Category Archives: Uncategorized
“K-Meleon is the Windows answer to Galeon. Thus, K-Meleon is a lite Web browser based on gecko (the
mozilla rendering engine). It’s fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant. To make it
simple, K-Meleon could be considered as the unbloated Mozilla version for Windows.”
snarky comments aside, kmeleon is interesting considering i was going to originally use this space to pass on a bit on why we might want to stop beating the lizard:
“There’s more to the Lizard then meets the eye, but you have to take a look beyond the box — or should I say browser?
Because much of the Mozilla effort’s project management has been in the open, we can learn from this effort, and even apply many of the management techniques to our own efforts.
As just one example, if you work for a large shop, consider using internal newsgroups as a way for your own architecture teams to communicate with other developers — this approach does work.
If nothing else, you can download and use Bugzilla, a sophisticated, free, bug tracking and reporting system.
As for the Mozilla platform: Take a moment to appreciate that the Mozilla development team has only been following the programming practices we’ve all been pushing for the last decade, and that the reusable component-based architecture is one we can all benefit from.
It’s a better use of your time than beating the Lizard.”
note to self. remember to read the latest alertbox on mailing list usability. you briefly glanced at it and have been thinking about how spam delivered to your one regular visitor could surely convince him or her that he or she should never have bothered with your two-bit site anyway.
almost forgot to throw the tivo article into the annotated bookmark bin. just pretend you didn’t see it when it first made the web rounds and you actually stop by here to get interesting stuff you can’t find anywhere else:
“The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don’t actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know. ”
wow. i can’t believe it hs been 6 days since i’ve posted anything. i feel like i’m out of some kind of loop and i’m not sure that’s a bad thing. summer’s coming to a rapid close and there’s much on the plate.
i guess it’s time for the blatant dumping of bookmarks into the annotated bookmark bin. first, a review of nautilus 0.1:
“Start with the Macintosh Finder. Borrow some good ideas from Windows Explorer. Package everything as components. And then toss in some ideas that have been floating around Apple for years (but never got shipped).”
“Eazel has taken the Windows Explorer metaphor and pushed it even further. Nautilus has the usual forward and back buttons, a history list, and the ability to view web pages. But it’s got some spiffy new tricks, too.”
here’s an interesting response from the slashdot crowd regarding any claims that review of nautilus is ‘revolutionary’ :
“I’m following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I’m disappointed to see Apple and NeXT’s best and brightest come up with… a file browser. I’m just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of “revolutionizing” the operating system was.
To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:
Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn’t–by all rights–even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.
Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard
and there is considerable resistance to improving it.Fundamentally, I’m a bit tired of hearing about how everyone’s “revolutionizing” everything, when they’re really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply “sudden, radical, or complete change”. The American colonies didn’t fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn’t so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.
The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It’s an artifact of how “things have always been done”. It’s a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don’t need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.
If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work.”
of course – the irony is that nautilus can’t be ‘revolutionary’ if it hopes to have any chance of conquering the desktop. it must match the ‘windows’ metaphor perfectly and reduce the ‘cost of switching’ or it will end up the trashbin of good ideas that were too painful to accept.
i’ve been meaning to do some recursive blogging – that is, blogging about blogs that blog about memes. kottke originally sparked my interest with his recent post regarding memes:
“It would be interesting to track the pace of meme transmission…and the speed at which transmission seems to be increasing. The difficulty in doing so is not knowing what to keep track of. When I see things, I can’t really tell the difference between meme-worthy & non-meme-worthy material…I’m more of an unwitting participant than trend spotter.”
evhead picks up the meme and runs:
“It would also be interesting to track the path of meme transmission. One primitive way this is done in the scope of weblogs is with the “via” or attribute link, where a blogger gives credit to the blog where he or she spotted what they’re posting about. Sometimes, you can track these links back several steps. Another related area where people are trying to more formally track such flows is with RSS headline feeds. I believe the original idea of RSS is that a site would simply offer an RSS-formatted index of what’s on their site, and others would use that to link back to them. But with all the crazy aggregation and syndication stuff being done by folks like Moreover, UserLand, ClickFeed, and Oreilly with Meerkat, one RSS feed can be the input for a system that then outputs it again, possibly categorized, commentated, or otherwise editorialized. Information you’re reading on one site could have conceivably gone through a long chain of such services. But since there’s nothing built into RSS to track this, this path is lost. The next version of RSS may account for such things. This isn’t exactly meme tracking, but it could be — especially where there is an editorial layer. And even more so if you think beyond just headlines (what RSS is mostly used for today) to weblogs syndicating other weblogs, picking and choosing the posts (memes, potentially?) that they like. Hmmm… “
this interests me because it essentially gets at what conflux is supposed to be about, or at least strives for. it most definately is not about being a newsfeed, but rather attempts to capture or crystallize a kernel of a ‘meme’ from elsewhere and add a layer or two. the near ubiquitous ‘redux’ posts are an attempt to further add a temporal aspect to the ‘meme-ish’ aspects of conflux. ideas come in, mate and mutate over time. hopefully there is at least one other person out there who takes the ‘meme’ and folds in other dimenstions.
i guess i should play both sides of the fence and state for the record that i’m not convinced that memes as they are usually defined aren’t just a new fancy, schmancy way of addressing an old idea – cultural replication:
“The idea of a meme, combined with the Darwinian model of selection, could in principle provide a powerful framework to explain culture, provided that culture was made up of memes. This, however, is far from being the case. A meme, as defined by Dawkins — there are many looser uses of the term that amount to little more than a new name for the old idea of a cultural trait — is a cultural replicator, just as a gene is a biological replicator. A replicator, I argue, is defined not just by the combination of a causal link and a relative identity of relevant properties between replicator and replica, but by the fact that the information that determines the properties of the replica is wholly derived from the replicator, or nearly so. The issue here is not the relative faithfulness of the copying process. It is whether the replica, perfect or imperfect, is in fact produced by a copying process. When a non-negligible part of the information realised in the replica originates from sources other than the replicator itself, so that its properties, even if identical with the alleged replicator, are not derived from it, then one is not dealing with a true replicator — in the cultural case, not with a true meme. Few cultural items are true memes, or even are “memish” enough for the meme model to apply.”
but that’s alright, sometimes it’s o.k. to dress-up old ideas in new words (as is now happening to memes themselves with the whole ideavirus meme) – and besides, it doesn’t change what i’m trying to do with conflux.
some things just make me feel old. i can almost hear a creaking wavering aspect to my voice, “well, when i was young we had good, clean hardcore – like minor threat and 7 seconds – not like these goddamn mooks. they just ain’t got no reeeeespect.”