Pecha Kucha

I had to post at least once while sitting in a SXSW talk, so here it is...

Can Pecha Kucha be a valuable format for condensed information transfer? I'm slowly processing Edward Tufte's work, and I buy the idea that we do harm by excessive filtering of information to make it palatable to our audience. But for certain topics, environments, and audiences, it makes a lot of sense to condense material.

Pecha Kucha is a style of presentation in which you present 20 slides for 20 seconds each. Transitions are timed, which forces the presenter to make quick and steady progress. The total presentation time comes out at 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Thinking about it reminds me of Dick Hardt's legendary Identity 2.0 presentation.

The Wikipedia article mentions the value for business applications, an area that hits close to home:

This is primarily a device to help ... force presenters to be more focused in their message, allow them to flow uninterrupted, and ultimately to avoid the "death by powerpoint" syndrome, of sitting through long and often tedious powerpoint presentations.

It could be a digestible format for some of the BarCamp presentations.

Interface Gripe #3 - PHP Error Messages

I'm learning PHP right now for work, and it's not the most fun thing in the world after using Ruby On Rails. C'est la vie.

However, error messages like this don't help much:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/proj/include/file.php on line 703


That's supposed to tell me that there's probably an extra space after my declaration of a tag for a heredoc:


$foo = <<<END_FOO[ space ]


The T_SL stands for the Token Shift-Left operator. At least it's not too hard to search for these messages.

I know that it's possible that this error could arise due to a condition unrelated to heredocs. However, I'm a big advocate of providing extra support for the common case. If you want to take this to an extreme, you can do a study on the various causes of an error that might produce a given message. Then you provide extra context or help text for the most common case(s). I know there's a (DWIM, QWAN, TMTOWTDI, DRY)-style acronym out there somewhere for this principle, but it escapes me at the moment.

The Amen Break

Here's a short discussion of the history of the Amen Break -- the 6 second drum break that, via sampling, contributed to much of the hip hop and electronic music that we have today. Snippets of songs by NWA, Mantronix, Squarepusher, and Perry Farrell are heard, among others. Remixes of this break's pattern show up in music by one of my favorites, Aphex Twin. Copyright issues are discussed in the video as well.

The video seems pretty useless - why do I care to watch a record play for most of 18 minutes, even if they custom pressed it? I know, I need to slow down and get in touch with my inner tortoise.

The New Generation of Graffiti

This is awesome. The Graffiti Research Lab built a system that uses a laser pointer to control a video projection that they can shine on buildings.

There's a howto here: GRL Laster Tag Howto

Slife - The Awareness Browser

Slife is an application that keeps track of the time you spend doing various activities on your computer. I have a strong desire to prioritize my activities to increase my productivity, and Slife could be a valuable tool for that. I've just started playing with it, so time will tell.

You can group your activities under your own project names with hotkeys to let you keep track of your work across applications. Maybe you want to label certain activities based on whether you're doing work or play, or label work you do for various clients to aid in developing project management metrics or for billing. There's also a tagging interface available (including hotkeys), so you can tag your work with whatever categories you wish.

There's also a community site, Slifeshare, that lets you automatically upload your activity to share with others. There are widgets for your home page or blog to show your activity as well. Since I'm struggling with the tension between privacy and exposure and community, this idea both excites and frightens me.

It's still early for this project, so I can't be too hard on them, but Slife didn't pick up the couple of chess games I played this morning. There's an extras section on the site that has plugins for other applications, but there's no support for Chess (included with OS X) or OmniGraffle today.

[Link]

Audrey Kawasaki Interview

Audrey Kawasaki is an artist I admire. In a recent interview which she refused to do in person, she talks about her introverted qualities, complete with lowercase i's:

i’m not a good talker in person. i feel much more comfortable typing this down at my own pace. My brain doesn’t function as quickly as most people, maybe – too aloof perhaps – plus i can never find the right words to match what’s going on inside.
i grew up pretty sheltered. Too shy. Too reserved. i was never a good talker. Was and still am a horrible story teller. But on paper, or on canvas or wood, with a pencil and brush in hand, i can be as loud as i want! i am clear and explicit as ever. There is no fear, no shame, nothing to worry about. i am honest and blunt and direct, and loving it!

I gravitated towards visual art at around five years old. After abandoning it for about 10 years, I've been trying lately to reclaim my skills. Audrey describes pretty well the way my brain works. Some of my earliest memories of drawing are of creating new worlds that my imaginary characters could inhabit and explore. I would sit up in my room drawing and reading. It's interesting to read about others with similar experiences.

Testing your Tests

Jester (for Java) and Heckle (for Ruby) are tools that take an interesting approach. They attempt to discover coverage deficiencies in unit tests. They do this by mutating your code in various ways, and then running your unit tests to see if they fail. The argument goes: if the code under test changes, then a unit test for it should fail.

I would expect there to be problems with false positives, as this article confirms. However, it does mention that FPs are easy to filter out.

Here's another article on Heckle.