Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to …
Category Archive: Thinky Stuff
Nov
17
Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.
Website #FAILs. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am. This amounts to assuming that all French speaking …
Oct
15
Amusing NNW Badge
Some of you will find this amusing; others will not. What matters is that I did.
Jul
14
Hype Instead of Content
Microsoft has apparently released some advertising for their new Office flagship collection (Office 2010). The movie can be seen on YouTube here. I find it upsetting that they can spend lavishly promoting nothing — note that there are zero product shots in this ad. It is pure blockbuster hype. Arial!? Don’t get me started on …
Jul
11
2009 USGP – MotoGP at Laguna Seca Photos
MotoGP at Laguna Seca was a blast once again this year; I have some early photos up at Flickr. Wonder if I’ll get a chance to edit them and expand the set. Who knows? Enjoy.
May
15
Who Writes This Stuff?
Sometimes you just have to wonder what the web developers were smoking. A large trading company recently told me the following after I failed to remember my password in three attempts: So there goes any hope that I’ll get that task done. They are forcing me to ignore them until I can restart my browser. …
May
06
PoTW: The Ocean with the Girls
More to come, but we had fun today walking down to the beach and hanging out. Flickr set. We walked down, Virginia in the stroller and Magdelen in the carrier so we could get there in time to play before nap time.
Mar
01
PoTW : Elephant Seals
KC and I took a trip down near San Simeon to see the elephant seals. Managed to get a few shots and put a set up on Flickr. These animals were really amazing. More information at Friends of the Elephant Seal .
Oct
07
Excellent Early Implementation of my Long Ago Proposed BAC Email Checker
Although not as direct as the approach I’ve long though useful, Google Labs has introduced the Gmail Goggles feature. In their words: When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a …
Sep
23
Some photo statistics
A co-worker of mine, Darren, suggested that it would be interesting to see what focal lengths are most popular in our image collections. He whipped up some perl code that would recurse through a directory hierarchy and spit out some data on lens focal length. I expanded the code a little so spit out per-image …