ux Archives - O'Reilly Radar

Four short links: 22 February 2011

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 22, 2011

Cluster (github) — Node.JS multi-core server manager with plugins support. Hot restarts, and other goodness. (via The Change Log via Javascript Weekly)
Nokia Culture Will Out (Adam Greenfield) — Except that, as realized by Nokia, this is precisely what failed to happen. I experienced, in fact, neither a frisson of elegant futurism nor a blasé presentiment of everyday life at midcentury. I was given an NFC phone, and told to tap it against the item I wanted from the vending machine. This is what happened next: the vending machine teeped, and the phone teeped, and six or seven seconds later a notification popped up on its screen. It was an incoming text message, which had been sent by the vending machine at the moment I tapped my phone against it. I had to respond “Y” to this text to complete the transaction. The experience was clumsy and joyless and not in any conceivable way an improvement over pumping coins into the soda machine just the way I did quarters into Defender at the age of twelve.
NextGen Education and Research Robotics — virtual conference on robotics in education.
Homemade Arduino Printer (Instructables) — made with an Arduino, two dead CD/DVD drives and a marker pen. Clever hack! (via MindKits on Twitter)

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by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 7, 2011

Users Can Self-Report Problems — users self-report 50% of the problems that professional usability testing uncovers, and they find problems that usability testers don’t. (The other way to look at this is: self-reporting only finds half the actual problems in a site)
The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox (PDF) — challenges faced by Gmail Priority Inbox and how they beat them. Priority Inbox ranks mail at a rate far exceeding the capacity of a single machine. It is also difﬁcult to predict the data center that will handle a user’s Gmail account, so we must be able to score any user from any data center, without delaying mail delivery(via Hacker News)
DimDim Acquired by Salesforce — congrats to the founder, who was an OSCON speaker, and his team. The open source remains, but will not be contributed to by Salesforce. DD Ganguly, the founder, is a good smart chap and I look forward to his next project.
WWIC — As Tim said when he forwarded this around: This is absolutely brilliant. Think deeply on it. Act on it. (via Alex Howard in email)

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by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 31, 2010

Rules for Revolutionaries — Carl Malamud’s talk to the WWW2010 Conference. Video, slides, and text available.
Self-Improving Bayesian Sentiment Analysis for Twitter — a how-I-did-it for a homegrown project to do sentiment analysis on Twitter.
LUXR — the Lean User Experience Residency program. LUXr brings user experience and design services to early stage teams in a lower cost, more efficient way than traditional project-based consulting. The latest from Adaptive Path’s Janice Fraser.
My Top Ten Assertions About Data Warehouses (CACM) — Michael Stonebraker’s take on the data warehouse world, and his predictions cut across a lot of our O’Reilly trends. Assertion 5: “No knobs” is the only thing that makes any sense. It is pretty clear that human operational costs dominate the cost of running a data warehouse. [...] Almost all DBMSs have 100 or more complicated tuning “knobs.” This requires DBAs to be “4-star wizards” and drives up operating costs. Obviously, the only thing that makes sense is to have a program that adjusts these knobs automatically. In other words, look for “no knobs” as the only way to cut down DBA costs. (via mikeolson on Twitter)