Jason Shepherd

moved!

2006-06-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

My blog has officially moved. Please join me over at http://jbshep.wordpress.com/. People with RSS aggregators should point to the new feed.The family blog will remain here on blogger/blogspot.This blog's content will remain here on blogger/blogspot as well. Who knows, I may be back!

pondering a move to wordpress.com

2006-06-17T22:58:00.000-05:00

I've started a new blog on WordPress and am pondering a permanent move. I really like WordPress and its capabilities so far. Anyone have any experiences with WordPress they'd like to share?If I do decide on a permanent move, I'll be sure to post a "farewell" along with the new blog feed (for those of you who use a blog reader).

guidelines for transitions (a.k.a. animated effects)

2006-05-10T21:15:00.000-05:00

Bill Scott offers an interesting discussion on animated effects (or as he calls them, transitions). I first became interested in using animation when I was researching the visualization of dynamic networks. One of my favorite examples of animation in a UI comes from GnuTellaVision, a project of some students at Berkeley (Ka-Ping Yee was one of them). GnuTellaVision used animation to help the

mi-3

2006-05-05T22:27:00.000-05:00

Warning... beyond here be spoilers, ye maties!I just saw Mission Impossible 3 tonight. I haven't been out of the house much since the twins were born (8 months ago already) so just getting to see a movie was nice. The movie was decent--probably better than MI-2. It seemed predictable, but maybe I've just seen too many espionage/spy films in recent history. Sometimes I think the genre has

free klm calculator

2006-04-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

I need to download and try this free Keystroke-level Model (KLM) calculator.

blogging chi2006

2006-04-24T12:24:00.000-05:00

No, I won't be blogging on CHI2006 because I'm not there, but for those of you who couldn't make it this year (like ME!) you can follow along with these blog sites:The Official CHI2006 blogThe UNofficial CHI2006 blogThanks to Rashmi Sinha for the pointers!Update, 26-Apr-2006: The student volunteers' blog for CHI 2006 is probably the most interesting of all.

javascript kung fu

2006-04-21T08:25:00.000-05:00

We've formed a user experience (UX) team at my client site. We're employing an iterative design process that involves a lot of prototyping, both low-fi and high-fi. In doing high-fi prototypes, I've found several new JavaScript libraries to be invaluable.Yahoo! User Interface LibraryOffers support for animation, connection management (AJAX), DOM traversal, Drag'n'Drop, and event management.

stop indicting your users

2006-04-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had trouble accessing a system I needed in order to do my work. Unable to resolve the problem, I submitted a support request to the company's support request database where it was fielded by a "Web team" engineer. It turns out that the URL I tried to use was wrong. "Strange," I thought, especially since I found the URL directly from the Web team's online documentation.

infotec 2006 ppt uploaded

2006-04-10T10:43:00.000-05:00

You can find the PowerPoint slides for my Infotec talk "A Crash Course in Web Usability" over here.

firefox extensions

2006-04-10T10:38:00.000-05:00

Here are the Firefox extensions I'm using these days (see screen capture below).

infotec 2006

2006-03-28T16:30:00.000-06:00

Several folks have asked about my presentation at Infotec next week. Here are the specifics.A Crash Course in Web UsabilityInfotec 2006Wednesday, 05-Apr-20069:30 – 10:45 a.m.Speaker: Jason B. Shepherd, Bass and Associates, Inc., ConsultantAbstract:Many people erroneously believe that designing good Web user interfaces is simply a matter of applying common sense. Why then are there so many

flickr photostream added

2006-03-22T22:44:00.000-06:00

I added a Flickr badge of my photostream to the right side of the page (under my profile). This shows photos I've most recently uploaded to Flickr. Most of the time it will be pictures of my children (which are also posted here).

time to stop beating a dead browser

2006-03-21T15:39:00.000-06:00

I'm officially ending this post. See the bottom of that post for rationale (like anyone actually cares anyway *grin*).

squatting?

2006-03-16T16:10:00.000-06:00

I can't believe MS let this slip under their radar.I should probably clarify the link above for historical purposes. If MS pursues legal action and the linked site gets taken down, I should note that at as of March 16th, the page shows a Mozilla Firefox insignia with a link to the Firefox Web site.

another msie css annoyance

2006-03-10T21:51:00.000-06:00

I updated this post with my latest gripe about MSIE's CSS support. This time the source of my frustration is attribute selectors.

essence of computer science

2006-03-06T20:45:00.000-06:00

Some of my favorite quotes about CS:Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Abelson and Sussman in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer ProgramsComputer Science is a science of abstraction--creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. -- Aho and UllmanAny programming problem

ajax and json

2006-02-14T17:21:00.000-06:00

AJAX and JSON have revived my enthusiasm for Web development. Prior to doing Web development, I did a lot of rich desktop UI work where the types of interactions you could design and code were (for the most part) limitless. Once I moved to developing for the Web, I learned how the typical interaction involves the user filling out a bunch of information, the request being sent, and then a whole

blogging black hole

2006-02-08T16:30:00.000-06:00

I've fallen into the trap. The trap I speak of is the period of time that passes when one stops blogging due to one of a variety of reasons. For some daily life gets too hectic to allow for blogging. For those who use blogging as a tool for self-reflection , falling into the blogging "black hole" is a good indicator that life has become too frenzied and simplification may be in order. In

random miscellany

2005-11-08T15:05:00.000-06:00

Ian and the twins have kept us busier than I could have imagined. We're finally starting to figure out how to balance a toddler, infant twins, two careers, and ongoing domestic issues. But then again, every time I say something like that life throws us a curve ball. Hmmm... forget I said it. :-)Here are some interesting links I've come upon over the last month or so. There are some real

cijug and itec presentations posted

2005-10-13T12:50:00.000-05:00

I just got back from speaking at the Central Iowa Java Users Group (CIJUG) meeting and the ITEC 2005 conference. Links to my presentations follow:CIJUG: Java InternationalizationITEC: Multilingual Web Applications with Java/J2EE

updates on ian, noah, and tatum

2005-10-06T22:06:00.000-05:00

I've updated Ian's blog as well as our family's blog. Photos abound!

presenting next week at cijug and itec

2005-10-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

I'll be presenting on Java Internationalization twice next week in the greater Des Moines area. On October 11th I'll be speaking at the Central Iowa Java Users Group (CIJUG) meeting in West Des Moines. The next day, I'll be speaking at the annual ITEC conference in Des Moines at Hy Vee Hall. If you're interested and in the area, please stop by. I believe the CIJUG meeting is a completely free

the twins have arrived

2005-08-28T13:02:00.000-05:00

The twins have arrived. Check out the family blog for info and photos.

ajax lessons

2005-08-23T12:23:00.000-05:00

I ran across this post recently. I especially like the tip of returning data via AJAX as JavaScript expressions (that can be passed to eval()) rather than as XML strings that must be parsed. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it. You don't need to spend browser cycles parsing textual data. Data will end up being parsed using JavaScript anyway... might as well nest the data in

ian's blog updated

2005-08-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

I've updated Ian's blog with new 23 month photos.

cross-platform web pages

2005-07-28T08:36:00.000-05:00

I've been tracking CSS problems in MSIE over here in my blog as our team attempts to make our site truly cross-platform across MSIE and Firefox (and others).Even better yet, Doron Rosenberg has published "Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla" over on IBM's Web site. His article goes beyond just CSS issues and explores differences in the ECMAScript and DOM implementations too.

mighty rearranger

2005-07-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

I speculated on this briefly over on Chris Mueller's blog, but now I finally own Robert Plant and the Strange Sensation's Mighty Rearranger. I must say, it is awesome!An album hasn't grown on me this quickly since listening to The Mars Volta's Francis The Mute (though this is radically different from Francis the Mute). Robert Plant is on fire. I'm sure I'm plagiarizing someone by describing

the move to orange city

2005-07-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Ian, Kylynn *, and I are now officially moved up to Orange City, Iowa. Lisa is still in Omaha. She is 28 weeks pregnant with our twins, and she is on full bed rest from here on out. The doctors think she could deliver any time in the next three weeks.We were fortunate to have lots of help with the move from our families. Most of our boxes are unpacked. The office is still a bit of a mess but

adsl

2005-07-18T08:01:00.000-05:00

I should really blog about our big move sometime in the next few days. However, as part of our move, I have switched over to ADSL from Orange City Communications. Wikipedia has a great entry on the intracacies of xDSL and its differences from cable modem technology. Very cool!

note to self: ruby on rails

2005-06-17T23:17:00.000-05:00

I did a lot of scripting earlier in my career but veered away from it when I submerged into the depths of Java/J2EE. Recently however, I've jumped back into scripting languages such as Python and Perl due to their expressiveness and native support for piping and manipulating output from different programs.One scripting language I haven't learned yet is Ruby. Ruby has received a lot of "press"

habitat for humanity blitz build

2005-06-17T22:46:00.000-05:00

As mentioned in a previous post, our church (Lord of Love Lutheran) is building a Habitat for Humanity home in a 10 consecutive day build known as a "blitz." We are right on schedule and the community support has been tremendous. KM3 News in Omaha has been running features and updates on the blitz build every day.The build has been an edifying and uplifting experience thus far. Working towards

recent news

2005-06-17T22:34:00.000-05:00

I've fallen into the "blog rot" trap. I haven't posted much of value as of late, and the items I've posted have been more link re-posting and less original commentary. I can't say what's to blame. Part of the problem is just being in a funk, but much of the problem lies in a barrage of life changes Lisa and I are experiencing. For starters, Lisa is pregnant... with twins! She is 23 weeks

cross-platform browser misery continues

2005-06-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've updated this post with adjacent sibling selector woes.

attention college cs students

2005-06-01T10:10:00.000-05:00

It's nice to see a company giving incentive to college students for a change. If you're a college student majoring in CS, IS, or another IT-related field, check out Google's Summer of Code. I wrote OSS during the summers when I was in school... wish they would have had this back then....

hooked on ecmascript and dom

2005-05-31T07:15:00.000-05:00

I used to hate JavaScript. I found it very lax in terms of expression evaluation and very hard to debug under MSIE. Then, I started trying to develop Web pages using "Web standards" (separation of content, style, and behavior using XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript/DOM respectively). Once I made the attempt, I learned how valuable Firefox can be when adding style and behavior to a page thanks to its

revenge of the sith

2005-05-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

I went to the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith on the 19th. I really can't give an objective review of the movie since Star Wars was such a prominent piece of my youth, but I can share several thoughts I had that night. The acting was better than in Episode 2. Much of it was still very "wooden" (as I've heard it called), but you have to attribute some of that to the

presenting at OJUG tonight

2005-05-16T14:21:00.000-05:00

I'm presenting "Java Internationalization" at the monthly Omaha Java Users Group (OJUG) meeting tonight. It starts at 6:30pm in the 1Staff Training office at 108th and Maple. Stop by for free food!Update (17-May-2005): Thanks to everyone who showed up. There's a link to my presentation here.

garage biology

2005-05-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

Become the mad scientist you've always wanted to be."Questions of science, Science and progress, Do not speak as loud as my heart." - Coldplay, "The Scientist"

semantic web: elegant syllogisms or over-generalized gack?

2005-05-08T21:54:00.000-05:00

I happen to know that some folks who subscribe to this blog's feed are interested in the Semantic Web. I wonder what they would think of Clay Shirky's thoughts in this article.

weak support of css2 in msie

2005-04-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

Making a truly cross-platform Web site is considerably difficult, especially if you try using standard CSS2 to stylize your content. The most prominent source of this difficulty is MSIE's incredibly weak support of CSS. MS claims CSS will be better in IE 7.0. I doubt it.I'm going to use this post to record the inconsistencies I find with MSIE's 6.0 support of CSS2, thereby accomplishing two

visual form's impact on cognitive processes

2005-04-10T16:00:00.000-05:00

This blog post is a good one for us wanna-be psychology hacks. :-) In it, Rashmi Sinha discusses how form impacts information retrieval (which then impacts interface design). This post is a good differentiator of implicit (unconscious) versus explicit (conscious) long-term memory.

amazon: it's not just for media and electronics anymore

2005-04-07T22:09:00.000-05:00

It's amazing what you can buy on Amazon these days. I had a friend request this for a graduation gift.

gift idea

2005-04-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

Too bad my birthday and Christmas have passed. This would make a cool, geeky gift.Thinkgeek always has cool shirts. I've always wanted an All Your Base shirt. If you're not familiar with the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," check out this link.

python encroaches... and the people doth rejoice

2005-04-03T23:11:00.000-05:00

This article claims Python is being used more frequently for enterprise systems. I sure hope so. I'd like to use Python more at work than I do now. I like being able to write terse code (as opposed to, say, the bulky OO syntactic idioms found in Java pre-5.0).

brain chips

2005-03-31T16:47:00.000-06:00

I've become somewhat enamored with how technology can help people with disabilities. This sounds especially promising. Thanks to Suresh for forwarding this to me.

j2se 5.0 autoboxing

2005-03-31T16:45:00.000-06:00

Krishna Srinivasan has an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) blog entry on Java/J2SE 5.0 autoboxing. Take a look at the section on immutable objects. The fact that equality operators function differently depending on the ranges of values compared makes my skin crawl. Yuck!

google culture

2005-03-25T22:14:00.000-06:00

The entire IT industry is gawking at Google and for good reason. Creating a company culture that fosters creativity, collaboration, and innovation isn't that hard, unless of course you're like most companies and make it hard. Read here for yet another peek through the black box of Googledom.

the mars volta

2005-03-24T08:00:00.001-06:00

I've been listening to a so-called "concept album" called Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta. The Mars Volta is a two-man progressive rock band. The lead vocalist reminds me of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, but in an even higher vocal register. The guitar work is just phenomenal. The album in general evokes a mix of Led Zeppelin (for the vocals, guitar, and bluesy feel), Rush (again, vocals),

firefox dom inspector rocks!

2005-03-19T05:40:00.000-06:00

I couldn't figure out why my table cells had padding around them. I hadn't specified any padding in my CSS stylesheet. Enter Firefox's DOM Inspector (see below).DOM Inspector allows you to look at each XHTML element to see what its CSS properties are and where they're being set. It turns out that Firefox and MSIE set padding around table cells by default. This might be part of the CSS spec...

nowrap in css

2005-03-18T09:43:00.000-06:00

I thought this was kind of hard to find in the W3C CSS 2.1 spec, so I'll share it here.HTML allowed you to specify a 'nowrap' attribute on tags so that the table cell would expand its width using the width of the text inside it. In the XHTML world, you'd do it in CSS like this:td { white-space: nowrap;}I wouldn't have expected this to be controlled by an attribute called 'white-space'.

hst retrospectives in rolling stone

2005-03-15T22:22:00.000-06:00

I recently subscribed to Rolling Stone, and today I'm especially glad that I did. The issue that arrived yesterday contains approximately 40 pages (minus advertisements) of retrospectives and memoirs involving Hunter S. Thompson (a.k.a. HST). Guest authors include President Jimmy Carter, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Ed Bradley, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, his widow Anita, his son Juan, his first

blogging to share knowledge

2005-03-09T22:02:00.000-06:00

People blog for many reasons. Some blog to reflect on their daily lives. Matt Payne blogs to remember things and retrieve them at a later date. I choose to blog to share information, whether it be information of a personal nature or information of a technical nature (programming, design, etc.). To me, this is the coolest part of blogging... just tossing information out into the void for

python: the ministry of programming (and silly walks)

2005-03-07T22:12:00.000-06:00

I have a new favorite programming language, and its name is Python. With its name inspired by the Monty Python comedy troop, the Python language has regex pattern matching, lambda functions, syntactic sugar for collections, OO-support, dynamic typing, and all sorts of dandy features. The dynamic typing is so nice, especially when you're used to writing Java code all day.I especially like how

no late fees?

2005-03-01T07:07:00.000-06:00

I remember when I first heard about the "No Late Fees" policy introduced by Blockbuster. I remember being confused as to whether they really meant "no late fees." It turns out they don't (surprise!). Anyone been bitten by this yet?Update (05-Mar-2005): I should note that I have not experienced this personally. I just blogged it because I found it notable.

several things

2005-02-25T21:58:00.000-06:00

A friend pointed out that I haven't updated my blog in a while. Well Tim, this post is for you. :-)A few things are going on right now. On Monday (28-Feb-2005) we will be releasing the latest version of our Web application, which will include multilingual support. Our development team is the first to internationalize a Web application at my current client site, so this release will carry with

tools for writing java user interfaces

2005-02-18T15:17:00.000-06:00

I am in the process of writing my prototype UI as part of my Masters thesis research. I'm making heavy use of Java Swing, Piccolo, and SwiXML. I've found that my knowledge of Java Swing has eroded significantly since I last worked on rich desktop clients at Northrop Grumman. Fortunately, this site has eased the re-learning curve. Thanks to cut-and-paste and the Jalopy Java source formatter,

google maps escapes into the wild

2005-02-10T09:40:00.000-06:00

Unless you've been living under a "virtual" rock for the last 48 hours, you've probably heard about the new Google Maps. Google's first foray into Web-based maps vastly improves upon the clunky full-page loading interactions found on Mapquest and Yahoo. The images are dynamically loaded into an IFRAME and the map data is sent across as XML and rendered using a combo of XML, JavaScript, and XSLT

i am kip and i am a cage fighter

2005-02-03T21:34:00.000-06:00

This is much cooler than the nerd quiz. Which Napoleon Dynamite character are you?

28 years and counting

2005-02-03T20:57:00.000-06:00

While the rest of the United States anxiously waited for the groundhog to emerge from his hut, I celebrated my 28th birthday. This Feb 2nd was especially memorable with my wife Lisa taking me to see the musical Mamma Mia at the Lied Center in Lincoln, NE. Mamma Mia now holds a place as one of my favorite musicals. It is certainly one of the more entertaining musicals I've seen (helped in part

World Herald story on blogging

2005-01-31T20:33:00.000-06:00

Several of us local nerds were interviewed last week for a story on blogging. The end result appeared today here. Kudos to Betsie Freeman on a well-done feature (despite the "experts" she had to work with *grin*).

lynx - the terrorist's hacking tool of choice

2005-01-28T10:40:00.000-06:00

It had to happen sooner or later. See here for the hilarious commentary.

speaking engagement

2005-01-27T22:38:00.000-06:00

It looks like I'm speaking at Infotec again this year. Instead of speaking on infovis, this year I'll be tackling the issue of internationalization. Here is my abstract. Title: Developing Multilingual Web Applications Using J2EE Many new Web applications have a requirement to provide application content in multiple languages. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) has support for managing

grand challeges in computing

2005-01-26T21:59:00.000-06:00

Bored? Not sure what to do on a Friday night? Why not get started on solving one of the Grand Challenges in Computing according to the British Computer Society (BCS)? The actual conference reports are here.

frameworks for j2ee app build/deploy

2005-01-25T21:15:00.000-06:00

A fair number of Java developers at work have been getting into AppFuse. AppFuse is supposed to simplify building and deploying J2EE applications by providing build scripts and preconfigured OSS frameworks (Struts, Spring, Hibernate, etc.). Their hope is that AppFuse will make it easier for junior developers (and possibly some senior developers) to create and manage J2EE applications in spite

xmlbuddy to the rescue

2005-01-22T13:38:00.000-06:00

One cool tip I picked up the other night at the Omaha JUG is to use the Eclipse plugin XMLBuddy. The free version of XMLBuddy provides XML element completion, DTD validation, and loading/viewing DTDs over the Net. The pay version has some nice additional features I'd like to get my hands on, including XML Schema support. If you're an XML hack and an Eclipse hack, check it out. I wonder if

payne presents eclipse/cvs

2005-01-18T10:20:00.000-06:00

I attended the Omaha Java User Group (JUG) meeting last night... my first non-UPRR JUG. Local programmer and PhD student Matt Payne gave a talk on Eclipse and CVS. Good presentation, Matt! February's talks will be on Jython and the PayPal API. See the JUG Web site for more details.

nerdliness confirmed

2005-01-10T17:24:00.000-06:00

I didn't think I'd score this high:

snowboarding... in the plains??

2005-01-09T14:23:00.000-06:00

In years past, Lisa and I and a group of friends have packed up our vehicle and headed to Colorado for a weekend of spills, chills, and ill-advised speed in the form of skiing/snowboarding. It has become harder to get away and the 8+ hour trip didn't sound nearly as fun this year. Fortunately, there is a four run ski slope just ten minutes from our cozy abode over in Crescent, Iowa. We had

xslt localization

2005-01-08T19:01:00.000-06:00

I just finished a design at work to allow our XSL stylesheets to be tagged to support localized messages. Once implemented, our application's resource bundles that are normally loaded by the Struts framework will become accessible to both JSP-based views (which is normal) and XSLT-based views (which was previously an unsupported capability). I'm using Xalan-Java extensions to accomplish this.

holiday frenzy

2005-01-07T14:29:00.000-06:00

Lazlo Hollyfeld: How did you do? Chris Knight: I passed... then I failed! Lazlo Hollyfeld: Then I'm happy... and sad for you. -- from the movie Real Genius In the spirit of Lazlo, my holiday week was relaxing... and exhausting. Lisa, Ian, and I went to my folks' place for December 24th. We returned on the 25th for our immediate family Christmas. On the 26th, we took Lisa to the airport

swixml... again

2004-12-16T13:21:00.000-06:00

I've been playing with SwiXML again. I like defining Swing components declaratively in XML, but I dislike having to register derived custom classes explicitly in code. Why can't SwiXML just try to load classes with similar names through the classloader. In other words, it would be nice if SwiXML saw a tag like and tried to resolve it to a class named MyClass with

omaha java meetup on 12/20

2004-12-15T09:25:00.000-06:00

The Omaha Java Meetup Group is having its monthly event this Monday (12/20) @ 7:00pm. I've never been to one of these before but plan on checking it out.

interview with bvu career services

2004-12-08T14:44:00.000-06:00

My alma mater interviewed me as part of their monthly Career Services newsletter. The interviewer did a splendid job of not making me sound like a blathering idiot, IMHO.

tagging along in orlando

2004-12-07T22:30:00.000-06:00

Lisa had a conference in Orlando this last weekend, so I reluctantly tagged along (har har). We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel and managed to find time for visiting Sea World and Universal Studios Islands of Adventure. Ian stayed with my parents and sisters. He must have had a great time; he didn't seem too intent on leaving when we picked him up. :-)

ten most persistent design bugs... or, how many top ten lists can we make

2004-11-30T10:07:00.000-06:00

Bruce Tognazzini fuels my speculation that usability pundits have an obsession with creating top ten lists of design flaws, heuristics, etc. All sarcasm aside, Tog has captured some fun design flaws in his latest AskTog posting.

cameron sums up necessity of discovery

2004-11-23T21:54:00.000-06:00

Director (and new Guest Editor of Wired Magazine) James Cameron shares his views on the frontier of outer space and the need for cultural change at NASA. Read on.

google gets scholarly

2004-11-18T11:22:00.000-06:00

Yay! Google has released Google Scholar, a tool for searching scholarly materials such as refereed journals and conference proceedings. For example, here's a search for tree visualization.

gaim rocks

2004-11-15T21:36:00.000-06:00

Our team at work used to coordinate production deployments using MSN IM. When we got our new PCs and laptops, we were "liberated" of the need to do administration on our boxes (read: we were stripped of admin rights). MSN IM is disabled so I've been unable to use it for deployments ever since. Then, I found Gaim. Gaim requires no admin rights and no registry additions on a Windows box. In

little hard drives

2004-11-14T22:00:00.000-06:00

I bought a Lexar JumpDrive this past Friday. I love the idea of having a mini hard drive on my keychain. Even better, I like being able to carry my Masters research materials and resume/CV with me wherever I go. I often wonder if, in my lifetime, I will see a race to make computing a more pervasive and hidden part of everyone's lives. Technology has become so ingrained in my daily life that I

cleverness in slashdot sigs

2004-11-14T21:10:00.000-06:00

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang I discovered this quote as the signature (sig) to a post on Slashdot. My sig, by the way, is favorite quote of mine made by Dijkstra. "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra

new ian photos

2004-11-10T23:06:00.000-06:00

There are new photos of Ian from Halloween and early November over on Ophoto. Highlights include Ian in his sheep costume and various milk-drooling pictures.

sql: rows in one table but not in another

2004-11-09T08:32:00.000-06:00

This comes up a lot in database programming. How do you write a SQL query that selects rows that are in one table but not in another table? Here's the answer: select a.field0 from table0 a where not exists (select b.field0 from table1 b where b.field0 = a.field0)

cyclones win

2004-11-07T22:24:00.000-06:00

Pigskin nirvana? You bet.

design principles in infovis

2004-11-06T12:37:00.000-06:00

In an attempt to organize my thoughts, here are several principles to consider when designing visualizations for specific task types. 1) Information scent - How does the user know how to find the information he seeks? What directs his browsing choices? How does he know what to look for? How does he know when he's found it? 2) Cost structure - How do we optimize the cost of knowledge access?

third CS monthly departmental colloquium @ uno

2004-11-02T00:38:00.000-06:00

Dr. Victor Winter will be giving a talk at this month's UNO CS colloquium entitled "Higher-Order Transformation and the Distributed Data Problem." It will be held at 12:30pm at PKI-279. Check it out if you're able; Dr. Winter's research areas (program transformation and high-assurance computing) are interesting ones. It's 12:38 AM and I'm still at work jockeying around with the backfill

tonight's big release

2004-11-01T13:51:00.000-06:00

We are releasing the latest version of our application tonight. We have implemented a new security model that is very fine-grained and flexible. It will enable us to "turn on" new user types in a way that is (for the most part) purely data-driven. From a release management standpoint, tonight's release is a behemoth. The new security model involves a multitude of code and database changes.

to-do item #15682937

2004-10-31T13:02:00.000-06:00

Install a WebDAV server on my home PC so I don't have to mess with FTP or Yahoo! Briefcase anymore.

humor: triumph takes on star wars nerds

2004-10-26T14:37:00.000-05:00

I've seen this time and time again, but seeing Triumph rip on the Star Wars nerds brings a tear to my eye and a spasm to my gut every time I watch it. Enjoy. Click the header of this post to see it. I'm not used to these blogger templates and how they do links yet. :-)

essential bach

2004-10-11T14:33:00.000-05:00

What better way to explore better methods of tree visualization than to have Bach's Brandenburg Concertos bouncing in your ear? In a related note, local classical radio station KVNO is holding its annual fall fundraising drive. If you listen to KVNO, please consider making a pledge.

language pollution

2004-10-07T21:45:00.000-05:00

The English language has changed so much in my lifetime. Colloquialisms, slang terms, and incorrect grammar regularly permeate dictionaries. For example, the previous non-word snuck is now listed as an acceptable form of the more correct version, sneaked, in most major dictionaries. As a purist, I abhor the eagerness to pollute the English language so quickly, especially when the changes

truly scalable tree visualization?

2004-09-25T13:08:00.000-05:00

The creators of TreeWiz claim that their tool scales to phylogenetic trees with tens of thousands of nodes. It looks very interesting. I'd like to take a test drive, but their example applet fails with FileNotFoundExceptions.

using XSLT to insert variables into another XSLT

2004-09-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

I recently encountered a need at work to insert an XSL variable into an XSL stylesheet. This is fairly easy to do using XSLT. The transformation shown below takes one XSLT and produces an XSLT result tree with a new XSL variable inserted just below the element. In this case, the XSL variable is named locale and has the value en.

structural comparison of large trees

2004-09-23T09:15:00.000-05:00

InfoVis pundit Tamara Munzner has made an interesting contribution with her TreeJuxtaposer tool. The strategies employed by this tool may yield benefit in my Masters research.

newest joys

2004-09-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

Bob DuCharme's XSLT Quickly arrived at my door today courtesy of the nice people at Bookpool. Ever since I tore it out of its protective cardboard cocoon, I have been rapidly filling in the gaps in my knowledge of XSLT and XPath. This is an excellent reference (and a fairly good tutorial) to have if you plan on doing any moderately complex transformations. I've been listening to Coldplay's A

new email

2004-09-19T21:09:00.000-05:00

I'm switching to gmail for good. My address is jbshep gmail com, but I will probably just use jason_b_shepherd acm org publicly since I can always change the forwarding on that one.

more zui information

2004-09-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

It is becoming easier to find information on ZUIs. Alan Salmoni has written a survey article on ZUIs over at Advogato. Hornbæk et al. also contains a comprehensive view of the ZUI research landscape.

MWAR reunion

2004-09-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

Microware (MWAR) had a reunion this summer, which I was unfortunate to have missed. MWAR is the (now defunct) company I interned with while in college. It's amazing what can happen in the span of 6 years. According to the bios section, one of my MWAR managers ended up getting engaged to one of the gals I went to college with. Weird.

la musique du jour

2004-09-15T22:07:00.000-05:00

Music has always served as a heartbeat for my mind, especially when I'm trying to drive through hard problems. I've recently (re)discovered several CDs that have proven helpful as I work through some issues with my Masters work. These include: Norah Jones - Come Away With Me Abba - Gold: Greatest Hits Maurice Ravel - "Bolero"

infotec 2004 revisited

2004-09-15T14:54:00.000-05:00

At the request of a co-worker, my Infotec 2004 presentation can be found here.

ian is 1

2004-09-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

We were very fortunate to have many members of our family at our house yesterday for Ian's first birthday party. There is a plethora of photos over at Ian's site, but some of my recent favorites are shown below.