Nuclear explosions since 1945

I love interesting data visualizations and happened to stumble upon this map of nuclear explosions since 1945 (high res) on Neatorama.

I have a lot of respect for designers who can take a mass of data and create an elegantly simple visualization like this one.

Original high res image (via Neatorama)

- Dave

Have you ever wondered what is lost or gained in automated translation services?  Have you ever used a web-based language translation tool like Google Translator or BabelFish and gotten a bizarre result?

An amusing site called Blahblah Fish translates your words into the language of your choice and then back out again into english.  Hilarity ensues.  For fun, I entered some famous lyrics from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

(Original)

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I’m coming home to you

Translated to Russian and back to English:

Sweet domestic Alabama
where the skies is so blue
sweet domestic Alabama lord,
I’m coming home to you

Translated from Spanish and back to English:

Sweet homemade Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet homemade Alabama Gentleman,
I’m that returns to house to you

And my very favorite – Translated to Japanese and back to English:

At the point where the Alabama sky of the sweet house is very blue
Alabama main thing and I’m of the sweet house; where it returns to the house in you.

I think the Japanese translation sounds like a beautiful haiku…maybe better than the original lyrics.

Try it out yourself.

Link to Blahblah Fish (via Neat-o-rama)

- Dave

There are many choices in life that could go one way or the other.

This is not one of them.

Simply put, there is a right way and a wrong way to hang your toilet paper on the roll.  Over the top is correct.  Under the bottom is incorrect.  No, incorrect isn’t strong enough.

Hanging your toilet paper under the bottom is COMPLETE MADNESS!

Who’s with me?!?!

[poll=6]

The bad: It’s a fucking disaster if you are using a Mac.  I fiddled with it for 2+ hours this evening and managed to crash Mac Mail at least a dozen times and download over 200+ spams to my Blackberry (I’m just lucky I didnt’ have more than 200+ emails in my Gmail account at the time.  Normally I have over a thousand, but cleaned it out recently).  Do you know how long it takes to delete 200+ emails on a Blackberry?  Well, I do.

The ugly:  I am back to POP3 access.  It works fine and with the right filters in Gmail, does exactly what I need it to do.  Unfortunalely, it’s not nearly as useful as IMAP could be.

At least I’m not the only person having these problems.

-Dave

Whether you think it’s crap or fantastic, let me know. Also, let me know if you ever have technical problems with the site. I think I fixed the right sidebar problem in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Hopefully the sidebar is showing up in the correct position at the top of the page now.

-Dave

Link to the google update.

-Dave

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Now playing: The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets – The Innsmouth Look
via FoxyTunes

I’ve recently played around with Yahoo Pipes, a feed aggregation and manipulation service provided by Yahoo, (here’s a yahoo or wikipedia explanation of the service) to manipulate some of my iTunes feeds to more easily update my little green Shuffle. You see, I have a handful of feeds I drag into my Shuffle on a regular basis. Normally I would create a smart playlist in iTunes and add a bunch of podcasts to it and life would be all bunnies and tulips. However, I’m a little picky and need to eliminate PDFs from the feed (since some podcasts include them and my Shuffle can’t dispay them). I also only want podcasts that I haven’t listeded to yet (with a play count of zero) in ascending order of release date (so I can listen to them in the correct order).

Here’s where the iTunes “smart” playlists fall down the stairs before prom night.

As far as I can tell, when creating an iTunes playlist you are able to add multiple actions (or filters) to the list; however, you are forced to select a single boolean operator to affect all the actions in the list. I can select “or” to act as the operator or I can select “and.” I don’t get the option to select an operator for each action in the list. Bummer.

It is at this point that my smart playlist has smeared her make-up and fallen down the stairs in her prom dress.

This is when Yahoo Pipes shows up at the door smiling with a giant pink corsage and fresh condoms.

Since I have a yahoo account (for del.icio.us, flickr, email, etc.) by default I also have a Yahoo Pipes account. I logged in and aggregated all of the (13) podcasts I wanted on my little green Shuffle and created one feed to rule them all. I then took that feed and added it to the iTunes “smart” playlist along with the other filters (“never been played” and “no PDFs” and “ascending order”).

Badda bing. A dynamic smart playlist that includes all my favorite audio feeds and no PDFs and no episodes I’ve already listened to and all in ascending order of release date.

If you have a need to aggregate, manipulate or filter feeds of any sort, you might want to consider using Yahoo Pipes.  It uses a drag and drop interface that makes the whole experience very simple.  I haven’t really cracked the surface with Pipes yet, but it seems like it can do some amazing things.

There…now wasn’t that interesting?

-Dave

I’m mostly interested in the design & usability sessions, but I’m also interested in the sessions about presenting content and team building.  It’s been tough to recruit good web designers in this town, so maybe they know a secret or two that I don’t.

Should be fun.

-Dave

1. Email a post – You’ll notice the “Email” link next to each post. If you think a post is interesting you can email it to a friend by clicking on the link and sending it to a few friends.

2. Print a post -You’ll notcie the “Print” link next to each post. This link converts the post to a print friendly text version, eliminating the side navigation columns for a clean print on paper (This change was mostly to make things easier for Dan).

• 2a. I also adjusted the the CSS to reflect a cleaner printing experience if the you happen to want to simply print the page directly from the browser. That version will capture the navigation of the site as well.

3. Notify me of comments – If you post a comment on the site, you will notice a new check-box that says “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.” If you check that box when you make a comment, the site will email you if someone else posts a comment to that article.

4. Changed templates – Yeah, the site looks different now. Again. I think this version looks pretty good

5. Added Blog Stats page – I added a page at the top of the site regarding the blog stats (number of posts, comments, etc) Interesting info if you’re into that stuff.

6. Added Who’s Online page – I added another page to the top of the site to tell you who is on the site at any moment.

7. Added recent comments widget – I added a “Recently Commented” widget in the left column so you can see who’s been commenting and on which posts.

8. Weather widget – I added a weather widget to the right column. I tried to add several different widgets, but none of the others seemed very stable. (This one was mostly for Tom who gets a good case of shadenfreude when he sees the weather in Houston. ) I’m not completely happy with the look of the weather widget, so it may change in the future if I find a better one.

9. Mobile/PDA page – I added the mobile phone link back into the navigation (under the login area on the left column).  This page will know when you are visiting the site with a web-enabled mobile phone or PDA and present you with a simple  page that will render easily on those types of devices.  It’s nerd-tastic!

Time to go outside and get somefresh air.

-Dave

The little plus signs above (when clicked on) open a small framed window that forces the user to scroll the tiny window to read any text from the RSS feed. See below:

This is not very user friendly for several reasons. The first reason is that any decent amount of text in the RSS feed will force the reader to immediately start scrolling (as in my BoingBoing feed above) the tiny little frame so you can read a full paragraph of text. Be nice to your readers and don’t force them to scroll every 4 seconds so they can read the next sentence. The second issue stems from the frame’s action when it expands on the page. It pushes content down the page forcing users to again scroll further down the page to click on the next plus sign and expand the next article.

This action of opening and closing little windows forces the user to constantly scroll up and down the page opening and closing little windows to read a few articles in the RSS feed. All this scrolling is pretty unfriendly to the user.

You might want to ask me, “Dave, if you’re so smart, why don’t you come up with a better way to do it?”  Well, I don’t have to.  The good folks at NetVibes have nailed this one out of the ballpark.   They have a similiar”personal page” set up, but with numerous improvements.  Here is one of NetVibe’s readers:

There is a similiar look and feel with the reader upon first glance.  The changes become more obvious as soon as your roll your mouse over a link in the list:

You get a little yellow pop-up window that stays there as long as you hover your mouse over the link.  This is great for a quick glance at the first sentence so you decide imediately whether or not you want to click on the link to ready the rest.  If you decide to click on the link, NetVibes opens up a full-screen browser that allows you to view all thearticles in the feed:

Very slick.  The interesting benefit for this tool is that you can easily read all of the articles in this feed without ever being forced to open or close little hard-to-read windows.  You can also load all the articles into this browser at once and simply scroll through them without ever having to visit the website.

It’s odd not to praise Google – because they get it right so often.  However, in this case, they hit a foul ball into the stands and beaned the beer guy.

You never want to bean the beer guy.

C’mon Googlers…give this another shot.  I know you can do better.

-Dave

P.S. – The Google Reader is fantastic.  The Google Personal Page developers need to have coffee with the Google Reader developers and trade phone numbers or swap palm pilots or something.