The Bloj

Today’s One Paragraph Blog: Dog

Posted on January 30th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris.

Dogs are an interesting species. The fact that a chihuahua and a doberman could mate, hypothetically, is something like pairing a tyrannosaurus with an ostrich.

3 comments.

Today’s One Paragraph Blog: Frankdensign (the 80-20 rule)

Posted on January 29th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Product Design, UI Design.

You probably have friends who use the internet. How much would you guess most of them use the buttons on the IE (or Firefox) toolbar?

Observation suggests a rule like this: For 80% of the users, only 20% of the buttons gets used (I, for one, never click anything under “Page”). There’s a great book that points this out quite nicely, but it doesn’t draw the thought to its conclusion. Perhaps there’s a place for ugly design that stitches together a haphazard mess of seemingly unrelated functions, knowing that most long term users will use their tunnel vision to filter out all but the most important functions to them.

TimGas: saying myspace and “design” within one sentance of each other
TimGas: is just asking for me to block you
Me: but it’s so true
Me: i don’t look at all the stuff on a mys**** page
TimGas: i’m feeling sick now
TimGas: brb, puking

0 comments.

Are we all better off with equality?

Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Tim.
Categories: Philosophy, Tim.

Many people argue that the world would be a better place if there was more equality. In the extreme case, equality has become synonomous with “morality”. Would we actually be better off if there was more equality?

Not necessarily. A recent slate article examines the discrepancy between black and white spending on “visible goods” (like fancy clothes, luxury car, etc). The proposed explanation is that black people tend to live in neighborhoods of other black people of relatively similar income levels (compared to that of white people). The increased spending on visible goods has nothing to do with race, but simply a result of increased tendency for “signaling”. The net result of “signaling” is that more money is spent on “visible goods” and less is spent on health care and education.

Does this mean that equality is bad? Probably not, however it certainly means there are significant unintended consequences that are highly unintuitive.

0 comments.

SSIS foreach

Posted on January 23rd, 2008 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

Did a little research on Sql Server Integration Services for the stuff we’re doing at work, and apparently the SSIS foreach isn’t capable of running in parallel… For an app that makes doing other things in parallel so easy, it seems very weird to not have this capability.

0 comments.

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