Leslie Wu's blog

Mobile California Proposition Guide

During a phonebank rally today, I hacked together an IUI / iPhone-based "Mobile California Proposition Guide."

As you stand on line on Election Day, please take a few seconds and skim through the propositions which matter most to you!

CA Proposition iPhone guide

Rock the Vote, yes We Can.

Grand Challenges in Vis

What are the Grand Challenges in (Info)Vis? was the topic for a panel earlier this week, feat. Georges Grinstein, Tamara Munzer, and Daniel Keim.

I won't resummarize here, but Tamara made a call for a vision of "total political transparency" as a problem that is infovis-complete, but many of us agreed we're far far away from that. Sure, we have the Sunlight Foundation and other efforts, but we're still drowning in a sea of data, full of schema borne in different oceans.

From a Grand Challenge perspective, InfoVis panelists often cited scalability and data integration as large concerns, but didn't unpack scalability in any way at all. I think from my perspective, we're at a point now where it's not that the number of data dimensions (dimensionality) is growing without bound, but rather that the number and size of heterogenous data sets is growing faster than our ability to make sense of them.

Traditional InfoVis or even Vis assumes you have a data set that may grow and get larger, rather than envisioning a world in which you have an ecology of data producers and consumers, schemas and lack thereof, bad data and missing data and the like.

Alon Halevy made mention over the summer of OpenII, an Open Source Information Integration suite, and there are efforts such as Freebase which try to collabo/crowd organize the world's data, but I think even for the space of Vernacular Visualizations, of spatial mapping and timelines, of health / finance and politics, we're far from a world where we can explore the world's heterogenous data space to make sense of it, and communicate subset views of the space to others.

Ah well, time to get to work :)

InfoVis 2008

InfoVis 2008 wrapped up yesterday, here in Columbus OH, and I have to say that the conference slightly restored my faith in InfoVis, the field and more specifically the research community that breathes the field alive.

But what is InfoVis anyway? In Stu Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Shneiderman's Readings in Information Visualization, Card et al. define visualization as

``the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition'' (p. 7, Table 1.1) 

There are at least three things to note in this definition. First, that if the term "visualization" doesn't quite make sense, we can substitute "visual representations" and, at least to me, we can start to ground our thinking more concretely or perhaps more analogically. Just as words are textual representations, images embedded with some meaning can be thought of as visual representations, which can be chosen appropriately, manipulated, or explored in some way.

oh hai DFW (on the way to InfoVis 2008)

I'm not going to drill down into the differences between data, information, and knowledge, but I think the second point to note is that this definition focuses on the potential for "well-designed visual representations of data" to amplify cognition. At first, this may bias us towards thinking only of how vis. reps., let's say simple scatterplots, can help us as individuals to understand relationships between different data dimensions, but from a perspective of distributed cognition (see "Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization" in this year's InfoVis 2008 proceedings), the "unit of analysis should not be a human individual, but a cognitive system composed of individuals and the artifacts they use to accomplish a task".

From this perspective, we can think of the potential not of simply aiding analysis, but in aiding communication (see references of Communication-minded Visualization), whether simply unidirectional presentation or as a talking point which spurs discussion (and "social interaction").

Finally, I'm going to drill down on "data", noting that Card et al. define InfoVis (as opposed to general Visualization) as specifically "interactive, visual representations of abstract data". Card et al. divy up Vis into Scientific Vis (SciVis), vis. reps. of scientific data, typically physically based as opposed to Information Vis (InfoVis), vis. reps. of abstract data, nonphysically based data.

In fact, the InfoVis 2008 page suggests that the key challenge of InfoVis is in designing a "cognitively useful spatial mapping of a dataset that is not inherently spatial and accompanying the mapping by interaction techniques that allow people to intuitively explore the dataset". What I find problematic about this division is that it's hard to place everyday maps into this dichotomy. Maps are, of course, inherently spatial, and yet they are not always intended for scientific-minded analysis.

More generally, perhaps what made me lose faith in the field of InfoVis was the way in which it seemed the field "progressed" in the last ten years without having a clear impact on the world at large. I think part of that perception was assuaged when I heard Ben Shneiderman talk about treemaps and the decades it takes for ideas to be accepted (or not), especially ones that are directly user-facing (new machine learning algorithms go from Andrew Ng's lab to industry like 0-day exploits, they say). But beyond that, I'm mollified by more recent work on what some have called vernacular visualizations.

campus

Vernacular vis was a discussion topic at last year's Vis -- this year, not so much.

Earlier this year, F Viegas and M Wattenberg followed up with an Interactions article titled "Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization". From what I recall, they didn't try to unpack "vernacular", but simply seemed to chose the term as a nod to the design world dichotomies of low-brow and high-brow. But if we drill down further and look at how Vernacular refers to "the native language of a country or a locality" (so says Wikipedia, some semblance of the Vernacular Web), then we quickly get into the concept of diglossia, of high and low languages, of high prestige / the elite / the learned and of the everyday / quotidian.

In our Vispedia work this year, we primarily supported three visualizations: maps, timelines, and scatterplots, which seemed in that order used (commonly) and in that order compelling and, dare I say, vernacular.

So what makes a visual representation vernacular? Both the design world high/low-brow division and the diglossia sociolinguistic view suggest that not only do representations / media shift, hustle and flow back and forth into the vernacular over the decades (jazz, comics, and video games let's say) but that these forms are specifically situated in some socioeconomic context according to some frequency / pop.-populist distribution.

somewhere

While I think those dimensions are worth further analysis, seeing for example how NYTimes InfoVis design affects vis. literacy in the digi / technorati and beyond, I think if we go back to looking at what is being represented (and secondarily, for what purpose do we chose to represent?), we achieve some deeper insight into what may typically fall into ze vernacular.

I'll posit here that the more closely a representation maps onto our everyday dimensions of space and time, the more likely that visual representation falls into the realm of The Vernacular. Secondarily, the more a vis. rep. is well designed for highly-probable / quotidian STUs -- situations, tasks, and users (see Dr. Olsen's "Evaluating User Interface Systems Research" PDF), again the more useful a vernacular vis. might be.

Along these dimensions, academic InfoVis (with the exception of M Wattenberg's work, for example this year's Word Tree work or the beautiful geometries & aesthetics of Stacked Graphs, which both play with our common notions of textual and stacked-graph spacetime) tends to veer largely away from the vernacular, by dealing primarily with abstract, high-dimensional data. On the other hand, academic SciVis (and VAST, in a different way) veers away from more everyday STUs towards a service lens of scientists, engineers, and analysts.

Where does that leave us? Earlier this quarter I had planned out a schedule for a Vernacular Visualization workshop at Stanford co-hosted by Adobe and the Stanford Graphics / Vis labs, but peopletime constraints had us push back the date to some indeterminate time in early 2009. But I think Vernacular Vis has a bright future! from academics studying InfoVis for the People from a Comparative Media Studies (MIT) perspective to IBM ManyEyes researchers M Wattenberg and F Viegas, from a long history of digital and analog cartography to recent developments in making geospatial mapping technologies (at least on the consumer side, not quite the design side just yet) accessible to large fractions of the population.

I'm going to write a bit more later on how Vernacular Vis fits into the "Grand Challenge" view of the InfoVis world but for now I'll pause here and summarize. The history of academic Vis research has tended to split into two factions (now three, including analysis), one of scientific visualization (i.e., how do we see airflow over surfaces? MRI scan data?), and one of abstract information visualization (how do we see protein-protein interaction or social networks? how can we make sense of financial market data or large document collections?). 

But just as hypertext researchers moved on right before the Web grew up and actually caught on, perhaps we're at a point where a more visual and interactive Web is growing up and the larger young/educated population is (?) more visually literate, and yet it's not clear where the last ten years of SciVis and InfoVis has to say towards having impact on that population. Still, with a more recent push towards more accessible / Vernacular Vis, towards communication-minded Vis and Vis as social spurs & catalysts, I'd like to say with some mild hope that we're on a decent, forward track :)

HRM 90

I noticed that I've been training with my Polar F11 for exactly 90 days now.

Timespan: 90 days

# Workouts Tracked: 50ish
Total Length: 60+ hrs

Total Calories burned: 23,692.

d.hike

(Originally posted on 30-AUG-2008 as a Facebook note.)

I got up today and hiked the whole U-loop of the dish barefoot.

:)

I was going to ping some folks to see if they wanted to come with, but alas my phone was out of juice and my charger was elsewheres.

I think I'm going to have that culminate my summer of barefootery, as the journey was a bit rough and the ground hot from the noonday sun, and hill sprints barefoot may have proved to be as ouch-inducing as track sprints unshod (but, worth noting, no blistering at all this whole time).

Folks along the way would ask me if my feet were hot, funny that they ask that as it was actually the roughness of the path that eventually got to me half way through (tho I kept on until the end). The path was pretty hot, but if you walk quickly and accept the mild pain it's not so bad. The gravel on the other hand... it stung a lil.

Hikehike

Volume-wise, a dish hike barefoot isn't that long, comparable to walking back and forth to lab barefoot as I have done a few times, and the hill grading is no SF nor Seattle. My HR did spike to 159 on the initial ascent, but after that it stayed at a calmer pace.

People also asked if I was training for anything, and I would say either "not really" or if they asked if I was training for something I'd say "a lil". Maybe I should have said I was training for life :)

I have a few reasons to cross-train barefoot.

red sox

One is sensory/nerve training. As that random Chinese lady says in ChiRunning, cushy shoes make your feet dumb. Do you spend all your days wearing boxing gloves? I hope not, and yet we do the same to our feet.

Another is form. According to Brooks Johnson (Olympic sprint coach, author of the Winning Edge, and former Stanford track&field head), the way you run barefoot (in terms of footstrike and so on) is essentially the optimal form for sprinting, shod or unshod.

(Apparently this is why Brooks Johnson and Vin Lananna, both track coaches at Stanford over the last some decades, have had their athletes occasionally run barefoot on grass.)

Third is function. While it takes some time to build up volume, "it takes time to develop the strength in the foot to use our natural arch fully", and even though barefoot-grass-running can cost a few percent less oxygen, it incorporates "more training for the small muscles in the foot and lower leg".

In contrast, when you wear expensive running shoes, you tend to apply more force, some studies show, and your muscles weaken since they don't have to work as hard. Interestingly, a study of n=180 (plus skeletons) demonstrated that "prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet". (Of course, running injuries have yet to decrease, in spite of the "advances" of the last couple decades.)

unshod 630a

Then again, this is generation that is expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents (gee willikers), in a world that has enough units of food to feed the world (we don't though...), that now has more overweight peeps than underweight, more suffering from overnutrition than undernutrition, more city-dwellers than not.

So, that's the way I see the median person in the world today, living in a city, eating too much of non-slow food, wearing muffs that make their feet sicker, weaker, more stupid. Anyway, I digress :)

That's it for now (mainly I wanted to chronicle my physical and intellectual journey re: shoes, and aggregate all the pointers I collected along the way).

If you do go barefoot on campus sometime, do check out the pebbling in front of the law school--my current fav. place to touch feet to earth!

Time to go get ingredients and prep for Monday, as a youth delegate for the Slow Food Eat-In in Dolores Park :D

My next goal will be to learn to DL (deadlift--lemme know if you'd like to lift with me :). In combination with Kettlebell swings and snatches (workshop next weekend), Pistols and jump rope, hill hikes and Miracle balls, I hope to be in decent shape come September.

Pavel OS, 1.0

I decided to install Pavel OS recently, in hopes that it will prove to be an upgrade from the piecemeal Slackware OS that I have been running off and on since high school.

What is Pavel OS? I'm glad we asked! Well, as you might know, humans tend to model the brain using whatever the latest advance in technology happens to be. These days it has been the brain as Computer, before that, brain as Engine, then brain as merely Organ bits.

oh hello there

It in the fitness biz, it has become chic to think of the whole body in that way too, that is, as a computer. Gray Cook, Pavel Tsatsouline, and now Marty Gallagher do it, talking about how our bodies are made of hardware and software, firmware and wetware. We may have been born to certain genotypes, and under certain stars, but how we use what god has given us is another question.

How are you'all managing your body-as-a temple?

Pavel OS is the latest new but not new Operating System for your body. Why does your body need an OS? Well, how did you learn to walk? Probably by falling forward, first uncontrollably, then later in a controlled fashion (one would happen to hope). Your brain then prunes its neural interlinks, soaking up patterns it perceives in the larger world. It does the same with the body--breaking down movements and desired actions into patterns, protocols if you will for physical action & reaction.

`

Enter The Kettlebell! Strength Secret of The Soviet Supermen

Pavel Tsatsouline

Sometime, your OS fails. And you fail FALL too. But, why do we fall? so that we might learn to pick ourselves up again...

In that spirit, Pavel OS teaches you to move from a strengthened core, and to balance max-strength with strength-endurance.

But how does one install Pavel OS? I'm glad we asked, comrade! First, pick up a copy of ETK--Enter the Kettlebell, published by Dragon Door--and your very own first KB--Kettlebell. You can purchase Kettlebells online, Russian Reds if on a budget, and Made in China Apollo imitations if you're a fund-limited student like me.

You start with KB swings--here is Olympic hopeful Mark O. Madsen demonstrating some beginning as well as advanced Kettlebell action, at an extremely high level and weight class!

Take a look at him go! And cheer for him at the upcoming Olympics as he competes in Greco-Roman wrestling!

Mark O. Madsen getting ready for the Olympics (full version)

Now, you won't need to work as hard as Mark does to start--rush slowly--but as you improve your KB double-hand swing form, you'll learn about balance, core strength, breathing, flexibility, and hip explosiveness along the way. If you do it right, with either great proprioception or a well-practiced trainer to guide you and your glutes, you'll be shedding pounds and gaining lean mass for weeks to come.

Of course, there's more to Pavel OS than that, but that's the way to start. Add a jump rope and a Polar HRM next if you like, inspired by MartyG's PurposefulP / Gray Cook / Bruce Lee, then read Cook's Athletic Body in Balance.

Ditching your expensive running shoes is a good start--transition using Nike Frees to some barefoot work if you'd like to have Iron Feet as an optional upgrade...

Yesterday, I wrote elsewhere that I sprinted barefoot on the hot summer track, for 100m sprints and 40y dashes, and then got on my bike, barefoot, to do more HR interval work.

Today, to celebrate my installation of Pavel OS, as well as the upgrade of modules imported from MartyG's PurposefulP(rimitive), I went for a 6am hike up these nearby foothills. I half-jogged, half-walked, half-ran, for about an hour, some five miles, some five hundred Kcalories. Phew!

I did so in the morning to optimize the burn, to make my body feed off fat instead of food-stored-as-fuel. Will it work? We shall see! Now in the mean time, for meal one of some seven (Parillo-styling here I come)!

RubyFringe [Toronto]

I just got back from RubyFringe [Toronto], quite possibly the best tech conference I've been to thus far in life.

I've been to a number of tech events, from LAN parties in SoHo to IEEE vision conferences in France, from GOOG developer days to ACM CHI, BarCamps to WebExpos, and RubyFringe--subtitled "Deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit"--had the best food and music of them all. And you know, cool peeps too, even if _why, defunkt, and ezra didn't make the show :)

Toronto Fog

Toronto

This year's RubyFringe (will there ever be another?) was held in Toronto, Canada, cityland of great diversity. I grew up not far from NYC, another such cityland, and now live some 60 clicks away from SF, and yet there's this way in which *-Americans tend to assimilate, as if bowed to the pressure of some greater cultural force. In contrast, residents of Toronto seem to retain more of their heritage in some way that seems difficult to explain. Perhaps it's mainly a matter of language and sheer numbers of pop. distribution?

Whatever the root, folks who move to Seattle seem to somehow lose (give up) more of their past than folks who move to SF, who may lose (give up?) more than those who move to NYC, and then the same for Toronto.

a day in modern RubyLand

That in mind, perhaps it's fitting that RubyFringe took place in Toronto rather than SF or Seattle, as the Ruby programming language itself is a sort of eclectic combination of PL design. And as much as I love Ruby, I sort of have had more love for the larger Ruby community and its eclectic (as in "Greek eklektikos, from eklegein to select, from ex- out") slashslightly eccentric nature, from _why to zed to matz. And I don't have strong arguments as to why Ruby is "greater-equal to" Python, except to say that (I feel) Python tends to attract Physicists whereas Ruby tends to attract Musicians / Artists.

That said, I would say that Ruby, or rather the larger Ruby "community", if you grant that such a ragtag thing exists at all, has been innovating muchlyso in the last four/five years, from the Win of Rails (Ruby on, which has since influenced newer PHP, Python, and Java web frameworks), to whytheluckystuff such as Hpricot, or well anything redhanded, from Mongrel also~use of Ragel to modern explorations in web microframework land (Merb / Sinatra), from the improv acts of Haml (markup haiku) to the newly released gist.github.com.

From the perspective of this apprenticing academic, there's nothing new in RubyLand, nothing new under the sun, as Ruby the-programming-language merely combines notable language features from Smalltalk and Perl, Lisp and the like, and yet to me matz succeeded in "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple". As an academic, one might often cite Ousterhout on Scripting, or even BAM on Natural Programming, but it seems hard to do (academic design) research in the space wherein Ruby, Rails, and jQuery have succeeded. John Resig's jQuery gets The Design Right and The Right Design and some might say the same for Ruby and/or Rails, but these claims are hard to falsify, and thus to publish academic research about (which is why I blog here'bout it rather than study modern Rubyland for my academic research :)

I hope that gives those of you (apprenticing) academics, hackers, observers some insight into some recent high-order bits in RubyLand. That said, some conference details to follow!

Day Zero

I missed the RubyFringe commencement--was out of it after some 31 hours of traveling from SJC--but caught bits of stories from FailCamp, which reminded me of my days at The Frugal Empire (AMZN dot com). People got up, AA-style, and said "My name is X, and I have failed", then telling their story of Fail.

What is "Fail" anyway? Epic fail? Many of you have seen lolcats, and perhaps or perhapsnot Fail is an offshoot of that genre of ridiculousness, where an oops-i-? image is post imprinted with an Impact-typeface screed of FAIL -- this generation's America's Funniest Home Videos, in screenshot, Internet meme form.

Fringe at the Amsterdam Brewery

But beyond this, I think what matters about FAIL is less about the fail itself than our culturally embedded notion of failure, specifically how we can FAIL and get up again, rather than being marked off as a failure. Guy Kawasaki has written about how, in Silicon Valley culture, you can FAIL and get up again without being A failure (as was the case in older, more risk-averse societies), and what I take out of FailCamp and RubyFringe in a larger sense is that FAIL is okay, is funny, is something to be sometimes laughed off and moved past. In the 3P's of things, FAIL is not Permanent, not Pervasive, not Pervasive. Just fail! ...so that we might learn to pick ourselves up again.



Day One

Day One began with breakfast and registration, where I volunteered and helped to get folks signed up.

• Jay Phillips presented his work on Adhearsion, an open source Ruby-based DSL (domain-specific language) that expressively represents, and then generates config for the open source Asterisk PBX / Telephony Platform. That is, if you'd like to configure a telephone exchange for your business / office using open source VoIP technology, Adhearsion allows you to do so in a compact, domain-specific language (above Ruby core), that can easily integrate with your employee databases. [I sat near Jay at a pay-by-the-pound Veg restaurant that didn't seem to offer much quinoa or tempeh, and Jay seems to be doing well by making Adhearsion consulting his business.]

• Dan Grigsby of unpossible.com was going to talk about Ruby deployments, but ended up talking about Sink's metaphor of Barrel Research. You could think of this as a spin on the Long Tail, in physical / volumetric form. Operating Systems, Office Suites, Browsers are the big rocks in the market if-it-were-a-barrel, but between the space of those rocks, you can fill in hundreds of little gems, and between those gems you have your grains of sand. He then talked about how we as hackers have skills enough to "hack the market", by exploiting inefficiencies in the market, whether by looking at diffs of Freedom-of-Information-Act dumps or by being inspired by cults, game design, Reefer Madness. Memorable quote? "You're not fringe if you work for the Man!"

• Tobias Lütke talked about Rockstar Memcaching and Yehuda Katz talked of "Living on the [Ruby] Edge"--Thor, a "full-stack package for writing robust binaries" that tries to go beyond optparse and Rake/Sake; DataMapper, an attempt to move beyond ActiveRecord-type ORMs to object-data mappings (i.e. REST or whatnot), or even just trying to support the Complexities of modern relational schemas; YARD, which tries to add microsemantics to Rdoc; finally, Johnson, which "wraps JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace". Dueling Garbage Collectors, ai-yah! I'm still not sure what to make of Johnson, but as fas as I can tell, most people aren't either :) You'all figure it out!

• Lots of people liked Luke Francl's talk on "Testing is Overrated". The most interesting slide data-bit for me was the one that argued that in terms of # of defects found, unit tests are okay, code reviews do better, more formal code inspections even better (having a facilitator and a process help that, or so I learned in a class I attended with Mr. McConnell as the teach'), and prototyping kicked all their butts. Nice. d.mix anyone?
  

• Nick [JRuby] Sieger talked about Jazz -- see his blog article on Jazzers and Programmers for the scoop -- and I rather liked this talk and the musical accompaniment.

I missed a couple of the next few talks (needed to crash again), but some people liked Obie's talk on The Hustle, whereas what I heard of it left me unsure of how I still feel about the interrelations of class, wealth, capitalism, and the like which still clash in my own life. Was I the only half-hippie in attendance? I, a product of the State, public schooled all the way from K to MS (but obviously not now...), monied and wealthy in some ways, and monied-less and wealth-less in others.

doyoulikecats?

I'm still not sure what to think here, and I suppose we generally ought to accept that we live in a Capitalistic state, but how much should that drive who we are and how we live? I suppose I'm still a half-young, half-hippie, half-idealist at heart that feels and feels out that kind of dirt.

That said, I do think marketing is important, as are sales, and yet, where do we draw the boundaries? What do we, have we lost along the way?

I'll end here, then talking of PORN. Zed Shaw gave a presentation titled "THERE WILL BE PORN: 10 Dangerous Ideas Nobody Should Implement". I missed the first some minutes, but he talked of combining a TODO list with Pornography and Dangerous Ideas like that. I talked with him later and, given his interest in the social impact of tech, pointed him towards Melvin Kranzberg (for example, see Kranzberg's laws of technology). Zed might like that kind of work, and Kranzberg's writings, but perhaps not.

Zed also talked, offline, about just watching Charles Moore as he programs, getting that record of his technique on tape. It is weird that we don't get to see programmers actually program, just perhaps pass them one-dimensional or two-dimensional foodstuffs below their locked doors (thx you Microserfs), and get binaries and/or source on the other end. That's a sad state of affairs, as perhaps we improve as coders soveryslowly, if at all. Would you pay to see Zed, or Charles Moore, Knuth (and his unexpected aspect ratio :), or Guy Steele hack? I do think that the HCI community has a history of watching people as they work, whether Lucy Suchman back in the day or one of BAM's PhD students as they see how programmers Actually Work, and yet we probably do know so little of how the masters do it. We see the end result, but not the struggles, the techniques and tricks, prototypes and shell commands, commits and rollbacks
along the way.

Arguably, Susan Lammers' Programmers at Work takes us part of the way there and Founders at Work sketches out modern startupLand, but there's a delta between startups and programmers back in the day, and programmers as described second-hand versus programmers as they Actually Work. That said, I hope Zed actually does this, and records the workings of some great Hackers before they pass away.

As for Zed's talk itself, well, what can I say, Zed is still a bad-ass. He has a long-ass entry on his blog, which I have yet to read through, but he did post the multi-track songs he recorded in phase-shifted real-time, as it were, using a Dr. Beat, a travelin' guitar, harmonica, and a software hack he calls Inculcator.

Inculcator? "To implant by repeated statement or admonition". Or rather, "a small project to help record live music sequences for dynamic playing and looping with a minimum of interface friction." It uses Ecasound and a probably ugly PyGame/Pgu interfaces. Now world, where's the Shoes ver? :)

Day Two

Day Two, to follow in another entry :)

But before I sign out, props to Pete Forde! to unspace & Meghatron, the other volunteers, attendees, and double You you.

re:mix, re: Vispedia

Long time no blog. Have been training as an artisan (bread and occasional bagel) baker and playing some hereandthere high-level Ultimate.

Here's part of an email I just sent to the mouseHole scripters list.

Alas, I haven't had time to work on the mouseHole of late -- I spent some time instead exploring the possibilities of the curious Firefox extension POW, which I got to half-work as a pseudo proxy.

I'm not sure how much POW has progressed since I last looked at it, but I think in the long term, building on something akin to POW might be the way forward, even if Ruby isn't yet directly supported in most browsers. I described some of these concepts here in "Remixing the Web":

   http://graphics.stanford.edu/~lwu2/ (third paper link)

essentially trying to replicate a mouseHole-like programmable proxy within Firefox itself, driven by jQuery and JavaScript, which at least reduces the programming burden if you've read jResig's JS book and feel comfortable enough in that tongue with jQuery at your side.

Since that work, I have also heard about Jaxer but not read much about it. It might be what some of us are half looking for?

On the one hand, there's something _why elegant about the tight combination of mouseHole, Hpricot and Mongrel, but on the flipside, Firefox's core can support SSL, is HTML/DOM compatible with itself, and can make use of extensions such as POW, GreaseMonkey, and the like.

To reiterate, it's a common reductionist pattern to think of the alternatives as being either the browser as the point of modification (extensions) xor programmable proxies as the point of remix (for example, see Bolin's MIT thesis where he makes this exact bifurcation), but we're at a point now where we can have our programmable proxy cake and eat the browser kiddies too.

Does that help? Googling for "jaxer programmable-proxy" doesn't seem to show any hits right now, and while I've seen discussion of doing mouseHole-like programmable-proxy ish things in POW, I don't know if anyone else has followed up on that vector of attack, beyond the proof of concept we built for "re:mix", but to me it seems like the Right Enough way forward as we try to democratize these tools of production and ICT.

~L

In other news, the Stanford University visualization research group now has a new web presence at graphics.stanford.edu/vis, and my most recent collabo project, called Vispedia, also has a new project-page-home on the web at graphics.stanford.edu/projects/vispedia.

Finally, in putting together a brief list of my recent work as a CS PhD student here at TheFarm, I realized that four of my recent projects and my current "Sniff and Scratch" work all have the theme I briefly mentioned in my mouseHole mail, that of "democratizing the tools of production and ICT".

And while there is great work in the larger space of using technology in the journey towards social justice, and in reducing digital divides, I am sort of more interested in looking at technology with a social justice and democratizing lens, and beyond the analytics that are common in the history of science and technology, I think it's important to try to have time-flow-positive impact in the coming years and decades, in a constructive here-it-is way, in contrast to the retrospective here's how it was fifty 2 a hundred years ago.

Kay, in the spirit of my flexitarian with a vegan offset foodie philosophy of late, I'm going to make some food for lunch. Chow, ciao.

jResig

I had a nice little chat with jResig of jQuery fame tonight, on javascript hacks and the future of the fox.

I first heard of jQuery by way of Hpricot, _why's fast and delightful HTML parser.

Coming from a job where I often hacked "engineered" back-end services in C++, it wasn't immediately clear what Hpricot (and thus jQuery) offer beyond XPath, but as I got more into front-end engineering work with d.mix, I got to better understand jResig's brilliant library design, with its elegant mix of XPath and CSS selectors and use of chaining.

The other day I skimmed through Learning jQuery at the local bookstore -- learned a few things -- and 1-click prime picked-up a copy of Resig's book on JavaScript to read some time. I gave some thought to having John sign it, but decided that was a bit too fangirl for my taste ^_^.

And as much as I admire jQuery's design, we ended up using YUI for d.mix, as it offered a greater panoply of widgets, and Hpricot for the remixing, as I just knew Ruby better at the time.

I showed John the final video we submitted to UIST, and told him a bit about my recent explorations of POW and FUEL, an explosive combination. I also tried to pitch my 3cent vision of a RESTful Firefox, and sketched how the concept of "ghost-and-the-shell" browsing, in conjunction with POW-type technologies, might help to keep the web stay open, in spite of the way web clients are closing (the iPhone, IE, and Flex/AIR/Flash) and it becomes harder to compete at scale with the data center haves.

There's a sense in which I see Firefox perhaps going the way of Linux, that is, a minority player on the desktop, third to APPL mostly-open but-not-quite tech (Open- BSD and WebKit on the back, Closed- OS X and Safari on the front) with great user-facing design, and that aging 800 lb. Gorilla up there in rainy Redmond.

Where Linux wins big today is in the data center (DC), at DC scale. Will Firefox win there tomorrow too? In the DC and not the Desktop? I'd place my small bets there, in hopes that there's room to grow!

But still, the future of FF as edge, as the ghost browser in a ghost-and-shell architecture, is not clear, and as a researcher, we've been exploring the frontier of customization, automation, and mashery on the modern web today.

And while this is a big too vague to pin a paper on, one thing I realized over the summer is that if we want to support evolutionary design on the web, a vibrant, ecologically diverse and recombinant web, we need to be able to support third-party variations of existing web applications, to enable lead users to remix these remixes (note how IBM ManyEyes does this not!), and to empower them to recombine data and IxN elements from extant webapps in novel, sometimes fruitful ways.

At recent Web Expos, I have been disappointed that "mashup" providers don't clearly differentiate between data mashups and what I used to call application mashups, but today, talking to JoelRB, I realized that perhaps the finer distinction is between data mashups and IxN (interaction) mashups (!). While I still have to crystallize that, one insight I had from d.mix, which I don't think I have blogged anywhere (?), is that there's an analogical sense in which mashups are like is-a, has-a, includes. That is, that one can see mashups as a modern form of behavioral inheritance, composition, and mix-ins on the modern application web.

I pitched this idea to AviB a while back, and even today it's not totally clear how to operationalize that insight, how to make use of it, but I'll churn and churn on it still from time to time.

I might as well make a public note of donkey sort, and note how it has, at least, progressed a bit in the last few months. Phrasing the problem as one of "attentional bias" of a sort, and then making the connection to Latin square designs has been somewhat illuminating. They didn't ask that Arrow fellow for user studies... would they today? ;)

As a researcher, I suppose I'm still trying to figure out the appropriate boundaries, territories between hacking and science, "scientific" research and engineering 'search, academia and industry.

With the modern application, soon-to-be recombinant web as it is, there's sometimes a swirl there, between science and engineering, deeper study and the entrepreneurial drive that still lives on here today.

How has my tech-touched life been changed in the last six months? A month+ ago I got an iPhone, and have transferred some 300+MB wi-fi-lessly since then, and taken over 200 photographs. I bought a Flickr pro account, gave up my Yahoo! mail plus, and stopped using both 30boxes and Google Calendar.

I twitter! Sometimes.

I use Safari almost all the time, except when I develop, in the same way that I'd prefer to use my MacBook all the time, except for times when I need to deploy to U'buntu.

My relatives, (some) professors, labmates are on Facebook now. They weren't a year ago.

I tumblelog. Love it.

But back to jResig. I told him that POW made it easier for me to experiment with FF/Moz as a platform, that in some weird way, if I wanted to develop for FF, a web "browser", I'd rather start by building RESTful webapps themselves, phrasing the 'Fox itself as a bunch of small web pieces, loosely connected.

Say, I said to him, besides telling 'im to ask _why to make jQuery a spanking new logo, shall we port Camping to POW?! How now, brown-orange POW. Look what you have wrought.

on proto types

I heard about Richard's K-Sketch from Mentalguy, who seemed to think it was as yet unreleased, but a CURIS undergrad and I were both able to get this kinetic sketch pad up and running on both Windows XP and Vista, with VS 2005 Professional and C# Express respectively.

I had thought of sending out the link to why's HacketyHack mailing list -- I guess I'll do that now -- telling folks to hack together K-Sketch with HH, to help motivate programming through storytelling.

srk has us video prototyping these days, as a way of quickly sketching user experience, and here's what I tried out.

Iteration zero wasn't a video at all, but rather a UX comic put together with a combination of my old Samsung 1.3M pixel cell phone, Flickr, and plasq's Comic Life (which comes with recent MacBooks).

I quite enjoyed iteration zero, as I was able to wander around PA snapping shots with my cell, sketch overlays with a sharpie, and then Photoshop/Seashore them together.

a UX comic life

For prototype One, I mainly combined a PNG version of my UX comic with Keynote transitions, in addition to using online demos of Opera Mini, the 3GP video recorder on my old Samung cell, and the freely available CamStudio to tape a portion of a Photoshop screen, manipulated off(cam)screen with some PSD layer legerdemain.

CamStudio worked well enough on Windows, and the mobile phone video had the added benefit of quick turnaround (Bluetooth transfer) and a low-to-medium fidelity feeling to its digital film grain. I couldn't find a OS X screen (video) capture utility that I could quite trust, and ended up using Windows Movie Maker on Vista to splice things together.

Prototype Two was done mostly in Keynote, which seems to offer a nice suite of transitions and build-in / build-outs, but it didn't seem to offer the kind of motion paths one gets with K-Sketch. In concert with a Flickr (Creative Commons) search, this video prototype got built a lot faster. Unfortunately, exporting QuickTime from Keynote seems to look pretty jerky (on my 2GHz 2GB RAM MacBook Pro), and SWF export seemed to screw up the Comic Life speech bubbles which I had copy+pasted into Keynote. Sigh.

Prototype Three, the most recent one, was done half in Photoshop CS2 (thank goodness for Academic site licensing) and a licensed copy of Techsmith's Camtasia Studio. I highly recommend both Photoshop and Camtasia for video prototyping, in spite of their high (for a student) price points. CamStudio suffices for simple video screen capture, but Camtasia goes a step further and offers the ability to quickly edit the captured footage: cutting out unnecessary footage, inserting captions and focus points, zoom+pan and the like.

I don't have first-hand experience enough to report on any FOSS video editors or compare them against iMovie / Windows Movie Maker or even Final Cut Express, but I'm guessing non-gratis, non-libre software wins there again.

Is there any academic work on video prototyping? I'm not sure, I have yet to look, but I feel as if there ought to be a useful point to explore in that space, beyond bpb's DEMAIS and Richard's K-Sketch, somewhere in between Expression Blend, Keynote, Photoshop, and Camtasia too.

K-Sketch might not be a bad place to start, although it depends on MSFT's Ink SDK, and it's hard to say how painful it would be to port K-S's C# to Mono.

A friend of mine working the graveyard shift in Beijing recommended me a book, titled China, Inc. -- oh the wonders of the Internets and IM -- and in looking at Bunnie's reports on Chumby things Made in China, I'm glad I don't have to directly compete with that large sliver of the economic world.

But back to K-S and HCI. How much would K-S benefit from layers and/or the ability to import PSDs/PNGs? I don't know, but a K-S-enabled HH would be pretty sweet.

I've been reading Bonnie Nardi's Small Matter of Programming once more and I highly recommend it. I have also been reading Cypher (ed) 's Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration again, and getting up to speed on theories of all sorts.

I'll end on some recommended links for you to chew on...

• On the ground running: Lessons from experience design « Speedbird
• A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
• Baekdal.com - The Goal is Pretty Simple
• adaptive path » blog

...and some papers too.

1. Harel, "Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems" (1987).
2. P. Baudisch, "Summary Thumbnails" (2005)
3. S. Baluja's recent work at GOOG on the Mobile experience
4. My recent faves: Mary Czerwinski, Bonnie Nardi, and Eszter Hargittai

 

Discbee #10