instanceof me

Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:01:17 +0200

Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia:

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

Explicit vs. Clever

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:02:02 +0200

Explicit vs. Clever:

Poorly chosen abstractions or rampant over-abstractions are problems, of course, but they are hardly “clever,” they’re just poorly chosen. Abstractions are a win when either of two things occur:

The effort to learn the abstraction is an order of magnitude less than the effort to reproduce the underlying mechanism, or;

You have correctly predicted in advance that the implementation will need to change and can do so without breaking the rest of the application.

A New Article Design – NYTimes.com

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:39:31 +0100

A New Article Design – NYTimes.com:

The New York Times is redesigning its Web site — starting with the article experience.

Technical Writing Checklist

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:18:35 +0100

Technical Writing Checklist:

A To-Don’t List by Stoyan Stefanov

Responding to Language

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:37:00 +0100

Responding to Language:

Imagine a scenario where we had a blog that has a language switcher between English and German. Generally German words are longer than English so we might want to set the reading length on the German version of our article to a slightly wider value.

The CSS might look something like this:
article {
   max-width:33em;
}
:lang(de) article {
  max-width:40em;
}
As soon as the ‘lang’ attribute is changed from the default en to de (through a mechanism like a language select dropdown) the width of the
changes to a wider reading length making a (potentially) easier read for our German readers.

Prototyping Responsive Typography

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:19:02 +0100

Prototyping Responsive Typography

Proverb + logic

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:14:34 +0100

Proverb + logic

Teaching an imbecile to play bridge

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:32:00 +0100

Teaching an imbecile to play bridge:

From Data and Reality:

The thing that makes computers so hard to deal with is not their complexity, but their utter simplicity. … The real mystique behind computers is how anybody can manage to get such elaborate behavior out of such a limited set of basic capabilities. The art of computer programming is somewhat like the art of getting an imbecile to play bridge or to fill out his tax return by himself. It can be done, provided you know how to exploit the imbecile’s limited talents, and are willing to have enormous patience with his inability to make the the most trivial common sense deductions on his own.

C and C++ Aren’t Future Proof

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:16:33 +0100

C and C++ Aren’t Future Proof

Should I use Yes/No or Ok/Cancel on my message box?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:06:04 +0100

Should I use Yes/No or Ok/Cancel on my message box?:

Never use ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’ when you could use a verb instead.

And you can almost always use a verb instead of ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’.

I agree with Lukas Mathis’ postulation that nobody reads your dialog boxes. Use a verb whenever possible instead of ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’ because your buttons will make sense out of context with the explanatory text or title.

While we’re at wording, another interesting StackExchange UX “User Experience @ StackExchange” question: Should error messages apologize?

Exponential Decay of History

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:12:28 +0100

Exponential Decay of History:

A common, naive approach to history is to keep a simple linear ring-buffer. When the buffer fills, we simply overwrite the element from some time ago. An advantage of this technique is constant space overhead. Unfortunately, a linear history too easily loses important contextual information about the deep past due to minute updates in the recent past.

The further into the past we look, the less information we need, but we don’t want to have any particular cutoff where we lose the history. What we need is a decay model with predictable computational properties. What we need is exponential decay or something similar – i.e. information with a half-life.

If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:52:03 +0100

If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it:

Unfortunately a UI walkthrough is quite an inelegant way to explain the core functionality of an app. It can be a frustrating obstacle before you can dive into an app, and you have to remember all of those new ways of using it once you get in. […]

Arguably a less intrusive way compared to a walkthrough is to guide the user in the situation with UI hints. This can be done through slight visual cues and animations. A hint should not be a popup (it’s probably even more disruptive than a tutorial).

Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:28:29 +0100

Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong:

A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The “overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year.”

Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear? […]
Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” he found.

In other words, half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later. Similarly, ordinary people’s brains are cluttered with outdated lists of things, such as the 10 biggest cities in the United States.

Rise for iOS, an alarm clock app with an interestingly...

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:47:14 +0100

Rise for iOS, an alarm clock app with an interestingly innovating UI.

Beating the Averages

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:01:03 +0100

Beating the Averages:

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he’s looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they’re missing some feature he’s used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn’t realize he’s looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

Paul Graham on choosing a programming language

matpringle: ‘Kurt Vonnegut’ by Mat Pringle. Click to read!

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:51:50 +0100

matpringle:

‘Kurt Vonnegut’ by Mat Pringle. Click to read!

meme-meme: Creative 3D printing. Wow.

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:50:34 +0100

meme-meme:

Creative 3D printing. Wow.

Portfolios on the Web

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:45:46 +0100

Portfolios on the Web:

Web designer Daniel Eden on the issues with presenting a portfolio:

We don’t design pictures. We design experiences.
An experience is something that is impossible to display in a static format like a picture.

What Programmers Want

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 10:03:26 +0100

What Programmers Want:

Michael O. Church on what motivates a software engineer (and what does not work)

Zen Coding is now Emmet — the essential toolkit for Web developers

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:23:55 +0100

Zen Coding is now Emmet — the essential toolkit for Web developers:

Emmet takes the snippets idea to a whole new level: you can type CSS-like expressions that can be dynamically parsed, and produce output depending on what you type in the abbreviation. Emmet is developed and optimised for web-developers whose workflow depends on HTML/XML and CSS, but can be used with programming languages too.