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June 27, 2002
electric chair
Computer desk-chair by Snowcrash.
Posted by dc at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2002
Wallmart on Stilts
The Dallas Plan Commission unanimously rejected
plans for a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Thursday.
The combination discount center and grocery
store, which would feature parking below an
elevated retail area, would be a departure from
Wal-Mart's typical suburban stores. The
retailing giant touted the store as a unique
urban concept.
See also dingbat:
Dingbat The building type most profoundly destructive to pedestrian frontage. A
building is raised on columns in order to maximize parking underneath. This type
inadvertently created by C.S.D. codes which key the allowed building area to the
quantity of parking accommodated on-site. P.N.D. codes specifically preclude this
type. A private building which denies typological discipline without functional
justification or is otherwise disruptive to the urban fabric. Modernist buildings
tend to extremes of articulation and heterogeneity of tectonic expression tend to
be Dingbats, as the modernist design process values unconstrained invention
over emulation or urban determinants. P.N.D. Codes attempt to preclude
Dingbats except with public and civic buildings, which are expected to be fully
expressive of the institutions they embody.
related links:
http://www.laweekly.com/bestofla99/essays/essay209.php3
(dingbats in los angeles: )
* floating:
They were called dingbat houses because of the quick and shoddy way they
were constructed. Frank Carroll: Three room house, living room, bedroom and
bathroom. The crew was two men and they put the frame up and the plywood
and the roof and had it ready to go in a day and a half and if you wanted your
windows you put em in and screens you put em in and any other finishing you
wanted done. You may leave in the morning and yours was the last house on the
block, and come home and there were two more just below yours, now yours
was not the last house on the block. The dingbat houses were a great
improvement over the squatters' camps, but the ragged construction style
created hazards of its own. Dust blew in through the cracks in the walls and
doorways, piling up against the houses, creating small dunes throughout the
neighborhood. Pat Lappin: That was the worst for the women besides the heat.
They couldn't put the babies on the floor because it was so splintery. About the
first thing they did when they got a paycheck was to get congoleum for the floor.
And of course that helped the dust problem but at least their kids could crawl
around w/o getting splinters.
Posted by dc at 07:33 PM | Comments (1)
June 24, 2002
software engineering
Tom DeMarco has a theory that software projects can
be estimated accurately, but if managers were to give
true estimates to upper mgmt, the projects would never
be approved, hence you pitch an unrealistically
short/cheap project then get extensions.
This is not what we mean by an iterative development lifecycle.
Posted by dc at 11:39 PM | Comments (1)
June 23, 2002
M$
Teare's What Happened To Realnames when they dealt with M$.
Posted by dc at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
suburbian distopia, 1957
Already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned
into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb nor
country. . . . You can't stop progress, they say, yet much more
of this kind of progress and we shall have the paradox of
prosperity lowering our real standard of living.
[more information on the Smart Growth Strategy.]
Posted by dc at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
Networking
In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
argues that what makes a node a hub isn't the fact that
is has a lot of connectors but rather the fact that when
new nodes are added to the network, these new nodes
preferentially attach to hubs, rather than to a random node.
Posted by dc at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2002
land econ
Joe Gyourko and Ed Glaeser (two economists) have even come
up with a method of calculating the cost of zoning controls.
They compare sales prices for lots with and without houses on
them, then factor out construction costs. What's left is,
implicitly, the value of "the right to build" - that is, what
people are willing to pay to not have to go through the
land-use and permit process.
How much is that? For Philadelphia, Gyourko and Glaeser
say it averages about $2.43 per square foot - or nearly
four times the value of land alone.
That's a rough regional calculation; the numbers in the
posher Main Line townships or neighborhoods such as
Chestnut Hill could run closer to Los Angeles or New York,
where zoning adds more than $30 per square foot to
land costs.
Posted by dc at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)
Insurance scam
The IIHS is funded by us, via our insurance premiums. The charter for the
IIHS is dictated to it by insurance companies, who, as Matt stated, are in
it for the money. They want our premium dollars and loathe having to
fulfill their contracts by paying claims. Thus, they want vehicles that
will minimize their claims payouts (passive safety, pring occupant
injuries in a collision). At the same time, they want to maximize their
income from premiums, thus the emphasis on aggressive speed limit
enforcement, since licence points translate to premium surcharges.
-- James A. Crider on autox.team.net .
Posted by dc at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
St. Louis life, on film
Metropolis St. Louis films are out.
The _Metrolink_ movie shows a run-away train zipping through
a post-industrial wasteland. No driver, or driver all but cropped out
of the shot. No passengers. Horror movie trailer, or STL promo ?
Money shot of the Arch.
_Soulard_Market_ is colourful.
_Cinema_ should a crowd with beer in a night carnival-like setting.
It's difficult to shoot in such low light, but the film captures
the atmosphere well. And there was beer.
Most other films look like they could have been made anywhere.
It that a subtheme, STL, it's normal, it could be anywhere. ?
_Worlds_ is beautiful.
_Explore_ best captures the notion that there's opportunity
to see and do in STL.
The Saint Louis / mstl.org branding could be bigger
and bolder. I was looking for the mstl.org URL, but
the casual viewer might miss it.
All films available in Quicktime.
Posted by dc at 11:57 AM | Comments (9)
June 21, 2002
OS X, Realaudio
How to play a 'radio' RealMedia in OS X:
Close Quit ie 5.1 (Native OS X interface).
Open RealMedia from the applications menu.
Select a station inside RealMedia.
RealMedia will launch ie 5.0 in MacOS 9 interface.
Select listen or somesuch button in the ie 5.0 window.
RealMedia will activate a player window in MacOS 9.
Listen, quit ie 5.0, re-launch ie 5.1, re-open windows in ie 5.1.
If you do get RealMedia working, watch this: 
Posted by dc at 07:07 PM | Comments (4)
June 20, 2002
like an economist
| You hear about Academy Award winners who keep Oscars in their bathrooms. Where do you keep your Nobel medal?
The actual medal is gold -- I keep it in a safety deposit box. We have a replica. I don't know where it is right now, but I'll find it. -- Joseph E. Stiglitz |
 | |
On Globalization: The IMF has a fixation on financial markets. Historically, people with that kind of focus worry more about inflation than they do about unemployment [because inflation does more immediate damage to their investments]. They worry less about poverty than they do about what will happen to the capital markets. In my view, a lot of that has been shortsighted. It is a mistake to ignore the social and political consequences of policies. Even if you don't worry yourself about poverty, it is bad economics. When the IMF cut out the subsidies for the food and fuel to the poorest people in Indonesia, it led to riots. Those riots led capital to flee and that exacerbated the economic downturn, the depression, in the country. So ignoring the social consequences is bad economics. ... I think that globalization -- which is nothing more than the closer integration of the countries of the world, as a result of lowering transportation costs, communication costs, the elimination of artificial barriers -- is something that's going to be with us. As this integration occurs, as we become more interdependent, we need to have rules and regulations. So if anything, today we need international institutions more than ever. The problem is that confidence in these institutions is lower than ever. Full interview [salon.com]. |
Posted by dc at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2002
Street Patterns: grid or cul de sacs
Berkeley didn't follow the misguided example of San Francisco,
which forced the grid pattern of its streets into the hills.
Instead, the streets of Berkeley were thankfully built to wind
around its curvier neighborhoods, so that on a map they
resemble a brain rather than a waffle iron. And the paths,
Grunland said, were a natural means of connecting residents
from their homes to the nearest trolley or rail head at a time
when driving was not an option.
He dismisses some of the local myths surrounding the
creation of these numerous hidden paths and staircases.
With a few exceptions, they were built by developers.
-- Berkeley Path Wanderers Association
Posted by dc at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2002
Search rules
You don't just make every combination of words in the search string a
potential phrase. Instead you explicitly define relevant phrases for your
domain, and then test the user's search for those specific phrases. In this
example "drug addicted" might be in a phrase dictionary, but "addicted
teens" would not. Therefore it would translate "drug addicted teens" to
["drug addicted" AND "teens"].
An excellent example of this at work within my industry is a request for
"latex free exam gloves." In this case, I can say with very high certainty
that the system should query for ["latex free" AND "exam gloves"] and that a
search for ["latex" AND "free" AND "exam" AND "glove"] will return products
the searcher does not want - specifically "Latex Powder-Free Exam Gloves."
BIG difference!! I also don't have "free exam" as a relevant phrase
anywhere. Therefore my phrase dictionary will include "latex free" and "exam
glove" - and other word combinations will be ignored.
Another excellent example is a search for "chemical retardant hazmat suit" -
I explicitily want to recognize "chemical retardant" as a single concept and
as a phrase. I do not want to return "chemical resistant, fire retardant"
suits for this search, which a simple AND search would do.
And if you break down how you think about a concept like "latex free exam
gloves" - this approach mimics your though somewhat. You actually think
of "latex free" as one concept (it just happens to be expressed as 2 words)
and "exam gloves" as another. Depending on your context, you may also have a
concept of "free exam" - but that concept isn't rel to any of the
products or content my users are searching, therefore I never test for this
combination of words. -- Mario Sanchez
Posted by dc at 09:36 AM | Comments (4)
June 15, 2002
What are you worth ?
If you undercharge today, it will be very difficult to ever ask the
larger amount necessary to stay in business.
Pronto. Unless the delta is small, it's very difficult to raise fees
substantially once you set a rate. Here's a trick:
If, for whatever reason, you think you need to lower your rates, don't. Use
your standard rate. But give the client an *explicit* break. Literally. Tell
them that "as a sign of goodwill," "since this is our first project." "as a
long time customer," "as a prelude to a larger project" etc., you are
providing services worth $XXX without charge. Make sure they understand that
this is a one-time , tied to an explicit cause and in expectation of
future business. And *always* get something in return for your largess: more
flexible hours/deadline, more freedom in execution, promotional rights,
intro to their clients/departments, reuse of code, access to their services,
etc. In other words, make them think there is an exchange of considerations
going on here, as opposed to you merely giving up something worth money.
...
The scenario might be more complex. For example, say you have one client
who is willing to pay a sizable fee. You might be able to undercharge
another client and in the end you still make a profit.
That may prove to be short sighted. As a client I'd be furious if I find out
that I was paying substantially more for the same service and, in fact,
subsidizing my competition. Also, the client you're undercharging will most
likely expect you to continue to undercharge. If you happen to need the
money at any given moment (regardless of anything else), then, obviously,
you should do whatever it takes to secure payment. But as a career move,
this is risky. Ziya Oz
Posted by dc at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2002
tiny url, vBulleting (hall of shame)
Tiny URL makes urls longer 
vB mails user to tell user her mail is full .
Posted by dc at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2002
sorting rules
We had our hands full just making the whole mess usable. It was like getting
blood from a stone trying to make this clunky enterprise software just
communicate workflow appropriately, much less handle a basic thesaurus, or
even a manually created index of some kind. We finally had to give up on the
fancier IA tactics. (ually we considered it a great victory that the
client put its main catalog items in alphabetical order, rather than
ordering them by profit margin!!!) -- Andrew Hinton.
Posted by dc at 09:30 PM | Comments (3)
Major General Domo
Why can't mailing lists with web archives generate a footer,
'link to this message' ?
Posted by dc at 09:25 PM | Comments (3)
June 08, 2002
Road Charges
A friend of mine, a bicyclist, argues that because I'm on the bridge
so much, I'm contributing to its wear and tear, and ought to pay even
more than bikers and Sunday drivers. Hello-o! I'm not wearing and
tearing the bridge; I'm just driving on it. My tires are made of
rubber, just like yours. Earthquakes, weather, and rising costs of
fuel, labor, security and insurance are responsible for the budget
deficit, not my dumb little Honda. -- Debby Morse.
Posted by dc at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
Agile XP
We saw a culture clash developing. While developers prefer to
use agile methodologies, managers prefer to use heavy
methodologies on IT projects and need to be strongly
convinced to use agile ones. We hypothesized that agile
methods do not give some managers the degree of control
or the insight into project progress that they need to feel
comfortable.
Assuming that agile proponents don't knock themselves out
by overhyping, overselling, or dumbing down to please people
in order to get accepted, during the course of the next decade,
heavy methodology proponents will find themselves like
King Canute, trying to command the agile waves to stand still,
with about as much luck. -- Cutter Consortium.
Posted by dc at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2002
Clay
Blog Lessons: User Patterns on LiveJournal
Clay Shirky
Track: Business
Date: Thursday, May 16, Time: 4:45pm - 5:30pm
Location: Winchester
Weblogs are "Small Worlds" models of human connectivity.
Like the famous "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon", the weblog
world is populated with highly clustered but overlapping
groups. A study of LiveJournal, a diary-format weblog,
shows that the average pair of users in a group of 250,000
can be connected in four hops or less, and that this
degree of connectivity relies on a small but fantastically
connected core of users who serve as 'human routers'.
The way their behavior affects the system as a whole
has interesting implications for weblog design and use
patterns.
The session covers the background on the Small Worlds
model of connectivity, followed by a presentation of
specific results from the LiveJournal study, and speculation
about the effects of such clustering on the design of
weblogs, and social software.
And Communities, Audiences, and Scale.
Communities are different than audiences in fundamental
human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot
simply transform an audience into a community with technology,
because they assume very different relationships between
the sender and receiver of messages.
Posted by dc at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2002
egroups gets yahooed
The innovative www.egroups.com is stagnating under
Yahoo ownership. The least Y! could do is let
a user's search apply to headers (author or subject),
message body, or all.
And why can't you choose between seeing indexes of
messages, 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 messages at a time,
as with google seach results ?
The days of interaction design optimizing for maximizing the
page views by new-to-web viewers should be long gone.
Posted by dc at 01:17 PM | Comments (3)
Urbanity on two levels
Complaints such as
Beyond the backyards of modest single-family homes, great cement
monstrosities rise up, casting a local park in shadow and offering a
host of out-of-place attractions: a 9-story office park, a 12-story
hotel, a 20-plex movie theatre and two 7-story parking garages. The
architects have made no attempt to have the buildings fit in with the
original neighborhood's ambience, and the nearby station
notwithstanding, these developments seem, if anything, to encourage
car use. There is no pedestrian street front, only a series of large
buildings, each with their large car entrances and adjacent parking
lots. (Construction is still under way, so this factor may change.)
The contrast between the old and the new is perfectly epitomized by
an old family-run cafe in a remaining storefront and the gleaming
black-tinted glass of the Starbucks and Jamba Juice franchises that
now occupy the bottom floor of Park Plaza, the office building.
-- SFGate.com.
are uninformed by designs such as
Sinclair Centrewhich have a pedestrian street level with nominal traffic
and parking, and an industrial lower level, with arterial traffic,
trucks, busses, and parkade access.
Posted by dc at 01:05 PM | Comments (4)
Greymatter ESC
Never hit ESC after typing in a long post in Greymatter
It clears the text entry window, without offering any undo possibility.
Makes me wish for an incremental save utility.
Posted by dc at 12:59 PM | Comments (3)
Homesick ?
I stumbled across this, it's enough to make me homesick.
from Vancouver.com.
Posted by dc at 12:50 PM | Comments (3)
X10
One of the few benefits of using Mac OS X is that with ie 5.1,
the annoying ubiquitous X-10 ads are broken.
Posted by dc at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
City Life
Cities are building sports stadiums, but talent wants bike paths.
Business is not a spectator sport.
While professional sports are seen more and more as a way to achieve
"major league" status and attract talent, our data suggests that there
is little relationship between these big-ticket venues and high-tech
workers. Many successful high-tech regions, notably Austin and
Raleigh-Durham, have little or no professional-sports presence.
The reason, I think, is that we're seeing the replacement of
spectating with participating.
Knowledge workers don't want to devote an entire Sunday to watching
football. These people are active. They want to participate. They don't
want to stand on the sidelines. A lot of cities believe that they'll make
it in the new economy if they get a professional sports team and build
a downtown mall. They couldn't be more wrong.
It's almost like taking drugs away from an addict: No more stadiums.
No more convention centers. What cities need to do is really simple:
Make it fun. Create a music scene. Build bike lanes. Make sure that
there are parks where people can play Ultimate Frisbee. Think about
the city's historic assets -- the old buildings -- as cool spaces for
hot companies. Richard Florida.
[Also see Out Town.]
Posted by dc at 09:21 AM | Comments (3)
software economics
What's the value of fixing a software bug ?
What was the value in testing to find such a bug in the first place ?
These questions are difficult to answer with real data.
"..the reluctance to publish such data is the ongoing and escalating
fear of litigation by class action lawyers and/or harassment by militantly
activist lawyers and muck-raking members of the trade and general press.
If one accepts the above unfortunate realities of the software industries,
it is clear that a call for detailed statistical data of a proprietary nature,
is unlikely to be successful, is out of place, and more aimed at discrediting
than at informing." -- Boris Beizer, software quality consultant.
Posted by dc at 09:02 AM | Comments (3)