Monthly Archives: August 2006
Lodged Net
I just returned from a short vacation with a little business mixed in. On the third day of my trip, I realized I needed to check my email. My hotel had free in-room Ethernet connections, but I hadn’t thought to … Continue reading
Down With Upper Case
Slashdot: War Declared on Caps Lock Key A good idea. And while we’re at it, let’s dump those silly Ctrl and Alt keys. Who uses them? F1 – F12 can certainly be abandoned, as well as that triumvirate of uselessness, … Continue reading
Tagged User Interfaces
2 Comments
Abstract Interfaces
Office 2003 uses a table of 1500 colors to render the user interface. That’s 1500 different colors designers have to choose for each color scheme. Overkill? Probably. But it says something about commercial software that sets it apart from most … Continue reading
Indecent Indirection
“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem.” –David Wheeler or Butler Lampson, depending on whom you ask I’ve seen a fair amount of press about Virtualization over … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
Leave a comment
Beset By Red Squiggles
When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. Every day, after I couldn’t put it off any longer, I would sit down and practice a piece of music. Whenever I made a mistake, I would stop, go back to … Continue reading
Tagged Office Technology, Writing
Leave a comment
My Life As a Robot
This poster hangs in my cubicle. The caption reads, “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job, the kind robots will be doing soon.” Besides saying … Continue reading
Functional Programming a Foregone Conclusion
Steve Yegge, who spent 7 years working on distributed computing at Amazon, writes about a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. Yegge: “it’s abundantly clear that it’s time for us to move up to a higher level of abstraction. … … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
Leave a comment
Finger-Painting on a Computer Screen
Another blog named Digital Digressions (nuts, and it looks like she used it first, too) points to a video demo of a touch screen with multiple contact points. This is the interface I want! Everything on the screen responds to … Continue reading
Tagged User Interfaces
1 Comment
The Turing Tar Pit
Or, why is the most frequently-asked question on every web programming framework mailing list, “How do I serve a static page?” Alan J. Perlis’ epigram on programming #54: Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
2 Comments
Zooming Interfaces
I really like the idea of Zooming Interfaces. I think they provide a better solution to having multiple documents/objects on the screen than the current overlapping-window pattern. The demo linked above has some pretty severe limitations, but even so I … Continue reading
Tagged User Interfaces
1 Comment