Month: September 2007

Gym Jones

Gym Jones is not a cozy place. There’s no AC, no comfortable spot to sit and there are no mirrors. Stressors are intentionally designed to cause discomfort and apprehension. Effort and pain may not be avoided. Physical and psychological breakdowns occur.

Live.com Usability

Walking barefoot over a cobblestone path is possible, and no step in particular will injure your feet. But the overall experience isn’t nice. It’s the same when a website has minor usability problems piling up: none of the issues taken on its own is disastrous at all, but taken together, the site ends up being a slightly bad experience. I wanted to take a minute to illustrate such a collection of minor usability issues with the new Live.com, Microsoft’s search effort. All in all shows that the Live.com team doesn’t have people with a 100% focus on usability.

why microsoft will continue to inhale the exhaust of their competent competitors as it watches them pull away, and take their remaining market share.

Inside Google Zurich

Bernhard Seefeld then (using the just-released Google Presentations, their online competitor to MS’ PowerPoint) described the 10 principles of Google engineering/software development: Single-source code repository for all Google code (G has a rather big repository, and all engineers have access to the source code) Developers can checkin fixes for any Google product (an “open-source” approach) You can build any Google product in 3 steps (get, configure, make) Uniform coding standards (how should code “look”) across the company Mandatory code reviews before checkin (if a developer fixes a bug in Gmail, the fix needs to be approved by the Gmail team) Pervasive unit testing (a “unit” is the smallest testable part of a program; unit testing validates that it works properly) Test run continuously, emails get sent (automatically) to developers if any failure is spotted Powerful tools that are shared companywide Rapid project-cycles, developers change projects often, and can devote 20% of their time to pursuing whatever idea/project they want (if it gets somewhere, Google will then throw some more engineers at it and turn it into a product or a feature) Peer-driven review process, flat management hierarchy

seefeld cameo

Seam Carving Demo

you can use your own images in this flash implementation of seam carving

Seam carving (or liquid rescaling) is an algorithm for content-aware image resizing. It functions by establishing a number of seams (paths of least importance) in an image and automatically removes seams to reduce image size or inserts seams to extend it. Seam carving also allows manually defining areas in which pixels may not be modified, and features the ability to remove whole objects from photographs.

DayJet

6 years ago, I was on the book-tour circuit discussing my book Free Flight, which had just come out. It was about several parallel innovations in the aviation biz — more efficient engines, cheaper and better ways of building planes, safer ways to navigate and control the planes — that might together make “air taxis” part of the solution to the misery of hub-and-spoke airline travel.

air taxis are here.

The only crowded parts of today’s system—the runways and approach paths to the big hub airports—are precisely the places air taxis plan never to go. The DayJet planes fly at altitudes basically unused by other aircraft, 4500-7500m. (Very small planes fly lower than that; airliners and corporate jets fly higher.) “What’s the biggest airport we’ll ever go into?. A place like Savannah or Knoxville. Where the airlines are is where we don’t want to be.”

an update on dayjet