Jason Hong's Confabulations

I can't take any credit for it, but two of the six that this person lists were developed as part of the Software Architectures and User Interfaces class I taught last Fall. Just a quickie to bubble up some novel Quicksilver plugins that are new-ish or even a bit esoteric. ... 3. Abracadabra triggers - Associate a mouse gesture with any command. Seems especially cool for people using pen and tablet. (more) 4. Constellation Menus - Love it, hate it, or just find it wildly geeky and beautiful, this is kinda A1c0r’s version of right-click on graphical steroids. (more and more) http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/13/qs-plugins/

A huge collection of different kinds of infoviz maps. Very cool, some of them look like Jackson Pollock created them. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

. . . . anyone can be a scientist. I saw people walking around in sweatshirts and jeans. Who knows? Maybe I can be a scientist. Drawings and notions of scientists by seventh graders, before and after a visit to Fermilab. Very cool. http://www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/amanda.html

I was digging around my old photos, and found some videos I took at UIST2004 of PARC researcher Ed Chi getting kicked in the stomach. This was part of his demonstration of a SensorHogu he and others helped develop for better scoring in Tae Kwon Do. Plus, it's just fun to watch Ed get kicked (sorry Ed, it's true!) Videos Video 1 (5meg avi) Video 2 (4meg avi) Video 3 (1meg avi) Original Paper: Ed H. Chi, Jin Song, Greg Corbin. 'Killer App' of Wearable Computing: Wireless Force Sensing Body Protectors for Martial Arts. In Proc. of 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 277--285. ACM Press, October, 2004. Santa Fe, NM.

I was expecting things like the Great Wall and the Three Gorges Dam, but it's really about modern buildings. Check out the Central Chinese Television CCTV building, I can't believe it doesn't fall over. I'd hate to work on the top floor of that building! Link

Very cool... Link

Someone created a fisheye widget for the web, basically the Mac OS X dock. Pretty amazing to see it working in a web browser! Link

Cute, shows graphs of how much game money is being exchanged for real USD money. http://gameusd.com/

Just tried it out, very cool idea. http://ws.cdyne.com/NotifyWS/phonenotify.asmx?op=NotifyPhoneBasic

This is just ridiculously cool. http://www.bathsheba.com/crystalsci/largescale/

http://cgi.money.cnn.com/apps/hpcurrconv Would you like to know how much dragon liver would cost if you could buy it in your local supermarket? In the Harry Potter books, it says it costs 17 sickles an ounce. So, enter 17 into the sickles box and click "Calculate." There's your answer: $4.82.

Great Caesar's Ghost! Someone just sent me an email commenting on a usenet post I made seven years ago on software engineering! I actually like what I wrote too, it still seems highly relevant in this day and age. Well, except maybe the part about Enterprise Java Beans... :) I've edited the line breaks slightly to make it more readable in a web browser. From: jasonh@xxx.yyy.EDU (Jason Hong) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: [NEWS] Re: Why is programming so hard? Date: 11 Dec 1998 23:02:30 GMT ... : : I'd like to hear more. Perhaps it would bring theory, : philosophy, and poetry to engineering. Here's a few I'd also add: o No natural visualizations There's no simple way to "see" or "draw" software, often making its abstract representation the only one we have. I'm also unconvinced that all of the various object modeling tools and techniques (UML, Fusion, etc) really augment our abilities to think and do d...

From Fortune Magazine , via the FoRK Mailing List The No. 1 policy prescription, almost regardless of whom you ask, comes down to one word: education. In an economy where technology leadership determines the winners, education trumps everything. That's a problem for America. Our fourth-graders are among the world's best in math and science, but by ninth grade they've fallen way behind (see table). As Bill Gates says, "This isn't an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system." The good news is that we've overhauled the system before. A century ago, as America changed from an agricultural to an industrial economy, something called the high school movement swept the country... We responded to a changing world again in 1958, after the USSR orbited Sputnik while our rockets kept blowing up on the launch pad... We went to the moon, science and engineering became cool, even glamorous, and we gained a wide technology lead. ... A prescription urged just as...

Bill Buxton has a page up on the CHI2005 panel about the early days at the MIT Lincoln Labs. Cool history about some of the early pioneers in interactive computing. http://www.billbuxton.com/Lincoln.html

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/230596_kristof30.html The LoJack security system has hurt the business model of auto theft, forcing thieves to go into new lines of work -- and that should inspire us to think more creatively and systematically about how to reduce crime. Sold for $695, the LoJack is a radio transmitter that is hidden on a vehicle and then activated if the car is stolen. The transmitter then silently summons the police -- and it is ruining the economics of auto theft. Car theft, it turns out, is a volume business. And so if even a small percentage of vehicles have LoJack, the professional thief will eventually steal a car with one and get caught. The thief's challenge is that it's impossible to determine which vehicle has a LoJack (there's no decal). So stealing any car becomes significantly more risky, and one academic study found that the introduction of LoJack in Boston reduced car theft there by 50 percent. Two Yale professors, Barry Nalebuff and Ian...

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/125th/ A good overview of some frontiers of science.

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/ Funny, other people I'd like to see parodied: RMS Steve Jobs Larry Ellison Bill Gates If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don't think too hard about it, just apply everyday common sense, and describe your reasoning process. Here's the question: Why are manhole covers round? Feynman: They're not. Some manhole covers are square. It's true that there are SOME round ones, but I've seen square ones, and rectangular ones. Interviewer: But just considering the round ones, why are they round? Feynman: If we are just considering the round ones, then they are round by definition. That statement is a tautology. Interviewer: I mean, why are there round ones at all? Is there some particular value to having round ones? Feynman: Yes. Round covers are used when the hole they are covering up is also r...

http://cat.xula.edu/thinker/ Cool demos and (brief) descriptions of some cognitive science principles. This resource is intended to assist students with their mastery and appreciation for the field of cognitive psychology. Thinker makes extensive use of Flash animations.

http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67483-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 In a 1996 interview, Steve said, "Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. To design something really well, you have to 'get it.' You have to really grok what it's all about." (A geek's word, to grok is a coinage of science-fiction writer R.A. Heinlein, meaning to understand something thoroughly by having empathy with it.) Steve went on, "It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.... Most people don't take the time to do that." He then proceeded to tell a story that both sheds light on his private life and gives some insight into the decision-making process that often turns life into a hell for people who work with him. Making the point that design isn't just an issue for "fancy new gadgets," he described how his whole family became i...

Folklore.org has some personal histories of the Apple Macintosh on it. My two favorites so far: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Black_Wednesday.txt "I've got good news for you", [Steve Jobs] told me. "You're working on the Mac team now. Come with me and I'll take you over to your new desk." "Hey, that's great", I [Andy Hertzfeld] responded. "I just need a day or two to finish up what I'm doing here, and I can start on the Mac on Monday." "What are you working on? What's more important than working on the Macintosh?" "Well, I've just started a new OS for the Apple II, DOS 4.0, and I want to get things in good enough shape so someone else could take it over." "No, you're just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete before it's finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, ...