I just noticed that the Jessamine County Historical and Genealogical Society has a new website. Their old one was sadly out of date.

The historical society has put together some excellent resources and are actively working to preserve Jessamine county history and heritage. If you visit the Applebee’s in Nicholasville you’ll notice a number of historical photos of the area, including some of High Bridge and its railroad station. I hope I will be able to obtain copies of these for use on the website and in promotional materials for the High Bridge–Wilmore Rail-trail. (Thankfully all these photos are out of copyright.)

I recently ran across a simple and thought-provoking comment while looking at some design documents for an open source project.

Target users have personality types. What may be simple for one, may not be for others.

I’ve used personas as a design technique for a number of products. A persona is a precise description of a stereotypical target user of a product. (For more details, see The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. He and other designers in his company have written about using personas.) A persona defines a fictitious person and the person’s goals. Although a persona is based on actual users and an understanding of their goals, a persona is not a description of an actual person—real people have idiosyncrasies and varying skills that may skew design decisions. A well-defined and precise persona can help the designer make decisions that reflect user needs. The persona also helps the designer step outside his own view-point and see through the eyes of another.

What intrigued me most was the mention of personality types. During college freshman orientation we were required to take the Myers-briggs test as well as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a practice that I’m sad to say has been discontinued, probably because of limited time and money. These personality assessment tools can be quite useful in pointing out distinctive goals, motivations, and behavioral preferences. It certainly helped me to better understand myself and my friends.

As a designer, I know that my personality type affects my perception and influences my design. I wonder if identifying a Myers-briggs Type for each persona would be valuable. With just 16 possibilities, but significant behavior and perception differences, it would be easy to add. A very simple 4 question test can be used to identify your personality type and these same questions could be helpful in assessing and creating personas. The Myers-briggs types also lend themselves to brief summaries.

I wonder how much our personality types are relevant to our use of a software product. For a communication product, it would seem quite relevant. I wonder if there’s an ideal personality type to design for. Perhaps you need the design to work for two completely opposite types. I’ll have to experiment with this.

The January 28, 2003 edition of the Lexington Herald-Leader had a front page article saying that under a proposed plan, Jessamine county would get a greater voice on the regional transportation panel. Jessamine has complained that it has no influence on the Lexington Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the group responsible for transportation planning in Fayette and Jessamine counties, and points to the lack of even a study for a connector road between Interstate 75 and Nicholasville as an example. Jessamine has only 3 votes to Fayette’s 18. Under the proposal, Fayette county would cut its voting members on the MPO to 10. Jessamine would retain its three voting members. The new MPO would have seven Urban County Council members, the Lexington mayor, the Fayette judge-executive, an official from LexTran, the Jessamine judge-executive, and the mayors of Nicholasville and Wilmore.

These changes to the MPO could benefit rail-trails in Jessamine County. In a sidebar, the Lexington Herald-Leader described the role of the MPO like this:

The MPO establishes transportation policy for the region and prioritizes which roads should be studied, improved or built. In addition to roadwork, the MPO also works on energy-conservation planning and oversees ride-sharing, van-pooling and air-quality programs.

The MPO also establishes bikeways and facilities for the disabled. This year, the MPO has a budget of $37.7 million in federal, state and local funds.

Macromedia has released a free update for HomeSite 5.0. After the update, you’ll have HomeSite 5.2. Read the Release Notes for more information about the bug fixes and behavior changes in 5.2. It says that Netscape 6.2 and/or Mozilla 1.0 can now be fully used as the internal browser in Homesite and that missing file:// path problems when using Mozilla as an external browser have been resolved.

Mike Pinkerton is pondering what to do with Chimera:

I’m torn about what to do with Chimera. It’s obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn’t any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much.

12 days before, he sounded much more optimistic and pointed to Chimera’s strengths:

So I bet you want to know what I think about Safari? … What does it mean for Chimera? Well, we have the ability to be much more flexible simply because we don’t answer to one man: Mr. Happy.… We’re also a real open-source project, not just one that dumps its changes back at the 11th hour because we’re mandated to. That means we get the help of everyone on the net not just in testing, but in development and feedback that is crucial to the success of the milestone releases.

We’ve come a long way in less than a year. Where do we go now? Now that the cat is out of the proverbial bag, we have a chance to openly evaluate what each browser brings to the table and ensure that we’re going in the right direction. Then probably 1.0 after a couple months of polish, then back on the Mozilla trunk so we can pick up a lot of the cooler features that have gone in, as well as speedups (15% by bryner’s latest numbers, and that’s almost as much as we need to catch Safari).

I think it’d be a shame to lose Chimera, even though I don’t directly benefit from it (well, I am using the Chimera theme for Phoenix at the moment) I’ve heard many good things about it from Mac-using friends. It also seems to be an important option for those that aren’t using the latest and greatest version of OS X as Safari requires. This whole conversation is a bit strange to have about an open source project. It may not matter whether there are other options if Chimera still fits some users’ needs.

Earlier I wrote about Donald Norman debating proper toilet paper UI and now we hear of excellent urinal interface design in Amsterdam. [via mpt]

Richard Koman’s article Eldred Opinion Met with Anger, Determination written for the O’Reilly Network expresses the general feeling and reactions in the technical community to the copyright case:

The hackers and activists who make up the Electronic Frontier Foundation are seething, said EFF spokesman Cory Doctorow. “There’s widespread anger and even rage that this decision came down the way it did, and there’s a renewed sense that something must be done as soon as possible to counteract the harmful effects of bad laws like the Sonny Bono act. … We are now at a point where the issue of copyright reform and the public domain, which two years ago was so obscure as to be invisible—even among very technical people—is now a mainstream issue, at least within the technology world. We can hope now that this [decision] will vault this issue into the nontechnical world, but certainly a generation of technical people have been changed forever by the preparation for and the outcome of this case.”

…

Eric Eldred, the Internet publisher who was the lead plaintiff in the case, … believes in the virtue of putting as much as possible on the Net. The court “seemed to accept the argument that the copyright law gives financial incentive to copyright owners to make things available, and extending the term only increases the chance of availability,” Eldred said in a telephone interview, “which seems to me just wrong, actually.”

Eldred thinks the burden is now on the publishers to make works available online. “If the court says this law is the best way to do it, then fine, let’s do it—put up or shut up.” If this doesn’t happen, he warns, Internet users will start taking the law into their own hands. “I think people will just kind of disregard the copyright law and make things available if they want to, and if there are suits about it, then maybe this decision will be some sort of defense.” He noted that there’s a section of the 1998 law that allows libraries and archives to publish works in the last 20 years of their copyright term. “As far as I know nobody’s taking advantage of that, but both the government and the court have pointed to that as some sort of escape passage, and I’d like to see people just go ahead and make the works available on the Internet, and we’ll see if there are any lawsuits that come out of that.”

…

There’s a general consensus among copyright reformers that the decision could be a rallying cry to energize a growing movement of hackers, consumers, and academics.

“I hope this case becomes a rallying point for people who care about the public domain, and this issue, which has been so obscure and hard to understand for most people, creates a more mainstream dialogue in which creators and audiences come to realize how important the public domain is,” said EFF’s Doctorow.

We’ve already seen the breakdown of respect for copyright in online music sharing and, I believe, in some ways in all online publishing. It seems an obvious reaction to the excesses of copyright protection; it no longer serves the good of the people. My own reaction is to look into ways to open my own works. The Founder’s Copyright looks promising. I’ve asked the Creative Commons for more details. I am also seeking to educate my friends and family about what was lost in this case.

The 9th most played game in the world is one you’ve never heard of. Read why Snood gets no respect or just go get the game. Warning: Snood is highly addictive.

Cedar Point announced its newest roller coaster for 2003: Top Thrill Dragster. With this “strata-coaster”, Cedar Point again blows past the previous coaster records.

Speed: accelerates from 0 to 120 mph in 4 seconds (Fastest coaster ever).

Height: zooms 90 degrees straight up to 420 feet (First coaster to top 400 feet).

Drop: plummets 400 feet at 90 degrees straight down with 270 degree rotation again reaching a speed of 120 mph.

With the addition of Top Thrill Dragster Cedar Point now has 16 coasters (more than any other park on the planet!) and four of them previously held the record for tallest coaster.

I am so there.

The Supreme Court rules that Congress can steal from the public. I shouldn’t be surprised.

This decision in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case extremely saddens me, particularly since it will severely impact internet archives for the next 15 or so years, and also because a fundamental constitutional principle has been overlooked. Larry Lessig has more commentary and the opinions.

Basil writes some thoughts on acoustics in orthodox churches and mentions an excellent article by Reader David Nelson. I found this nice HTML version of the same article, Acoustical Guidelines for Orthodox Churches. Acoustical design can significantly impact Orthodox worship. Without proper care, the clarity of the speech and chanting will be lost and noise will be a distraction.

I’ve found it fascinating to read similar articles about the importance of acoustics in the Jewish Synagogue and find that most of the same design requirements apply.

Synagogue Acoustics: “Shema Yisrael (Hear, Israel) strongly implies that acoustics is fundamentally important to the design of Synagogues.… A pleasant sound and good speech intelligibility are blessings that will make the experience of the worship service more enjoyable, and create a precious opportunity to hear the human voice partaking in that most human activity, prayer.”

One thing I hadn’t realized is that electronically amplified sound is not permitted in the Orthodox Synagogue on the Sabbath. This has led to innovative solutions such as the Acousto-Fluidic Sound Augmentation that may produce better sound: “An interesting advantage of acoustic augmentation over electronic amplification is the fact that the entire process occurs at the speed of sound rather than at the speed of light. In our system the sound travels through the sound pipes at the same speed as the voice in air so that the sound coming out of a speaker arrives at the same time as the spoken voice or the outputs of nearer horns and, as a result, there is no bothersome echoing. Using an electronic system one has to specially design in time delays to prevent echoing. Consequently the acousto-fluidic system provides a very natural sound and rendition.”

Silence is Golden: “Some times we don’t want to hear everything. Imagine if you could hear and understand every conversation at your office. It would be terribly distracting. But when we do want to hear every little thing—at a religious service, in an important meeting, at a play, or at a concert—background noise is critical. During a lecture or sermon, any audible sound not made by the speaker is noise; during a performance, any audible sound not created by a performer is noise.” This general article about accoustics identifies many sources of noise. Ones that will most affect us at St. Athanasius are traffic noise, air conditioning, and buzz / hum from lights.

David Hyatt discussed in more detail why Apple would chose KHTML over Gecko as the engine for the Safari browser. Unfortunately it has been taken down now. John Gruber apparently saw it, too, and quotes the following snippet over on his Daring Fireball site:

Imagine that your number one priority for a browser is speed. You want a browser that launches almost instantly. You want a browser whose page load peformance can be improved dramatically. This is your number one goal, because you want to address what has been a fundamental problem on your platform (OS X) ever since it was launched: that no browser has accomplished the goal of fast startup and fast page load. Your job is to find an existing open source engine and improve it to the point where it does have fast startup and phenomenal page load times.

Hyatt also pointed to David Baron’s review of the Gecko layout engine for examples of the challenges facing a company seeking a layout engine. Hyatt essentially said that in order to use Gecko to accomplish Safari’s speed goals, Apple would have had to significantly rearchitect some parts, drastically trim or remove several libraries, such as the image and network libraries that were redundant with Mac OS X libraries, and learn Gecko’s unique terminology for everything. With KHTML they did not need to rearchitect because they found it already small and well-designed. But it cost them the unmatched standards support of Gecko. It will be interesting to see how these comparisons motivate improvements in both engines.

Update: jwz saw it too and points to the LiveJournal archive of Hyatt’s post. He says Hyatt says he is working on a more accurate version.

I got a chance to play with Safari and tested out a few different sites. I started to feel like I was flying blind. Where’s the JavaScript console? Where’s any notification of JavaScript errors for that matter? If Safari is going to claim to be “like Gecko” it needs to work like it. In one case the contents of a DHTML page that works fine in Mozilla just didn’t appear and I had no information about what was failing. Frustrating.

I was also bothered by it not recognizing the view-source: prefix to show the source of any URL until I found the Activity window. The Activity window shows all the URLs loaded with a particular page and you can double-click them to view them individually. Nice. Still, the View Source bookmarklet has worked in basically every browser for years so it would be nice to support.

I found a site describing a Safari Enhancer that “enables several hidden features of the Safari webbrowser beta.” The screenshots show a Debug menu with a View DOM tree item, the ability to change the browser identity of Safari, a minimum font size option, and ways to import bookmarks in various formats. Sounds helpful. Too bad I don’t have a mac to play with all the time.

I’ve been playing around with trying to implement a JavaScript version of SnapBack like in Safari. I thought I’d try it first as a bookmarklet since the JavaScript History object already provides some of what’s needed.

With JavaScript you can easily jump back to the previous Google page in history. Here’s a bookmarklet to do just that: BackToGoogle. This is limited, but may be a nice shortcut. The feature in Safari has the advantage that the SnapBack button only appears when it would be useful. Safari also resets the location of the SnapBack if you use a bookmark or type a URL. In the case of this bookmarklet, it always goes back to the previous Google entry in the history.

I believe I may have found a bug in Mozilla in writing this. According to the documentation, history.go(location) should load the nearest history entry whose URL contains location as a substring (the most recently visited). Mozilla appears to be loading the first history entry that has that substring (the first one visited). Or so it seemed.

I’ve done some more experimenting with this including working with the UniversalBrowserRead privilege so I can use the history array, but that has not helped. What I’d like to be able to do is traverse the history looking at the referrers. If an item has no referrer then it would likely be a nice location to jump back to. (Or potentially the page right after it if it has a query string; it would be more likely to be a search results page.) Unfortunately, I see no way to get the referrers from JavaScript other than for the current page. I wonder if the browser’s history mechanism actually keeps track of the referrer or if it just contains the list of URLs loaded in the window.

Really. “Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died,” said Michael Wallace about his father, who died of heart failure Nov. 26, 2002.

Apple Gets It is an interesting commentary on Apple’s new Safari and Keynote products. I believe it was written by Brendan Donohoe, who was a former interface designer for Mozilla.

Aaron Swartz alludes to Safari having spell check in HTML form fields. If only Mozilla had implemented it back in 2000 when it was suggested. See Mozilla bug 23421 and bug 16409. This will be a killer feature for anyone that writes text in HTML forms, especially bloggers. Unfortunately, both bugs are still marked helpwanted.

Don Merton (formerly of Mozilla.org and now engineering manager of Safari at Apple) has sent a message to the KDE developers explaining why Apple picked KHTML as the engine for their new Safari browser. He writes:

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance….

Update: jwz claims that “translated through a de-weaselizer, this says:”

“Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can’t even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?”

Don also posted a very lengthy list of changes that Apple made to improve KHTML. He promises that Safari source code should be available soon.

Competition is good. Bring on the browser wars.

Just caught the live feed from MacWorld 2003 where Steve Jobs demonstrated the new Apple web browser called Safari. Impressive. The SnapBack feature looks cool: You go to Google, search for something, go to one of the resulting sites and wander around a while, and then just click the SnapBack button to jump back in history to your original search results page. Seems a reasonable and frequently needed shortcut, although I’m unclear how it affects the back button and it might add some user confusion about which to use. He also demonstrated SnapBack with Amazon and said it worked for any site. I would have been really impressed if it worked for searches on any site, but I suspect it just goes to the root for non-known search engines. I liked the excellent mechanism for reporting bugs.

Jobs said it is based on the KHTML open source project when I expected it would be based on Gecko like Chimera. It really surprised me, especially after they hired David Hyatt. It remains to be seen how well Safari does with standards, but more standards-based browsers is a good thing. I hope it is solid. If Safari is really the fastest browser on the Mac, that’s cool.

I can’t wait to try it out.

Update: I added a link to the Safari information on the Apple website and to a KHTML page.