michael-mccracken.net

Updates from January, 2008

• 

  Twitter Stats in SVG using gnuplot

  mike 1:15 pm on January 2, 2008 | 4 Permalink
  

  Damon Cortesi just shared a handy script for grabbing your tweets and compiling some stats about when you post to twitter and who you reply to.

  His script generates a list of numbers and included a Numbers template to paste them into. Since I don’t have Numbers, I’ve modified his script to write a file that can be read by gnuplot, and wrote a basic gnuplot script to output an SVG file version of the stats.

  While I was at it, I changed it so it no longer counts “@someone” separately from “@someone:”.

  Both scripts are right here – gnuplot_twitterstats.tgz

  It uses gnuplot 4.2, which you can get on OS X with macports using port install gnuplot +no_x11'. (Or it’s a pretty easy build on its own, see the gnuplot download page )

  Here are my stats: Click here for a full-screen version.

   

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• 

  HPC blogs and news sites

  mike 2:17 pm on May 4, 2007 | 0 Permalink
  

  I’ve always liked the programming-languages community website Lambda the Ultimate, and recently I went looking for something similar for the High-Performance Computing community. I didn’t find exactly that*, but I did find a few great resources for news about HPC and computing research policy:

  HPCWire is a well-known news source for HPC. It has daily news updates, and occasional columns by guests from around the industry. Most of the news is press releases from companies and government labs, but it’s nice to have a single place to check for them. However, there is apparently no RSS feed, and to get email updates, you have to buy a subscription. I haven’t, but I do check back occasionally to read the columns.

  Supercomputing Online is another professional news outlet, which reads a little less like a press release, seems to have more coverage of academic news, and does have an RSS feed.

  insideHPC.com is more of a weblog than either of the first two – John E. West covers news stories in brief with some added perspective and analysis. I like his approach, and I’ve joined him to help cover academic HPC issues, both computing research and issues affecting computational scientists.

  One of many blogs at Sun is the HPC Watercooler, covering Sun’s HPC products and services, as well as some non-Sun related news. I’ve found it pretty interesting already, and I’d be interested to see weblogs from other HPC vendors.

  Finally, a couple of blogs that are less directly related to HPC but still very relevant for computing researchers, are Dan Reed’s weblog at the Renaissance Computing Institute, and the CRA Computing Research Policy Blog, both of which cover computing research policy and funding issues that don’t often show up in news coverage of either government or computing.

  * – if anyone wants to start an LTU-alike site for HPC research, or point me to one, I’ll sign up and contribute in an instant.

   
• 

  Quick n' Dirty OmniOutliner to MediaWiki Applescript

  mike 6:42 pm on January 30, 2007 | 6 Permalink
  

  The other day, I had a big outline on a wiki that I wanted to edit in OmniOutliner so I could hide and move things around with a real outliner, then export it back out to the wiki.

  I managed to get it into OO with copy and paste and a lot of RSI-inducing tabbing, but the text export options can’t be massaged to export MediaWiki-style (eg, ‘#’ for level one, ‘##’ for level two).

  So I wrote a quick Applescript to get the data out and get me back on my way. I thought I’d post it in case it would be useful to anyone else:

  tell front document of application "OmniOutliner Professional"

  set expText to ""
  
  repeat with aRow in rows
      set rowText to ""
      -- start from 2 to treat top levels as headers
      repeat with i from 2 to level of aRow
          set rowText to rowText & "#"
      end repeat
      set rowText to rowText & " " & topic of aRow
      set expText to expText & return & rowText
  end repeat
  
  set the clipboard to expText
  
  display dialog "The exported text is in the clipboard."
  

  end tell

  Update: see the comments for a version for TWiki. Thanks, Peter!

   
• 

  NHL on Google Video

  mike 1:06 am on November 8, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  Last spring, when I wrote about highlights from the NHL Playoffs being available on the iTunes store, I said:

  the sensation I felt when I noticed the announcement of NHL playoff video available on iTunes was that of Steve Jobs signing my name on a check for ten dollars and winking.

  This weekend, when I saw this: video.google.com/nhl.html – free videos of every NHL game, including historic games, I went plain nuts. Go check it out, even if you don’t know you like hockey yet. If you don’t have a team, may I suggest the Pittsburgh Penguins? There’s probably still time to become a Penguins fan without being a bandwagon fan, but it’s running out…

   
• 

  Dear GMail spam filter

  mike 2:36 pm on October 6, 2006 | 4 Permalink
  

  Dear spam filter,

  I cannot read Russian. If a message is in Russian, it is spam, just like all the other Russian messages I have marked as spam.

  Thank you for listening – your pal, mike

   
• 

  Zoomr, Yellow Tree

  admin 2:55 am on July 19, 2006 | 7 Permalink
  

  I’ve taken to carrying my camera around with me, for practice. It’s lead to an unhealthy obsession with camera bags (of which there is no perfect single choice).

  It’s also lead to maxing out my Flickr account quickly, and I have no cash for a Pro account. So, I thought I’d try the new – Zoomr 2.0, and see what I like about it. Geotagging and Google maps integration is cool, and I like the trackbacks, but to be honest, the interface could be much cleaner. Lots of loud colors and bold text vie for attention with the photos, which should be the real focus of attention on a photo sharing site. At any rate, here’s the first photo I uploaded to Zoomr, something I took while waiting for the 30 bus at UCSD:

  
   
• 

  Browser history: take the user's perspective!

  mike 12:34 am on June 23, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  Even after moving web-based mail to a separate app, I still usually have at least two browsers open at all times – Camino when something doesn’t load in Safari, Firefox for tails (a microformats helper), and Safari, which I’m used to, has my bookmarks, and auto-fills forms.

  Safari freezes and crashes pretty often for me, but I can’t easily switch away from it because it has my history, both in actual saved history and collections of bookmarks which always seem to get dumped into an ‘Import’ folder when you move between browsers.

  Browser history doesn’t seem like a lot of data. It seems like a natural choice to keep in a central place, just like the OS X Address Book. However, I don’t know of any effort that takes the user’s point of view and lets us keep a separate history list, so we don’t have to lose data every time we want to try out a new browser.

  So – anyone want to step to the plate? Hopefully all it would take is a good API and one browser that works with it – if one WebKit-based browser (OmniWeb) and one Gecko-based browser (Camino) adopted this, it would take something big to make me use Safari again. If a browser imported other browsers’ history and made it easy to save & search that history separately, I couldn’t think of a reason not to try it out, and see what other features I might like.

   
• 

  Webmail.app follow-up

  mike 8:23 pm on May 16, 2006 | 8 Permalink
  

  I came back from a weekend camping trip to find that my post about WebMail.app got a lot of attention: TUAW, Hawk Wings, and MacUser, for starters.

  Some people got what I was trying to do with it, and some didn’t. The idea got passed around a bit, so a few commenters probably didn’t read my original post. That’s not a big deal, but I did want to clear up a few points that weren’t obvious from what I did write.

  I don’t hate Apple Mail.

  I didn’t say anything about disliking or replacing Apple Mail. Mail is my primary mail client, and there’s plenty about it that I like. I just use both, since I like GMail better for viewing mailing lists.

  WebMail.app was not a mission statement for the web.

  I like rich local clients. I don’t think that apps like WebMail are the future of desktop apps.

  I don’t think that cloning WebMail.app for any given website/web app will necessarily be a good idea. Sometimes it will, but if you could benefit from system-specific GUI features or services like Spotlight, CoreImage, AddressBook integration, control over data backup, etc, then just another browser window won’t help you. For instance – I can’t think of any reason to move flickr browsing to a mini-browser like WebMail. I don’t need to avoid distraction when I’m using flickr – I’m already distracted.

  Also, I’m not qualified to expound on the future of the web, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves there.

  I wanted it to be a bad browser.

  This was the part that got people who didn’t read what I wrote in the original post about distraction. Yes, you could get almost the same effect by using real browsers with their toolbars off, but the whole point was to make it hard to distract yourself on the web.

  There’s a fine line where if you add any more features, you’re re-implementing a real browser, and that’s counterproductive. We can disagree on the position of that line, but I feel I hit it pretty close. For instance, if you want tabs, I think you should probably just use a real browser. And for my purposes, not being able to open links in other browsers is an important feature.

  It wasn’t a product announcement.

  I wrote it to avoid distraction – I’m not going to be supporting it, adding features, nor will I even work very hard to get an icon. I suggest using the icon mentioned in the Hawk Wings post about it. That’s probably what I’ll do if I ever get around to it.

  Some people suggested features that wouldn’t make it more distracting, including handling other web mail sites, doing the right thing with uploads for attachments, importing contacts, a better login interface (actually, I don’t get why you’d care about that), and using newer WebKit builds for better compatibility. I don’t plan to do any of these, but you’re welcome to. If anyone wants to use the name and take it in that direction, I’m OK with that – let me know.

  I do use it, though, so if it ever breaks on a new system and there’s no good replacement, I’ll get it working again.

  I have heard from at least one person who’s building a similar app and has done some more interesting things with it, so when I find out more about that, I’ll pass along a link. (But I’m not sure if it will be free or open source.)

  It was super easy.

  Now that I’ve addressed most of the criticisms that I wanted to, I want to ask that if you like this app, please reserve your praise for the Web Kit team at Apple – it took me months to realize that I wanted this app, but only minutes to build it because of all their hard work. It really was basically the demo app, and not even the one at the end of the talk. Thanks!

   
• 

  Webmail is not web browsing.

  mike 5:00 am on May 11, 2006 | 100 Permalink
  

  Webmail is really a separate application. When I’m visiting GMail, I’m checking mail, not browsing the web. So what’s so bad about using a browser for this?

  Minor Gripes

  If I keep a browser window running with GMail, now clicking on the Safari dock icon just brings that sucker up instead of creating a new empty window.

  I love the GMail key shortcuts and Safari has an annoying tendency to get the key focus wrong so I have to click in the window somewhere after moving up out of a thread to get my shortcuts back.

  Safari crashes, I forget to reload GMail, I miss important messages.

  Even all that isn’t so bad. For a while I ran Firefox with only GMail open. I could get a GMail notifier so I won’t miss messages… but:

  The Real Problem

  The final straw is this: Every time I check mail, I’m diving right into the world’s biggest time-sink. My email isn’t usually a waste of my time, but all the windows I’ve left floating around, my bookmarks bar, or a quick Google search are. These are the things that eat up afternoons, and webmail is a gateway to that distraction.

  Browsers have lots of features that I don’t need to use GMail: bookmarks, back & forward buttons, a search field, page history, a location bar, and on and on.

  My Easy Way Out – the Minimalist Specialized Browser

  A while back, I wrote a separate web browser just for GMail.

  All it does is load GMail in a nice big window and duck out of your way. No location bar. And no bookmarks.

  It says: Go ahead and follow that link your friend (or bug tracker) sent you, but to check BoingBoing, you’re going to have to go over to Safari. Maybe you’ll decide to go back to work instead.

  It’s basically the WebKit demo, except that I tried to improve the key shortcut situation a bit, and it has a progress indicator.

  I’ve been using it for a while now, and the only features of real browsers that I miss are pretty simple to add – text find, a refresh command. I just haven’t needed them that much. Sadly, one feature I’d love to add to GMail, a key shortcut to “go to inbox”, eludes me, since their Javascript is pretty obfuscated. Update – “go to inbox” already exists as the sequence “gi”.

  Meet WebMail.app

  If you want to try out this idea without the hassle of writing those ten lines yourself, get a tarball here: Webmail-1.0.tgz and let me know what you think.

  The source is in there, it’s BSD licensed, and I’ll happily accept patches that make it more useful for email, but remember that making it more useful for general browsing is kind of not the point.

  Oh, and it lacks a real icon. Sorry.

  Update much later: a new version that supports printing and attaching files is available here: Webmail+printing+attaching.zip

   
• 

  Dear Innovative and Revolutionary Management School

  mike 5:55 pm on April 10, 2006 | 1 Permalink
  

  Dear Rady School, you may be dedicated to producing business leaders who can straddle both the business world and the world of science and technology, but please ditch the little animated guy on your homepage who told me that.

  Also, please read this adaptive path essay on user-centered URL design, and revisit your URLs. Most of your URLs look like this: http://management.ucsd.edu/cms/showcontent.aspx?ContentID=163

  I care about 30 of those characters, including dots, one slash and protocol. There are another 31 characters that never change and don’t tell me anything about the page.

  For the previous URL (#163), might I suggest: http://management.ucsd.edu/facilities

  And for the next number up, #164 (apparently not up yet, but it should be the web syllabus for a class), might I suggest: http://management.ucsd.edu/courses/2006/summer/mgt-111

  Thanks,

  mike