Life style changes

By sylvie on January 12, 2012

We’ve been going to a kinesiologist for a good while now. To be honest, when André first told me about making an appointment with this specialist, I was a bit confused since I had no idea what a kinesiologist did. Then, once I saw that it had something to do with sports, I was even more confused.

Actually, kinesiology is about the study of human movement, not just sports as I first read.

My first thought was that it might be good for me, since I needed help getting my leg(s) back into shape but was unsure how it would help André with his type 2 diabetes.

It turns out that Diane offers a holistic approach to getting back in shape. It isn’t just about giving us a series of exercises (for me, to help with my rehabilitation, and for André to help lose weight and become more limber). It’s also about making us more aware of what we eat and changing our diets radically. This is particularly important for André, but I freely admit that I’ve been eating crap all my life and need a kick in the butt to change my bad habits.

Of course, undoing decades of bad eating habits is not something that can be done overnight. It’s a constant struggle to remember to add more vegetables to our daily diet. Both André and I are of a generation when available vegetables and fruits were fairly limited. Boiled potatoes, turnips and carrots were the veggies your mother served you next to a big slab of meat. Salads featured iceberg lettuce. The most exotic fruits you could find were bananas and oranges. These limited choices got boring pretty quickly and made eating vegetables a chore (to me, at least).

In addition, I have always had a sweet tooth. I learned to cook in my early teens for one very specific reason: my mom hardly ever made desserts and I like to have something sweet at the end of a meal. So I learned to make cakes and pies and went on to ever fancier desserts. By the way, it’s a lot easier to make fancy desserts when you’re a student and have plenty of time. :)

At first, I thought I would never be able to get out of the habit of wanting something extra-sugary to finish off my meals but I have discovered a combination that is perfect for me. My desserts now consist of one or more fruits and one piece of dark chocolate (70% or more cocoa) (actually, I don’t always eat the chocolate, but I do always try to eat at least one piece of fruit). The dark chocolate is so intense that I never need more than one piece and it takes care of my chocoholic habit. And I have discovered something interesting. I have become so used to the sweetness level of fruits that I find cakes to be too sweet now.

We’re still struggling with the vegetable thing, though.

In summary, I am quite happy with the services we’ve been getting from Diane. While I’m still struggling with losing the weight I put on when I had to walk with a cane, I know that it’s a long process and I am committed to getting there, and she is giving us the tools to do so. My left leg is so much stronger now and I have a bunch of exercises to help continue increase my muscle strength. And I can see the improvement every time I go for a long walk.

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Topics: Personal | No Comments »

How can you be social if you’re not on social media?

By sylvie on January 5, 2012

A good post by Liz Lawley on the issue of people leaving social media. It’s an interesting issue, but one that appears not to have been studied at all. The links that Liz gives are towards people talking about this problem, not studying it. It would be a hard thing to study, unless you use a more anthropological approach.

It appears that this phenomenon has been dubbed “technology refusal”, but I wonder about that name. It seems to me that there is a difference between refusing to participate in Facebook while still using the rest of the web and refusing to use a computer. Facebook is not a technology, it’s a website that supports a certain type of socializing with your friends. I think a phenomenon like that needs its own name. Facebook Fatigue?

Maybe you think that socializing should only be done in meatspace and not in the virtual? (Then best never write or phone your friends.)
Maybe you don’t like Facebook’s approach to privacy or its constant redefinition of what is private, what is yours and what is theirs?
Maybe you don’t like the way Facebook defines friendship?
Maybe you’ve been made miserable in Facebook because of blow-ups with friends or “friends”?
Maybe you need to get away from a specific person and being on Facebook is just not a good idea?

Personally, I don’t like Facebook. For me, it’s the constant privacy kerfuffles that started my increasing disinterest with this site. I’ve also read too many confessions from people who have gotten into huge fights with FB friends (mind you, I read these on a completely different social network). And I’ve been made aware of certain painful indiscretions from family members, the kind that might haunt the person 10 or 20 years from now. If FB still exists then, of course.

But I am still in LinkedIn, I still use Twitter (probably too much), I still maintain this blog, I am still an active member of other social media. Heck, I’m still in GooglePlus and Facebook. I appreciate that they let me see what faraway family and friends are doing. I just wish there was another way of doing it.

Topics: Social Software | No Comments »

Yarn U: A Review

By sylvie on December 30, 2011

I was offered a free copy of Yarn U, an iPhone/iPad app, by the author Mary Beth Klatt, with the caveat that I write a review of the app. While I don’t usually do reviews, I was interested in trying this particular app so I accepted. It just so happens that I am thinking of knitting up a wrap and haven’t decided on which yarn to use. Since Yarn U is a database of yarns, I thought it might be helpful to choose a yarn.

As a usability and HCI person, my chief interest was in the user interface of the app. Now, let me start by noting that Mary Beth has used a self-publishing company, Sutro Media, to create her app. Good on them for making it possible for non-computer scientists to be able to publish apps. Sutro Media’s main productions are travel guides which probably explains the particular user interface approach that they have chosen.

Going through a self-publishing company also means that the resulting apps are a bit pricier. The $2.99 ($2.95?) price for Yarn U is high for an iPhone app though quite cheap for iPad apps, so depending on where you put it, you’ll feel like you had a bargain or bought the gold-plated version. :-) If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I am a cheapskate at heart and I’m not sure that I would have downloaded the app if I had had to pay for it. Of course, we’re talking about a woman who went through a crisis of conscience before accepting to pay $5.99 for a birdwatching app with all the birds of North America in it even though the price is so much lower than any equivalent book.

User Interface

The user interface is plain. Once you’ve gone past the splash screen, you are presented with a list of all of the yarns in the database. At the left-hand top is a button that opens up the iPhone scroll wheel where you can filter the list through a criterion (type of yarn, brand, or yarns that have a free pattern link). At the top right is a button that will show you a list of the other apps available through Sutro Media.

At the bottom is a Browse button (that takes you to the list of yarns), a Photo button (which appears to present photos related to whichever filtered list of yarn you have chosen, so if you have chosen Debbie Bliss, for example, the photos will all be for that collection). The third button is a Comments one, where you can read what others have written about the various yarns or add your own comment.

If you want to learn more about the app or the author, you have to select “Everything” in the scroll wheel and then look for the “About Yarn U” and “About the Author” entries, which are below the numbered yarn names. I don’t know if this is typical of Sutro Media apps, but the explanation on how to use the app is too sparse to be really useful. For example, this is where a detailed explanation of how to get the free patterns should have appeared, not in the comments. As well, I don’t know that the table of contents on the About page is all that useful, although it does make it clear why some of the yarns have an asterisk next to them (it signals an incomplete list of yarns for that brand).

Once you choose a specific yarn from the list, you can see the title at the top (which alas does not stay put if you go down the page), a photo of the yarn or a finished object using the yarn, a description of the yarn, brand details about the yarn, pro and cons , comments, price, and a few places where you can buy it. At the bottom of this screen are a comments button, a share button and a favorite button. I’m not sure how the share button works since it crashed the program the few times I tried. it.
One nice thing is that you can “favorite” a yarn so that you can find it easily later on. This is done by clicking on the heart shaped button at the bottom of the yarn description. Then, later, you can find your list by choosing “Favorite” in the scroll wheel.

Content

I am far from an expert in knitting so I can’t comment on the precision of the yarn descriptions, but I am impressed that Mary Beth should attempt to keep track of all the yarns available. This is a gargantuan task so it’s not surprising that there are yarns missing and that some of the descriptions are incomplete.
For example, I was looking at the description of Noro’s Silk Garden. I was a bit surprised that the Con entry was empty since in the description, the author notes to watch for colorway problems (without explaining what they might be) and notes that the texture can be scratchy at first.

I imagine that future updates will attempt to fill in the missing information.

Prices will give you an idea of how expensive the yarn is, but I’m guessing that they are in US dollars, so Canadians should expect to pay a bit more. The hyperlinks to specific yarn sellers may be of interest to some people though I imagine most knitters and crocheters will already have a favorite yarn store, on-line or off. I also found some typos.

Pros

Cons

Summary

If you do a lot of knitting or crocheting and are interested in exploring the yarns that you could use for a project, you should find Yarn U useful. I see myself using this in combination with Ravelry, where you can see the various yarns that people have used for a specific project. Reading up on the pros and cons in advance will help me make better decisions about what yarn to choose.

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Topics: HCI, Crafts, Smartphone | No Comments »

User experience video

By sylvie on December 8, 2011

The video “Creating and Measuring the User Experience” presented by Jeff Noyes at Drupalcon is very interesting, though at over one hour, make sure you have a big chunk of free time before starting it. I found it through a tweet by @acagamic, AKA Dr. Lennart Nacke at UOIT, ex-guildie, /wave.

In addition to explaining why and sketching out how to work on the user experience side of building a website, Jeff presents a long list of tools and applications that you can use for the various steps in the process. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an online version of the slides he presented so I went back through the video and noted down all the tools mentioned. The only problem is that Jeff shows icons, which makes guessing what some of them are difficult.

Since I thought it would be really useful to have that list of tools and services available online, I present them below with links to their website. There are two icons which I was incapable of figuring out. I’ll just point them out and if you know what they are, feel free to leave a comment. There’s also one icon I’m not 100 percent sure of, I put a question mark next to that one.

Surveys

Jeff presents four different online survey tools. I have used Survey Monkey and have found it perfectly adequate for my needs, but you may need something a bit different, so check out the other three.

Analytics

There are lots of tools to do website analytics beyond Google Analytics.

Ideation

Sharing ideas among team members is simplified with online tools.

Task flow

Jeff presents two types of tools for illustrating task flow. The first are standalone tools, the second online services.

Tools

There is also a fourth tool represented by a V icon which I couldn’t figure out.

Services

Gray boxing

Gray boxing is kind of like wire framing, but where you enter “this is where information goes” instead of putting ipsum lorum text. Basically, if you can use a tool for wire framing, you can use it for gray boxing. I have been using Balsamiq Mockups to create wireframes for a wireless project and am quite happy with the results.

Storyboards

Prototypes

If you want to build a prototype of your service, you have a choice between standalone tools, services and, if you’re working on mobile development, mobile services.

Tools

Services

Mobile Services

I could not discern what the third (actually second in the video) icon was.

After you’ve talked to the users, brainstormed some ideas and built a prototype, you still have to test your user interface. The following sections show various tools available for different approaches to testing.

Moderated Tests

These are mostly communication tools without support for running tests.

Self Moderated Tests

These tools are specifically aimed at supporting user testing.

Static Image, Self Moderated Tests

Navigation tests

Conclusion

I am grateful to Jeff for listing all these tools for developing user interfaces. I was only familiar with a very small number of them, so it’s good to know that there are quite a number of alternative solutions I could use.

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Topics: usability, User Interface, Design, Software, Human factors | No Comments »

Multi-touch gestures in Lion OS

By sylvie on December 2, 2011

I’ve been accidentally doing multi-touch commands with my trackpad on my laptop and my mighty mouse on my desktop Mac. Highly annoying, especially when you don’t know how to recuperate from the command.

After a bit of searching, I found this page at Apple explaining about the gesture input for trackpad and mighty mouse.

So now I know that the accidental zooming I’ve been doing is the result of double tapping the mouse and I can get out of it by doing another double tap. Useful information indeed.

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Topics: Tips, HCI, Input devices | No Comments »

It’s the feeling of insecurity that gets to you

By sylvie on November 23, 2011

Somebody broke into André’s van at some point between Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon and stole some items, including the GPS. It probably happened during the night, since the person took the time to turn off the overhead light in the van.

Annoying, yes, but they didn’t do any permanent damage to the van and the items can be replaced, so while I wasn’t too happy about the incident, I shrugged it off: nobody was hurt, and that’s what’s important, right?

I wasn’t counting on the fact that the incident was going to have an impact on my psychological well-being. I’ve been having trouble falling asleep since then. The first night, I had nightmares of people forcing their way into the house. I’ve been jumping at any unexpected noise, especially at night. Even André has been feeling paranoid and we have even discussed the possibility of adding car alarms or a home alarm system.

How ironic that we had so much trouble selling our previous house because it was in a less favourable part of town. In the ten years we lived there, we had zero incidents of this sort. Now that we’re in a more “desirable” area, we have had three incidents with the van in the 11 months we’ve been here: someone tried to remove one of the wheels; someone broke into the van but stole nothing (I presume they were surprised before being able to do more than rifle through our things); and now this.

Just goes to show how prejudices about neighbourhoods can be so, so wrong.

Topics: Personal | 1 Comment »

False positive

By sylvie on November 23, 2011

The IT folks at work try to stay on top of spam and phishing by flagging those emails that seem suspicious. Sometimes I wonder if a bunch of scientists and engineers are really going to fall for one of those emails, and then I remember that our image of suave, sophisticated nerds is just that, an image.

Usually their software does a fairly good job, but I was amused this morning to see an email from an innocuous group get flagged as potentially not from who it said it was from. It turns out this group uses a specialized company’s software to create its mailing list messages. The group is not a bunch of computer scientists, so the software lets them create good looking email messages with lots of images in it.

The problem is that whenever they put a link to their website, the software replaces it with a link that goes to the software’s parent company and then redirects the person to the group’s website. In other words, the company is counting how often people are following links in the emails created by their software, which is a legitimate activity.

But because the hyperlinked text does not correspond to the URL in the hyperlink, our security software flags the email as suspicious, thus making me wonder for a few seconds who would try to imitate a quilting shop for phishing purposes.

In an era where security specialists are trying to teach people how to recognize phishing attacks, this is an interesting edge case. Do we defeat the software company’s attempt at aggregating data about how well its software is working by telling people to never click on hyperlinks in emails? Do we tell people not to click on hyperlinks that don’t correspond to the text except in these specific cases? Do we go to the software company and tell it to stop doing that?

The thing is, people are going to click on hyperlinks in email messages. They’re just so darned convenient. Heck, I’m constantly linking on hyperlinks in Twitter and those things are all shortened so it’s not even possible to see where they lead to.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. My personal feeling is that people should to be taught from an early age how to distinguish legitimate from phish emails through systematic exposure, but I don’t know how well that would really work.

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Topics: Security, Phishing | No Comments »

Reviewing research papers

By sylvie on November 18, 2011

Joe McCarthy’s got some interesting points about the process of reviewing papers for conferences, as well as how to write rebuttals to said reviews. In a nutshell, he says that reviews should not be attacks on the authors and that rebuttals should not be attacks on the reviewers.

One thing Joe suggests is writing from the first person (”I don’t understand what’s going on here”) rather than from the third (”the authors obviously don’t know how to write papers”). I think I personally do a mix of both of those approaches. I know I’ve written a lot of “I’m not sure what this sentence means” types of comments, but I also know I’ve written a lot of “The authors need to improve X, Y and Z” types of comments. I will endeavour to be more first person in my future reviews.

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that my review style is based on one super-detailed review that I got for my thesis. The professor had obviously read all of the thesis and produced a huge number of improvements. While I was at first devastated to see all his comments, they were so on-the-spot that I quickly came to appreciate the effort he had made. They were not personal attacks on my writing style, they were genuine attempts at getting me to improve my output.

I try to do the same in my own reviews. I go into every review thinking, how can this paper be made so great that others will want to read it and cite it? With this goal, I will often end up writing a lot of comments to try to help the authors. So if you get a super-detailed review, it’s possibly one of mine :-)

I know that Daniel Lemire is not a big fan of research reviews. His argument is that peer review is no guarantee of great (or even good) work, and he’s right about that. In psychology, for example, it is impossible for a reviewer to reproduce research in order to test the validity of the study being presented. Studies with human participants take weeks to organize and run. As reviewers, we only have so much time (and no money) to spend on our reviews, so we have to take the reports at face value.

Alas, at least in psychology, it’s practically impossible to publish a paper that attempts to reproduce another study and forget about publishing papers that don’t find a significant difference between groups. But that’s a whole different issue.

Topics: Writing, Research Papers, Review | 1 Comment »

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