strayorange

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenaghen, DenmarkAugust 2009Canon 40DTamron 18-250 f/3.5-6.3Lightroom 2

Tweaked version of Twister -> [link]

Wordboner-ish typography inspired by my own motto “Identity comes only from diversity”.Made in Adobe Illustrator CS4. The font is Bebas.Thank you for viewing, I hope you like it.

For a site I’ve been working on I’m developing a PHP module that allows to display page suggestions based not on the page content but rather on which pages past visitors requested.

The rationale for this is – intuitively – that the pages visited by the majority of  past visitors probably are the pages that the majority of future visitors could be interested in. It actually may sound more complicated than it really is: what it means is that when a user requests a certain page, the module extracts from the server log which other pages have been visited the most by past visitors of the current page.

Starting from this simple idea I’ve been adding a bunch of refinements, such as filtering out pages already linked by the current page, that try to improve the quality of the suggestions. As a bonus, I implemented a (rather basic) visualization of the scores as computed by the module. This can be a quite handy way to spot immediately if there are pages that are not performing really well. This is an early screenshot of this visualization (the column on the left contains the name of all the pages on the site and the column on the right contains the corresponding number of page views) that already highlights some problems, namely that the two top visited pages are poorly linked to the rest of the site (the corresponding row is completely red almost everywhere).

Obviously this approach is far from perfect, but I think is an interesting concept nonetheless. I already have some ideas about how to further improve this method – for example by taking into account not only the current page that the user is viewing but rather all pages the user has visited up to now. Also, since the website has (for now) very low traffic, scalability is not (yet) a problem but obviously for this to be really useful it should be made as scalable as possible.

When I released ImageTweak 0.19 I wrote in the changelog that the main change was the support for proper image drag&drop.

It actually works correctly but this change had the side effect of changing the normal mouse pointer used by ImageTweak to indicate that you’re moving an image around the window. I noticed this before releasing the update, but it seemed like a minor annoyance worth the additional functionality. I actually tried to fix it but found no way, and since there were a lot of people writing negative reviews on AMO for the lack of drag&drop support I decided to release it without fixing it.

Fast forward some weeks, and it turns out that actually the new behaviour is quite confusing and many are complaining about the mouse pointer showing the “forbidden” shape while moving the image. Fewer than they were complaining before about the lack of drag&drop, but still…

So I set out to find a solution for this problem but apparently there’s no way to freely control the mouse pointer shape during a drap&drop operation. The only thing that comes closer is setting the mozCursor property of the DOMDataTransfer interface to “default”, but that works only on win32 and simply switch the cursor from “forbidden” to the default arrow.

I’m therefore pretty much stuck in a fix: I have to fix this problem but I have no idea of how. If you know how to do this, or know somebody that might help me in fixing this, please let me know.

I’m working on pervasive games for my master thesis and I have to ask you a little favour.
Can you please tell me which is your favourite game and why?
Doesn’t matter if it’s a computer game, a card game, fight with your bigger brother or whatelse. Just write a short comment to explain why do you like it.
Thanks in advance for your help!

p.s. For the people that are wondering why am I working on pervasive games for my master thesis or what is the relation with my studies, I’ll answer that is a good way for working and having fun together!

After a month or so in the AMO review queue, ImageTweak 0.19 is finally available. Current users should be notified of the update soon.

To learn what’s new in 0.19, read this post. To download the latest version please head over to AMO.

Today I saw the following videos and now I’m wondering how can we do normal things with more fun?

Have fun!

While waiting for the review process for the 0.19 update to end (apparently the queue is a few weeks long – damn you Mozilla) I got bored and decided to create the ImageTweak page on Facebook.

Go spread the word!

Having recently bought a netbook (MSI U123) I had to readjust my browsing habits since normally I work on a 24″ Dell 2407WFP with a resolution of 1920×1200, whereas the MSI has a meager 10.1″ at 1024×600.

As a result I had to tweak my browser of choice to be able to work nicely on such a small screen. Fortunately enough, Firefox allows you to tailor almost exactly as you want, and to reclaim much of the needed vertical screen space.

So, let’s get started. read more »