ACM Author Profile pages

ACM recently announced the creation of Author Profile pages in their digital library. This is a nice addition to the DL since it shows bibliometric data for the author, including the number of times his/her papers have been downloaded. Authors also have the ability to add their photograph, a link to their website, and email address. My author page is on the left.

GUI Blooper: Windows Calculator

It just occurred to me this afternoon that Window's standard calculator application has a "GUI blooper". Can you spot it? Hint: It has something to do with multiplication.

The blooper is the use of the asterisk (*) symbol for multiplication instead of the traditional x symbol. Look at any calculator, physical or virtual, and you'll always see the x symbol used. My guess is very few non-technical people know * stands for multiplication, and the only way they figure it out is by process of elimination.

So why does Windows use *? Practically every programming language out there uses * for multiplying, thanks to the yahoos who forgot (chose not) to include a multiplication symbol in ASCII. So to the programmers who wrote the Windows calculator, using * seemed only natural. I just wonder how this got past their usability experts.

Update on 4/28/08:

Dustin makes a good point in the comments below that Microsoft was likely just mapping the symbols from the number pad. Consistency is a key to good UI design. But, I think the carrying the limitation of the keyboard into the GUI isn't the best decision. It would be like only allowing the OS to have 12 major functions because there are only 12 function (F) keys on the keyboard.

Fav5

My 5 items of interest for the week:

1. This is very cool: Google News now shows quotes taken from news sources. What has John McCain been saying recently?


2. Udi Manber, VP of search quality at Google, answers 20 questions about web search. (I made my search engine class read this.)


3. Researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz are working on long-term archiving using disks rather than tape. Their system, Pergamum, "is a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based, storage appliances that stores data reliably and energy-efficiently."


4. Video games are becoming a big business ($9.5 billion last year in the US), and universities are listening, creating degree programs for game developers.


5. Microsoft worked so hard to get their Office Open XML (OOXML) standardize accepted by ISO. And now the bad news: Office 2007 doesn't produce documents that adheres to their standard. My guess is the next service pack changes the file format so it does conform.
   

"Move Over" law is being enforced in Arkansas

While driving through Pocahontas, Arkansas, on Hwy 64, Becky and I encountered a police officer on the side of the road giving someone a ticket. We were in the right lane close to the two cars, so I snugged the left side of the lane to give them plenty of room. I could have moved over a lane, but there wasn't any need since they had plenty of space.

A few minutes later the same police car was tailing us with his lights on. After being pulled over, we were told that we had vilolated the law because we did not move over a lane when driving past him. I couldn't believe it. This was a law?

Now you would think the officer would have checked his records and seen that I had never received a ticket in my life. "Hmm... this is a law abiding citizen... maybe I should just give him a warning since he's the kind of person who will follow the law now that he knows about it." Instead, he gave me a whopping ticket.

I could say more about the ridiculousness of getting ticketed for this offense, but instead I just want everyone to know: you must pull into the other lane whenever you pass a police car, ambulance, etc. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Dad's Retirement

Becky, Ethan, and I drove up to St. Louis yesterday to surprise my father. He was retiring today and was being honored with a surprise luncheon. 35 years in city administration... wow.

When we first arrived at the lunch, we hid out in the kitchen. The Mayor was standing with my dad in front of the group of city employees. When given the signal, Becky and I emerged from the kitchen (I was carrying Ethan) along with Mom, and we walked up to where Dad was standing. He almost lost it.

We presented him with a map of the world where he can place pins showing where he has been. He was also presented with a Cowboys golf bag and a number of other gifts.

We ate a nice lunch while Dad showed off his grandson, and a number of people told me how Dad was seriously the best city administrator they had ever worked for. It was really neat seeing how great a job Dad has done in Wentzville. I hope the same can be said about me when I retire some 30 years from now.

Fav5

Today I'm stuck at home trying to recover from the latest disease Ethan has brought home. Here's my 5 items of interest for the week:

1. Google recently announced their newest attempt at crawling the Deep Web. When their crawler sees a form on a "high-quality site", it enters words and selects various checkboxes and radio buttons. The form is then submitted, and the resulting page is crawled. Very cool. Google also announced the Google App Engine. It's a service that allows you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure so it can grow to accommodate a large amount of traffic. It's a free service until it exceeds a set disk space and bandwidth quota. Unfortunately, there's a limit of 10,000 developers, and I wasn't quick enough to sign up, so I'll have to wait until they increase the limit.


2. Joel De Young, one of our Harding CS graduates, was recently interviewed about his company's newest game: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness. Sounds like Joel's HotheadGames is making some buzz.
   


3. A study by Univ of Minnesota researchers shows there are two indicators that determine how good of an answer you will receive when posting to question-and-answer sites like Yahoo! Answers: how much you pay, and how many responses you receive.


4. Jansen, Booth, and Spink have developed a system which can automatically classify a search query as navigational, transactional, and informational. They used their classifier on a large dataset of search engine queries and were accurate 74% of the time. Based on their results, approximately 80% of all search engine queries are informational, 10% transactional, and 10% informational.
   


5. Congratulations to the Harding Programming Team on their first place finish at CCSC-MS. We showed them Razorbacks how to program...

My brother is a married man

Congratulations to John and Mindy on their marriage last Saturday in Dallas. They had a really nice wedding in the backyard of a friend, and the whole family was able to attend. It's hard to believe my brother is finally married... now my sister is the only single sibling left!

Fav5

I'm headed to Dallas today for my brother's wedding! Before I leave, my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Despite the controversy, it looks like Microsoft's Office Open XML will be ratified as an ISO standard.


2. Adobe has interesting news about Photoshop CS4: it will run on 64-bit Windows but not 64-bit Mac. This is a good article to read about the concerns of developing cross-platform software. (Thanks, Allan)


3. Have you been rickrolled yet?


4. Is Google in a slide?


5. Three days ago was of course April Fool's (and my father's birthday- any relationship? ). I pulled a joke on a fellow colleague, but nothing that would make this list. The best joke I saw was on Wikipedia. Anyone else have a favorite?

April Fools

I guess it's time I came clean. Michael, you're on Facebook! And you're one popular guy... already 26 friends!


Please don't turn me into the Facebook police.

Update on 4/3/2008:

Michael said he thought this was a pretty funny joke, and he promised to login once a year on April 1 to see if anything has changed. So if any of you want to be his friend, send in a request. I'll check his Facebook account about once a month and answer any outstanding friend requests. Let's see if we can push his friends count at least to 100 by April 1, 2009!

Ethan: From 1 month to 12

Each month on Ethan's birthday we took a photo with marshmallows and candles. Look at that boy grow!

Month 1

Month 2

Month 3

Month 4

Month 5

Month 6

Month 7

Month 8

Month 9

Month 10

Month 11

Month 12

If you think it's easy getting Ethan to pose for these pics... think again! Here's some "outtakes":

Happy Birthday, Ethan!

Technically his birthday is not until tomorrow, but we had a big first birthday party for Ethan yesterday with the grandparents, and I wanted to post a few photos. It's amazing seeing how Ethan has changed over his first year. He started as a little guy who couldn't turn himself over, and now he's almost walking and talking!

Ethan has certainly changed our lives. It's been tough for Becky and me to give up some of the freedoms we used to enjoy, like being able to go out whenever we wanted or take weekend trips. Or just sleep in. But I can honestly say having a son has made me a better person. And I think I understand a little better how hard it must have been for God the Father to watch his son endure the cross.

Cox in USA Today

My in-laws are in town, and my parents are going to be here in a few hours to celebrate Ethan's first birthday. Too much going on to write a Fav5, but I did think this was cool. From the Religion section of USA Today:

Monte Cox, director of the Center for World Missions at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., says his days spent hoeing and listening to workers in Kenyan cotton fields in the 1980s helped him be a more effective church planter there. He also acknowledges a need for today's short-term missionaries to establish better relationships by taking time to learn about their hosts.

But in his view, God calls Christians to do more than listen in the mission field. "These days, virtually everything qualifies as mission," Cox says. "Mission is more focused than simply breathing, or breathing while you live among another people. … It ceases to be mission if there is no intention to speak the truth that we go to tell."

- USA Today, Mar. 18, 2007

March Madness

I picked my brackets in about 60 seconds, and it's mostly paying off, at least when you compare my standings with my 26 friends who picked brackets on Facebook:


It's when you start comparing me to the entire Facebook population where things aren't so rosy :

Fav5

It's Spring Sing weekend at Harding, and the sun is shining. Here's my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Technology Review has just released its top 10 emerging technologies of 2008, those technologies that are most likely to make a huge impact on the way we live. I personally find offline Web applications to be most interesting. This is an area Adobe and Google are vigorously pursuing.


2. Joan Smith (my former office-mate in graduate school) and Michael Nelson (my former Ph.D. adviser and pioneer of digital preservation ) just published an article in D-Lib Magazine showing a year's worth of crawling activity on some specially designed websites. Make sure you check out the animated images in Tables 3 and 6- they show the crawling behavior of an aggressive Google and timid Yahoo and MSN.


3. Ethics 101: You're a popular search engine that allows users to see emergent news from a number of sources. But you're housed in a country where the authorities often seek to squelch information that doesn't hold to the party line. If you show news stories that make the authorities look bad, your search engine will be shut down or blocked. What do you do?


4. Joel Spolsky writes an excellent article about IE 8 and the many difficulties of creating software that supports "standards". This is required reading for all you software engineers and CS students. (The article is a little long, but it's worth it.)


5. While we're on the topic of web browsers, almost a year ago Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Safari (Apple's web browser) would run on Windows. Now Apple is using iTunes to push it out to the Microsoft world. My guess is that many unsuspecting users are going to think they need Safari to run iTunes since it appears in the same dialog box they always see when needing to install an iTunes update. Many users are going to downloaded it and puzzle over the new icon on their desktop. This should be interesting...

Meme: Passion Quilt

Mark Elrod tagged me for this meme. I don't usually do this kind of stuff, but I thought this one had a useful point.

THE RULES: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators. (Sorry, but I respectfully decline.)

"Love thy user as thyself."

The title is based on Lev. 19:18 and Jesus' statement of the two most important commandments in the Law (Matt. 22:39). On a shallow level, if software developers would write programs that treat their users with dignity, kindness, and respect, I think we'd have far less frustrated users. On a deeper level, if we as Christians would treat our fellow employees, family, and even strangers as we would want to be treated, what a huge impact for Christ we would have in this world.

Spy Hunter commercial

In a brilliant marketing move, Pontiac has made a commercial for their new Pontiac G8 based on the popular 1983 arcade game Spy Hunter. I'm not one to admit being motivated by commercials, but this one did have an effect on me... I have a nostalgic place in my heart for Spy Hunter.



P.S. If you liked this one, you'll probably get a kick out of Honda's Tron commercial.

Harding students serve homeless over Spring Break

This post is a little late. The week before last week was Harding's spring break. While many students view spring break as a time to party and self-indulge, several hundred Harding students take a different approach. They go out across the country and serve, painting homes, feeding the homeless, teaching the Gospel, playing with orphans, etc. I'm always amazed at how giving these students can be, taking Jesus' admonition to go into the world and be light seriously.

This year a group of students went to my hometown of Denver to work with the homeless. An article about the student's mission trip appeared in the Denver Post which you can read online. (Ah, the Denver Post... that brings back not-so-pleasant memories of delivering papers at 4am...)

I'm glad these students focused on Denver as there is a rather large homeless population there. As stated in the article, there are approximately 1,400 people between the ages of 13 and 25 living on the streets in Denver on any given day. As a teenager, I remember going downtown during the winter months and being shocked at how many people were spending the night on the street in subfreezing temperatures.

Jesus once said that the poor would always be among us, but that doesn't mean they have to go homeless. It's good to see young Christians tackling such a significant problem.

Fav5 on Pi Day

It's 3.14 and time for my pick of the week's top 5 6 items of interest:

1. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, gave the keynote address on Sunday at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). The talk was led by interviewer Sarah Lacy, a columnist for BusinessWeek. Let's just say it did not go well. At all. You can see Sara's attempt to defend herself and the full keynote (it gets pretty bad around minute 55).
   


2. Meredith Morris, a researcher at Microsoft, is working on helping groups collaboratively do Web search together with their tool SearchTogether.
   


3. Google recently released a YouTube JavaScript Player API which allows you to place a player within your page and control it programmaticly. Here's a simple example.


4. USENIX has gone OA - now you can access all their current and past papers freely online. Excellent.


5. Thinking about using Facebook in leu of a face-to-face study group? If you're a student at Ryerson University, you better think again...


6. (BONUS) Congratulations to the Harding Bison basketball team who will be playing in the NCAA Division II Basketball Tournament. This is only their second appearance in the tourney. The opening game is Sat at 2:30 against Tampa.

What does Questio Verum mean?

I recently stumbled across WikiAnswers where someone had posted the question:

What does questio verum mean?

This is of course the name of my blog, and I'm sure many have wondered what the title was supposed to mean.

Questio is Latin for seeking, and verum is Latin for truth, so questio verum is seeking truth. As a Christian, college professor, and researcher, my life is geared around seeking after the truth. I believe God has placed within all of us a desire to know the truth, and it's up to us to openly and honestly follow the truth, wherever it may lead. Yes, we can handle the truth.

Search engine text snippet

Recently my search engine class was discussing where search engines like Google get the text snippet they display on the search results pages (SERPs). For example, a search for frank mccown using Live.com shows the following SERP:


The text snippet circled in red might be from the full text of the web page, from a description from ODP (see this example), or, as in this case, it might come from the meta description tag like the one I have in my web page:

<meta name="description" content="Frank McCown, Assistant Professor of Computer Science">

Just for fun, I changed this tag a few weeks ago. Although Live has re-crawled my page since then, they have not re-indexed the meta tag. But Google (and Yahoo) have:


This of course is a very misleading description of my web page, but Google doesn't appear to care. A Google search for this description will not make my page appear in the SERP, so the misleading description is only hurting me (and those trying to find me).

I'm a little surprised Google doesn't at least search for the terms from the description in the accompanying web page just to make sure the description is not misleading. I suppose it's better to err on the side of giving your web page author the benefit of the doubt than to deal with all the complaints of those whose tags might be ignored.

Matt Cutts from Google discusses text snippets on YouTube.