A while ago, I wrote a post containing notes for a talk about interaction design. These were real notes for a real talk I intend to give, and so were a kind of a shorthand for me. People helpfully commented, and one asked for a less talk-notes and more essayish version of the same content. As my friend mentioned, there are no new ideas here. Alan ( Read more... )

See http://www.cogmios.nl/weblogger-jelle-starts-initiative-to-help-donald-knuth-20071017.htmlRead more... )

...but Javascript toolkits suck the worst. It seems that every Javascript toolkit is seriously damaged. Let me count the ways:

* YUI: missing critical widgets (like combobox, charting), and does not seem to feel a lack. Open source nominally, but very closed development model.
* Prototype: idiosyncractic ($ as a function) and a hard stack to ( Read more... )

Going to filksings and having Frank Hayes' disease means that I usually keep my lyrics on my laptop. Filksings can go up to several hours, and sometimes connecting to electricity is annoying. Some use PDAs but they have small screens and are annoying. The OLPC would be perfect for that -- even in the middle of the woods, I could charge the battery ( Read more... )

So I read this, which is interesting if pie-in-the-sky (the first step to writing a new rendering engine is more or less implementing Graham's 100 year language now). The chief part I had an issue with was "you can't get that market share without being Web-compatible. (I suspect this is almost the entire reason why Opera hasn't been a runaway ( Read more... )

I had 6 mails in my mail box, 3 from social networking sites (LJ, Facebook, Linked-In) and 3 spams. Yes, some people still send me mail the old fashioned way (mail clients) but it does seem nowadays mail is mostly a delivery vehicle for notification from social networking sites. Is it possible to optimize a specific protocol for web-updates- ( Read more... )

Spoilerific! Don't click if you don't want spoilers for Bionic woman premier.

( Read more... )

I thought, from reading stuff on the web, that the anti-filking sentiments were somewhat over -- filking is accepted as a respectable aspect of fandom. My first face-to-face meeting with such anti-filking sentiment in fandom was in the Starbase 972 bonefire, where (despite scheduling it in advance in the planning), people tried to shout us down ( Read more... )

Douglas Crockford, a guy from Yahoo!, gave an interesting talk about javascript on Yahoo! Video: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111584 where he makes an analogy between using the DOM API to skating of broken ice (browser DOM bugs) except it's hyper-ice, because ( Read more... )

Reference: see older post
I know I said I'll do the notes there too, but they grew too much, so I'm putting them in a new home. Note that I plan to edit this post too :) ( Read more... )