Irreproachable Honourableness

Flock

I've been using the Flock web browser for several weeks now.  I first saw it recommended in Andy Clarke's Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.  Clarke recommended Flock as a tool to collect images for getting design ideas.

Flock provides a media bar for viewing images from Flickr, Facebook, and select other websites.
. Clarke suggests using the Media Bar to search Flickr (or the other supported sites) for ideas for the "mood" of a proposed design.  For instance, one could search for "purple" (for a website for one indigo-infatuated friend of mine) or for "flame" (lots of chaff to sort through there: anything that can possibly be part of the name of a band will get you lots of fan photos).

In any case, Flock also provides a Web Clipboard: you can drag selections of text, photos, whatever, over to the clipboard and save them.  I have a "mood" folder there, full of images that (in me) evoke the response I would like my website to give…someday, when I have time.

But beyond that, Flock has become my default browser. It has sidebars that provide live interfaces to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, news feeds (granted, I still use Google Reader); there's a photo uploader; there's a blog editor. It has a few problems, still being resolved, and is chasing a moving target: every "Web 2.0" site is probably changing their site interface weekly, so interactions with Facebook broke down for a day or so a few weeks ago, and Google has made some changes to Gmail that have still not been overcome. But the Flockers are doing well, and it's a tool I enjoy using, and that has made using the web's social networks more enjoyable.

Tags: flock, browser, web, transcending css, css, mood

On multitasking (of a sort)

In Produktiver Programmieren: Interview mit Kent Pitman (Note: the embedded title refers to Ron Jeffries, the XP guru), Kent Pitman talks about one aspect of being productive:

Have multiple tasks available to work on. Some years ago, I saw a talk by Isaac Asimov in which he made the same observation. He pointed out that he hated working on what he was supposed to, so he would strategically place other things that were also important around the room and when his eye would wander, looking for something to do that wasn't what he really should be doing, he'd at least find some other thing that needed doing. And eventually things would get done anyway. Also, sometimes you just can't do one thing all the time. If I have a large writing task to do, I try to find another project of a different kind (e.g., programming) to interleave with it. It helps break the monotony. If you don't use techniques like this, you simply end up wasting your slack time, and that time is never recovered.

Note again: He also mentions that touch-typing, and using editors designed for touch-typists—he uses Emacs—probably gives him a significant productivity edge, because competence with a programmer's tools—and this includes a keyboard—improves productivity.

Google Reader

I've been using Google Reader for reading weblog feeds for a few weeks. I'm now going to try sharing those interesting items using Google's shared entry "clip". The colors aren't perfect (yet), but we'll see where this goes.

More on multi-screen productivity

In my posting on Synergy, I wrote of how I tie three (or four) screens together, spanning two (or three, with my laptop) computers. This gives me the ability to monitor the peripheral things (the second screen on my Linux workstation) like time reporting, system logs, support requests, and reference documentation while focusing on my primary interests (development, debugging, documents) on the main screen.

Apparently, there are others who find similar setups help in their productivity (albeit we have much different tastes in software).

If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

Can I Borrow Rather Than Buy?

Want to read a book, but don't necessarily want to buy a copy? Like to support your local library? Or just too many books in the house already?

Use LibraryLookup (Build your own bookmarklet) to put a link on your toolbar. Read about a book on (say) Amazon, and click the link: it will take you to your local library's entry for the book.

More on Life Hacking

Signal vs. Noise comments on the article cited earlier in The science of interruptions

The Life Hackers

A co-worker—perennially amused at the three or (with my laptop running) four monitors on my desk—sent me the reference to this article on computers and the study of interruptions.

"[Managing and multi-tasking the online relationships of work and personal life] makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.

…

[In a study, users ] juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time.…

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing.…

…When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their computers. They placed their applications on different screens - the e-mail far off on the right side, a Web browser on the left and their main work project right in the middle - so that each application was "glanceable." …

The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. [Emphasis mine—rl]

[Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times]

More on spammers

Or, less, I guess...given the appearance of dozens of trackbacks that link to sites that take advantage of human weaknesses, I've disabled trackback, as earlier I disabled comment posting. Regrets, but I'm not that active here anymore.

RSScache.com

I received an email from D2Soft Technologies on behalf of their service at RSScache.com

It's the solution to all your RSS bandwidth over usage. In 10 seconds, start saving your bandwidth! We support RSS 0.91, 2.0, Atom, RDF and more!

Apparently they read a given RSS or Atom feed for you (just insert my.rsscache.com/ after the http:// in a URL) and track your IP address. Once you've requested the same feed five or so times, they'll empty it until something new is posted. This reduces user's inbound bandwidth usage. A blog owner can modify the URLs for her feeds, and readers will then benefit from the caching service without taking special action.

Naturally, I wanted to know, cui bono? who benefits from this (or, better, how does RSScache/D2Soft win)? Apparently they will sell a suitably-scaled version of the caching service to site-owners, expecting to reduce their bandwidth usage (and resulting overcharges) substantially. For instance, they'd reduce the monthly bandwidth usage of my feed from around 600MB to 50MB (based on 60K hits/month, which I haven't seen (I have 40K hits over the last year on the whole site).

I found it funny that the feed they used to e-mail me was one that was abandoned a few years ago.

Update: I also wondered if RSScache might insert ads into the feed, which seem's to be the question in McGee's Musings about Engadget.

More on writing

In Writing and knowledge sharing Ralph wonders,

What's the relationship between facility with writing and the quality of thinking in organizations?

I'm reminded of the article Unskilled and Unaware of It, in which

Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

It may be that the people who fear writing are those who are actually capable of doing so. It often seems that the Internet as a whole offers ample evidence that those who are—well, less capable—have little or no fear of writing for their peers.

Highlighting Search Terms

A List Apart has an article on Enhancing Usability by Highlighting Search Terms that looks like a great idea. If I can find the time, and the readers who would be interested, this might be fun to try. (I'm still a top "source" for information on cello repair in Boston, if only because I posted a query about it a few years ago. All I need to do is highlight the terms in appropriate colors.)

Source of the quotation

If you visit the online version of The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah, and scroll about 3/4 of the way through the single very long page, you'll find the quotation used in the heading of this blog:

"Alas!" said Hiya, "the sentiments which this person expressed with irreproachable honourableness when the sun was high in the heavens and the probability of secretly leaving an undoubtedly well-appointed home was engagingly remote, seem to have an entirely different significance when recalled by night in a damp orchard, and on the eve of their fulfilment.

I post the information for those who have wondered and posted comments elsewhere in this blog.

Intro to weblogs

d2r: an introduction to weblogs provides another introduction to what's going on here...or hopes to go on here...

Oh, look! There's a Part Two, also...

3D17: Collaborative Editing

I found an article on 3D17.org on SlashDot. 3D17 (readable in a 21st-Century way as “EDIT”) is a site experimenting with collaborative document creation.

People often talk to communities, but how do communities talk back? 3D17.org aims to answer that question by allowing a large number of people to collaboratively create some text, be it a letter, fax, or email. Have you ever thought what kind of letter the combined intelligence of 1,000 people might produce to support your opinion? 3D17 will answer that question.

Currently any document can get accessed by anyone, so you could have a pre-teen from the Czech Republic collaborating on a letter to your senator, perhaps, but it is a new use of the web worth considering, even as a thought-experiment made real.

What you do when they won't write things down...

Jane Penson asks, What do you do about people who won't write things down? Well, you sigh, roll your eyes, and ask if they have something you can read that describes the problem, and its history, etc., so

1. they don't have to go through the story over and over; and
2. you don't have to sit there and listen as they go through it one more time, moving through the IT department looking for a solution.

And then you sit back and listen patiently, because they'll do it their way, and you're there to help, any way, not judge their methods.

(Clearly, Jane's catching up on things...I posted that entry on people's not liking to write—Note, Jane, the possessive with the gerund...I thought you'd like that—ahem, I posted that entry many months ago.)

Citation: tools for blogging

Jon writes on citation, and provides two wonderful “bookmarklets” for quoting from websites. One works in Mozilla, the other (probably) in most browsers. (The Mozilla-specific one relies on a Mozilla function to take the current selection and expand it to include all the relevant HTML context—magic, really.)

It's a wonderful piece worth reading in full. And of course there's a serious point behind all the satire. The web came from scholars and is all about sharing knowledge. Citation is the conversational medium in which we do that. Links are powerful tools that we're still learning to use, but citation is a more than just linking. I'm becoming deeply interested in how we can publish fragments that are easy to cite and that, when cited, carry rich context with them. Phil Windley's [Jon's Radio]

(This, because I want a copy outside the firewall, too...)

Corporate Blogs and Barriers

François writes in Corporate weblogs, barriers to adoption,

Weblogs are particular in the sense that they allow to easily cut the fat out of content. If, after reading a few posts, you cannot get a feeling that the tone and content are right, then the weblog is probably not worth your time (or does not deserve to be called a weblog). In supporting weblogs, companies will not be able to skip what is my favorite question when I assess a web project: where is the beef?

Once again, the issue of the human voice. Weblogs give us a chance to hear that quality, in a world more and more saturated with mechanical voices (as in glossy marketing, whether in a preacher or a luxury car ad) and inauthentic enthusiasm.

More on anti-spam for weblogs

Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog

Read on for a few quick solutions which MovableType users can implement right now to stave off all but the most persistent spammers.

MT-Blacklist

MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin

It looks as if spammers are attacking weblog comments (and TrackBacks) now. (Not me, yet, but this blog is very low-profile.) I may need to remember this.

Ineffable?

Seb's Open Research

Could it be that the ineffable Ron Lusk has returned?

Google defines “ineffable” as

1. Incapable of being expressed in words; unspeakable; unutterable; indescribable.
2. Not to be uttered; taboo

Really, I'm just a fairly ordinary man. Peculiar, but ordinary.

George Bush is blogging! (Well, sort of...)

Official Bush-Cheney '04 Blog Now Online

Today, Bush-Cheney '04 launched its official blog offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” and from Bush-Cheney '04.

It seems more likely that supporters or campaign staff or other second- and third-parties are blogging “for” President Bush. This doesn't quite have the same feeling as an “own voice” blog.

The power of blogging

McGee's Musings

This suggests to me one of the advantages of blogging as a form over newsgroups and threaded discussion. In a threaded discussion I am more bound by context than I am here. Lowering the power of context without removing it entirely, makes blogs more conducive to working out your own ideas. I wonder what Denham would have to say about this? He's generally been an advocate of the collaborative powers of tools such as threaded discusisons and wikis. Blogging adds another flavor to the mix. The challenge now becomes working out for yourself and your organization how to manage the mix.