Weird brain typing thing
I was trying to type the word “without”, and without paying attention I typed “within”. I didn’t notice it till I went back to proofread. Is the word “in” stored in neurons near the word “out” or something?
I’m pretty sure that type of “proximity typo” has happened to me before, too. Why does that happen?
What to do about the automakers
Apparently there’s a limit on how many characters can be in a reply to a posted item on Facebook, so I have to post this here.
I’m responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman’s column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:
I know, it’s a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn’t allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.
I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing “brain work”.
My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).
With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.
(While they’re waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our “crumbling infrastructure”. The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years[citation needed]. Time’s up.)
Photoshop in the Real World
My dad just emailed me this cool picture of Photoshop in the “real world”.
It’s interesting because it’s cool, but from an HCI perspective it also drives home the importance of affordances: you don’t just pick a tool, you actually grab it and use it; you don’t just choose a color, you actually dip your brush in it.
Proxyless Domain Proxy
The Premise
I have a site for a school project that I’m hosting on a school server. I want to keep it hosted there for reliability/accountability reasons (i.e. if their servers go down on the day of a presentation it’s their fault; if I use my discount host, it’s my fault), but I’d like to use a custom domain.
Neither school nor my host seem to allow proxies (RewriteRule ^/~nliebman(.*)$ http://localchi\.com$1 [P] doesn’t work), so there had to be a different solution.
The Solution
First I need to credit this to pippo over at Dev Shed.
Rather than having Apache rewrite the school URL to my own URL, the trick is to have PHP do all the work, and simply rewrite the PHP file’s URL (on my server) to show the filename from the school server.
On my server, I created the following PHP file, called getRemote.php:
<?php readfile( "http://projects.si.umich.edu/~nliebman/".$_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ] ); ?>
Then, I added this rule to my .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/getRemote.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /getRemote.php [L]
I didn’t need to touch anything on the school server. I do take a performance hit since my server needs to get the content from the school server before serving it to me, but it’s pretty light-weight stuff, so it’s worth it for the pretty URL.
Stupid Excel 2008 Bug
I just have to say that there’s a totally stupid bug in Excel 2008’s window handling: like any normal program, you can use Command+` to cycle through all open windows. What’s weird is that Command+` also cycles through documents that have been minimized to the doc. Annoying, seeing as the main reason I minimize docs is so I can cycle through just some of the ones I have open.
While I’m at it, if you have a cell that, say, starts with bold text and is followed by normal text, if you auto-complete a new cell with that same text, it applies whatever the formatting of the first character is to the entire cell.
Who wrights this stuff? Oh yeah…Microsoft.
Orientation
I just have to say that it’s really weird (in a cool, good way) that I’m meeting all these people who actually think about some of the same stuff I do. It’s actually really cool. Full orientation starts tomorrow!
Twitter…
I am now on Twitter as Noleli. Truly, I have no idea why.
The Non-Distracting Nature of Notifications
I had long assumed that notifications, like those served up by Growl, would be distracting. After all, how should I be able to concentrate while being bombarded with pretty little updates on everything from what song just started playing to what that latest IM said to how many new articles NetNewsWire has decided to throw in my face?
Ok, I admit that the NetNewsWire notifications are distracting (I’ll turn them off as soon as I’m done writing this post), but most of them aren’t so bad. There is one, though, that I have found, somewhat counterintuitively, to actually be conducive to staying focused: the new email notification.
The reason is that even without Growl notifications I’m going to be made aware of any new email by the dock icon badge. That is what makes it impossible to ignore. The vast majority of the email I receive is not important, but what if this one is? The curiosity is just too much to handle, and the act of stopping what I’m doing to check that new email is very disruptive. With a notification that tells me the sender, subject, and first little bit of the body, though, without even moving my mouse or stopping what I’m doing I know that I can safely ignore that email.
Who knew that more information could actually help keep you focused?
On Following Directions
I have long been fascinated by a particular divide among users of technology: those who follow a step-by-step process, and those who “get it”.
This first came to my attention about seven years ago when I decided to learn how to use the video switcher in my high school’s TV station. I took home the manual for the summer and started going through it. For weeks I was frustrated, not because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted it to do — because I could — but because I didn’t know what I was doing. It was: press these two buttons at the same time, then slide the knife down, then push this one button again. I just didn’t didn’t know why. There were fundamental concepts of signal flow in the switcher that I didn’t know at the time, and that lack of knowledge led to an inability to understand what I was doing. It wasn’t until I finally realized what was going on, the “ah ha!” moment, that I could stop thinking so hard and just use the darn thing.
Unfortunately (from my extensive observation of friends and family), most users of computers and other consumer electronics never have that moment. The reason, I believe, is an inability to see beyond the two dimensions of the user interface. Interfaces have structure (as poorly thought out as some may be), and so do what they control. For example, the typical universal remote control has a series of buttons to change which device the rest of the buttons will affect. When I see such a remote, it is clear that it is modal, that pressing one of those buttons is akin to putting down the TV’s remote and picking up the remote for the cable box. To many people, however, it is little more than rote: push the TV button before using the volume buttons; push the Cable button before using the channel buttons.
What is happening here is two-fold: first, the user fails to see the modality of the remote, seeing it as just a flat series of buttons. This is compounded by an obliviousness of the signal path in the TV/cable box system. If a worst-case user were asked to avoid the remote altogether and walk right up to the units, it is possible that they would know to use the channel buttons on the cable box and the volume buttons on the television without fully grasping that the cable box is actually sending the video signal to the TV. It is easy to see that this situation gets very messy very quickly by adding an amplifier into the system. Unless you understand that the audio and video signal originate from the cable box, with the video signal being sent to, say, the Composite 1 input on the TV and the audio is being sent to the Audio 2 input on the amp, it’s all just a confusing mess. Add to that the need to sometimes (who really knows when!) push the AUX button on the remote in order to change the volume, and you have a very dissatisfied user.
The same premise can be applied to computers. It is difficult for many people to see past the flat monitor into the hierarchy and order of a file system or menu- and document-based application. Every once in a while, when I’m first getting acquainted with a particularly large or complex piece of software, I don’t necessarily understand the flow of the program. It can all seem like a bunch of buttons and menus. A bunch of buttons and menus, which, when pushed, change other buttons and menus, can be very intimidating.
Take what is a very simple and elegant process: installing an application on Mac OS X. A disk image file is downloaded to the Downloads folder. By default, the image is automatically mounted, so it shows up on the desktop. Dragging the application from the window that displays the contents of the disk image to the icon that represents the Applications folder makes a copy of that application in that folder. Once it’s there, just unmount (eject) the disk image and put the image file in the trash. (Note that the key here is understanding things like how the icon represents the folder, and a folder can contain other items.) By thinking about this process from the mindset of someone who doesn’t understand the concept of a hierarchical file system, let alone disk images, one can imagine how convoluted and seemingly unnecessary it is. To a great many people, you get what you want on the computer by double-clicking the thing that says what you want. When the disk image automatically mounts and a window containing the application opens, that’s the end of the process. Just double-click the pretty new icon and that new version of Snood is up and running. Oh, what confusion ensues when after rebooting that disk image no longer appears on the desktop!
Wizards are an attempt to guide such users through complex processes with a simple question-and-answer interface tied to a decision tree. They can be decent, but what the computing world may need is something like what the Logitech Harmony 1000 remote has [tried to] bring to the remote control world: a flatter interface with fewer clicks, albeit with fewer options.
These occasional glimpses into how (it appears to me, anyway) most people see and experience their technology can be very enlightening — and frustrating, because this lack of understanding, this “how” as opposed to “why”, is holding back a great many people from using technology to its full potential.
Upgraded, finally!
I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.6 from 2.3! That means I can actually create and edit posts from Safari rather than switching to Firefox. Hurray!
