Vacuum

Yahoo makes changes to Flickr, users are not happy

The site loads slowly, the photos are all squished together, and the carefully curated metadata and tags and comments and photo names are de-emphasized. It's like a weird mix of Pinterest and Tumblr.

I'm hoping for a classic.flickr.com to preserve the old UI, in the same way that old-school Weather Underground users can use classic.wunderground.com to see things the way they were meant to be.

If I had the time, I'd cherry pick the best photos from my Flickr stream and blog about them here.

Losing the categorical imperative

For a long time - over 2000 posts - I have been putting blog entries into categories. The categories used to live in a long list on the right sidebar. I've taken them out of the sidebar, and now they're much less visible in the user interface to the point of being invisible unless you happen to search for them.

I have touched enough categories to not be authoritative on any of them. A good, tidy, modern blog that is comprehensive in some narrow sphere would have a tidy list of categories and would post in each of them regularly enough to be helpful. In contrast, a laundry list of one-time enthusiams just makes it pointedly clear when my interests have waxed and waned.

Another problem is that Typepad doesn't have a straightforward way to "pin" a blog post to the top of a category, the same way that it can mark a post to stay on top of the main page. That makes it trickier to create permanent navigation within a category.

I do hope to put together some better navigation, so that someone coming to the blog for the first time can read some more popular posts or ones that I like. The whole thing has long since gone from a narrow, coherent narrative and turned into an unpolished open notebook, gathering scraps from here and there and not always pieces that have an obvious relation to the work as a whole. If it were a real scrapbook it would have tape-tags sticking out of it at all angles in all colors flagging things that deserve to be seen again; that doesn't have to be done with categories.

More reading: Do your categories still make sense?, from Blogger's Secret.

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Category:Categories

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Pick a Label - How to Categorize the World - April 23, 2013

Zoom! Speeding up the web, one page at a time

I was reading this Medium post from Eric E Anderson on blog design and especially on sidebars, and decided to rework the design of this blog. No more interminable list of categories - instead, just one little picture of me upper left, and a link to the book I'm working on upper right.

The full article is worth reading; it suggests that the footer is unexplored territory for blogs, and that you're better off with a single column with the relevant consequental contextual information at the bottom, not on the side.

I'm a little hurt by making the sidebars full of white space, but not much. My paper notebooks have lots of marginalia, but they are marginalia that change with every page, and a lot of it is sidebar note-to-self rather than publishable anything. Still, the pages load a lot faster when they don't have quite so much crap on them, and I haven't even started to explore adding more stuff at the bottom.

Typepad is particularly good as a place to play with designs, they have a lot of premade ones that look much better than anything I would cobble together on my own (see e.g. this early effort which I wrote in vi, which is probably where I'd start from if left to my own devices).

Pages load a lot faster. Zoom! And that alone is worthwhile to do a redesign for.

"The business model is hamsters generating less money with each turn of the wheel."

The phrase is from Dave Winer, noting the path of Web 2.0 company growth and the difference between what the systems are worth to the owners vs. what they are worth to the early adopters:

The APIs are corporate APIs, the CMSes are silos, the business model is hamsters generating less money with each turn of the wheel.  

I can't say this is wrong, but it brings some regret for the time spent being the early hamster on the wheel and seeing whatever value I added to the likes of brand new systems being captured completely by those systems. It makes me want to start something brand new of my own - but then - you end up being captured by all of the tools you have to learn to bring it online.

Perhaps the best thing to think through this is that all new shiny online services have a lifespan. Some of them grow quickly and then die (remember Pownce? I thought not), some of them grow slowly and still live on somehow (remember Plurk?), others never get off the ground (a dozen tiny spam-overrun Twitter clones), and a tiny handful make it to Twitter size. You generally don't know when you're starting to talk to people through some new online system whether you are going to treat it as a long-term commitment to learning a complex system, or just some hands-on experimentation in something to be ignored and forgotten in a few weeks.

So you are a hamster, and you see a wheel. Do you get on to try it out, give yourself some exercise, or do you go to your workshop and build a better wheel?

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assisted synesthesia as augmented reality

A comment I wrote on Ethan Hein's account of color-coding sequencer tracks:

When you say “color coding improved your ears”, the first thing that comes to mind is that you are doing some kind of machine-assisted synesthesia. very cool, that.

another enticing pice from oblong industries

It's true that one of the elements is a blue ball that bounces in time to the music and touches down on the notes that are playing just then. Also true: a ball like that can never be entirely serious, but it can be entirely effective. What works is assisted synaesthesia, making sound seem like sight and looking seem like hearing. The time in which music happens is turned into the space of the animated score.

And then pretty quickly we hit this video of John Underkoffler at TED on the future of the user interface. Not quite what I was after, very lovely in its own Minority Report style but not for the perspective I was after.

This has an interesting perspective from a synaesthete, but I won't quote based on the copyright:

PLEASE DO NOT LIFT CONTENT FROM THESE PAGES WITHOUT FIRST OBTAINING PERMISSION. ONCE PERMISSION HAS BEEN OBTAINED, YOU ARE OBLIGED TO INCLUDE A LINK FROM THE CONTENT BACK TO THIS SITE. You are welcome to post content on this site, provided you include a link back to its hosting origin. Many thanks.

An, finally, aha, wikipedia yields a reference: Plouznikoff, N., Plouznikoff, A. & Robert, J.-M. (2005), "Artificial Grapheme-Color Synesthesia for Wearable Task Support", Ninth IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pp. 108-113

This paper presents the benefits of generating an artificial visual synesthesia through a wearable computer. Following a short introduction to remind the need for seamless human-wearable computer interactions, this paper makes the case for drawing upon synesthesia, a combination of the senses naturally occurring in a small portion of the population, to augment everyday entities and more precisely to enrich written graphemes. We present the rationale behind our research and summarize the functionality, architecture and implementation of our current prototype. Preliminary results suggest that this kind of artificial synesthesia improves short term memory recall and visual information search times.

and the followup paper crucially gives the link to augmented reality

This paper studies a novel approach advocating the virtual alteration of real-world interfaces through a form of augmented reality. Following an introduction reminding the need for easy to use and more consistent interfaces across our many day to day devices, this paper makes the case for using wearable computers to enhance the interactions between humans and conventional appliances. We present the rationale behind our research and summarize our current prototype's functionalities, architecture and implementation. Preliminary results suggest that virtually altering the interface of real world devices improves execution times for simple tasks using these devices.

Awesome homebrew USB Lego printer printed "Hello World" from a Mac

The critic says "I like Lego City better."

New design

Mostly, the design is new because I was ready to scrap a bland custom design and go with something from the Typepad gallery.  I also like this one in part because it has a nice wide area for pictures in blog posts.

I had to hit "shift-refresh" to force everything to load.

There's something effortlessly fun in doing a redesign just by picking a selection from a menu, and suddenly having everything look new.  How few things work that way!

It was especially nice that when I picked a photo to use for the theme, that the system suggested an appropriate accompanying color palette.

Also noted, 5/22/2010: as author, my top navigation bar has an "edit post" button, so I can change things well after the fact.  This is promising.  I do notice that there are no archives links anymore and no easy way for anyone to notice that I've been plugging away at this for years, but the "search" box is very welcomed, and should unearth some things that would have otherwise been buried.

3/19/11: The design I had picked was "Chroma". I've swapped that out for "Journal Black", which served to restore the category and archive links. --Ed

4/24/13: Now using the "Clean" theme, with radically simplified sidebars.

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network buffering, a design for robustness

Networked buffering: a basic mechanism for distributed robustness in complex adaptive systems, James Whitacre and Axel Bender, 2009/12/10, arXiv:0912.1961

Excerpt: This paper proposes a generic design principle for generating robust traits in complex systems that requires two basic conditions to be satisfied: 1) agents are versatile enough to perform more than one single functional role within a system and 2) agents are degenerate, i.e. there exists a partial overlap in the functional capabilities of agents. Our principle claim is formulated within the so-called networked buffering hypothesis. It outlines how degenerate systems may readily produce a distributed response to local perturbations and reciprocally how excess resources related to a single function can indirectly support multiple unrelated functions within a degenerate system.

Translating a bit out of complex systems speak, here's my interpretation.  Note that the paper proposes a design principle (and not a rigorously tested set of experiments) so there's room to explore this principle in a variety of worlds and words.

The first note is that the pieces of the robust complex system in question are flexible and reconfigurable ("versatile").  Every part has multiple uses; every person has multiple sets of skills; for every functional role, there's more that one piece that can fit that functional role.  The expectation is that for any gap that you find from the temporary dislocation of a portion of the system there would be some other resource available to fill it, and also that if you have a temporary need for increased resources in some role that there would be a variety of resources available to pull into it.

The second note is the that the agents are diverse (oddly, in this language, "degenerate") in their skills.  This implies most critically that if two agents could fill the same functional role, that there might always be a swap between them so that one of them could take it one while the other applied their exceptional talent to the need that was pressing. 

Between the two principles you see how a system might get a considerable amount of redundancy and of reconfigurability to address exceptional needs.   For any individual task, there's more than one set of agents to address that task.  Any portion of the system that is redundant for any given task is also exceptionally qualified for some other task. 

I want to draw conclusions to modern management, to staffing and scheduling and vacation time, and to the risks to brittle organizations when budgets are cut.  I haven't even made sense yet of the "network buffering" piece.  Too short a post for that, please do have at the paper and see how that makes sense to you.

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.

yarns made in Michigan

An unnamed reader of this blog searched for the phrase "yarns made in Michigan" and found some page here that wasn't the best answer for that query; let's fix that.

Spun and dyed in Michigan:

Stonehedge Farm and Fiber Mill in East Jordan, MI makes and sells the Shepherd's Wool line of yarns,

The three-ply yarn is spun to 1000 yards per pound, which in 4-ounce skeins is 250 yards per skein. It knits like any commercial worsted weight yarn, about 5 stitches to the inch on size 6-8 needles. This yarn is worsted spun, meaning it's very very smooth and almost shiny in appearance. It will give great stitch definition for intricate patterns such as lace, cables, and knit/purl patterns.

Happy Fuzzy Yarn - Riin Gill, Ann Arbor. Rovings, too. And she rides the bus too!

If you're a knitter, the bus totally rocks! Someone to drive you everywhere you go and give you the gift of time to knit? Golden.

Dyed in Michigan

Briar Rose Fibers - hand painted yarns

Color Joy “Lynn from Lansing” - yarns, patterns, especially sock yarns and patterns

Joan Sheridan Hoover of Heritage Spinning and Weaving in Lake Orion also dyes some beautiful yarn, including luxury fibers like silk. Here’s her website but I cannot find a link to her hand-dyed yarns.

Spinner's Flock is a group for hand-spinning enthusiasts, and the people who raise the sheep (and goats and rabbits) that provide the fibers.

thanks to freddyknits for the details - esp. the East Jordan store (hm that's on our way up north...)