Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com Character

Similar to , a specialized 20 questions game: Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com Character

Clever basketball fans

Reported many places, a humorous story about fans from U. Cal., Berkeley who played a wonderful prank on an opposing player during a basketball game against USC. This version of the story actually has a post-game interview with the victim and he took it surprisingly well, especially given that apparently rattled him enough during the game that he show only 3 for 13 from the field.

Human Foosball

Human Foosball - looks like fun.

Technorati tags: foosball

Tiny Football Player

This is old news, but not to me. I'm not a gamer, but from what I understand, the Madden football game lets you download rosters of real players into the game. But back in September, they had to take down a roster update because it showed New York Jets lineman Michael King as being only 7 inches tall. The cool thing is that there are pictures!

Geeky Friday: A rant about underlined links

A rant on why I don't like underlined links and why Bloglines and 37signals have prompted me to write about it.

When Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser in the early 1990s, the links in the text were identifable because they were underlined. It wasn't possible to change the color of the text as Berners-Lee did his work on an early NeXT workstation. While these machines had plenty of cool features (see another article I wrote), they only had a four tone gray scale display. Modern browsers, and the displays we view them on, come in color.

Yet underlined links are still used in every web browser. I hate it. I think it's unnecessary and it makes the text appear busier and more difficult to read. So, the first thing I do with any new browser is to uncheck the "Underline Links" button. Here's a contrived example of the difference this can make. First, here's some text from Wikipedia without underlines. By choosing a darkish blue for links, the main text flows well from black to blue and back again. Yet it's still easy to figure out where to point your mouse to click on a link. Now the same text with underlines:

(Note - This is example is contrived for two reasons. One is that wikipedia text tends to have more in-line links than average pages. The other reason is that wikipedia's stylesheets disable underlines for all users -- not just those of us who already have them disabled. I had to manually re-enable them to create this example. The designers at Wikipedia feel as I do about underlines.)

If everything is a link, why differentiate?

A real, non-contrived example is the list of feeds as it currently appears on bloglines.com, shown below. This appears in a separate frame on the left side of the browser window. Clicking on any one of these links changes the content in the big frame on the right side of the browser. This is essentially a menu -- every one of these lines is a link. An additional visual cue to demonstrate that these are links is not needed, and yet, their stylesheet forces it on me.

Moving on to the next example... "I know there's a link here somewhere"

Another bad use of underlines is assuming that users haven't turned off underlined links. The Signal vs. Noise (SvN) blog, from 37signals, is guilty of this assumption. Ironically they are also the authors of the book Defensive Design for the Web (as well as the Ruby On Rails web framework and various web applications).

Here's how I see text on a snippet from SvN: Quick - where do you click to read the source article? There is no visual cue! When I move my mouse around, I find that the link is magically highlighted when I move over it.

Trying to follow links from this blog is like playing a video game.

Since most people either like the underlines or don't ever bother to change any preferences, I'll accept that this is a personal choice. But, if a site, such as SvN, decides that it prefers to use only underlines as visual cues for links, then it should be sure to enforce this using its stylesheet. It's not hard. In fact, 37signals already does so on their home page. (The SvN page does get positive marks from me for deciding that one visual cue to show links is enough -- they just need to make sure that their users see that one cue)

I need to finish this rant with clarifications about Bloglines and 37signals. I like the way the 37signals guys think and I own (and recommend) the above-mentioned book. I use Bloglines every day (although lately I've been forcing myself to use the invisibility cloak greasemonkey script to limit the times I catch up on news). Now, if they could just understand the way I feel about underlines.

Tags: css, underlines, bloglines, 37signals

Pandora - customized streaming music goodness

Earlier today I listened to episode 6 of the Inside the Net podcast in which the hosts interview the founder of Pandora. Here's how a TechCrunch post describes the site:

If you don’t agree that this is the coolest application you’ve seen in a long while, re-read this post over and over until you agree, because you are wrong. I am in love with Pandora.

No, wait, that's not very useful; accurate, but not useful. It's a streaming music application with a great recommendation engine, or, as my wife said when I described it to her: "the ultimate mix tape."

You create a "station" by suggesting a single artist or song and the Pandora application streams more music to you based on the data from the "Music Genome Project". As described in the podcast, Pandora employs trained musicians to analyze individual songs for some 400 attributes. From this, their recommendation engine suggests new songs for you to listen to. So, rather than relying on popular songs recommended by other users, it attempts to make recommendations based on musical qualities. You can also give some hints by explicitly giving a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to a song or by offering additional artists or songs as representative of the curent station.

About six or seven songs into my first station, seeded initially with R.E.M. and a similar band, The Feelies, it has produced mixed results -- good suggestions with songs from Collective Soul, The Cult, and Man Break, but off the mark with Iron Maiden and Poison. After giving the thumbs down to those last two, the quality picked up. Later I tried a couple different stations with different types of music. Again, I gave thumbs up and thumbs down a little bit and the selection of music improved.

Technorati tags: pandora, music

Further thoughts on India

I've been back from India since Dec 17 and have gotten swept up in holiday activities. A comment from somebody calling him/herself paliopolis today asked if I was back. So, without further ado, here are some thoughts on my trip: My flight to Mumbai eventually pushed away from the gate in Frankfurt at 15:40, just over four hours late. Some of this additional delay was caused by a passenger who had been on the plane from Chicago to Frankfurt but was now missing. Since her checked luggage was not missing, there was understandable concern. Ground staff were paging her through the airport, gate staff were walking the aisles on the plane double-checking and the security teams were minutes away from removing her luggage from the hold – when the missing passenger arrived, strolling back onto the plane laden with bags from the duty free shop. My under-standing of the possible security concern did no transfer to the reality of the situation.

Like every long international flight I’ve taken, this flight showed a real time map of the plane’s position and path. What makes this different on Air India was the periodic disclaimer slide:

Physical features map only.
No political borders depicted.

The plane landed in Mumbai at 3:40 am, India Standard Time. Add immigration, baggage claim, customs, driving to hotel, checking in and minimal unpacking and the end result is that it was nearly 5:30 am before I went to sleep. My wake up call was at 7:30 am.

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While in India, a scandal erupted in which some fifteen members of Parliament were caught on camera accepting bribes. That was the headline on Tuesday’s paper. The top story in Wednesday’s paper ran the headline “Netas, babus take sting off spy cameras”. That’s two new fun words: “netas” are politicians and “babus” are bureaucrats. The other fun thing is that the substance of the article was about options for detecting and disabling spy cameras. The message seems to be that the only thing they did wrong was getting caught.

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I spent most of the week in meetings -- fascinating meetings, but meetings nonetheless. Still, just being there I got a sense of the vast difference between American and Indian culture. Bangalore has clearly progressed much from the influx of IT activity, but the base infrastructure hasn't kept up. Our hotel was about 10 miles from the office, but we allocated an hour and a half to get there each morning. The food was amazing. I've always liked Indian food and everything I ate there was wonderful.

Bangalore isn't much of a tourist center. I saw one interesting temple and visited a botanic garden (with only one tree in bloom). The best statements of the modern Indian culture were two visuals. The first was a flight attendant dressed in a traditional saree, standing on the tarmac, and punching out a text message on a cell phone. The second was an ad on the back of a bus in Bangalore reading "The first ISO certified saree showroom in Karnataka." I'm not really sure how one certifies a saree showroom.

Colored bubbles

Yesterday morning NPR aired an interview with the inventor of Zubbles - The World's First Colored Bubbles!. They'll be available this Spring, so I expect we'll be having these at my kids' birthday parties.

Technorati tags: bubbles

Quotes from home

I'm in Bangalore now and have more thoughts on India, but haven't put them together yet. I was talking with my wife and she shared two wonderful quotes from my 4.5 yr old daughter:

We were leaving the house and she saw the reminants of rock salt and asked what it was. I said we put salt down when it is icy because salt melts the ice. She thought a minute and said, "Mom is the sun made of salt?"

We were driving to school and I had the radio on. They were playing some song and then some commercials came on. I was not listening at all, but it must have been some jewelry add because she suddenly said, "Mom, does gold make you feel special?"

Stranded in Frankfurt

I'm en route to a business trip in India. I arrived around 7:00 am and expected to depart at 11:35, but the Air India flight coming from Chicago was delayed. Seriously delayed. Projected departure time is now 15:05 - three and a half hours late. I'll get into Mumbai around 3:00 am and will be ready to go to meetings at 8:30. I plan to sleep on my flight since I won't be able to sleep much at the hotel tonight.

Other random thoughts about this:

• Frankfurt is not a wonderful airport to spend a long layover. There are not many comfortable places to sit, the power outlets are few and far between and the food offerings are limited. On my last visit to Europe, I changed planes in Amsterdam. It was a much shorter layover, but it seems like it would be a better place to hang out. Unfortunately, I'm scheduled for another long layover here on my way back.

  At least there's WiFi available.

• In addition to the typical electric carts used for carting around those who need help getting from gate to gate, some airport employees ride bicycles through the hallways. No, they don't carry the disabled on the back of their bikes. I think these are either managers checking in on different gates or maybe just errand runners.
• My understanding of circadian rhythms is being reinforced. The first few hours here were exhausting. Now that's it's around 8:00 am at home, I feel much more energized.

Stay tuned, I'll post more thoughts from India during the week. If not during the week, then next Saturday when I'm back here in Frankfurt.

Retro handsets

From an article in the New York Times, retro handsets from Hulger which plug in to cell phones (complete with spiral cords) or connect wirelessly via bluetooth.

Technorati tags: cellphone headset

New Firefox tricks

I've been using Firefox for well over a year now and I'm still finding new tricks. Below I discuss using keywords for easy, fast custom searches, the nifty foXpose extension, keyboard shortcuts, and my current list of installed extensions.

Keyword search shortcuts

The absolutely coolest, most useful new trick is the ability to easily assign a keyword to a search. For example, go to Wikipedia. Right-click on the search box and choose "Add keyword for this search...". You'll get the "Add Bookmark" window: The name will identify this search in your list of bookmarks, but that's not important here. The "keyword" field is the fun part. By assigning the keyword "wik" to this bookmark, I can now search wikipedia via the address bar of my browser. So, I hit Ctrl-L to go to the address bar and type "wik heavy metal umlaut" and I'm taken to the wikipedia search result page (or directly to the article if the search is precise enough). So far I've added searches for technical documentation (Oracle, Python), technical help (asktom.oracle.com), news (washingtonpost.com) and other reference searches (wikipedia, answers.com).

Firefox does have a pretty good collection of searches available for the search box, but this is an easier way to add a custom search and it's easier to do these searches without using the mouse to change search engines

foXpose

Next is the new Viamatic foXpose extension. Derived from the Macintosh feature, Exposé, this creates small images of all currently open tabs and displays them for the user to choose from. The image to the right shows my browser with tabs open on blogger, gmail, bloglines and del.icio.us. Note that this extension won't work with Firefox prior to version 1.5

More keyboard shortcuts

I mentioned above that it was necessary to use the mouse to change search engines. That's what I used to think, but I was wrong. LifeHacker posted a nice article detailing keyboard shortcuts in Firefox -- including how to switch search engines. So, for the record, to search (the old way) without using the mouse: hit Ctrl-K to go to the search box, then Ctrl-Up/Ctrl-Down to get to your search engine of choice. There are many additional search engines which can be added to this search box. I still think it's easier to add a keyword for the search as described above.

My current extensions

Last but not least, here are my currently installed extensions. These are shown in three tiers, with the most frequently used in the top tier and the least used in the bottom tier.

1. Digger - for chopping off chunks of the current URL. This is a successor to Diggler which I wrote about last year. The most recent version of Diggler doesn't work under Firefox 1.5 and seems to be a stagnant project.
2. IE View - quick, easy context menu option to load the current page in IE.
3. Tabbrowser Preferences - adds some extra preference options for controlling tabs.
4. Aardvark - Again, something I've written about. It's still useful for nicely printing non-print-friendly pages.
   

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5. Yahoo Companion - only for easy access to my Yahoo bookmarks.
6. LiveLines - provides an easy way to subscribe to a site's RSS feed into my bloglines account.
   

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7. Web Developer - I'm not doing a lot with actual development lately, but when I need to explore CSS, table layout, etc., this is the best tool. Aardvark can help with layout analysis, but Web Developer is better.
8. Viamatic foXpose - discussed above, too new to decide just how useful it will be.

Technorati tags: firefox foxpose extensions