It’s been my experience that the names of wireless networks do not tell you much about where they are. I do not use wireless network names as default names for anything.
For example, here are the wireless networks I can see in my apartment right now are:
2WIRE985
APOGEE
B&G Enterprises
gobias
Hookers
linksys
NETGEAR
orange
Paris205
Skynet
UFA
I don’t even think that Paris205 is a [...]
I was blown away when I read the first part of this talk given by Joel Spolsky at Yale, because it so totally nails problems I’ve seen at Microsoft and problems at my alma mater.
I was also reminded of Will Shipley’s excellent article on the limitations of unit-testing.
Less than half the population of the world has the manual dexterity to wiggle their fingers at the speed of 50 words per minute or better.
–Dr. Alan Lloyd, seminal typing instructor.
Computer professionals often seem to have unrealistically high expectations of what the “average” typist can do. For example, according to this Wikipedia article (as of [...]
I do not put much faith in Hick’s Law. I’ve seen it misapplied and drastically misinterpreted. Its limits, and edge-cases, are not widely known. I am convinced that it is generally not a dominant factor, even when it is relevant. I don’t agree with many design choices it is used to justify. In [...]
Interesting, and useful tidbit:
Just a curiosity, but it happens that in a yes-no binary response test, the reaction time to select “no” is longer than for “yes.”
Source
This is worth investigating further, but tonight I’m bushed. If anyone has any more information, especially quantitative data, I’d love to hear it.
This is a bit of the design process behind one line of one settings panel inside IMLocation.
The “Locations” panel controls everything having to do with to locations. The pane’s “headline”, outlined in red, shows what is assumed to be the current location.
It reads like “Your current location is home”. It does not say [...]
A few days ago, out of morbid curiosity, I went looking for a a quine written in AppleScript. To my surprise, I couldn’t find one.
I’d never actually written a quine before, so this was a good ‘excuse’ to make one (and brush up on some computability theory — use it or lose it).
Well, here [...]
Before you consider using any of the unsupported hacks I’m about to discuss, check to see if existing frameworks , or iChat’s AppleScript interface, will do what you need. Any software update can break unsupported code in unpredictable ways at any time. When Leopard came out, all the hacks I had been using [...]
I was watching BBC News on EyeTV this morning, and caught the tail end of a horrific story about hundreds of French patients who received crippling, and sometimes fatal, overdoses of radiation.
Earlier this year, a major scandal erupted in France when it was discovered that between 1989 and 2006, two radiotherapy units had accidentally given [...]
When writing a short AppleScript to complete a specific task, do not write a procedure that checks if A exists, then operates on it if it does. Instead, write an expression that operates on A, and ignore any exceptions caused by A not existing. Surrounding the statement in a try-block will ignore any [...]
