interaction design

“The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward,” he scoffed. “Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface.”

Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface

Rodent Issues

My (enormously expensive optical) mouse has gone nuts. It has trouble distinguishing between single-clicks and double-clicks. About 70% of the time, it will interpret a single-click as a double. It wasn't until it started doing this that I noticed how much I use the damn thing for text selection and editing. It's driving me crazy.

It seems to be a hardware problem, cos I've reinstalled the drivers and tried other mice. Apparently Intellipoint optical mice are prone to this problem, when a tiny bit of metal cracks inside. I haven't been mistreating it much though (not half as badly as my keyboard at any rate). I'm sorely tempted to crack it open and have a look around (not gonna be easy to do without breaking it though...no screws), but I think it might still be under warranty. If I'm really unpleasant to the folk in Dixons, they might give me a new mouse.

The other thing nettling me at the moment is that my internet access has gone flaky. No-one else in the house has any problem. The data-rate has slowed to a crawl, and it fails DNS lookups every second page. It's peculiar. Some sites (like work mail, skynet) I can reach without trouble...but clicking on links almost never works. Instead I have to paste the link into a new browser window and hit refresh a few times and it may (if I'm lucky) load up. It took a hell of a lot of refreshing to get here. I might try Firefox (or whatever it's called these days), if I can find an installer somewhere.

It's funny how two relatively minor issues with my wagon can distress me so much. That's probably not a good thing.

I sense an almighty windows reinstall coming up.

Have some juice.

Half-glass apple juice with shot of vinegar for more attractive (to fruit fly) smell. Shot of washing-up liquid for (I assume) reduced surface tension.

So they drown. Layer of dead flies forms on surface of juice. Corpses slowly become water(juice)logged. Sink to the bottom slowly, one by one, joining layer there.

The funny thing is, there's still just as many of them around the kitchen, so they must be breeding faster than they're drowning. I suspect natural selection is right now in the process of creating a hyperintelligent species of fruit fly that doesn't like apple juice.

So today I went after them with the hoover. If that doesn't put a sufficient dent in their population for the apple juice traps to finish them off... ...well then god help us all.

(Transmission cuts off. Fade to black, roll credits.)

Guilt

ummm...well, I'm still around, but feeling terribly guilty about the lack of updates. Normal service may possibly be resumed soon. Have been busy(ish), staring at screens and trying to compose thesis-worthy sentences. Very soon, I hope to be composing thesis-worthy paragraphs. Within a few months I should be capable of pages. Chapters are looking good for sometime this decade. At the current rate, my thesis should be mostly complete by 2024 (except for proper footnotes, obviously).

Since this isn't a proper update, I'm just gonna list out a whole bunch of things with no links. This is really just a glorified email.

Fahrenheit 911 is pretty good. I've watched a rough cut downloaded from the web (which Michael Moore sanctions apparently) and I fully intend going to see it in a cinema, so as it gets the ticket sale (apparently nefarious Republicans went to see it in the states, but bought a ticket for Garfield the Movie and snuck into the theater to deny Moore the sale). The movie focuses more on emotion than facts...but that's not neccessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of facts in there too, and they're not anything tremendously new. Moore understands that many people already know the facts in the abstract, but they've lost their capacity for outrage due to overexposure. F911 is very effective at getting the anger going again.

Turns out that Ross, one of the guys who moved in a few months ago, is something of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. He believes that the US had foreknowledge of the attacks, but allowed them to happen for "geostrategic" reasons. The US needed a war in Afghanistan to secure the Unocal pipeline and to balance power in the region. He has a movie called "Truth and Lies of 911" which outlines the evidence for this thesis, and it's fairly persuasive. It didn't entirely convince me (the guy presenting the film is a bit of a nutcase), but there are a lot of interesting facts in it.

Oh, and I watched Matchstick Men last week. It's a good movie, despite featuring Nicholas Cage. I recommend it if you're looking for a DVD to rent.

Music-wise, I'm still rambling through Ross' enormous mp3 collection. The Avalanches, Mew, the Killers, Bic Runga, Tori Amos. "Lola Stars and Stripes" by the Stills is a kickass song. I'm still listening to DJ Shadow's first album and Sigur Ros.

Allmusic has gotten an updated interface. It looks pretty cool, but they're having some teething problems. Probably the only web resource as cool as Google.

I went to go see Rodrigo y Gabriela in Dolan's last week. Ok, this is the 3rd time I've seen them and I guess their stuff is a bit samey...but it's still amazing to watch them beat those guitars into submission. They have a new live album out which I'm thinking of getting.

The Frames are releasing a new single in August, to precede their album due in early September. Highly anticipated, I can tell you. Hansard ran through the single (called Finally) in Dolan's 2 weeks ago. I'd heard the song before, and thought it was pretty good, but they've gone and added 2 or 3 whole new sections to it - which fit perfectly. It's always interesting to hear how the songs develop as they go on.

They're playing in Marlay Pk. (where we saw REM last summer) at the end of August, along with Idlewild, Supergrass and Bell X1. It'll be the biggest gig they've ever headlined. Will I be there? Wild horses...

Preparations are gathering momentum for an enormous house party here on Friday night. It's Marius' 36th birthday, and judging from the amount of beer that's been bought...it may very well be his last. It's kind of a meta-party, with everyone inviting everyone they know, for no particularly good reason. In stark contrast to many student house parties I've attended, this one has been meticulously planned. The entire house has been cleaned, beer bought, an itinerary composed (the Mill Bar, the Lodge, the house) and finger-food was mentioned. I await the outcome with interest. It has all the makings of a complete disaster.

Oonagh is planning a paintballing session sometime in August and is trying to enlist everyone she knows who might be handy with a gun. She got first dibs on Finbar, Jeff and Marian G. I get Alex, who's a pacifist. As her ex, I'm considering investing in some groin protection.

What else? Well, my camera hasn't arrived yet. Apparently the shop is still ordering it in. Serves me right for buying so cheaply I guess.

Eventually I will come up with a proper update...

foobar2000 - a good-enough mp3 player for windows

It doesn't take up half your hard drive or have more shiny buttons than a 747 cockpit, so it's obviously not in a position to compete with dbPowerAmp. But for luddites like me that are still using a pre-AOL version of Winamp, it might be worth switching to.

Some good things about it:

• Gracefully handles large (thousands of files) playlists, caching tag info.
  
• Tab-based interface for multiple playlists. Reasonably clean UI throughout.
  
• Saves playlists & player state on exit.
  
• ReplayGain. Calculates the "perceived loudness" of an mp3 and saves a gain value in the id3-or-equivalent-tag of the file. Adjusts the volume accordingly when playing. Simple. Effective. Took a while to do the initial gain calculations, though - about 6 seconds per file on my machine. Fortunately it wasn't written by an untrained ape, so it can continue to play music while it's doing the calculations.
  
• CDDB support. Select a CD's worth of files, press one button to get nice correct track info by using the track lengths to identify the CD, press another to write it into the id3 tags. Shweet.
  
• Support for every file format I care about.
  
• "Playlist builder" to make playlists from simple search queries.
  
• No skins. No visualisations to speak of. Yes those are good things.
  
• "Stop after current" command. Select a track in a playlist to skip to it after current.
  
• No bugs evident in the last 2 weeks of use.
  

Some bad things:

• No convenient volume control. Strange.
  
• "Current Track" indicator in the playlist view is a little hard to see.
  
• I have to write use-case documentation. Oh wait, that's nothing to do with the mp3 player.
  

In other words go download it already.

Happy Birthday DJ Doon!

Oh, you want content? Try this rant, and remember you asked for it.