I have been reading

I have not been posting in months, but I have been reading some books.

• http://books.verg.es/index.html Notes on some of the books that I have been reading
• http://notes.verg.es/index.html Notes on articles, presentations, tools...

I have also added some watercolor-painted stick-figure icons to http://els.verg.es/xavier, that has links to some of the different pieces of my digital identity.

Carrots & Sticks? Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

Fun and surprising TED Talk by Dan Pink on Motivation.

Experiments show that extrinsic motivators (carrots and sticks) work great for simple/mechanical-like tasks, probably by providing a narrow focus. But... rewards make performance worse for creative/complex tasks!!!

It's a funny coincidence that today I picked up a free copy of the The Wall Street Journal and it had an article on executive bonuses. Huge expensive carrots that, according to the experiments above, lead to less ability to deal with complexity.

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

Sacha Chua rocks, as usual

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

Introducing... TiddlyWiki!

Dave Gifford created a very nice intro to TiddlyWiki. Going over the 20 first slides will take you less than a minute and will give you good reasons to read further and start using tiddlywiks.

| View | Upload your own

Jazz in the hood

Martin Espinach, coffee machine and lunch mate, gave yesterday a very nice internal talk about how his previous project used bugzilla and Mylyn to help them plan, assign and track team tasks. Although they were initially excited about Mylyn's task-focused UI, none of the team members ended up using it; they did love Mylyn's ability to get notifications from bugzilla. It looked like a neat solution.

When his very detailed talk was almost done, he told us that, for their recently started new project, they are using IBM Rational Jazz. I felt like killing him, but I then I would have missed the chance to complain about his talk during every afternoon coffee in the next weeks.

And Jazz? So far, they are loving it. I'll have to ask him to demo it to our team.

SendTo Clipboard coolness (TiddlyWiki links to your files)

The SendTo folder is a simple and powerful tool to customize Windows Explorer to simplify some recurring tasks. If you often want to link to files in your PC from your TiddlyWikis, you'll like this hack. It creates two new items in the "Send To" menu:

• clipboard - file url: Copies to the clipboard the file: url of the file or folder that was showing the "Send To" menu
• clipboard - new tiddler javascript url: Copies to the clipboard a javascript: url that, when pasted into the address bar of a Firefox tab showing a TiddlyWiki, will create a tiddler with the contents of the file that was showing the "Send To" menu
  

You can jump and just download and run the thing, a small .hta file, or take less than three minutes watching it in action in one of the lamest screencasts ever:

SendTo Clipboard Screencast from Xavier Vergés and Vimeo

Using it

• Just download the .hta file and open it. No, wait! Never open .hta files unless you trust its author or you have taken a look at the code.
• Provided that you trust me or that you have checked the code, you can now open it. Maybe a double click will be enough (your Windows associates .hta files to mshta.exe, a version of IE with high security privileges in your machine). Maybe you need to use the command line and type mshta path2twlink.hta.
• Follow the simple steps described in the .hta file, and you can start using your new shinny Send To menu items.
• You are expected to edit the file to customize what gets copied into the clipboard. It should be easy. You may get ideas to push the sendto+clipboard+javascript urls concept further; adding them to the tool should not be too hard.
• You are also expected to do some dancing, since this is DanceLikeMattHardingWare.
  

Lessons learned while hacking

• I initially wanted to use just a .js file. Getting access to the clipboard from a .js file is hard, so I went for an .hta. It turned out to be a good thing, because it ended up providing a way to avoid to the users the trouble of creating the shortcuts by hand and to me the trouble of documenting the recipe.
• The problem of using an .hta file is that I found no way to keep it invisible, that it has an unusual way to receive its params, and that I had to warn you about its dangerousness.
• I think that I've spent more time recording the lousy screencast and comparing video hosting services that coding. The number of times that I rerecorded the #@%! thing will remain undisclosed; I have my pride. Regarding the hosting services, after reading about them, I posted the video to google, blip.tv and vimeo.
  I still have no winner, but google's video quality was awfull, so I had to drop it despite its super cool feature of letting you link to a specific point of the video. Update: looks like the winner is http://viddler.com: links, comments and tags on specific points of the video, plus the best player of all (in full screen mode, showing the original size, the quality was just perfect): http://www.viddler.com/explore/xdexavier/videos/1
  

Mockingbird Molotov cocktails

I'm not much into poetry, but Rives seems to be monopolizing most of my rainy Sunday morning. Using June Cohen's words, "on the surface, it's light-hearted, but then he layers in unexpected depth and emotion".

Some cool things would happen if Rives controlled the internet, although I wish there were a transcript because he pushes my English skills a bit too far.


Mockingbird, including a TED 2006 remix that is not available in this text version, creates vivid surprising and pretty images on me.

But, my favourite, by far, is Compliment, in text and in beatboxer+poet+harmonica video. Mmmm, wait Xavier, that's dangerous stuff to listen to when you are happily and safely uninterested in that kind of love; so lets use a quote by George Bernand Shaw that I heard in Helen Fisher's TEDtalk The science of love, and the future of women:

Love consists in overestimating the differences between one woman and another

La felicidad y la bola de cristal

A toda prisa a la librería de la esquina [1] a comprarme Tropezar con la felicidad, de Daniel Gilbert, después de haber escuchado su divertida y sorprendente conferencia en TED Talks.

La idea básica de la conferencia es que somos muy malos en nuestras predicciones sobre lo que nos hará felices o no. Al parecer, tenemos las mismas posibilidades de ser felices tanto consiguiendo lo que deseamos como no consiguiéndolo.

Está llena de datos sorprendentes, como que, un año después de acontecimientos tan distintos como quedar parapléjico o ganar la loteria, las personas de los dos grupos muestran el mismo nivel de felicidad. O que mayores posibilidades de elección van en detrimento de nuestra felicidad (más sobre esto en la también sorprendente conferencia de Barry Schwartz The paradox of choice).



[1] Mi librero no tiene el libro, así que lo encargo y me llevo uno de José Antonio Marina. JAM siempre me gusta. La magia de escribir, escrito con María de la Válgoma.

Curioso: ¿por qué me da esta pájara de comprarme libros sobre escritura (Bird by Bird, The War Of Art, La magia de escribir)?!

Democratizing visualization

I learned today about IBM Research's Many Eyes, available at alphaWorks. Although at first sight it seems simply a nice tool to create nice visualizations, its goal is to enable collaboration around visualizations.

In Fernanda B. Viégas' words, the intend is "to enable people to collectively reason about the trends and patterns they see on the vivid representations of data called visualizations", or "distributed data analysis and collaborative sensemaking".


How? You can upload data sets. You can create visualizations of them. You can discuss the visualizations, highlighting parts of them.

You are not sold into the power of good visualizations? Check out Hans Rosling's Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen TEDTalk (aka No More Boring Data, as posted on youtube). Or play with a tool similar to the one that he uses in the presentation, at http://tools.google.com/gapminder.

And whatever you think about Many Eyes, Hans Rosling, logarithms or baseball, do go and check the improved TED site.

Update: It seems that Many Eyes is not the only project in this area. From an article by Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg,

We think that social data analysis is a lively area right now and we are not the only ones exploring this space - two other sites of note are Swivel and Data360. Each of the 3 sites has a different emphasis, but what we have in common is a belief that the web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious.

Social Data Analysis. Nice term.

Ajax i Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe i atSistemas

Web 2.0: la revolución de RIA en el desarrollo de aplicaciones web. Un enfoque práctico: al World Trade Center de Barcelona el primer de febrer, i a Madrid el 8 de febrer.

Organitzat per atSistemas, Business Partner Premier de IBM.

Ups! Inscripcions al 91 640 76 20 o per mail a Isabel Hueso (ihueso at atsistemas.com)

Google Tech Taks (engEDU videos)

You *have to* keep an eye on Google's TechTalks. I have not seen an obvious link, so here it is a search and a feed on that search (better, since it provides longer descriptions). They are mostly about computer science, but the range of topics is quite broad.

It is great that they are choosing to publish all these terrific talks they host.

Update: from http://video.google.com/googleplex.html

Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics ranging from Current Affairs, Science, Engineering, Humanities, Business, Law, Entertainment, Medicine, and the Arts.

I also learned about the Authors@Google series:

Authors@Google is a speaker series where thought-provoking, Zeitgeist-making, trend-setting authors come to the Googleplex to read from their works and share their thoughts with us. The following authors have agreed to release their talks to the world on Google Video.