good tools need skill 2006-1-1 (115 words)

The hi-res user experience: "[Learning] music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products--we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn."

All good tools are bad 2005-12-24 (236 words)

Why is all the software we have "bad" or "flawed"?...

Amazon Mechanical Turk 2005-12-2 (179 words)

Wow, this is deep. And it's really not a joke at all. To me this new program has a very special meaning:

machinima 2005-11-27 (106 words)

The Long Tail weblog had a post about "machinima" - the art and practice of making animated movies with the help of realtime-rendering. Commonly done with first person shooter game engines like Halo 2, Unreal etc.

virtual team, worldclocks and confusion 2005-11-10 (265 words)

One of the challenges of being part of a virtual team - a team that is sprtead out about almost all of the world - is that of commubication delays.

Tinderbox, a bunch of postIts? 2005-11-4 (200 words)

Mark Bernstein mentioned "a clever little book about using 3M Post-It Notes for information triage, planning, and decision-making in small groups. The core idea is to use wall space as a sort of ad hoc spatial hypertext"....

spidering hacks gone AJAX 2005-10-20 (60 words)

This explanation of the way the MySpace worm was coded reminded me very much of the "Spidering Hacks" I recently coded for a client...

Assosiative Text... the Bernstein way 2006-5-27 (489 words)

Is this the lazy web at work? Hardly. But when I was reading Dr. Bernstein's (Eastgate/Tinderbox) blog lately, I felt a strong sense of "way cool, my wish is coming true!"

backup, yeah, WTF 2006-6-17 (301 words)

Oh yeah, HEY. BAckup your shit. And I mean, like, NOW. Really, do it. Regardless of what I'm just about to say here.

we are LIVE 2006-6-28 (19 words)

So no YOU can come on in. PeopleAggregator went live earlier today, and there's no more need for invites.

What the hell is this PeopleAggregator and should I care? 2006-7-2 (33 words)

Gaurav Bhatnagar has taken the time to write up some very good answers to this basic question. Go and read it. Now. Oh, and don't forget to visit PeopleAggregator.net and sign up :)

tracking external links - for you 2006-7-11 (103 words)

Oh wow. The folks at MyBlogLog.com either had the same idea (or used mine) and went all the way. They are offering a service that can track what people are clicking on oon your site and analyse those logs for you. Popularity etc. Looking at the JavaScript it's really the same basic concept: when a link is clicked, a request to a external image is created by changing the URL of an image element. Pressto we have an entry in a logfile we can analyse. By using all sorts of URL parameters we can pass along all sorts of interesting info too.

widgetization of the web 2006-7-11 (394 words)

Richard and Paolo are talking about the "widgetization" of the web. The inclusion of webservices (bits of useful content, links, info etc) in other pages is a very compelling concept. We have been seeing this traditionally with things like Google's AdSense and Amzon banners and boxes. But the concept is now being taken far further with more useful widgets all the time.

why not to WYSIWYG 2006-7-13 (54 words)

Mark Bernstein: "Obstacles and constraints embedded in writing systems can sometimes lead to better writing." I agree. Fancy styling will not write your novel, whitepager or report. But fancy styling can very well keep you from concentrating on writing. Writing, is words. If the words don't cut it alone, making them pretty won't either.

DeBabelizing the profile space 2006-7-20 (701 words)

So now I have my work cut out for me. With PeopleAggregator aiming to be an IdentityHub, a place to normalize and move info and data between digital identities, and me being labeled the 'PA identity guy'. So here is my task for the near future. In simple term it can be called "build import/export capabilities for profile meta-data". With the concept of remote authetication like with SXIP, OpenID or whathaveyou also comes the notion of a remote profile. Now on the technical level the resulting user profiles are not actually 'remote', but we have to pull in any availeable external profile meta-data a user might have with the remote system she is using for login. And to allow for the openess and freeness of user data PeopleAggregator stands for, we need to ALSO build a way to write-back this info. Import/Export you can call it. Marc calls it the DeBabelizer of profile meta-data....

my custom GarageBand install 2006-7-22 (187 words)

Well I talked about this on my "Joy Of Noise" page. I nowadays do most my audio twiddeling in GarageBand. It suits me and is quite flexible once you establish a workflow. There are some tricks I still use Audacity ofr, but those are mostly the descructive audio editing tasks like tempo-shift or extreme filtering. But my install of GA has one major difference to the standard one. I have no, zero, nada Apple Loops or any other pre-looped material installed. All my audio material is custom recorded, sampled from other sources (like sample CDs) or just plainly generated (Audacity again, with the Nyquist scripting language). The original reason for this Apple-Looplessness were space constraints. My G4 TiBook has only 10GB of HD... I moved to an external Firewire HD very soon, but the lack of original Apple Loops prevailed. It has become a virtue to me. And I also use only very limited amonts of software instruments. Actually there is only one track that has any, and that instrument is a third-party chello (Claire Fitch). Did anybody say individualist or purits? Hehe.

Virtualy coaching visuals 2006-8-1 (350 words)

I was recently asked to help a friend with the visual design for his upcoming website. Now we could have worked in the normal fashion of a designer/client relationship. I do some proposals, he comments, I modify etc. That is an incremental process that works well via email etc....

more detailed peepAgg import 2006-8-9 (200 words)

So ok. I am a bit quiet of late. Here's why. This DeBabelizing of the profile space is taking form. Which currently means I am fussing about with the extreme verbose-ness of XSLT. Here is how the part will eventually fit together:...

Serenity arrived 2006-8-10 (312 words)

And Serenity will eventually replace Tranquility. Not as a concept. Serenity is the machine name of my new MacBook white 1.83 dual core intel - thingie. and Tranquility is the name I gave to this TiBook almost two and a half years ago. ...

alter-natives 2006-8-10 (53 words)

Wow this is cool. Apple's WebKit on windows. Swift is a browser based on WebKit, but running on windows. MAybe this really is the beginning of a cros-platform widget-engine? The FireFox/Mozilla/Gecko stuff seems not to have been able to deliver that as of yet - on any platform it supports...

a blog is a tool baby, not a guarantee 2006-8-10 (170 words)

Here's an interesting post about some publishers who are trying to market books by 'making' the author to blog regularly. I really like the commentary in that post: "I don’t know any successful blogger in the world who takes a few minutes a post.  And it’s not just simply a “post” anyway....

Why use XSLT in the first place? 2006-8-12 (123 words)

I have been asked why I want to use XSLT for the Import/Normalisation/Export Architecture for PeopleAggregator in the first place. ...

developing for PeopleAggregator on MacOS X 2006-8-12 (517 words)

This just a short note for people interested in developing (or customizing) the peopleAggregator code on MacOS X, as I do. ...

excuse me? You really want to write XSLT? 2006-8-12 (293 words)

So hey. I want to use XSLT as transformation p-code in PA. But please I hear you wail. XSLT? Easily maintainable?...

Who ever they are 2006-8-12 (127 words)

They are using a really bad way to get people on their site:...

theming without templating 2006-8-14 (199 words)

Theming a webapp usually entails a combimation of (HTML( templates and a little CSS. But why this heavy lean on the HTML building blocks? Maybe this is because people stull haven't fully grasped the idea of structural (semantic) HTML, where the markup has only minimal direct relation too the was things look later on. ...

stupid magically 2006-9-4 (167 words)

Ok, who would have guessed I would say something like this: but I do start to like XSLT. It very much has it's uses for transforming (well, yes) and also filtering of data. And in some ways it currently makes sense for me to outsource some of the actual data munging from PHP to XSLT. ...

Wikipedia biography is doomed 2007-1-28 (33 words)

Mark Bernstein has some thoughts on Wikipedia and biographies. And yes, with that kind of editorial process, I agree (to his conclusion). This remids me very much of the experience Marc had earlier.

Whobar.org 2007-1-5 (264 words)

OpenID 2.0 has been proposed for some time now. Most of the action has moved to the Heraldry project, whichn is currently in the Incubator phase at the Apache Foundation. The PHP libs in the SVN there are the JanRain Inc ones, which seem to be at the OpenID 1.1 state. OPenID 2.0 is not fully agreed on as a spec, so there is little actual code to be found. As some might know Sxip already had some of the more interesting features of the OpenID 2.0 spec implemented. Most noteable what is referred to as "Attribute Exchange" now. There was said to already be code written by Sxip devs that would implement that part of OpenID 2.0... now THAT would be very useful, but it hasn't seemed to have made it into Heraldry. ...

microID - am I missing something? 2006-10-25 (105 words)

MicroID sounds like a good plan. It's a nice and quite simple way to 'sign' content you creat with a verifiable ownership. Cool. The basic idea is that only he who can edit the content can actually add the required hash of MicroID = sha1_hex( sha1_hex( "mailto:user@email.com" ) + sha1_hex( "http://website.com" ) ); to the content. Ok. That's for positive verification. But who is to stop someone elde to use my signature for their content? Why would someone want to do that? Well go ask email spammers why they use my email adress to send you their crap, will you?

Magpie 2.0 is in the works 2006-10-16 (53 words)

Kellan announces the continued work on the famous Magie RSS suite for PHP. Cool stuff, but what seems like the most important change for me personally is the move to dual GPL/BSD license. There really are situations where you want to use and support OpenSource code, but GPL just won't do it.

look ma, I'm at BarCamp Berlin 2006-9-30 (7 words)

And there are pictures! On Raju's Blog...

Uhm yes, but no... 2006-4-9 (130 words)

Oh wow, Mark Bernstein really disagrees with Seth Godin. While U can understand Mark's point of view, I also need to add that I think there's a misunderstanding here. When Mr. Godin talks about "marketing" he does not mean glossy ads or superbowl TV commercial. In the Google talk Mark is referring to, Seth makes this quite clear. (At least for me.) Google's superior marketing was not to do with better ads or anything. It had/has to do with what Mark would call "design descisions". Marketing starts at product level, with the actual engeneering. Chouces made, features added or left out. You might call this a superior product. Better designed in an engeneering sense of the word. More of what the poeple want to have. That kind of marketing.

Euphoria at 0.9Hz 2006-3-31 (646 words)

What might read like a weird title for a new track... might actually be that. But right here I just want to write about a cool little tool I found that creates binaureal tones. These are commonly used for brainwave entrainment. The theory is that if the brain is stimulated with a certain frequency (via sensory input, here audio), it will "entrain" or synchronize with those freqencies. As research has shown, certain states of consciousness (alertness, relaxation, deep sleep etc) have a typical dominant brainwave frequency. As these frequencies are in a range below audible sound (40Hz-0.5Hz), an amplitude modulation of a higher tone is used to create the stimulus....

design processes - refine or innovate? 2006-3-30 (175 words)

Mark Bernstein has an inzeresting view on how his design process differs from a more 'sociological' approach: "[H]ow do you move from research to action? I like to try to make things better by making better things -- to look at that things like weblogs want to be, and then to make tools that try to bring out new facets and new affordances, tools that help people do new things. Those tools are always going to be challenging and quirky and strange, at least at first, because their new tools to do new things.
If you innovate from sociology, you get polished tools that help people do what everyone is already doing, but that use new shapes and new techniques to make things simpler and more comfortable."

How to really learn from debugging 2006-1-27 (551 words)

Everybody who has ever done any kind of programming knows the wild hunt for the cause of an error. You change a thing here and try. Same effect. Chage something there. Try. Same problem, but now also something is wrong there. Change back, try this route. Repeat until the problem is gone. Properly done with a good staretegy this is called "debugging", but very often we get so caught up in trying this and that until it somehow magically works. Sometimes this process is so long and the path so twisted with so many false starts and deadends that in the end we no longer know what exactly the resolution was. What actually caused the problem, and how can we avoid it in the future? Here's some ideas about how to learn, really learn from debugging:

because you deserve to know 2005-10-26 (122 words)

All that content output recently and then I go quiet again. What's up?

What is a DLA? 2005-10-24 (190 words)

What is a "Digital Lifestyle Aggregator"? In the spirit of "Thinking like a Genius" I wanted to shed light on my question from as many angela as I could.