Last week Florian mentioned, that it is quite interesting to see when students submit their stuff for an assignment. I thought this was quite interesting. To answer this question visually, I used data from the courses “Introduction to Computer Networking” and “Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing”. Both courses had assignments over two weeks and a deadline set to Monday, 8:00 AM. The data consists of 811 submissions over a total of 8 assignments.
The data is exported from the ILIAS submission system. It is then parsed and an SVG is generated. The code I wrote therefore and the datasets are available via GitHub. After playing around with different styles and layouts I ended up with the above punchcard visualization (Benjamin deserves credit for bringing up the punchcard visualization idea).
It is interesting to see that students in fact submit stuff the whole night before a deadline. Interesting peaks are at midnight and between 7-8 AM. Especially the hours right before and after midnight are quite heavily frequented. To me, the most suprising fact was that students actually really do submit their stuff during the whole night :-).
I have written a simple Twitterwall — a website which tracks tweets for a certain term. You can leave the website open and it will constantly show new tweets on the term you defined. This has proven to be quite a nice feature for events like BarCamps or other conferences. Setting up a beamer and displaying the Twitterwall in fullscreen is quite a nice feature for visitors who want to get a feeling for the conference mood or check on news.
Credit for the extrinisic motivation goes to Falco, who used the wall at the DEM 2013 and threatened to fork the project, if I wasn’t working on it. He also submitted a pull request for quite a nasty little bug. Last weekend we also used the wall at the OpenCityCamp. This brought up some issues, but I think I eventually figured them all out. The future will hold the answers.
However, the project is still in an early stage and quite simple in its functionalities. So far there is no possibility to track users/locations or show images, though I plan to add this over time. I have released the project under a free license on GitHub and as a package via npm (npm install twitterwall).
You can easily set up your own instance (further details in the readme) or you can use the public instance I have set up on http://twitterwall.creal.de.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Simplicity is beautiful. Simplicity is pure. Simplicity is what we should aim for. Instead modern user interfaces, modern design, is overloaded. Creeping featurism: constantly adding features as a way to satisfy the need of any possible, thinkable customer that one might ever encounter. While searching for the perfect solution we eventually end up with a mess. We no longer have an interface that aims to solve a specific problem, but instead an interface that aims to solve everybody’s problems.
In a lot of ways this reminds me of the Unix philosophy, where basically the exact same problem is found within software engineering.
As an effort to improve the usability of some websites, which I often use, I started to build a loose collection of templates for the Privoxy web proxy. Basically the templates simplify the layout of the websites. I never add stuff. All I do is throw elements away.
To me, the interfaces look much more aesthetically pleasing and the websites are a lot easier to use. Unnecessary elements don’t take up all the space, don’t aim to catch the attention, don’t distract from what’s important. But make up your own opinion. On the left you see the unfiltered websites, on the right you see the websites after filtered through an AdBlock browser addon and the template collection.
I have published the project under a free license (MIT) to GitHub. Follow the Readme there to get stuff up and running. Please note: the project is in an early stage and each CSS change on the websites might affect the templates, thus you should not be surprised if some things might not look as expected. I plan to add various other sites to the project over time.
Update: I have created a tumblr where I will publish screenshots of the latest simplified websites: minimalistic-web.tumblr.com
I spent the last few days in Bonn at the Informatiktage 2013. The event was quite nice and I got the opportunity to meet some interesting people. I attended a two-day workshop by a big tool manufacturers IT manager. The workshop was about scalability and shifting some non-crititcal components into “the cloud”. Though I am quite sceptical about the cloud-thingy, the workshop held quite some insights for me. The thing that stuck most with me was their strict implementation of the design principle “design for failure and nothing will fail“.
As part of the event a three-page paper/summarization of my bachelor thesis was published within the proceedings (first time something of me got published — yay!) and I held a poster session (the poster is linked below). For me, the exchange with other students/activists/hackers is very important. Often just simple thoughts or hints on technologies I didn’t know about, inspire new ideas and projects. During the last 2-3 year I have attended a lot of meetups, BarCamps and other events and I took something from each of them.
