Miscellaneous-B » misc

Crisis in Ragan

lawley — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:18:11 +0000

Circa 1998, and tired of giving the demo live (usually with little notice), we filmed Crisis in Ragan (sic). This is the short version for CSCW ‘98.

Patent

lawley — Fri, 12 May 2006 01:27:43 +0000

In an interesting bit of serendipity the other day, I was playing around with CiteULike as a means of managing a whole pile of new research papers I’m ploughing through for my new research, and adding in my own set of personal publications when I stumbled across this patent that cites my 1993 paper Using Weakest Preconditions to Simplify Integrity Constraint Checking.

Seems the work I did for my PhD thesis (which extended the above paper) may actually have had practical value after all :-)

Now, I’ve scanned the patent text, but I can’t see what real value they’re adding that’s not already described in the published work, so I can only imagine that it is the specific application to the 5ESS switch that avoids the prior art clauses.

Mucking around with MT

lawley — Tue, 17 Jun 2003 12:10:37 +0000

Played with the templates a little. Used Girlie’s site as a guide:

http://www.thegirliematters.com/tips/

Upgraded to MT-2.64

lawley — Mon, 16 Jun 2003 23:15:04 +0000

Well, in an effort to solve the recent entries linking problem and get better default templates, I’ve upgraded MT on this machine. Looks like a good move so far.

Project Concept

lawley — Sun, 17 Nov 2002 07:56:54 +0000

Thinking about “killer apps” I figured that what people would like is something a simple to use as PowerPoint but for creating whole web sites.

The basic idea is to find a happy medium between structured content and a DWIM/direct manipulation interface.

PowerPoint seems to manage this by encoding the structure in a set of pre-defined template-like pages that the user can then edit and change to their heart’s content. “Fields” are available, but about the only things that are actively used by the majority are the footer fields (date, title, page number).

PowerPoint’s problem is also simplified cf web site creation in that “structure” amounts to linear order of pages. For a web site we’ll need to provide a simple way to reflect the concept of linked pages.

At the moment, my “killer idea” is little more than the concept of templated page structure reflecting the notions of menu bars either down the left side or across the top of the page and to allow pages to be “tagged” as appearing in the menu.

Actually, reflecting on my recent use of “Image Rodeo”, it seems like a very cool starting point for doing something like this – templates themselves may be a little difficult to construct at the moment, but if the outline structure were extended a little to incorporate multiple named attributes per entry, and “aliases” in the outline to allow for graphs, then I think we could get a long way.