paying attention to attention

Tried out a recent version of Touchstone briefly and although it’s got lots of interesting ideas (and quite a bit of implementation as well), it won’t yet work for me until it has a few key features – technically, the ability to work with https-delivered and authenticated feeds are mandatory for the way I subscribe to feeds now, and from a interaction point of view the ability to manually segment (or mark up) feeds (on subscription) into different types with different attention-management heuristics – news, events and alerts…

Simplicity or Optimization?

A comment from a colleague on the importance of the experience programmers bring when refactoring to good design

“Something that doesn’t get mentioned about refactoring to a ‘good design’ is that there is a lot of experience brought to bear about what is good. ”

A use of linguistic analysis in design

Seeing a reference to Skinner & Behaviourism (about which I have to admit I know very little) in Animals in Translation, I began thinking about the notion that “all that can be studied is behaviour” and that any reference to internals is problematic. I find this a non-starter for any meaningful study or account of human behaviour. I wonder if you could try to argue that this approach is merely an extension of the attitude of Ethnomethodology (EM), which I respect, already has towards cognitive science and other forms of abstract theorizing – the rejection of up-front in-advance modeling of unstudiable phenomena like ‘mental processes’. However what you are doing with an EM-inspired approach to the study of human and social phenomena is (I think) to engage in a form of practical reasoning – what kind of an account can I give of this.

The joys of parameterization

A hidden gem of parameterized tests discovered in Junit 4 javadocs.

While developing the tests for the new sodaplay.com, which needed to test that certain pages generated correct links no matter the name of the context path… That’s a pain because you want to repeat the same tests with just a single parameter difference (the context path). And I’m going to have to do that for each page that I want to test…

Sodaconstructor engineering workshops @Bristol

The Science Learning Centre at @Bristol have been granted EPSRC funding to do Angela McFarlane‘s proposal of running a scaled-up version of David Shaffer and Gina Svarovsky’s Sodaconstructor engineering workshops in the UK

Customisations

When talking about playforge modules last year, we had an idea that XML-based ui definitions might be helpful. Some of us had had some experience with XUL/Mozilla – and saw the power. We thought initially, maybe we take some sort of existing framework and integrate it. However the more we’ve looked the more we come to believe that our requirements are slightly different to most of the XUL-like options out there.