Marty Alchin, some rights reserved.1 Jan 2010
One advantage of working with Django is getting to know a lot of really talented designers who love to throw out tidbits of their knowledge. Recently, one such tidbit reminded me of something I knew, but hadn’t abided by for a while: “the last thing you should do when beginning to design an interactive system is write code.” This got me thinking about my own flight search project, and how I should probably designing the interactions as behaviors before trying to code them. Then I realized that even that was too specific to be useful at this point. First, I need to formally state the problem I’m trying to solve.
11 Sep 2009
It’s been almost two weeks since I launched my labs, and I thought it was high time for an update. Even though the travel experiment is my most exciting one, I wanted to spend some time giving some love to NASCAR this week.
31 Aug 2009
Perhaps the crown jewel of the labs so far, I set out to right some wrongs that were inflicted on me during travel research for a trip out to the San Francisco area. I had such a hard time finding the information I needed among walls of text and advertising that I decided to try my hand what I think flight search results should look like.
31 Aug 2009
My wife’s been watching a lot of NASCAR lately, and I’m actually finding it quite interesting, in spite of my prior reservations. More importantly to the geek in me, though, NASCAR is a treasure trove of data just waiting to be viewed, and from the look of their leaderboard, this can be a painful task. So, I set out with my newly-acquired knowledge of the sport (hey, it’s no less a sport than horse racing) to identify the key interesting aspects of a race and figure out how they could be viewed more easily.
31 Aug 2009
The first thing I thought about when reading Wilson Miner’s article on accessible data visualization was that it shouldn’t be too difficult to do charts with bars going different directions. Doing so would allow a convenient way to represent values that could be either positive or negative, typically as compared to some other data point that remains constant throughout the entire data set. Thus, my first choice for applying this technique would be golf scores, since each hole is scored relative to par. Even though the value of par varies with the difficulty for each hole, the score relative to par is the important bit that’s recorded and used to compare the abilities of different players. So I set out to improve the efficiency and attractiveness of their leaderbord.
31 Aug 2009
A few weeks ago, there began some discussion on Twitter about a few people who wanted to update their personal sites, and they gained a bit of attention from others who were interested in doing so. Thus they formed the site sprint, wherein all participants agreed to launch their redesigns on September 1. I rather like my current design, and I don’t have the energy to redesign it, but I had mulling about the idea of a “Labs” site for a while, so I thought I’d use the deadline as challenge to actually get it going. In all, 15 others also participated, and I eagerly await their results.
23 Jun 2009
After following some discussion about it, I signed up for chi.mp once it launched as a beta service, and it hasn’t really impressed me all that much. Recently, though, I was asked to take a survey about my experience, and I was disappointed to see that the survey didn’t really ask what I feel are the right questions. Since surveys only allow you to answer the questions that are asked, I’d like to take a few minutes to speak candidly instead, in hopes of better addressing the issues I have with the service.
9 Apr 2009
Thanks to my subscription to the Django Snippets RSS feed, I was recently introduced to CSS Naked Day by way of a snippet to help automate participation. The snippet itself really just provides a way to know when CSS Naked Day is (it happens to be today), so you can prevent your templates from including stylesheets. It was a clever enough snippet, but it made me curious what CSS Naked Day is and whether I should participate.
2 Mar 2009
To the experienced programmers out there, the subject of this article will be immediately apparent. To others who are a bit more … excitable, it may seem rather risque. To those who watch a lot of television, it may simply be a reference to a certain warehouse retailer (I won’t bother giving them a Google boost). But, there are those of us who don’t have Computer Science degrees, and have never been told what the Big O notation is, and the Wikipedia article isn’t much help unless you’re a mathematician (I’m not). Thankfully, I finally had a big “Oh!” about the Big O, and I thought I’d share how I see it, for those of you who may not get what everybody’s talking about.
6 Jan 2009
There are a few of you out there who know I’ve been talking for months now about plans to expand the collection of community-oriented sites that are available for us Djangonauts to use and enjoy. It’s not that I think the current crop of sites are deficient in any way; it’s just that each site has a specific role it intends to fill, and I think there are more roles that need filling. In light of this, I’d like to officially announce Django Events.
6 Jan 2009
So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything of real value here, and I’d like to change that. Sure, it’s not like I’ve been slacking, but I have a blog for a reason, and I’d like very much to make good use of it. I’d like to take a few minutes, though, to explain where I’ve been, where I am and where I plan to go in 2009 and beyond.
1 Nov 2008
So, the recent interest in National Blog Posting Month has made me reflect on my own writing over the past since since I took part last year. I wrote 30 posts in a month, then just 10 posts in the next 11 months. While I don’t regret letting my professional writing get in the way of my personal writing, I feel somewhat obligated to start giving back again. Once the book’s out of the way, I should be able to get back to writing here more regularly, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a bit of what’s been occupying so much of my time.
14 Jul 2008
I’m certainly not the first to mention news of bit.ly, a new URL shortening service, but I’d like to look at it from a different angle. While I applaud most of what bit.ly is trying to here, especially in terms of data capture and availability, there’s a fundamental flaw in their design: if shortened URLs are permanent (which they clearly should be, if their data collection is to be of any long-term value), users MUST NOT be able to specify them explicitly.
22 May 2008
It’s been a while since I’ve posted regularly, and those of you who really keep your ear to the community already know why. Last week, news broke that I’m writing a book. I’ve actually been writing it for several months now, since before the sprint last December, toying with the idea of contacting a publisher. After getting positive feedback from several people at the sprint, I bit the bullet and contacted Apress in January, got a contract and have been working pretty much non-stop ever since.
8 Apr 2008
Like much of the Web development world, I caught wind of Google’s new App Engine launch last night, during the NCAA championship game. I wasn’t following the Scobleizer video though, so I was relying on the TechCrunch article and people in #django and #django-dev to fill me in on what all the fuss was about.