Chance Favors the Connected Mind

Nice video. How do we apply it to today's world and the work place? What can institutions do to promote the connected mind? The elitist would say that not all minds are worthy of being connected. And ... that may be true. But even if true - who would make such a determination?

So here's to less intrusive, more private inconnectivity. Here's to it being possible.

Kludge of the Year

My nomination for kludge of the year comes from a friend who is working in Africa. He took this picture of a man jump starting his car.

The most popular programming languages in 2011

There is an interesting graph at IEEE Spectrum.

I agree with the author who wrote:

What has been interesting in recent years is the rise of JavaScript for writing Web-based applications that connect users to databases—think Gmail. In fact, JavaScript's ascent is largely due to Google's creation of the V8 JavaScript engine, a speedy compiler that powers its Chrome browser.

And then there is the rapid rise of Objective-C which underlies Mac OS and iOS.

[It] was barely in TIOBE's top 40 in 2008. But since then, it's climbed rapidly in popularity because people have been using it to write apps for the iPhone and iPad.

I've been looking at Objective-C for a while. An excellent site is at djavupixel.com

How do different age groups perceive web applications?

I’ve been wondering how different age groups perceive web applications. I am not finding what I’m looking for. Too many of the tests seem to focus upon how *today’s* elderly perceive the web. For example: “In most cases designers can use standard Web-related terms and assume that users understand them. But in this study, several users were unsure about Web terminology, such as page, homepage, website, or the Web.”

This is not a function of age – but a function of new users. It just happens to be that these new users are also elderly.

I’m looking for such information such as contrast, font size, font type, line-width, pop-ups, amount of content on a screen, decision making, etc…

Jakob Nielsen wrote the following back in 2002

Why Usability is Lower for Seniors
Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors. However, as indicated by our usability metrics, seniors are hurt more by usability problems than younger users. Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory.
Usability for Senior Citizens

OK. So we have the IA perspective on it - but how about the UX? We know reading comprehension is imperative. How about more tests on what *works* in a wider sense? What stimulates interest? What changes exist in how people scan and use websites as they age? I suppose we're going to have to wait for more tests. Maybe as eye-tracking software become more and more affordable we can have more information.

Unrecognized attribute 'targetFramework'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

I'm learning ASP.NET; installed Visual Studio Express 2010 and had some issues getting started.

I was getting the following message whenever I tried something a little more complicated than request.write(now).

Parser Error Message: Unrecognized attribute 'targetFramework'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

After looking around I found that the error was that ASP.NET 2.0 and not ASP.NET 4.0 was installed.

Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > IIS

Right click on WebSite > Properties > ASP.NET > Version >

It should be some version of 4.0 and not 2.0

Don't forget to restart IIS.

A Joke for Atheists

Apologies to my religious friends, but this was too funny.

Since my teen-age years I've used the following to explain how I arrived that there is no God.

A is A. (A being defined as EVERYTHING.)

Either

A has always existed. (Inconceivable)

or

A comes from nothing. (Impossible)

Following the dictum of the great 19th C philosopher Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

Since A coming from nothing is impossible therefore A has always existed.

Qwikster, Branding Hell for Netflix

Netflix has made a series of mistakes lately. One can agree or disagree with Netflix's decision to raise their prices, divorce themselves from the DVD market, force some of their customers to have two accounts (one for the streaming video and the other for DVDs). In fact a good case can be made for Netflix to go entirely to streaming video (provided their library includes all their current DVDs) and even for them to raise their prices but there is no excuse, none whatsoever, for them to not research their trademarked name.

The Board of Directors at Netflix approved the unimaginable: they approved the name of their spinoff company without checking to see if the twitter handle was taken. It was.

Say hello to Qwikster

And here's one of the last tweets from qwikster:

Bored as shyt wanna blaze but at the same time I don't ugh fuck it where's the bowl at spark me up lls

What a public relations nightmare. How is it possible that a tech company allowed this to happen? Here's a few paragraphs from a less than complimentary article:

If there is one downside of Netflix's decision to cancel Qwikster, it is that Jason Castillo, the semi-coherent, weed-curious high-schooler who owned the Twitter handle @Qwikster, never got to extort Reed Hastings and his company for all the money that he could. The single bright side in the monumentally stupid Qwikster fiasco was the existence of @Qwikster; there was an unspoken hope that the totally undeserving, totally unprepared and likely totally blazed owner of that Twitter handle would somehow stumble into a large financial payday from Netflix, which would have represented some kind of victory-by-proxy for all of those customers stupefied by Netflix's stupefying decision to split the services in the first place.

Qwikster was a dumb idea. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It should certainly be a first ballot entrant into the Bad Decision Hall of Fame, enshrined next to New Coke, Prohibition and that time Garth Brooks dyed his hair black and played rock music under the name Chris Gaines. Better choices have been made at 24/7 Las Vegas chapels after too many Limoncello shots.

I agree. Better decisions have been made by drunken fools partying away their life savings in Las Vegas.