Noscope

Megastructures 7 Comments

July 29th, 2006 scifi

There’s nothing like striking Wikipedia gold. Megastructures:

Topopolis:
A topopolis is a tube-like space habitat, rotating to produce gravity on the inner surface, which is extended into a loop around local star. Topopoli can be looped several times around the local star, in a geometric figure known as a torus knot.

View picture of a topopolis

Dyson shell:
The variant of the Dyson sphere most often depicted in fiction is the “Dyson shell”: a uniform solid shell of matter around the star. Such a structure would completely conceal the emissions of the central star, and would intercept 100% of the star’s energy output. Such a structure would also provide an immense surface which many envision being used for habitation, if the surface could be made habitable.

Greenpeace: The City Gas Guzzler [Update] 12 Comments

July 24th, 2006 environment, fuel, greenpeace, politics, Work

What does your car say about you?

Greenpeace UKs latest campaign targets SUVs, or 4×4s. Most of these cars light trucks pump out three times the pollution, spending three times the fuel of a regular car, making them unfit for most purposes, especially city driving.

I’m immensely proud to have played a small part in the creation of the campaign website. Teamed up with my friend Anders, we whipped up a design and a website mocking the website of the British International Motor Show. The deadline was tight, but the end result was good.

View Greenpeace: The City Gas Guzzler

[Update] Watch the video on Youtube

New Firefox 2 Theme Mockups 7 Comments

July 13th, 2006 firefox, screenshots, usability

1. Search Bar: new icon required for the “search” action, design required to visually associate an “action button” with a textbox, design for showing search suggestions, design for making it clear that user can select the search engine.
2. Icon Polish: use shapes and metaphors from the existing *Stripe themes, but unify (and soften?) the colour palette and update the edges, detail, styling and gloss to match better on Vista, with modern XP apps, and OS X.

3. Tab Strip: improve distinction of selected tabs, differentiate appearance of background tabs from tab strip, optimize close tab button for use on all tabs.

4. Buttons in Textboxes: make buttons that appear in textboxes distinctive and provide affordances to indicate that they are “clickable” elements.

View screenshots

Personally I think there are definite usability enhancements in some of the changes. I don’t like that the style moves away from the default OS theme, though. This is one of the areas where Opera excels; the fact that it can use native UI widgets rather than having to mimic them.

A Server-Friendly Stats App? 14 Comments

July 9th, 2006 statistics, voxpop

I’ve tried quite a few statistics solutions. BBclone, Shortstat and Refer to name the best. They’re all “client-side”, meaning for every page visited, a small script must be called to update the logs.

Compared to server-side logging, these solutions are usually more readily accessible and typically easier and faster to decode. Unfortunately for me it seems, they all suffer the same problem: after having run for months, stats having poured in, things start to slow down. The database grows with every hit and in the end the server dies because of it.

Having successfully gained useful answers to questions like these in the past, I will try my luck and ask you, esteemed reader:

• What experiences have you had with client-side stats software?
• Have you, unlike me, managed to install software that cleans itself up as it goes and shows only say, the latest month of statistics and successfully deletes the rest?

If at all possible, I would prefer recommendations for free software, since based on past experience, I’m likely to uninstall after a couple of months worth of data.

Firefox OS 19 Comments

July 6th, 2006 firefox, mac, operating-systems, windows

What I would like to see as the roadmap is not adding more features to Firefox, because it’s a good browser, but if you had a development cycle for a Firefox OS, and you had 10 percent of the computers in the world going out with Fire OS on it, then we would see some improvements in this corporation in Redmond. 
[...] people would trust Firefox and Mozilla far more than they trust the Microsoft Corp. with the integrity of their computers.

Source

While I would like to see a real alternative to Windows and OSX, part of me thinks we’ve already got enough Linux distributions. On the other hand, none of them have achieved any kind of critical mass. If the Firefox developers could do it well, then it might be really interesting. What do you think?