Posts Tagged Geeky
The Flash Mind reader
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on February 14th, 2003
I just came across an amazing little Flash application, which claims to read your mind. I usually don’t pay to much credence to these things but I gave it a try anyway.
The application first asks you to pick any two-digit number. Add both of these together and then subtract that number from your original number. You then look up the result in a list to find the corresponding symbol. Once you click on the crystal ball it will display the symbol.
To my astonishment the result was correct. For the sceptics amongst you, it is important to mention that the application will not ask you to enter any information at any point. Everything is done in your head and all the necessary information is displayed on the same screen as the crystal ball. The only required interaction is that you click on the crystal ball.
How was this achieved?
Before reading on you should give it a go for yourself.
If you know a little about the psychology behind interface design you may have already guessed what is happening behind the scenes. The most important part of the screen is the list of numbers and symbols. Notice how the numbers are placed in descending order and reads from top to bottom rather than line-by-line. This was done on purpose.
A normal person whose mother tongue is based on the Latin alphabet (ie. not Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew etc.) will scan and read a screen from the top left to the bottom right. The list is ordered and spaced to break this normal reading pattern. The idea is to make the list difficult to read without external aid. In the case of user interfaces the external aid is usually the mouse. Much like a finger it helps you to keep track of where you are reading. The use of a “finger” is a normal reaction when faced with odd reading patterns. The reader may not even be conscious of the fact that he uses it. This is exactly what the application expects from the user.
The application is designed to track the mouse movements over the screen. Notice how the instructions ask you to concentrate on the icon. This is a trick often used by magicians to focus your attention on something. The application is no different in its approach. It wants you to leave the mouse on the correct entry in the list for a few moments. Once the mouse is fixed in place the application will record the position and assume that this is the symbol it should display. If the next movement is rapid and does not stop until a click event is triggered on the crystal ball, it will display the object stored in memory.
I really have to hand it to the guys at CyberGlass. This is the first time that I’ve seen an application which makes use of such an approach. Hopefully there’s more to come.
See correction in next blog item.
Power Laws and the poor
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on February 12th, 2003
Jason Kottke posted an interesting article last week on the topic of “Weblogs and Power Laws”. Assuming his contention is true, which I think it is, this weblog would be at the very bottom of the curve - whichever one that is.
In terms of visitors, taking out search crawlers, the number of visitors can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Referrers are for the moment nil. Which is no surprise as I’ve made no effort to publicise this site yet.
On the other hand, the outgoing links do obey the Power Laws. My favorite blogs and news sources are often quoted. Other sites much less. Google, oddly enough, scores high in this site. After a little digging I found that my links to their glossary seem to make it into quite a few blogs.
Honey they got the pot
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on January 26th, 2003
I just read the most amusing little piece on The Register, an IT news source I frequent on a regular basis. Their apparent contention is that the american military would apparently be foolish enough to provide administrative access to the .mil domain. Thus allowing anyone to create a domain of their choice under the .mil primary or worse, wreak havoc with existing .mil domains.
While the author shows to have sufficient self control not to give the reader sufficient information for an easy search for this so called magic key he also fails to show the most elementary reserve a journalist should have. Verifying your sources is one thing - which he did - the other is to lend credence to the story itself. Apparently Mr. Greene has never hear of a concept called the Honey Pot….
NS6: The loose DTD and HTML comments issue
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on November 26th, 2002
I think I’ve come up with a rule to test the issue I raised in my earlier post regarding Netscape 6.2.3 and its amusing treatment of malformed HTML comments when using the Transitional DTD. The following code will illustrate the problem:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>NS6.2.3: Loose DTD & Malformed Comments Bug </TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<!– Malformed Comment Tag —->
This text will not display because of a malformed comment tag<br>
<!– A second Malformed Comment Tag —->
This text will display. The parser somehow closes the tag<br>
<!– Malformed Comment Tag ————–>
This text will display even though the comment is malformed. <br>
<!– A second Malformed Comment Tag ————->
This tex will not display<br>
</BODY>
</HTML>
From the experiment above we assert that NS6 will not close comment tags if the closing argument, the “–>” marker contains between 4 and 13 dashes in it. Mystery resolved. Could this be due to some buffer somewhere?