Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla : Days of our lives. Honestly.
Updated: 6/10/2002; 1:22:26 PM.

 

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Thursday, 18 July 2002

Funny wired article

headline headline headline. deck deck deck deck deck deck deck deck deck [Wired News]

The funniest wired article in a long time.
8:58:37 PM    


LCD

Roller status. Now I need to get that data into Roller, perhaps by file-upload perhaps by SOAP. [Blogging Roller]

Go with at least file upload - it's lowest common denominator.
6:45:38 PM    


Snells Law

Sam Ruby: "Loosely Coupled. The only standards that will ever be accepted are those that permit the greatest autonomy among participants."  A good rule of thumb.  A good set of follow on rules would be:

  1. The likelyhood of a standard being accepted is inversely exponential to the number of pages in the spec. 
  2. The number of pages in the spec grows exponentially to the number of different people/companies working on the spec.
  3. The number of different people/companies working on a spec is directly proportional to the amount of media hype the spec gets.

Conclusion: The more attention a spec gets, the less likely it'll be accepted. 

[snellspace]

Good enough to stick on my .sig. Shall it be christened Snell's Law? :)
6:41:31 PM    


Dumbing down can be dumb

All our icons for hard drives suck because... the hard drive is not a concept that the UI should be exposing to the user. Until we abstract the filesystem to the point at which it is invisible to the user, and the user just thinks in terms of organising and sorting their various bits and pieces, filesystem programmers and desktop UI designers haven't done their job properly.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

The problem with that is that some people have already built mental models that include where the data is on why physical device. I have used "dumbed down" systems where things like this were completly hidden, and it led to a feeling of vertigo as I couldn't find where said program was putting my files. Made me want to reach for find. But this was win3.1, not linux. :)
6:39:42 PM    


Business Expenses

Fluffy the Dinosaur. I wanted to get a rubber chicken instead of a dinosaur, but the only place we could find one was in Gowings, and they were asking $AU25 for it. I still think we should have bought it, just for the fun of expensing "$25: Rubber chicken". [The Desktop Fishbowl]

I can see that going down a treat with the ATO. :)
6:33:44 PM    


5 Layers

Kevin Werbach has his email running through five layers of filtering which results in only about 10 spam a day. [lawrence's notebook]

Ouch. There has to be a better way.
5:35:54 PM    


SQuirreL

I have spent the afternoon toying with SQuirreL. I must say, it is the most impressive java sql client I have used so far. I can see why it has been incorporated in commercial products. Yummo.
3:18:44 PM    

Everyone is ripping content these days

Copyright enforcer Ranger Online caught stealing content. Do as we say, not as we do [The Register]

hahahahaha
2:44:58 PM    


VFS & Commons Net

vfs. vfs is a new Jakarta Commons component being developed that implements a Virtual File System, allowing local files, FTP, SMB and zips to all be treated the same in Java code. Its also worth checking out the commons net component that is based on the old NetComponents code base, for working with various network protocols such as FTP etc. [james strachan's musings]

Useful kit.
10:56:47 AM    


Xopus

Jon Udell: isn't XML infastructure now standard enough so that all browsers on all platforms can offer a rich-text alternative to TEXTAREA -- one that does WYSIWYG XML?  Try Xopus. [Sam Ruby]

Hmmmm. Could be useful.
10:55:10 AM    


Ease of use

Walking before running. I've just spent the day in Canberra, doing some consultancy work for one of the government departments. [...]

Before attempting to implement broad KM initiatives, it is necessary to have in place basic foundations, like a functioning intranet. Now, none of the organisations that I have worked with in the last year even have this. [Column Two]

Ugh. All I can say is that for knowledge management software to be useful it is going to have to be easy to use. A whole lot easier than current lan software & hardware.

Maybe there is a new market for Mac with their WiFi & bluetooth & auto-discovery. We will see.
10:45:18 AM    


Amazon Light

Amazon Light. Amazon Light is a Googlesque search interface using Amazon Web Services. Nice.

Thanks, Matt [ia/ - news for information architects]

Man oh man. The real reason that web services are going to be big - undoing years of bad user interface design. Hooboy. Amazon Light is beautiful.
10:40:03 AM    


© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.



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blogchalk: Brett/Male/26-30. Lives in Australia/Sydney/Carlingford and speaks English. Spends 60% of daytime online. Uses a Faster (1M+) connection.
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