Archives May 2009

The book "Don't Make Me Think" has a simple mechanism for doing user testing "on the cheap", we used it to some good purpose and someone asked me about it at TorCHI, so here's a summary:

• do user testing approximately once per month or once every two weeks
• recruit users as closely as possible to ...

We had a lively discussion last night about programmer liability.  Consensus (such as there was) seemed to be that perfectly reliable software is extremely expensive and likely futile as a goal given complexity restrictions, basically if every app must meet milspec the industry as we know it is toast, as costs would go through the ...

I'm going to have to find myself someone to act as reader for the thesis rewrite.  Jacinta helped enormously when I was writing the original, as she constantly demanded that I explain the details I was assuming other people understood.  Should try to find some Architecture students to review and challenge me on it.  Maybe ...

Working some of the outline points on critique into the thesis.

I've been playing idly with how to get back into academia.  Dumb thoughts that keep coming up:

• convince some design school to use my (assumed finished) thesis as an introduction for first-year students, point at that and see if some school would let ...

PyOpenGL 3.0.1 is pretty much finished AFAICS. The biggest visible change is support for the OpenGL_accelerate module (written in Cython) which provides a noticeable speedup for my applications.  However, the fact that the code is C (once generated) means that bugs are going to be introduced (including possible segfaults).

There are also a number of ...

Human beings are playful creatures.  If we are to understand human design and intention we must understand the process of play.  The professional designer is in some way paid to retain the plasticity and playfulness of the childlike mind, to be able to play with ideas and forms in ways that most adults have long ...

Have TED talks running in the background (I'm beginning to see TED as more useful these days, it's not about new information, it's about getting a feel for how people are communicating the issues).  Interestingly, in Gates' presentation (the one where he releases the mosquitoes) he describes briefly the idea of the video-recording and migration ...

I got about 4 hours of writing in today.  You'd think that would be a huge amount of material, yet it's just a few paragraphs here and there and some editing.  I've been going through the original outline looking for "lost points" that need to be covered.  Quite a few of them even in just ...

Section on Associations and Identification has now landed in Of Design.  It doesn't yet include all of the material from the original thesis, but it's most of the stand-alone material from there.

So I sat down this evening and did what I was supposed to do on Monday, namely look at my thesis and work out how to finish it in a reasonable period of time.  Very exciting.  It's been a long time since I worked on the ideas, and as I read through the work so ...