My friend Jeff has an interesting idea going.  He’s taking pictures every day and putting up the choice photo on Flickr.

- Bark

Taking good photos everyday is not an easy task.  I tried playing along at home and kept up for like two days.  And my meager efforts really never made it onto web either.  But if there’s anyone who can take on a big task, and see it through with determination, it’s probably Jeff.  This guy rode 4,161 miles across the country on his recumbant tricycle.

You can do great things with Mathematics, as long as you do something else.

- Found on Daniel Lemire’s blog

From Geeking with Greg, Google describes perfect advertising

We need to understand exactly what people are looking for, then give them exactly the information they want.

It [also] needs to be very easy and quick for anyone to create good ads … to measure [and learn] how effective they are …. [and then] to show them only to people for whom they are useful.

In other cases, ads can help you learn about something you didn’t know you wanted … [and to] discover something [you] didn’t know existed.

- “What strikes me about this is how much this sounds like treating advertising as a recommendation problem.”

If you can make advertising useful then it ceases to be something that you try to tune out and becomes something that you try to tune in.  I wonder what Don Draper would say.

fun.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Edward Gorey House. I was particularly pleased to see some of his rough work. Before he got going with the pen and ink, Gorey would do a basic forms layout on paper. What you see in his initial scribbling is the genesis of form. This becomes more impressive as some unfinished works showed the finished and the rough there all in one.

I think that anybody who touches ink to paper thinks about layout and composition. You have a little spark of an idea and you start fleshing it out. And then you realize you have a space to reckon with and you need to do something with that space.¹ But you don’t necessarily want to lard it up; well, maybe you do if you’re Martin Handford creating a Where’s Waldo? So you think about what belongs and what doesn’t. What creates harmony, what furthers discord.

At work in the Gorey sketches are the slow ruminations of a planner. Not all people need to work this way. Frank Gehry’s doodles don’t indicate much of a process to me at all; I’m sure it’s there, but I have a hard time differentiating it from chaos. Process is understandable, chaos isn’t.

Not all draft work requires significant planning. Christopher Bowns spells out his preference panel interface design (via df.) in a series of steps. The process, consciously articulated here, is one of iteration. What Christopher Bowns describes is a series of discovering deficiencies and attempting solutions. It’s a little meandering, but I think it’s generally indicative of how people work. Computers support this approach much better than the relatively unforgiving ink.²

If you’re very familiar with the problem domain you probably don’t roll out ideas that have known deficiencies–at least not without good reason. Lucky for us Christopher Bowns took screenshots along the way. Articulating these deficiencies through example is much different (and more accessible) than something like the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The Yahoo! library is great, but it starts from the point of success and appropriate usage. Usability is inextricably linked with the unusable. In other words, you often learn more about what works (and why) from what doesn’t.

Notes

You can be much more daring with Photoshop than you can with oils. Screw up? Ctrl+z. But because you can be much more daring, you’re not really as daring. #

Gorey, always particular (he hand lettered his manuscripts), was choosey about the forms of his books. Web-pages and dialog boxes don’t come in 8 1/2″ x 11″. But UIs have their own set of conventions and constraints. #

Adobe recently announced that Google and Yahoo! (Where’s Microsoft?) will now be able to crawl Flash.  From what I can tell this announcement was met with some enthusiasm and some mehs.

Jon Gruber offers the following view:

It’s completely closed and opaque. Adobe is only providing the magic recipe to Google and Yahoo; all other search engines remain locked out.

Adobe to their credit say:

We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.

In general I’m a fan of the “develop it, get it out the door, fix it, and get it out the door again” philosophy. But I hope that by “broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all” it means the rest of us dopes get it in short order too.

According to the natural language processing blog:

Computational Linguistics is open access.
Just officially announced. Minor details: as of Mar 2009 (first issue next year), there will be no print version (electronic only) and will be open access.

Cheers to the folks at the ACL and The MIT Press (my old employer).

I’ve been running across a lot of squirrels on the internet lately. 

This is the Conversation Rate squirrel.  As if you couldn’t tell from the bling.  I really don’t know what to make of a squirrel that can be hired for $50K a month.

On the more serious side, the squirrel fish is not a squirrel (er, fish?) to be messed with.

This squirrel (er, fish?) can crack some nuts.  In the past I’ve found that Safari’s JavaScript implementation leaves IE (decent with innerHTML, slow as molasses in January with DOM manipulation) and Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey in the dust.  To see the WebKit team beat their own benchmarks soundly is really quite a feat.

According to this Readability Test, the website you are now reading is more challenging that Reader’s Digest (I do love their jokes).  However I am still bested by The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell.

Play hard, accept defeat when it comes-that’s my moral.

Or at least so says Mike Davidson:

This sounds overly simplistic, but I really do think Apple just split the mobile world into two choices: settle for a free phone or buy an iPhone. There just aren’t many reasons to do anything else.

While this does sound overly simplistic, most of the best-selling phone section at Amazon can be had for less than a penny (including some pretty nice Nokias).