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December 17, 2001
Dance this mess around
| Hyperreal has a music classification system. |  |
Relatable can automaticaly classify music by beat, tempo or acoustical properties.
Posted by dc at 09:43 PM | Comments (5)
Comedy noir
And why are there no comedy noir ?
"It used to be the common wisdom that you lit a comedy differently from the way you lit a drama,"
Mr. Grazer said. "That's why so many older comedies look overlit. It was a way of signaling the audience that it was a comedy. But this one is lit so richly it looks just like you'd expect from a real, traditional western. This is just a distillation of the kind of look audiences had become accustomed to after so many years of John Ford and Howard Hawks movies. The audience back then was aware of
this, subliminally, and it added to the comedy." -- prodcuer Brian Grazer, in
WATCHING MOVIES WITH BRIAN GRAZER: Inducing Hilarity by Doses of Shock,
by RICK LYMAN NYT, December 14, 2001.
Obusable:
From the same interview:
A cassette ... had been slipped into a VCR attached to the big-screen television set at one end of the conference room, and Mr. Grazer was staring at the buttons on one of the various remotes arrayed around him, trying to figure out how to fire up the movie. The offices of Imagine, the film and television production company that Mr. Grazer founded with the director Ron Howard in 1986, are on the sh floor of a modern office building in the middle of downtown Beverly Hills, and the distant groan of traffic could be heard below along Wilshire Boulevard.
...
Mr. Grazer stared again at the remotes, pressed a couple of buttons. Nothing happened. He shrugged, handed it to me. I tried a couple of buttons, too. "Play" seemed a good bet. But no. He reached over and clicked on the intercom. A few seconds later, an assistant bustled into the room, smiling apologetically, and clicked a button on the front of the VCR. Immediately, the movie roared to life.
"We can make it louder," Mr. Grazer said. "I like it kind of loud."
Posted by dc at 03:17 AM | Comments (6)
December 16, 2001
Around the way
| If you walk clockwise around a lake, which way do you go ?
It depends on where your clock is. But if your clock is under the lakewater, chasing the Assuming that both clocks move clockwise, of course. |
 |
Posted by dc at 03:15 AM | Comments (28)
December 14, 2001
exit topica
Select Cancel to Continue continues to annoyingly grace too many installers.
This example is from topica's mailing list manager.
Posted by dc at 06:58 PM | Comments (1)
December 13, 2001
NYT out of context
When the New York Times cites itself, it would be far more
useful to link to the cited articles rather than to the company's
generic investor information.
Pre-configured related search options save users
from knowing the exact words needed to retrieve
articles like this.
Detail:
Posted by dc at 10:38 PM | Comments (9)
NYC School of Thought
The transformation required a repudiation of all responsibilities and an
ever-growing tendency to react by being domineering or playing the victim
when reminded of them. In this, and his constant self-promotion and carefully
created persona, he may have been ahead of his time, something akin to
the first New York artist.
The Artist as Bully and Self-Described Sex Machine By ROBERTA SMITH:
review of ((PAUL GAUGUIN:An Erotic Life) By Nancy Mowll Mathews).
Posted by dc at 09:00 PM | Comments (2)
December 12, 2001
bandwidth gone
This error message would be some much better if it said,
Back in 20 minutes or
Enter e-mail address to be notified when site is available again.
Posted by dc at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
wrapping
What I want is a setting on my viewer to:
- wrap text to 72 columns per inch
- don't wrap URLS
Posted by dc at 03:14 AM | Comments (3)
December 09, 2001
MSFT theology
Microsoft always figured that it's better to let the hardware catch up
with the software rather than spending time writing code for old computers
owned by people who aren't buying much software any more.
-- Joel Spolsky.
Posted by dc at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
review: BMW F650gs mesage board
Message From: #760 - 2001-Dec-06
Subject: new board: thoughts
Some thoughts on this new BMW f650(gs) message board.
The best feature is that each message has its own URL.
The worst feature is that the Perv 7 days/Next 7
days navigation is ambigous or broken.
First, thanks for the effort, and success in getting it running.
Second, I can offer some advice on how to make it better:
Two features I'd like are optional cumulative voting (karma)
as seen in slashdot or greymatter blogs. Members vote
on good/bad or 1-10 on any message. Members set their
reading karma threshhold and view only messages with
greater than threshhold karma.
Another nice to have feature is a 'message museum' where
particularly good messages -- which stand by themselves,
as trip reports, modification instructions, or whatever
-- are selected by a moderator, or the audience via karma voting,
are maintained as a companion to the board.
Perhaps in July 2002, a page of '50 best messages'
would entice new Chain members to sign up.
Some of the new features are a bit odd or broken. See below:
1. Clicking on + in the subject/author list to expand a thread
should make the article window show the lead article in the
selected thread. Instead, the article window is unchanged
by this click.
2. If I'm logged in. the 'login' link should change to a
'welcome $nicname' indicator. If I see 'login', I click on
it and log in, repeat. repeat.
3. The Prev 7 Days | Next 7 Days are broken in ways that
I haven't fully explored. But keep clicking on 'Next 7 days'
and see duplicated navigation:
Prev 7 Days | Next 7 Days
Prev 7 Days | Next 7 Days
Select 'Next 7 days' a few more times, since it's still
an active link.
Then select 'Prev 7 days' to go back. repeat.
ually you get a list of messages, but it's much
shorter that the list you saw when you first logged in.
Why don't next and previous just go back and fourth ?
When I first view the newmessageboard, the most recent posts
are shown, but the link to 'Next 7 days' is active. Is
this a link to posts which are newer than now ?
I'm just unclear about the direction of 'prev' and 'next'
posts. is prev = older and next = newer, or does next sometimes
mean 'even older' ?
4. A link to 'newest posts' would simplify navigation,
if it linked to a list of the newest posts or newest threads.
5. Regarding the confirmation of registration e-mail
5.1. don't use html in e-mail.
5.2. the page I get from the 'activate account' is broken.
I tried both Opera on NT2000 and and lynx on NetBSD.
5.3. try to keep URLs one line long by not making them so long;
and or not indenting them so much.
4. You might like to uses a special 'newuser@f650.com'
for such automatic verification e-mail and save the
webmaster@f650 for human correspondance.
5. Changes keep happening to the board as I write this message,
and try to verify the issues I'm reporting.
Dates were in and are then not in the subject/author window.
I hope it is safe to make changes to a running board.
Usually, changes are tested, then once a month (or so)
the system is locked for a few minutes for a software upgrade.
6. If I have expanded a thread with +,
read all 48 meassgeas in the thread and
hit browser refresh to see if there are any new posts
in the thread, the subject/author view collapses
the thread, and it's hard to find the same subject again
in the subject/author window.
When I select a thread or + or -, there can be some
weird vertical jumping causing me to lose the
sight of the thread I clicked on, or whose +/- I click on.
7. re DHP's 'there is a major UI issue with not being able to
expand a topic and keep it expanded while examining another topic or message'.
I would agree if I saw that happen, but if I click on two +
to expand two threads, I see two expanded threads. I saw
this before I signed up and specified something about exanding threads.
I could go on, but another thing to consider is to use
an existing message board package. For instance, the Honda
The S2000 board is one of the best.
Oh, and I'd like a much bigger message composition window-textarea.
thanks,
David W. Crawford #760 dc@omor.com
my hands are still cold, I can almost type.
Posted by dc at 06:46 PM | Comments (3)
Jakobian
Book Review: Homepage Usability, 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir
Homepage Usability is not a pleasant size to hold and read.
Surely people who do usability for a living would have thought of these things?
A large square volume, 25cm a side, with colour everywhere
... with a lot of graphics. Not what you'd expect from Jakob.
Posted by dc at 04:12 AM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2001
index
In her book on indexing, Nancy Mulvaney suggests that an indexer
is a sort of query translator, mapping between the categories and
vocabularies employed by the author and those used by a variety
of different readers. What's a "drive" to me might be a "disk" to
you, so let's point at the discussion on disk drives from two entries.
Or, there may be multiple ways of coming to the same issue, and
this can affect how topic hierarchies are constructed. If I'm trying
to solve problems capturing audio to a digital file, will I look up
"Audio: capture" or "Capture: audio"?
Indexers are quite savvy about these things.
Posted by dc at 09:29 PM | Comments (4)
December 05, 2001
web logs (server side)
Web log analyzers need to partition logs into
developer's own testing
robots
general public's actual use.
Posted by dc at 04:12 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2001
Get on trak
| Amtrak, the 1-800-USA-RAIL phone number isn't well optimized for the regular commuter to learn the status of his train -- the system asks lots of questions, and periodically Amtrak inserts new things at the beginning which make it hard to program a phone to spit out the needed information quickly and conveniently. This is a reasonable design choice to support the occasional Amtrak rider, and so I don't suggest changing it. | . |  | |
For the regular commuter, however, it would be a great convenience to be able to call a phone number, provide a train number by touch-tone, and hear the status. We know when the train is scheduled to be at our station, and don't This should also save money on phone bills and equipment relative |
. | ||
| . |
(dial special number) Hello, you've reached Amtrak blah, blah, blah; this phone number is 523# "Train 523 left Davis on time at 5:44, but is 15 minutes late
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Posted by dc at 12:01 AM | Comments (1)