Ping points out how computer people love to use the word "performance" when they really mean "speed," and that performance is about way more than just speed.
Author Archives: Jimmy Lin
Fan films: creating, not just consuming, popular culture
I finally read an essay that Daniel e-mailed me over a year ago. Professor Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has written about fan fiction as a medium through which ordinary people change their relationship to popular culture from being passive consumers to active participants in its creation. He uses …
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Ajax libraries galore
Lately there's been a bumper crop of JavaScript libraries for creating Ajax applications. At first, it was largely a grassroots effort, and to this day some of the most popular libraries like Prototype, script.aculo.us, Behaviour, Dojo, and MochiKit are maintained mostly by one person. But now the big boys are joining the party. Yahoo has …
Montreal
Last month I was in Montreal for the CHI conference. I came away impressed by the city; it really is a wonderful blend of Europe and North America. (The signs are all in French, but everyone speaks English!) The original city center still has blocks and blocks of historic buildings intact, while downtown and surrounding …
The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club
There would be more innovation in mobile phones and services if they were as open as personal computers and the Internet are today. A grassroots movement of Silicon Valley tinkerers are pushing such an agenda, the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, whose name pays homage to the famous Homebrew Computer Club (where the Apple I was …
Cody’s Books’ Telegraph store to close
Kepler's Books in Menlo Park may have barely survived, but other venerable indies are hurting. The main Cody's Books store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing. I have fond memories browsing through (and even buying!) books there. Although its two smaller stores will remain open, this hurts.
PhD Comics creator at Stanford
Jorge Cham did speak at Stanford after all, which was good for me since it made my drive a lot shorter (although I was prepared to drive up to Berkeley…). And his talk was one of the funniest I’ve ever been to. It was also packed; the Clark Center Auditorium was filled with guffawing grad …
HCI blogs
I read a lot of news online, geek and otherwise, but lately I've been trying to read more about human-computer interaction online. There are certainly a lot of blogs and web sites on society and technology in general, but I'm thinking more about resources that focus on HCI and usability. Here's what I've found so …
User interface design patterns by SAP
Also last month, I went to a San Francisco Bay Area ACM meeting on component-based user interface design, which turned out to be a talk on UI design patterns. Aha! It turns out that SAP has developed an extensive collection of design patterns for their domain of business applications, and they have an extensive web …
BayCHI April meeting on search
Time to plow through my backlog of stuff to post. Last month I went to the BayCHI meeting on Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information, which was about social search and recommender systems. I got a few things out of that meeting. How do you recommend to someone that they'll like obscure …