One of the more notable graphical changes in Leopard was the change of the Mac OS menubar’s style into a translucent white and changing icons from color to a black and white style. (With the exception of the international menu.)
However sadly some developers of third party apps have seemed to ignored this fact and their menu-apps are still playfully colorful. It’s not a terrible mistake but it always irks me. Bizarrely the HIG is silent about this issue.
Fortunately there is an easy fix for this problem. Simply go to the relevant application, right-click on it and choose “Show package contents”.
The locate the menubar icon. This will typically be a png in Contents/Resources. Now simply edit it in your favorite image editor. Then simply restart the app with the icon.
Engineers at IBM performed one hell of an engineering feat. Essentialy they created a neural network of terrabytes in size.
Interesting are some of the philosophical issues they encountered. They actualy created a model so complex that it is harder to understand then an original it is modelling.
Funny thing, this advertising. Maybe it’s just the mind-space I occupy, but I can definitely remember quite a bitofAppleads.
Whereas I can’t remember a single Dell ad. Not a single one.
Given the facts, this quite surprising. A recent report from Philip Elmer-DeWitt quotes that Apple spends $300,000 less on advertising then Dell. Another interesting fact is that Dell now employs the person who was behind the successful and famous Think Different campaign and also behind the word iMac.
How is this possible? Dell seems to be doing all it can to get on with it’s advertising but still fails?
I believe the answer is that, as a advertising companies creative director in the film Czech Dream says, you can’t lie in ads. You can’t effectively force people to believe something you don’t.
And that is the problem with Dell. He just doesn’t believe that his products are good. And neither do the people who do their ads. Just read their blogs.
Amy Wallace from the Wired writes about the spread of irrational rejection of vaccination due to being the proposed (obviously without evidence) cause of autism.
The article quotes an interesting fact: this type of denial is not new. Before it happened in America it happened in England:
In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily… [They] were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers…
And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.
Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” he says, taking a breath. “You’d like to think we would learn.”
The target of this fallacy is also interesting. Vaccination stands at the very core of todays medicine. Louis Pasteur who discovered germs as the cause of disease did this also in close co-findings on vaccination. He is also the person who created the first artificial vaccination. This was in the 1870s. He was also the person who told surgeons to wash their hands before performing surgery.
It is not wild to say that this person - a rigorous scientist - had probably the biggest effect on human health in the whole history of mankind. And these half-educated scumbags just dare to defy all medicine that brought them their nice safe lives.
Let me conclude with one last quotation from the article:
I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die… Now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.
There have traditionally been two different styles of baguettes - the french and the american-itallian. These two baguettes taste surpirsingly different. I believe this is due to the different guiding principle of their design.
The french baguette is minimalist in it’s aesthetic. It’s at best with a simple crusty bread, all of it’s ingredients focused on pushing one simple way. It has a beauty of a line - the mouth is focused and enjoys this one thread of pureness.
Imagine a french tuna baguette. It would be on dark bread, with smoked tuna nicely accented with boiled egg and moistened with tomato. All topped up with fresh lettuce. Nothing here to distract you. Perfect.
Now the american-itallian baguette is baroque. It’s aesthetic is a spiral - it takes an indirect approach to taste. It comes on a soft bread often enhanced with herbs, spices or cheese. It takes a vast multitude of ingredients all working one way or another in climbing it’s twisted staircase to an absolute of taste.
An example would be a meaty baguette: on light bread seasoned with oregano and coated with light cheese. Layered with spicy pepperoni, fine prosciutto and maybe a bit of turkey. Coated with wealthy portions of tomato, peppers, lettuce and red onion. Nicely peppered and, most importantly, drippy with virgin olive oil and fine balsamic vinegar. A true symphony of tastes.
Recently there seems to be a new breed of baguette: the pop-art baguette. Like is visual arts precursor it seems to lack any guiding principle, constantly struggling to define itself, taking in whatever it finds. Wish it luck. (It has one benefit however - it tends to be dirt cheap.)
This is an amazing user interface solution for effective multitouch on the desktop.
It also solves some problems with organizing your desktop in a reasonable manner. This is a problem I have been thinking about and the proposed solution seems interesting. (If this is your problem, checkout this app.)
Hint: The second part of the video is much more interesting then the first.
I was trying to get internet into my new flat. I decided to call an ISP.
A phone bot answers the call. No surprise here. This is the usual procedure and it’s hard to conceive of a better way to do this.
I get to the part where you’re supposed to get to a human operator. Now we get to several different options.
The operator answers right away. This is great and we’re done.
Horrible music starts playing. Then you wait. And you wait. And then you wait some more. Now this sucks horribly. The music is always terrible and you just plain don’t know how long are you going to be waiting. This is especially terrible if you don’t know that you’re calling the right number to solve your problem. Also consider that you may be paying for this exercise in patience.
The PhoneBot gives you a estimate and then 2. This is a lot better then B because at least you can hang up if it’s hopeless.
Now out of the alternatives 1 is obviously the best. However I understand that this may be difficult to achieve due to resource constraints.
This is my proposal: When a person calls, make an estimate for his waiting time. If it is short (less then 2 minutes) tell him so and let him wait. If it’s longer apologize, tell him the estimate and save his number. Tell him that you’ll call him in the estimated time. If the user wants to wait, let him (there may be situations were this is more convenient). Whenever an operator is ready, call the user. If he doesn’t pick up, send him a text message explaining the situation.
Does that sound like a reasonable way for an interaction?
This is a service so obvious that I’m surprised nobody really thought of it until now. Well actually they did, but nobody got it right until now.
This service checks any URL with 23 different browsers/platforms and captures screen-shots of them. It also allows you to publish reports of your results to boast of how cross-browser compliant you are.
Interesting is the payment scheme for this app as well. If you have a free account you can freely use it as much as you want on a weekend and only very limited on weekdays. (Nice way of ensuring that the pro pays ;)
Also Adobe recently released an alternative (which I’ll be trying out soon).
Note: This is an essay I wrote about six months ago. I’ve modified it slightly to suite the blog format more. I also removed the APA style referencing into a more readable superscript format.
The brain is an information‐processing
and decision‐making organ. This information processing can be divided into many
separate cognitive tasks, just to list a couple of examples: vision, language (speech,
both producing and understanding text), spatial orientation, memory (all the
different types of memory), abstract cognitive tasks (e.g. arithmetic, higher math,
theorem proving etc.) and many others. In this essay I’ll be comparing a human intelligence with the capabilities of a modern artificial intelligence.
