·:[ magpie’s shiny things ]:·
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Intellectually rather than physically. That is.

It no longer makes sense to have two blogs.

All the tech/info design/geeky stuff that I’ve been involved in the past three months has been tied to my art, Jim’s photographs, or the small bits of the web for which I am the custodian. Making it most relevant to my more “artistic” blog and leaving little to post here.

Further adventures of the magpie can found at the site of her alter ego ms. shoes.

John Maeda is one of my heroes. He’s taking a new job at RISD in June. In one of his blog posts at our.risd.org he had this to say:

Also, some of the best artists and designers are great cooks. There is something to cooking that is not only inherently inventive, but also exemplifies the very nature of unselfish giving from the heart. What you could eat yourself, you choose to give to another as the most meaningful sustenance for survival.

Link

Boingboing Crunch Gear reported this morning the planned closure of the last plant to manufacture Polaroid “film”.

We had a Polaroid instant camera when I was a kid. Instant pictures being of course a big hit with the munchkin crowd and then later messing about the emulsions and making “spooky” pictures being a hit with the larger kids.

One of the coolest uses of Polaroid film has been for taking verification photos for various contests and races. My favorite of those being the Iron Butt Rally.

Arrival at various bonus locations was verified by taking a Polaroid picture of your “rally towel” with some named monument at the location. For example: A picture of the Lincoln Monument - the one in Laramie Wyoming.

Polaroid picture verification offered the triple advantage of being:
1) Cheap.
2) Light weight (relatively.)
3) Difficult to spoof.

So here’s the challenge:

What technology (combination) can you use to prove that a person was in a particular place at a particular time.

Remember this system has to be carried on a motorcycle through just about every god awful environmental condition you can imagine and operated by a probably dog-tired and certainly distracted rider. It has to be cheap enough to deploy a couple of hundred units and secure enough that the contestants trust its results.

Details of the plant closures and Polaroid’s search for a licensee are available 0n the Boston Herald site.

I finally figured out what it is about the behavior of the new (vista) version of windows explorer that is odd.

When you look at the folder contents in the right side pane, if there are more folders than will fit WE extends the list to the right (with a scroll bar on the bottom of the window) rather than down (with the scroll bar on the right side.)

This is counter to the way extra content is handled in every other part of the computer universe. Users expect to scroll down, not right.

I recently acquired a Blackberry Pearl.

It’s a nice little device that doesn’t absolutely scream corporate whore but lets me carry around a lot of the essentials of my life in my (overloaded) purse. It also has perhaps the smallest screen in production on a device capable of truly accessing the web.

While I love having access to all the minutia of my life in an instant. (Third oldest niece’s middle name? Coming right up.) Using it to find stuff on the web drives me half nutty. A simple look-up of store hours or a phone number is a mess for anything I don’t already have book-marked. Google’s presentation of paid and then “yellow pages” generated search results ahead of the store’s actual site is beyond annoying. (It’s also very difficult to distinguish between the paid and not paid results - at least in the standard blackberry web browser.)

I’ve been thinking that it’s about the tiny size of the screen.

Even in my planning for the weather information of our website I’ve been focused on the getting it all to work in the tiny bit of screen that the Pearl affords. But I had some hints that there was more to the matter than just the form factor. I decided that the left hand listing column of single data points should be moved up in the HTML file so that they would appear first when you get to the main weather page because exactly how warm/cold it is and how much rain has fallen are the two bits of information I most need when I’m not at home.

This morning Peter Merholz at Adaptive path writes about designing for mobility and hits it in one.

His key statements are:

“The thing that’s interesting about designing for mobile isn’t the form of the device. It’s that the device comes with you.”

…and…

“We don’t want to explore cyberspace when we’re out-and-about. We want to quickly get a key piece of information, or make a key connection. We want key functionality at our fingertips.”

The differences in the environment in which we are using the device/web dictate differences in how we want the web to behave. It’s not about the device. It’s about the task appropriate for the context.

Even a laptop with a monster screen used in the Avis parking lot of the airport should display the basic information such as the “store locater” or “map” navigation buttons at the top of the page. Because we don’t want to browse the selection of books at Borders we want to find the nearest Borders store.

It’s clarifies what has been bothering me about using the web via Blackberry and why it is that I am trying to do with our own weather pages isn’t quite working out. I have a sneaking feeling that I’m about to discover that simply rearranging the HTML (to sort out the load order) and making a second CSS file (to address the constraints of the mobile device form factor) is not going to be enough. Mobile implies a different set of tasks and information needs that can’t be addressed by rearranging the boxes on the page.

This afternoon I have been looking for non-business examples of graphical presentation of data. Particularly I’ve been looking for good examples of sports statistics presented as summary graphs. The baseball equivalent of a weekly sales trend by region graph, if you will.

I am underwhelmed. There are a couple of sites out there doing historical graphing. Including (not recently updated) Baseball Graphs. But the major sports sites (ESPN, and the league official sites.) Still rely on the traditional text and numerical “box score” that I first learned to read sitting with my dad at the breakfast table. There’s a nice example with explanation of a baseball box score on wikipedia for those of you not lucky enough to have grown up with baseball for breakfast.

Check out this ESPN report on theColorado/Boston game (21.oct.07) Other than the addition the cute team logo icon next to the game highlights, it looks pretty much the way it did in the morning paper. Why?

My best guess… We learned to follow the game via text and numbers presented in the box score format. It serves it purpose well and we know how to read it. We don’t want to learn to read some other (visual) language.

from the shop manual for my truck:

slacken vent flap trunnion fixing

fabulous!

Better Explained is a web site created by Kalid Azad based on the idea that

There’s always a better way to explain a topic. Insights are fluid, mutable, and work for different people.

He focuses on math and programming (web technologies) with a little bit of the kitchen sink thrown in.

His ability to use a narrative voice and the freedom to add graphics put these explanations in a different category from the more authoritative voices heard on wikipedia but avoid the we have everything and here’s five ads too feel of about.com.

His Another Look at Prime Numbers takes the otherwise for math freaks only topic of these oddly behaving numbers and looks at them from a very different perspective Chemistry. Odd and amusing and likely to stay with you for while.

While some experts quibble with a few of his statements. (Politely.) The ideas are made clear for the layman - and reading the comments will show you where the little gaps were covered over.

Nice job.

I’ve got his two articles on version control queued up for “waiting around for other people” reading.

I’ve been working on moving a bunch of our old family website (Black Dog Farm) to a new server (Blackdog and Magpie.) It’s not the prettiest website you’ll ever see but it serves well as a sandbox.

At the moment I”m working on building a new set of weather reporting pages. We have a fairly complete set of weather observation instruments and an old machine in the server cabinet that records that data from them. Here at the MCWD I can fire up a program called Virtual Weather Station and look at many (many) graphs, charts, and reports. The trick now is to get all that lovely data up on the web. (I’ll detail some of the strengths and weaknesses of VWS in another post.)

In addition to displaying our total geekiness by having live weather reporting on our website, we use the reported data to keep track of some of the highs and lows of rural life. Like power line destroying winds and freezing temperatures.

Today’s quandary is about what data to put where on which page and how to arrange it.

The main item on the first page is easy. VWS provides a nice summary graphic called “Broadcast” that is uploaded via ftp.

But what to do with the rest of the space? In particular what to do with the left column? I’m torn between providing cool stuff for visitors, like a rotating Northwest weather trivia and providing the information I most need when I’m not at the house.

I find the concept of managed knowledge to be sort of like steampunk. How the world would be if we had been able to hang onto some cherish anachronism.

So why do I do it?