bodmas blog

Don Norman is the other half of Nielsen and Norman the usability consultants. He has provided Chapter 7 of his book The Invisible Computer as a Web reading. The title of the chapter is Being Analog – which we as humans are… You can also read other chapters on the MIT Press site and on the Nielsen Norman Group site – a generous portion of the book.

Strongly recommended as background reading for the Forensic ICT unit – trying to understand the motivations of some kinds of computer criminals.

• Chapter 1: Drop everything youre doing
• Chapter 2: Growing Up
• Chapter 7: Being Analog
• Chapter 9: Human centred product development
• Chapter 10: Want Human-Centered Development? Reorganize the Company

This blog is now running on Wordpress strayhorn using a theme munged from the WordPress classic. Ultimately, I’ll be running the whole site from this blog.

The upgrade was as simple as suggested. Nice one chaps.

• Last few Drink or Die members are going through the courts – a non-profit cracking and warez ring
• The BBC report on the UK conviction of Alex Bell and Steven Dowd now in 2005 after raids in 2001 relating to activity in the mid 90s has me thinking about the difference in timescales in IT and in legal process
• The legal actions in 3 countries will have taken a large percentage of some of the younger DoD members lives
• US Fedral sentencing is noticibly harsh in these areas and some people face extradition to US
• How were these people rationalising what they were doing?
• The big coup of DoD was to release Windows 95 (remember that?) before it was published
• Note to the chillun: Download Open Source Software – noone will be after you in 10 years

• A series of Java based statistics simulations provides covarage of most aspects of statistics at level 3 and 4 (Normal distribution, skew, sampling, tests of significance)
• These are part of the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics and you can download the lot as a ZIP file (or as JBuilder source code)
• The site also includes a stats textbook (with links to other Web resources), case studies with real data sets, and an analysis tool (java based) that can access the case study datasets.
• Could be handy for question based / activity based teaching in stats

• Andrew Hunter provided a simple and ingenious perl script that will ftp a directory’s worth of files to a remote Web server
• Well done that man
• This script worked fine on Windows under Active State perl and works (without modification) under Mac OS X using the perl that comes with Panther

• The headmap sphaeric web page has a simple geometrical method for finding rough positions of the planets based on using concentric circles to represent the orbit of the planet and of the earth.

I’ll re-work this a little minus the ideology.

Note added 27th Feb : errors prove large for Mars. The smaller signal is the declination error and the larger is Right Ascension error, both differences in degrees. The peak error in RA is getting on for two hours of time!

Jupiter has an orbit that is much larger than Earth’s so the heliocentric and geocentric longitudes for Jupiter are not that different. Mars and Earth have orbits that are much closer in size – so the ‘parallax’ when you sit on Earth instead of the Sun changes a lot.