CogBlogged from ‘December, 2006’

Keep out the comment spam bots! On the receiving end of much internet spam roach droppings, I understand the use of captchas, those random letter combos generated as graphics, intended to keep out the automated spam bots on web submission forms. I have used them myself. So I like them when the work for me, but oi! I cringe when I have poured my eneergy into writing the perfect comment and eager to see it posted, and Zam! I am forced to squint at some obscure twisted set of letters and punch the into the box. It really does short circuit the connection experience you just made with a blog writer and your communication. It completely drops a trap door open on your usability experience. But okay, necessary, small evils we can live with. What I do not like living with are crappy captchas, the ones that make you work [...]

flickr foto A Tree Swims in Arizonaavailable on flickr Hmmm, did some aerial agent drop this Christmas tree in our yard? Good shot! It landed in the pool! At least someone got to use the pool this year. Okay, actually we put the tree in here. On the advice of 2 different friends, it is suggested a good day’s soak in the pool will help the tree last longer in the Arizona dry climate. "Hey! No rough housing in the deep end!" While on one hand, we’ve been soaking Christmas trees in a swimming pool, I was rather unusually surprised to take a peek at the only flickr pool I started, and after a few years of contaiing 3 images from me, has grown to a collection of almost 600! The In Camera No PhotoShop pool, a place for photos that have captured an effect that looks like it was [...]

Not sure if the net really even noticed, but for the last few days CogDogBlog was been Four Oh Four, off-line, DOA, kaput, flat-lined. It is almost ironic- on my plane flight out from Phoenix to Austin, a thought floated in my mind that I had not recently showed my gratitude to Audree, a colleague from my Maricopa days, who is not only a brilliant programmer (she coded the Maricopa eportfolio software), but for the last year, she has provided my free web hosting for CogDogBlog on a server she maintains for her outside work. The irony was that she emailed me that night to let me know my apache web server was unable to handle out of the ridinary requests way out of control, and that it needed to go offline as it was dragging down the other web sites on her server…. and that she was getting out [...]

At least I was home for the weekend! But Monday, and I made it through a 45 minute line at the security gate (hey folks get those dangerous gels inside the baggies!) for my flight to Austin. This week is the 2006 Pachyderm Users Conference — the first time around for this conference, but it will also take place next year. Sometime in the cracks of the weekend and the rest of the flight, I need to brush up on my Pachyderm expert tips (I’m on a panel, posing as an expert), a hands on workshop for Audacity (basic recording for an interview/intro, editing, save to mp3), as well as helping facilitate a half day preconference workshop on Pachyderm. What’s Pachyderm, they say? Check out the elephant sized project’s web site. I’ll post some references for the Audacity workshop once it is polished. One thing I did find when googling [...]

The point of cognitive desperation on a plane flight is reading the in-flight magazine (no there is one level lower, reading the Sky Mall catalog), but o my flight Thursday to San Francisco, I chuckled at a “map” of the US (under heading “Food Nation”) featuring city/place names that are also food names… and right there, partly representing Arizona, was out little town of Strawberry, we our cabin sits. Of course, there are some oversights from our elsewhere in our state: * Potato Lake * the town of Ajo (means garlic) * Salt River (condiments are food, right?) * Rye * Turkey Flat (also several creeks) * Berry * Tortilla Flats (and a creek) * Peach Springs * Walnut Canyon (and a creek) * Lime Creek And on a side bark to web content, here is an example of lack of micro-contenting information. The magazine took a clump of separate [...]

No web form open to comments goes un-spammed, so its no surprise that via 2 different YouTube accounts I have, that there have been a spate of unwarranted, message spam porn links from folks like “goodlife100″ and “xacana10″. Sadly, YouTube, awash in Googlebucks, seems ill equipped to do anything about this. It’s hard to even locate a decent contact, and when I reported this last week, I got a reply saying they were aware of the problem, were removing accounts, and asked me to keep forwarding notice of message spammers. Well, for one thing, these accounts are still sending messages to me second account, so their action did nothing. For another, such a solution of asking me to copy paste the crap to send them, is a rather retrograde approach to dealing with spammers. I’ll just turning off the availability to get messages, but I was expecting a bit more. [...]

Are you trying to get a pulse on the wild west of the latest videos streaking across YouTube, or looking to out flank your friends who forward those funny flicks by email? Try Viral Video Chart: We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we’ve had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 20 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what’s hot and what’s not. At the moment we only look for references to videos on the three most influential video sharing sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. We plan to add more soon. We also considered wiretapping your email and [...]

Another interesting web add-on I looked at today is snap “preview anywhere”. It is essentially a service, you enroll a web site URL, it generates a line of JavaScript that goes in the HEAD of your site’s pages (or better the single header template file). But what does it do? It adds a function so that every hyperlink in a page can be a graphic preview to its destination. So when you mouse rollover a link, you can see, before you click, a small window version of that site, and it may convince you whether or not it is worth really following through with that click. As a test, I “snapped” CogDogBlog today, so a previous post has a link to http://www.openaugment.org/. In the old web, you’d have to make some guesses based on the hyperlink’s text itself, the context in other content, and perhaps some guesses by seeing the [...]

Wow, I have stumbled into some amazing, attention distracting things recently! I am not sure I can describe drawballl (not that the site explains, but hey, somethings need discovery). The “Ball” is a giant round piece of canvas, where people can go in at a very small scale and draw, draw, draw will colors, creating small bits of art of a fine scale. So you start out a great distance: So you move a circle around and click to zoomin several levels to see the micro level patterns: I think that the site keeps a record of all pen strokes, so the drawings can be peeled back in time (you see this animated in the “Hall of Fame” area). Apparently, the site owners keep an out out for “good stuff: and try to preserve it. But I must admit, I just got abig smile out of their opening agreement screen, [...]

Just got back home from a tremendous 2 days of NMC meetings (wow, I never thought “tremendous” went with “meetings” but ours are) where I was able to check off one of my 43 people… the legendary Doug Engelbart. And of course the reflex association goes to “yeah, he’s the guy that invented the mouse…” but that was but one small thing he did for computer users. Just about every aspect of the computers we pound at like millions of monkeys can be traced back through Jobs ‘n Woz through Xerox Parc to Engelbart’s work at SRI in the 1960s. It has been a while since I had since the famous 1968 Mother of All Demos (the full video is up at Google Video), but it is un-canny how he demonstrates computer interface elements that still took a generation to arrive (and have not evolved much beyond). So here is [...]