Apr

First draft of my thesis, done! Kinda.

So as many of you know, I’ve been trying to get my Master’s thesis done soon so I can graduate this May. Today I reached a bit of a milestone: the first draft. It’s not all I want it to be: it’s still missing a few figures, mostly screenshots to explain what’s going on. That’s funny because the thesis is partly about how difficult it is to comprehensively describe pictures. But I wanted to fire something reasonable off to my advisor so he can start editing it / tearing it to pieces.

If you’re interested, you can download it here [PDF, 4MB]. Only 58 pages 1.25 spacing. Booyah.

The dude even looks like me :(

1129 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

User Experience

search tagging/thesis

Apr

Broken Alt-Tab and Web Applications

One thing that has recently become a problem for me is the loss of usefulness of Alt-Tab. For those of you who don’t know, Alt-Tab in the Windows world and beyond is the shortcut to quickly switch your active application (task switch). But what happens when I can’t switch to my active applications, because they’re buried in my web browser?

The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.

This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.

User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows. The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task. Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”

Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox. At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek). Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).

Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab. Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good. The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a great little M.Sc. topic. :-)

As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.

1137 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

User Experience

firefox/hci/usability

Mar

Don Mills Road at Earth Hour

Don Mills Road, Earth Hour at OSC. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org.

We went to the Ontario Science Centre for Earth Hour; lots of fun, free hot chocolate, $1 popcorn, instructions for star-gazing, and some passionate African drumming.

I guess nobody told the apartments across the street to turn their lights off for that hour as well. It was really unfortunate, but made for an interesting contrast.

1146 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Personal Stuff

earth hour

Mar

Earth Hour @ the Ontario Science Centre

To anyone who is looking for something to do on Saturday afternoon, it’s Earth Hour (shut off everything electronic for an hour, @ 8:30pm). The Ontario Science Centre is running a bit of an event.

The Google calendar event for the Toronto Activity Club (TACKY) calendar.

For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be there at 7:30pm!

Earth Hour at the OSC

1149 days ago Short URL Comments

Personal Stuff

earth hour/tacky/toronto

Mar

Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache

Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way. For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom. This is great, but there is a lot of concern about how useful and usable newsfeeds are to the average web citizen.

Feedly: A great news aggregator

Like most people I find myself going to the same six or so places on the Internet for news every day: Digg, Yahoo Sports, IHT, CSMonitor, Globe and Mail, and so on (BAM, roasted Sarah Palin) All of them have RSS feeds (the little orange icon ). Rather than having to visit page individually to decide if I want to read the articles, I can aggregate their newsfeeds to a single place. As far as what that “single place” is, there has been a LOT of competition: My Yahoo!, Google Reader, Sage, etc.

Of all of these tools, my favourite by far is Feedly. It’s an add-on for Firefox (sorry Internet Explorer users, you have other options I’m sure). It allows you to (with a single click within Firefox) to add a feed to your own custom little magazine landing page. Usually RSS readers make your landing page look like an email inbox. The layout makes it very readable, and the simple category support is easy to use. From their website:

Feedly weaves your favorite content into a magazine-like start page. Based on Google Reader, Twitter and Firefox. Insanely Well Integrated.

Feedly Screenshot

As a side note, I love when developers of software have really interesting developer blogs, especially with posts about use cases and new features.

Twitter Music

I’ve been twittering up a storm, kinda. On Monday, some people participate in #Musicmonday, which means they twitter about a song they would like to share with the world. This is great, but in order to listen to the song you’d have to track it down. So as a courtesy, the good people at twt.fm have built a web app to tweet your #musicmonday song with a link to either the complete track or a preview (whichever is available on imeem). There are alternatives to this setup, some much more established.

twt.fm (it's a little prettier now ..)

WP Caching (after 2005)

Now something for those of you who run your own blogs on your own servers. WordPress has been a wonderful blogging platform, especially since they added automatic downloading and installing of plugins! One of the plugins I’ve battled with in the past has been WP-Cache. No new version since 2005.

Nobody told me, but now there is WP-Super-Cache, and it fixes much of the disagreements I had with WP-Cache. From the authors blog:

WP Super Cache version 0.9.1 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website. Major changes under the hood in this release, and many bugfixes.

1153 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Software Development

caching/firefox/Music/twitter/wordpress

Mar

Bike is out for the season.

New colour for the spring. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org.

The weather has been co-operative, so I spent a few hours in the last couple of days doing a little bit of maintenance. Changed the oil, cleaned up the accidental oil spill, de-rusted the chain, adjusted the chain slack. There is something wrong with the rear brake (fluid is new and fine), so I’m thinking that one of the pistons is seized: project for next week. A seal kit is $25, and realistically it’d cost me $100 in labour .. or two days of serious fidgeting.

If you anyone remembers, I bought an extra seat last year and cut the back-end off it. Then I got it re-upholstered in brown leather. It clashed with the red and white, so I repainted the seat black with spray-on vinyl dye I found at Canadian Tire.

Looks better already. I am definitely looking forward to this season.

1156 days ago Short URL Comments

Personal Stuff

motorcycle

Mar

Bridging the digital divide between rich and poor using cellphones.

Today is the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web, and in celebration there was this telecast on French TV from CERN about the future of the web. Stéphane Boyera’s five minute talk stood out as being particularly interesting to me.

There is a digital divide in the world, as there are 5 billion people that have never used the Internet. Bringing them on board ought to be a priority for agencies involved with human development. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs access to a traditional computer. In much of the developed world, even in places where there is no running water, there are cell phones. Cell phone networks cover 80% of the world’s population. I can attest to this fact in my travels to India. In the middle of the foothills of the Himalaya’s there was limited running water, sporadic electricity, no sewage, but every family has a Nokia with SMS and a web (WAP?) browser.

The idea that services (education, banking, emergency services, and the like) can be delivered via mobile platforms is the cause d’etre of this W3C working group. From their website:

Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D)

The MW4D Interest Group explores how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Amazing ideas, definitely worth checking out. As with any good idea, there are a variety of challenges, from availability of information, software development, and information literacy of the population.

Though it’s a solution that will gain traction in the future. From a developers perspective, if I have use cases that involve use by emerging internet populations, I better be thinking about mobile browsers and serious localisation. The BBC speaker at the same conference mentioned that 20% of hits to the BBC website from Africa already come from cellular phones.

1163 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

development/mobile/user interfaces

Mar

Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner on the chaos and rewards of open source

On March 4th TorCHI hosted Mike Beltzner (blog) who is the Director of Development at Mozilla, though he prefers to call himself the “phenomenologist.” His talk focused on how Mozilla has harnessed the power of the open source community to build Firefox: managing the chaos of open source and have good ideas rise to the top.

I’d like to share some of the notes from his talk, as I have a feeling I’ll be going back to them in a few years when I’m an open source superstar.

Listening to People

When you have an open source project, your developers aren’t your work friends and users aren’t people you can call. Thus there have to be very well defined and implemented listening channels. Examples of which are (from lowest fidelity to highest): crash reports, form-based feedback, bug-trackers, wiki’s, forums, IRC. All are important.

Ideas on voting: in open source projects, voting (“+1!”) works as a great pacifier. It can be used to measure impact, severity, and interest, but should not steer what is of primary importance (or really used to make any important decisions on things).

Designing by/for People

Despite the fears and chaos, design-by-community has rarely steered Mozilla wrong. Though it may be chaotic, the community has very strong and hierarchical leadership. Through effective leadership, good design ideas rise to the top. More on that later.

Design-by-community is very different from, say, what Apple does. Apple has one persona: Steve Jobs. That’s great as long as Steve doesn’t miss any ideas (which he will), and if he doesn’t love things that aren’t all that super-great (Cover Flow). Apple doesn’t have a succession plan for Steve.

Gave great example of the development of the UI features involving closing tabs in Firefox. Ultimately he admitted that Google Chrome got it right, Mozilla got 80% of the way there, as per normal :-)

Organising the Chaos

Expect chaos in open source. Managing chaos begins with managing the design, rather than the code itself. In any design decisions, opposite camps form very quickly – especially spurred on by half-finished designs being released as Alpha products.

To manage this chaos, you have to infuse some order. First point of order is having a public and well defined road-map or a cheat-sheet of where the product is going. Then build the product in layers, and introduce every major change as an Add-On first. Educate contributors about “why” things are happening.

Discussions should be supported by research and data (possible cross-over with academia here, especially for people looking for small M.Sc. projects).

Disagreements ultimately end in negotiation, but never forget BATNA .. what’s the worst that will happen (typically “Screw you guys, I’m going to Opera”). No you won’t. And if you really disagree with the design change, write an add-on to correct it (yey!).

Leadership and Playtime

You need to identify and elevate in importance people who are “good” contributors – reward them with ownership of small modules in their expertise domain. Form small teams with well defined scopes of responsibility. The leadership of these teams can be concentrated around these good contributors.

The modules of code are led and owned in a heirarchical manner. Ultimately, someone is the sole owner of the whole thing. In the case of Mozilla, it’s Mike Connor (youtube) from Toronto, who is kinda hilarious.

Give your contributors complete and absolute freedom to explore the system. They will reward you with neat things like add-ons to inject random stanzas of poetry into web pages, and localised versions of your product.

Localisation as more than Translation

This came out of the discussion portion, but he spent a great deal of time discussion on the localisation challenges involved with marketing Firefox in China. He wrote extensively about it on his blog.

The bottom line is that localisation has to be more than translation: it involves studying the interaction of the people with the product, and changing the design of the browser. Not the technical core of the browser – you should be able to adjust all necessary behaviours and design via add-ons. Discussed how Maxthon benefitted by being included on a very popular pirate build of Windows.

Lesson here is that customisation via add-on’s is ultimately key to solving many design problems.

1163 days ago Short URL Comments

Software Development

community/design/firefox/open source/toronto

Mar

Toronto hip-hop: Get ‘em Down South.

This is part two of a series of posts about Toronto hip-hop. Part one featured Famous and Luu Breeze, two up-and-coming MCs that are making an impact on the mainstream with their lyrical game. This issue will focus on two others that are harnessing the power of the American hip-hop machine, but repping T.O. just as hard. One MC, and one DJ.

I first ran into DJ Wristpect (blog), aka Shez Mehra, partying on a random Thursday in Guelph. Guelph is about 45 mins north-west of anywhere near Toronto, but has one of the busiest party scenes in Ontario due to the University in town. Guelph is traditionally rich in musical talent, with notable exports such as The Constantines, Royal City, Gentleman Reg, and the kids who run (ran?) Kazoo. Toronto music faithful will have some familiarity with most of these acts. And anyone who gives a shit about the state of Toronto’s DJ community will have also heard Wristpect and the great work he’s been doing with Little Brother(!), Just Blaze(!!), and AZ(!!!). More recently he’s been doing great things on tour, such as parties with DJ AM and MSTRKRFT.

Rock the Bells

The highlight of Shez’ career for me0 has been the Bridging the Gap series of mixtapes – bridging Toronto hip hop with artists from the U.S., specifically North Carolina, New York, and Chicago. These are all available for download on his blog. If you’re only going to grab one tape, check out the HipHopDX co-branded Rock the Bells mixtape, which is party music at its finest. If you’re going to grab two, check out the aforementioned collaboration with N.C.‘s Little Brother.

Bridging the Gap Vol. 3

Now, as far as reaching for collaborations with American hip-hop superstars, nobody has reached harder than Drake (myspace). I don’t know how much money that kid and his faithful invested in the relationship with Lil’ Wayne: if you’re putting out tracks with the Greatest Rapper Alive and running with Young Money, the pressure is definitely on. Once again, the recent mixtape is very strong, well reviewed, and available for free download (see a pattern emerging yet?)

(This video is for Lindz .. you the fucking best)

My favourite Drake collaboration is actually with Alabama’s Rich Boy (put some d’s on that myspace) – the track Must Hate Money, which I remember from last summer.

So Far Gone Mixtape

It’s good to see these two get together sometimes. “I Run T.O.!”

More to come.

1164 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Personal Stuff

drake/hip hop/mixtape/toronto/wristpect

Mar

Toronto hip-hop: whazz happenin’ baybee?

For as long as I’ve been listening to hip hop (arguably, not that long .. Wu-Tang Forever was the first album I cared about, which was in 1997), I’ve been trying to figure out why Toronto specifically, and Canada to a lesser extent, doesn’t put out mind-blowingly good hip-hop non-stop. Why is there no buzz in the way that there is in the Houston, Detroit, or San Francisco? So in hopes of being part of the solution, I’m going to wind down some of the local stuff that has me boppin’. This is hopefully part one of a series.

Toronto’s urban population, be it black, white, asian, or whatever, is financially better off and generally more educated than the similar demographic in the U.S., so why is that not giving us an advantage? Maybe I just answered my own question – but I seriously doubt that the ability to make good hip hop is tied to poverty and the lack of a high school education. On this tangent, Famous (myspace) has a track 4th Biggest City, released early last year. The theme is: we’re in the fourth biggest city in North America, VideoFact gives you $40k, and the CRTC will make sure your song gets played at least 30% of the time on any urban station; carpe diem.

There is always the one notable exception: Kardinal Ofishall. Sure, there are K-Os and Shad-K, both of whom have the university crowds buzzing, but Kardi kills it for the city. He is the epitome of Toronto hip-hop ambassadorship. He rose far above that framework that Choclair, Saukrates, and the rest of the Northern Touch crew laid out. Bakardi Slang might as well have been an advertisement for a newer, more bloodclot English language that Plies could slur, but the album died a bad label death when MCA folded. He put out Not 4 Sale, a pretty pop-friendly album (stream it here), for which he caught some heat from people who care – but someone has to blaze the trail of Toronto to the main-stream, nes pas?

But here I’m trying to focus on the non-Kardi Toronto hip-hop world, which feels much smaller and harder to know.

To me, recently, Famous and Luu Breeze have been the standout MCs who have the chance to take a stand in the mainstream. Maybe not in the profound hip-hop megastardom way, but rekindle hope amongst listeners: the way Black Milk (myspace) and others brought new light to post-Eminem Detroit, or P.O.S. (myspace) gave hope to black kids in Minneapolis who want onto Rhymesayers.

In Ain’t No Use Famous discusses the shortcomings of being the rapper he is, as he’s trying to play catchup with the influence of those who told him to tuck his pants to his socks, obey his thirst, and wear white T’s.

This kid Luu Breeze (myspace) has an album dropping soon, so I’ve been told by every conceivable media tidbit about him. The mixtape was sleek, you can download it here. Charge It to the Game is obviously going to be the single, is a banger, but after two high profile videos, I’m not impressed with L&G Films. A Yatch? At least be excited to be on a boat.

More to come.

1166 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Personal Stuff

famous/hip hop/luu breeze/toronto/video