dammIT home

Interesting links of this week:

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

Interesting talk/article

Great tits cope well with warming

It took me some seconds to realise they where talking about birds

The Boing Boing post on the article has some great comments too:

Doesn't everybody like to be woken up in the morning by a cock?

Hey, how are boobies coping with the climate shift?

Oddly, their feet have turned blue, despite the warming trend.

Delightfully lame, but funny

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Driving to work over an alternative road with nice views of flowery fields, small towns and lined with lots of trees filtering the warm sun overhead, I almost felt like I was going on vacation. I can't say that I dislike that sensation ;)

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 1 comment »

Today is a beautiful day. It's warm and sunny, the woman are pretty in their summer clothes and statistics class only tool 23 minutes. Hell, even the grad student giving the practical was pretty.

After that, I spent about an hour trying to get on the campusnet with my N810, only to find out there's a bug in the proprietary wifi driver/stack from Nokia that causes my username/password to come through scrambled...

I saw Herbie on the highway from my metro today.

Also, I admire the way two girls behaved in the crowded metro. They both where quite heavily burned (as in "from a fire"), both in their faces and on their limbs, but they wore nice summer clothes nonetheless. Really too bad to have your skin and beauty destroyed that way; one even missed most of her fingers on her left hand, still steadying herself with it against the rocking of the train. They made quite an impression on me. I even thought I knew one of them; it's a weird world...

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

So I ordered some new hardware parts for building a decent workstation a while ago. Today I received the first batch: two 750GB sata hdd's, making a nice grand total of 1.5TB :)

However, I also received an email stating that the processor I ordered - a Intel core2duo E8400 3GHz one - is in the backorder and expected the 2nd of June. I heard Intel has difficulties shipping it, but this is a set back :( It will likely leave me with an almost complete pc for over two weeks. Oh well, patience is a virtue...

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Interesting links of this week:

YouTube - Star Wars Ewok Gospel

OMGWTFBBQ

Camera Shoot-out: Nikon D40 vs Sony Ericsson K850

Of course, the best camera is the one you have with you, but it's clear that all the marketing buzz about megagood pictures from your camera phone is just that: marketing

TfL Toolbox

Control traffic lights from a pda

Eduroam / VU-Campusnet settings

With these settings, I *should* be able to get my N810 online at my university

Luminaries look to the future web

Some thoughts on the next 15 years of Web

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment

Interesting article on a new user's actions on a fresh Ubuntu install. Might help making programs a bit easier on first use, but I also agree with the first comment on initial tweaking

Binary marble adding machine

Marbles are fun :) Also check out this marble pump

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Awesome.

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Through pidgin's developers mailing list, I found this insightful comment by Eric Lippert on software users:

It's not that users are morons or that they "forget" to think. Its that users are trained to not think. Users very quickly learn from experience that:

• dialog boxes are modal. But users do not think of them as "modal", they think of them as "preventing me from getting any work done until I get rid of them."
• dialog boxes almost always go away when you click the leftmost or rightmost button
• dialog boxes usually say "If you want to tech the tech, you need to tech the tech with the teching tech tech. Tech the tech? Yes / No"
• If you press one of those buttons, something happens. If you press the other one, nothing happens. Very few users want nothing to happen -- in the majority of cases, whatever happens is what the user wanted to happen. Only in rare cases does something bad happen.

In short, from a user perspective, dialog boxes are impediments to productivity which provide no information. It's like giving shocks or food pellets to monkeys when they press buttons -- primates very quickly learn what gives them the good stuff and avoids the bad.

Modal dialog boxes are in general, badness -- and you'll see that more and more products rely less and less upon them. But they are particularly heinous when security is on the line. Security questions cannot be asked on a "retail" basis. The way users make security decisions is to set their policies appropriately and then let the security system enforce their wishes "wholesale".

[source]

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Interesting links of this week:

Serious car cloning

Don't mind the Polish texts if you can't read them, as the pictures speak for themselves. Some serious car cloning going on! Fun thing is, some of the clones look better than the originals

Dealing with an (IT) bully

Some good advice when dealing with someone who's bullying users or coworkers around

Firefox 2 Vista Black theme

For those stuck on that operating system, get this Firefox theme to make your world a bit prettier

Halifax Bank Security

Wow...

The banker tapped my account number from my ATM card in, and then printed out a sheet that summarized my details: name, DOB, address, phone numbers, etc. He slid it across the table and asked me to double check that the details were correct. At this point, I could have been any mugger off the street who just withdrew several hundred pounds and had the full details of whoever I mugged. I'm fairly sure I could have closed the account and withdrawn the funds in full, without any security challenges.

eyeOS - Web Desktop

An online desktop, surprisingly usable. Quite some features are present already. Check it out!

The geekiest pants… ever?

Wow

Ugly notification area in GNOME

This redesign looks really nice. Now to get such a design in xfce4 [or in real life at all] too and I'm happy :)

Irssi scripts for Bitlbee

Handy tools

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

This morning I was sitting in my car driving towards work. I had some nice music on the stereo and the sun was starting to warm the land. These are conditions in which I naturally start to hum along with the music, even singing along. This Wednesday was even better, with its sunny, warm weather; I caught myself humming contently while walking in the sun through and from university. Thinking of the new workstation I'll have in about two weeks time, I can't help but smile too.

Also, the memories of last Sunday's stroll through the woods in the dunes with my girlfriend make me hum happily. Sometimes life is just enjoyable :)

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »

Let's just say I converted some of my savings into a much needed hardware upgrade of my workstation. *rubs hands in glee*

Posted by Michiel Scholten | | 0 comments »