Evilsoft.org

The Smithsonian is currently showing an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum that showcases some textiles designed for extreme conditions and properties. What is of particular interest (as I am not going to DC until perhaps this winter) is that they have a flash version of the exhibit. To view this version go to their current exhibition listing and click on the Extreme Textiles link. Some of the highlights of the exhibit include Marlow Superline with a breaking strength of 4,416,000 pounds or the Airbeam inflatable bullet resistant arch used by the US Army to quickly create hangers for aircraft maintenance or the Rotor Blisk a rocket engine turbopump made of carbon fiber that is capable of functioning at up to 2,732F.

“I was coming down the stairs and I saw your feet resting up on the table. I knew it was you from the socks, even before I saw your face. ” Paul

I am infamous at my school for wearing “toe socks“, ridiculously bright and garish socks with individualized toes. I find them comforting and fun, and at this point a little defining. I wear them under tennis shoes and sandals, to court and in class, around the house and at parties. I used to be a one of those people who would not leave the house unless all my accessories went well together and complimented my outfit. Now I see no problem pairing green, pink and blue striped toe socks covered in hopping green frogs with almost any outfit.

“I saw a Family Guy episode where Lois told Peter she had thrown out some socks and he said ‘not my rainbow socks with the individualized toes!!’ I instantly thought of you.” Nick

In addition to being a great way to keep my feet warm these socks are a great icebreaker, everyone comments on them. I have more people coming to talk to me on a day when I wear toe socks than on any day when I don’t. They also make great puppets for bored and restless children during all the mundane and boring times in which parents make them participate. Many a toddler fit has been precluded by the sudden vocal stylings of pink, orange, and white striped fluffy sheep toe sock puppets.

Granted you must get over the desire to affirmatively declare that all your clothing matches or coordinates. Most toe socks are created in such a way that no matter what you wear, they will never compliment nor coordinate with anything. They are garish enough to clash with themselves. But whenever I wear them, I happily feel as though I am breaking some small social norm and carving out a little niche of my own. Even if it’s only for my feet.

I was poking around on one of my new favorite blogs titled “Creating Passionate Users” when I came across a reference to something really neat. Apparently Airstream hired Christopher Deam to design the interior of one of their trailers. To quote MoCoLoco “The summum of modern form and function – on wheels. ” I could not agree more. Apparently I am coming late to the party here with this trailer as it was introduced on 2003, but it sure is pretty and I sure do want one. Hmm perhaps I can add this to my Amazon wishlist…

This trailer is a wonderful example of design being used to transform the mundane into something elegant and that is actually a joy to use. This trailer reminds me of a concept I have been reading and thinking about for some time, namely that objects that are attractive actually seem to work better. Don Norman has written an informative piece about this, he points out what I think many people intuitively understand, attractive things work better. From a purely rational viewpoint this does not seem to logically follow, one would think that an object designed for pure functionality would always work better. In practice we find that this is not always the case.

There is a dynamic tension inherent between attractiveness and functionality and sometimes this results in attractive items that, given a specific environment, seem to work better. The example that Norman uses that most hits home for me is the idea of using a monochrome or grey scale computer monitor for my day to day computing needs. Rationally there is very little actual advantage to using a color monitor for most computer uses. But I am not giving up my color display, and likely neither will anybody else. This is simply because we like color, it is more attractive. In some instances color can be used to convey additional information, but for most computing tasks, programming, reading email, word processing, etc, color is nothing more than decoration. However our subjective experience of using color vs. grey scale is that color works better. Norman’s explanation for this is very cogent and relies upon the introduction of the concept of “affect”. To quote his essay – “Affect and cognition can both be considered information processing systems, but with different functions and operating parameters. The affective system is judgmental, assigning positive and negative valence to the environment rapidly and efficiently. The cognitive system interprets and makes sense of the world. Each system impacts the other: some emotions — affective states — are driven by cognition, and cognition is impacted by affect.”

Affect is our instantaneous reaction to the people, things and events around us. This response is emotional and colors our views and actions in the light of our emotional rather than rational experiences. From a brain chemistry POV we find that different emotional states alter our brain chemistry, and this in turn alters our perceptions and cognitive functions. Depending on a given situation and its resulting affect our cognition or reason will occur in either a depth first or breadth first manner. This results in thinking that is either very focused and not easily distractible or thinking that is very broad and more prone to very creative, easily distractible thinking. The easiest example for either type of thinking I can think of involves driving. So imagine you are driving to work listening to good music, the road is clear and your mind is relaxed and unfocused. This environment is one that would cause positive affect in most people. You are thinking of many different things, all at once. Basically mentally you are playing with concepts such as: designing houses, coding problems at work, dog training, etc. All of a sudden you see flashing lights ahead and in the distance an accident that is crawling with police and emergency services appears. Immediately your mind shifts gears and becomes intensely focused on driving and the immediate environment. All other thoughts disappear and suddenly you are applying your breaks, changing lanes, and more to the point, you are now paying “the fuck” attention. This shift in thinking and behavior results from the instantaneous negative affect caused in response to the situation. In my experience logic and reason follow after the oh shit response has already occurred.

Negative affect focuses the mind, making it less distractible and positive affect broadens the thought processes, making it more distractible. This has broad yet simple consequences for design. Things used in stressful, negative affect situations, must accommodate people who may have a high level of focus, perhaps even tunnel vision. Therefore they must be well designed so that they are both simple to use and understand. Whereas things designed for positive affect situations should reinforce the positive affect, by making the person experience more positive affect. This change in information processing then allows the person to be more creative and makes their work easier. Hence items that create a positive affect, and most attractive items do enhance positive affect, encourage creative activities. Hence attractive tools do actually work better.

And what does this have to do with trailers… well what is going to be the more comfortable therefore easier to use trailer, this one or this one.

So as mentioned in my twist tie art post I buy a lot of gadgets. Cell phones, palm pilots, cameras, video cards, motherboards, label makers, automatic kitty litter boxes…. If it’s a gadget that doesn’t suck, I’m your audience. Well, this leads to a problem. All these things come with instructions booklets, adapters, driver CDs, screen covers, receipts, and a bunch of other crap. Now, I know that I could keep the CDs in one place, and the adapters with all my other cables and crap, but I’m finding that with enough time of this stuff spending in a drawer, the less common cables and adapters can lose their association in my mind as to what they are for. CDs disappear into the living mound of junk on my desk, instruction booklets go missing, and forget about the receipts.

Well, this problem has a rather simple and elegant solution that my father showed me a few months ago. What you will need:

• Clasp Envelopes
• A Sharpie
• Some sort of filing cabinet

I suspect the solution is fairly obvious based on the list of materials. With every item you purchase that has more then one related item (receipt, cables, instructions, etc) whip out a clasp envelope, write the name of the object on the face of the envelope, and then stick the whole thing in your filing cabinet/file box. This has a number of benefits. First off, it keeps everything that is related together, and these envelopes can normally fit everything that comes with most gadgets. Second, they are just over 8 1/2 x 11, so they can pretty much fit in any filing cabinet either as their own files, or in a thicker handing folder. Third, do you really need to fill your CD cases with a bunch of driver CDs that you use at most what? *maybe* two, three times….*ever*. Fourth when you are done with the object, this makes it really easy to sell/give it away/freecycle it.

Since I have started doing this, it’s really helped tame my office, hope it helps tame yours.

Now that is scary.

Credit to Mr. Williams for pointing this little gem out.

I’ve had some strange habits in my life, but this one has got to be one of the more bizarre ones. In my life I have purchased a lot of gadgets. I mean a LOT of gadgets. And one universal thing is they all come with cables, and those cables are almost always tied together with twist ties. Well, for the past 5 years, I have kept those twist ties, and used them for somewhat stranger ends: The creation of little twist tie people and other beings that I can scatter around my desk, causing my office mates to conclude that I am most deffinitly something of a whack job.

Pair of lovers

The process is pretty easy, you need about 3 twist ties of roughly the same length to make a person. One creates the head and body, 1 creates the arms and chest (or breasts in the case of one of the two in the below picture “Pair of Lovers”) and the final one creates the abdomen and the legs.

Climber

Once you have a number of people, you can lay them out doing any number of things. Personally I find ones that unnerve your co-workers such as the below “Ctulhu Worshippers” to be the most enjoyable. But it’s very easy to create scenes that are allegories for political battles at the office, or scenes based on recent events.

Ctulhu Worshipers

After having done this for some time, it’s fairly easy to figure out how to do more unique things, such as dragons, ettins, or really anything your imagination can come up with. Personally I think my next project will be a twist tie darth vader for the upcoming release of revenge of the sith.

Dragon

Suggested tools:

• A pile of twist ties, varrying lengths
• a leatherman, or other needle nosed pliers (good for crimping the joints to make them hold well)
• Paperclips (I don’t show any here, but you can easily turn a paperclip into a number of things such as swords, staves, other handheld objects, even furniture)
• The odd mixture of motivation, creativity and boredom to take on a project like this

Ettin with victim

I am a Star Wars fan. I grew with the movies and have enjoyed them for years. Perhaps I will be able to forgive Lucas for his arrogance and excess, if this new movie lives up to its appearances and initial reviews. I am not so sure he would be so forgiving.

37signals, the cool cats responsible for Basecamp have finally released their next big thing and damn it is cool. It is not going to cure cancer or anything but it certainly is a nice organizational tool. It’s simplicity in design has lead to a really intuitive UI. Good job guys. Anyway I am sharing a few pages for some ongoing projects (in the GTD sense) you can see them here and here. Essentially what backpack allows its users to do is to create webpages to hold information for projects/lists/stories/etc. It could be used as a blog, an interface for simple CRM, a management tool for simple projects, a whole lot of other things.

This is another Ruby on Rails implementation that shows (me at least) how good development tools and smart developers can make something really elegant in a short period of time. The ease of adding widgets to my own backpack webpages is fantastic and I am really excited about using Backpack for some needed life project management. And I am hoping it will push me into learning more about Rails development.

It has been stated by some that the future of web develpment is going to be with this type of framework. I could not agree more. Now it is certainly debatable whether or not these frameworks will be written in Ruby (mmm Ruby) or Java (mmm Java) or something else. I myself am a total web development noob so I have to learn as I go and see for myself.

So this, the next installment of my “I just re-installed my box, what’s on it” series we are going to look at the wonder that is the Firefox extension. Firefox is indeed a fantastic browser, but what really makes it a killer app is the ability to extend it so that it perfectly meets your needs.

Bar none the best experience I have had with this was at work. Being a contractor, I have to punch in and out multiple times per day, but my employer’s IT department doesn’t support anything other then IE internally (this seems to be the norm). Well, they made 2 small mistakes in their html and javascript that made the site unusable on anything other then IE, which of course means that I have to use two browsers. Well, Greasemonkey came to my rescue. Because I can use greasemonkey to dynamically re-write sites, the timesheet app now works perfectly in firefox for me, and IT didn’t have to lift the finger they refused to.

So, what I have installed in my firefox:
Web Development:

• Venkman: A javascript debugger for firefox. This package is fantastic for javascript developers, and provides you with a number of useful features. Must have if you do javascript.
• Web Developer: Adds a menu bar

Google:

• Google Pagerank Status: Google Pagerank is the algorithm that pretty much controls the web, well now you can see in your status bar just how popular a particular site is according to google.
• GooglePreview: This extension is surprisingly useful. All it does is adds a snapshot of the web page into the google results. If you are looking for a link to a page you have been to before, the fact that you can see it is invaluable.

Just Plain Cool:

• FoxyTunes: Lets me control Winamp from the status bar of firefox. No more fumbling around to which desktop my winamp is on, just find the nearest browser.
• BlogThis: A plugin that well…lets me post here more easily.
• del.icio.us: A fantastic replacement for the bookmarklets that let you post a link to deli.icio.us. All the functionality of the experimental del.icio.us interface, but with a xul window. Yum.
• SessionSaver 2: I keep a lot of tabs open. I mean a *lot*. This makes rebooting, or for that matter shutting down firefix a 10 minute ordeal as I determing which pages I still need to read, and which ones I ma done with – as I save the links somewhere for after my reboot. Well, no more. Sessions saver grabs the state from the last Firefox session, and opens the same windows/tabs.
• Greasemonkey: This plugin isn’t interesting, it’s web changing. Greasemonkey is a paradigm shift in how the web works. No longer are we constrained by the piss poor design decisions other people make in their websites. Using Greasemonkey, you can write or download scripts that completely change the way that a web page works. You can alter the content, layout, javascript, whatever you need. Some really clever thing shave been done with this like the hack that overlays the subway system of Chicago on google maps.
• Aardvark: Sort of a cross between Greasemonkey and webdeveloper, Aardvark lets you select elements of a web page, and either remove them, or alter their formatting to make them easier to read/print. Perfect for printing sites that make getting a good hard copy a pain in the ass.

Gotta love MIT. Apparently you only need one time traveler convention.