ManyEyes visualizations

ManyEyes makes some really neat visualizations. Try playing with my stack graph, which visualizes the proportion of movies created in each genre, over time.

Amazing...

Check out this "picturesque" waterfall.



Source: Gizmodo

Not a Big Truck

Thanks for the smile, Google.

2% of the world now on Facebook

Facebook's unique views for this month equate to over 2% of the world's population. Somehow, TechCrunch failed to note the figure framed in such a way. Just think, over the entire world, 1 in 50 people spent time in facebook this month. When you consider those stubborn people you know who won't join (not to mention a ton of parents and older folks who haven't been encouraged to join), the third world countries who have bigger problems to solve like worrying about clean water (though some of them do have internet access in one form or another), and all of the language barriers involved (though Facebook's translation efforts are pretty neat), it's amazing.

We can only hope Facebook uses the great power it has for good and not evil.

Maintenance for your Mac - Who'd have thought?

I always wait for a scare...
I was having some scary sounding clicking noises come out of my Mac Book Pro that caused me to look into hard drive issues (I've had noisy dying Windows HDs before, so I checked there first). Now that I'm scared of HD or other such failures, I'm backing things up and trying to dig deeper for any other problems that I can diagnose from the operating system. I thought I'd blog a bit about what I'm learning about Mac maintenance in the process. This may only be relevant for Mac OS 10.4 users, as I have not yet upgraded to Tiger.

Repair Disks and Permissions
The first thing I tried was to run the Disk Utility. The Disk Utility is accessible by going to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. From here, you can click on your HD (mine is a 111.8 GB Fujitsu), then click on the First Aid tab. There are two activities you should do for your main HD for regular maintenance: Verify Disk, and Verify Permissions. If they're in the clear, you're good to move on skipping the next paragraph.

If you have problems surface from running Verify Disk, you cannot immediately click Repair Disk. The easiest way I learned of to repair this is to reboot into safe mode. To boot into safe mode, turn off your computer, then turn it on again and just after the Mac startup noise, press and hold the shift key until you see the screen with the Apple logo. By the time it gets to the login screen (some 10 minutes later in my case, with no indication of progress), it should have attempted a repair of your disk, and you can try running Verify Disk in the Disk Utility again to be sure that your repair was successful. Problems indicated from Verify Permissions are more easily corrected: you simply need to click Repair Permissions.

Defragment your disk
I always liked watching Windows' defrag utility when I was young... for the first few minutes, and then I'd go find a non-computer amusement. When I got a Mac I learned it's not really necessary to defrag. However, if your hard drive is very full or you do video editing defragging once in a while is a good idea. Although I've done a bit of editing in iMovie lately, I decided not to when I learned I'd have to install some third party software.

Manually run the periodic UNIX maintenance scripts
Several UNIX scripts run on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in the background on your computer. If your computer is not on at the time they're scheduled for, they may not run as scheduled.
To run them, simply type sudo periodic daily weekly monthly in a terminal window and supply the root password. You will not receive any feedback, but the prompt will return

Backup your files
Don't wait for a scare. Back up your important files on an external hard drive, a few CDs or DVDs, or use the internet whether it's extra file space on your web host's server or dedicated backup space.

Find out more
I found this page especially useful when looking for things to do to properly maintain my Mac:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintainingmacosx.html

Share your interests Wordle style

I have to say, this Wordle cloud of my interests (fed in from my del.icio.us tag usage) is pretty neat!

Make your own.

Thanks for the pointer, Greg!

My gmail usage trends

I found a nifty little tool a while ago, offered through Google, that will analyze your mail usage and make pretty graphs and "top 10" lists about your mail usage. There's a snippet of my results on the left, the top recipients of the mail I sent, shown with relative frequency to one another. It's interesting to see the top to be teammates from a class project, (with one of the repeated below at a different e-mail address), the bottom one being my webteam committment to the Inter Cooperative Council, and other than my mom, the rest are coworkers. You can see when Bhavesh joined the team because he becomes visible in the visualization.

If you want to try it out for yourself or learn more, check out the Google Code mail trends page. (You'll need a gmail account with IMAP enabled, Python 2.5, and Cheetah which was a quick install.)

A plug for OmniGraffle

I am learning a lot about designing interfaces this summer through working on DrProject. I've dabbled with interface design before by creating a few paper prototypes, wireframes in Visio, and free form design of a game and some website screenshots from within OmniGraffle, a great multi-purpose diagramming tool for OS X. Although I am relatively new to both Macs and interface design, I've really picked up OmniGraffle over the past year. I've found it to be easy to use and enjoyable. I guess that like most interface designers, I've found my favorite prototyping software and I'm sticking to it, for now.

OmniGraffle comes with "stencils" which are shapes and symbols that you can drag and drop onto the canvas. (Graffletopia is a great resource for stencils.) In addition, you can create multiple canvases within one document, and have one or more "Master" canvases that can be used to include elements from one canvas as the beginning for multiple canvases. You can also link from any OmniGraffle object to a website or a different canvas. This lets you export the entire document as a clickable prototype. (Be sure to select Entire Document in the export options if you try this.)

Here are a few resources if you're interested in prototyping interfaces with OmniGraffle:

Graffletopia User Interface stencils

How to create clickable HTML image map or PDF prototypes using OmniGraffle

Yahoo design patterns provides an easy package of 16 stencil sets, but it is also a great resource for thinking about and learning about conventions for design patterns, like breadcrumbs.

My design process has pretty much been like this:

• Talking with developers about requirements and design decisions


• Brainstorming more concretely by mocking up ideas in OmniGraffle


• Questioning my assumptions and thinking about the interface from a new user's point of view.

I think I've also been using the design principles and other less tangible knowledge I've learned from classes and readings. So far this summer, I've read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think and I'm working on Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture. Once I'm past my big deadline for my job at Clearsighted, I hope to spend even more time reading.

(You can also find this post on my DrProject blog.)

what America wants to learn

This is a screenshot of my quirky browser (it has a Mario skin) with the built in Google Toolbar auto-suggesting items for which I might be searching.
Note that kissing, making out, and growing weed are in these top ten "how to" suggestions. I suspect the first two are a result of pre-teens increased internet usage to solve their every need. As for growing weed... that's kind of funny, since it's illegal here and all. Good for them not censoring that. I wonder if Google filters their "suggestions." I just tried sex, f***, porn, and pornography and only got suggestions for sex, which were rather tame. I just tried changing my Safe Search settings (which had been on moderate - I don't need porn popping up all the time) and none of the queries had their suggestions changed.

It's amazing to think of the power Google has over us, to suggest, censor, or filter so many of our everyday activities. I do hope that Google continues to be a proponent and creator of Open Source software and that it gives us a chance to eliminate any doubts about freedoms lost or if we have lost something, to reclaim it.

Vista Shmista (Caution: Whining Ahead)

I have encountered a bug in Vista several times which seems like such a wonderful demonstration of why Vista should not pretend to be good at search. When you're browsing to a file using an Open File dialog, there is a search box in the upper right. Thinking, "Oh, cool, I guess I can just type wordpad there instead of finding it by browsing" when I needed to open a text file in !notepad, I typed in wordpad. Vista proceeded to display search results, including WordPad, but they were not clickable, and I could no longer do anything to get rid of the modal window, except kill the application. Don't include a search option if you're not going to support it!

On a positive note, I figured out that if I close Firefox on the OS X side, Vista (using Parallels) is much speedier, probably because they are both memory hogs. And then I can use Firefox within Vista, and my system is really only slowed down by one monstrosity and not two. (Ok, I shouldn't call Firefox a monstrosity... but it could use some better memory management!)

I wish my job didn't require Windows (or at least highly prefer it). Or I wish I hadn't installed Vista, thinking it'd be cool to try something new. Right now, it's complaining at me that I don't have enough harddrive space to install Service Pack 1. I don't want to continue to let Vista eat away at my hard drive, it's already claimed 15GB of 120, and keeps insisting on more. I think I heard bad things about SP1 anyway...

I might get a chance to work on open source software this summer. That would be a great experience in light of my current sentiments of slight negativity toward massive corporations (more negative toward some than others, and it varies a lot over time, too). We shall see!

A model of an ethical consumer

I am taking a class on information seeking behavior this semester, and as I prepare to write my final paper, about a specific user group (vegetarians), I am sidetracked by the idea of creating a model of an ethical consumer. What is the decision making process that a consumer (specifically, one who tries to make ethical choices) goes through when deciding upon a good or service? Here are a few of my thoughts on questions they might ask. Not all of these are exclusive to ethically-minded consumers.

• Is the quality good?
• Is it something I can use?
• What can I afford?
• What is accessible (less effort to buy)?
• Where is it from? (environmental impact of transport)
• How was it produced? (wasteful? chemical byproducts? cruelty to animals?)
  
• Who made it? (Were they treated fairly? Individual or corporation?)
• Who distributed it? (Were they treated fairly? individual or mass-distribution)
  
• What was it made from? (new materials? sustainable or recycled? animals?)
• Am I creating demand for something new? (And is it available used/refurbished?)
  
• Is it a brand/vendor I can trust?
• Do the people who make/sell it have similar beliefs to mine/support causes I believe in?
• What will I do with it when I'm done?
• Are there alternatives? What's the difference?
• How long does it take to receive?
• What is the political context of this good/service? (is it available because mega corporations lobby for support or does it support democracy?)
  
• How did I hear about it? (friend vs. ad)

I'm sure there is more. Which of these questions do you ask yourself when you buy something? Does it vary with what you're buying? What questions have I forgotten? If we all asked ourselves a handful of these before every purchase, how would the economy change? Would we become more ethically-minded or would we just upset free trade? Which of these is it even feasible for an average consumer to consider, beyond whether it is affordable?

I have so many questions. If only I had answers.

Thoughts on a Pepsi can

I decided to drink a can of Pepsi tonight. It was a free can, provided to me by my school several days ago when on the way out of a buffet, I realized I would probably be needing caffeine some time in the following few days. Tonight I decided to give in. There's a party being held at my house this evening, and I'm at the library trying to focus on my paper until 2AM to let them settle down. I think I'd rather be sleeping, but might as well be productive, right?

So anyhow, this is my first intentional consumption of caffeine in a while now. I'm not opposed to drinking caffeinated beverages, I just tend to avoid substances that alter my brain chemistry or substances on which you can become dependent. And I have my water bottle with me nearly everywhere I go anyhow (and water is free to order in the U.S., too - hooray for frugal graduate studentship).

It's interesting to experience pop (or soda if you prefer) for the first time in perhaps a year or more. I've noted in the past how the caffeine effect is amplified when it has been absent from your system, but the fizzy feeling in your mouth is also amplified. I am also unimpressed with the taste, and wonder why this is such a popular beverage when it is so boring. Looking closely at the bright blue can, I see hot air balloons, trees, and many many recycling symbols. It seems I've chosen the perfect time to try Pepsi as their can design currently echoes some of my values. The flowers lining the bottom of the can are actually stems tacked on to recycling symbols as well. They're really into recycling! Apparently they are a sponsor of the Keep America Beautiful. Good for them. I don't think they'll have a problem with getting people to recycle the can itself here, since they're worth 10 cents. In fact, I often see the jobless or homeless digging through trash eager to find the lazy college student's hastily discarded "trash." But it promotes awareness in other ways.

The fizz takes its revenge and I begin to burp.

Thinking back to elementary school, I recall that I would often barely break the seal and literally suck the pop out of my pop cans. It was especially fun to shake it up and have only a little come out the top for me to lick off.

I remember that while it wasn't a huge deal, my parents began by not allowing me to drink pop very often (just as we rarely ordered pizza, and didn't have cable, and bedtime was at 9PM). But on all of these accounts, they eased up by the end of elementary school. I wonder if my brother and sister had the same experience? And I wonder if my parents conditioned me successfully to not desire cartoons and caffeine, or if it is just the way I am that I do not want them.

Ah, the memories in just a single can.

Help me get my feet back on the ground

I just discovered the coolest help menu ever (on left).   This help menu, available from within iSquint, doesn't actually do anything.  In fact, if you click on it, it tells you there is no help available for the program.  But the way it made me smile to see Beatles lyrics at 2am as I am desperately trying to get a program to work for me to convert .flv movie files was totally worth it.

iSquint is a program intended for converting movie files to iPod ready formats.  I just needed something to take me from .flv to something iMovie could handle, and it seems to have done the job admirably.  Good for you, iSquint!  You have my vote for cool app of the day.

You have one new crush from -insert location here-!

I don't like deceptive advertising. Not that I would be tempted to click on the ad above (I'm happy with my relationship), but isn't this stooping kind of low? Using my IP to figure out where I am and hoping I'm lonely and want to find out who my crush is. Or wait, shouldn't it be the other way around? The ads I usually see while playing Scrabulous on Facebook say that there are new messages from people with a crush on me. I think that's what they meant for this one. In any case, I think it's kind of lame, but I guess it works. Poor lonely internet users.

Types of Blogging

I have noticed that more types of blogs are becoming popular. Not only do we have the traditional social blog on sites like livejournal, or all purpose blog on Blogger, but we have microblogging via Twitter and Pownce, along with photo blogging, and on the verge of becoming popular, I suspect, are blogs of the tumblelog sort. Tumblelogs can be a mix of links, pictures, and short blurbs, basically a form of microblogging that mixes in different kinds of content. The easier we make it to share our every thought, the more people do so. Mobile technologies, SMS and beyond, are increasing our mobility and connectedness. This helps us keep more weak ties. A study I read about recently showed that we have fewer close bonds than people used to. It's a popular topic of debate whether this dilution of our real life social ties network is good or bad. It may be better for networking to have a lot of contacts, but what about having close and meaningful friendships? It's been difficult for me moving to a new state for graduate school and having very little free time in which to generate new meaningful friendships with people I can be around often. While it's easier to maintain my ties over distance than it would have been pre-Facebook, I do miss my friends dearly.

I wonder if the generally more diluted nature of our social networks is also a common reason for shyness in making new deep friendships. I think for me it may be.