the HCI apprentice; search networks; neighbours

today Peyton switched from using the Plastik window decoration to using the laptop window decoration. he's pleased with it with one exception: the close (or, in Peytonese, "the ecks") button is on the left. after hitting Apply in the configuration dialog, he turns to me and say, "I think I've found a bug." he then showed me that the ecks is on the "wrong side." i explained that the decoration put it there on purpose. he got his "I'm thinking really hard about this" look on his face and then asked, "But why isn't that a bug?" oh yes, already he's learning the basics of HCI, starting with consistency. fear his arrival on kde-usability-devel ;-P

i'm currently reading "Modern Information Retrieval" by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (ISBN 0-207-39829-X). the preponderance of hyphenated last names aside, this book rocks. there are a number of structures detailed in the book that are hauntingly similar to what Scott, myself and others have been looking at for desktop searching.

the parts on distributed and parallel searching are very interesting, and it's good to be able to start learning some of the math behind these data structures in general. it's a little unsettling that the book seems to imply that the least developed area of this field of study is the user interface. apparently to date user interfaces on these sorts of systems have pretty much sucked. looking around at what's available in the industry for actual users, i'm not going to argue much.

my neighbour knocked on the door that opens up onto the shared basement area at nearly 11am. why would i be home at 11am? i have a day job. well, i was home, so i'm probably not helping with her misjudgement of my home time frequency, but that's because peyton was not in the mood to go to preschool today so i cut him some slack and am working from home. she's working on the whole "getting her mail to her house" deal (because it's obviously tricky, right? *rolls eyes*). she's not sure how mail is delivered (i suggested to her box and the 'B' version of our shared numeric address). she's looking into it, but if they don't do delivery to 'B' (of course they do) she wants to have her mail delivered to my box. weird.

well, at least she bakes cookies and stuff and then shares them.

our company's yearly christmas party in Banff was this past weekend. boy was i sore on Sunday. partying in the mountains seems to hit me harder.

kicker's coming along. mostly layout-related bugs left. Kiosk functionality, better keyboard accessibility and a new mouse over are the only major features left to do. i worked on keyboard accessibility yesterday, and i'm nearly complete with that. the only really big trick was dealing with autohiding panels and knowing when an applet should actually have keyboard focus.