Frequent spill

A recent project of mine has just been launched. Applied Microphone Technology just went online with their new site that I build. It’s a pretty basic setup, but focused on bringing the endorsed artists and the users of AMT’s products in the center. So whenever you look up a product, you’ll see who’s endorsing it and with what instrument – if you check out the instrument you play yourself, you can see which of your heros they endorse.

It’s been an honour to work with a company, who have legend artists such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins, Stevie Wonder, Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker and many more in their roster.

So go check it out. Once again it is unfortunately only the backend that has all the nice AJAX functionality.

After my last post, something suddenly took up all my time. Now, I’m about back to normal – the amount of my time spent on the new precious has normalized.

I am very fortunate to have parents who have stayed together since they were 18 and 19 – over 35 years. I am also very fortunate to have had the joy of celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary with them in New York this past week. Instead of throwing a big cliche “silverwedding” party (that’s what we call it over here), they decided to spend a week in New York with their children and their partners. I only wish that I can be as happy when I’m in their age. Below are a few pictures from the trip.

It has been over 3 years since I bought my first mac, well, my only mac. My old iBook, which has come to rule under the name “precious” (my girlfriend thought I spent a little too much time with it) is about to loose its throne and pass it on to a much more worthy speciment of its kind.

I just ordered a 2,0 gHz Mac Book Pro from Apple.com, which will arrive at my doorsteps in 6-10 days. Can’t wait!! Suddenly my iBook G3 seems so slooooow!

Why is it that a large amount of non-fictional books use 50-60 pages, if not more, on summing up the history of the field? Why can’t they just use 10 pages on the exact details that justifies the book? Or just sum up the relevant history in just 10 pages? Or at least just guide the user to skip those initial pages if he has read something similar before? (Which is most likely)

When the field of the book is about something related to computing, there is a 99% chance that you’ve read the same bla bla in another book. But you still keep on reading all of the 50-60 pages in the belief that something is coming out of this repetition. That the authors wrote it for highlighting something special. I just finished reading such a chapter, and again I have come to the same conclusion: that chapter was useless for me – the authors didn’t highlight anything else than the rest of the authors in the same field has done before. They even had the same perspective on the history of the field that all the other authors have had.

Instead of describing the history, then use the same pages with the distinct purpose of defining the book’s paradigm. This is what is needed: some self-critique. What can I use the book for and what can’t I use the book for. Set the limits of the book.

Could it be because the author gets paid by the number of pages written instead of by the number of copies sold?

Well – I hope the history of beginning a book by summing up the history is soon to be history!

Sometimes, I get a real good laugh about the advertisement banners shown throughout the internet. One thing is to see a porn ad here and there – you get used to that and you rarely see the same ad twice. There is one coincidence though, which is just too stupid.

Be-mag.com is a European skate magazine – print and on the web. Its visitors are 99% male in the age of 14-24 and come from all over the world – but dominately from the U.S.. Now… the last month or so, there has been a permanent banner ad for an Austrian female’s website: Seite der Frau.

This is just hilarious. I think this probably the most mis-targeted advertisement campaign I’ve seen in a while.
What’s the idea of showing an ad like that? It can’t possibly be for the hit-count?

I have blogged earlier about what I thought Denmark should do in order to achieve its pronounced goal of becoming a leading IT-nation – or maintaining that role.

Now, Janus Friis, one of the founders of Skype, just won this year’s annual Danish IT-award. In an interview with Computerworld, he answers questions on what Denmark should do to maintain its leading role as an IT-nation. His reply to the question was:

Jeg sad med i et forum for “innovationsfremme” ledet af Martin Thorborg. Alle snakkede om, hvordan man skulle stimulere, blande sig og lære studenterne at være iværksættere under deres uddannelse. Da det blev min tur, sagde jeg, at jeg synes vi skulle fokusere på “statsudblanding” i stedet for statsindblanding

Translated to English, that is:

At a forum for promoting inovation lead by Martin Thorborg (Jubii founder), everybody was talking about how the state should stimulate, take part of, and teach students how to be entrepreneurs during their education. When it was my turn, I said that I thought we should focus on “state outerference” instead of “state interference”.

Another remark was (translated into English from Danish):

Society needs to take care of the basic settings for the development of new companies, which is primarily tax-related. If not, the companies will simply move out into the globalized world.

I echo that 100%. I am glad that somebody with greater voice than mine finally came out at said it.

I am beginning to see the end of my journey of my what is to be 5 and a half years of university. It is going to be a big relief to finally be able to go fulltime on work, but at the same time I’m saying goodbye to a whole lot of stuff. Besides the steady stream of new and enlightening knowledge that I have had the pleasure of enjoying through the last 4 and a half years, I am also somehow saying goodbye to a lot of enlightening people, who have helped evolve the way I think and approach things. There are so many people who each influenced me, but a few stand out:

In the early years of my university, my fellow student, David H. Hansson, really got me going with getting serious about my code and the way it is created. He introduced XP to me and all that comes along with it such as unit testing, refactoring, serious use of patterns, etc. As many, I still enjoy watching his footsteps over at 37 signals.

Later, it was Lene Nielsen who, with her different approach to user-centered design with a film-manuscript background, could give another kind of feedback to ideas. Her response to my approach on user-centered design, which much more represents a software engineering approach than her own, inspired to new ideas. Only a few professors at the university have such an ability to inspire.

I just started writing my master thesis on (among other things) communication of requirement specifications from designers to programmers through narratives (ie. personas) instead of through written documents, at Microsoft. I truly hope that they will be my last and best source of inspiration in all my years of university.

When I finally finish university, the large network of inspiring people is not to be taken for granted anymore. I hope I can change my approach to being inspired from this reactive approach to a new and better proactive approach.

Man, it’s going to be a lot of work!

The first feature to go public on be-mag is the live article. The premiere of the article, which is running right now, is a live “feed” from the RFCC allstars game of the “U.S. vs. the World”, which is going down in Northern California – and did I say right now? Ex pro skater and now owner of the skate-brand Remedyz, Kato, is reporting live with video and pictures.
The feature has a very sweet AJAX’y adminstration interface.

The first live article on be-mag.com can be seen here (Beware of the frames – access the article from the front page – and no, I did not choose the frame solution – it’s over 2 years old).

UPDATE (January 8th): The second feature is online now… the image gallery of be-mag.com. This feature includes some pretty hefty access rights administration, publish que, placement of logos on to pictures, AJAXy tags ala flickr, and a bunch of other stuff.

As a reply to this.

Ruby on Rails (RoR) opposers claim that you can’t compare RoR to for instance Java or PHP. Somehow they are right as RoR is a framework and Java and PHP are programming languages. A discussion should therefore be unnecessary. But the Rails in Ruby on Rails is not the only reason why RoR kicks ass.

From recent experience of having to go back to PHP (a demand from a client), I can say that the programming language you choose sets your limits as much as the framework you choose. Things that are possible in Ruby are just not possible in Java – and certainly not in PHP. My PHP on Rails can attest to that!

I believe that a reason that PHP and Java haven’t had the pleasure of a slim and simple framework such as RoR is because of the restriction they each put on programming (compared to RoR). The frameworks developed for these languages are equally slim and simple as their native language allow them to.

So even though frameworks and languages are two different things, the first reflect the latter.

Then again… the choice of language (and framework) should depend on the project. Sometimes it just isn’t worth laying out the whole Struts or setting up a RoR application when what you need can be achieved much simpler.

A recent HCI / UCD project of mine has been to examine different ways of describing the user of a software product – so called “personas”. My focus was to examine whether representing the user with video instead of text would allow the developers to engage more in the lifes of the user. The amount of engagement is measured in the persona’s ability to function as an agent in a scenario: is it easy to imagine the persona working with your product?

The whole reason to use personas, is to make developers engage into them in order for them to create scenarios. The scenarios situate the fictitious users (personas) in context with the developed system, and can in turn help spot usability complications from several angles (with multiple personas as actors and with multiple scenarios with the same persona). Scenarios do not have to be part of the documentation-fest, but can be created instantly in the minds of the developers each time they want to make a design solution from a perspective other than their own. The only documentation necesarry is the persona itself – but once you get a taste of who the persona represents, there is no need for going back to read the documenation describing it.

Anyway… back to the original topic – which is better for allowing engagement: a textual persona or a video persona?

What I found was that there are severe differences in how a reader looks at text and how how a reader looks at video. When you read a text of a fictitious person, you instantly know that the person you read about is fiction. Text can’t describe everything, but tries to in an abstract way. When you read that a person is a “striking liberal” you might conclude that the same person likes a sense of autonomy in his job, or that he likes to take responsibility of his actions. We read more than there is to read – we impose certain characteristics to the person as we create an instance of him in our minds. We use references to people we know as we try to fill out the missing narrative gaps.
When you watch a real person on video do different tasks and hear the person speak in an interview, you believe that person is a real person. There are fewer missing gaps as we can watch facial expressions, hear the pitch of voice, and listen to what the person is telling us. We look at the person represented on video as he is really existing – as he is a real person. The person on video is seen not as fiction, but as fact! – Even though the person on the video is completely fictitious!
This means that we restrain ourselves from putting words in the video-persona’s mouth. As the person is real and not fiction, we have a hard time making up and imagining new details about him. This is important if you are going to imagine the persona in different contexts. When it comes to using the person as an agent in scenarios, we go blank and can only keep to the details and dilemmas presented in the video. We hesitate from mixing fiction into facts.

This has turned out to be a very interesting study. Is it really true that we can not see video-representations of persons as a fictitious person we can further evolve in our minds? And what does this say about the power of mass-media television?