Everybody with the slightest interest in user interfaces should watch the well-known video of Jeff Han at TED. Every second of this video surprised me. The day after I first saw the video, I was actively searching for more information about the used technology. Several other people managed to build a multi-touch screen, so I thought I could do it too. I 'designed' a small prototype, the size of a normal piece of paper (A4).
Currently most of my spare time is occupied by my multitouch project. I'm building a low-budget touchscreen, by using simple materials: acrylic, IR LEDs and a simple web cam. Search YouTube for some example videos. The images from the web cam contain light spots on the places where I touched the acrylic. The center coordinates of these 'blobs' needs to be determined in order to use them for UI control.
Part of my research goals is to find a fast blob detection algorithm. So during these boring hours I've been brainstorming about possible methods to determine the center point of blobs.
Without having a look at (commercial) blob detection libraries, I came up with four possible methods.
During the last two elections citizens of Eindhoven and 34 other cities in the Netherlands had to vote using the good old red pencil or on a German voting machine. The new voting machines were banned because the ballot information might not be kept secret. I wanted to find out what caused the information leakage and found that you could read some data via an eavesdropping method called 'Van Eck phreaking'.
A Dutch guy, Wim van Eck, published a paper on this eavesdropping process as early as 1985. This paper stated that for example CRT displays use high frequency electric signals to drive itself. These signals happen to information about the displayed data. Because of these high frequencies, these signals are also radiated into the air where they can be picked up by antennas and be further analyzed by computers.
According to Van Eck, the signals were similar to those of TV broadcasting signals, but only lacked a synchronization signal. By using an external synchronization signal, the exact image can be duplicated on another screen.
Web developers are constantly looking for new techniques to interact with readers/users. Now, the upcoming Web 2.0 bubble involves an increase of the need for interaction techniques, such as rating systems, which are widely used to initiate interaction between the content supplier and the users.
But... Rating systems, as they are implemented these days, are not as great as they seem to be. There are two main disadvantages, of the use of rating systems:
<acronym> considered harmfulSince I joined W3C's HTML WG, the mostly discussed tag has been <acronym>. The discussion is about whether this tag should be dropped from the HTML 5 specification. I, as a minimalist, think it should be dropped.
Why do I think it should not be included in the next HTML spec? Let's have a look at the definitions of the word:
According to this definition, an acronym is some sort of abbreviation. Then why don't we just use the <abbr>? You could say it can be used to show the abbreviation is of some special sort, but that could be added in an attribute too. But I don't think it's necessary to know if it's an acronym or not.
We should be very careful with approving tags. If we needed a tag for every special situation, not one of us will be able to tell which tag can be used best, semantically or technically. Tags need to add significant semantic value. Take images for example: I prefer <img> above <jpeg>, <gif>, <png>. Don't you?