Steven's Weblog

This is a pretty damn smart idea that will probably spawn a number of new technologies to improve HCI. The general idea that you can get more information from a data stream by filtering out some of the data is not a new one to those familiar with information theory (in the Shannon sense), but to apply it to something like the movements of a mouse is a new idea to me. And, ya know, if it’s new to me, then… OK, that doesn’t really mean it’s new to anyone else.

IBM Unveils Mouse Adapter That Assists Hand-Tremor Sufferers

I’m thankful for… my sisters and mother. I just spent a weekend with them, doing almost nothing actually interesting in the traditional sense, but we all had a wonderful time. Cuz they’re all wonderful people. It’s nice to be exposed to some of the deeper bits of greatness in people whom you’d love even if they weren’t so great.

Information Architecture and Alzheimer’s Disease

This kind of discussion will really improve the world some day, I think. Everything we can figure out to allow people to extend their spheres of input and output, regardless of their condition relative to ‘the norm’, will have unanticipated positive consequences, for the person and for the world.

Every being, in-the-world, has a vantage point from which the infinite-dimensional holographic world can be integrated for a new picture… or something like that.

This is an interesting idea: using the JavaScript ‘with’ keyword, you can hack up a syntax for an embedded DSL pretty easily. Even if I had known about the ‘with’ keyword :-), I might not have thought of that. Although I actually did do something like that in Python before, using a string of Python code and eval, which is actually the same thing but harder.

Now, the syntax you get here isn’t perfect; the extra commas and stuff aren’t that cool. However, it’s neat to see that such a simple idea can get you so close to having well-integrated embedded DSLs.

I’m thankful for… productization.

While it has its downsides, it is pretty amazingly cool that a company can package up a set of concepts/technologies like light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, polymer-encapsulated pigment microparticles, multimegabit-per-second data transmission, parsing and execution of a doman-specific language, etc., into a thingie that you just plug in and it prints. If I had to know how to build those pieces myself, or even understand most of them beyond the first layer of jargon, I’d be stuck with a pencil and paper. Wait, make that a rock and a patch of dirt.

‘course, ask me how much I like it when I’m in the midst of a productization phase myself, and I might have a different answer…

Huh… I just realized I hadn’t visted a certain set of my favorite web sites in a week or so. Turns out I had accidentally closed one of the folders in my bookmark tree. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

This article, Largest Machines On Earth: Particle Colliders, is interesting in its own right, but the thing that struck me as I was reading it was: what kind of amazing chain of PR goes on to get billions of dollars of funding for something so abstracted from the average person’s everyday life? I’m gonna have to ponder that one for a while, because I think there’s something deep in there…

Of course, a lot of males could be swayed by the simple argument: “It’s a HUUUGE freakin’ machine! Like a racecar track, kinda!” 🙂

I’m thankful for… perambulation.

I’m thankful for… the fact that some of the nasties humans create can have some positive effects on other living entities, too: Pollution Can Convert Airborne Iron Into Soluble Form Required For Phytoplankton Growth.

Doncha love free software? Have I asked that before?

I had a 91-page PDF document with the pages in backward order. That’s annoying. I tried to use Acrobat (Standard) to reverse the pages, but I’m too dumb to make that work. My best guess after 20 minutes of searching Adobe’s help and the web was to print to PDF with the ‘reverse pages’ turned on. That did not produce a satisfying result.

Then I popped over to Freshmeat to ask that oasis of software goodness for some help. In less time than it took to try the print experiment (it had cranked for a good 15 minutes…), I found pdftk, installed it, learned how to get it do do what I wanted (pdftk manual.pdf cat 91-1 output manual-rev.pdf), did it, got a satisfying result, and mailed the developers a thank you note.

Woot.