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Saturday, February 28, 2004Classical Interrogation@ 08 pm | PermaLink"These results are supportive of research by Jensen (2001), which states that participants listening to classical music are more likely to disclose personal information than those listening to no music." - Usability News, 6.1 2004 It would be interesting to have music playing in the background of a job interview, or some other highly structured interaction and contrast classical with other music forms. Previously, that same day...Flabbergasted@ 04 pm | PermaLinkUm. Colin Mockery, a singing airplane, Mr Bean and Harry Potter... together again for the first time.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004iPod Control@ 12 pm | PermaLinkGreat interview on Wired with one Dr. Michael Bull. He talks about how the iPod and other portable music devices are used to control one's environment. Below is an excerpt, read the full interview with Dr. Bull at Wired. For example, a lot of people use it to go to work, for commuting. I found that they use the same music on a regular basis. They will often play the same half-dozen tunes for three months, and each part of the journey has its own tune... It gives them control of the journey, the timing of the journey and the space they are moving through. It's a generalization, but the main use (of the iPod) is control. People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction ... and they're having a good time. That can't be understated -- it gives them a lot of pleasure. So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they're listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don't look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you're otherwise engaged. It's a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004Grey Tuesday@ 01 pm | PermaLinkActually the protest is interesting, but I was more drawn to the idea of how quickly I could revise and add a new layout to OrderSomewhereChaos.com. The Grey layout will be the default for today, but will remain in the Layout list after today as well.
Monday, February 23, 2004Oregon Quarters@ 09 pm | PermaLinkObviously Fark has done this for every state... it was simply Oregon's Turn for the 25 minutes of fame... Previously, that same day...Cool Link From@ 11 am | PermaLinkCool. I was running around BlogDex last night and it turns out that my Python spoof got linked from commonhouse.net which is the blog of Quinn who's involved with Danny and friends with lots of San Francisco digital media types. Maybe actually interesting posts would generate some more traffic here.
Thursday, February 19, 2004Choose For Yourself@ 09 am | PermaLinkAfter working out a particularly strange solution for a client's web publishing system mess, I decided that before the client's developers poured too much time into it, I really ought to figure out if the solution would actually work. Essentially, what needs to happen is for JavaScript to control Server-Side Includes. "But Ross!", you say. "SSI's are executed on the server, well before any JavaScript gets executed. Anything you do will require passing back a Post via a form, or at the least, a query string... right?" Not quite. It turns out that SSIs can be used to parse the HTTP_COOKIE environment variable. Set this up with the right statements and the site should be able to make JavaScripts control the SSIs. My demo? My own site of course: rossolson.com also known as ordersomewherechaos.com. As of late last night, instead of the layout always changing every hour, you can now control the layout with a little pulldown menu in the navigation bar. The pulldown has a JavaScript call that sets a cookie and then reloads the page that it's on. The code that I used to have simply rotating the layouts now looks to see if the cookie is set first. If it is, the layout is chosen appropriately. If it's not then it's a free for all and your get the layout you're given.
Saturday, February 14, 2004Travelers Access Point@ 09 pm | PermaLinkEarlier this week I wrote up a request for someone to build a TAP: the Traveler's Access Point. It's a idea for a very flexible and portable access point that I could basically take any where and work with. I got back a few interesting responses:
Money being what it is, I won't be diving into this right now, but it's still something rolling around in the back of my head... Previously, that same day...Big Fish for Real@ 01 pm | PermaLinkThis was from a set of photos that I received called the best Photos of 2003. If you look careful you can see that the animal's tail is vertical... That means it's not a mammilian aquatic... it's a fish. A big fish. Previously, that same day...Bash Shell Hot Keys for Mac OS X@ 01 pm | PermaLinkFirst you need to set your preferred shell to be bash. bash is wonderful as shells go. Here's how to have it full time in Mac OS X. You can make bash your default shell with NetInfo Manager in the Utilities folder. Open NetInfo Manager, select users, select the user whose default shell you want to change, click the lock to make changes, and then find the shell property and change the value from /bin/tcsh to /bin/bash. Save your changes and exit from NetInfo Manager. Now that you've got bash, you can use these handy hot keys from ugu.com:
Yay for bash!
Wednesday, February 11, 2004Traveler's Access Point@ 09 am | PermaLinkThe Traveler's Access Point is a portable device that delivers WiFi access to clients with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of options. The device consists of a rectangular box, 3 inches tall, 5 inches wide and 12 inches long. When laying flat on a table, there will be two short ends and two long sides. On each of the two long sides there will be 3 PC Card (PCMCIA) slots (Type 2, CardBus). On each of the ends there will be a BMC style antenna connector. Additionally there will be a 12v power plug input. The slots will be able to take any of the following combinations of cards: Flash RAM cards, Modem cards, Ethernet cards, WiFi cards (b, a, g or other), CDMA/GMS cards, Bluetooth cards, and USB (Firewire?) cards. One side of the TAP's slots will be designated as 'WAN' and the other side as 'LAN'. Each slot will have a button that allows it to be fully disabled without ejecting the card. The BNC connectors can be used to provide additional antennas to increase range to the two end slots which are expected to hold the WiFi or BlueTooth cards. The TAP can be configured to be a repeater, a bridge or a standalone access point that provides a multitude of options for configuration. The Tap will have a web based interface and a small reset button. Would someone build this please?
Tuesday, February 10, 2004Hip Hop and Usability@ 10 am | PermaLinkI'm sure you'll see this sooner or later. Listen to it now so you don't have to see this thing later... The World's first Human-Computer Interface Design rap.
Monday, February 9, 2004MSIE in light of recent patents@ 12 pm | PermaLinkMicorsoft's MSDN has the following to say about Internet Explorer and the quesiton about what would change if there was fallout from the embedded media patent suit. From msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/: "Given the present legal status as well as requests made by partners and customers, Microsoft will, for the time being, not move ahead with the modest steps it intended to take to modify Windows and Internet Explorer as a result of the August jury decision in the Eolas patent lawsuit. "
Sunday, February 8, 2004Interesting Intro Class@ 10 pm | PermaLinkLooks like this could be an interesting Intro Class at Portland State... Don't you think?
Friday, February 6, 2004Bluetooth Headsets@ 10 am | PermaLinkYay! Apple's new Bluetooth Update 1.5 finally supports headsets. It's finally coming together! Now all I need is to actually buy a BlueTooth dongle (or a new laptop) and then an appropriate headset to match.
Sunday, February 1, 2004Halftime Tivo or Reply Needed@ 05 pm | PermaLinkAt the very end of the halftime show of the superbowl, did Justin Timberlake rip off part of Janet Jackson's shirt? I'm not saying he did, but I thought I saw something kinda strange. I'm so glad the game started to pick up. 4 minutes left in the first half and no points? Then 2 scores by each side in 4 minutes? Crazy.
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February 2004
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