“little things”

My Wikipedia investigations of late (I want to propose a major new feature and I’m feeling out the “deep” WIkipedia) uncovered the little known fact that as a registered user you can have a personal stylesheet and javascript file—which means that with a little know-how you can have Wikipedia looking and feeling exactly how you want it—and have this look-and-feel follow you around with your account. If you use the default skin, Monobook^WP, your personal stylesheet and js file are monobook.css and monobook.js. There’s help here.

This opens the door to all sorts of customizing galore—skins, plugins, new features…—and while I still have to dig into it properly, so far I’ve found the amazing Navigation popups script, which pops up a small, smart (meaning it does interesting stuff depending on context) preview of any Wikipedia link you hover onto. Its slightly annoying until you get used to it, but once you do get it into your “work”-flow it’s very sweet—blazingly fast and with tons of handy extra options. Installing it is a snap too, just add one line to your monobook.js.

Thought I had already written about this obsession of mine but since I can’t find the post I’ll assume a better part of me reigned in and I had spared you. Most friends, however, haven’t been so lucky and usually win me to point it out in the hope that I shut up quickly: the oh-so-unnecesary “www.” bit one sees in most URLs. There was a time when it may have been needed—like, 1995—but why now? Now, some URLs actually won’t work without it, but that’s usually because of net administrator negligence; in most cases doing away with the appendix is a very minor setting. Once you know this, you die a little (literally!) every time you’re forced to stand it—and you’ll start to notice how often you are.

Today I just found there are in this topic—as in, we are remembered everyday, everything else—fellow anal freaks (tongue-in-cheek-ly, this ones). They even set up a website to spread the meme: . Of course I had to oblige. Even learned that there were futher Super Saiyan^WP levels to attain. So as of now, this is is a ”class B” website, which is the “classification [that] helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.”

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

I had never seen this before but it’s a neat idea. Have you seen other examples?

Just found today that you can place the cursor over some editbox labels and slide away to change the editbox value. How neat! (This UI candy seems to date from Photoshop CS [link])

Most people don’t even know about it but right at the bottom of the left sidebar of every pedia there’s an in other languages section that turns out to be one of Wikipedia’s pearls.

• the mathematical concepts of an upper bound (mayorante in Spanish), a set (insiemi in Italian) or a tuple (n-uplet in French);
  


• computer concepts like scrollbar (Bildlauf in German; literally, imagecourse), web browser (navigateur web in French; literally, web navigator), hyperlink (collegamento ipertestuale in Italian), real-time (Echtzeit in German), multimedia (multimedialità in Italian), and operating system (système d’exploitation in French);
  


• relatively unknown Greek gods like Cybele (Cibeles^CB in Spanish) or Priapus (Priape in French);
  


• exotic (anything really)
  
  
  • animals like the civet (Schleichkatzen in German) and the platypus (ornitorinco in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • fruits like the passion fruit (maracujá in Portuguese) and the jackfruit (yaca in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • plants like the okra (gombo in French), the  spearmint (yerbabuena in Spanish; literally, goodgrass), the mandrake (mandragora in Spanish), and the  jimson weed (higuera del infierno in Spanish; literally, infernal fig);
    
  
  
  • flowers like the fuchsia (bellebloem in Nedersaksisch^WP), the medlar (níspero in Spanish), and the saffron (azafrán) in Spanish);
    
  
  


• neologisms like meme meme (mème in French), GM food (alimento transgénico in Spanish), and the long tail (longue traîne in French, sometimes longue queue);
  


• international phrases like to be, or not to be (Sein oder Nichtsein in German) and Land of the Rising Sun (La Tierra del Sol Naciente in Spanish);
  


• digital accoutrements like inkjet printer (Tintenstrahldrucker in German), touchpad (pavé tactile in French), or flatbed scanner (escáner plano in Spanish; literally, flat scanner);
  


• drug paraphernalia/jargon like chillum (chiloom in Italian), syringe driver (Spritzenpumpe in German), rolling machine (interpercolatrice in Italian), bong (pipe à eau in French), and withdrawal syndrome (síndrome de abstinencia in Spanish);
  


• translatable acronyms like NAFTA (TLC in Spanish), NATO (OTAN in French), USSR (CCCP in Russian), or GDP (BIP in German);
  


• or simply peculiar expressions like popular science (divulgación científica in Spanish; literally, scientific divulgation), conspicuous consumption (prangende forbruk in Norwegian), prince charming (príncipe azul in Spanish; literally, blue prince), intellectual property (immaterialrätt in Swedish; literally, immaterial rights), apple of discord (Zankapfel in German), or noble savage (buen salvaje in Spanish; literally, good savage).
  

With surely hordes of brilliant interaction designers being paid top dog to scour Google’s interface beyond dizziness, it’s truly hard to point something in it that could be outright, unambiguously improved. And it’s a good thing they put so much effort in it—Google has such scale that even the tiniest improvement could, on aggregate, save millions of man hours. (A recent story made the point dramatically by calculating that if Google used a black background it would save some 750 megawatt-hours per year.)

With this frame of mind, it surprised me today to find out what I believe is a clear improvement—a tiny, puny, mini one, but still. You see, when you quote a phrase in Google (and in most any other search engine) you specify that you want results with only that exact phrase. This can easily be too stringent and so Google helpfully suggests you to remove the quotes whenever you get very few (or no) results. The problem is it only suggests with plain text…

...when it could easily suggest with hypertext (linking, of course, to the unquoted search; similar to the way spelling suggestions are linked to the search for the correct spelling).

I wish some Googler sees this…

Tab Mix Plus is simply a pretty good Firefox extension that adds a lot of extra, welcomed functionality to your tabs. Today, lost somewhere within its not so easy-to-use preference pane, I found a little tooltip that is a wonder of clarity, of communication^EEM.