Category: Technology

Review of blend from an Interaction Designer

SB.com: –Engage!

After all this, I realized that MS made a really powerful tool for really expert users. It seems that after all is said and done that it is a tool not for interaction designers, but for interactive designers and thus its real promise is lost because interactive designers don’t design or engineer applications but rather sites, and experiences. Interaction designers do both, and quite honestly are more skilled and experienced in designing complex interactivity than those who come to all this from interactive design. I know I’m going to get burned from that statement, but while interactive designers are really great and knowledgeable, they don’t know a heck of a lot about UX, cog psy, HCI, usability, etc. It just isn’t part of what they do. They concentrate mostly on implementing the presentation layer without much attention to the context of use, without using user centered research models, etc.

First of all, I didn’t know there was a major difference between Interaction Designer and Interactive Designer, although I guess it makes sense that you would want to distinguish between the two different disciplines. I usually hear User Experience vs developer, or something like that.

That aside, it is a very interesting take. It actually makes blend a bit more appealing to me, because I’m more a programmer than designer, but the interface seems pretty screwy relative even to Flex, so I don’t know…

Microsoft’s take on the data center in a trailer

I haven’t really posted about this because datacenters haven’t been my thing for a while, but I have been following the discussion with a sort of geeky fascination.

I’d heard the google rumour for a while, then came the Sun announcement, then the Rackable Systems product. The idea is great, no need to scale out your datacenter by buying new buildings and spending millions of dollars to set them up and get all the equipment configured. Instead, buy out a whole shipping container of machines, park it next to (or on top of!) your building, hook up power, water (for cooling), and bandwidth and DONE! Plug&Play at the macro level. Need more power, add another container.

Now, James Hamilton from Microsoft has proposed a twist on the whole thing: Recycleable data centers in trailers! Pack the container to the gils, have no serviceable human parts and when the thing stops working, send it back for a new one! I kinda dig it, although I don’t know why, cause I couldn’t geek out like in that X-files episode.
xfiles-killswitch01.jpg

[via Geeking with Greg: More on a data center in a trailer]

Apple TV

Nope, didn’t buy one… yet. Not sure if I shouldn’t just get a Mac Mini instead.

Turns out that it is a mac super-mini (from The Forums at Something Awful):

bash-2.05b# system_profiler
Hardware:

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Mac
Machine Model: AppleTV1,1
Processor Speed: 1 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 1
Memory: 256 MB
Bus Speed: 400 MHz
Boot ROM Version: ATV11.00D9.B00
Serial Number: CLOWNS666
L2 Cache: 2 MB
….
System Version: Apple TV OS 10.4.7 (8N5107)
Kernel Version: Darwin 8.8.2
Boot Volume: OSBoot
Computer Name: AppleTV
User Name: System Administrator (root)
Graphics/Displays:
…
GeForce Go 7300:

Chipset Model: GeForce Go 7300
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x01d7
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3144
Displays:
HP LP2465:
Resolution: 1280 x 720 @ 60 Hz
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported
Rotation: Supported

Also it took about 25 seconds for someone to hack it with a larger drive

Warning on installing Apple Updates

Unsanity.org: Shock and Awe: How Installing Apple’s Updates can Render Your Mac Unbootable and How You Can Prevent it


When you see the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of a software update, Mac OS X is really updating prebinding. Updating prebinding has a very, very nasty bug in it (look at _dyld_update_prebinding). If multiple processes are updating prebinding at the same time, then it is possible for a system file to be completely zero’d out. Basically, all data in the file is deleted and it is replaced with nothing. This bug is usually triggered when updating Mac OS X and every update to Mac OS X has the potential to render your system unbootable depending on if the “right” file is deleted or not. It’s triggered during the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of installing an update. This phase is actually just running update_prebinding. If you launch an application that links to libraries that are not yet prebound, there is a chance one of those files will be zero’d out as dyld automatically redoes the prebinding on that file.

The next generation of macintoshes

will run on light and daydreams. They will be omnipotent and will catapult Apple into the stratosphere as most profitable company… EVER. Steve Jobs will be canonized by the Catholic Church and all wars and famine will end so that all people can bask in the radiant glow of their Apple devices.

I mean, I’m a mac fanboy, but I think that the folks at UBS are smoking the crack. Will we see a touch screen mac? Yeah probably. Maybe an iPod first, then laptop screens and then maybe monitors as the price to produce the stuff comes down, but the Mega-Platform? C’mon.

Apple’s multi-touch technology seen spawning “mega-platform” [Apple Insider]

Google’s best perk

Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush – New York Times

This is the kind of thing that makes me love/hate google. About 15 years ago, I used to commute from San Francisco to Mountain View (at SGI, whose ex-campus now houses google). I’d sold my car, so I didn’t commute on the 101, I took the CalTrain (metro commuter rail). It would take between 75 and 90 minutes each way (including Muni bus to the station).

I would have killed for this kind of perk! If I ever move back, I’d demand this perk from whatever company I worked for.

my iTunes quandry follow up follow up

iTunes Logo

Yeah, turns out iTunes doesn’t like symlinks. So having some folders in my iTunes library symlinked to another drive worked as long as I wasn’t adding new files into that folder (like podcasts). Podcasts would never leave the download directory and get moved into the symlinked root.

So I just got a bigger drive, which is not what we would call a “scalable” solution. I’m at 500GB now, and with me adding more and more video into my library, that isn’t going to last too long.

Entourage hang fix

In an earlier post, I was complaining about how Entourage would just go away for 15-20 minutes at a time. I’d searched the net for info on how to stop it in vain. I’d cleared out gigabytes of messages without a noticable difference, but then looky what came across my RSS feed yesterday!

Macworld: Mac 911: Stop Entourage background churning

I just turned it on. Hopefully this will do the trick. BTW, when I turned off the “background” integrity checks, it said that it wouldn’t happen when the laptop wasn’t plugged in. Yeah, that wasn’t true for me.