Lars Pind

1. Install Dave’s bar.
2. Download oacs.xml
3. Save it into C:\Program Files\Quick Search Deskbar\searches

I’ve created a search for OpenACS bboards for Dave’s quick search deskbar, so you can say oacs form builder or oacs whatever, and immediately jump to search the bboards.

Creating more of these are insanely simple. Just a little XML and a little JavaScript, and off you go.

The download’s here: http://www.pinds.com/download/oacs.xml.

Dictionaroke.

Supercool ... but turn up the volume.

And another bookreview just went live.

New bookreview up: Writing Well.

It happened all the time at ArsDigita, and it just happened to me again.

If you’re developing software, you probably know them: The inevitable, endless, mindless, useless discussions about this or that feature of the user interface. When they’re at their worst, there are two alternatives, and two parties. One side says it must be this way, the other side says it must be that way. There’s no movement in the positions. Eventually, someone suggests “we can’t design, why don’t we make this an option”. That isn’t a solution, it’s just deferring the problem. I hate it.

What I hate about the whole setup is that’s it’s so Win/Loose. You win, I loose, or I win, you loose. How can this type of discussion be transformed into a Win/Win? How can we come up with a solution that we’ll both be perfectly happy with?

One option is to defer to outside expertise. Perhaps we’ll say that we’ll see if we can find advice from Jakob Nielsen on this. Or we could go find some popular implementation of something similar, such as Yahoo! or Amazon or YABB or whatnot, and agree that we’ll do whatever they do. But what if we each find contradictory Nielsen quotes? Or what if Yahoo! and Amazon does it differently?

Is there a way to transform this all too common type of discussion into a Win/Win state of mind?

Green potatoes.

If you liked my shortcuts, you’re going to love this: Dave’s Quick Search Bar. It’s my shortcuts on steroids.

I’m reading in 7 habits again, and I’ve gotten to habit 5, “seek first to understand…”, and there was something that clicked: That when you’re listening to someone you can actually decide to listen to and respond to the feeling instead of the content.

Now I know that this sounds incredibly obvious. But it’s live I’ve always had this notion that we’re all somehow obligated to say what we really mean as precise as possible. So when somebody says “What are you doing tonight?”, they’re not really interested in what I’m doing, they want to know if I’m interested in hanging out with them. For example.

It’s not like I haven’t been able to hear what they were really saying, or to sense the feeling that they’re trying to convey. I’ve just always felt that it was their responsibility to express themselves more clearly if they want my attention, and so I’ve insisted on answering the content of their questions as precisely as possible, often with the hidden agenda of a reductio ad absurdum, to help them see how their original question or statement wasn’t precise enough.

The simple little lesson that I learned, is that I don’t have to be bound by contract to reply to the words, I’m free to reply to the intent, to the emotion, so what I understand was meant by the question. I never knew I had that liberty. How stupid you can be sometimes! :)

(Btw, my consolation is that I’m not alone here, it’s a typical Homo Logicus trait)

Another book has been added: Tom Wolfe’s Hooking Up.

I’m really impressed with Rackspace, they’re so organized, their concept and their policies are really clean and easy to understand, they’re totally organized. I want my company to be as organized as they are: This is what we offer, this is our guarantee, these are our internal procedures that ensures that level of service and quality. Gotta get to work! :-)

I’ve been really bad about putting up new stuff on my site, recently. But this morning, I insisted on taking the time to write about one book, namely Fire in the valley.

Hopefully I’ll get around to putting up another book tomorrow. I have a small backlog of books I’ve read but not yet written about.

Asteroid will hit the earth ... better enjoy life the next 17 years.

Graphic @ for Spam Prevention: Clever little idea.

Also, checkout the redirect-mailto link trick (and why Jakob doesn’t use mailto links).

Collaboraid, my e-learning and groupware software company, now features a company web log. Not much there yet, but it’ll come.

Visit the usual location: /download.

Quote from the version history:

0.6.4d Added poster information, optional per parameter. Added “url” shortcut variable to the blog template. Updated documentation. (July 23, 2002)

This version features a database drop script. Wow. Visit /download.

Fair Use advocates silenced by Big Brother in The Register.

Listen.com’s Rob Reid received applause from the audience when he disputed Valenti’s assertion that Big Hollywood can’t possibly compete with free “pirate” distribution services.

Reid said those selling digital content, like Listen.com does in a $10-a-month subscription, have to make it more convenient, higher quality, and more comprehensive than free music download sites. “I have to create something that’s better than free,” he said. “I have to give $10 worth of value. I don’t win by legislation, and I don’t win by litigation—the Internet is too open and the software developers are too good.”

Exactly what most of us have been saying all along. When will the recording industry learn to listen to their customers?

Getting information retrieval right this time:

At the height of the 1990’s information technology bubble, an information broker, researching a question for a client, called me and explained that her client was having a dispute with another dot-com company over which company had been the first to invent the idea of "push" technology, i.e., automatically sending information to people in interest areas they had designated in advance. The goal of the query was to determine that no third party had had the idea earlier.

I explained to the broker that the idea of "push" technology was first called "selective dissemination of information," or SDI, and, to my knowledge, had first been proposed in 1961 – yes, 1961 – in an article in the journal American Documentation by an IBM computer scientist by the name of H.P. Luhn (1961). He worked out the idea in considerable detail; the only key difference was that the old mainframe computer would spit out informative postcards to be mailed to customers, rather than sending the information online – since there was no "online" to use in those days.

JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab

You may not have received this email

The Tsunami’s done it again.

Apparantly the user interface design stuff I did for ACSJ for ArsDigita (now Red Hat) is now up at http://ccm.redhat.com/user-centered/.

This Microsoft thing makes me think … Given identical products, an open source product actually ought to be more expensive, not less, than a closed source variant.

Why? Because you get so much more than just the software. You get the right to use it throughout your organization, once you’ve gotten hold of a single copy; you get complete freedom of choice with regards to vendors to support you; and if the software doesn’t do what you want, you can hire anyone you feel like to fix it for you.

So why does open source software so frequently get confused with free-as-in-beer?

Sympathy for Microsoft by Roblimo.

wIndependence Day.

Palladium and the GPL

Deep links.

“the threat to big media is not to its pocketbook but to its self-importance.”

The Trees Fight Back.

Hunky-dory (meaning). Fantastic. Thanks, Carl.

Heard this for the first time a year ago when my cousin, Henrik, read it aloud. Just found it again, and I love it. Written by an 85-year old Nadine Starr:

“If I had my life to live over, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up, I’d be sillier than I have been on this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. I would burn more gasoline. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who lives sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments and if I had my life to live over, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day. I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a rain coat and a parachute. If I had my life to live over, I’d go places and do things and travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over I would start barefoot earlier in the spring & stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades, except by accident. I’d ride more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies.”

-Nadine Starr

Don’t let school interfere with your education.
- Mark Twain

Sorry, I’d broken the comment functionality. It works again now.