The New York Times > Technology> Review> Connecting Paper and Online Worlds by Cellphone Camera

The New York Times > Technology> Review>

Connecting Paper and Online Worlds by Cellphone Camera: "On these posters are symbols the researchers call SpotCodes: concentric rings of black-and-white blocks representing ones and zeros. Focusing your camera phone on the code and then clicking any button launches a wireless service -- for example, the ability to buy a train ticket, check an airplane's departure time or download a ring tone from a store display.

The codes can be produced on any inkjet printer and can be read even by phones with low-resolution cameras."

What paradigm has no name but flies?

Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon:
Discussing Gmail, and an emerging paradigm that doesn't seem to have a name...

"When a client connects, it effectively downloads an implementation of that model. Once in situ, further conversations between client and server can go up a notch - expressed in terms of domain specific concepts 'render the inbox will you? There's a good chap' rather than 'At X,Y render a blue box...'.

Web clients carry around a basic, low level programming language called Javascript. The real beauty of Javascript is that it is dynamic - you can blurr the distinction between code and data. You can hoist the level of abstraction you work with in your app by layering domain specific concepts on top of it in the form of functions and data structures. You can sling across data structures already teed up for use on the other end with the aid of the magic of 'eval'. You can implement complex behaviour by sending across a program to be run rather than trying to explain what you want done declaratively to the other side.

Now, in such a world - would you send XML data to and fro? Developers with a static typing programming language background might be inclined to say yes but I suspect javascriptophiles, lispers, pythoneers and rubyites are more likely to say no. Reason being, it is so much more natural to exchange lumps of code - mere text strings remember - that can be eval'ed to re-create the data structure you have in the XML.

In my opinion, there is more power in that one idea than in the whole minatory miasma of WS-GetAGrip. [webservices]
"

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Q&A : Indonesian hominid find

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Q&A : Indonesian hominid find: "The local inhabitants of Flores talk of little people that lived in the forests and, according to legend, the 'hobbits' were still on Flores when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago. The most recent legend dates to only 100 years ago."

HCI Glossary

Imagination Cubed

Imagination Cubed

The Imagination3 demo is genuinely cool. If we chould type in real time, it would be really really useful for chatting as well.

Windows Error Messages on Billboard

from Boing Boing: :
"Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard

Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with 'Toronto.' Link

defective yeti

defective yet, where have you been all my lifei: "America's Next Couch Potato

I'm going to make a million dollars selling mirrors to idiots and telling them they are ultra-thin flatscreen TVs that only receive reality shows about lazy people.
"

links on information visualization

links on Information Visualization I gave a presentation on Information Visualization and HCI to a colleague's class on Data Mining and pulled together a set of links.

Paralysed man sends e-mail by thought

Paralysed man sends e-mail by thought:
"In June 2004, surgeons implanted a device containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic. The device, called the BrainGate, was developed by the company Cyberkinetics, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Each electrode taps into a neuron in the patient's brain.

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

The team now plans to implant devices into four more patients."

How do I create custom sidebars in Firefox?

"How do I create custom sidebars in Firefox?

To create a custom sidebar in Firefox, bookmark the URL you want to use as a sidebar, right-click the bookmark and select 'Properties', and check 'Load this bookmark in the sidebar'."

Just Letters

Just Letters: "Instructions: drag letters :-)" Perhaps the most interesting and elegant social software I have ever seen. As art, as metaphor, as collective consciousness, as game, as challenge.

The Trikke scooter — the latest way for people to look dumb
I couldn't have put it better myself...and yet I am now a proud owner.

be the first kid on your blog....

Hey, at least I didn't get one of these:

spontaneous integration

Here are some recent del.icio.us bookmarks worth blogging.

(I'm finding the combination of blogger, delicious, flickr and various bookmarklets to be incomparably easy to use. A half-dozen separate products, some corporate, some amateur, fitting together better than any integrated product of which I'm aware. What does that tell you?)

Webnote Sample Workspace

post-it note metaphor wiki

Delicious Library

nothing to do with del.icio.us, but gonna be big: isight camera and mac becomes barcode reader and library system

Open Laszlo

Version Control with Subversion

www.welie.com -- patterns in Interaction Design

WikalongExtension - Wikalong Firefox Extension

Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page.

How to write Firefox extensions

TDSOS: The Damn Small OS

The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr.

Interaction Design Patterns

A superb site

Newspad -- The Website for Paddington, Bayswater, Hyde Park and Maida Vale

Newspad -- The Website for Paddington, Bayswater, Hyde Park and Maida Vale: "
What a beautiful design!

Paddington Development Corporation has just unveiled, or rather unrolled, a startling new pedestrian bridge which crosses an inlet from the Basin in front of the new Marks and Spencer headquarters.



It's all done by a fiendishly clever system of hydraulic rams inside the handrail. So, it can be rolled up when M&S want to bring a hospitality boat into the inlet.

The Rolling Bridge has encountered no snags unlike another high-tech artistic construction, the bouncing Hungerford Bridge on the Thames, and it seems able to take most loads with ease.

John Taplin

20/9/2004"

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X (think UltraEdit for Windows or as an alternative to BBEdit)

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X : "TextMate is The Missing Editor "

A code folding editor for python on the mac...almost. The folding doesn't work reliably for me. But its a big step in the right direcdtion.

The New York Times > Science > What a Story Lice Can Tell

The New York Times > Science > What a Story Lice Can Tell:

"In a finding that seems bound to inspire several science fiction treatments, Dr. David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville has reached the startling conclusion that some human lice show signs of having evolved originally on a different human species."
...
""I really think we are only scratching the surface...,'' Dr. Reed said."

WikalongExtension - Wikalong Firefox Extension

WikalongExtension - Wikalong Firefox Extension:
Wikalong looks like a real Next Step on the web. I have to figure out how to setup a private wikalong server. I also want to tell Jon Udell about this AND tell him its time to fix is blogroll link to point to jonschull.blogspot.com.

I also need to remember to track a suggestion I myself made using wikalong that it be used to create a dynamic map of frequently travelled by-ways in cyberspace... That idea, and some already-underway discussion of it, is at http://wikalong.phunnel.org/kwiki/index.cgi?WikaLongByWays

"Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet.

One general difference in the functioning of the wiki you may find is that wiki links would be external, as opposed to traditional wikis which are more internal link centric."

MeaningofLife.tv

MeaningofLife.tv: "Robert Wright interviews Daniel Dennett on direction in evolution"

Just one page in Robert Wright's MeaningOfLife.tv

A wonderful website

George Bush as programming project leader

George Bush as programming project leader:

"Over a year into the project, having lost over 1,000 employees, Bush The Project Leader would just be pointing at a handful of completed tasks: 'We got rid of that old, buggy Hoo-Sane system. The company's better off without it. We're still having problems building the replacement, and a lot of programmers are burning out, because it's a bigger task than I thought, but at least we got rid of the Hoo-Sane system that I've always wanted to replace.'
"

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Art Review | Josef and Anni Albers: A Bauhaus Couple Lived Their Less-Is-More Credo

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Art Review | Josef and Anni Albers: A Bauhaus Couple Lived Their Less-Is-More Credo: "'Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living,' an enlightening, quietly excellent show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum,"

I'll be in NY Nov 20...