Why is the flight attendant call button on the ceiling of the plane?
Flew JetStar few days ago and while reaching up to the ceiling to close the reading light realised that the call button to get the attention of a flight attendant was also there on the ceiling. My understanding is that one of the usages for this call button is when there is possibly some emergency/important matter you need to tell the flight attendant. So is it just me who thinks it is rather silly that this button is up on the ceiling making it rather hard to reach? (It would be quite bad if there was severe turbulence and a kid stands up to try and push this button to get some help...)

Ok, maybe that was a bit too short - but here are two quotes that I've came across in the recent few weeks that I thought are worth sharing:

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
- Sir Ken Robinson

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
- Albert Einstein

Don't forget your weaknesses, but pay more attention to your strengths.

This advice came from a work colleague few days ago. As summarised above, although you should not completely ignore your weaknesses your time is probably better spent concentrating and making your strengths stand out even more. My understanding of the reasoning behind this is if you spend a whole tonne of precious time and effort in building up your weaknesses, it will make you better overall, but you won't stand out. Since you have spent the time working on your weakness (and 'neglecting' your strengths) you will be able to do a good job at most tasks but it'll be harder to do a spectacular job at something.

On the other hand, if you concentrate on your strengths and make them even better you'll be an "expert" at particular tasks and you will be able to stand out in that area. So when someone needs someone to do a job in that area, you will come to mind as the person most suitable to get the job done well.

Of course you can't just not work on your weaknesses at all, for example, there are many 'weaknesses' that you can't just ignore completely - eg communication. If communication is not one of your strengths, I believe you should work on it so you can communicate comfortably and effectively; but there is no need to stress too much that you can't deliver speeches as well as the guy on the stage - after all, public speaking may as well be one of his strengths that he is working hard on improving.

Small invisible 'surprises' that make usability better

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome...are all web browsers and all have their good and bad bits (except Internet Explorer which only has bad bits). Firefox has the "Awesome Bar"; Safari is faster in comparison; and Chrome is even faster! Everyone has their own browser they prefer which is expected (though if you are still using Internet Explorer - I recommend you change to another browser, you'll never look back!).

I recently saw this invisible "feature" of Chrome that made me smile and marvel at the intricacies of usability design. As a super short summary - in Chrome when you want to close multiple tabs in succession with the mouse, you close the first tab, and the second tab's close button will land right under your mouse pointer ready for you to click again and close. While in Safari (and Firefox too) depending on which tab you close the next tab's close button may not be right under you mouse - thus requiring you to move your mouse to close the next tab. It's only something small, but it shows that Google has thought about it. Another 'plus' is it works so well you generally don't realise unless you are looking specifically for it - a true sign of something that is well designed in my opinion.

Despite the usability in Chrome being evidently thought out very well, I'm still sticking with Firefox for now - I can't live without my multi touch gestures, add-ons and the awesome bar! The super fast Chrome speed is something I'm hoping for but will have to live without for now.

Mini portable notebooks - www.pocketmod.com

A friend introduced me to this awesome discovery she made some time ago - make a simple notebook out of a single sheet of paper. No glue, just some folding and a cut in the paper! With the knowledge of how to fold a "PocketMod" you can quickly create a small notebook to jot your ideas/to-do list down. I've found that even though the area you can write in is technically the same (if not less) as the unfolded piece of paper, because it is now smaller and more notebook-like it is easier to carry around, write in and keep intact. Being able to turn a "scrap piece of paper" into a mini notebook is definitely useful.

Cool procrastination video

Not so much of a musing, but I am sure we all procrastinate. So here's a short video (~4min) about Procrastination for those who are in a procrastinating mood

Something as simple as "fun" can change people's behaviour for the better.

When I saw "Piano Stairs" on YouTube it made me smile It was great to see that by adding some 'fun' to something ordinary like stairs can change people's behaviour. It was quite interesting to see the range of people that chose to take the stairs over the escalator because the stairs had been converted into a piano - seems like everyone likes a bit of change and fun! If you're wondering who would spend so much effort transforming ordinary stairs into piano stairs, go and take a look at the people behind it - The Fun Theory.

Get feedback on your work - even if it is crap!

As some may be aware, I can be quite obsessed in making sure things are perfect. There is something in me that wants to go over every single detail to make sure nothing is out of place. This is all well and good for small projects/tasks (though I probably still spend too much time perfecting things that most people will not even notice) but when it comes to slightly larger projects this obsessiveness is a curse. So when I read "Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway" on Coding Horror, although not exactly related to obsessiveness, it still jumped out at me.

One of the reasons for my obsessiveness (I prefer to see it as attention to detail) is most likely because I want to know that I have thought of everything and checked everything. But realistically this is impossible. There is bound to be something I've forgotten, didn't think of or didn't know existed at all. Which brings me back to the article - no matter how much you try to polish something there is bound to be something you left out simply because you didn't know about it.

So it is important to get feedback as soon as possible - obviously you shouldn't ask for feedback on something that is totally hopelessly crap but neither should you wait until it has been fully polished and super shiny. In my opinion, the key is being able to identify when you have something good enough, stop being obsessed and get some feedback.

Here's a nice little poem by Donald Rumsfield about knowns and unknowns

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

Sunday, 22 November 2009

#326 - Hot weather makes me feel lazy.

Today was a super hot and humid day in Sydney and I just simply felt like doing nothing at all. The day was indeed a very lazy day, just sat at my desk doing not much at all. In fact halfway through the day I just decided to lie down and sleep, though not much longer afterwards I woke up because it was too hot. Tried googling to see if there was any explanations to why hot weather makes people sleepy or lazy, but unfortunately didn't come up with anything useful other than a random comment on a forum saying "Cold weather makes me sleepy too. Being awake makes me feel sleepy."

Monday, 23 November 2009

#327 - Tackle things one at a time as they come - don't spread yourself out too thin!

Everyone of us have the same amount of time - 24 hours in a day and it is really up to us how we use these precious 24 hours. Many of us have heaps of things that we want to do, a huge "to do" list that seems to only ever get longer and longer, unfortunately with only 24 hours it isn't always possible to accomplish everything that we want to do. Discussing this with a friend, we came to the conclusion that the best way is to concentrate on a few things and tackle them as they come, rather than spreading yourself out, having a finger in everything and only getting bits and pieces of everything done. We felt it was more important to get a few things done well rather than have lots of things partially done. In fact, this is quite related to one of my earlier musings (Thursday, 29 October) - focus is important in achieving a goal.

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

#328 - USB 3.0 will be here...soon!

Today was the first time I heard about USB 3.0 when I read this article: "Where's USB 3.0?" Maybe I'm slow, but a quick skim of Wikipedia reveals that USB 3.0 was first demonstrated in September 2007, the standard/specifications released in November 2008 and the originally estimated public release was sometime this year.

Reading about USB 3.0 makes me want it right now! It is said to be approximately 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (max transfer rate of 3.2Gbits/s compared to 480Mbits/s) - that is like transferring 700mb (amount of data that fits on a CD) in 1 second! In addition, USB 3.0 will be able to simultaneously send and receive data (current USB devices can only do one at a time).

Unfortunately the good news sort of ends there. If you plug the new USB 3.0 device into a normal USB 2.0 port it will transfer at the USB 2.0 speed. Also, as with many 'deadlines' the public release has been delayed to sometime next year, so still sometime before we get devices using USB 3.0 and computers with USB 3.0.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

#329 - Be optimistic and don't say something you'll regret.

Watched the TED talk Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion today and despite probably missing his focus on classical music, I still felt it was quite good (he is a great speaker). The two messages that I took from his talk were right at the start and at the end.

The first one was: be optimistic. Benjamin tells of two shoes salesman who went to Africa and saw that the natives were all barefoot. One of them reported "Situation hopeless. They don't wear shoes." The other reported "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." Exact same situation, yet so very different responses. I try to be as optimistic as possible, so I would hope that I can be like the second salesman and have a bright view on any situation.

Towards the end of the talk, Benjamin tells a story about a girl who survived Auschwitz. Unfortunately one of the last conversation with her younger brother ended with her berating him and calling him 'stupid'. So since surviving Auschwitz she made a promise to herself: "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Although this is probably something that is going to be very hard to achieve, I think it is something that we can all aim to do - don't say anything that we'll regret.

Thursday, 26 November 2009

#330 - TEDxSydney

Being a big fan of TED (awesome talks - many of them are must sees) the idea of having TED in Sydney sounds great. Although I don't think this is strictly a TED event per se (the 'x' means "Independently organised TED event"), I hope the talks will be just as great. Since TEDxSydney will be held in Sydney, I would imagine it will have a more local focus with more speakers coming from Australia - it'll be interesting to see what talks come as a result of TEDxSydney!

Friday, 27 November 2009

#331 - Be grateful - it's good for you

As kids I'm sure we've all be told to be grateful for what we have and thank people who help us etc. So it was quite interesting to read this article Does "counting your blessings" really help? It explains a 10 week experiment where three groups of participants, one group was told to list five things they were grateful for, the other five things they found a nuisance and the other five to just list events during the week. The group that listed five things they were grateful for were in general more positive and also healthier. Other studies have shown that gratitude is not only related to feelings of happiness, hope etc but it might actually cause you to be happier!

Saturday, 28 November 2009

#332 - WordPress doesn't have tables!

The fact that there is no simple way to insert tables in WordPress came as a big surprise to me when I started writing the "Firefox Multitouch Gestures" post. Googling about it only led me to various WordPress plugins for adding tables, though none of them seemed to do what I wanted to do - a simple table! I had always assumed that being a fairly mature blogging platform, WordPress will support simple tables 'out of the box' by unfortunately this is not the case. So I resorted to the HTML mode and manually entering table tags for the table. As expected, switching between HTML and WYSIWYG mode in the post editor screwed up the HTML, but luckily it wasn't that bad. The table works, but it appears slightly malformed (there is no right border) - will do for now I suppose.

Sunday, 15 November 2009

#319 - Two things: Fast decision making can be critical at times and people can sometimes think very irrationally...

I was standing at the train station today waiting for the train and looking at a group of three people who were just talking to each other. Suddenly one of them accidentally drops their phone (an old Nokia 3315), all three look down at the phone, then one of them stepped forward to pick the phone up. Except when he stepped forward he kicked the phone down onto the train tracks. Now all three were staring at the train tracks. At the same time the announcement overhead starts "The train arriving at platform three...", the group looks to their right and indeed a train is coming.

So what do they do? One of them is just standing there seemingly still deciding whether he should go and grab the phone or not; the other jumps down to grab the phone while the other is yelling "leave the phone!". Luckily the guy that jumped down to grab the phone jumped back up before the train passed - he had probably only 1 or 2 seconds to spare. The fast decision made by the guy that jumped down meant that he was able to get the phone and be safe (had he hesitated he would not have made it in time), but on the other hand, I feel that it was a rather silly decision to make - risk your life for a phone.

Monday, 16 November 2009

#320 - Yann Tiersen's  Comptine d'un autre été: L'après midi is lovely song.

My sister introduced me to "Comptine d'un autre été: L'après-midi", a piano piece composed by Yann Tiersen and I feel it is a very nice song. If you feel like you've heard the song before it might be from the movie: Amélie. Although the YouTube movie clip isn't actually related to the movie, it is a nice (but sad) clip to watch. Will be looking forward to learning to play this song when I get my hands on a piano!

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

#321 - Message to Oracle: Empty string is not the same as null.

This is just a rant as a result of a 'bug' that needs fixing from work. For those of you who are non-programmers, 'null' in programming is quite literally 'nothingness'. While 'empty string' is a string that has zero characters to represent nothing (Strings are just a series of characters). Null is the absence of a value. Empty string is something to represent nothing. This probably isn't the best explanation, so it might not make much sense as to why there is such a distinction to represent "nothing" ... but take my word for it there is.

So this brings me to my rant of the day - Oracle databases silently converts any empty string values into null. So if you try to store an empty string into Oracle it will magically be stored as null. This causes all sorts of problems when you take the value out from the Oracle database and try to use it, since it will give you null when you are expecting empty string (all other databases will return empty string).

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

#322 - Understanding Your Brain for Better Design: Left vs. Right

As most people know our brain has two halves - left and right. The biggest difference between the two halves is how it processes what we see. The left brain takes a more 'bottom up' approach - looks at all the small details and builds a bigger picture. Whereas the right side is more 'top down' - looks at the big picture and slowly breaks things down into details.

Obviously we need both halves of our brains to work, but generally we all have a dominant half which effects the way we think and perceive the world. I used to feel that the more creative of us were right brain dominant and thus it was in their nature to be more creative. However, this article brings up a very good point - left brain dominant people are just creative in a different way compared to right brained people and depending on your brain dominance you should play to your dominant brain's strength. I'll be giving that a go and trying some slightly more orderly creativeness

Thursday, 19 November 2009

#323 - Don't be afraid to ask for help when you're in trouble.

Today was a rather slow day at work because I was attempting to figure out something I knew very little about. When first tackling the problem it felt like there was a possibly I could get it working, but then as the hours passed by it became clearer to me that I was just going around in circles I could have (and should have) at that point asked people around me for help since I knew they would know much better than me, yet me being stupid I didn't. Why? As stupid as it sounds, it was because I didn't want to feel stupid asking a potentially stupid question. But as the day drew to a close and not having progressed much, I realised my stupid mistake and felt very stupid.

So, the lesson of the day? Ask for help when you feel like you need it (do give it a good try first, don't just ask for help before giving it some thought), because it may or may not be a stupid question, but if you don't ask for help at the end you will most likely eventually have to ask for help and you will feel stupid for not asking for help!

Friday, 20 November 2009

#324 - Google releases the Chromium OS open source project.

Sometime ago there was talk about Google releasing Chrome OS and today that exact project has been open-sourced! The main idea behind Chrome OS is that for most of us, a good majority of what we do on a computer these days is using the Internet. We boot up our computer, and chances are we open the web browser, check our email, the news, forums etc. So the smart people at Google thought, well if we are hardly using any of the desktop applications and all we really want is to surf the Internet, why not cut out all the wasted time loading desktop applications that we rarely use? As a result, they came up with Chrome OS. It seems like a very interesting idea to me and now that it is available for poking around, might just install it on my old laptop and see how it goes ps. Is it just me or does it feel like Google will take over the world?

Saturday, 21 November 2009

#325 - Writing emails in a language you are unfamiliar with is a long and painful process.

It's no secret that I'm not that great with written Chinese, in fact I'm quite bad at it. Today I tried writing an email to my parents in Chinese and it was really really hard! In the past, I would enter Chinese using 'bopomofo' (a phonetic way of entering Chinese) which was slow since I didn't know which keys were where; but do-able since I know how to speak Chinese, so all I had to do was enter the sound and pick the correct character.

However, this time I was trying to practice my written Chinese so I was using the awesome Chinese input method in Snow Leopard - you quite literally draw the character in. After a couple of characters, I realised how much I had forgotten - even the most basic of characters I had no clue how to write! I ended up going to a English-Chinese dictionary and looking it up. The entire email of approximately 3 sentences took me at least 30min!

Sunday, 8 November 2009

#312 - There is actually a ISO standard (ISO 8601) that covers the "representation of dates and times"

In my attempt to give my weekly musings a bit more structure, I looked up what day and week of the year we were in. The day of the year was simple enough, but the week was actually more complicated that I thought it was! I always assumed that 1st January will be Week 1..but then thinking about it, if 1st January is a Friday, will it still be Week 1? According to ISO 8601, if 1st January is a Friday, Saturday or Sunday it is actually Week 52 or Week 53 of the previous year (ISO 8601 week starts on Monday). To confuse things even further, the system followed by USA is different to ISO 8601 - weeks start Monday, and there are partial weeks at the start/end of the year. If you're wondering, 09/11/2009 is Week 46 and the reason I start on Sundays for these posts is so I can have Sunday to write them up, and it's no fun to come up with the musing for the day and write about it on the same day.

Monday, 9 November 2009

#313 - Magic is awesome! But figuring out how it is done is tricky.

Had been playing around with Ruby on Rails for the past few nights (getting it to work with PostgreSQL is amazingly tricky!), but when I finally got it working I was able to continue with the very basic online getting started tutorial. A couple of commands later I had a "working" web-app - create/update/delete posts and comments was all working. It was great to see it working, but unfortunately I had close to no clue as to how it was all working thanks to all the rails magic. My initial quick attempt (it was like 2am) at poking around to see how everything worked was futile - I just confused myself even more So as much as I like all the awesome magic that makes things "just work", I think understanding and finding out how everything clicks together is important too. (Of course, this applies to 'normal' magic too - watching them is fun, but working out how they work can be challenging, but probably just as rewarding)

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

#314 - An item that is expensive doesn't necessarily mean that it is of higher quality - do your research!

A couple of weeks ago, read "9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You" on Coding Horror, and would say it is definitely worth reading. The 9 points listed are all quite good and I have to admit have been victim of most, if not all of them. Reading/knowing these 9 points will probably not make you immune to sneaky marketing techniques, but hopefully it'll make you more aware when you are deciding what to buy. Though, if you do end up buying something for a bit more than you should've paid, don't worry - a random post I read ages ago (will try to find it) said that you'll grow to like what you own and think it is the best

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

#315 - Even something boring like a business card can be made awesome with some creativity.

To a good majority of people, business cards are probably quite boring - a rectangular piece of cardboard with the contact details and logo of the company. They're all about the same, with some variation in the colours/logo/names, but it is probably hard for any particular one to stand out. Of course there is nothing wrong about standard business cards, but even something as simple as business cards can be made to be simply amazing with some thought and creativity - 100 (Really) Creative Business Cards. In my opinion, some of them are probably a bit overdone, but there are plenty that are just simply awesome - the one I like most is the tooth decay/dentist one. Looking at all the business cards made me want to think outside of the box and take something old and boring and give it a twist.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

#316 - "...the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." -Apple

Looking into the Evolution of Apple Ads lead me to one of their earlier campaigns "Think Different". It was quite interesting to see how much has changed from when computers first came out and comparing it to what we have now. Though the one thing that stood out for me was the quote above in one of the ads. To me the quote seems to be challenging people to voice what they are thinking without worrying if other people will think they are crazy and/or stupid (something that I find hard to do myself). The other reason I like it is if someone calls you "crazy" you can point them towards this quote

Friday, 13 November 2009

#317 - Window blinds are opened during take off and landing so that passengers on the plane can be aware of the outside surroundings and alert the crew if anything seems amiss.

Was on a plane tonight and the usual take off/landing notice of "please open your window blinds" caused me to think...why? A quick google gave me a reasonable answer which makes sense: with the window blinds open, the passengers can see outside and alert the crew if needed. To be honest, I never thought of it that way - always thought it was something to do with some technical reason such as cabin pressure. As the idiom says: many hands make light work! Well, in this case, many eyes make flying safer!

Saturday, 14 November 2009

#318 - Listening to 'live' music and playing music sounds different (in a better way) to listening to music from the computer/stereo etc.

Without thinking much, it might be easy to think that listening to music from CDs etc would sound better then listening to someone play since the recorded CD is probably a professional playing and recorded in a specialised studio with all the acoustics tuned to perfection. However, I have always found that listening to someone play (especially someone you know) almost always sounds better! They may make mistakes, but somehow the overall feel of the music just feels better. Similarly, playing a song yourself is very rewarding - despite all the mistakes when practising, when you're finally able to part of the song it feels great! Note: I often label myself tone-deaf, so you might have to take this point with a grain of salt, though it'll be interesting to see what other people think.

Sunday, 1 November 2009

#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.

This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them

Monday, 2 November 2009

#306 - Rule of thumb: Red wine doesn't go with seafood - Wine and seafood: Red rags

For those that know me, I hardly drink wine (in fact I hardly drink alcohol). So the random fact of my day is drinking red wine while having seafood can leave a strong and unpleasant fishy taste in your mouth. Iron levels in wine is the cause for the fishy after-taste since iron reacts with the healthy unsaturated fat in fish to form unstable chemical compounds that cause the unpleasant fishy odours. So it seems like it as long as the wine has low iron levels, you can enjoy your seafood dinner - though white wine in general have lower iron levels than red, so probably still a safer choice.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

#307 - Sweeps is gambling for dummies.

Today was Melbourne Cup and when I came into work today saw an email about entering the "Sweeps". There were multiple $2 and $5 sweeps and I had no idea how sweeps worked, other than you had to put money in and you *might* get some back if you won. It was only after lunch that I found out how sweeps worked - everyone who entered gets assigned a random horse and then at the end of the race, the winnings are paid out in some sort of proportion to the winners (the payout split seems to differs slightly depending on the sweeps organiser).

Guess sweeps works for people like me who don't know much about the horses so getting assigned a random horse is just about the same as picking a horse myself. Maybe I should've tried my luck in the Melbourne Cup sweeps - though it would've helped if I knew how sweeps worked in the first place.

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

#308 - A high IQ doesn't mean much, being able to make rational decisions is just as important. - Clever fools

I've always thought that IQ tests are quite pointless and silly - a person isn't "smart" because they can figure out what pattern comes next in the series. Being able to analyse, think logically and connect the dots are definitely important, but in my opinion what makes a person "smart" is how they interact with people, how they make decisions and how they justify their actions.

This is obviously very vague but that is because being "smart" means so many different things in different contexts. The New Scientist article "Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart" talks about rational decision making as being an important aspect of an individual's intelligence which I feel is very true. It's a pretty good read and one of the things that I like are some of the analogies used to illustrate how purely measuring IQ is quite limited: "A high IQ is like height in a basketball player...There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ." -David Perkins

Thursday, 5 November 2009

#309 - Time flies!

Today was a bit of a strange day, a series of events made me realise how time flies! In the morning news today they mentioned it has been a year since Obama was elected as President - to me it definitely didn't seem like a whole year has passed since all the US election frenzy. Then at work, a colleague mentioned that in a few short weeks we will have reached the end of another decade and will be starting a new one: 2010. Ten years ago it was "Year 2000" with all the Y2K worries. Ten years ago I had just started high school. Finally, while filling out some forms I realised that I had been working full time for nearly 9 months now - it might not sound long to some people, but to me it feels like I'm still new and just started not long ago.

Friday, 6 November 2009

#310 - An extra little bit of attention can go a long way.

Not quite sure how this popped into my mind today, but it just did. Simply put, I believe that an extra bit of thought and attention when we do things can make a big difference. Not quite sure how to express it nicely, but basically, spending an extra second or two every now and then to think about what you are doing and if you can do anything different to make things better pays off. It might be beneficial to yourself (eg. noticing the dark clouds outside and packing the umbrella) or others (eg. suggesting that other idea that they might just find helpful). Many times the extra attention will probably go unnoticed, but sometimes you'll be happy you packed the umbrella and the other person might just find that extra little idea to be perfect.

Saturday, 7 November 2009

#311 - The humble mouse movement is controlled by the "Mouse Acceleration Curve"

When you are using a computer, more often than not you'll also be using the mouse to point, click, drag etc. But have you ever thought of how the physical movement of the mouse is translated into the movement of the cursor on your screen? I haven't, until today. For the past few months been using my MacBook Pro and every now and then I will be using the mouse instead of the track-pad and the mouse movement just felt wrong. It'll move fine but then as I am approaching the target (eg. a button) the cursor seems to slow down and become rather unresponsive - very very annoying when playing World of Goo!

Getting rather annoyed at the "broken" mouse movement, I decided to see if there was a fix for it and after a bit of googling I realised neither my mouse nor laptop was broken, instead Apple just had a different (read crappier) "Mouse Acceleration Curve" compared to Windows.

This article I found explains the whole thing quite well - basically, it's obvious that the movement translation can't be a 1:1 ratio - needing to move 1cm physically to move the cursor 1cm on the screen is not practical (this is about as much though as I gave to the mouse movement prior to today...but there is so much more!). The simplest possible solution is to change the ratio to say 3:1 - but that causes another problem: "you'd have to move your mouse about [2.1 mm], no more, no less, to move from the center of the close button to get to the center of the minimize button".

The solution? Use both. When the mouse is moving fast use a X:1 ratio to move a far distance with little motion; while when the mouse is moving slow use a 1:1 ration to get the precision needed. As the article explains "For mouse motion to feel natural (at least for most people), the curve has to start by moving upward fairly moderately, then gradually flattening out as the value of X increases...A comfortable and useful curve is shaped like a curve. Mac OS X's curve, however, is shaped more like a cliff". This explained the "broken" feel I got when using my mouse - general movement across the screen was all ok, but because of the abrupt flattening at the top of the cliff, when I slowed down to click on the target, my mouse practically slowed down to a halt.

Luckily, it can be easily fixed. There are some 3rd party applications (shareware) that can give you a more control over the acceleration curve. USB Overdrive and SteerMouse seem to be two most popular. However, I went with the free option and downloaded drivers for my mouse off the Microsoft website. Now back to playing World of Goo - unfortunately this means I can no longer blame my lack of co-ordination on bad mouse movement!

i challenge you to write a weekly entry to your blog on 7 new things you learned about this world, 1 new item for each day. not too difficult hey?

There was no reason I could think of to decline this challenge, so I have decided to take the challenge! Though I'm going to cheat a tiny little bit, instead of "7 new things I have learned" it will be things I have learnt, found interesting, would like to share. So here we go - my first weekly post and hopefully the first of many more to come!

Sunday, 25 October 2009

Thought of the day: www.example.com, www.example.org, www.example.net are reserved domains that are not available for registration!

In the past couple of months, I've written and done a fair bit of testing and as expected there are always going to be "dummy" email addresses, web-links etc. The most common being ones like: admin@example.com, www.example.com. One random day I thought to myself "Hey, what if someone registered 'example.com' as their domain name, wouldn't they get a tonne of random traffic?"

Well, to my surprise, the domain names: www.example.com, www.example.net and www.example.org are actually all reserved and not available for registration. If you want to read all the details you can have a look at RFC 2606 (warning: I've found RFCs have the tendency to be sleep inducing).

ps. didn't quite discover this on Sunday, but discovered it relatively recently - and trying to remember something that happened on Sunday when it's Tuesday is surprisingly hard!

Monday, 26 October 2009

Thought of the day: Incentives/rewards that are offered to us to motivate us can actually make things worse as it restricts our ability to think creatively. Intrinsic motivators work heaps better than extrinsic motivators.

Watched the TED talk: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation and indeed it was surprising. From experience our society tends to use incentives such as money to motivate us to do something. However, in Dan Pink's talk he shows us that there is scientific evidence that this extrinsic motivator is probably doing more harm that good in the majority of cases.

He highlights that scientific studies have shown that for basic mechanical tasks extrinsic motivators work really well, but for any tasks that require "rudimentary cognitive skills" these extrinsic rewards actually make things worse. The reasoning behind this is that "Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. … That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility." The problem with this is that most companies/businesses operate using the reward-based system even though a good majority of the jobs require employees to think outside the square to solve problems. It's definitely a good watch!

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

Thought of the day: Friends are a great source of motivation - whether it be working together, giving you ideas, or even just 'triggering' ideas

I think this one is quite self explanatory…simply talking to friends often gives me this extra energy to go and do something. Sometimes it's just the conversation itself, other times it's something I've always wanted to do, but didn't know how to approach it, and friends are awesome at giving you ideas. Talking to friends doesn't always trigger the motivation inside me, but talking to friends is always nice

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Thought of the day: Sitting in front of a computer is really bad for your posture - should be wary of your posture and do stretches regularly!

Ok, I admit that I am in front of a computer a good majority of the day - pretty much all day at work, then all night when I get back home. After a rather bad fall during on Tuesday during soccer asked a friend who is practicing physio and luckily she said all seemed good. Though she did also tell me that since I spend so long in front of a computer I really need to watch my posture - straight back, shoulders back and no poking my head forward to look at the monitor. In addition should also be regularly doing stretches to relax the muscles around the neck/shoulder area.

Been told time and time again about the posture (though it is so hard to sit upright!) but didn't realise that we should also stretch on a regular basis to relax/strengthen the muscles around the shoulders/neck. Guess that is one extra thing to do in the breaks I try to take every 30 minutes when using a computer.

Thursday, 29 October 2009

Thought of the day: Passion, focus and vision are all vital to achieving a goal.

In my many random readings, came across this article: 10 things Google has taught us, and I thought the first three points were quite good. You need passion to move forward and be willing to put in the hard work. You also need focus otherwise all your passion may be spread out amongst too many of your ideas. Lastly, you need a vision to tie together the "focussed passion" to work to an ultimate goal.

One of the quotes I quite liked from the article was to do with focus: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully". I have probably suffered from this fault myself - too many ideas and I seem to want to try them all out - will need to learn to pick carefully and say 'no' to the other ideas!

Friday, 30 October 2009

Thought of the day: All domain names consist of letters from the English alphabet, numbers, dots, dashes, underscores right? Well, actually no, meet: Internationalised Domain Names!

Was watching the morning news when I saw that the ICANN had approved domain names that contain non-Latin characters. My initial reaction was something along the lines of: Wow, that is awesome. Would be cool for non-English speaking people! Though it would mean getting to these non-Latin domains may prove tricky - you can't expect everyone to know how to type Chinese, Greek, Arabic etc! I wonder how this will work…

I had thought that Internationalised Domain Names were new and just introduced today, but a quick google later in the day revealed that I was very very wrong. In fact it was proposed in December 1996 and implemented in 1998 and a protocol to handle non-Latin domains had been agreed on, adopted and supported by many top level domains!

Today's announcement seems to be just an extension from IDNs as existing non-Latin domains still ended with .com, .kr, .tw etc but now with the announcement from ICANN these restrictions no longer apply. It shall be interesting to see how this unfolds and if the allowance of non-Latin extensions will mean greater use of IDNs on the Internet.

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Thought of the day: Auctions feel very much like gambling, and "3rd and final call" don't seem to be very "final" at all!

Attended an auction today (was only there to observe, didn't bid) but what I can say is it felt like the bidders were gambling that that extra $1000 or $500 in their bid will make their bid the winning bid. For at least 3 bids before the winning bid, I was able to sense the winning bidder felt like he had won, but was then out bid, so he tried his luck and put in another bid.

It was also very interesting to see how the auctioneer dragged the auction on when he saw that there was potential interest from one of the competing parties. In my opinion it was a bit unfair, since several times at the "3rd and final call" the auctioneer actually stopped and asked uncertain bidder "are you sure etc etc" and because of that it increased the price by at least $1000. Maybe all auctions are like that where "3rd and final call" isn't really final until the auctioneer is 100% certain that he has squeezed every last bid out of everyone.

ps. Not convinced that "Thought of the day" is a great name...been trying to think of another name all of today but couldn't come up with anything! Any suggestions…?
pps. This is my first stab at something like this - any comments, suggestions, feedback will be awesome!