Category: General

Today’s book game output:

   To turn the car to the right, one turns the steering wheel clockwise (so that it moves to the right).

Just back from CHI 2004, the biggest annual usability conference, this year staged in Vienna. Jiri Mzourek, Matthias Mueller-Prove and I presented an HCI Overview paper about usability in open source software– specifically, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org and GNOME.

Bumped into Ron Bird, who I haven’t seen or heard from in 10 years when we worked at the now-defunct Reuters Usability Group in London. Also bumped into Seth, from whom we skilfully managed to avoid taking any questions at the end of our presentation 🙂

Coolest talk by far was from the guys at Carnegie Mellon who invented the ESP Game which, if a not unreasonable number of people play it, could end up generating accurate textual descriptions of every image on the web within a month[1]… neat idea or what?

[1] Sort of.

Tsk… can’t believe Luis went all the way to Nuernberg and doesn’t appear to have visited the toy museum!

Sunny, windy, expensive, streets too crowded to see or do much. And he was Welsh anyway. At least we got a day off though…

Been working on a draft UI spec for some wireless enhancements to JDS. Barely has the electronic ink dried than Mark has implemented and committed some of it– what a guy 🙂

Apparently our household has acquired an EyeToy. I may never be allowed near PES3 again…

Finally joined the wireless age today… albeit in the least impressive way possible. I now have a bluetooth V90 modem so I don’t have to trail a cable roud my flat any more 🙂 The Windows driver software for my USB dongle was a pain to configure, though… hope it proves easier on Linux, but somehow I doubt it…

Wow. I haven’t written anything here since September :/

Work continues apace on the Java Desktop System… we seem to be working on about 96 different releases at once, and consequently spending lots of time porting features between them when it would be more fun to develop new ones… but hey, it seems to be working so far. Right now I’m putting together a bunch of recommendations from our most recent usability study, which will hopefully make it into the version after next.

Had a brief chat the other day with Seth about moving the HIG to a GNOME-friendly 6-month release cycle… sounds like a good idea to me, although as always I dunno when I’m ever likely to have time to work on it :/

Sounds like Sun will be sending a fair old crowd to GUADEC again this year as well, which is cool… and I think I’ve managed to get out of doing a talk this year, which is even cooler 🙂

Hrpmh, moving house. Don’t you just hate it?

Oh, and just to comment on Seth’s recent HIG clarification, it’s probably fair to say that right now I do bugfixes and general maintenance to the HIG on Sun time, and write any new bits on my own time 🙂

• Seven people die in a fancy aeroplane doing something they knew was really dangerous to start with: 48 hours’ continuous news coverage, and still going strong.
• Thirty innocent people die when a bomb goes off in a bank in Nigeria: 10 seconds of coverage, squeezed in before the adverts.