bodmas blog

“Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn‚Äôt so much that the designers had contempt for their users as that they seemed never to have been taught to think about users at all. One gets the feeling that the web design curriculum at too many colleges and universities consists of little more than tips on how to use Flash to imitate sites that won awards five years ago.”

Zeldman comments on entries to a recent Web site competition

• It all starts with the goal
• That is usually easy on educational Web sites

• 128 kb/s
• ¬£13 for 24 hours connection time
• I could be using this for heavy downloading
• iBook needed the wireless card replacing as well as the combo drive but it is behaving now

Kepler introduced the idea of elliptical orbits and increased the accuracy of prediction of planetary positions by a large factor. He based his calculations – essentially a curve fitting process – on the observations of Tycho Brahe, the first observational astronomer to produce continuous nightly observation records.

I’ve parked an old site of mine that contains low precision formulas and procedures for calculating the positions of the planets at http://bodmas.org/kepler/ for now. I’ll be bringing this all together into a PDF based handout over the next few months.

Chromagenic monochrome again, but this time with some tweaking. Curves on the door (corresponding to a two bath developer characteristic) and contrast on the roof.

A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) actually starts at Chapter 3. It has cartoons and an unusual style (for a programming book).

A sample: “Most variables are rather temporary in nature. Some parts of your program are like little houses. You walk in and they have their own variables. In one house, you may have a dad that represents Archie, a travelling salesman and skeleton collector. In another house, dad could represent Peter, a lion tamer with a great love for flannel. Each house has its own meaning for dad.”

An editor assembles a book called The Best Software Writing from Web based essays on software and interface design. The book is published (typeset in sabon). A blogger assembles a page pointing to the original essays .This can’t be a copyright issue can it? I mean the originals all existed available for free before the book was published.

• Can a collection of Web links be copyright?
• Can the editor of the book claim some kind of intellectual input through selection and sequencing of the essays?