Friday, June 08, 2001
Things have been a little thin here for a lot of reasons: the main one being that I had to move. I'm now working for the UC-Santa Barbar arm of the Digital Alexandria project. Its a cool project, and it's nice being here because there are lots of folks doing way cool research on all kinds of related stuff. And really, that's what Vizbang is for now...research.
I also haven't been writing much because I'm thinking about reorienting the site. I think I want a more integrated blog, for personal as well as professional stuff, but I still haven't quite decided. So, like a lot of things in my life right now, it's in some kind of weird quantumesque vague state and is going to stay that way for a bit.
But I'm still working in this area (at least for some of the time), and still thinking about it, so this site is still potentially relevant. I'm just not quite sure how it'll play out just yet but hopefully this explains the recently even thinner posts than usual.
[11:39:41 AM]
Tuesday, May 08, 2001
Two really nice urban design related links: The New Colonist and CarFree.
[5:15:23 PM]
Wednesday, May 02, 2001
Wireless Valley Communications Home Page, neat looking 3D viz of what looks like wireless antenna patterns here.
[9:56:31 AM]
Monday, April 30, 2001
Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead (Alertbox April 2001)...neat, a step towards a useable interface on a WAP phone.
[10:04:19 AM]
Saturday, April 21, 2001
Lab Rat: Virtual light...Herring article about Augmented Reality work being done in industry.
[1:55:46 AM]
Saturday, April 07, 2001
Today I'm playing around with Java 3D. So far, I have mixed impressions. I'm really disappointed that the 2D text feature turns up blank. I'm using the Windows OpenGL version and this is certainly far from an unusual problem with displaying 2D panes of text in 3D, but it's still disappointing. On the other hand, I really like looking at the code; it looks like a really cleanly laid out API. A little crashing here and there and a few problems getting it to install (I had to reinstall my version of the JDK), hardware acceleration seems to be working although some of the demos are chunking a bit...so, yeah, mixed reviews.
[5:59:38 PM]
Friday, April 06, 2001
Walrus - Mappa.Mundi Magazine - Map of the Month...mappa mundi talking about CAIDA's (San Diego's) super-cool very large net maps.
[10:55:01 AM]
Thursday, April 05, 2001
Nice article about CHI2001 (going on right now, I wish I was there) from the Seattle Times.
[11:30:00 AM]
Wednesday, April 04, 2001
That last quote from the AskTog: First Principles piece was a bit disingenuous. Here's the rest of it: "Once users reach our applications, we must take care to reduce navigation to a minimum and make that navigation that is left clear and natural. Present the illusion that users are always in the same place, with the work brought to them."
I'm posting it, really, because the purveyor of bigstripes more or less called me out on it. He writes "All the keen projects [yours, etc] seem to be about putting space back in. About spacial awareness as the key to
navigation, as it was for memory palaces. For the first time there is a glimmer in the back of my head that maybe this isn't the way to go."
On some level I definitely agree with him (and Tog); I think that imposing undue cognitive load on users is a bad thing and that interfaces that "put space back in" all too often tend to do this. But I also think it's one of the things that I'm well on the path to solving. Vizbang is quite explicitly not a map, and because no free navigation through the space is necessary, vizbang spaces can be designed to work more or less exactly like a regular 2D page based space. The simplicity and other advantages of 2D will not be lost.
But for those who want it, the 3D is there. I'm not sure I can explain why, but I've always wanted to see entire sites. I've always wanted my homepage to exist inside a spanish villa (or a cathedral, or whatever), and through sharing my work I've now run into enough people with similar dreams that I think it's more than a fluke.
If nothing else, it makes for a fine, fine demo (true even for the preliminary spaces I've created so far)...and that may be what ultimately it's good for.
[10:07:24 AM]
Tuesday, April 03, 2001
AskTog: First Principles...from the very last paragraph (titled Visible Interfaces): "The World Wide Web, for all its pretty screens and fancy buttons, is, in effect, an invisible navigation space. True, you can always see the specific page you are on, but you cannot see anything of the vast space between pages." Nice summary of exactly what I'm working on.
[9:53:38 PM]
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Doc is talking about what the web is good for. My answer is simple: it's a great platform for communicating and sharing information, research, and news, where news means everything from information about our lives to what's going on in the world. It's an ok platform for some kinds of commerce. And it is, at best, a mediocre platform for retail sales.
[1:10:13 PM]
Monday, March 26, 2001
Lots of news this morning: Adobe to unveil 3D software - Tech News - CNET.com, the press release for this just came in. Tried to download it from the link off this page but the link to the FTP server seems to be severed. Looks like another go-round on avatars.
[11:30:50 AM]
Three new interface dev quick ones: NYT on the Microsoft research effort brain trust, Infoworld on Antarcti.ca, and The Standard on Mirrorworld's Scopeware.
[10:43:46 AM]
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
.NET Glossary, Microsoft describing "Hailstorm," a new initiative. "HailStorm will help move the Internet to end-user subscriptions, where users pay for value received."
[10:09:37 AM]
ZDNet: Interactive Week ACM wrap up...interesting that the VCs here are saying they're into usability projects and companies. All the VC and money people that I talked to exactly were not into this sort of thing: they wanted things that would obviously save companies money in the short term almost exclusively. Hm.
[10:06:01 AM]
Saturday, March 17, 2001
OpenP2P.com: Interoperability, Not Standards [Mar. 15, 2001], yes yes yes yes and, finally yes. Really, really spot-on analysis.
[8:46:09 PM]
Scene Graphs: the 50,000 ft View, some slides from siggraph 99 talking about some ongoing problems with scene graph APIs.
[1:12:11 PM]
Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Rhizome.org is amazing. I seem to recall checking this out a long time ago; it has changed a lot and now is a wide ranging collection of interactive art. The "Spiral" applet-based interface is just beautiful.
[12:53:25 PM]
Rhizome.org: Immersive Virtual Environments, article about Char Davies' new work. Also: apparently it's on exhibit somewhere at 010101.
[12:47:03 PM]
Sunday, March 11, 2001
ACM1 was really nice. Very low key and education-focused, lots of neat research that I'll probably post here about as I dig through it. So many interesting projects in the world!
sharing cars is good
this blog is back
The industrial revolution tore things apart. The information revolution is putting them back together, but it's slow and it's still a revolution, so bad things are going to happen. Lots of friction right now.
[1:40:05 PM]
Tuesday, March 06, 2001
VC Demands Fuel Revolt At Startup. I like it when the people actually building the stuff work together on issues like this.
[11:02:32 AM]
Monday, March 05, 2001
Excellent, a conference I can afford to go to: ACM1: Beyond Cyberspace. It's this weekend in San Jose and doesn't seem to have been too widely publicized, I heard about it through a research project list I'm on.
[12:41:29 PM]
Sunday, March 04, 2001
Two from the attempts to redesign how the money thing is working school: Potlatch Protocol and OpenCulture.org.
[5:55:11 PM]
Friday, March 02, 2001
O'Reilly Network: Building a Black Hole With OpenGL [Sep. 15, 2000], looks like a super nice walkthrough of an OpenGL app.
[9:11:10 PM]
Thursday, March 01, 2001
Meanwhile, there's this kind of old article from The Nation that talks about charts of corporate media ownership that were put together by Mark Crispin Miller. The charts themselves don't seem to be linked in anywhere there, but they do show up here. These charts would make an excellent Vizbang demo, and even if I never got around to that I'd love to have an easy syntax to describe these kinds of corporate relationships.
[12:33:52 AM]
I've been posting infrequently again. Things are changing...for a way too large set of reasons to go into here, I'm no longer focused on turning Vizbang into a company. I'm back looking for work, and so far not having an easy time getting all the variables to line up. So I've linked in the ASCII version of my resume and an old version of my 3D design portfolio over in the column of many uses on the right of this page. Not sure how long that will last, since when I've had a linked resume up before it mostly resulted in email from recruiters that had apparently not bothered to even glance over it. I'm thinking of either adding a cover letter or fleshing out the summary section, but not tonight.
Anyway, the job market seems unusually skimpy right now. If you're looking too, godspeed.
[12:05:41 AM]
Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Software Tries 'Concept Mapping', yahoo article about yet another mapping project.
[7:45:19 PM]
Sunday, February 18, 2001
From the same site: "Kaizo Laboratories was founded on the belief that having the right idea and no money is better than having the wrong idea and $20 million." Right on.
[1:11:50 PM]
missingmatter, an excellent blog that the author recently wrote and informed me of. Here's his post about IAML and Vizbang. I'm not currently making better use of organic shapes or transparency and other subtle and/or neat graphics tricks mostly because I simply either tried to implement them quickly and they didn't work consistently (i.e. with transparency) or because I simply haven't gotten around to doing so. The potential for applying higher quality rendering to this work is, though, basically quite limitless and it's definitely a direction I can see things going in the future.
[12:51:53 PM]
Thursday, February 15, 2001
Start-up sees browsers' future in 3D - Tech News - CNET.com. Hmm.
[12:08:46 PM]
Tuesday, February 13, 2001
New (?) stuff from Mappa.Mundi... World Wide Wunderkammer. Seems somewhat reminiscent of a comment Mark made a long time ago, something about wanting the web to include more tchotckes.
[12:30:35 PM]
And finally, after months and months of the power crises, the mainstream media finally manages to break the renewables angle: A Lost Opportunity That Worsened Crisis/Utilities and federal regulators shut the door on renewable power in California.
[12:01:46 PM]
Wednesday, February 07, 2001
The Anti-Mac Interface...this is old, but good. Talks about the incredible stickiness of the WIMP interface.
[1:39:01 PM]
Tuesday, February 06, 2001
The Brain patent Hmmm.
[4:09:08 PM]
Hmm, does this thing actually work? It seems like very very many of the 'blogs listed are all in the 60-65% range, although it's hard to read their scale.
[3:09:04 PM]
Taylor is ranting about the uselessness of micropayments, and as usual, he's right on. But the reason it's coming up again is because Amazon has started some new microdonation thing, which makes much more sense, and might just work. At some point I'll dig into this and put a payme button up here. It's the kind of thing that will be useless for a while and maybe then will get a critical mass and pick up steam, with the emphasis on maybe.
[3:00:56 PM]
Trellix came up at a really good meeting that I had last week. It had, but apparently no longer has, a navigation bar that gave the user of a site some positional feedback on where they were at in the site. It was a map, but a pretty good, pretty decently implemented one. However, they aren't using it on their site any more, but ironically enough I feel like it could really benefit from it. Maybe I'm weird, but these basic questions (how big is this site? where am I in it?) still aren't being answered by anyone.
Unfortunately, my work isn't really doing that good of a job of answering them yet, either. One of the things that was so so good about this meeting was that I finally got direct, technical feedback on what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong. And it's OK, because I know I'm doing stuff wrong, and I know that's inevitable. What I am doing right, and I hope to be doing more right soon, is creating a testbed where paths to generating interfaces that answer these basic questions can be easily created. Not just created; but created, destroyed, and rebuilt. Creative destruction.
Or maybe there's been too much destruction...another thing that was discussed is the sheer number of unsuccessful attempts that have been made in this direction. Perspecta. VRML. Trellix's thing. Chrome. All the little one-off demos that people have created over the years. New versions of rendering layers that come out that are harder to program than old layers.
And yet people are still banging away at this whole class of problems. There are some solid companies on the context page, and there's certainly lots of good research going on. It just all happens in fits and starts, taking both longer and going faster than anyone thinks it will.
[2:12:32 PM]
Monday, February 05, 2001
Uncommon Wisdom from a Trio of True Believers, an interview with the folks who are starting Ironweed Capital. Nice to hear about first-timer focused VC. Interesting that so many big companies were started by first timers (like AOL, Microsoft, and eBay) at a time when so many VC are looking for people who have been through it.
[2:22:29 PM]
Friday, February 02, 2001
Space Shuttle News Reference Manual, this is off topic too, but very cool: it's practically instructions for building a space shuttle. Maybe not quite, but very very detailed information about it at least.
[3:45:49 PM]
This one of their's looks a lot like this one of mine, from a long time ago, except their's is much, much bigger.
[3:22:52 PM]
walrus : gallery...this page (all walrus screenshots) is especially nice.
[3:14:31 PM]
Walrus - Graph Visualization Tool [from Mike], very cool, very large hyperbolic trees. These have all the same usability issues as all hyperbolic trees, and it looks like they're doing the "cube=page" thing that I tried, but these are unusually beautiful examples.
[3:08:25 PM]
Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Brill's Content: Nader's Untold Story. Ok, this is off-topic, but it's awfully interesting.
[2:17:03 PM]
Monday, January 29, 2001
Suck lays waste to wireless. I tend to agree, but I just have yet to see any wireless application (other than two way text paging) that I would even vaguely want. Doesn't mean they don't exist though.
[5:52:42 PM]
More on Cast Software...I just used their VB application miner to look at the Vizbang source code. Here's a screenshot of one part of their application. I think it's totally cool! Even for a relatively uncomplicated application like mine, this is helpful and neat, and it would be proportionally more helpful for something more complicated.
[12:59:55 PM]
Friday, January 26, 2001
CAST - Parser-based software for e-business and n-tier applications this is neat stuff. It looks like the server is in France (and ergo can be kind of slow, although it could just be IE/DHTML wonkiness), but the demo is really cool.
[1:05:38 PM]
Bush Tries To Ease Power Woes, here's the original link. Woof.
[12:07:00 PM]
Another stage 3 alert for energy-starved Californians more power blahblah...apparently our fine president offered to "relax pollution standards" to help us out here, which is so awful and ridiculous that it makes me crazy. This is just like SimCity, Governor Davis! BUILD MORE WINDMILLS!
[11:45:16 AM]
Thursday, January 25, 2001
Powermapper - Automatic Site Mapping Tool, looks neato...for mapping of existing sites, including page thumbnails.
[5:58:59 PM]
Doc Searls Weblog, under "Gratuitous Blog Rolling", apparently lots of bloggers are Meyers-Briggs type ENFPs. Interesting: I am, too, or close at least; last I checked I was halfway between I and E on the extroversion scale.
For some reason writing this entry made me think of Seven of Nine on Voyager, demanding to know what her designation is. Hmm.
[4:13:00 PM]
Could Partial Answer to California Energy Woes Be Blowing in the Wind? (AP), hmm, someone has finally written a story about using renewables out here! For some reason it's broken in Tampa Bay but not elsewhere so far. Hmm.
[1:11:21 PM]
Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Utne Reader Online: Society. I'm doing a little research on creeping corporate ownership of everything and storing the rough notes in my increasingly misnamed other blog. The Utne link isn't really visualization related, but I really like the point it makes on the absurd omnipresence of stock market info (and what it could be better replaced with).
[11:19:59 PM]
About BXXP...what is it? Has anyone done anything fun with this? Seems interesting...
[5:52:18 PM]
Friday, January 19, 2001
Web Sites Begin to Self Organize ... from the NYT, but after scanning it, it doesn't seem to mention the first self-organization structures that the web evolved: web rings.
[1:36:22 AM]
XPLANE | xblog (The visual thinking weblog.) dunno if I linked this before anywhere, but it's going to be in the right hand column in a second. Very cool and incredibly comprehensive blog.
[1:27:57 AM]
Vios ... yet still another one, this one looks like they're working on a real-estate model.
[12:59:13 AM]
Jester.com, here's some new competition. Still more reminiscenes of VRML demos. This came from the Herring's dealflow column; they apparently just did a $6.8M self-financed round, are burning $300k/mo, and have significant revenue. Interesting.
[12:57:57 AM]
Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Real World. Ugh. The web is a mess. Looking for production information for abonecronedrone. Hmm.
[2:53:57 AM]
Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Laid Off Or Under Arrest?/Massive Dot-Com Workforce Reductions Inspire Military-Style Security. Wow, yucky. How not to do layoffs.
[5:36:15 PM]
MoneyHunt...yep, it's a TV show where the prize is seed funding.
[11:30:23 AM]
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