Moving innovations

Last Friday was the first time I attended a talk at a university in a long time. After regular visiting of conferences in the past I had not had much time and opportunity to go, and so I did not attend talks or conferences for a few years. But with Mary Czerwinski from Microsoft Research being in the Netherlands and talking about worker attention I had to find time to attend. I know Mary from a joint term in the SIGCHI committee, but at that time we never really talked about work interest because the committee meetings were usually fully booked anyway. Besides, at that time I was not so much interested in information workers, at least not professionally.

I’m not going to summarize the talk here (which would be somewhat hard to do due to the fact that she was highlighting a number of different projects from her research group at Microsoft Research), but two things that stood out for me at the end were logging and context.

A number of the projects had user logging at its basis, and I completely understand the utility of the idea. There is so much information in what we are doing that can be useful later that it really is a waste to let all that information just disappear. On the other hand the amount of data can be vast, so some kind of filtering strategy is needed at the source to keep things manageable. Obviously this is not a new idea, I remember using a predictive unix shell in the early 90’s, for example, but today’s processing power and memory make it much more feasible to do this at a grander level. I will certainly raise the idea at work to see if we can add logging to our Wat vinden wij over Service or incorporate it in one of our future projects.

This would also be a nice challenge for the GNOME desktop I’m using. What can you log on my behalf, and how can you help me with that information later. Sounds like a big but interesting project, but due to the size not something I’ll be able to explore at the moment. I’ve mentioned this on the GNOME 3.0 wiki.

The other interesting concept was, as I mentioned, context. (Just putting you back into that context). A nice visual example of this is Scalable Fabric, where you pile up windows on the side of the screen when not in active use, and group them into clusters. A single window or pile can be restored easily. A more down-to-earth but immediately useful tool is Groupbar, which allows the taskbar to be manually grouped and clustered in meaningful sections, instead of clustering many open windows by application type as is the default in Windows and GNOME. I’ve opened a bug/feature request for that.

But the use of context goes beyond simply piling some windows together and hoping for the best. It also has to do with the documents, to do items, etc. that all make up the context of what you are working on right now, just before being interrupted by that phone call, and what was I doing again? Providing better support for maintaining and switching context can still use a lot of improvement, and will mean a major step forward in making computers truly usable.

Glorious sunny late-summer weather is always a good excuse to get out of the house. This morning I explored the Kaapse Bossen near Doorn. This time not one of the long-distance hiking tracks, but a GPS route of my own creation. While the route didn’t always work out very well it was fun to just wander around the forest without paying notice to the painted signs.

I got up really early to be in the forest at daybreak. Unfortunately I didn’t spot any animals, but the forest is always beautiful in the early morning light. The Kaapse Bossen also have the added attraction of a watch tower with a panoramic view of the whole area. Especially nice with the morning light striking the crowns of the trees.

Last week finally allowed for some hiking again. With rain almost every day for the last weeks and not much free time I had not been able to do much hiking, but last Sunday we hiked from Postel abbey in Belgium to the town of Eersel.

The abbey was a bit of a surprise as it turned out to be the local magnet for daytrippers. We counted 6 ‘frietkot’ places near the parking lot and at the end of the afternoon all of them were busy. So much for the peace and quiet, but they do have a great selection of cheese.

The main attraction of the trip was the heather on the moors which is blooming at this time of year. Surely we saw enough of the stuff on the Cartierheide.

Things are progressing with my goal to become a Gentoo Developer so that my XEmacs overlay can be put into portage for the benefit of all Gentoo users.

I now have a mentor, and I've already turned in the first of two quizes which are part of the Gentoo training program. With the weather so hot in The Netherlands I don't have much energy to work on new things, but doing the quiz and browsing through all the Gentoo documentation for the right answers was a good alternative.

I also noticed a few changes that need to be made in the xemacs ebuild to make it conform to the latest insights. I try to look in to fixing this in the next week.

I still would rather have a PVR, but OnTV is a really nice Gnome applet.

After maintaining my XEmacs overlay for a few months I've decided to take the next step and put in my application to become the official maintainer of XEmacs for Gentoo. I've sent a mail to the recruiting team, we'll see how things develop from there.

Just back from a weekend in Luxemburg I left for a few days of walking on the North Coast of Brittany in France, more specifically the Cote de Granite Rosé in the Cotes d'Armor. Even though there is a fairly well developed bus service in the area, it still can be hard to get around, especially on some of the more remote areas of the coast, so I have been hiking with full gear, including a tent. I must really pay more attention to packing as my pack was a bit heavier than I would have liked it to be.

The northern coast is not really rugged, but still steep enough to be interesting. With the strong tides in this region whole areas are bare during the low tide but may make passing through them impossible during high tide. Camping out was fun, and I was actually glad to have some sea fog on the second day to avoid the blistering sun to some extend. Blistering indeed, I have a bit of a nasty sunburn in the back of my neck.

Traveling took a bit longer than I hoped for, but I did manage to squeeze in a visit to the Mont-Saint-Michel, one of those must-have-seen places in France.

Finally some good news: my camera survived its first drop test.

Last weekend it was time again to pick up on the GR57. This time we started in Gouvy as the part between Le barrage de Nisramont and Gouvy severly lacks in public transport options. We'll do that another time when we have two cars available. The first day took us from Gouvy to Troisvierges through rolling farmland. We took a quick detour towards the highest point of Luxemburg which was just a kilometer or so from the track. Amazing that it wasn't part of the track, even though the whole thing is rather unassuming.

The second day we went from Troisvierges to Clervaux in a different landscape. Most of the day we walked through the valley of the Woltz, with much more forest and quick steep hikes up and down the plateau surrounding the valley. With the high humidity we did not have much energy left in the end, and we were glad we only had to hike a meager 12km. We still took quite a bit of time, mostly caused by excessive picture-taking. I love my new camera!

Today I'm feeling the strain on my muscles from the activity last Sunday. As a summer reunion of my skiing friends we had a Golf clinic at the club Het Rijk van Nijmegen. The weather was great, perhaps even a bit too warm and sunny, and all in all we had quite a fun afternoon. It wasn't my first golf clinic but I think I picked up the most from this one, and I had some really nice swings during pitching. Still, I find the putting part of the game annoying, and since that is where the game is won I won't be picking up golf any time soon.

Last Tuesday cabfab building, where our office is located, was officially opened. Never mind that the entrance is currently still a big mess, but hopefully that will all be finished soon. A good party was thrown and there were a lot of people in the building wandering around. Anticipating on this we decided to pimp up the office a bit with some nice flowers, and I couldn't resist taking some pictures with the new camera. The highlights are on flickr.