Weblog

Learning Ruby

2009-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

A friend of mine wants to learn to program. I recommended either Ruby or Python and petitioned the Lazyweb for good places to start. In case they’re of use to anyone else, here are the recommendations I got back:

Poignant Guide

Way out in front is the Poignant Guide. It’s by why. It starts with a cartoon strip. Awesome.

Tryruby

An in-browser console. Allows you to dip your toes in the water without having to get your systems all set up. Bonus for the terminal-shy.

Hackety Hack

Calling itself the “coder’s starter kit”, Hackety Hack seems to be a self-contained, multi-platform training course, including a console, tutorials, cheat sheets and a place to store your own little apps. It’s currently being re-worked but worth keeping an eye on.

The Barcamp PaperWiki experiment

2009-04-17T14:00:00+00:00

While in Iceland back in November Brian Suda and I (when not discussing ideas for sausage innuendo) had an idea for a kind of physical wiki. I had met a guy at Etech a few years ago who was experimenting with placing blank pieces of paper and pens in public spaces and seeing what conversation might develop; Brian was trying to work out how to make real-world travel guides more social. One of the ideas we came up with was this physical wiki - to act both as a social object and a way of sharing knowledge amongst strangers. When I found myself on the Barcamp London Planning Committee I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a prototype: PaperWiki v1.0b.

What is a PaperWiki?

Basically, it’s a load of bits of paper stuck on a wall and connected by bits of string.

Things are written on bits of paper and stuck on the wall. People can locate things spatially - grouping notes as they see fit - or connect related notes with bits of string. They can also write directly onto other peoples’ notes. Simple and fairly intuitive.

Setting up

Given the Barcamp context and the technical awareness of attendees I assumed that the “wiki” label would carry a fairly big hint for use. I added a note about the wiki with a link to the title to act as an example too though, just in case.

Seized by last-second doubt I also scattered a few sample questions about the space as well.

The experiment

The best and most surprising thing about the whole shebang was how easily people seemed to accept the idea. I was worried that it’d need a bit more explanation or worse still, might not use it at all.

That said, it turns out that when presented with a blank piece of paper geeks will create a Twitter clone. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - I’m not coining Stenhouse’s Law just yet - but it went down a storm. Introducing Papr.

And alongside Papr a PaperNet emerged, including its own protocol, pampp://…

…a link-shortner, Tinyprl…

…a Flickr clone, Plickr…

…and assorted other jokes…

Conclusions

Uumm, it’s not quite what I had in mind! By Sunday the jokes had overwhelmed the useful information… More Geocities than WikiSpaces. But it was still good fun and it seemed to serve its purpose as a social object so I think it was a success.

The photos that I managed to take are up in a Flickr set and there are a bunch more from other people floating around too.

Little Known Readability Research

2009-04-13T14:00:00+00:00

I just read Smashing Magazine’s 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography in Your Designs, which heavily references the Robert Bringhurst’s classic The Elements of Typographic Style. The advice is all good but there’s more recent supporting evidence to draw upon than this 1992 tome. Here are two good papers that I’ve been quoting:

Optimal Line Length

Users tend to read faster if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (2.5 inches or less) it may impede rapid reading. Finally, users tend to prefer lines that are moderately long (4 to 5 inches).

Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text. Participants were also generally more satisfied with the text with margins. Leading was not shown to impact reading performance but did influence overall user preference.

Frankenstory

2009-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on? Well, I did but I’d completely forgotten about it. Fortunately my friend Tone hadn’t…

The game’s called Exquisite Corpse or Consequences - depending on where you come from - and is ludicrously good fun. Tone grabbed his mate Suzie and with him acting as middle-man Suzie and I gave it a try over email:

Thomas the tank engine rolled into the station, just as he did at 6:43 every morning. The platform was quiet - it was still too early for the morning rush of commuters - and he coasted to a halt, perfectly in line with the lights at the end of the platform. But before he could open the doors to get the hell outta there, the roof came crashing down. “Man!” Shouted Rock Master Scott, “the roof is on fire!”… the Dynamic Three jubilant that their jail was finally burning yelled in unison “we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn!”. Scott smiled… they were free now. Together they fled into the forest, shooting furtive glances back the way they had come, desperately hoping no one had noticed their escape. No one had and before long they hit the main road back into town. From the safety of the thick undergrowth they peered left then right to see Killa Gorilla cooking dearest Kevin on a spitroast. Hooting and banging his chest, they knew they’d make dessert if they stepped out. With no way back they thought fast; “what would Jesus do?” or “what would Rambo do?”. Pulling out their machine guns they were home for tea.

The End

It was so much fun that we decided to make it as a little web app! Suzie as designer, me as developer (unusually) and Tone as wrangler. The result is Frankenstory, which is loads and loads of fun! Give it a try, let us what you think, and hopefully tell your friends.

Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map

2009-04-04T17:00:00+00:00

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.

@media Ajax 2007

2007-09-05T16:48:00+00:00

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It's a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

In a lineup like that I clearly can't talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I'm taking a slightly unusual tack for me: revelations. Since Ajax came along my job has changed in ways I wouldn't have predicted. Technically I'm a flavour of designer yet after many years of specialising I've found myself having to skill up again.

To keep a handle on what the rest of the team produce I've become a testing fanatic;
I've had to go back and relearn how to program - not to necessarily produce back-end code but to understand what the real implications of my design decisions are;
I've been converted to Agile practices as a means of effective collaboration.

None of these things are traditionally within the remit of 'design' but they all feed into producing a successful app. To try and describe these changes and what I've done about them I will be presenting But I'm a Bloody Designer! on the first day, straight after the keynote by the Ajaxians.

So, the lineup's great, it's in London. @media Ajax: coming soon. Say hello if you decide to come...

Etech is over

2007-04-04T19:29:00+00:00

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn't about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions... Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I've never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he's been doing for a while and I've been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it's like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter's managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I'm not used to having people not just know what I'm talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It's not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph's leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we're in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers' MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don't get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I've spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I'm starting to think that I was wrong. I've been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it's got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we've got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

Speaking at eTech

2007-03-21T21:34:00+00:00

On Sunday I'm packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I've always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I'm incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control... It's a bit of a mouthful, I know. It should be interesting though and I'm looking forward to it. Charles is doing the first half on the human need to build mental models of the tools they use and I'm going to quickly run through the increasing difficulty in letting them do that with modern emergent systems. Yep.

Straight after the conference I'm going to be hopping in a car and driving to San Francisco via the coast road. I don't exactly know why but it appeals to me for some reason. I did a long drive down to Key West during The Spring Experience in December and really enjoyed it. This time it'll be two or three days on the road, staying in motels along the way - a proper road trip. Then I've got a few days in SF to just chill, have a look around and take in the sights before heading back to London. It should be a good 10 days!

Leaving freelancing

2007-03-07T12:50:00+00:00

After 5 good years I'm hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I'm becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up 'sedentary' is likely to be completely the wrong word... It's going to be hard work - we're up against the big boys - but it's a really interesting field and the product we've been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don't know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it's a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I've been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I've been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I've become less interested in web standards per se (it's just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I'm really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I'll be permanent within the next couple of months. It's going to be a busy period for me... I really want to get the work I've been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I'm speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I've also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there's a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

MySpace vs Facebook

2007-03-03T23:39:00+00:00

I've been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I've barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It's just too much hassle. It's hard to wade through the hundreds of peoples' friends looking for bands I want to check out. It's a hassle trawling through all the spam comments and ads for clubs/bands/whatever to see what my friends are doing. But all my friends are there...

I was invited to Facebook a month or so back by a mate and I registered, spent ten minutes filling in info and then forgot about it. But in the last week it feels like there might be a change a-comin'... I've had maybe half a dozen friends join and all of a sudden I'm logging in regularly. With Twitter-like status, photos, the activity feeds, stories, comment threading and an interesting selection of participation functionality Facebook have done a far better job of the social stuff. It's an easier and more fun way to keep up with my friends.

The separation of my online social community from my music one seems right - the uses are quite distinct. A lot of people happen to use MySpace just to keep up with mates though, and I suspect things are about to correct... I think both sites would be the better for it too.