Real data proving that UI design for function beats UI design for aesthetics. Well, for web and app designer aesthetics, anyway, which are trend-based and emotional rather than useful.
Luke Wroblewski: Obvious always wins
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Slothsavers
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Breslin@Kottke
Susannah Breslin is taking over Jason Kottke’s web site for a while. Although admittedly her work can be a bit dark at times, and I’m pretty sure my Dad wouldn’t care for it, I love Susannah Breslin! She’s a brilliant writer and she’s thoroughly mastered the art of blog.
Boarding Axes
No, this isn’t another link to “Oh my god, there’s an axe in my head“. It’s to the very interesting (and very narrowly focused) Boarding Axes in the Age of Sail website.
The boarding axe was a combat tool and weapon from the fighting age of sail and has become one of the rarest survivors from that period. Once a common implement found in large quantities on all armed sailing ships, it has almost, by virtue of its lowly status, become extinct. Even the major arms and armour museums […] can boast only a handful of boarding axes.
looking from the top down
Wonderful web site the Daily Overview.
it’s also a tumblr, whatever that is.
Tough Guy Scientists
I swear this is exactly how it works. I’m on the left.
Holiday Dump Status Report
Thanks to State Representative Michael Ramone, last week the Delaware Department of Transportation served a “cease and desist” order on the leader of the illegal dumping ring that’s been filling the wetlands on Upper Pike Creek Road with construction debris. He was given seven days to remove the fill or DelDOT will do it for him… and charge accordingly.
Unlike DelDOT, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control continues to do nothing, but State Senator Karen Peterson has bluntly told DNREC’s David Small that she will be instigating a senate inquiry if they don’t stop shirking their responsibilities.
State Representative Timothy Sheldon has engaged the New Castle County Department of Land Use. If past history is any guide, Land Use won’t be taking any back talk from contractors or local corrupt cops. The status of the County action can be tracked by looking up complaint #201409617 here.
What a lovely Xmas present for me and my neighbors!
Twitter finally has something I want
Twitter’s architecture has always seemed about as useful as handing out megaphones at a narcissist convention. And lately, of course, everybody’s become aware of what a hate-amplifier it is. But I have to say I really like this.
Concerning Nature’s “open access”
Earlier this week the Intartubes were boiling with the news that Nature Magazine would open its archives back to 1869. Which would, indeed, be marvelous and unexpected.
But it’s a little more complicated than that… it seems Nature’s publisher, Macmillan, is going to let paid Nature subscribers use (yet another) foredoomed-to-failure “read only sharable format”.
The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.
That sounds pretty great for everybody, right? Win-win!
ReadCube, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles’ PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment.
Starting to sound a lot dodgier now… we may have a reality disconnect going on…
Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts.
Yep, reality check sorely needed. Hey, look, smartphones have cameras!
ReadCube -> monitor screen -> camera phone -> email -> PC -> printer.
There are no formats that can be viewed but not printed. If you think such a thing exists, everything you’ve built is suspect, because you’re apparently not entirely aware of what’s going on around you. The odds are good that Macmillan’s “read only format” can be trivially defeated, and that script kiddy hacks will be available in short order.
Any questions?
Office not so 365
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service failed at almost exactly midnight last night, taking down hundreds of websites who may have thought that hardware redundancy could magically protect them from sysadmin oopses, as well as users of Xbox live and Microsoft’s flagship service Office 365.
Viva Zorggroep, a Dutch healthcare organisation with 4,000 employees, said it had also been affected as a consequence of adopting Microsoft’s online apps.
“At this time, our supporting departments such as finance, HR, education, IT et cetera are working with Office 365,” said Dave Thijssen, an IT manager at the company.
“This morning these servers were unresponsive, which means users were not able to log in to Office 365.
“As a result they had no access to email, calendars, or – most importantly – their documents and Office Online applications.“We also had trouble reporting the outage to our users as most of digital communication – email, Lync, intranet/Sharepoint – was out.
The outage persisted for over five hours for some customers and apparently there are still latency issues at this time. This is of course a violation of the Service Level Agreement… so you can keep a nickel or two of your monthly rent, I bet.
SatNOGS wins Hackaday prize
Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.
XKCD Philae coverage as a flipbook
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Microsoft climbs aboard the WordPress bandwagon
If you were thinking to yourself “what my PHP-based content presentation system really needs is an expensive backend from a company that has historically done incredibly poorly with PHP” then Microsoft has got your number.
Internet soft spots
Want to build a ginormous botnet without doing a lot of work? Compromise one of the Internet’s soft spots.
If you take over bOINGbOING.net, you can use the site to inject malware in 1.3 million visitors. Chump change! How about TheChive.com, or Kottke.org, or whatever? Face it, you’re not going to get more than 15 million suckers. It’s just too much effort for a lazy man; you’d still be doing a lot of hard work to recruit a paltry few million zombies.
So, you take over jquery.com, or typekit.com. Now you’re cooking with gas! It’s become common practice for websites to use remotely sourced scripts – so there are thousands of sites that will blindly push out whatever is in the file jquery.js at jquery.com, and all that site’s visitors will run it just as blindly. So if you take over a popular script or advertisement source, you can leverage that into billions of individual attacks, quite easily.
And that’s my Halloween horror story for this year.
Between Books between locations
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Historical European Martial Arts Wiki
Wiktenauer is an ongoing collaboration among researchers and practitioners from across the Western martial arts community, seeking to collect all of the primary and secondary source literature that makes up the text of historical European martial arts research and to organize and present it in a scholarly but accessible format.
“Man Ass”
Unix-derived operating systems have a tradition of making commands short and easily typed regardless of social conventions.
So, in order to consult the manual page for the Autonomous System Scanner, you would type “man ass” at the command line. People involved with AS work would not find this remarkably odd or offensive – we’ve already got jobs to do, that don’t involve complaining about other people’s sense of propriety.
However, if one creates a site that automatically generates HTML-formatted web pages from the man pages of the Ubuntu V13.04 linux distribution, popularly called Raring Ringtail, one ends up hosting a page describing “raring man ass”.
The Internet being what it is, such a page may have unexpected effects on your google analytics results…
John Lopez: Scrap metal sculptures with a midwest theme
Mom sent me a link to an article on Bored Panda about John Lopez‘s welded iron work.
Redstone Rockets
I enjoy reading John Bullard’s History of the Redstone Missile System, although most people are likely to find it pretty dry. I found it linked from Jim Ryan’s marvelously informative site, which is a memoir of his Army experiences manning the Army’s Redstone missiles from 1958 to 1962. It’s a wonderful site to visit if you’re a hardcore rocket buff or cold war historian, although perhaps not much fun for those who couldn’t keep themselves awake in history class.
I think sites like Jim’s are the best thing about the World Wide Web. Computer professionals didn’t need the WWWeb to communicate with each other and organizations didn’t need the Web to move data – those needs were already met by the Internet itself, underlying the Web. But the Web lets people like Jim reach out to the whole world, not just computer gurus, with information that would never otherwise be available to many of the people most interested in it.
Kickstarter Con Men?
I’ve heard several rumours about swindlers working kickstarter, but my own experience there was very positive.
The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography is online
Science is increasingly on the web, and traditional gatekeepers are increasingly cast in the role of buggy whip makers.
-> The Online British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography.