One of the things I’m learning a bit about is survey design and statistics. There isn’t going to be anything new, here, though, so you’ll appreciate this even without a specific background in these fields. And namely: if you ask people wrong questions, you’ll get wrong/bad/no answers.

Let’s look at this survey from Opera that is shown after you download their browser.

What’s bothering me here is the second question. “Why do you use Opera instead of another browser?”

What makes you guys think that I do it instead of another browser? I regularly run 4 browsers (Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE, in approximately this order of frequency). In fact, the three first ones are running as I write this, as I like different things about each. Even if you argue that most people only have one browser on their PC, one of the options in this very survey is that you may run Opera on your mobile and something else on the PC.

Surveys are always about generalizations, sure. But this is a bit too much and throws out a lot of nuance exactly with the community that Opera should embrace — the techies who regularly run different browsers and can appreciate its advantages.

As a solution to this question, it would have been a great place to ask, “What other browsers do you run and why?” Have people rank features of browsers against each other if they really run several. Saying instead of was an immediate reason for me to not even bother with this survey further down, who knows what other bad questions I might have to waste my time on.

I’m really upset at Apple right now. I had FileVault enabled for my home folder. Turns out you should disable it when installing Leopard, or all hell breaks loose. In my case, the latter meant doing a clean install. And I can only praise my wisdom for making a backup before installing (quite unusual for me). But it still sucks bigtime.

Turns out that when you have a FileVault home folder, Leopard can’t open it. What’s more weird, it actually logs you in fine after completing the install, so you can see that everything works, and think it’s all fine. Well, no. Upon next boot, it can’t sign you in and tells you that the FileVault folder is bad.

There are some threads about it in Apple forums, as well as other places. There may be ways to get it working after the fact, but the easiest thing to do is just to disable FileVault.

It might sound like a bad thing. But I’m happy to learn that my writing is understandable to people with elementary school education. Language as a communication tool is very important to me and I continue to explore and use it in multiple registers. Sometimes you need academic/sophisticated writing, but a lot of the time, what’s actually appropriate is just “simple English”. And there are simple and automatic ways to calculate this for more common languages.

This is also related to one of the classes I’m taking. Many of the privacy policies in the world and especially in the US are specifically written so that they are hard to read and understand, so that they can hide all sorts of nasty and obtrusive provisions there among other text.

(Via Jason Hong.)

Today in our software architecture class we talked about simple sensors like IR, accelerometer and such. This led me to think about two iPhone bugs that I have recently seen.

First, iPhone has an elaborate system for detecting device orientation and setting screen orientation based on that. It works well, is noise-resistant, gives good feedback etc. BUT: it makes an important assumption: that the user is vertically oriented, e.g stands up or sits. And when user is horizontally oriented, e.g laying down in bed, the whole thing breaks down. You lie down in bed and try to look at your phone when laying on your side… but the screen orientation is perpendicular (90 deg opposite) to what it should be. Very disruptive/annoying. So you can’t really read your emails in bed with this thing.

Secondly, iPhone has a system where during a call there are touchscreen controls that you can use to mute your mic, use keypad for DTMF tones etc. And it’s supposed to be built so that when you’re holding the phone away from face, you can use them, but when the device is next to your head, i.e you’re talking, then brushing against face won’t activate those controls. Well, it failed on me this morning. I was on the phone with someone and suddenly the other party started shouting “where did you go???” I tried speaking, but the other party sounded like I wasn’t speaking. And then I looked at the controls — turns out that somehow “mute” was activated. I think I brushed the phone against my face and the device incorrectly registered this as touchscreen touch.

At least the good mitigating factor in the latter case was that the touchscreen controls are really obvious and salient and upon a single glance it was apparent to me that “mute” was turned on, so I could simply turn it off and go back to normal again.

I just watched this insightful documentary by Channel 4 about Russian Federation’s demographic crisis. I’m far from claiming that this is a comprehensive overview of how life really is these days in Russia — certainly there are brighter moments, and this documentary presents just a few grim episodes. But some things there are also politically telling, like Russia’s dislike of foreigners, or how a local paramilitary chief says Heil Hitler and has Mein Kampf standing in his bookshelf and threatens to decapitate disobeying journalists.

Documentary homepage. Download/watch on Google Video, or watch below.

Got this email.

This is a bit of an odd request. I saw your icon struggles with your LaCie drive. I recently purchased one and wiped it without remembering to back-up the icon. Could you by any chance send me a copy?

Sure. Download here. I believe the sender refers to this previous post, see also this.

I recently got an iomega 500gig drive. I was going to get LaCie 2TB Big Disk, but it had bad comments on Apple Store site, so I got this one with good comments. And I reformatted LaCie into FAT32 so it’s usable across Mac and Windows without additional drivers. Continues to work fine.

I got Leopard today at a sweet student discount from the Carnegie Mellon student book/computer store. But that’s going to be an entirely different story, as I’ll hold off installing it for the Thanksgiving break when, unlike today, I wouldn’t have any crazy homeworks or papers or things due the very next day and the risk would be smaller.

Meanwhile, Apple has apparently released an update to Tiger, 10.4.11, that among other things installs Safari 3 that is now apparently out of beta. One immediate change with it for me is that Google Reader layout no longer sucks, and Google Reader is much faster with Safari than with Firefox for me. So I can start using Reader mostly with Safari now. Except when I need some advanced features like offline syncing that requires Google Rails that’s apparently currently only supported on Firefox.

The other nice thing that Safari 3 has is a much better in-page text search. Although it still can’t search inside content of text areas or form fields. I think it should.

Today, as part of my Human Factors course, we had a field trip to a local Sony TV manufacturing plant here in Pennsylvania. In class, we talk about job safety and the related anthropometric and biomechanical issues. Going to an actual factory was a good opportunity for us to probe how all that theory is applied in real life and actual job stations, and how the manufacturing operation in general runs. Plus, it was just cool

They made us sign an NDA so I can’t really post in detail about everything I saw, but I guess it was similar to many other factory settings. But one thing that shouldn’t really be a secret to anyone these days is that manufacturing in the US is very expensive compared to Asia or even Mexico labor-cost-wise, so that factory has in the past had much more staff work there than they currently have.

For me, it was just interesting because I haven’t really gone to factories and manufacturing settings that often (ever?). Yet this is where everything in our life comes from these days — the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the electronics we use, the cars we drive… so it’s good to have some perspective into that in general, and the Human Factors and safety issues associated with it in particular.

I’m running a little site called Moodgeist, among other things I do. I had to disable the displaying part of it, sorry. See that site’s blog for status update and future plans.

I got into a bit of hosting trouble with my site. To fix, I had to implement the following things.

1) the tags list is now removed from the sidebar. If you want to find any old stuff, just enter a keyword in search.

2) you can now only comment if you sign in through TypeKey. Sorry. I had to do this to fight the comment spam in the most easiest way. And yes, I know there are tools available and I’m also using them, but I don’t have time to put into fixing this right now so this was easiest for me to do. So if you want to comment, you’ll have to sign in through TypeKey for a while.

I want to redo the whole site towards the end of the year both layout- and platform-wise and I’ll revisit these things then.