know's it doesn't work but cannot put their finger on why - its a non discursive problem.
I did have a fun Idea of how to find out what is going wrong.
Take a group or groups forbid them to meet in real life ( they might live in the same building or room). then organise them to meet in a meeting room for meetings.
find a measure of the performance then begin to introduce restrictions. For example put up a partition in the real meeting room forcing everyone to look through a smallish screen sized holes at each other. Keep adding more problems ( (2) speeking through microphones to remove directionality) until the real meeting has as many problems as video conferencing. By examining the problems you have to introduce to make the real world not work you should have a good idea of what items need to be fully solved for a digital version.
It made me wonder what happened to all the research in to video conferanceing and multimedia over IP. Either they found out how to make it work and havn't managed to get the right stuff out. Or they found out how to make it work and know they can't make it work. Or they havent managed to figure out what went wrong. My vote is for the last option, its an interesting example of how everyone one know's it doesn't work but cannot put their finger on why - its a non discursive problem.
I did have a fun Idea of how to find out what is going wrong.
Take a group or groups forbid them to meet in real life ( they might live in the same building or room). then organise them to meet in a meeting room for meetings.
find a measure of the performance then begin to introduce restrictions. For example put up a partition in the real meeting room forcing everyone to look through a smallish screen sized holes at each other. Keep adding more problems ( (2) speeking through microphones to remove directionality) until the real meeting has as many problems as video conferencing. By examining the problems you have to introduce to make the real world not work you should have a good idea of what items need to be fully solved for a digital version.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Equator Website Weight Furniture
Equator Website Weight Furniture
the thing I noticed was Key Table ( file under already been done).
The Key Table gets a sense of people's emotions from the way they dump their stuff onto it. Much as slamming doors are a crude measure of mental state, so the table uses the transient onsets of a new weight to gauge mood. Reactions to emotional entrances are triggered as mechanised frames swing pictures off centre to warn other inhabitants to tread carefully.
the thing I noticed was Key Table ( file under already been done).
The Key Table gets a sense of people's emotions from the way they dump their stuff onto it. Much as slamming doors are a crude measure of mental state, so the table uses the transient onsets of a new weight to gauge mood. Reactions to emotional entrances are triggered as mechanised frames swing pictures off centre to warn other inhabitants to tread carefully.
diamondspin found!
I've wasted a lot of time trying to get Jbuilder and CVS to work together. Even http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ failed it can only handle a CVROOT on the same machine not as a remote drive. I'm guessing but I think the OU don't have a Pserver or a Kserver... although I could be wrong. I don't know enough about the servers to know what kind of unix boxes they have yet I could SSH to. I need to go and talk to more people. Still all very fustrating.
From the mac I CVS checkedout the source code to the zoom family tree stuff and then began to find my way though all the code. All very fustrating, the code that exists to run the diamond touch stuff never came up on my google searchs. Paul had some examples which ran in Java ( harray), and I was trying to figure out how to use them. Over lunch ( was is positivisum) mention was made of a diamond touch subsystem. After stuggleing with 3( count them ) diffrent java IDE's I eventually found something i could maniuplate. A little low level but hay that's cool. Y&P and the new woman Eva left for high tea while I hacked into the code which began to work!
I then got the pure zoomView to work and now just need to use the background thread feature of zoomView to pick up the touch and box events I have a couple of days doing PHD stuff but hope to have something primative on friday.
when i got home Yvonne emailed me a very excellent link to the diamondSpin people. Diamond spin hopefully if enough people linkt to it then it will appear in Google.
I think it might be possible to hack the diamond hardware and project up from a projector to some gound glass this would remove the hand shadow problem.
Friday, January 19, 2007
More cool tech.
Ruth spoke to the guy on the train and he was selling ( i guess ) these things. They have a pen that looks at special markings on paper to figure out where the pen is on the page. The idea is then you can use this to record paths of what people have written on a page ( without scanning it in). A kind of real pen/paper interface for stroke recognition system.
Ruth is moving back to a physical note book. She can't find an online calendar than she can use without power/laptop on the train *. Intreastingly I am booting up a new physical note book primarly for all my on line passwords ( back up via photocopyer). I keep saying to people that as a programmer you are always competeing with paper. What makes paper note books work - light weigh zero boot time and zero recharge/discharge time and nice interface to drawing. Down side - no delete, and more over no find.
I love to play with the evaluation kit. maybe if I get the big display working next week.
* the laptop is hevey and ruth wants to be able to go in with lecutures on her ipod.
OU DVD so cool
I was watching the very excellent intro to the OU user interface design course. It was so wonderful it even had the bit with Tog putting salt into his coffee and falling into the literal basment. I must have seen that years ago and it all stuck in my mind. It was so cool if a little padded in the shoulders. Hay and the academic consultant was Simon the guy I share an office with now is that enough to freak you out or not?
Look back I think I have problems with the basic premise.
The essential background premise of program one was that you had a known user and have to provide then with some specific activity. Sounds basic and it is kind of right.
This does make things easy but it also ignores a second segment of development that is creating tools and facilities. For example did the inventor of the wordprocessor go out and try to develop a tool for writers? If someone asked you do something like this would you end up with something as general as a word processor. Surely the user testing with a number of authors would lead you to making a less general tool and produce something overly tailored to the task of the author.
As for facilities imagine creating a website to look a train time table, one might get side tracked talking to the people who look up train times and book them at a station. Clearly you can do a lot of the process of story boarding, not to mention testing. I still feel there is a difference working with people (experts) who know what they want what they do and non experts who aren’t sure what they want.
This is what used to be called technology push and market pull. Infact I think the best products sit nicely in the middle, think Google, eveyone wanted better searches and the google guys had the right social recogmentation technology.
For example take the process of designing a dating website. This might begin by noticing a number of faults with either other dating websites or dwell up on the problems that prevent a dateing website from being started. Perhaps you think what about a website where you enter in all your friends email address and the machine looks for a match between yours and someone else. If the machine finds a match then it emails the intermediary. The intermediary then answers the question is A suited to B. This would you think over come the perceived danger of meeting a deranged maniac. This would be a example of technology push with a sprinkling of market pull.
I guess the central problem is where the innovation happens. When the user interface designer is approached with a proposal then the innovation has already happened. This has defined the problem and the client ‘knows’ the solution, even if it is the wrong solution.
How might I start ?I think I would find some well known software disasters (Child Support Agency, Bull Ring) and find the ones where the wrong user interface killed the project.
may be I'm thinking about it to much, or many be things have changed.
Still just my own stupid impression be intreasting to see what people are going to do to revise it.
Am I insulting enough people here?
Look back I think I have problems with the basic premise.
The essential background premise of program one was that you had a known user and have to provide then with some specific activity. Sounds basic and it is kind of right.
This does make things easy but it also ignores a second segment of development that is creating tools and facilities. For example did the inventor of the wordprocessor go out and try to develop a tool for writers? If someone asked you do something like this would you end up with something as general as a word processor. Surely the user testing with a number of authors would lead you to making a less general tool and produce something overly tailored to the task of the author.
As for facilities imagine creating a website to look a train time table, one might get side tracked talking to the people who look up train times and book them at a station. Clearly you can do a lot of the process of story boarding, not to mention testing. I still feel there is a difference working with people (experts) who know what they want what they do and non experts who aren’t sure what they want.
This is what used to be called technology push and market pull. Infact I think the best products sit nicely in the middle, think Google, eveyone wanted better searches and the google guys had the right social recogmentation technology.
For example take the process of designing a dating website. This might begin by noticing a number of faults with either other dating websites or dwell up on the problems that prevent a dateing website from being started. Perhaps you think what about a website where you enter in all your friends email address and the machine looks for a match between yours and someone else. If the machine finds a match then it emails the intermediary. The intermediary then answers the question is A suited to B. This would you think over come the perceived danger of meeting a deranged maniac. This would be a example of technology push with a sprinkling of market pull.
I guess the central problem is where the innovation happens. When the user interface designer is approached with a proposal then the innovation has already happened. This has defined the problem and the client ‘knows’ the solution, even if it is the wrong solution.
How might I start ?I think I would find some well known software disasters (Child Support Agency, Bull Ring) and find the ones where the wrong user interface killed the project.
may be I'm thinking about it to much, or many be things have changed.
Still just my own stupid impression be intreasting to see what people are going to do to revise it.
Am I insulting enough people here?
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
mesureing stress by keyboard.
I was having a chat about thinking of generating poetry to create memorable passwords with Paul. This moved on to thinking about measuring identityby using the way we type ( the pattern of time between keys ) as the measure.
Paul made the observation that we might type diffrently when angry or stressed. So the observation that we might beable to do a simple stress monitor by looking at the way we type. Quite a low tech way to augment a machine to measure users 'state'. down side is the training period.
I suggessted using the accellerometer in the laptop to detect taps against the side ( as I am stress punishment). Or have a soft club you could use to hit things - this would be measured and sent back to the stick.
Paul made the observation that we might type diffrently when angry or stressed. So the observation that we might beable to do a simple stress monitor by looking at the way we type. Quite a low tech way to augment a machine to measure users 'state'. down side is the training period.
I suggessted using the accellerometer in the laptop to detect taps against the side ( as I am stress punishment). Or have a soft club you could use to hit things - this would be measured and sent back to the stick.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
languages
I wondered what the ideal language to develop graphic under interfaces in is ? Not Fortan Vs C or what ever. I was wondering if something like a functional language would be idea. Ok clearly a functional programming language is totally wrong as we need to maintain 'state' between the events. OK they did invent Object orientation to help out but languages like java and C++ need so many odd looking syntactical clugdges to make things work.
Do you need something like anonymous functions ? I would hope not. Objective C did do a good job in many places especially in saving documents to file but the reference counting conventions are evil.
Still its floating in the back of my mind.
Do you need something like anonymous functions ? I would hope not. Objective C did do a good job in many places especially in saving documents to file but the reference counting conventions are evil.
Still its floating in the back of my mind.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
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