Here’s a cool Estonian project. Since late last year, volunteers have been going across the country and mapping illegal garbage dumps onto a map on the web. And this weekend, some 45,000 people came out (something like 3% of the whole country… in the US, it would be almost ten million people, think about that) to clean it all up and get rid of the dumps once and for all, and to change the perception that littering is OK. Now it isn’t any more.

Please help my schoolwork by going to this link and completing the survey. It should take about 15-20 minutes, and you have a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate. If you could do it over the next few days, it would be really great. Thanks.

Below is our official invite.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are conducting a web-based survey about online communication habits. If you complete this survey, you could win one of three $50 Amazon.com gift certificates! Odds of winning depend on the number of entrants, but are guaranteed 1:500 or better. The study takes 15-20 minutes.

To participate in the survey, go to http://tinyurl.com/4gju65

Thank you for your help.

I’m having a problem for the past few days with my iPhone. There’s a weird icon on my status bar and I cannot make heads or tails out of it. Look at the top “status bar”. The two rightmost icons are battery indicator and alarm indicator, which are fine. But what is the leftmost one? Here are two screenshots of it, in black-and-white and color mode (iPhone icons have two modes, depending on what screen you are viewing).

Apple and iPhone are really failing me here. A natural thing to do would be to click on the icon to get more information about it, but I can’t do this. When I click/tap, nothing happens.

I looked in the iPhone user guide. It talks about all sorts of fun icons that may be on the status bar on page 14, but this particular one simply isn’t there. So we have an undocumented icon. Great.

The icon may have something to do with my data usage. I was roaming internationally a lot over the past week, and the icon appeared sometime during the trip when I couldn’t place some international calls any more. Which in itself is weird, as I have an international plan with AT&T and everything has been fine. Until now.

I went to AT&T site and some data plan indicators were red there, but I do not understand them and I have no way to interact with them.

What Apple has failed to do here is to meet my expectations, which are very different for iPod and media stuff and other non-vital gimmicks that I don’t mind being “out of order” once in a while, and my phone that needs to be rock solid and I need to be able to immediately make sense of everything that is going on, relating icons to my past knowledge and such. This icon doesn’t mean anything and I don’t have an easy way to find out what’s going on here and what can I do about it and it’s really bothering me.

UPDATE: the answer, as often, is less conspired than I thought and is here. (Why I did not find it with my original search, I have no idea.) And they should still update the manual too, or have some disclaimer about what versions it does or does not apply to. (I guess that this TTY thing was added with a software update, and the manual hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that.)

On a recent flight, I finished reading “Mao: The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. (The image below is the cover of the European version. The US version has a different cover for whatever reason.)

It was an extraordinary reading experience for me in many ways. First, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book for this long I started reading it in February of last year (2007), and finished now in April 2008. So I read it for more than a year. Not daily, of course — it was mostly a way for me to fill time when having nothing better to do on long flights.

This already shows you one of the great qualities of this book. It is immensely readable and can be continued where you left off without any trouble at all. Sometimes I didn’t touch it for months. Yet when I picked it up to continue, I sort of recalled the gist of where I left it off and could carry on straight away. The book is divided into thematic chapters and thus you can have a go at it piece by piece and don’t have to digest the whole thing right away.

Tomorrow (Friday), I’m off to CHI 2008. I looked at the program and I’m a bit overwhelmed at this point, as there will be a whole lot of things going on. I’m hoping to meet some great people and see some interesting things that are happening in the HCI world. Maybe I’ll blog some about the actual content too, maybe not. I’ve been so low on blogging due to this semester being very difficult and time-eating. Part of it is that my schedule dictates that I have to get up at 7 each morning. I’m not a big fan of this, but what do you do. And there are many 14- and 16-hour days.

Today is actually a pretty typical example.

• I had my first class (interaction design) at 8:30am to 10:30am
• then a quick meeting with my design team about the current project
• 12 to 1:30 gadgets class
• pick up some things for the conference from HCI admin office and bring them to Master’s lab
• 2pm to 3pm a phonecall
• 3pm to 3:30 design user research meeting
• 3:30 to 4:30 preparing for project team meeting
• 4:30 to 6:10 project team meeting
• 6:10 to 7 preparing for user research (pick up supplies, print stuff…)
• 7 to 8 user research — we’re doing this cool design project where we have to go to people’s homes and learn about ways of family management so that we can build a smarthome device to support some aspects of that

I’m not trying to show off anything here with this calendar, I have many friends in business whose schedules I’m sure are much worse each day than this. It’s just that I’m pretty tired each night so there’s very little bandwidth left for extracurricular activities like blogging.

The up side is that I’ll be travelling for the next ten days so it’s a bit of a break from school. Even though I may have to do a little schoolwork during that time, but I’ll mostly try to avoid it. On Friday I fly Pittsburgh to DC, DC to Vienna. I land at Vienna Saturday morning, and will spend Saturday in Vienna — sort of a daytrip. It’s cool as Vienna is a very nice old European city and I also have some personal/family connections there, I was last in Vienna 18 years ago as a kid visiting my late grand-aunt, so I’ll be visiting some places related with that and generally be a tourist. And Saturday night it’s off to CHI to Florence.

I don’t think many of my readers go to CHI, but if you happen to be one of those who do, grab me for a quick chat

I still have to upload my Paris pictures. Darn, I could use the smarthome device that I’m making myself, getting pictures uploaded is such a hassle.

(Update: I got a question about what are HCI and CHI and what’s the distinction. H is for Human, C is for Computer and I is Interaction. They are both the same thing, just labelled differently. Originally it was CHI but then some people thought humans should come before computers. See also a previous post by Rodrigo on this).

I had to fly from Newark to Pittsburgh last night, on the way back from my spring break vacation in Europe. And again, it somehow turned out so that long intercontinental flights are never a problem, but short domestic US legs are not that great and can result in bad experience.

The flight was scheduled to leave at 8:15pm and be in Pittsburgh around 10pm. Considering I had previously had a 8-hour flight from Paris and 5-hour timezone switch, that was in itself already a little tiring, but manageable. But it got worse.

So… I knew this day would come.

I’ve had OpenOffice for a while. I mainly use iWork for Office-type stuff, but there’s some things where OO is better, in particular with formatting some Word documents. And OO is better at saving to Office formats too. In iWork I have to do “export” and need to maintain two copies of the same document if I don’t want too much hassle.

Yet eventually OpenOffice on OS X became too annoying. My two most annoying favourite bugs were that when you start it, it says “Command timed out” and you need to click OK before you can move on. And secondly, it sometimes has trouble opening things from non-local volumes, such as SFTP-mounted volumes or WebDAV.

So I was looking for a way to throw it out. And the final push came when I could go to Carnegie Mellon computer store and pick up the student-discounted MS Office for Mac 2008 and install it. Bye bye OpenOffice for now.

I’ll still keep using iWork over Office wherever I can. It is just so much nicer and less cluttered. And I think it’s also faster. But sometimes you need to work with DOC-s with funny stuff in them, where iWork may not be able to fully make sense of it all, but you may need to do things like print them exactly with the formatting they were produced. So sometimes Office is a necessary evil.

And look how nicely the icons of Pages/Word, Numbers/Excel and Keynote/PowerPoint are together in my Dock without any fighting at all there seems to be some colorcoding going on here, I think Office started it a long time ago and looks like iWork followed suit, with “wordprocessing = blue”, “spreadsheet = green” and “presentation = orange”. (Well there’s also other Office apps, but I don’t really use them.)

UPDATE: another interesting thing that happened after installing Word is that Thunderbird sometimes displays a clown icon for Word documents. I have no idea why it does that, and doesn’t seem to be happening elsewhere in OS X. Is it some political statement by Thunderbird people or what gives?

I’ve had a pretty interesting past few days. One of my classes is Basic Interaction Design where we learn how to ideate, prototype and build interactive systems. Today was the final delivery of a project. They’re done in teams of three and my team for this project was pretty awesome. Over the past few weeks, we worked on persona and scenario design, wireframes and sketches, and so finally the time came to learn how to put it all into a working Flash thing.

I hadn’t opened Flash ever until a month ago, but I was hoping this program and course provide me an opportunity to learn about Flash in the form of actually doing something with it, versus “dry” training. So when time came, we somehow worked it out so that I did most of the Flash work, even though I marked myself as not having much prior experience. But I’m used to learning things fast.

So over the past weekend and past few days, I found myself immersed in Flash and working with crazy architectures and timelines four or five levels deep and putting it all together. We had done all of the concept work with teammates and came together to propose some UI designs and the final UI was somewhat of a mix of our individual work. In the end for the final-final thing, it worked out so that they provided me the artifacts and things like static Illustrator screens and text copy, while I put it in Flash.

The last few days were especially awesome. I worked on the thing Sunday night from 9 until 3am in the morning. On Monday, I got up at 7 to go to classes. At 3pm, I was done with classes and fortunately didn’t have much other immediate work to do, so I could immerse myself again into the project and prepare for our agreed 8pm meeting. The three of us sat together until 2am and it was mostly a work session where we just agreed the final deliverables and the things that go into it and then proceeded to flesh everything out and integrate.

I wanted to do work around transitions in Flash to make static Illustrator “screenshots” into a coherent flow. This meant that very quickly I had to learn things about multi-level masking (which you can’t do… but you can nest movies and have masking in each) and sort of learn on the go about what’s the right way to organize things in a scalable manner.

I had a little time to walk home today. And my walk from school to home can easily include a visit to the local Apple Store if I just take a small detour, it’s located conveniently midway . So I figured why not drop by the store and play a bit with the new MacBook Air.

In short: yes, it is a very very nice machine. I liked it a lot. I’m not going to buy it for myself, but I can recommend it to anyone who does not need a supercomputer like me.

File permission setting in Windows and OS X could use a lot of improvements. As it stands, it’s very often unusable and people make many mistakes with it, thinking that they have configured permissions to one setting, whereas in reality the effective settings may be something else.

Today in Usable Privacy and Security class, Rob Reeder presented his research about this. I have always been wondering about that dialog, but I don’t think that I ever figured it out. And finally I think I’m somewhat getting it, after he as a PhD student explained it to me and the rest of the class

Just to make things clear, here’s the dialog I’m talking about.