Author Archives: donturn

About donturn

Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems, information analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis.

The Vintage Mac Museum

Adam Rosen has put together a great online Vintage Mac Museum, where you can learn all about the history of our Apple hardware. Adam is very knowledgable about the history of the Macintosh, and has some great info.

This brings to mind all of the Macintoshes I’ve owned (or used for work):

  • (Fat) Mac 512k
  • Macintosh SE (with 20MB HD – woohoo!)
  • Macintosh SE/30
  • Mac IIx (with the Texas Instrument LISP chip in it)
  • Mac Classic (color)
  • Duo 280 (where I installed my own internal modem, the Mac equivalent of neurosurgery at the time)
  • NeXT slab (that counts now, doesn’t it?)
  • Powerbook 540 (Blackbird?)
  • Mac IIsi
  • Quadra and Performas (many different ones, all similar)
  • A large, Macintosh-less gap that could be called the dark ages.
  • Powerbook G4
  • G5 tower
  • MacBookPro

And there are probably at least a few more I’m forgetting.

IDEA 2006 – October 23-24 in Seattle

If I could only stay in Seattle another month, I’d certainly be attending the IDEA 2006 Conference (Information: Design, Experience, Access.) going on at the Seattle Public Library, October 23-24, 2006.

From the conference blog:

IDEA 2006 brings together a diverse set of designers, creators, and researchers addressing a fundamental challenge we’re facing today – how to let everyday people take true advantage of the overwhelming mass of information that floods their lives.

There are currently many different kinds of folks working in this space, but they typically don’t talk with one another. For this event, we’ve made an effort to invite presenters across a stunning array of disciplines – museum design, information visualization, librarians, environmental design, user research, engineering, interaction design, product strategy, and more.

It’s important to recognize that this is not airy-fairy theoretical stuff. These presenters are practitioners, people actually doing this cross-channel, cross-media work with complex information. A primary goal of this conference is to give you the confidence to cross boundaries and engage with a wide range of problems.

So if you want to find out where the world of design and information is heading, and how you can prepare, come join us October 23-24 in Seattle.

Just because I can’t make it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. What are you waiting for? Register for IDEA 2006 right now!

Call for Papers – Special Issue of the Journal of Web Engineering

Along with my colleagues and co-guest editors Jim Jansen, Kirstie Hawkey, Melanie Kellar, and Andy Edmonds, I am happy to announce a call for paper submissions for a Special Issue of the Journal of Web Engineering focusing on Logging Traces of Web Activity.

People are now using the World Wide Web (Web) to seek, gather, and share information in increasingly complex ways. In order to develop the next generation of Web information systems, we must have an understanding of people’s goals, their context, and their situational aspects. These aspects are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate in laboratory settings. Therefore, researchers must turn to naturalistic studies involving large number of users who may be separated geographically. In these settings, many researchers require logs of user behaviour on the Web to study the interactions of Web users, both with respect to general behaviour and in order to develop and evaluate new tools and techniques. Traces of Web activity are used for a wide variety of research and commercial purposes including user interface usability and evaluations of user behaviour and patterns on the Web. Unfortunately, current tools and processes do not support consistent and detailed studies using logs of user behaviour. As such, there is a duplication of effort, which hampers progress in the field.

This special issue is inspired by the Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection workshop at the WWW 2006 Conference this May in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Relevant research themes include, but are not limited to:

  • Methodologies for data collection (client-side, server-side, proxy-based)
  • Collection of browser data (e.g. events, bookmarks, history, and caches)
  • Collection of data from users across different browsers
  • AJAX-compatible logging systems
  • Using mixed data sources for data validation
  • Cleaning Web data
  • Web data warehousing
  • Using Web data for proactive user functionality
  • Methods for matching user behaviour to task models
  • Qualitative annotation of Web data

Submissions

Submissions should be full length articles. All submissions will be peer reviewed and should describe original research that is not under consideration in any other forum. Please follow the formatting guidelines of the journal. Submissions should be emailed to melanie@cs.dal.ca in PDF format. All questions regarding submissions should be directed to Melanie Kellar (melanie@cs.dal.ca).

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: January 8, 2007
Reviews Due: February 8, 2007
Notification to Authors: February 19, 2007
Final Papers Due: March 19, 2007

Seattle & Portland this week

I am in Seattle this week for the Seattle Innovation Symposium, where academics and industry are working together to understand and distribute the innovation. I will also be talking with some of the smart people at Microsoft about the OpenChoice project: a platform for Web Content Classification & Filtering that I’m working on with many others at UT.

I have already been in town a day and half. I’ve been enjoying the nice weather (no, that’s not a Seattle rain joke) and the downtown area. Yesterday I hit Dilettante Chocolates and walked down to the Pike Place Market for some fresh crab cocktail and hot french bread (a tasty sandwich indeed) at the waterfront park. Then a trip over to the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project (museum) and ran smack dab into a Star Trek convention (no, that’s not a Seattle geek joke). Then somehow I ended up at REI, which seems inevitable here in town (yes, that is a Seattle treehugger joke).

Later in the week, I’m driving down to Portland and will plan on at least one Lewis & Clark related stop, but am open to any road trip recommendations or must-sees in Portland. (I’ve never been to Oregon and I’m happy to correct that error. Also, that’s one more state I can say I’ve been to.)

Labor Day means Pizza

I’ve been working through Peter Reinhart’s book American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza and working on my own quest for perhaps not the perfect pizza, but some very passable options I could make myself.

With Labor Day freeing up a little more time, I tried out two batches of pizza dough. This time I pitted two different flours against each other, with the constant of the bread machine as the dough prep system. (If it is possible to get passable dough from a home machine is a bigger test indeed.)

The first batch came out pretty good, but was perhaps a little heavier than expected, perhaps from the fresh basil and dried oregano I minced and mixed in with the dough. Here’s what I came up with (I forgot to get a picture before I started to cut up the pie):

pizza dough experiment 4, no cheese

While this pie was quite tasty, the key wasn’t the dough, it was the roasted red and yellow peppers (not hatch chiles, just peppers this time). If it looks a bit odd, note that I forgot to buy some cheese, but the majority of the time I don’t like most cheeses on pizza anyway.

The second dough batch was with a “bread flour” that I also partly sifted. I also tweaked my recipe by adding about 1/4 tsp. more EVOO. This time I added just a bit of dried oregano and some rosemary to the dough, but much less overall than the spices from the previous batch.

Here’s what I came up with, forgive the oddlly-shaped final form:

pizza dough experiment, no cheese

The key to this one? Chopped jalepenos and more fresh rosemary with slightly over-ripe roma tomatoes. Tasty. I also have to improve my abilities to evenly distribute toppings. The dough was definitely better, lighter and cooked just a bit better on this other pizza stone.

MacBookPro first impressions

Yesterday I got a MacBookPro and am only starting to use it. It’s the 15″ with a 100GB 7200 rpm drive with 2GB RAM. Sweet. The Migration Assistant was just about perfect in moving everything over. I set up a administrator account with administrator priviledges, but not the same name as the account name I want to transfer from my G4 Powerbook. (I think I’m still going to be calling the new machine a powerbook out of habit).

As you go through the migration process, you boot your old machine in target disk mode (hold down the “T” key when booting the system) and with a firewire cable connected to both machines, the data transfer begins after a few questions about what accounts and files you want to move over (just a few choices, for files mostly everything on the disk or just those related to the account you want to migrate). Then the transfer begins. I started this once and when the estimate was more than 3 hours for the transfer, I deferred until later in the evening. Sure enough, about 3 hours later (much later), it seemed to be done.

Easily enough, I just rebooted the MBP (maybe I just need a great name for the new machine – any ideas? “Bender”? too obvious?) and logged on with the account name (and password) from the G4 powerbook. Simple as that. I knew things were looking good right away as the boot screen changed color to the background I had on the G4. Everything loaded from my startup items, with one exception, Textspander (yes, I know there is a newer version out). Nice job Apple software developers.

Mail.app snapped open quickly (after being selected my old customized dock – great!), but crashed in just a few minutes when I went to clearing out my junk mailbox. (It might have something to do with getting junk mail in odd character sets I don’t have the related fonts for. Just a theory.) I started mail.app right back up and it’s still going strong now. After working around in mail, I don’t feel a neck-snapping performance improvement, this is a bit disappointing.

Next was Firefox 1.5.06 and it seems fine too, including extensions. I checked and it is a universal binary. This is disappointing in a way, because Ffox still seems slow. (Oh, if there were all the right extensions in Safari versions.)

I like the increased screen resolution and the keyboard feels fine, a little mushy but with good bounce on the keys. Also, not as noisy as the G4. The addition of a camera is nice, but I don’t think I’ll make much use of it. There is not Firewire 800 slot anymore, I would have wished that Apple would have put another USB port in its place. As has been commented on before by many others, there is no internal modem included. I hope I don’t have cause to regret that. The PC Card slot is replaced with a smaller add-on slot that has some name I won’t remember because I’ll probably never need a device for it. The new magnetic plug power supply seems fine, but the box is actually LARGER than the old one. Also, I had three G4 powerbook power supplies, now that investment is lost (except that the extension cords seem to fit with the new power supplies).

The next, system-wide step seems to be making sure I have (intel) universal binaries for all of the applications on my system. I assume all the Apple applications are ready (and they were kept from deletion when I transferred the account over from the G4 with its potentially non-universal binary app versions).

The big question: Does anyone know of a utility that could scan my disk and make a list? (even better, give me links for the apps? even better, auto-download those possible?) Comments or emails are most welcome.

The best thing I have found so far to help with this is the MacUpdate: Universal Binary (Macintosh Intel) page (with an RSS feed).

Hatch Green Chile Salsa

While not really an open-source salsa recipe (it is much too basic), this is what I made this weekend, now that Central Market has their roasted green chiles from Hatch, New Mexico in stock.

There are no exact amounts, almost everything is adjustable for your tastes and what you have available, so let’s be algebraic with ratios:

  • 2x Organic Plum Tomatoes – diced
  • Kosher Salt – 1 pinch/tomato used
  • Oregano, Cumin or fresh Basil to taste (or not)
  • 0.5x Garlic Clove – finely minced

    • Stir these first four ingredients together well and let sit while prepping the remaining ingredients

  • 0.75x Yellow Hatch Onions – diced
  • 1x Roasted Green Hatch Chiles -diced (assume 6″ long peppers with seeds removed)
  • Roasted Yellow Corn (not pictured)

And this is what you get.

Excellent with some corn tortillas.

Let's kill the CAPS LOCK KEY

Does anyone use the CAPS LOCK key? It does seem to be a throwback from a very different time. WHO NEEDS A CAPS LOCK KEY? INTERNET NEWBIES? YOUR FAVORITE SPAM MAIL PROVIDER? (Especially when most WYSISYG word processors like Microsoft Word have a function that easily converts text to upper case whenever you please.) This Slashdot post: War Declared on Caps Lock Key explains it all.

“I’ve launched a campaign to rid the world of the caps lock key. Sure, there are more serious problems to solve but please, think of the children! How am I going to explain to my kids why some of the most valuable keyboard real estate is squatted by a large, useless key that above all you must not press! Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key. It’s going to be a hard, long, and possibly very embarassing war on uppercase, but some things just need to be done. ”

Of course, there is a (Google) group called CAPSoff to discuss the woes and strategies (and some humorous nonsense) about getting rid of the keyboard’s least popular key.

Allow me to point out that I have two other keyboard pet peeves too:

  1. The num(ber) pad on the right of most full keyboards, that rarely gets used and requires a Kent Tekulve side-arm mousing style. I want those 4 inches back on my desktop!
  2. Keyboard real estate I’d like to have is a BACKSPACE key on my powerbook keyboard.

A trivia question: do you know how “upper case” got its name?

Update: Of course, there is a blog about the CAPS LOCK key fight.