semi/signal

I finally understand…

h/t to Things Of Interest, where you’ll also find a nice explanation to go along with the diagram.

An amazing design by Volpin Props of a Warhammer 40K, Ultramarines bolt pistol.

Something I said a few months ago in a previous post,

…tablets are a new form of computing devices, one poised to become more powerful and user-friendly than the netbook/laptop form…

I mentioned the JooJoo in that post, but the iPad pretty much demolished any chance the JooJoo had at success.

The iPad itself has done phenomenally well and my optimism for tablets seems to be shared by the general public. Despite lackluster first impressions of the iPad on tech sites when it was announced, the iPad has managed to sell at a staggering rate (2 million sold, 2 months after going on sale).

My prediction of the tablet overtaking the netbook and laptop form-factors seems to be coming true as well; from the Wall Street Journal,

…internal estimates [at Best Buy] showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%.

Nice summary at SAI.

Apparently I’m not good at reading nor following rules.

I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that I used Google Maps for hotspotdot instead of Microsoft’s Bing Maps, with the Google logo plainly visible on the map.

It never crossed my mind that this might be an issue. Trademark or not, using components from a variety of vendors is pretty much the norm for any sort of web development or web design.

Fascinating, enlightening article,

… memory usually works in the opposite way, with traumatised people reliving experiences they would rather forget.

In a briefing to the US Supreme Court, Professor Richard McNally from Harvard University described the theory of repressed memory as “the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry”.

He maintains false memories can easily be created by inept therapists.

“The stress hormones that are released during a trauma tend to consolidate the memory, make it rather strong and sometimes even intrusive, as you see in post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said.

I came across this a while back on Fast Company’s Co.Design, showing the abandoned town of Kolmanskop, Namibia, once home to German diamond miners. After the diamond fields dried up, residents gradually moved away, turning Kolmanskop into a ghost town by the 1950s and leaving it prey to the sands from the desert.

Follow the link to see the rest of the pictorial.

The photos are by Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. His portfolio is increadibly impressive and definitely worth a look.

By Skeleton-Boy on deviantArt,

Google has announced it will be shutting it down.

I saw the demo of it in the Google I/O webcast last year, it seemed interesting, like Facebook comments but more professional and more generic (not limited to a closed social network); however, the idea of it as a service to replace email left me uneasy. I liked email. Sure it could be better, and Wave was in some ways better, but it didn’t seem substantially better. On a more ideological level, I also liked that email was vendor-free, I wasn’t chained to Google for my most important communication tool.

I was somewhat alone in this opinion. Most outlets were already predicting Wave as the next big thing and the end of email was fast approaching (nice summary from SAI).

Using Wave was disappointing. It was like being in an empty chatroom as no one in my social network was there. Lonely, but I figured that could change, this was, after all, just an early beta. Most striking to me was the 3-column design, which seemed like overkill and placed, IMO, an overload of information on the screen (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a successful app with a 3-column layout). More importantly the actual user interaction seemed quirky. You had your list of waves in the center column, but you replied to and created new waves in the right-most column. The information in the 2 columns were intimately linked, but the layout made the thread and its associated waves seem disconnected. A 2-column layout with a Facebook-comment-esque system in the right-hand column would seem to have been a better design and allowed for user content to claim the majority of screen real estate. One early lesson I learn working on apps: let the user’s content come through.

Beyond my first impressions, nothing brought me back to Wave. It wasn’t significantly better than email and having yet another messaging or social networking tool was a burden for me. It may have been an okay project collaboration tool, but the feature set never blew me away and my misgiving about the UI didn’t compel me to go in that direction.

QR Codes are basically just another type of bar code, but they’re cooler for a few reasons,

• There’s no license to use them. From Wikipedia: “The use of the QR Code is free of any license. The QR Code is clearly defined and published as ISO standard. Denso Wave owns the patent rights on QR Code, but has chosen not to exercise them.”
• Most smartphone have an app to decode them, and if the text is a url, the app can usually get you to the site quickly.
• You can easily make them from a number of web apps, such as the one @ qrcode.kaywa.com
• The codes themselves look pretty cool and iconic.

I first noticed them on FastCompany.com, where authors used QR codes to link to their articles page. The practice has since stopped and was pretty stupid to begin with, as the codes are really only valuable in physical setting; it’s still much easier to click a link when your in a web browser (yea, I do realize that’s exactly what I did above, but that’s more for demo purposes rather than accessibility). More recently, I’ve noticed them on Freelancers Union posters in the subway.

There many be a number of other potential uses. I met someone a while back who was, for whatever reason, focused on eliminating business cards and providing a digital means by which people could swap info. Not unheard of, but I really don’t think you can simplify a business card transaction with any great success – it’s already pretty damn simple. However, attaching a QR Code could be a good way of allowing someone to quickly get a digital copy of what’s printed on the card.

On a side note, it would also be awesome to see QR Code graffiti popping up one day.

An odd issue I encountered doing Outlook interop with the Outlook Primary Interop Assembly; an exception with the message “You don’t have the permission to move this item” is raised when attempting to update an appointment. Thanks to this post I discovered the issue is caused by attempting to set the start and end times of an appointment with a recurrence pattern.

You cannot set the Outlook._AppointmentItem.Start and Outlook._AppointmentItem.End properties. You only set the Outlook.RecurrencePattern.StartTime and Outlook.RecurrencePattern.EndTime properties to indicate the start and end times of the event.