Douglas Adams on technology (1999)
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when [...]
Beware of relying on URL shorteners
The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher’s DNS server, and the publisher’s website. With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of [...]
Where Open Source meets Usability
A common problem in open source development (though forgivable, given nature of open source), is completeness. http://www.openusability.org is an effort to redress this from a usability angle at least. Still early days, but well worth supporting. Getting to a state where it is usable for ‘the common computer users’ is one of the greatest challenges [...]
Searching using profiles
User profiling is about empowering the web user – the user should always control the data they want to be availables to web services (search engines the largets example). In order to fully leverage their technology, web service providors want your information, so they can present you with relevant information from the www. The problem here is that you would not have control of that data – there may be many times when you dont want your browsing information recorded, for many reasons!
