Have my 3 readers missed me? As you can see, I haven’t posted in a few days. It reminds me of a saying:
Exclusive dedication to necessitous chores renders John (or Phil in this case) a hebetudinous fellow.
Yes, it’s true. Work has been especially demanding this last week. We’re trying to get some new functionality out by the end of the quarter, which of course just happens to be Tuesday, March 31st (2009). So, with me being on the test team (actually pretty much THE test team, though I’ve had some help from the developers and business folks since we’re all stakeholders in getting it done), it’s been TestFest 2009! for the first time this year (I suspect it won’t be the last). Which leads to the point that I’ve barely had time to eat or sleep, let alone do schoolwork (JAVA I) this week. I’ve been eating, sleeping and dreaming this product for the last week and a half. Hopefully this post marks the return to a more normal workload for school, home and work.
As you can see, I’ve been messing with the look and feel of the site. I like the colors/patterns, but I’m not sure I’ve got everything in the right place yet. If you have some comments, I’d be willing to listen. I’m also not opposed to putting it back to all white, though I’d really like it to be a little more “something” than that. See this post for the all white look.
On a more humorous note, those of you who know how much I like watching Gordon Ramsay shows will appreciate this one.
I have a real fondness for educational videos, OK make that a strong like (love?) of educational programs. I like to be stimulated mentally. This usually takes the form of watching Discovery, The History Channel or The Learning Channel. Since I no longer have cable, I’ve had to do without much of the educational programming I used to watch. I’ve mostly been stuck with reality cooking shows (you MIGHT learn something) on Hulu.com, or my own DVD collection of things like Planet Earth, Good Eats (yeah, another cooking show) or some of the various military history programs I have.
Enter Academic Earth. Of course, Lifehacker beat me to the punch, but I know some of my readers (all 3 of you) don’t read Lifehacker. Academic Earth has a ton of educational videos you can watch, neatly organized by topic. They advertise that they have thousands of videos, and it appears by far the greatest number of the videos are in the Entrepreneurship section, where they are further broken down further into sub-categories. There are videos there from Yale, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton, with Stanford representing almost 1000 by themselves via the Entrepreneurship section. It appears that the courses come from:
I wasn’t able to find anything online for Harvard, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Of course these classes do not offer credit without enrollment, but the chance to self-improve should be enticement enough. I know I am looking forward to the Computer Science courses on Stanford’s site to supplement the IT classes I am currently enrolled in. If you can watch Hulu videos, you should be able to watch any of the Academic Earth programs, they seem to use the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player plug-in (all the ones I tried).
Other online course-ware that doesn’t seem to be a part of Academic Earth’s programming are:
Safari Books online. A Blackberry curve. One a kick butt service, the other a kick butt phone (ok, debatable…but its pretty good for Verizon) but never the twain shall meet. Or will they? I just got an email from Safari touting their new m.safaribooksonline.com site, so I went and tried it out on my Curve’s little screen. I have to admit it looked pretty darn good to me.
Main Screen - Safari Books Online mobile
The top picture is the main Safari Books interface after login. Here you can search or go to various preset selections. I chose My Favorites.
My Favorites - Safari Books Online mobile
The second Picture is the My Favorites screen. Notice the green dot indicating that the book is mobile friendly. I didn’t encounter any non-friendly books in the short time I was playing around (before I started reading!).
Chapter 1 - Safari Books Online mobile
The third picture is, of course, one of the books I had in my list. This shot is of chapter 1, scrollable to the end. Selecting 1 takes you to the previous chapter (the introduction in this case), 2 takes you to the next chapter, and 3 to the bottom/end of the current chapter. I found the text to be easy to read, though I am not certain how long I’d be able to focus on such a tiny screen without getting a raging headache. I plan on using it for those “in-between” moments, so that puts it in a 15-30 minutes of use category, which should be doable. If you’ve got a safaribooksonline account and an internet capable mobile phone (they claim support for Nokia, BlackBerry, iPhone,
and Windows Mobile) head on over to m.safaribooksonline.com and take a look.
I received the video card from NewEgg today and was able to get it installed and working. Found out that one of my monitors was “bad” since it kept going into power-save mode, even when the cable wasn’t plugged in. I was able to swap it with another I had on hand and get it all working. I can’t get too good of a shot since I don’t have a lot of space before I hit the wall behind the desk. I’m not necessarily happy with the PCI card performance, but it’ll probably be sufficient for reading pdfs or until I am ready to upgrade again. I can see visible lag when dragging windows onto the PCI card desktops; I guess I am just spoiled.
I had to laugh about this article when I read it. Seems Douglas Bowman, a visual designer at Google, is tired of having to explain why he designs things the way he does. Seems he feels that Google has too many engineers, asking engineer type questions and viewing the world through engineer tinted glasses. Sounds like he’s a bit bitter about their not respecting the “artiste” to me.
On one hand, I kind of get where he’s coming from, since he considers himself an artist, and his product, art. I’m sure Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have people asking him why he was painting the Mona Lisa with an undecipherable expression (though I’m sure they asked him once it was done, when it was too late to change! Ok, yeah, he could always slap more paint on, but really?). He’s trying to use emotion (I am guessing, but the best art involves emotion) and style to try and explain his design choices. In the art world (in my limited experience), this is how artists convey their ideas.
However, in a web-based business that is driven on exacting metrics and yes, contains a LARGE number of engineers, trying to explain your artistic reasons for designing something the way you did is akin to black magic. It’s an unknown, and engineers don’t like unknown. They want to know WHY and HOW. If you don’t have an answer, they will want to run experiments to determine the answer (reference the 41 shades of blue in the original article), or find similar items and gather data about it. This allows them to feel confidence in their product. Be thankful that software engineers do not require licensure…if they did, designs would require extensive testing (think normal testing * 100) and documentation before being released, as well as review boards, ethics and all the other trappings that civil and mechanical engineers deal with.
My final thought is this: Is Google trying to be known for radical or interesting design? My take is no. Instead, I think they place function over form, and that the form only needs to be good enough to allow the functions to work. By keeping it minimal, they have built an ubiquitous suite of tools that are used by millions every day. Unfortunately for Mr. Bowman, I don’t think Google will be missing him.
If you’re a Lego fan like I am, and you’ve ever taken a stab at creating tanks, planes or helicopters that are more
Lego Tiger I from Mechanized Brick
“realistic” than the normal Lego fare, you’ve got to take a look at Mechanized Brick‘s creations. For their Series II line, they have a Huey, Tiger I, Sherman, F14, P3 and Churchill. While I am fond of the F14 and the Huey, I think just from sheer detail and impressiveness that the Tiger I is my favorite. I could actually see myself playing with this toy vs. putting it on the shelf and looking at it.
The kits are pretty pricey, so I’ve not yet laid my hands on one of these to give it a “test run”. Of course I am trying to figure out what parts were used to create this tank, and see if I have them in my inventory to try and reproduce it. Currently Mechanized Brick is only selling the complete tank, but if Series I is any indication, they will begin selling the plans once Series II sells out. Head on over to Mechanized Brick and check out their Lego creations.
I’ve got a few projects that I’ve had on the back burner for awhile, so in an effort to get things done AND generate some content, I’ve decided to make them articles for Phil’s Comments. Here is the list of planned projects for Q2:
DIY 4.5TB Nas. In this DIY project I will give new life to an old server.
DIY firewall. In this DIY project I will install m0n0wall on a neoware eon workstation.
Since I have 3 racks of equipment in my office (not all of which is running), I will be paying particular attention to heat and power usage statistics. Tune in for further updates.
I saw this on LifeHacker originally, where it caught my eye as a project I could easily do with all the spare hardware I have laying around, most of it which has little to no value but still functions correctly. Head over to Glowview to give the original article a read.
wall-mount pc
I’m especially fond of this idea, as I have 2 things working in my favor:
A brother-in-law and a father-in-law that are professional framers. SCORE!
The number of used laptops I have laying around that are missing plastic parts that cost a fortune on eBay or the number of laptops I have laying around that need new batteries. I currently count at least 3 that I could do this with. SCORE!
If I decide to do this I will have a follow up post to show off the work. Now if I could just make it touch screen too, that would make it that much cooler. I suppose I could slap a bluetooth dongle in there and use my HTPC keyboard or something similar (maybe a gyro mouse?).
