Author: Oliver Wrede
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The end of filesystems
What users will see in the next few years is a replacement of the filesystem storage paradigm with a database storage paradigm. Microsoft is working on it and Apple seems to develop something similar as well. Oracle already stretched their database to accommodate some kind of filesystem like access – which is not aimed at…
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Blogs at universities
Stephan Mosel pointed to a new weblog initiative at the University of Minnesota. This project offers a free weblog to every university member. This now makes three places in US that offer central weblog services to every member: Harvard University: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/projects/blog/ Univeristy of Minnesota: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ Peter Baumgartner asks why german universities do…
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Information Visualization Companies
Marian Steinbach has collected companies specialized on information visualization: This is a list of some ~30 companies which have a focus on products or services that deal with information visualization. From A like Aaron Marcus + Associates to X like XPLANE.
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On Outliners
Here is a teriffic series of articles about outliner software: NoteTaker and NoteBook—May 2004 Announcing the FORE/1 Outliner—Apr 2004 Legacy Outliners—Mar 2004 Outliner User Interfaces—Feb 2004 Outliner Use Patterns—Dec 2003 Outliner Features—Part 2—Nov 2003 Outliner Features—Part 1—Oct 2003 Outliner History—Sep 2003
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Frontier: There’s life in the old dog yet
Frontier 9.0.1 beta 2 is released. Seems UserLand has started to work on Frontier and Manila again. That’s good news. I’d like to hear what they have in store for the Frontier application core.
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Design hypothesis vs. Scientific hypothesis
As a comment to the Rotman Management design issue (pdf) magazine Victor Lombardi quotes Jeanne Liedtka from page 12: The most fundamental difference between the two, they argue, is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today’s…
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An MFA is the new MBA?
Beth Mazur on her IDblog: The May issue of Design Research News has a very interesting promo about the Harvard Business School (HBS) declaring the ‘Master of Fine Arts’ (MFA) as the new ‘Master of Business Administration’ (MBA)… essential for a business career. But they point to the online publication [PDF, 19 MByte] of the…
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Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP
Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP: Find out how to create XML-RPC, SOAP and REST web services using PHP, the most popular scripting language for web applications. [via Der Schockwellenreiter]
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Outage tonight
I apologize for an outage of this site. The Zope server crashed. Seems I need to run some kind of watchdog+restart script. Does anybody have a tip about this?
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How inventions change communication
On 1st July I’ll present some thoughts about “Once upon a time… an imaginary retrospective about the history of technology of the next 30 years” at the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt. I think the topic will be fun to talk about. I don’t really have any idea what kind of people will visit that…
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BlogWalk 2.0 ahead
I am going to participate in the BlogWalk 2.0 workshop in Nürnberg on 28th May. I think there are about 15-25 people invited. In contrast to the BlogWalk 1.0 event in March this time it appears to be focussed on weblogs in education. There is also a BlogWalk 3.0 event already scheduled for 4th July…
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Visual Design Elements of Weblogs?
Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright:Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs [DOC] Conclusion: One pattern clearly emerging as a result of this research is that individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. This confirms one of the predictions / observations leading to this study: that ‘significant’…
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Content vs Context – a contradiction?
Peter Baumgartner reminds us about the role of usage context for quality assessment of learning materials: In all the projects funded by the German BMBF we have tried to deliver excellent e-Learning content. As chairman of the “audit commission” I led a group of experts who recommended the ministry a change of gears: Instead to…
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More critic on Nielsen
Andrei Herasimchuk wrote an open letter to Jakob Nielsen in response to this Alertbox story: […] Mr. Nielsen, I respectfully request you stop posting articles like this. You do yourself and the usability field a disservice by speaking in terms that are vague, not backed up with research data, and filled with hyperbole. Further, until…
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Using the 5Es to Understand Users
Whitney Quesenbery has a very memorable explanation about usability: The 5Es are helpful in planning your usability testing, because each suggests specific techniques:
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Spike
Spike is a a cross-platform shared clipboard (OS X, Windows 2K+).