Membranophonist’s Ramblings

1. Woz wanted to access the ARPANET, but did not have the thousands of dollars to buy a teletype system. He put his engineering skills to work and built a terminal system using a typewriter keyboard and a television.
2. Combining the knowledge gained from his television terminal project with digital chips, Woz envisioned how color could be introduced to computer displays while working on Breakout for Atari.
3. Woz did not like the “hard-to-understand lights and switches” of the Altair. He saw the potential of combining his CPU design with his television terminal to form a stand-alone computer.
4. Being of substantial wealth post-Apple co-founding and an electronics engineer, Woz was an early adopter of home theater technologies (laser discs!). He found the array of remotes required to control everything problematic. Knowing that all the different components needed were infrared signals, he designed and built the first universal remote.

• It seems impossible to buy plain denim jeans in this city. I don’t want pre-faded, pre-scuffed, permanently wrinkled, or otherwise counterfeited jeans.
• Hipsters: please bathe. Seriously.
• The 24-hour subway beats Seattle’s Metro bus system. Going out for a late meal is much easier here in part because of the transportation infrastructure (decrepit as it is in places).
• The Strand is a great bookstore unless you are looking for design books other than those focused on graphic design.
• New Yorkers are rain wimps.
• iPods are very popular.
• I’m surprised by the number of men here who don’t know how to wear a suit. The trousers should be cuffed and the coat should not have sufficient sleeve length to double as a straight jacket. Also, wearing a t-shirt beneath your button-up shirt gives you the male equivalent of panty line.

(For example,) we wanted a flat filesystem, where you wouldn’t put your files in directories, but you would tag them with keywords, and instead of saying “Open this directory,” you’d say “Open all my email and send it to this person.” In the end we realized that directories are nice and the industry has been using directories for a long time, so it’s almost intuitive. We do have database features in the filesystem, but they’re not as extreme as we first thought.

Cyril Meurillon, Senior Kernel Engineer for the BeOS circa 1998

You can learn more about the BeOS Bible at the publisher’s page.

NetPositive, the default browser for the BeOS, allowed users to attach keywords to bookmarks and create dynamic groupings (Smart Bookmark Folders, essentially) based on these and other metadata such as the title and URL.

I just got back from a few days in New York, where I was visiting a friend who is graduating from the New School’s jazz program. You can hear Nick’s trumpet playing at his site.

Using Wayfaring, I’ve created a map showing a few of the places we went.

I encountered several interaction design problems during the trip.

1. The parallax of the touch screen-based MTA card machines is too high, leading to mistakes when targeting small buttons such as the numbers on the screen that allows the input of arbitrary monetary values.
2. The need to select the screen language every time a subway card is filled could be removed by encoding the selected language preference on the card itself. A means of changing the language would be provided, but the step would no longer be required every time money was added.
3. More broadly, having to take different trains for the airport and the subway is just stupid. In Boston, the Blue T line takes you directly to Logan airport for a standard subway fare. The AirTrain to JFK is $5 each way. The trains are nice and have pretty good maps and clear announcements, but why a separate train system? I’m guessing it has to do with jurisdictional boundaries between the Port Authority (which manages the airport) and the state (which manages the subway).

Apple’s iWork applications (Pages and Keynote) provide text styling options beyond those available through the standard Font panel; kerning, leading, and text shadow coloring among them. I wanted to use text with a colored shadow created in Pages to get the iTunes control label look in a mockup. I should be able to simply copy and paste, right? If only it were so…

Pages at the top, TextEdit in the middle, Curio at the bottom:

Ick.

Radar Bug #4339939

To illustrate a bug in Apple’s Preview 3.0 concerning the display of image dimensions, I will use the Man of the Hour, I. Lewis “Five Indictments” Libby:

As you can see in the Document Info window, the dimensions are 200 x 297.

Now I crop the image a bit and save the changes to disk…

The image dimensions don’t update until the image is reopened.

How cropping the image increased the file size is a mystery to me.

Our kids are going to be rich, in the top half-a-percent of the world, but 99% of what I have will go to philanthropy, and Bill [Gates] has the same attitude, basically. We are not going to turn out super-superwealthy kids. They’ll be wealthy, there’s no question about that, but the idea of dynastic fortune turns me off. If you talk about equality of opportunity in this country and really having everybody with talent having a fair shot at getting the brass ring, the idea that you hand over huge positions in society simply because someone came from the right womb, I just think it’s almost un-American.

Fortune: Buffett Speaks Out…

I like the last sentence in the above quote, but it means that we wouldn’t have The World’s Greatest, Most Fearless Leader Ever!

I came across this via Oliver Willis, who highlighted Buffett’s comments on the idiocy that is the flat tax.

If you go to the men’s washrooms at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, you may notice there’s a fly in the urinals. So what do you think most men do? That’s right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don’t even think about it, and they don’t need to read a user’s manual; it’s just an instinctive reaction. The interesting feature of these urinals is that they’re deliberately designed to take advantage of this inherent human male tendency. The fly isn’t really a fly. It’s a drawing of a fly, permanently etched onto the porcelain. And the etching isn’t placed in just any old location on the urinal. On the contrary, it’s been strategically etched into the “sweet spot” of the urinal, the point of curvature that minimizes splash back.

Kim Vicente: The Human Factor (pages 85-86)

Someone give that designer a medal!

The Onion — February 18, 2004: Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades

ABC News — September 14, 2005: Gillette Announces Five-Blade Razor

[Adhocracies] are highly decentralized organizations of professionals deployed in small teams in response to changing conditions in dynamic, complex environments. The adhocracy is the organizational type that least adheres to traditional management principles, relying on constant contact to coordinate among teams.

Jonathan Grudin, Groupware and Cooperative Work: Problems and Prospects (page 183)

Another interesting bit from “The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design”.

A quick search tells me “adhocracy” was coined by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock. Quite fitting that I first found the origin of this word at Wikipedia.

My investigation into the etymology of “adhocracy” also led me to the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form. Wild, wild stuff.