blog.fredrikohlin.com

Started Things, the use of which I have discontinued. Phew.

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:16:45 +0100

Started Things, the use of which I have discontinued. Phew.

18milesperhour: IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE? …so long as you don’t...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:17:14 +0100

IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE?

…so long as you don’t dare ride a bicycle!

A hearty thanks-for-nothing to this 1950’s safety manual for scaring the bejesus out of the youth of America.

And we didn’t even include the pages about the dangers of hiding in leaf piles and flying kites. No, we’re not joking.

Critical Mass 2010, Budapest.

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:08:36 +0100

Critical Mass 2010, Budapest.

The future, as predicted in 1911 by “the most learned and...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:44:27 +0100

The future, as predicted in 1911 by “the most learned and conservative minds in America.”

Little Big Details: long press on podcast to show the complete...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 11:29:06 +0100

Little Big Details: long press on podcast to show the complete title.

Technical Writing

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:53:55 +0100

Engineers employ technical writing, which is very different from the literary writing you learn in most English classes. Consider this passage:

    Helen, thy beuty is to me
      Like thos Nicèan barks of yore
    That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
      The weary way-worn wanderer bore
      To his own native shore.
                    
                       Edgar Allan Poe

To express these ideas in technical writing, we would simpy say

    He thinks Helen is beautiful.

As seen in an engineering textbook.

Check out the slides from SI 658 - a lot of good stuff in there!

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:56:27 +0100

Check out the slides from SI 658 - a lot of good stuff in there!

TextMate 2.0, please get released.

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:32:36 +0100

TextMate 2.0, please get released.

Joys of the iOS 5 notification center: six days of rain.

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:48:21 +0100

Joys of the iOS 5 notification center: six days of rain.

I thought I’d write a note proclaiming the second coming...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:23:09 +0100

I thought I’d write a note proclaiming the second coming of this blog. Hm.

Attention-Worthy, Week of 2009-09-27

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:28:28 +0200

My weekend has been focused on EuroIA, the early European information architect conference, this year held in Copenhagen. As you’d expect, I had a great time and met a lot of cool people!

A good way to start off this week’s link mania is with some impressions from the conference. Jeroen van Geel over at Johnny Holland did a good job summarizing many of the sessions; check out day 1 and day 2! Few people have had time to put their presentations online, this one, from The Architecture of Fun, is interesting.

I’ve actually had some time to collect links before the conference. Let’s continue with another set of slides, this time from SeedCamp Week in London. Startup Metrics for Pirates, expands a bit on the AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) acronym - and uses a lot of funky colors. On the same topic is 7 Things I Learned From My Startup Failing, which talks about skill and focus as keys to success.

Some different types of research also caught my eye this week. This presentation, titled Developing and Modeling Mobile Application [PDF] is really about more than the title suggests. It describes KLM, Keystroke-Level Model, which predicts how much time it takes to execute a task. This seems to be a quite complex system, but heavily researched and empirically validated. Also about mobile is The Google App Market - An Analysis. Since I own an Android phone (and can confirm that most apps are not that good…), I find this article especially interesting.

Not related, is the fact that I found out about webcredibility.org - and the fact that it doesn’t exist anymore. The site was run by a Stanford research lab and published, among other things, guidelines for achieving credibility online. These guidelines can still be read though, thanks to archive.org. Make sure to read some of the related papers as well; I liked What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study [PDF].

I’ll finish up with two random links. First, logoblog.org goes through a list of college and university logotypes. Secondly, The story of the Gömböc is just plain weird - a shape with an apparent mind of its own.

Final note: I experimented with automatically importing my Google Reader shared item into the blog. Ultimately, I decided against it - follow my shared items here instead.

Spotify – liberation or DRM-hell?

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:38:22 +0200

Spotify – liberation or DRM-hell?:

Interesting take - and I agree. Putting all your eggs in Spotify’s basket doesn’t feel right.

Henrique C. Alves - Keeping simple with Django

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:38:22 +0200

Henrique C. Alves - Keeping simple with Django:

Code tips of the day!

swissmiss | Arial versus Helvetica

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:38:22 +0200

swissmiss | Arial versus Helvetica:

It’s all in the details.

Raphaël—JavaScript Library

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:59:04 +0200

Raphaël—JavaScript Library:

Check out the demos, it looks pretty good!

What You Should Plan, Do, and Support

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:42:00 +0200

What You Should Plan, Do, and Support:

I posted this comment:

Isn’t the technology adoption life cycle by its very nature misleading? Since it depicts adoption, the actual number of users is not shown.

If the “late majority” is as numerous as the “early majority,” doesn’t that make the values of the groups equal? E.g. Blogs have more visitors than social hubs at the moment, since the cumulative number of users (or cumulative user acceptance) is greater. Or, big family V8s make more money than fuel efficient cars.

Isn’t this kind of a paradox?

The HTML5 drag and drop disaster

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:48:00 +0200

The HTML5 drag and drop disaster:

A lot of frustration and a lot of profanity - and a fun read. Still, HTML5 and its associated JavaScript APIs still have a long way to go. As evidenced by this, the HTML5 Super Friends, and others.

From your 201 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read ...

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:06:16 +0200

From your 201 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,211 items, starred 18 items, shared 25 items, and emailed 0 items.

google-jstemplate - Project Hosting on Google Code

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:46:31 +0200

google-jstemplate - Project Hosting on Google Code:

Another random release from Google - a templating system for Ajax based applications.

Attention-Worthy, Week of 2009-09-19

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:04:43 +0200

I a world where micro equals better, it’s sometimes nice to focus on just one thing for an hour or two. Here is a collection of links to longer form content that I’ve found interesting over the past week.

Longest, and my favorite, is From Nand to Tetris in 12 hours. In this 2007 Google Tech Talk, Professor Shimon Schocken describes a one semester course in which students build (simulated) hardware and software, for a fully functioning general purpose computer. It’s an inspiring video, both from an educational point of view, and because it gives an insight into the inner workings of computers.

Even more technical is Rich Hickey’s presentation, A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]. You don’t have to understand it all to appreciate it—it covers a lot of the general design of object-oriented programming, and how that’s based on several assumptions of time.

Next, I’m happy to note that the book Dive Into Python 3 is released as a free download. A great resource for Python geeks looking to learn about version 3.

Website of the week is Russell Beattie’s blog, a title which he earns with two awesome posts. The first is Mobile Web Browser Thoughts, a monster post on design principles of mobile browsers (exemplified by Mozilla Fennec). The second is Empirical User Experience Design Through Action Costs, a new (?) way of measuring usability.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with two absolutely non-technical links - a reddit post correctly titled Random thoughts from people our age [our age being late teens to late twenties] and beautiful illustrations on sleep by NYT’s Christoph Niemann. ❧