- Improvisation and Forgiveness (JP Rangaswami) — what makes us human is not repetitive action. Human occupations should require human intellect, and there’s no more human activity than making a judgement call when processes have failed a customer.
- Kinect Tech in Laptop Prototypes — “waving your hands around at your laptop” will be the new “bellowing into your walkie-talkie phone”. (via Greg Linden)
- Beautiful Web Type — demo page for the best from Google’s web fonts directory. Source on GitHub.
- Ethics of Brain Boosting, Discussion (Hacker News) — this comment in particular: in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident — blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature. And you thought that typo where you accidentally took the database offline was bad ….
"web design" entries
Permission to be horrible and other ways to generate creativity
Denise R. Jacobs advocates for new approaches to work and community.
Author and web design consultant Denise R. Jacobs reveals lessons she learned about creativity while writing her first book. She also discusses her efforts to give women and people of color more visibility in the tech world.
Four short links: 30 January 2012
Human Labour, Kinect in Laptops, Web Fonts, and Brain Boosting
Four short links: 14 December 2011
PHP Virtual Machine, Archive Your Tweets Easily, Prioritize Your Links, VC Memes
- The HipHop Virtual Machine (Facebook) — inside the new virtual machine for PHP from Facebook.
- PHP Fog’s Free Thinkup Hosting (Expert Labs) — ThinkUp archives your tweets and other social media activity for you to search, visualize, and analyze. PHPFog hosts PHP apps scalably, and I’m delighted to be an advisor. Andy’s made a video showing how to get up and running with ThinkUp in 3m. (This is impressive given how long I squinted at ThinkUp and swore trying to get it going on my colo box just a year ago)
- The Secret Lives of Links (Luke Wroblewski) — notes on a talk by Jared Spool. On the Walgreen’s site, 21% of people go to photos, 16% go to search, 11% go to prescriptions, 6% go to pharmacy link, 5% go to find stores. Total traffic is 59% for these five links. The total amount of page used for these 5 links is ~4% of page space. The most important stuff on the page occupies less than 1/20th of the page. This violates Fitts’s Law. Makes me think of the motor and sensory homunculi.
- VC Memes — the success kid is my favourite, I think.