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95 posts under this tag.

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Sakura 2
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6
Sep
26

The weird thing about fetishy picsELZR like the one below is they’re so beyond-words good if you were actually on the look for them you wouldn’t find any. This one, for instance, I found yesterday (here) while looking for pictures of sakuraWP, cherry blossoms, on Imagery.

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KinKey 2
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6
Sep
22



EnglishEnglish | EspañolEspañol



KinKey is a tiny app that makes it easy to type with a US keyboard the special characters of
-Spanish

-French

-German

-Portuguese

-Italian

-Catalan.



It works in Windows XP/2000/Vista.

 Three step installation: 
# Download. (200 KB)
# Run.
# Chuckle… There Is No Step Three1!


KinKey is now running in the background (and will run itself at every startup unless you uninstall it). At any2 text-editing place you want, you can now, say, press E and ^ at the same time (in the same way you press Ctrl and C to copy) to get French’s e circumflex, ê. The order doesn’t matter, you could just as easily have pressed ^ and E to get ê.

Here’s a list of the characters you can type with KinKey:

Example:

Pressing A and / results in á.

Pressing Shift (or with CapsLock on), A and / results in Á.



Acute accent (´)
LetterKey 1Key 2
áA/
éE/
íI/
óO/
úU/


Grave accent (`)
LetterKey 1Key 2
àA\
èE\
ìI\
òO\
ùU\

Circumflex accent (^)
LetterKey 1Key 2
âA^
êE^
îI^
ôO^
ûU^

Dieresis or Umlaut (¨)
LetterKey 1Key 2
äA%
ëE%
ïI%
öO%
üU%

Other Diacritic Characters
LetterKey 1Key 2
çC5
ñN~
ãA~
õO~
 
 
 
 
 

Other Special Characters
SymbolKey 1Key 2
¿Ctrl Shift?
¡Ctrl Shift!
æA3
œO3
ßSZ
«<
»>
E=
£L-


To uninstall KinKey, close first the program by right-clicking its traybar3 icon, , and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.

Kinkey was inspired by Jef Raskin’s Humane Interface book (particularly pages 185 to 187) and was implemented through AutoHotkey.

That’s it. Enjoy.


fn1. Groupie-ly stolen from Instiki.

fn2. There are two known exceptions where KinKey won’t work: Vim and Adobe Photoshop.

fn3. The traybar is the area on the bottom-right part of your screen, right next to the clock, where many system-state icons are located.


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IIBB: Limpiaparabrisas 2
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6
Sep
19

Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de MerkabastosELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.

Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?

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Happy Birthday Rails! 2
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6
Sep
08

Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).

Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.

We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.

David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails steps into year three

1 Who, incidentally, got into a weird, but well-deserved, skirmish with DHH some days ago.

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What could be 2
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6
Sep
07

Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous postsELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:

Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”

Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p124

To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson CrusoesWP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?

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The Physical Impossibility of Life in the Mind of Someone Dead 2
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6
Sep
07

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The Chance Causality of Talent 2
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6
Aug
29

This time a fascinating little gem from the cover article, The Expert Mind, of this month’s Scientific American: The month you were born plays decisive importance into whether you’ll become a professional soccer player or not. That’s a fact.

A 1999 study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent. In Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia, the players were much more likely than average to have been born in the first quarter (Q1) after the cutoff date for youth soccer leagues.. Because these players were older than their teammates when they joined the leagues, they would have enjoyed advantages in size and strength, allowing them to handle the ball and score more often. Their success in early years would have motivated them to keep improving, thus explaining their disproportionate representation in the professional leagues.

NOTE: The cutoff dates were August 1 for Germany, Brazil and Australia, and April 1 for Japan.
Philip E. Ross, The Expert Mind

I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s wonderful, mocking account of how he became a scientist (which appears in John Brockman’s Curious Minds, a book I’ve praised lavishly already).

Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist. Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either. One of the curses of being an experimental psychologist is the habit of scrutinizing one’s own mental processes. Recounting childhood influences is a mental process no less subject to quirks and errors than falling for the visual illusions on the back of a cereal box. Everything I know about the recollection of childhood influences makes me approach this assignment with misgivings..

In a classic 1977 review, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued that many of the causes of our choices never enter our consciousness. Here is a simple example. If you present people with an array of articles of clothing and ask them to pick one to keep, they tend to pick the rightmost one. But if you then ask them to list the reasons they chose that article, no one says, “Because it was the one on the right.” They cite only the features of the objects themselves. Not having served in experiments in which the same items were presented in different orders, people have no grounds for knowing that a dumb factor like left-to-right position could be a cause of their behavior. And that’s a major problem for memories of what influenced us: None of us has taken part in the experiments that would isolate the causes of our choices in life.

[Ultimately,] chance must play an enormous role in development. We might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb, whether we got the top bunk or the bottom bunk, whether we were dropped on our head, whether we inhaled a virus. Needless to say, few people cite factors like these among their childhood influences..

Steven Pinker, How we may Have Become What We Are

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Why are hyperlinks underlined? 2
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6
Aug
18

The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries..
Steven Johnson, Interface CultureAM, p110-1

Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.

I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe buttonA, that immemorial “knoblike appendageWP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.

With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial RevolutionsWP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).

One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factorsWP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter: the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.


But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-lineWP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’sWP bitmap revolution1 graphical interfacesWP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors2 and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”3 invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.

4

With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documentsEE together. So what if Ted NelsonWP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?

The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.

1 “The word itself [bitmap] suggested an unlikely alliance of cartography and binary code, an explorer’s guide to the new frontier of information.” Steven Johnson, Interface CultureAM, p21

For insight into the bitmap revolution see M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream MachineAM, p366-8, and the raster graphics pedia.

2 Among which the worst yet best-known is probably the so-called “desktop metaphor”WP.

3 See Larry L. Constantine, Lucy A. D. Lockwood, Instructive Interaction: Making Innovative Interfaces Self-Teaching, p8, and also the affordance pedia to understand how the term is used by interaction designers.

4 Notice how of all the buttons showcased only MacOs X’s corner balls break that familiar perspective talked about in the 4th paragraph (usually hinted at through internal shadowing). I finally understand why they felt so jarring when I first saw them: not only are they overcolored for their humble functions, they’re not buttons, they’re weirdly lighted marbles.

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Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese. 2
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6
Aug
16

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…

I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..

..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.

This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..

It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.

But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.

Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:

Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.

Thomas L. Friedman, A Well of Smiths and Xias (emphases added)

I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.

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Gmail Matrix 2
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6
Aug
11

I don’t know exactly when or how the thought came into my mind but this morning the epiphany was there: wouldn’t it be cool to see Gmail’s half MB Javascript source1 a la matrix code viewIY? Indeed it would, and so for the next half hour I became a man posessed. It was amazingly easy (“ya sabiendo es facil”) to hack it up in JS and it makes for an interesting screensaver.




When I finished I realized it would be really easy to make my makeshift Matrix code generic and so here’s a quick stab at it. Type whatever text you want matrixified and a new window will (hopefully) popup with it. (Though be warned, it’s pretty rough, unpolished code and it’ll surely be too slow if you don’t have a fast computer.) Anyway, enjoy.



Next time you see Gmail,


think,


fn1. Which I downloaded thanks to Firefox’s wonderful Webdeveloper extension.