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The edible martini

This has been an interesting topic for me recently.  Some stuff I’d like to check out:

Community 2.0: Measuring the Success of Online Communities

Anything on the Community 2.0 Conference this past year.

I recently heard a great interview with Tamora Pierce about writing fantasy books for girls. The interview was on To the Best of Our Knowledge. Tamora talked about the changes girls go through as they hit puberty. She has visited various schools and commented on the difference between all-girl-schools and coed schools. Girls up to 6th grade are confident, full of energy and inquisitive. When they hit 7th grade, it changes. She does not see this missing energy in all-girl-schools as much.

If you have a young girl you may find her bibilography of interest.

Marla Sharp gives excellent presentations on HTML form usability and accessibility.  I first attended her presentation at the California Web Accessibility Conference (CalWAC).

I highly recommend her presentation on Accessible Forms. She runs a Web development shop called 10 Sharp.

I really dig Steve Johnson’s Interface Culture (1997).  Its old, but relevant, and very interesting to read with 10 years of hindsight. For example, he claimed the next big development in the interface will focus on text.  He was dead on (think Google).  Some other interesting comments on text (I’m on chapter 5, titled succinctly “Text”) include:

1. The modern word processor interface has changed the writing process and even our content.  We type faster, can delete instantly, change words mid sentence… the impacts of such abilities are limitless.
2. New technologies are often woefully under estimated.  For example, computers are highly susceptible to utility morphing.  One minute you have a calculator, the next its a word processor, and then its a CD and DVD cataloger.  As Johnson points out, “William Gibson writes in Nueromancer, ‘The street finds its own uses for things–uses the manufacturer never imagined’”.

   The mother of all such underestimations involves an Intel engineer’s mid seventies bid to the board of directors to make a personal computer.  The board asked him what a consumer would do with a PC, “…his most compelling scenario involved filling electronic versions of cooking recipes… It was like inventing the wheel and then immediatley demonstrating what a wonderful doorstop it made.” Johnson’s book is literated with such witty metaphors.

3. The command line was a barrier for user adoption.  Nothing new here, though I’d love to hear his thoughts on what feels like the rebirth of the command line.

Well, sorry to cut this short but back to my vacation (I’m in California remember)…

What a great article about a systematic process for creativity. What would an artist say?

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” - Paul Dirac

Formal creativity–two words that most would agree do not go together. Jacob Goldenberg, Roni Horowitz, Amnon Levav, and David Mazursky, authors of the Harvard Business Review article “Finding Your Innovation Sweet Spot”, attempt to smash this apparent oxymoron. I’d like to see these guys in a room with some artists and psychologists to really get at the bottom of where creativity comes from.

Starting from research on “systematic inventive thinking” by Russian engineer Genrich Altshuller, the authors identify five “innovation patterns” in creativity that can be used as a template for developing new products.

The patterns are Subtraction (removing features), Multiplication (exaggerating one feature), Division (splitting a product into a couple of products), Task Unification (combine the window defroster and antennae in a car) and Attribute Dependency Change (relate product to its environment). Read the article if you’d like to see what they are about.

I took a class in college on human sexuality (which as you’d expect was very popular). When we got to the chapter on love, the professor made a comment that frankly offended me. “Artists know nothing about love. We need to go to scientists to really understand it.” Mind you I was studying art at the time, and challenged him on every argument. But he made an interesting point, one that Paul Dirac’s comments on art and science illustrate: both disciplines address different human needs.

I’d still love to see a good debate on it though.

Ludwig Wittgenstein to be exact.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

A great article from Kuro5hin.org sheds some experienced light onto the Windows Source code that was leaked/stolen.

In We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source, author Selznak gives us some true insight into the thousands of lines of Microsoft code that was recently leaked mostly on to the P2P networks.

As you would expect, the comments gave insight into the human side of the company. Ranging from slight profanity to humurous “hacks”, I can almost imagine myself having a conversation with one of these guys about the frustrations involved.

Some of my favorite “Hack” comments:

privateinetmshtmlsrcsitelayoutflowlyt.cxx:
// God, I hate this hack ...

privateinetwinineturlcachecachecfg.cxx:
// Dumb hack for back compat. *sigh*

privateinetwinineturlcachefilemgr.cxx:
// ACHTUNG!!! this is a special hack for IBM antivirus software

privateispupkitrusttrustuiacuictl.cpp:
// HACK ALERT, believe it or not there is no way to get the height of the current
// HACK ON TOP OF HACK ALERT,

privatentosudfsdevctrl.c:
// Add the hack-o-ramma to fix formats.

privateshellshdoc401unicppsendto.cpp:
// Mondo hackitude-o-rama.

privatentosw32ntconserverlink.c:
// HUGE, HUGE hack-o-rama to get NTSD started on this process!

privatentosw32ntuserclientdlgmgr.c:
// HACK OF DEATH:

privateshelllibutil.cpp:
// TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD HACK

privatentosw32ntuserclientnt6user.h:
* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.

There are lots of morons too..

privategenxshellincprsht.w:
// we are such morons. Wiz97 underwent a redesign between IE4 and IE5
privateshellextftpftpdrop.cpp:
We have to do this only because Exchange is a moron.

privateshellshdoc401unicppdesktop.cpp:
// We are morons. We changed the IDeskTray interface between IE4

privateshellbrowseuiitbar.cpp:
// should be fixed in the apps themselves. Morons!

The article praises the code quality, down plays the use of stolen Open Source software and venerates the task they have in maintaining backwards compatibility.

Microsoft ain’t so bad, at least their programmers aren’t.