Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button…
This sort of thing makes me very unhappy… without my permission, Microsoft pushes out an add-on for a competitor’s product. The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started…
I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year,…
“We love you, but signing this agreement doesn’t make us legal partners.” — Aviary EULA That’s from the “summary” column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side. It’s an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal…
Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…
The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I’m still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts. Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of…
I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for years. It’s a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it’s integrated with Google’s online photo album and Google’s YouTube service, so it’s very convenient. It’s also behaving very strangely. After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is…
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…
It seems that a recent ‘reply-all storm’ at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users “reply-all” to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies…
Another article that’s on my mind as I consider how to integrate group work into an unusually large literature class. In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of “isomorphic” questions, which have different facts but require students to apply the same principles or…
A former student writes: I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies. Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of…
I’ve never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me. My first…
Philipp Lenssen at “Google Blogoscoped” spotted a change in Google’s panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in. Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording “Report a concern” at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading “Report inappropriate image” –…
How long has this been around? I just noticed it. Google’s user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven’t had the chance to play with it. I’m not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google’s search results, so I’m going to have to read up…
Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I…
Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over. Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most…
I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo’s “Top Questions” is “What happened to my profile?” but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful “Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!” page, which does not actually answer the question. Another question is “What happened to my alias profile?“,…
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html I’d like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don’t think it’s possible. I’d never heard of the “Argument Slide” before. The “concept visualization” cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students. I’m taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at…
A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn’t recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and…
In a Ph.D. thesis called “The Paradox of the Guided User,” a dutch researcher examined the productivity of users who were dependent on computers, and users who had a pen-and-paper alternative. The article doesn’t link to the full dissertation, so it’s risky to extrapolate beyond the quotes in the article, so I’ll just repeat a…