There is an really interesting article by Stuart Kaufman in Edge.org which looks at autonomous agents as being able to both reproduce itself and do at least one extra work cycle.
I’ve recently found the topic of biology really exciting particularly in the relationships of organisational dynamics, semantics and bioinformatics.
Mark Pesce: visionary, programmer, poet and co-inventor of VRML will be making a special appearance at the next Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH December 2003 meeting.
The meeting will be held at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) at 7pm on Tuesday 16th December 2003.
An interesting map which shows some of the relationships of Spam mailers.
The map was created by a body called the Clueless Mailer Spamdemic Research Centre, who aims is to provide accurate information on Spam, it’s use, misuse and guidelines on responsible mailer guidelines.
Daniel Vine has set up a really neat tool that shows you a screen capture of any web URL as seen via the Apple Safari 1.1 browser.
The Browser screenshots are created in real-time by an iMac G3 400Mhz running OSX 10.3.1 and Safari 1.1
Icograda have a great resource section on Graphic Design Organizations, Collections, Libraries and Exhibitions, Design Magazines, Publishers, Schools, Tools, Techniques and Typography.
Superfuture City is a growing collection of honest reviews of selected shops and establishments located around the world including Tokyo, New York and Sydney.
The website has been designed to find the supercool stores located in cities worldwide.
The website is now complemented by a Superfuture Talk forum for the supercool shopper :)
IBM have a Beta Card-Sorting tool that helps interface designers organize information based on users’ expectations.
The software comes with 2 packages – USort and EZCalc, and can be used as virtual cards and can generate card lists and tree diagrams. The 2 packages are used in designing Web sites, program interfaces, and other information design applications.
There are other similar card sorting tools available, including:
1. Classified
2. WebSort web-based (PHP)
3. CardZort
Louis Rosenfeld (co-author of the O’Reilly IA polar bear book) has referenced Andy Edmonds, a human factors masters student’s online card sort tool – uzCardSort. His tool website also contains a great list of other available card sorting tools.
There is currently a great discussion underway in the ACM CHI-WEB list on Usability Myths.
A website No-WWW.org has been set up to encourage not to use the www. in domain names, naming them as a deprecative feature which server administrators should make redundant in their code.
Modern browsers today automatically prepends http:// and it is suggested that the www. is redundant and time consuming to communicate.
The OZCHI conference is to be held on 26-28 November at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
OZCHI is the annual conference for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Ergonomics Society of Australia.
The conference will attract an international community of researchers and practitioners from human factors and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, design, social sciences and management.
The University of Minnesota Duluth have posted a useful reference site on Information Architecture, with great links to processes and methods including affinity diagrams, prototyping, wireframes and various other resources.
Peter J. Bogaards has posted a great link to a new Ethnography Wiki. Ethnography is a branch of Anthropology that deals with scientific description and study of human cultures and human behaviour.
The Wiki focusses on ethnography in design, technology and business and is a useful tool and resource on the application of ethnographic research in design & business.
The 4th Chess match, where Garry Kasparov takes on the world’s best chess-playing 3D computer program – ChessBase’s Fritz, in a 3D battle has resulted in a 2-all draw.
PNG Second Edition has now become a W3C Recommendation. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have released the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (2nd Edition) as a W3C Recommendation and also an International Standard, ISO/IEC 15948:2003.
PNG is a graphics file format that is used for raster images, including the use of Indexed-color, grayscale, truecolor, and additional support to the alpha channel. More information can be found in the W3C Graphics Activity website.
The winners of the Built for the Future – ReUSEIT competition have been announced with Michael Pick, Jonathan Biggs and Ray Henry picking up the price for top redesigns of USEIT.com.
