Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau
Detective stories and tales of bughunting in software and hardware.
Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.
Link tags: folk
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Folk Interfaces
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.
Now apply that to software:
Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.
Southern Mosaic
A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
Why Suffolk Libraries chose to build their own self-service app.
It’s so great to see the initial UX work that James and I prototyped in a design sprint come to fruition in the form of a progressive web app!
In the case of this web-app, if the tablets go offline, they will still store all the transactions that are made by customers. Once the tablet comes back online, it will sync it back up to the server. That is, essentially, what a Progressive Web App is — a kind of a website with a few more security and, most importantly, offline features.
Folklore.org: The Original Macintosh
Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it.
Like a real-life Halt And Catch Fire.
The Ray Cat Solution
A website dedicated to one of the most, um, interesting solutions to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage problem:
- Engineer cats that change colour in response to radiation.
- Create the culture/legend/history that if your cat changes colour, you should move some place else.
There are T-shirts!
A 5 day sprint with Clear Left exploring library self-service machine software – Leon Paternoster
Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.
This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:
I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.
Scarfolk Council
Dispatches from the disturbing town of Scarfolk, where it is permanently the 1970s:
Scarfolk is more than its famous sewage treatment works, it’s more than its high security mental facilities; it’s more than its world renowned covens; it’s more than its fine reputation which it rebuilt after a spate of grizzly serial killings…
It’s funny and creepy in equal measure. Actually, the creepiness may be the larger measure.
Tweet Clouds
My Twitter folksonomy. I'm glad to see that present continuous verbs are the most used.
Flickr: adactio's photos tagged with lastfm:event=97947
Yes, there is a reason why I'm using this machine tag. Watch the next release of Last.fm for machine tagging goodness on events.
www.steve.museum - Home
An experiment in social tagging of art museum collections
Powerhouse Museum | Sydney Australia
Fantastic collection of user-tagged content at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Ma.gnolia Blog: JSON, HTML, and Microformats. Oh, My!
Magnolia is providing microformat feeds: simple HTML documents marked up with xFolk, hReview or hAtom. It's basically a simple sort of API. Very nice.
Flickr Services: Flickr API: flickr.tags.getHotList
This new method in the Flickr API could be used to create some fun zeitgeist-driven mashups.
REST web services interface :: Tagyu
As a follow-up to my post about Yahoo's term extractor, I should point out that Tagyu also has an API. It's RESTful and simple.
Folksonomy - New York Times
Daniel Pink explains folksonomies.
delimport - Spotlight Plugins
This excellent little plug-in allows you to search your Del.icio.us links from Spotlight.
Smithsonian Global Sound
A fantastic online music store from the Smithsonian. You can download MP3s and liner notes.