Because it’s much more fun than doing an alternative analysis on quicksort and I found the current site devoted to Jeremy Lin puns a little abysmal, I decided to create my own.
Behold: #linify it.
It’s actually a dead simple site that I threw together mostly during a class, and its core revolves around a few key regular expressions and replacing instances of them. Below are the ones I currently use—do you have any suggestions?
| Pattern |
Replacement |
Example |
^in
^In |
lin
Lin |
insanity → linsanity |
^li
^Li |
lin
Lin |
library → linbrary |
^.in |
lin |
winning → linning |
lin/i |
LIN |
slinky → sLINky |
ling$ |
LIN' |
styling → styLIN' |
Lin |
 |
Jeremy Lin → Jeremy |
15 February 2012 at 19:42
Google has always had decent UX practices, notwithstanding their complete lack of Android UX guidelines before 4.0 and the occasional dubious Doodle. Tabbed browsing can suck sometimes (and I’ve tried to make it suck less before), but this feature of Chrome has always made me happy:
This image shows me in the middle of closing a bunch of tabs in Chrome by clicking the “close” button on one of the tabs on the left. Notice a few things:
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Generally when you close tabs, they will either resize 1) uniformly to a predetermined “natural” size or 2) to fill the tab bar, whichever property is satisfied first.
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Here though, the tabs are not resizing, or else they would have been resized to fill the tab bar (note the empty space on the right, indicating they’re being forced to not resize)
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This makes it easier for the user to close the tabs: I don’t have to keep moving my mouse to hit another “close” button. I would be chasing “close” buttons if the tabs kept resizing.
This in and of itself is already pretty cool. But notice how I’ve always been clicking “close” on the 4th tab from the left. What happens when there are, say, 3 tabs left? Because the tabs aren’t resizing, my cursor would no longer be over a “close” button.
Should the width of the tabs stay consistent until I indicate I’m done clicking “close” buttons? Since I’m no longer hovering over a “close” button, should the tabs go with option 1 above and reset to their “natural” sizes? No. What Chrome does here is downright genius:
The tabs start resizing, but they resize so that the “close” button of a tab stops just under my mouse cursor—ready to be clicked. I can keep clicking to close more tabs without moving my mouse at all. Note the difference between the image above and the one below, where I moved my cursor and caused the tabs to resize to their “natural” sizes.
To paraphrase Fitts’s Law, the further away a target is, the longer time it will take to acquire and act upon that target, and the more frustrated your users become. If you think about it, Google here is actually bringing Fitts’s Law to you. Instead of you moving your mouse to acquire a target, the target comes to you.
There’s an awful “In Soviet Russia” joke in here somewhere.
†In their defense though, Firefox for OS X does seem to behave this way as well. However, this "resizing to the cursor" feature seems to be missing in some other favorite apps with tabs, such as Safari, Sublime Text 2, and Terminal (well, it's not that I have that many tabs open... I just have really small Terminal windows sometimes).
07 February 2012 at 11:14
SOPA and its Senate cousin, PIPA, are really bad things. Many well-known websites are participating in a demonstration against the two acts, including Wikipedia English, which is blacking out its entire site.
I do not support these bills, nor the intents behind them. Never have I appreciated Wikipedia and free information on the Internet more. But sometimes you’re a kid in college and you just really have to study. If you’re like me, you can use the bookmarklet below to uncensor any English Wikipedia page†.
To use:
- Drag the link to your bookmarks bar
- Navigate to a Wikipedia English page
- Click the bookmarklet
You’ll need to re-click the link again on every Wikipedia page, but hey, at least you can view them.
Of course, you can always also view everything in Polish.
†Sometimes each click will also open up a link to americancensorship.org. Take action.
18 January 2012 at 00:44
(Otherwise known as: Because I have a blog again and I’m allowed to be narcissistic.)
With Gmail yelling at me at least three times last semester “you’re maxing out your inbox!” I thought it would be interesting to do some analytics and figure out some patterns in my 87,455 email messages. Using a handy Python script, mail-trends, I verified what pretty much everybody already knew: you get a shitton of email when you join a campus organization.
Below is how my mail breaks down by year in terms of volume. I came to Columbia in Fall ‘09 and joined Bwog that first semester.
Because the exponential growth in mail could just be attributed to general college shenanigans, the breakdown of email recipients for 2009 (the “To:” field in an email) really verifies the Bwog Effect on mail:
(The blue “David Hu” is my Columbia email address, and there are multiple Bwog aliases for technical reasons. Other recipients are hidden for privacy reasons.)
And by 2011, there were more emails addressed to tips@bwog.com than my email address in my own damn inbox:
However, just like how it’s important to be reminded of friendships and friends when work for school or a campus group seems to take over your life, it’s good to realize that in a sea of Bwog-related email threads (subjects hidden), sometimes conversations among friends still reign supreme.
03 January 2012 at 17:33