onfocus

G'day, mate. CNET Australia has a few excerpts from Yahoo! Hacks for your consideration: DIY: Yahoo Hacks. Be sure to read the article to yourself with an Australian accent for the full effect.

Also: Insider Tips at ZDNet and CNET. (hooray for syndication!)

I have to complain about the weather at least once each winter. Here's the Corvallis forecast: It's been gray and rainy for quite a while, with continued gray and rainy. Oh, and flooding. During stretches like this I imagine Ray Bradbury wrote The Long Rain after a trip to Oregon.

If you subscribe to any of my RSS feeds in Bloglines you might be wondering why images aren't appearing in my posts there. Well, onfocus is a common JavaScript function and Bloglines changes any instances of onfocus appearing in a link tag to nofocus to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Unfortunately, that means all of my image URLs are pointing to nofocus.com at Bloglines, and of course my images aren't at that domain. I knew choosing a geeky domain name would eventually come back to haunt me. ;)

I sent an email to Bloglines support explaining the issue, and hopefully they'll be able to make an exception for my feeds.

Update: Bloglines asked me to find a workaround, and they say they're still looking into it. I guess I could host all of my images at another domain, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a domain. oh well, I suppose this is an odd problem for them.

Flickr Hacks has a cover!



You can't tell from this tiny version, but seeing the cover is also fun because it mentions that Caterina has written/is writing the foreword—it must be true! It's great to see the book coming together. Click the cover to see a larger version at Amazon.

And we have a winner! Congrats, Ryan. Your copy of Yahoo! Hacks will be on its way later today. Thanks to everyone who played!

The answer I was looking for: February 2005. You can read more about this moment in history here, here, here (my post), or here. And if you already have Yahoo! Hacks you'll find the answer on page xiv in the Preface. This launch was a turning-point in my perception of Yahoo!, and of course that release kicked off an entire year of suprising announcements from Yahoo! including acquiring Flickr, launching Yahoo! 360, launching My Web, and acquiring upcoming and del.icio.us among many others.

Just for fun on a Sunday—I'll send a copy of Yahoo! Hacks to the first person who sends me the correct answer to the following question.

In what month/year did Yahoo! publicly launch their Search Web Services?

Be sure to include your name, mailing address, and site URL (if you have one)—and you'll need to be ok with me publishing your name/URL on this site. Employees of Onfocus Holdings, Ltd. are not eligible, this is for entertainment purposes only, void where prohibited.

Update: oops, I didn't realize this question would be so confusing. Here's a hint: try searching for the phrase yahoo search web services launch at Yahoo! Search, and check out the date on any of the announcements from Yahoo! sources in the results.

If you like photos of statues and water check out 10 more photos from my trip to the Mexico Coast.

Happy New Year! I spent the last week or so on a ship with sk's family and 2,000 of my closest friends—cruising around the Mexican Riviera. Here are a few photos I took along the way.



The cruise left from San Francisco, and it was a bit of an adventure getting there. We missed a couple of flights sitting on Highway 84 with traffic stopped all around us. Portland was a sheet of ice as we flew away, and we finally got to SF at 3 am. Luckily we built in an extra day in SF so we didn't have to worry about missing the ship.



The first stop was Catalina Island off the coast of California where I snapped this pic of P&A:



Puerto Vallarta was my favorite stop. I enjoyed the surreal sculptures along the waterfront.



Here's a picture of P looking at some colorful, intricate Huichol Indian art in Vallarta.



On Christmas day, sk and I hiked to the top of the tallest working lighthouse in the world, El Faro. This dog was carefully guarding the lighthouse.



It definitely didn't feel like Christmas day while hiking straight up in 90 degree weather. We had a great view of Mazatlan from up there.

The last Mexican stop was Cabo San Lucas, here's a panoramic of Cabo I took from the ship. sk and I kayaked around the bay, and we saw some of the best scenery of the trip. I was kicking myself for not taking a camera along.



It was nice to see the sun and spend some time away from the world, but it's also good to be home. I have a bunch of bold items to unbold in my inbox and newsreader, so I'll be digging out for a few days. I also have a bunch of photos from the trip, and I'm hoping to put together a gallery with larger photos in the next couple of days.

I had an early Christmas with my folks this year, and waiting for me under the tree was a Lensbaby 2.0. I've been having fun figuring out how to use it. Here's one of the first pictures I took with it:



One thing that's frustrating about the lens is that you can only change the aperture by physically adding small metal discs to the lens which are held in place with magnets. It's a bit cumbersome when you're out and about trying to take blurry pictures of trees. But I guess that's a limitation that comes with a flexible, bendy lens.



Also, I have no idea which aperture was in for a given picture. I'm so used to being able to check the exif data on a digital picture, that it's frustrating to loose that. I can't just load the picture and see what the aperture was set at. I might have to resort to carrying a notebook and jotting down aperture disk switches.



What I like about the Lensbaby is that you loose some control. While I usually try to have everything in focus, avoid motion blurs, lens flares, and all of the annoying accidents that can ruin a photo, they're all a part of the grammer of photography. That's why Holgas and Lomos are so popular—not because they take spectacularly clear photographs, but because so many happy accidents happen while you're using them. The Lensbaby is also an accident enabler.



I took these photos on a walk just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska last week.

I went to the dentist today for the first time in over ten years. I had some bad dentist experiences as a kid, so I've always been nervous about going. sk has been hounding me to get an exam, so I finally caved and let her make an appointment for me. She kept the date secret so I wouldn't worry about it, and sprung it on me a week or so ago.

I relived many of the nightmarish visions from my childhood today: the cramped rooms, the lead vests, the adjustable machines hovering above, below, and beside. Not to mention the gag-reflex, saliva, latex gloves in the mouth, and all of the metal pointy things with their scraping and poking. I'm sure technology has improved in the past decade, but the experience was very much the same.



The people there were all very nice, I'm not blaming them for my bad experiences. They probably aren't even aware of the environment around them, and the feeling of powerlessness it instills. I think some user experience design is in order for the offices—and probably a movement toward patient-centered design across the industry. It's all too industrial now. Don't they focus-group this stuff? Where's the market research? The psychological studies? They must know their office environment affects their patients.

Luckily I can report that my teeth are in great shape and I don't have any problems. And as an adult the experience isn't nearly as bad as my (probably) exaggerated memory. I'd like to keep my teeth healthy and I suppose that means more trips to the dreaded reclining chair.

If you want to subscribe to an Engadget/Gizmodo style weblog about consumer electronics that doesn't have advertising in its RSS feed, check out Gear Factor by Wired (RSS). Since these types of blogs are essentially a type of advertising anyway, I don't understand the need for extra ads in the feed.

I'm really enjoying Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, and I feel like it's a must-read for Web literacy. The title refers to the intersection of search and ubiquitous computing, and the book is sort of a quick history of information management and a look at where information is headed. Morville mentioned an insightful quote by Calvin Mooers that I hadn't heard before:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a consumer to have information than for him not to have it.

I often think of more information and access to more information as inherently good. But Mooers has a great point that information has to be processed and can often lead to more questions than answers. I've found a personal information wall in my own use of RSS readers. And I think this quote is a more useful way of stating the information overload problem than the saying ignorance is bliss. If I think about information as painful as well as useful, I have to change the way I design and interact with applications. And Morville argues that the change should be toward collaborative filtering and information as something social. I think the book explains some important Web trends like folksonomies, user-contributed data, and long tail power laws without going into the land of business hype. I'd like to give this book to some of my less web-centric friends because I think it's a good guide to understanding how moving from atoms to bits affects our relationship with information.