details of a global brain
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Study.log
I had a brief look at study.log. It is a personal information manager (developed with Macromedia Director). It is generally a very interesting concept. But the implementation has issues: there are show stopper bugs, it is very slow you can’t drag & drop objects from the OS layer into the application. Director possibly is not…
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TiddlyWiki?
I came across the TiddlyWiki tool. It is some kind of interactive Wiki opening pages with animation once you clicked a link. It is basically just a very clever JavaScript enhanced HTML-page containing the whole Wiki. You save the page (after allowing the script to do so), upload it to a server and you’re done.…
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Enabled comments via Haloscan
Marco Kalz complained about a missing comment feature. So, Marco, especially for you: Comments! I did not want to implement a comment feature myself, so I use the free Haloscan service to add comments and trackbacks. The drawback of this is, that comments may get lost once I want to quit the service.
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Podcasting symposium
There is a podcasting conference at ISIS institute at Duke University (in North Carolina) next week. I also found this podcasting directory for educators and some information about podcasting in education from Apple UK. Speaking of podcasting: If there would be a video feed containing clips like this I’d instantly subscribe to it! My bookmarks…
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It doesn’t get worse than this
Michael Ruppert doesn’t hesitate to comment on Rita – the second category 5 Hurricane that is making landfall this year. It will possibly be desasterous to US economy: The remaining half of Gulf energy production undamaged by Katrina is directly in Rita’s crosshairs. He is quoting several articles. For instance this quote by John Kilduff,…
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Workshop on Blogging
I am in Hamburg at the Campus Innovation conference to offer a small 90-minute workshop on blogging together with Nico Lumma. There are many attendees from the E-Learning community and universities here. I hope I can spur some ideas… Notiz an die Teilnehmer:Die Folien des Vortrags finden Sie hier [PDF; 3,6 MB]
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Return from Hamburg
I am in the train back to Cologne. I am thinking about, what I was seeing and hearing the last two days at the Campus Innovation conference. The conference theme was trying to bring educatiors and administration closer together in context of e-Education. Talking about the different sessions would make this a very long post.…
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Webdesign changed
I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long…
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AIGA conference summary by Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke is an invited weblog author at AIGA conference in San Francisco. He wrote some useful commentary and round-ups: Preparation, Lonely in a packed room, 20 courses not taken in design school, Friday round-up.
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Map of natural desasters
Munich Re Group has a map with probabilities of natrual desasters.
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Sleepwalking to the end of earth
Geoffrey Lean reports from a gathering of climate scientists in Exeter (invited by Tony Blair) after alarming signs have been discovered that the climate change could be faster and much worse than ever expected – with a point of no return reached before 2020. I don’t even want to quote from this article – you…
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Consistency in Design is (part of) the right approach
Jared Spool points out that consistency is a matter of dealing with user’s current knowledge – not with formal elements of the visual design. Unfortunatly he uses a very misleading headline for is article which is really not in line with the point he is trying to make. The headline is »Consistency in Design is…
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Scapegoat 1.0 Pro
I am reading John Maeda’s Simplicity-Weblog from time to time – especially because I offered a seminar about this topic a while ago. Most of the posts of John are typical day-in-day out observations of a designer sensible for the details: sometimes I feel he can make an article out of anything (which tends to…
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NextD dive-in
I am busy doing things that I can’t learn anything from right now (which is always kind of hard work!). But I am trying to catch up with what is going on at the NextD initiative (I wrote about that before). NextD is currently a spot where designers are thinking about »design thinking«. An example…
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CS site up
I seems I am making a slow move to Plone. I just replaced a static Manila-driven homepage of me with a Plone site. After working on a Plone skin for a client it seems creating a design for Plone has become less of an obstacle. The main problem I have is lack of time: there…
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9 out of 10 Features undiscovered in MS Office
According to this article at heise.de Microsoft learned from a study that 90% of the features users would think as being “nice to have” in a future release are already included in the current application – but just haven’t found by them yet. There couldn’t be no better proof for the fact that »functionality« is…
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No comment
Too late!
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Design education reconsidered
Colleen Taugher is speaking out what many (me too) are propagating for a long time now: It is clear that the most exciting design professionals work in complex, multi-disciplinary, dispersed teams in order to develop innovative solutions to some of modern life’s slipperiest problems. While design students will still need some old-school training in basic…
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Plone 2.1 out!
Plone 2.1 was released. There are many new features. Mostly they are brushing the application. Some days ago I created a skin for Plone. It took quite some time to digg the vast CSS styles. There is also some cleanup necessary for that, but generally it is as easy and flexible as it could be…
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Design blogs @ Technorati
Technorati is running a new »Blog finder« feature: You can find weblogs that cover a certain topic. I looked for »Design« and I got the usual suspects but also some (to me) unknown gems – like Drawn, a blog about illustrators. This blog doesn’t even list (I guess there is an issue with the tagging…
Got any book recommendations?