Posted by Rachel on January 19th, 2006 — Posted in Meta-blog
Apparently WordPress version 2.0 was just released, but this is not what baffles me. I’ve just set up another blog for my HCI group using the same easy “One-Click Install” method made available to me from my lovely hosting people.
You would think that the interface would be exactly the same, even though the two blogs look different on the outside. Somehow this is not the case. The two blogs appear to use the same version of WordPress, but this blog as a far less confusing “write post” interface (an interface that I think has slightly confused my team-mates). There are none of these expanding menus on the right to chose from users, categories and breakfast cereals to author your post with (the cereal thing wasn’t really a choice).
For at least the team-mate I live with, posting was a bit confusing. Fair enough, you pick “Write” from the menu and then “Write Post” (as a non-admin user, he doesn’t have the myriad of other options I am faced with), but then what? The rest of the options weren’t visible. Hopefully with time and exploration it’ll be easier. At least with my incredible admin powers, I can at least edit the entries into the right categories. On the other hand, I had to show one team-mate where to log in, and he had to explain over msn messanger to my other team-mate what to do. Putting the log-in options at the bottom of default templates wasn’t an inspired idea, and is counter-intuitive for people not used to blogging.
edit: It appears on checking the other blog that it’s a later version than this one. But why make it more difficult to navigate?
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Posted by Rachel on January 16th, 2006 — Posted in Miscellaneous, Notes, Project
Breadth-first search would result in computers exploding due to the size of the database before I could get anywhere with results.
Depth-first search would work better, but may still need to impose a limit on the number of links down it goes.
In other news, it occured to me that podcasts have a very similar format to blogs (in fact, they are blogs, just with the addition of sound files in their feed), so I may need to find some way of dealing with this.
Also, Talkr is a services that turns text-based blogs into podcasts. Looks fairly interesting, but I doubt I’ll ever use it. I read all the blogs I subscribe to quicker than I could listen to them and I already have a hefty menu of podcasts that I listen to regularly.
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Posted by Rachel on November 22nd, 2005 — Posted in Project
Managed to dig up some fairly interesting papers on blog searching, and how to differentiate blogs from non-blog pages. Also found some equally interesting, but not useful for my project papers on various blog-related topics.
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Posted by Rachel on November 10th, 2005 — Posted in Project
In my databases lecture today, we were introduced to linear hashing. Apparently it’s not too hard to implement in java and from the looks of it would deal with all the records I would have to keep in an okay fashion.
http://swig.stanford.edu/pub/summaries/database/linhash.html
http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/linearHashing.html
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Posted by Rachel on October 24th, 2005 — Posted in Project
It occurred to me, having set up this blog, gallery and forum software on my webspace, that I could have my project be a web based application. Theoretically, I have unlimited MySQL databases available on my hosting plan and currently I am using 3. Add to that the fact that I’m using less than a tenth of my hosting space and about 5% of my monthly bandwidth usage (and that’s with a moderately active fansite hosted)… it’s looking like it could be an interesting idea.
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Posted by Rachel on October 24th, 2005 — Posted in Miscellaneous
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes - Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
Number two on the list is certainly something I agree with. I have my photo on the about page of this blog, so that my supervisor might be able to recognise me, and associate me with my project.
As for number ten, I only have this blog hosted on my own space because it’s not so important for all my friends to read it - it doesn’t really say what’s going on in my life. At least in my own mind, it makes it a “work” blog rather than a “play” blog and helps to ensure that the content is at least vaguely on topic.
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Posted by Rachel on October 18th, 2005 — Posted in Miscellaneous
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Can fingerprints wear away?
If the letters and texture of my keyboard keys wear down within 6 months of getting it, then I think I can probably assume that my fingerprints are in no better shape. 
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Posted by Rachel on October 18th, 2005 — Posted in Miscellaneous
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Bang blast
If I found any one of my blogs (aside from perhaps the fictional character roleplaying ones) covered in adverts about bleach… I would be more likely to buy some other brand. I’ve become very attached to my blogs over the years and on the whole, they’re very much a personal thing.
I put my diary online because I tend to lose paper diaries. I use security functions to keep the more private stuff private, but as when I look at my blog, I see all the entries at once, even advertising on an entry that just had the results from an online quiz on would feel intrusive.
It’s interesting to think how a blog, which pretty much anyone can read and is mostly publish publically, can be thought of as private.
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Posted by Rachel on October 10th, 2005 — Posted in Project
My project proposal is all done and handed in. It’s not really as detailed as I would have liked, but as I don’t really have a clue what kind of detail I could put in… there’s not much I can do about it. Most of it was written last week, but the last 3 days have been taken up by going home and being distracted by food and techsupport for my parents.
On the plus side, delayed trains means that I have discover that my laptop can still access the wireless network in the department. I can see lunch being used to investigate more into the design and implementation of my project.
Tomorrow, I will go and see if my supervisor has the papers he promised last week… and I think I will start looking into the search engine half of the project.
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Posted by Rachel on October 6th, 2005 — Posted in Project
Most of my project proposal is written up from the notes that I have, and I’ve been trying to think where I put the notebook I was using towards the end of the summer term. All I need to do now is look over my software engineering notes to be able to plan my development timetable (or at least include the right stuff to do in it!)
Other than that, been thinking on my project more and making notes on various ideas that pop into my head.
This terms modules are more interesting that I thought they’d be. Databases 2 will certainly come in handy for my project and it’s surprisingly not boring. Compilers & Languages is cool and occassionally funny. Virtual Reality is fairly interesting too. Haven’t had the chance to do very much there, as we’ve just had the one 2 hour lecture so far, which was mostly introducing VR and some of the basics. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s lecture as I’ll get the chance to start using VRML to build things.
What else?
Oh. Commercial programming has been interesting, some of the speakers have been really good. Not sure how I’ll be able to apply it to my project, but we’ll see.
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