You hear that, Mr Andersen?

The mechanic that would perfect his work...

My workmates are going to be having a "Mite-Off" tomorrow; there's already NZ Marmite, Promite, and a jar calling itself "Our Mate". One of our English staffers will be bringing in British-style Marmite, and someone else will be bringing in some Vegemite. There was a lot of discussion about what to spread this stuff on - there seemed to be a general agreement that dark breads are a better substrate for this kind of spread, but they'd use the blandest of white breads, so that the spreads will be judged on just their taste, rather than how well they compliment the dark rye or sunflower & barley.

Okay, on reflection I guess we're taking this a bit more seriously than it really deserves. :)

In other food related news, our Sushi Guy is giving out small pottles of saki as a free bonus with lunchtime purchases, as a kind of end-of-year celebration thing. Talking to someone who claimed to know about these things, it's apparently not a bad saki, either. It's probably just as well that this insn't widespread a tradition - a shot of bad bourbon when you buy your MegaCombo, or Southern Comfort with your KFC? Ouzo with your kebab? What would be next, tequilla with your burrito? Oh, wait...

***

Went to a really interesting interface design talk at the university by Dr Ben Bederson. The guy had done a bunch of research that was actually pretty relevant to the work we're doing at Weta, such as the problem of browsing huge photo archives. (His tool, PhotoMesa, looked pretty nifty - though we'd have to mine it for ideas, rather than use it directly, since it's a Windows tool, and we'd want a way to access the movies that the pictures would be proxies for.) He had some really useful things to say about designing tools so as not to interrupt the flow, and to make it possible to transition from a novice user to an expert - and why mouse-based menu interaction intrinsically requires the user to concentrate on the interface rather than the task. In fact, an immediate consequence has been to make me rethink some design decisions I was in the middle of meeting - which is an indication of a good, useful talk to me. :)

One of his areas of research was presenting children's books from around the world in an online format, the International Children's Digital Library, so that children could to access books that they'd otherwise never see. The site is www.icdlbooks.org, and he talked about some of the neat things they'd found - for example, children tend to classify books by their physical characteristics, like the main colour of the cover. They'd also done research to show that to get the same error rate as adults clicking on 16x16 pixel buttons, 5 year olds needed 32x32 buttons, and 4 year olds needed 64x64. The interface also includes some attempts to limit the "zero or mega" problem of searches - that is, searches that produce no results, or far too many. In this example, once an option is chosen, it stays clicked in, and any of the search buttons that wouldn't produce any results in conjunction with the selected options are greyed out - effectively, you can't make a query that returns zero records. Nifty stuff.

Plus, it has "The Black Sun":

A small black rabbit was born and because he was black he was seen as different from the other rabbits. The rabbit became eccentric and disliked bright colors. The black rabbit dyed the uncle of the sun black. Then the earth had no sunlight, no daytime, it only had the dark. The black rabbit regretted this decision and made the world bright and colourful again.

Now all I have to do is learn to read Chinese. :)

Posted by svend at December 2, 2004 6:16 PM