Saturday, July 28, 2012

Interesting notes on user interface design

[Updated Mar 5, 2017]

I've been bookmarking these notes on UX design. Some of them are worth reading over and over. Well, ideally they should be applied but I'm a server-side engineer. So, the most I can do is identify applications of these concepts in the tools and devices I use:

Some old notes I had made earlier (also read the links in the comments) - #1, #2.

Until next time!
Ashwin.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Definition: Weird - When you see Google presenters at Google IO touting Macbooks and talking about building and using Android.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Some books I read, mostly sci-fi and mostly average


Wireless
Short stories. Some were good. Some too dry, felt like filler - meandering time travel stories with no plot.

Line War (Agent Cormac 5)
Interesting. Some intrigue. Read like the Silver Surfer meets powerful AIs. Last book in the Ian Cormac saga.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
Surreal, feverish, strange, slightly disjoint, even satisfying at first a but mildly disappointing ending.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)
A brief distraction from Sci-Fi. I bought the book after watching his interview on Youtube. Not a bad read.

Marooned in Realtime (Peace War)
Takes post apocalyptic novel to a new level. Pretty impressive time scales, although a bit sad and disappointing in the end.

Duplicate Effort: A Retrieval Artist Novel (Retrieval Artist Novels)
Average. Beginner writer. Starts off in a mildly interesting, vintage Asimov type of setting but the writer's inexperience shows.

Courtship Rite 
Couldn't finish it. Waste of time.



Ashwin.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Summer reading (if you like technology)

I've been meaning to share these links for a while now.

I spent a few days digging up a few, interesting computer science algorithms we were introduced to in school (a while ago). Back then we didn't have ubiquitous internet access nor did we have 10 years of cumulative collective knowledge via Wikipedia, blogs, articles and tangible "computer sciencey" use cases like the ones at Google, Twitter, LinkedIn to demystify them for me. During my recent wanderings on the interwebs I found these nice articles:

Folks doing interesting work experimenting with BerkleyDB and also LevelDB type of LSM stores at Yammer, VoltDB and LinkedIn.

A very detailed and thoroughly researched presentation on the state of the art in Metrics-monitoring-logging.

The Google Chrome and Android guys have been writing and presenting about the how they've been pushing browser and mobile technologies. I'm pretty sure Apple also does these things but they don't seem to talk about them openly. What impressed me was how far Web technologies have come - in terms of tooling and profiling. The sophistication is almost at par with high performance server side technologies
The confusing array of Java Web technologies requires some sorting out - Comparing JVM Web frameworks

Being a Java developer (meaning clueless about lower level, system stuff), sometimes I try to find articles about what others are doing in lower level languages, to help me stay grounded (I wish). Last month I found some on bit twiddling and other native stuff. Although I have to admit I forgot almost everything the moment I finished reading them.
Networking and latency - they go hand in hand.
The guys working on and using Lucene also have interesting things to report

I know all this has been "nice to know" or "file it for later" kind of reading. So, here's a really useful, simple Java article on handling properties and configuration files in Java using Apache Commons Configuration.

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday (for those in the US)!