41–50 of 64 posts
Lets see if I can find his research.
Update: found it! http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/l3dge/
Idea: pipe stdout and stderr through a text-to-speech program. Programs with noisy logs would be running around screaming like lunatics.
"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."
[0] http://www.askapache.com/hacking/ping-unix-darpa-muuss.html
The paper got accepted at CHI 2001, but never would make it today. It's a nice summary of what made CHI so great in the past, and how tedious it has become. (For the paper to make it into CHI 2015, it'd probably need a part where the author surveys 50 people and asks them inane questions such as "on a scale from 1 to 5, how likely are you to use the software for your sysadmin needs", and then measures+plots mean time…
A modern version would make it to alt.chi. People present alt.chi papers (usually very though provoking) at the conference.
"It is unfortunate, especially in the light of recent schoolyard tragedies, that first-person shooters are so popular. Even though studies on the effects of violent media on youth are not conclusive [..], interface designers must proceed with caution when adding potentially aggressive aspects to interfaces. One must take into consideration the age of the expected user base and the possible use of non-aggressive alternatives."
It's interesting to see personal antidotes which have been shown to be incorrect to be permitted in papers.
Today if the paper was written the text could have been replaced with -
"..researchers found that the playing of such games actually had a very slight calming effect on youths with attention deficit symptoms and helped to reduce their aggressive and bullying behavior." [2]
(replace 'youths' with 'sysadmins')
[1] http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
[2] http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+select...
Idea: pipe stdout and stderr through a text-to-speech program. Programs with noisy logs would be running around screaming like lunatics.
Hah, imagine a system where processes were placed in an arena and they battle it out for cpu time. Programmers will not only have to build their applications but also write an AI to protect itself, an IDE could be a fortress where processes could be relatively safe.
Or maybe Core War? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
Brilliant idea. With the Unix file systems, that show about everything of a computer, it should be possible to create a game, where the whole world is generated by that informations :D
IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!") Also, not quite the same, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game
It was pretty much the original Decent, but using the directory tree of my HDD as the basis for the map. If it ran into files i could understand, like say images, it would use those as textures etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!") Also, not quite the same, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game
Aha, I found it. The file manager in question was fsn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
Idea: pipe stdout and stderr through a text-to-speech program. Programs with noisy logs would be running around screaming like lunatics.
I've been thinking of a similar idea, but instead of text-to-speech, doing something like choir.io and playing positive, negative, or neutral sounds. The resultant noise would give you enough information to get a feel for what's happening.
Since then i found myself pondering how we limited our computing interaction to our visual sense, where as interacting with mechanical devices also involve auditory and tactile feedback. A fridge moment was when i was waiting for my coffee machine to do its thing, and how i instinctively responded to changes in the noises made.
Never mind the analog modem days where i got into the habit of leaving the sound on for the handshake, as i could then tell if i got a good or bad connection based on the sounds heard.