Bus fouls

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Seattle bus-rider and blogger Bus Chick writes about bus fouls in a April 26, 2006 post.   Bus fouls are like party fouls — although there are no written rules that spell out what constitutes a party foul, anyone who attends parties recognizes fouls.  Just like party-goers, bus-riders will recognize these bus fouls. 

Even if you don't ride the bus regularly, you'll probably get a chuckle out of these.  If you do ride the bus regularly, be sure to read the comments for even more fouls. 

In a recent post, Bus Chick confesses that she committed a bus foul while courting her future husband — holding a seat for him.  The comments to that post are also entertaining for regular riders.

Categoriesfun

Visual demo that people can't see blue very well

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Of the three primary colors, people (homo sapiens) see green best, followed by red, but we really suck at seeing blue.  This page:

http://nfggames.com/games/ntsc/visual.shtm

is a nice demonstration of just how much we suck at seeing blue, especially compared to green.  Most image and video compression takes advantage of this fact, and sacrifices a ton of bits devoted to transmitting the blue portion of an image.

Current status of CableCard and "open cable" in general

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Cable Card Goes Mainstream on July 1 (crave.cnet.com)

The article above summarizes the current situation with CableCard — it's just barely starting to become availble. 

Some background on CableCard … 

CableCard is a small standardized electronic card that you plug into a cable set-top box (or DVR) of your choice.  The idea was that consumers would be able to buy their own set-top box or DVR (e.g. at BestBuy), and the cable company would send the consumer a CableCard which contains the security/access-control hardware to prevent cable theft.

CableCard is a hardware solution to the cable companies security/access-control concerns — you have to get a physical CableCard from your cable company.  The article also mentions a software solution under development, known as Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS).  As a software solution, you would not need to get a physical piece of hardware (like a CableCard) to plug into the cable box you just purchased from BestBuy.  Rather, the cable company would electronically send "keys" to the software in your cable box.

After years of little activity on the CableCard front, much of the recent activity is due to a March 2005 FCC ruling (pdf) requiring cable companies to stop shipping "integrated" cable boxes (including DVRs) by July 2007 (in 2 months).  To avoid fines, the only solution available to cable companies today is to ship boxes that support CableCard.

Universcale

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Most of our day-to-day experience involves objects that range in size between a millimeter up to a few hundred meters (a large building).  But the universe we inhabit has much much larger and smaller scales.  It's hard to comprehend just how tiny a bacteria is compared to the size of the solar system.

Universcale is an interactive flash app that allows you to scroll through scales from a proton all the way up to visible universe.  The scale contains silhouettes of objects of various sizes.  You can click on each item to get more details.  This app was made by Nikon (the camera/optics company) as part of the "Feel Nikon" section of their website.

Universcale reminds me of the popular 1977 documentary Powers of 10. But the interactivity of Universcale makes it much more compelling than the documentary.

Practical eye-tracking for GUIs

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The Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design (GUIDe) project at Stanford has a nice video demonstration of their EyePoint system for "pointing" in GUIs (see below).

Eye-tracking technology has been around for a while, so that's not the interesting part.  The interesting part is how they deal with the "Midas problem".  The advantage of a mouse is that you can let go of the mouse when you don't want to move the pointer, but with eye-tracking your eyes are always moving.  It's called the "Midas problem" in reference to the legend of King Midas, who wished for the power to turn things into gold at his touch;  this backfired because everything he touched immediately turned into gold, including his food, his drink, and even his daughter.

EyePoint deals with this problem by still requiring some other action to indicate that pointing is desired, but without totally eliminating the speed of eye-tracking.