in no time I managed to backup my blog (it’s almost a decade old, people), upgrade to 2.3, replace all categories to tags, and add a beautiful tagcloud on the header.
.
that’s it my folks, gone are the categories, and welcome proper tags!

by Ryan McReynolds

you’re not welcome
.
if you search for RNC on flickr, you’ll find a lot of pictures of the protest. enjoy it, you won’t find that much on the mass media.

a gift, frm a friend
.
the good thing about having an obscure blog is the ability to give nice gifts to friends without a pike in your traffic.
.
on the zip file, bullet, from allien allien. neat idtag, also. dunno why, i’m all fours to this song.
.
limited time offer, grab yours now!

RIAA ownz U
.
RIAA radar is a bookmarklet that warns you if the band you search is RIAA related or not.
.
think of it as a “moral scanner” of your listening habits.
.
i had an idea, so, of an app that scans your entire music library and gives you a percentage of how much RIAA owns you. below, my mail:
.

Hey, I loved the idea of a RIAA Radar. We are living in strange times, with big corporations bombarding us with misleading information, so some form of accounting is good to return to reality.
.
The bookmarklet is a nice idea, but it just checks one band per time.
.
My idea (here we goes) is to have an app that imports your iTunes Music Library, analyses it, and in response brings you to a page with your % of RIAA-owned songs, with a banner so people can copy it on their blogs/websites.
.
in this sense, the service would be an oracle, or a social badge, where you advertise how much RIAA “owns” your musical tastes. People could in this way compare their habits with each other. a social game, so.

back button troubles
.
reading at slashdot about usability problems on OS apps, i remembered some nightmare cases from the company i worked with, still in brazil.
.
we were building a corporate CMS, the program was getting bloated (impossible marketing promisses, lack of planning) and we reached an impasse: in addiction to the task at hand, some other tools were added - like IM, bookmarks, notes, quick tutorials - and with just a window to navigate, each new task competed for the user’s attention.
.
our solution (me and another interface designer, amid a sea of 11~12 programmers) was to divide the window in frames, separating the central tasks (workflow, word processing, programming) from the peripheral ones (messages, dictionary, to-do-list, quick tutorial).
.
the problem: we invalidate the back button (back what? the message? back the work at hand? back the action of sending the message? undo?). since it’s the most used feature, we had to find a solution.
.
and we did: a small log window on the bottom of the peripheral tasks window, with a history of what you did, and the possibility to return to where you were, and possibly undo some features. the default would be 3 lines, but a multitasker user could change the preferences to 10, 12 lines. with a better back button than the original one, we could drawn the users to our interface and reduce confusion.
.
they loved the ideas, both. sadly, they implemented the first one (the frames), but not the second one (the log window). dunno why, everytime i asked for the second feature, they answered it was easy and could be done later. i assume that the mindset of programmers works this way: if it’s hard to do, it has to be important. if it’s easy, it’s probably irrelevant. that is, a subset of loving to do hard mental jobs, is the impression of any easy job as a personal offense to their abilities.
.
don’t get me wrong, i love work surrounded by technical people. they are straightforward, they love a new challenge, and if they are in a project with you, they are all to this, with no passive-agressive, competitive sabotages that some artistic people are full of. but if you get this only-hard-work feature unchecked, you soon get trapped in a bloated, neverending project, with a lot of contempt for criticism.
.
well, in the end they accomplised the first feature, but never the second one. the back button was still there, confusing users. some months later, we were moving to another floor, but two programmers were busy finishing something “really important” for the client. i asked what it is, and they said “it’s a fullscreen for the system”.
.
“why would they need a fullsccreen system, anyway?” (at the time, it was already know that users feel annoyed by fullscreen browsers, and tend to move away, simply. they didn’t know why the fullscreen. i asked some other people around.
.
in the end, all the client wanted was to get rid of the back button. it was his solution to the problem, because we failed to offer a complete one.
.
and yeah, the users complained later…

assynchronous collab
.
i’m reading about the “outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” documentary (go fast, NYT link there), and the way it was done. it’s a classic example of what i’m thinking about - assynchronous collaboration - and since we’re on the web, how easy (and cheap) it is to get some results that it’s gonna be our new way to work.
.

“In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months. Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox’s telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list’s categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film.
.
Once the list of categories was complete, Greenwald asked MoveOn to round up 10 volunteers, each of whom was assigned a particular time slot during the day to monitor Fox, so that the network’s news stories or commentaries were under observation virtually 24 hours a day. When a MoveOn volunteer would spot an example of footage that fit one of Greenwald’s categories, he would note the date and precise time and send the information in an e-mail message to Greenwald, who had an assistant code it and transfer it to a spreadsheet.
.
By May, Greenwald had received enough examples to construct a rough outline of the film. He then hired five editors. In the evenings, two editors would consult Greenwald’s spreadsheets and locate the flagged footage in his vast library of Fox News segments. During the day, the three other editors worked simultaneously on separate parts of the movie, stitching together a coherent narrative from the Fox clips as well as interviews that Greenwald conducted with former Fox employees (some of them disguised to protect their identities) and commentators like the former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the liberal media critics Mark Crispin Miller and Eric Alterman. At the end of each day, the editors posted their work on a secure Web site for Greenwald’s review.”

math & universal ethics
.

Many different programs were submitted and then pitted against one another. A majority of programs simulated ‘traders’ who were out to explit other traders (reflecting the traditional pro-conflict bias), while other programs simulated traders who were willing to cooperate. Surprisingly the ‘winners’ of this competition were programs that emphasized cooperation.
.
‘Winning’ was not defined as defeating rivals in single encounters (in which case betrayers would have won), but in maximizing the benefits of trade. In this situation, programs that tended to betray quickly ran out of partners with which to trade, since one betrayal would start a vicious circle of counter betrayals and mistrust. In the long run, the winning programs were the ones that had the following characteristics:
.

• they were not out to exploit other programs (in the terminology they were ‘nice’, because they did not betray first);
• they retaliated in kind after being betrayed;
• they were willing to reestablish a relationship after retaliating (they were ‘forgiving’).

.
Even in a second tournament, when the human programmers knew that nice, retaliatory and forgiving programs had won (and were therefore able to writing betraying programs that took advantage of this knowledge), the same kind of programs won again.