Stray Hawkeye

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months.  I actually fell out of my chair laughing.  That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it.  But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Snip:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:

• If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less.  Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
• No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
• One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
• Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
• Give the eye room to breath.
• Be consistent everywhere.
• Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
• You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
• Never, ever, ever build anything in flash.
• Blinking things distract people and we are all already too distracted the way it is – never make anything blink.

Pleasantly trippy, though simple, Lego illusion.

Cute and clever diorama and detail (via The Brothers Brick).

Using Legos to mend walls.

Lego candles.

An absolutely enormous / insane (read: awesome) Lego aircraft carrier.

Nathan Sawaya makes all sorts of amazing Lego sculptures / art (found via Makezine).

A great/bad pun in Lego:

Attack of the Second Amendment from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo. Via Gizmodo.

On the slightly more serious side, here‘s a really interesting story from The New York Times about Lego as a company and the changes they’ve made and where they’re heading (via Kottke).  As much as I fully realize that things like that have to happen to keep the company afloat, it kind of makes me sick too.  I’ve bought Legos for birthdays and Christmas in recent years and each time it seems like they get more and more expensive, with almost no really little sets, and they’re so specialized that it’s hard to build much out of them aside from what’s on the front of the box.

I remember quite fondly Lego sets I had when I was little (okay, I still have some of them) that came with multiple sets of instructions for things to make out of them, and also had things pictured on the box that you could make which there weren’t instructions for, just to get the creative juices flowing a little more.

I sort of credit the old Lego sets with a lot of the way I look at thing (perhaps I had this view before I got Legos, and they just happened to fit in well, who knows).  Mostly, putting pieces together, taking things apart and rebuilding them, just seeing how things work, and being willing to mess with them a little.  I often explain my interest in computer programming in these terms – programming is Legos for adults.  (Legos are Legos for adults too, but we’re going for a metaphor here people.)  In programming, especially object oriented programming, you have all these different pieces you have to fit together and line up just right, and when you do, you have built a new toy to play with from the parts you had.  And you can combine them in all sorts of ways, and swap out pieces here and there, and build whole new things no one else has thought of yet.  And when you’re done, you can reuse it all and not have a mess.  And the building that happens is a mix of building with your hands, and planning it out in your head as you go, and adjusting as you run into problems.  In an overblown metaphoracal sense, Legos are life.

So, in closing, here’s a great, very simple Lego ad campaign (via Swiss Miss) that’s the way I like to remember them.

Random Fact: Linus Torvalds (the guy who started Linux) and the state of Iowa share a birthday – today, Dec 28th.  Linus is 40, Iowa is 163.  Happy Birthday to both!!!  In other news, I’m pretty sure noticing that makes me a huge dork, but I’m pretty okay with that.

A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because.  Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them.  Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored.  Anyway, the post:

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This one is more of a request than an idea.  So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players.  Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video.  This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player.  The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders.  For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy.  So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.

The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds.  That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip.  More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think).  I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive.  I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.

So, using VLC‘s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:

In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:

And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out.  To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:

Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:

The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out.  A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.

So, I feel bad pointing out errors in web design publicly, because I completely realize how hard it is to get it right across all browsers, and operating systems, and all their different quirks.  This site admittedly has its bugs from time to time as I mess with it (just fixed one (I think) that’s been bugging me forever with IE where it says “to here” under the date on each post), and I’ve worked on plenty of sites at work that have had far larger issues.  However, for a really, really little spacing issue, that happens to line up just so, this one made me laugh, so I thought in good humor, I’d share it.

I was reading about the new Lyndale Tap House on Because Emily Says So, and it sounds absolutely delicious.  So, I clicked through to their website to see where exactly it is, so I can go some time.  And, on my particular computer, with my OS and web browser, and, in particular, whatever fonts I happen to have installed on my machine, the home page looks like this:

It looks fine in IE on Windows (the title is notably more narrow), in Firefox on Windows it’s wider but still okay, but in Firefox on Linux, well, I’m not sure that’s the image they’re going for, though sort of a nice overlay effect none the less.  And I really like the cow in the bottom corner.

I hate websites made in flash.

You can’t link to it.

You can’t really direct people to what you’re talking about.

You can’t make small excerpts to show your readers that it’s actually worth their time to visit.

You can’t bookmark the parts you really like and find them later.

They use a different control structure so they’re harder to use (link aren’t blue and underlined, things generally don’t behave the way you’d expect), showing, in my opinion, that the people who use flash see themselves as more important than their readers/users – i.e. my way is better than what you’ve learned.

It’s not supported on nearly as many platforms, which limits its audience (Flash is one of the few things that still doesn’t work very well on Linux).

It’s a proprietary technology, though that’s a rant for another day.

Search engines can’t search it, which makes it even harder to find it.

Artists and designers are generally the most guilty of using flash for website design, because it does give a very custom feel.  Generally, when I open a site and see that it’s flash, I close it immediately.  There’s a lot of great artists and designers out there that I’d love to share, but won’t because they make it too hard to link to their work.  A lot of great content doesn’t get spread because of a really simple unfortunate design choice.

About the only place where flash is an appropriate design choice: games.  The end.  Nothing that’s not a game should use flash.  Ever.

From talking to people lately, it seems like nearly everyone feels trapped in their job because of the economy. And it seems like most jobs are involving more and more stress, and cut backs, and expectations, and general unpleasantness, which all get further magnified by feeling like there’s no good way out.  Thought this video might help.  Not that I’m suggesting anything like this, just saying it seems like more and more people can relate:

Not sure how much of that is authentic and how much is staged, but entertaining none the less.

I also wonder when the economy starts to show signs of improvement, how many people will be job hopping, what percentage of workforce turnover most places will see, and how much happier (and most likely, more productive) everyone will be.

Also, did I mention my computer at work today decided to melt down and stop working for me?  Yeah.

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Update: I looked around a little bit, and apparently the video is staged – it was for an office supply company of some sort.  Kind of figured with the various camera angles and such, but still rather entertaining.

Do you want to know how to become a computer expert?  How to wow all of your co-workers with you technology skills?  Well, the great secrets of computerdom have at long last been revealed for lay people.  Here it is.

Please print that.

Then memorize it.

And tattoo it on your arm.

I might also add the slight addendum of after the box “You’re done!”, one that says “Remember what you did for next time.”

I’d like to meet someone who can type in such a way that the tapping noises the keys make are timed so that they convey the same message that the person is typing, but at about a third of the speed and in Morse Code.

- …. .- -   .– — ..- .-.. -..   -… .   -.-. — — .-.. .-.-.-

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

I especially love that last one.

A while ago at work I was working on a rather dull programming issue.  I had been working on it for several weeks.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but and it largely consisted of going through a tremendous number of computer generated files produced in an incredibly archaic and unreadable format, and trying to make sense of them, with no documentation.  Things like establishing that if a line started with “ARFTJ|PRU|742|X” it meant that it was the start of a customer’s address, and the zip code would be somewhere in the next line.  Or that if it had “890-439,UIC,<something>,qw94″, the <something> would be a single letter indicating if the address was new, old, being updated, or being deleted.  In filtering through all this gibberish, I was also polishing off my command line skills (as you’ll see if you’re a complete dork and critique such things, they’re still quite rusty in the below.  Also, blurred in a few spots for security’s sake).  In particular I was trying to find out what all the <somethings> in the above were.  At least narrow down all the possibilities to work through.  I knew “D” and “N” where quite common, and I had seen one or two others here and there.  So, I cut all the relevant lines out of the originals files, and then made an alphabetically sorted list of the possibilities I was dealing with.  I have now bored you with the details.  At this point your mind should be roughly as numbed as mine was when this popped up on the screen as my result:

That’s right.  DINOZ.  I think it’s trying to tell me something.

XKCD again.  This made me laugh really, really hard.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this yet.  Like back in the days of Nrrrd Grrrl.  Though better late than never I suppose.

I love this song, by Jonathan Coulton, who is not only awesome for writing great, funny music, but also for licensing his work under a Creative Commons licence, and having a realistic take on how the music industry should actually work.  When I talk about how much I hate record labels that make it hard to share their content, and are ultra-unfriendly to the internet, this is what I want them to be like.  Dear Jonathan Coulton, please take over a major record label and make them not dumb.  In fact, please take over all major record labels and make them all not dumb.  Thank you.

I also like the wonderfully dorky class project style video take on the song.

If you’ve ever worked in IT, especially support, this is for you.

Via Ovablastic