I’ve been doing a series of presentations here at the InSTEDD lab in Phom Penh, and so far the best-received one has been (to my surprise) about something I really just getting into: OpenStreetMap.
I figured that this would be a good-spirited critical discussion about FOSS philosophy given that Google was in town. :) [...]
So, I’ve spent almost a month now as a resident geek at the InSTEDD Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
InSTEDD is working on epidemiology-related technologies that are very relevant to my research interests:
InSTEDD’s mission is to harness the power of technology to improve collaboration for global health and humanitarian action. We are an [...]
For the last 5 months I’ve been working with friends at Ushahidi and Meedan on a project nicknamed “Swift.”
Our goal with Swift is to provide a crowdsourcing platform for “data triage.” Imagine something like Mechanical Turk used only for tagging news, photos, microblogging and videos. There’s no business model or anything like that — it’s [...]
I have been trying to quit programming for about six months.
I’m down to about 2 times a day, on average, sometimes more. It’s a problem.
Don’t get me wrong, programming is one of the best disciplines I ever stuck my nose into. Programming teaches you fundamentally how to constantly improve your craft. But it’s [...]
On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled [...]
Just found out about Political Streams.
I really do like this idea, but reinventing the pie chart with those desaturated squares is not a good start. I’ll be checking it out to see how they iterate on representing the concept, which is fascinating.
It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all [...]
Somehow Kermit managed to skewer the woo-woo hippie hype surrounding visual thinking 40 years ago.
But then of course he really gets to the truth of the CA design scene: “You really have to let go, you unwind into the cosmic infinity of things.”
via http://iatelevision.blogspot.com
After a few months of work, we have gotten a new wireframe of the mobile app running on the iPhone.
For the User Experience people: Bill Buxton is a genius. Got me sketching. (And redefined “sketching.”) 1.5 hr. lecture. Teaser: includes the phrase “Charlton Heston flying through the air.” Oh and also please buy Sketching User Experiences. Operators are standing by.
For the type nerds: Erik Speikermann is my idea of what real men are [...]
Most of the gang at Bolt | Peters went to BayCHI tonight, and I was really impressed by a presentation from Yahoo about BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).
Turns out that, once you get beat badly by Google, you start to get really open. Nice.
Basically BOSS (bad name, great tool) means that, with [...]
Today Adaptive Path, the godfather company of the interface and experience research industry, released the first of some amazingly high quality concept videos about the web browser of the future.
I’m really impressed, even though I spent most of the day grousing about some of the details of the interface they showed — my nitpicking [...]
Actually this is better than Thursday morning TV, which, in my hometown at least, was pretty weak. This stuff is amazing.
First some of the best nonprofit advertising I’ve ever seen.
Second a great bike water filter pump.
Lastly a favorite app redesigned.
(more type video if you’re into it)
And the bike:
The wacky bike was designed by [...]
Smartly presented information is a nonprofit’s best friend. If you can’t communicate the problem, no one is going to give a damn. Hash’s blog just pointed me to some powerful charts Sokwanele mapping project , which I’ve mentioned previously. These charts are extremely important data to have in the public domain, and it’s great that [...]
Intel produced this fantastic map yesterday at the 2008 Research@Intel Day. Red countries have higher rates of technology adoption. This is really valuable data for thinking about how to influence the adoption of technology, and for thinking about the ICT4D political spectrum in more than two shades of grey (or red and orange I guess). [...]
It’s been a good book month for interface geeks and IXD/UX people. Congrats to AP on the new book and kudos especially to upstart publisher Rosenfeld for the innovative stuff they are doing, including user testing of their 500-page, large font digital versions. Rock on, you madcap publishers you. You’re gonna make it big working [...]
On the occasion of amazing new videos of the latest prototype, it’s worth remembering that Android (not the just-barely-open iPhone) is the future of mobile development for the masses. Especially when combined with the hardware support of the Open Handset Alliance and the general propensity for open source projects to kick ass.
PS: where the [...]
Hack zero: Switch to Gmail
This is not a joke: Gmail is a fantastic and nearly spam-free platform. Notably, you can hook it up with a custom domain name so no one knows you are part of the Goog machine like everyone else.
Hack one: Greylisting with Postfix on Ubuntu
A mail transfer agent using greylisting will “temporarily [...]
I was never super into Alan Cooper (of Inmates are Running the Asylum fame) until I read this hilarious argument with Kent Beck, the godfather of Agile programming. (pssst. don’t click on that flaky wayback machine link. I’ve republished the article here, probably completely illegally, for your convenience. But it’s pretty depressing that this doesn’t [...]
Several times this weekend I used the phrase “unixlike” or “unixy” to describe applications or devices.
This is what I meant:
Most importantly, it means that you play well with others, as in the Unix concept of standard out: Whatever your application does, it is able (intended, really) to be used as the input to [...]
Just a quick open invitation, if you are in San Francisco this weekend:
UPDATE: Changed the time to 4pm.
I’m meeting with designer-researchers Niti Bahn and Dave Tait on Saturday, April 19th, at 6pm 4pm at Atlas Cafe in San Francisco (in the Mission). Come have a beer with us! We’re talking generally about designing [...]
So I went to this Street Hacks talk 2 nights ago is here: http://www.janchipchase.com/ (it was awesome, you missed it. Clam Pizza.) And then it turns out Chipchase just got all famous this week, seriously: First a rad video in the Economist:
And then in the New York Times.
Here’s my Reader’s Digest version, [...]
Speaking of personal metrics …
simone:~ chris$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
80 cd
70 ruby
44 svn
33 rake
28 ll
24 ls
23 rm
17 ssh
17 df
12 mate
I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about “personal metrics” (aka “attention data”, aka your “information wake”). Pictured are some examples from Last.fm, Nike+ and RescueTime (which I used for a few days this week! My Saturday computing is visualized below.)
As an infoviz junkie, I have to say that I have always *adored* this stuff. [...]
Very much looking forward to this Adaptive Path event (San Francisco) tomorrow:
Street Hacks and Long Wows - An Evening with Chipchase, Burns, and Schauer
How long have you been using your current cell phone? And what happened to your previous model? If you live in a country like India, China or Ghana the answer is [...]
The Zimbabwe Election Watch is doing a pretty amazing job of aggregating media reports about the Zimbabwe elections and using Google Maps to present the results. I’m both impressed and depressed about it.
Next week I’m sure Rails will be completely passé in favor of Merb (managed by git, of course). But for now, here’s the stuff that makes me a happy programmer this weekend:
Rspec With Xpath.
Autotest/Zentest
Continuous Integration (a practice not an app.)
CruiseControl.rb (see this for Rails).
CSS Dryer. Here’s my last ramble about server parsed CSS.
Now this is what I am talking about: A mobile phone based API for doing things like managing quantitative research projects. Supports a bazillion types of phones. Developed by a South African company. You own your own data. Sounds like a brilliant new project and I look forward to hearing more about it.
The [...]
Glenn Gould; he was at his best when he was young, wearing his bathrobe, hunched waaay to low, and doing incredible interpretations of Bach … and doing this awful singing thing …
Just like he is here:
And Margaret Kilgallen, the archetype of San Franciscan brilliance:
I’ve felt for a long time that education is the most important vehicle for social change. I mean, really how else does anything actually get done? You’ve got to have some kick ass teachers along the way, or you’re gonna be a vegetable. And vegetabledom happens to entire societies. Watch out.
So I’m a little [...]
If there is anything I hate more than cell phones, it’s money.
I mean, of course everybody *likes* money, but seriously, who wants to actually deal with it? Going to the bank, cutting checks to the landlord, saving receipts, budgeting, negotiating salaries, calculating the tip, trying to find stuff on sale, thinking about taxes … [...]
If you need a professional application server, particularly for rails, I’m recommending Rimuhost these days.
Their VPS plans are a reasonable deal, but, as always, the support is what is always most important when choosing a host unless it’s a super small static site, in which case the big guys like mediatemple, dreamhost, bluehost are [...]
Things are looking great so far with this hairbrained project of ours.
Fabulous, actually: Bolt | Peters is super interested in the project and wants me to work on it for some percent of my total time at work. Which is fan-freaking-tastic! Thanks BP!
If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out [...]
There’s this great movie called A Beautiful Mind that I saw once, and in the last few months I’ve been quoting it a few times when talking about my programming career. Overall it’s a great story, but the one scene that really gets me is when he (John Nash, famous mathematician) is standing in front [...]
Three videos for your Sunday afternoon enjoyment. (The first two are for the hippies, the last one is for the geeks.)
The Corporation
“Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel-prize winning economist, the [...]
The other day I referenced Jan Chipchase’s blog as “almost certainly my favorite.” This is patently false. I am a big fat liar when I get excited. (Chipchase is probably tied for second with a few other exceptionally cool writers.)
The blogger at the top of my feedreader is, really this time, absolutely, Ethan Zuckerman. I [...]
I am obsessed with cell phones right now. Mostly I bloody *hate* them. I haven’t had one for six months, but work made me get one last week. So since they made me get one I am lobbying to get into some cell-phone-type research, partly to figure out my personal issues with cellular voice communication, [...]
I’m just getting started on a new project nicknamed Kestrel.
The basic idea a simple and user-centered web app that helps facilitate ordering, billing and member management for CSA’s. Things are JUST getting started and I am soliciting help in doing some feasibility research as well as a basic evaluation of existing CSA management applications. [...]
I’ve been following the recent debate about the future of web standards and whatnot. It’s been making me think a bit about what I really want to see in the future of web standards. And I can’t get this great California zine Cometbus out of my head. (Well, ok, by “following the recent debate” [...]
