Jan spent quite a lot of time making his Gamecube more visually appealing. I believe he has finished this about a year ago now… he’s more apt handling hardware than handling code (quite my opposite, actually), so getting the site up took a while longer. The code may look awful, but it’s the contents that count, isn’t it ;) ?

There’s also this movie which is situated around Christmas in the first world war which I’d like to see some time. It is because of the Christmas truce, something which could be learned from I guess… but anyways, enjoy your holidays :) !

It increases the length of URI’s by four characters, it is annoying to have to pronounce it all the time and on top of that the acronym is meaningless. From today on I’ll refuse to ever type www again and I hope many, many others will follow to get rid of the stupid thing once and for all.

Akismet was originally designed for Wordpress, but as can be seen on their page they encourage people to port the plugin to other blog software as well. If it works I think it’s really great, the only downside is that one needs a Wordpress.com account to be able to use it. And I got mine just today, after a two week wait after subscribing for it…

Despite the wait I think it will do its job very well now that it’s running. Thanks to Ben for letting me know about it ;) .

In today’s world of cyberspace and Google more and more documents are accessible. Literally trillions (if not more) documents exist today with many billions added every day. The need for people to have quick access to relevant documents grows at an equal pace, but is severely limited by the sheer amount of available documents and the amount of rubbish present within these. First, this paper will investigate a visual approach to address these problems and make a distinction between different classes of visualization goals in the document visualization domain.

As data acquisition is key to any visualization, the first problem at hand is the challenge of dealing with natural language and what can help to extract useful features from it. While counting words can give a good estimation of a document’s contents, it is by no means satisfactory and different aspects of natural language that can be either helpful or harmful will be covered. Not only the language is a problem: unlike physical phenomena documents cannot easily be represented in a carthesian coordinate system causing all kinds of restrictions that need to be dealt with.

Once the problems in the field have become clear, a selection of existing methods are evaluated against some criteria to determine whether they are usable or not. These methods aren’t necessarily specific to document visualization. Document features are ordinary metrics that could be visualized with any suitable general purpose tool so some of these will be tried as well.

Finally, a method called ThemeStar will be presented. ThemeStar is a single document visualization which is partly borrowed from and inspired by a visualization from so called role playing games. It consists of a “blob” whose shape denotes affinities with defined search strings and heavily relies on the human ability to tell shapes apart. It is this ability that is key to achieving a visualization that allows for lightening fast judgement of document relevance just by quickly looking at their diagrams.

While I found producing bulk amounts of text quite fun to do, I especially enjoyed writing this because I finally got to know some very nifty features of LaTeX. I’ve been using some LaTeX for quite a while now, but this was mainly for lab reports only a few pages long that didn’t make it worthwhile to use fancy headers and cool things like BibTeX and cross references that achieve this extremely slick look. To make matters worse, the other people I’ve been writing papers with so far insisted on using Word which doesn’t help much either. But patience pays off…

To those who already have in-depth LaTeX knowledge my joy may seem a bit… overdone, but hey, isn’t a moment of sheer excitement about a tool the reason you’re still using it..? I know I will :) . As for the paper’s contents, it mainly has got me interested into linguistics and I think I’ll bug a German studying friend of mine until he cries and tells me everything he knows about it.

And glitch reports are appreciated of course.

I found this link in my feeds today: The Dvorak Zine. Some enthusiasts came up with a printable magazine for street promotion… I must say that the mag itself is a great and informative read, but I don’t think I’ll hit the streets with it… that is… not just by myself. But again: the comic they wrote is a nice read and the stats generator is cool too. Here’s the distribution of keys of one of the dutch texts on this blog:

I learned dvorak about 4 months ago and it took me 2 weeks to reach usable typing speeds. On top of that, I’m a less attractive “fix my computer” victim as I have completely forgotten about qwerty…

That’s something you may look forward to, but the actual reason for this post is something totally different. Whenever I get behind my computer screen I usually wish to do things, one of which may be chatting with friends about matters, as this is cheaper than doing this by phone. I like talking with people, be it face to face or online. But I am developing an increasing dislike of the latter as of late, mostly because of annoying habits of some people. Suddenly disappearing may be one thing, but what aggrevates me most is the lethargic slowness quite some people display during IM sessions. It is not uncommon for me to wait 5 minutes or longer for a response on something I said, perhaps two sentences each time. So in one hour I perhaps get 24 sentences out of a person… getting bored to death behind my computer about 85% of the time. While some people seem happy living that way I certainly do not and I most certainly do not want to be forced into doing this either. Sure, mail and feeds need some attention too, perhaps a downloaded movie once in a while, but usually I’m done very quickly if not for some slowpokes I’d feel sorry for if I just went offline instead of patiently waiting for them.

Luckily quite some friends of mine do get to business when talking online, but even then only one problem remains… one’d need to be locked into a room with one’s computer 24/7 to ensure not to miss one’s friends. The best bet I can think of is cheap internet access through cell phones. Go anywhere you want and cheaply get in touch with your friends anywhere you like. It’d be heaven… though it’d be probably best to ritually burn all cell phones and IM software and go talk to people for real instead. The ease of use of these horrendous… things just makes people lazy :P .

Some of you might already have noticed that I have quite an eccentric taste when it comes to color, with the shade of purple commonly found in amethyst gem stones as one of my all-time favorites. Having switched to xfce recently and feeling that I needed a change from the immensely cute bunny that sat on my wallpaper I decided that I wanted a color oriented desktop again. I did some googling and since I find thunderstorms one of nature’s most intriguing phenomena one can imagine that I’m quite pleased with what I found ;) .

I snatched it here — this site seems to have a quite nice collection of other wallpapers as well.

Imagine that you have an article with quite some links in it, of which you decide to follow one. As it turns out you click some more to get where you want to, producing a chain of pages. Once you’re done you decide to go back to the page where you started by using the back button of your browser and to click another interesting link in the article. Suddenly it occurs to you that you forgot something on the previous chain of pages after which you decide to return to your starting page once again. But this interesting list of pages has disappeared from your forward button now…

The scenario above is the reason that for quite some time I’ve been wondering why simple lists are being used for a browser’s history. Why not a tree? It won’t change the behaviour of the back button at all and it will only add a menu of which branch to follow when using the forward button. To enhance usability it would be a nice idea to have a miniature picture of each page to accommodate the users who think in images rather than in text (I do to a certain extent). To make things even better one might think of using graphs rather than trees. As trees are graphs themselves using graphs comes with the same advantages as the tree approach, but when using detection of duplicate pages in the history a graph can be constructed which has the following information on each page:

1. Which pages led me here?
2. Which pages did I visit from here?

Alltogether this is a very detailed representation of one’s surfing behaviour and teamed with the ability to resume browsing sessions on startup (like Opera and Firefox together with SessionSaver or Tab Mix) it’d be a great help to enable users to continue browsing where they left last time without having to wonder how they actually got there in the first place.

Now if only someone would implement it…