Eamonn's Pile

Draft of brochure for Enchanted Hills house

2006-09-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Well, we now have a draft of the brochure offering our house for sale.

Our house is going on the market soon

2006-08-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Our house will be going on the market just after Labor Day.

Police Sting

2006-06-18T11:55:00.005-07:00

San Francisco's Finest are making sure drivers stop for pedestrians.

technorati tags:San Francisco

Guerrilla Urban Micro Park

2006-06-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

You too can unfurl some turf and create a suprisingly congenial small park in an urban parking space.

Photo-Illustrated Tree of Life (Flickr/TOL Mash-Up)

2006-06-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

I have created a depiction of the evolutionary tree of life on Earth that is a simple mash-up of Flickr and the Tree of Life web project. It displays photos that have been taxonomically tagged.

Six Days at Harts Corner in 24 Seconds

2006-05-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

I created this AVI movie which shows the view from a traffic camera at Hart's Corner near where I grew up in Dublin. The action is speeded up 20,000 times.

Blood sacrifice, the left and the 1916 insurrection in Ireland - Ireland / Britain History

2006-05-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

This anarchist analysis of the 1916 rising and the Irish War of Independence has some interesting points of view that I had not heard before. The author claims for example that the reason that the British agreed to come to terms with Sinn Fein is that they were terrified of much more radical left-wing movements in Ireland and Britain.

Google Trends: irish

2006-05-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

This is the Google Trends graph for the search term "irish". Note the big peak every year on St. Patrick's day.

In Memory of David

2006-05-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

In memory of a friend, David, who died of cancer last year at a tragic young age I am helping to raise money for the Cancer Society. If you can, please donate.

San Francisco Airport

2006-04-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Airport
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

On Sunday evening I arrived at SFO with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately our plane to London sprung a pressurization leak and we had to wait in the airport for two hours while they brought us a new plane from Denver.

Moonlight on the Ocean

2006-02-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

Moonlight on the Ocean
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

Last weekend we went down to Carmel Highlands and spent the night in the Highlands Inn where we had been married almost 14 years ago.

It was a beautiful night, and from our hotel room we could see a perfect half-moon casting light on the ocean.

Suspended Drops #1

2006-01-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

Suspended Drops #1
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

It was raining as I left my wife's office building last week and in the parking structure water was running along the ceiling in lines of suspended droplets.

Golden Gate from Alcatraz

2006-01-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Golden Gate from Alcatraz
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

It was a wet, windy, gloomy day out on Alcatraz.

Using Film-Making Techniques to Synthesize Compelling Video Shows from Consumer Photographs

2005-12-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

This is what I worked on last year.

"We describe a software architecture that combines storytelling and cinematographic techniques to guide consumers in creating compelling video shows from their photographs. The software implementation of this architecture could run in cameras, consumer appliances, PCs, or web services."

Visited States

2005-12-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Visited States and Visited Countries for these maps of all the U.S. States and countries I have visited.

I still have a lot of the world to see!

Hovering

2005-12-14T00:02:00.000-08:00

Hovering
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

I was cleaning out my hard drive today and I discovered this photo that had fallen through the cracks. It is some kind of bird of prey hovering above my house during the summer.

War, "The Price of Freedom"?

2005-12-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

War, "The Price of Freedom"?
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

The slogan for the "Americans at War" exhibition at the National Museum of American History is a bit simplistic. The wars covered in the exhibit included ones that were not really about freedom: the Spanish American war which was mostly about extending American colonialism, the Mexican war which was about westward expansion, and the Indian wars which were at best ethnic cleansing, and at worst genocide. As for the Vietnam War and the current Iraq war, let's say that opinions differ on whether those were about freedom. Still the exhibit itself was in general well presented and is worth seeing.

Writely Update

2005-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was wrong, writely does support hyperlinks and spell checking (as demonstrated by this posting), and they responded to my feedback very quickly. So it really is a very nice tool for writing blog posts. My experience as a very small sample usability test indicates perhaps that the UI design and help text should be tweaked a little to make the available features more obvious.

It so happens I am co-writing a paper with someone outside my company right now, so I think I will test to see if collaborative writing works. However he is on a Mac, so perhaps he will run into the Safari problem.

Writely

2005-09-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

Writely

I remember back in the dot-com boom days one of the new-new things were ASPs, application service providers, who provide hosted applications to replace enterpise and desktop applications. In fact I was one of the team on such a venture developing a collaboration tool for small businesses.

When brainstorming over what applications were good candidates for web hosting, I remember we explicitly rejected word processing as not being suitable. But that was before AJAX.

Now, I am posting this entry using a service called Writely, which is a web-hosted word processor that allows multiple people to collaborate on writing a document. I can do all the usual styling like bold, italic, underline, different fonts, and different sizes. It is a well executed application, though still missing a lot of features like, as far as I can tell, spell checking and hyperlinks.

OK/Cancel � Comic

2005-09-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

As a software developer I found the OK/Cancel � Comics a really fun and informative insight into the point of view of a user experience designer.

Common REST Mistakes

2005-09-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

Nice guidelines to REST in Common REST Mistakes. I particularly liked the closing summary:

Overall, the thing to keep in mind is that REST is about exposing resources through URIs, not services through messaging interfaces.

Human Universals

2005-08-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

I first saw Donald Brown's list of human universals as an appendix to Pinker's "Blank Slate". It is quite a stunning list of things that seem to be common to all humanity, including things you might have thought were unique to your particular culture. Thanks to Jack Fenner for putting up this slightly modified version of Brown's list.

Packed house at BayCHI

2005-08-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

Packed house at BayCHI
Originally uploaded by Stewart.

Oh look! I am in one of Stewart's photos.

Engineers need to understand how the mind works

2005-08-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

I like this point of view of Pinker (From Edge 3):

Computer technology will never change the world as long as it ignores how the mind works. Why did people instantly start to use fax machines, and continue to use them even though electronic mail makes much more sense? There are millions of people who print out text from their computer onto a piece of paper, feed the paper into a fax machine, forcing the guy at the other end to take the paper out, read it, and crumples it up—or worse, scan it into his computer so that it becomes a file of bytes all over again. This is utterly ridiculous from a technological point of view, but people do it. They do it because the mind evolved to deal with physical objects, and it still likes to conceptualize entities that are owned and transferred among people as physical objects that you can lift and store in a box. Until computer systems, email, video cameras, VCR's and so on are designed to take advantage of the way the mind conceptualizes reality, namely as physical objects existing at a location and impinged upon by forces, people are going to be baffled by their machines, and the promise of the computer revolution will not be fulfilled.

[...] [The problem is that the] machines were designed by engineers that aren't used to thinking about how the human mind works. They're used to designing machinery that is elegant by their own standards, and they don't think about how the user is going to conceptualize the machine as another object in the world and deal with it as we've been dealing with objects for hundreds of thousands of years.

Maybe available to help your project

2005-07-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

You might want to have a look at my resume if you are in the San Francisco area and looking for a senior technologist with a lot of programming and research experience.

Here are some hints as to why I might be available:

HP drops 4 research groups in downsizing (SF Chronicle)

HP Labs also decimated (The Register)

Research Unit at HP to Be Cut (LA Times)