Author: Vince Kimball

Ben Bederman's DateLens.  Responding to this week's column, Glen Vanderburg notes correctly that I should have credited Ben Bederson's pioneering work on fisheye distortion in GUIs. I checked, and Samuel Wan does cite Bederson on his blog. Glenn writes: Ben has been working for over ten years now to increase the richness of our GUIs… Continue reading Ben Bederman's DateLens

Library Web Site Design on a Shoestring. I came home from the ILA Conference to find a copy of Carrie Bickner's long-anticipated book, Web Design on a Shoestring, waiting on the doorstep, courtesy of The Rogue Librarian herself. From the introduction: “Web Design on a Shoestring tackles every aspect of web production from the point of… Continue reading Library Web Site Design on a Shoestring

Open WorldCat Project!. In response to my BloggerCon comments, Bill Brembeck from OCLC sent me the following message: “We began efforts in June of this year running through June 2004, which we have named the 'Open WorldCat' pilot. The purpose is to determine the feasibility of a new service to raise the visibility of libraries… Continue reading Open WorldCat Project!

Ernie the Attorney has a good wrapup of Pop!Tech.  [The Scobleizer Weblog]

Coffee with Jonathan Sapir.  Last week, I spent an afternoon with Jonathan Sapir, president of InfoPower Systems Inc., an Illinois-based application development company. Currently counting 50 employees, the 10-year-old firm has spent the last year stepping slightly away from its traditional software development work in order to design and implement a Web services system in… Continue reading Coffee with Jonathan Sapir

Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Site. Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites by Alison J. Head [via InfoDesign (Peter J. Bogaards)], a good article on personas, showing more than telling, with good example personas and a brief case study using BBCi. Includes pointers, necessary details, and a tutorial featuring… Continue reading Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Site

PHP EasyWindows Installer 4.3.3.1 released. The latest release of this installer, which sets up PHP 4.3.3, FastCGI, Turck MMCache 2.4.1, PEAR and ADOdb for IIS, Apache 1.3 and 2.0. This is the installer that we use in-house for our Windows projects. If you want a PHP installer that is tuned for IIS with FastCGI, this… Continue reading PHP EasyWindows Installer 4.3.3.1 released

ADOdb 4.00 released. ADOdb 4.00 is out after a 3 month beta testing process. The distinguishing feature of this release is the performance monitoring functionality. AFAIK, it is the first Open Source cross-platform, multi-database performance monitoring and health check software in the world.  [PHP Everywhere]

The nTag sleep attack.  The badges at Pop!Tech were wee interactive computers called nTags. When engaged in conversation with someone, you could choose to send your contact information to that person, see what that person is interested in (based on your interests), get recommendations on people that they have met that you should meet, and… Continue reading The nTag sleep attack

Where NetNewsWire stores data. When you’re upgrading to a new version of OS X, and you want to make sure NetNewsWire doesn’t lose its subscriptions and preferences, you need to copy two things to your new installation: 1. The preferences file at ~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist 2. The folder at ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/ The prefs file contains your subscriptions… Continue reading Where NetNewsWire stores data