Developing Upwards

This is a tale of the worst customer service I have ever been witness to. I am the victim in the story. Were it not for my love of On Demand, I would have been on the phone with DirectTV days ago. I'm still considering, but it depends on some things. All I wanted was High Definition television and a DVR box from my new cable company. Now, for background, I am renting my current house from my mother-in-law, to keep the house for her, while she works a temporary position with her company's training infrastructure. We're trying to keep as much as possible in her name, so that her move back is easier. Here is the tale, in bullet point: Call and schedule an appointment and backup appointment for HD DVR and a cable modem installation. Miss the first appointment and figure they were busy. Call first thing on the day of the backup, to remove the cable modem from the order. The phone company gave me a discount to keep the DSL, that saved me more than a bundle from the cable company....

Thankfully, Brian Jones has finally went public with the Python Magazine he is launching. Why am I so thankful for this? I can talk about it now, and how I'm a technical editor, columnist, and will most likely author an article some issues aside from the column. The working title for my column is "And Now For Something Completely Different" and I think I will stick with that. It is all very exciting. Being a huge fan of education of and through Python, the magazine is really fantastic in my eyes. Whatever I can do to help it along and turn it into a positive move for the community is worth the effort. Keep your eyes out here for a surprise about the magazine before the first issue comes out. See his original post: Python Magazine Lives Technorati Tags: python , magazine , programming , development , pythonmagazine

Search results suck past the first page . Google might have a billion results for some search, but it won't give them all to you in the result page. You are probably only interested in the first five or so results. To be nice, you get a whole ten results on the page. If you want more, you need to go to page after page of ten results at a time, possibly millions of pages worth to get every single result. Obviously, you won't do that, and for two reasons: You don't care about all ten of the results on the first page, much less the thousands or millions of other result pages. Refining your search is far easier than going through one page at a time. Having or bringing the information you want to the top of the listing is better than looking for it further down in the listing. That being the case, our solutions should center around making it easier to bring information up from the mountain of results, instead of finding ways to bury you inside of it. Some interesting headway has...

The hating of MySpace is not unique, but any professional-seeming information to back it up is rare. The findings are probably dead on with what I would expect, and I don't even see Facebook or know anyone on it. I do see the people on MySpace and the kind of people that I definitely do not see there. Social classes in the United States are always interesting, because there is a different dynamic than the expected class lines. Although, income certainly comes into play, it is not the definitive factor. After reading about the division it reaffirms my desire to use Facebook. However, I don't know anyone on Facebook. All of my friends are on MySpace, including those running their own businesses, those with families, any of the younger members of my family, and the ones making far more money than I. The social divisions that mark MySpace are also what tie me to it. apophenia: viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Google is building fact mining into the search engine. Coming across a little article over at The Best Article Every Day, I got wind that Google Spreadsheets can do lookup of certain statistical and financial information. You can have formulas that include things like the latest Microsoft stock quote or the boiling point of sodium. This seemed interesting, so I played with it a bit, but changing the formula quickly to play with it was awkward. "Can I just Google this stuff," I thought? Yes. Read on for my findings. The documentation for the Spreadsheet function, GoogleLookup, talks about entities and attributes . "Pluto" is an entity and "mass" is an attribute. As it turns out, you can just search for "mass of Pluto" or "birth rate in Canada" and are presented with a new type of search result. We can see that Google seems to be pulling facts from the websites they index. They are structuring the information into subjects and pr...

My back and legs hurt, but this might be a solution: the Stand Up Desk. There are different ways to implement this. Some people shell out the money for adjustable desks. You could place a shelf with an extra monitor and keyboard at standing height and attached to your machine with splitters. I'm looking into the kind of adjustable mount arm attached to portables in hospitals, to install behind my desk and allow my screen and a set of keyboard and mouse to adjust up easily, without the rest of the desk needed. I think alternating sitting and standing will be nice. Until then, I'll stand up to read. The Stand Up Desk - lifehack.org

The best interface to software might be doing nothing at all. Implicit interfaces are gaining mindshare. This is not a new idea. Amazon improves your experience based on your habits, for example. Google increasingly employs subtle, personal weighting of our search results. In The Implicit Web , Alex Iskold talks about the services of Amazon, Google, and Last.fm. All of them take advantage of the implicit actions of their users. Last.fm lets us track, publish, and find songs we listen to and like, and after installation, I forget it most of the time I use it. Implicit Today A number of services have risen that really should be implicit, but are not. This might be caused by implicit interfaces' very nature of being unseen. Although they can be wonderful ways to interact with our networks, they are difficult to deploy. Developing the algorithms to translate user behavior into user interaction, without hindering the user experience, can be difficult. Even coming up with an idea for em...