Ramblings & ephemera
From Wikipedia’s “Gruen transfer” (28 September 2009):
In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when consumers respond to “scripted disorientation” cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques) …
The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, security | No Comments »
photo credit: sleepymyf
2005
From Brian Krebs’ “Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat” (The Washington Post: 1 August 2005):
DefCon 13 also was notable for being the location where two new world records were set — both involved shooting certain electronic signals unprecedented distances. Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
23 October 2008 … The dry, technical language of Microsoft’s October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward. A security flaw in a port that Windows-based PCs use to send and receive network signals, it said, might be used [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Operator No. 9’s “That decorating touch” (Interactive Week: 24 April 2000): 100:
Dan Sweeney, general manager of Intel’s Home Networking division, says that when the company showed consumer focus groups the AnyPoint Wireless home networking system …, people became very confused, because there wasn’t a visible antenna. The desktop version of the wireless adapter — [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: 917press
From Christopher Fahey’s “Who Watches the Watchman?” (GraphPaper: 2 May 2009):
The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.
&hellip What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?
An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):
… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jakob Nielsen’s “Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities” (Alertbox: 30 March 2009):
We asked participants what information they want to see on non-profit websites before they decide whether to donate. Their answers fell into 4 broad categories, 2 of which were the most heavily requested:
The organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.
How it [...]
Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Nicholas Carr’s “Google lifts its skirts” (Rough Type: 2 April 2009):
I was particularly surprised to learn that Google rented all its data-center space until 2005, when it built its first center. That implies that The Dalles, Oregon, plant (shown in the photo above) was the company’s first official data smelter. Each of Google’s containers [...]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Daniel Eran Dilger’s “The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown” (AppleInsider: 1 April 2008):
Thanks to its extensive use of battle-hardened Unix and open source software, Mac OS X also has always had security precautions in place that Windows lacked. It has also not shared the architectural weaknesses of Windows that [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (danah boyd: 24 June 2007):
When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn’t until late 2004 that teens [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Sam Hiser’s “Achieving Openness: A Closer Look at ODF and OOXML” (ONLamp.com: 14 June 2007):
An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format (“ODF”) and [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):
The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets” (Wired: 4 October 2007):
Storm represents the future of malware. Let’s look at its behavior:
1. Storm is patient. A worm that attacks all the time is much easier to detect; a worm that attacks and then shuts off for a while [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From James Turner’s interview with Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery & recent appointee to the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, at “A 2008 e-Voting Wrapup with Dr. Barbara Simons” (O’Reilly Media: 7 November 2008):
[Note from Scott: headers added by me]
Optical Scan: Good & Bad
And most of [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Ellen Siever’s “What Is the X Window System” (O’Reilly Media: 25 August 2005):
X was intentionally designed to provide the low-level mechanism for managing the graphics display, but not to have any control over what is displayed. This means that X has never been locked into a single way of doing things; instead, it has [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Jerry wrote this & sent it to a client;
A fat footer is a means of showing secondary navigation, or
showcasing primary navigation, or reinforcing selected pieces of your
navigation. Here are some examples:
On a long-scroll blog page, put some choices at the bottom:
http://bokardo.com/
Put sales and branding at the top and navigation at the bottom:
http://www.dapper.net/
Promote the pages you [...]
Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Joshua Porter’s “Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?” (Bokardo: 14 November 2007):
… web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.
Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using [...]
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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I bought a mug that has no handles on it at all. I noticed that the accompanying slip of paper said, “Most Copco travel mugs are intended for right or left hand use.” Well, yes, if there are no handles, that would make sense. It goes on, “If your mug is handled, the lid is [...]
Posted on September 1st, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, musings | No Comments »
