blog lives on

Since I moved the blog to blog.petervandijck, it's living on (hosted Wordpress). I was reading through older posts today, this is starting to feel like a long-term solution. I also set this up to share to Twitter.

Birth Certificates

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-birth-certificate-became-a-ticket-to-society

When pumpkin could be any squash

What it says on the label and standards.

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074635.htm

 

Ah standards!

The countries that don't exist (BBC).

Timezone standards

Timezones are fascinating when you get into them, and this is a good place to start: http://time.is/time_zone_news

Unicode Emoji standards

How Unicode decides which emojis to support.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/technology/how-emojis-find-their-way-to-phones.html?_r=0

Changing definition of extreme poverty

World Bank changed the definition of extreme poverty - interesting discussion of the challenges.

Funky CSS color names - history

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/tomato-versus-ff6347-the-tragicomic-history-of-css-color-names/

The “Named Colors” section of the CSS Color Module Level 4—the latest specification for color values and properties within the Cascading Style Sheets language—are 141 standard colors. Each has its own name, so beyond the essentials of “black” and “white” are shades like “papaya whip,” a warm orange pastel; “lemon chiffon,” a faint, milky yellow; and “burlywood,” which has likely made an appearance on a safari tour guide’s shorts.

and

Thomas agreed. Frustrated with inconsistent displays, he started to find it futile to standardize color names. In response, he stated in an e-mail that he “sat down one evening with the handiest standard of subjective color names, a box of 72 Crayola crayons. That birthed "aquamarine," "orchid," and "salmon," to name a few.

You gotta love standardization efforts!

"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time"

This is a real email: http://datacenter.iers.org/eop/-/somos/5Rgv/latest/16

"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time"

(related to the leap second in 2015)

Via AWS

 

We give names to moons of other planets, so why is ours called just "Moon"?

The taxonomy of spaceships

Yes they have a taxonomy, apparently.

Google goes beyond "Other" for gender

Announcement post

For many people, gender identity is more complex than just "male" or "female."  Starting today, I'm proud to announce that Google+ will support an infinite number of ways to express gender identity, by giving you the option to customize the way your gender is represented on your profile.

Facebook Gender

The always wonderful "Other" category.

How to socialize an event properly (hastags omg)

How to socialize an event properly (hastags omg)

Design and engineering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtpyRSuaak Seriously good talk. Very powerful:

1. The elegance of simplicity.
2. The power of experience. (What's a great experience?)
3. The magic of stories. Technology + Art = Magic.

How can we get lots of disciplines work together? To solve large problems?

• At Pixar, creatives and techs get paid the same.
• It's really hard to get the tech people to respect the creative people and vice versa.

Works for all systems, not just software. Culture:

• Peer culture: everyone shows everyone else their work and get lot of feedback.
• Learning environment. Empowered people. Great at tech & creativity - work hand in hand together. Same team. Giving feedback.
• Product design + Engineering + Understand Consumer problem.

Design thinking:

• Team of DIFFERENT thinking people. Not just engineers. Different. Respect each other. Bounce ideas of each other.
• Examine and understand a problem.
• Iterate to a solution.
• NEED A TEAM! Not one person, one designer, one product leader.

more medellin photos

http://www.juanarredondo.com/#/barrio-triste/BT-01

Medellin

Great photos of Medellin http://www.behance.net/gallery/Las-Golondrinas-Comuna-8-Medellin/5910203

Bootstrap tour

Easy product tours with http://bootstraptour.com/

Marketplace

Escrow and payment provider for marketplaces - https://www.balancedpayments.com/ looks good.

Developing the ability to get stuff done is crucial. Some quick thoughts:

• Technical skills.
• Maker's schedule. (so you get stuff done in a day)
• Process. (OKRs) (so you get stuff done in a week)

A startup accelerator for the world’s poorest

https://medium.com/on-startups/ca9a1a6c9da0 See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6380008

Tech is what makes a city great

http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/10/tech-makes-a-city-great-the-mckinsey-report/

fast content extraction

https://github.com/c4milo/boilerpipe

National Geographic Photographer Meets Deadly Leopard Seal - Then This Happens.

Just watch the video, yey seal (and that it sucks to be a penguin).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-o-LGns_uY

Hank bought a bus

And made it into a living space.

Travel forever?

Or, "walk the earth", as they say. Why we need nomads.

Like for blogging?

Thinking: is the Like for blogging related to the Linkroll (since a link is like a Like)? I should get an email or notification when someone Likes my post. That's the feedback loop I'm talking about. And Liking should be 1-click. So is adding to the linkroll 1-click?

It is conceivable that there is simply no distributed solution that can compete in user experience with a closed solution like FB and such. But that doesn't sound like it would be true.

The new blogging, again

I'm oldschool but I like blue and white. New look today.

Now, the new blogging. Can we reproduce the LIKE in the world of blogging? The feeling of immediate feedback? The one-click micro-payment that has no limits.

Here's a related thought: why do people think stuff on blogs is more private than stuff on Facebook? (Technically it's not.) Because more people see it on Facebook. And you get feedback.

Blogs need more feedback. Commenting is too much work. Where's the LIKE button for blogging? (And I don't mean the Wordpress Like button, that just feel like micropayments to Matt.)

Mmm...

Classification conundrum: non-human persons

In which India declares dolphins "non-human persons". Cool. Only one but: humans can be performers. So why not dolphins? Still pretty cool, kinda sci-fi.

Definitions unclear -> go to jail

"The definitions of ‘national security’ and what constitutes ‘intelligence’ — and thus what must be classified — are unclear."

Standards

Arbitrary standards are more defensible (Pantone example).

The dictatorship of data

How data was misused in the Vietnam war.

In 1977, two years after the last helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, a retired Army general, Douglas Kinnard, published a landmark survey called The War Managers that revealed the quagmire of quantification. A mere 2 percent of America’s generals considered the body count a valid way to measure progress. “A fake—totally worthless,” wrote one general in his comments. “Often blatant lies,” wrote another. “They were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara,” said a third.

Census categories: What happens when you let everyone self-identify?

I've blogged about this before, the US census is an ongoing and fascinating categorization case study.   From the article: "By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race."

• First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110 percent. People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
• Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40 percent of them had been identified as white in the previous census). The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

   

Categories and the world: categorization of abuse and dependence

New and improved categorization of abuse and dependence just joins them, with this amazing quote in the article, where two students were trying to figure out the difference between abuse and dependence.  

“Isn’t ‘abuse’ like when you get a DUI?” said the medical student.

“Yeah,” said the psychiatry resident, “and ‘dependence’ is when you get withdrawal, right?”

“I think ‘abuse’ leads to ‘dependence,’” said the neurology resident.

“Or maybe ‘abuse’ is not as bad as ‘dependence’?”

“So what about our patient? He’s pretty hard-core.”

“I see him all the time in the emergency room. Totally intoxicated.”

“I’ve seen him drunk on the train.”

That sealed the deal.

“Dependence it is!” they all agreed.

zipcar localization: british english, canadian english

Zipcar is the first site I have ever seen options for the type of English: American, British, Canadian.

Backing packing in heels, gotta love it

Backing packing in heels, gotta love it

Urban decay

Urban decay tourism :) (great pictures)

Social design talk notes

Never too old to learn.

• I believe in fundamentals.
• Adaptation, evolution. Design = solve the problem. (So changeable design > unchangeable design.)
• Community = group that works together.
• Group -> social -> trust.
• Trust each other to get things done.
• Our environment is everyone else.
• You want to be unique but also fit in. You feel lonely.
• So you form an "identity", so you can fit in but be apart. A representation of yourself.

Identity:

• Create an outside world we can control. Collect. Music. Home. Friends we trust. World is not so scary then. 
• Can also create inside world we control: yoga, music, meditation, learning, ...
• EVERYONE is doing this.

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone" (Thoreau) Social design = facilitate communication.

• People just need to talk.
• Need identity, trust.
• People need connection.

Social Graph (nodes & edges).

• If you write it out, forms a narrative. Story.
• Narrative leads to identity: this is me. This is what I did.
• The connections give things life.
• Graph is very valuable information.

Stream.

• Don't hide info, show it all in feed.
• Keeps going, like life.

Collections.

• Pile of things that I like.

Feedback.

• When something happens, send feedback (like, pin, repin, tag, ...).

"Virtuous cycle of sharing" -> enough stuff and connections so it grows. Might as well build things that bring people together.  

Old faceted tags screenshot

Saved via here (via a trippy duckduckgo search), I found this screenshot of a semantic tagging system that I built and then gave a talk about around 2005/6 or so. The idea was that tags were organized in facets, which gave them some level of meaning (ie. "sanfran" is a place), and from that meaning and from tags that were used together, you could infer more meaning (ie. "peter has been to sanfran").

Wow this is exceedingly cool

 

 

But what is not so cool is that WP doesn't seem to let you post animated GIFs? Come on guys!

Click the image to see the animation.

Where the illustrators hang out

Salon.io is pretty interesting. Posting this here to not loose the link (which is also interesting). What an INTERESTING post!

2013 social media cleanup

Let's see:

• New blog at http://blog.petervandijck.com (and Wordpress.com's image import is just magical btw). This was the biggest deal.
• ITTT for cross-posting to Twitter from blog. This is meant to encourage me to blog as opposed to posting on Twitter.
• Turned off bunch of apps on Facebook. No more cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook. Twitter is work-world, Facebook is friends/family who don't care about my geeky rants.
• Still using Path as my private little Facebook for a few select people.
• Next: set up phone apps for everything.

New blog posts will go straight to Twitter

Perhaps this will inspire me to blog? The problem I'm trying to solve is that of audience.

My first blog post ever. Still pretty good :)

New feed

I moved my blog to http://blog.petervandijck.com. I expect this to be a long-lived URL, wouldn't be surprised if it lasts 30 years. Which means my feed has also changed, those of you who still use Google Reader or something similar, subscribe to http://blog.petervandijck.com/feed/

I moved my blog

To a new domain (with redirects), blog.petervandijck.com. I put it on Wordpress.com. And may I just say: the moving and importing of content was ridiculously easy. Wordpress even copies images from your old site into your new site. Automatically - nothing you have to do. That's impressive.

Feature debt and the art of taking things out

There is 1 feature in your current product that you could take out today, without any negative consequence at all.

Taking it out will make maintenance and software evolution, technical debt, support, and probably even the user experience better. It will make your codebase more maintainable. It will make everyone happier. You added that feature because you thought it would make a difference, but it doesn’t.

In evolutionary terms, taking this feature out will increase fitness (or keep it fixed) while decreasing complexity.

That’s feature debt.

No product is so perfect, so optimized that all of its features are in perfect balance, all necessary, all required.

No digital product anyway. Here’s one that’s pretty close. But note:

1. It’s very simple.
2. It’s been optimized for centuries.

So let’s assume that there is 1 feature in your product that you could take out, with positive effects. Once we agree on that, it’s quite likely that there are more than 1 features that you could and should take out. There are features you should not take out, too. The more complex the product, the more features you should take out. Facebook surely has dozens of features that they could take out today, and the net effect would be positive. Google probably has hundreds. Windows has thousands.

There’s not a lot written about the art of taking things out once they’re launched. Taking things out during the “design process”, sure, but not after it’s launched.

Apple is famous for removing features from live products. They’re also famous for launching products with very few features, but that’s for a different post.

There are 2 kinds of features that you can take out: features that nobody uses, and features that some people like but that aren’t helping *you*.

Features that nobody uses are easy to take out. The hard part is to define “nobody”. Early on (first year or two), I like to go with 10% of my active users. If not even 10% of my active users are using this feature, we should probably kill it. You could do 20%.

It’s easy to know when nobody uses your feature. Track it. Once you use metrics to inform (not drive) your product decisions like this, you’ll never go back. But that’s another post as well.

Features that a significant amount of your users actually use and like are harder to take out. But if they’re not helping *you*, perhaps you should. These are often features that are attracting the wrong kinds of users, or encouraging the wrong kind of activity, or perhaps they just don’t fit with the direction you want to take the product in.

If you’ve never considered taking features out of a live product, try it. It engenders a whole different mindset. You’ll start asking, before even developing a feature: do we really need this? It will make you want to measure things. It will make you think more deeply about your product. It will be good for your team. That’s probably a rule for a good product team: takes features out of live products.

Notes:

• The debt metaphor comes from WardCunningham
• See also: You Aren’t Gonna Need It
• Decreasing complexity is good, because it speeds you up.
• Andrew Chen calls it product design debt.
• Architects call design debt “work that remains unfinished after a deadline”, which isn’t exactly the same concept.

The new blogging.

I suddenly understood: the new blogging is BETTER than the old blogging.

Twitter, Facebook etc., that’s for links and quickies. Blogging is for deep thinking, well written essays etc. (And for news blogs etc.) That’s what I enjoy reading, and I think that’s what I’ll try to be blogging then.

Firing up LiveWriter!

Let's see if we can start blogging again

I miss it.

Bird categorization by the cat in the hat

What makes a bird a bird? All birds have feathers, and that is that. (video)