details of a global brain
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…
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…
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.
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
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.
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…
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…
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]
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?
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…
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…
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’…
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…
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…
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:
Spike
Spike is a a cross-platform shared clipboard (OS X, Windows 2K+).
SOAP in Python
Here is a good place to start learning about SOAP in Python (written by Mike Olson, Scott Archer and Uche Ogbuji). There are five Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 [via Daily Python-URL]
TinderDo sample file
I have added a sample file for a ToDo list management with Tinderbox. It is basically implementing the description of “TinderDo” by Gordon Meyer. Unfortunatly he did not include a sample file to start directly. So I made one myself. You can add tasks (and nested tasks) in the ToDo container and after entering a…
When user interfaces fail
Some people like to do “designer bashing” from time to time. I was just in the mood to do some “developer bashing” today. There are a number of reasons why user interfaces of many software packages fail. I assume (slightly unfair and inaccurate), that in many cases there is no interface designer involved with user…
Educational scenarios
Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture: Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and…
Got any book recommendations?