Original Cin

…it filters through.

I’m currently trying to lose weight, so I’ve been keeping track of calories online with NutritionData. It’s been one of my favorite websites for years for looking things up, but I didn’t realize they had such a nifty tracking system. Can I admit that I think it’s fun to see how everything in my diet changes all at once every time I enter a new food? What’s more, this has already helped at least a little bit:

• Nutritiondata alerted me to the fact that I was getting much, much more saturated fat in my diet than I should have been.
• As long as enter Omega-3 and Omega-6 for (at least some!) custom foods, I actually have some idea what their ratio is
• Nutritiondata’s also let me know that I’ve been getting lots of vitamin A, which is a good thing once in a while, but not something you want to do every day.

There also some annoyances – most of the data in the ND database comes from the USDA; I often find myself entering nutritional labels for foods. But with so many users, I’m sure I’m duplicating the work that many, many other people have done before. If there were ever a more obvious case to apply a crowdsourcing philosophy to a website, I don’t know what it is. For some reason, I can’t share the labels I enter with other website users, and they can’t share with me. Why?

My diet was messed up by 3 hours of website downtime. A local app would be better. (I was going to ask why there isn’t a Gnutrition program, but it turns out there is and that’s exactly what it’s called. I might give it a try later.)

Nutritiondata should probably take a hint from the Advocates for Self-Government and change their nutritional/filling grid into a diamond, with very nutritional, filling foods at the top (I realized a week ago or so that I can do this with my goal grid).

Finally, and bizarrely, every new day involves clearing the old data out completely. There is no archive. I’ve just been jotting down notes in a tab-delimited text file. I understand why they might not want to store a bunch of what-I-ate for years and years on end, but they can’t hold onto information for, say, a week or so?

FanCruft, my anime website, has just gotten a much-needed facelift. Here are before and after pictures:

When I first made Fancruft, I wanted to make it look good even in Internet Explorer 5 running on a fairly low-resolution screen (640×480). Many “Web 2.0″ concepts were new; RFC4627 was published just earlier that year. People were still advocating Smarty for PHP templating. I had been a Wikipedia administrator for maybe around a year and a half, and had not yet read The Wisdom of Crowds.

A lot of works still needs to go into FanCruft, but it now has a fairly modern face. IE 5 is no longer a concern, and the site now renders much more consistently across IE 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari. IE 6 doesn’t seem to understand fixed positioning and misinterprets it as absolute positioning, but this is still acceptable. The site is now designed for a screen of 800×600, but linearizes fairly well and should still be acceptable on smaller screens.

The independent “scattered” buttons have been replaced by a bar with a uniform height and no margin. Min-width is now supported well enough that I don’t mind just setting it and forgetting it, instead of using the IE5/6 hacks of yesteryear. Also, the buttons now glow gold on hover; yay!

The fine print at the bottom of the page has been cut down to a minimum, and the RSS icon now hovers on screen, just in case it isn’t noticed in the browser’s address bar. Overall, FanCruft is sleek and good looking.

One of the neat things about Google: They often work to subtly improve their service, and when they do, they often integrate the improvement so seamlessly into their existing site that you can easily miss it. This is a screenshot from the other day. I’ve entered the (domain) name of a website, and Google has automatically put a search box for that site under its listing in the results. I almost entered a second query in this box and clicked the button without even noticing that this was something I hadn’t seen before!

A search for "chipublib" on Google

Found while I was searching for something completely different: Disk Clock – A new conception of time for the OS X Dashboard. Be sure to look at the online demo in Firefox; the clocks are pretty, if confusing, and you don’t need a Mac.

Seen on Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden’s blog: How to Think:

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out?

I haven’t updated StorySage.com for nearly 3 years, and I think it’s time for a change. I spent yesterday working on a new, improved design for the site, please let me know what you think:

As part of my 2008 campaign to “Create It,” I’ve decided to try to build a clock of my own design. This is, quite frankly, crazy. As a matter of fact, I have little experience with anything that I might use to create this project other than some halfway-decent programming sense.

Anyway, on to what I have in mind: A ring, on a square board roughly two feet wide. The ring acts a sort of pie chart of time, and updates in one hour increments (no minutes in my clock, I don’t believe in sweating the small stuff!). At 12:00 midnight, the clock is completely green. The clock then begins turning red, one hour block at a time. At noon, the ring turns yellow, and the process repeats until it cycles back to completely green again at midnight. The drawing above shows 4:00 PM under this system.

I’m thinking of using LEDs to light up the clock face, and I plan on picking some up to play with the next chance I get.

…or, at the very least, it’s usable. Here’s a screenshot:

The earlier screenshot that I posted was launched with window.openDialog, but I’m still having trouble getting Chrono to launch in its own window so that everything “just works” — so instead, I’ll be using it from inside Firefox, which I have open most of the time anyway. I even have a bookmark to go to it right away. I figured that I’d go over everything I’ve done, and describe what I’ve learned and what I could do to improve this project (but probably won’t). (more…)

I’ve been busy working on my 2008 theme, “Create it” — long fascinated by the power of XUL, I’ve decided to use it to improve my personal scheduling system. Here’s a screenshot of what I currently use, an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet:

And, here’s what I’m planning on replacing it with, a Javascript-automated, XUL scheduler:

Pretty spiffy. No, it’s not exactly Sunbird, but it could possibly make a decent Sunbird extension. One of the things I’ve had a lot of difficulty getting my mind around are the various security restrictions and variable scope oddities — I spent a lot of time trying to determine where my user settings (and by “extension” my chrome directory) actually were, since I’ve moved the same Firefox installation across three computers already.

A while ago on Coding Horror, there was a discussion about the HTML reset button (I think…). The short version is that the reset button can only destroy a great deal of work that’s been done to enter information into a form, and that in most cases it should be avoided. I would argue that this is an important exception to this rule – if the form contains a large number number of fields for which the default value is special, including a reset button is vital.

I was reminded of this while using PhDs.org’s ranking program. There’s an option to free-fill in several options with values that fits a pre-made “profile.” And if you don’t like the profile and want to create your own, disregarding some of the options? Rather than clear them out one by one, there’s a convenient “clear all” link at the top of the page. In the same way, FanCruft’s advanced quiz allows you to reset everything back to the default value of 5, so that, if you’ve decided that you’ve messed up, you don’t have to reload the page or manually click 5 for every option.

After poking around a bit after my last post to determine the current state of alternate shells for Windows, I found SharpE and gave it a spin. I think it is a great example of how software that looks beautiful can still go terribly, terribly wrong in its UI. I’ve attached a screenshot so people know what I’m talking about:

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Large, beautiful desktop icons, a reasonable, if not great layout for UI elements…

Look at the bottom. That’s the taskbar and my Quick Launch bar. Ugh! It’s so small, it hurts my eyes! Either SharpE’s developers are running their system at a much lower resolution than I am, or they use a projector to place their desktop on a wall. It hurts my eyes to look at this, and clicking on anything in the area feels like threading a needle. This would be a forgetable and forgivable note if there were any way to change the size. Maybe there is, and I just didn’t find it with all that right clicking.

Why exactly is this a problem? First of all, I’m in my mid-20s. My vision isn’t great (I’m nearsighted in one eye, farsighed in the other, and have astigmatism to boot), but I generally don’t have trouble seeing things in detail. Like I said, SharpE literally hurt my eyes to look at it and use for a long period of time, even though it looks good. There is no way in hell the vast majority of people in 50s and older are going to be able to use those minicons on the bottom of the screen. The persistant may pull it off, but the benefits of SharpE seem too small to make such persistance worth-while.

Seth Godin recently said to avoid tiny print if possible. In the UI world, we have Fitts’ Law, (see also Coding Horror). Icons should not be that small relative to the screen. I don’t think there’s been an application where a 15px by 15px icon is a good idea for a very, very long time indeed.

I feel like I’ve been unwillingly tossed into one of those “Conversion analysis” things that appears on the Lunametrics blog from time to time, and I hate it.

First of all, I’m looking for a box. I have two of them already. They’re file-sized boxes about 8 to 10 inches deep with long, oval holes. I’ve found they’re great for mounting onto the wall with some 3M command hooks. I’m pretty sure that the brand on these boxes was Rubbermaid. I saw some similar items at the store made by Rubbermaid, but not the exact boxes I’m looking for. I’d like to buy some.

What would you do in this situation? There is, or at least was, such a brand as “Rubbermaid Office Solutions” but if it’s still being maintained, it’s not accounted for on the Rubbermaid site. There’s commericial solutions, laundry, kitchen, medical… but not what I’m actually looking for. Following the trail to Newell, they reveal, basically, that Rubbermaid-branded office products do exist, but fail to say anything more.

Trying a different tactic, I searched for Rubbermaid USB hubs, and found a company called Eldon. No problem there, except that they neither seems to sell USB hubs, nor file boxes. Clicking along the company’s downright bizarre description of their corporate structure (as a consumer, I really do not care one iota that Rubbermaid household products are manufactured by a sibling company to the people who make office doohickeys). Finally, I managed to get information on something that resembles what I’m looking for: Eldon sells things which are pretty similar as both “Rogers” and “Households” I suppose at this point I get to try putting part numbers in Amazon to see what pops out, since there’s no information at all on how to get any of these products anywhere in sight (they have a list of distributors and retailers off the home page of their site, but the first link I tried was broken).

This is entirely too complex for something that should just be a matter of walking to a local store and paying cash for a relatively small item.