Advogato blog for clarkbw

All-Star Break

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:07:12 GMT

I arrived in Vancouver on Tuesday July 1st after my long adventure across the country. I think all the sun, baseball parks, and driving ran down my system so after my friends left and I got 2 days of work in I spent the weekend sleeping.

Cleveland Indians	Detroit Tigers
Chicago White Sox	St. Louis Cardinals
Kansas City Royals	Colorado Rockies
Oakland A’s	Seattle Mariners

Eight stadiums in all. An amazing trip, though some places were certainly missed due to timing. I would have loved to see a Cubs game in Chicago as well as a Giants game in San Francisco but the teams weren’t available when we were coming through. Next time.

Vancouver

Is a beautiful place. I seem to have brought nothing but perfect weather with me as everyday but one was sunny and warm. I quickly setup a Canadian SIN (which is similar to an American SSN), a local bank account and spent the last couple of weeks getting settled into to my international digs. I had already prearranged a stay in a temporary apartment which is working out well as it’s right in Yaletown and lets me easily explore the downtown area.

Vancouver has such a mix of different people. Everyday I hear people speaking in a number of different languages, Chinese, German, Russian, and Spanish to name a few I could recognize. Everyday on my walk to and from work I smell someone smoking weed somewhere. And everyday I hear the grinding and pounding noise of construction. Overall somewhat similar to summers in Cambridge.

Experimental Message View

Before I left the states we started work on something I called The Experimental Message View. I’ll post more about it later, but the simplistic goal is to create a new way of interacting with messages and with the required technology change enables others to easily create alternate experiments inside Thunderbird.

Andrew Sutherland has been cranking on the Global Database work with an initial preview, an m-1 trial release (download and install), and even an early visualization.

Paul Rouget has updated his work on the new treeview API which could help us implement richer message lists by changing how we display messages.

Things are coming together quickly.

Where’s Scotty when I need him?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:03:56 GMT

This Scotty, not that Scotty. Yesterday andrew and I were interrupted at the office by a power outage that effected the entire city block around 11am. And again today when I got to the office it was still closed.

At least one downtown building told power will not be restored until 8:00 am Thursday - Latest info on downtown power, traffic, transit

That’s my office! Would have been useful news if they informed me which building it was before I made the trip downtown to find it closed and missed the status call. I still need to pickup a canadian cell phone and it would have been useful to arrive at work more than 5 minutes before the call.

Go West Young Man!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:06:52 GMT

This Thursday I take permanent leave of Boston to make my new home in lovely Vancouver, BC. Boston has been my home for over 4 years now and after growing up in neighboring NH I honestly never thought I’d be back here this long.

Boston Skyline @ 4:45am by StarrGazr License:

Though it won’t be the place I’ll miss, it’s my friends and I wish they were coming with me. I’ve tried to convince several of them to do that. Why can’t we all live in the same place?

On Tuesday my u-pack boxes arrived and I squeezed in all the possessions I hadn’t thrown out in the last couple weeks and feel are worth bringing across the country. I actually don’t have many of these things even though they add up quickly. On Friday Moose and I will have left Boston on a grand trip across the states.

Moose is too old to fly anymore, he might not even make this trip in the car, not really; he should be fine. But luckily I won’t be alone with a dog who farts a lot as two of my best friends and I are cramming into my little car to catch baseball games on the road as we make our way from one coast to the next. Thus our route isn’t a clear shot from one place to the next.

I will be partially online during the trip, uploading photos of baseball stadiums, cities, arches, and other parks along the way. I also want to keep up with all the changes we’ve got planned, Thunderbird is starting to make so much progress it would be crazy to take too much time off right now.

Vancouver skyline at night by istargazer License:

Thanks to everyone I’ve met in Boston, all the friends I’ve made. Please come visit me in Vancouver.

You can learn a lot from TV

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:06:04 GMT

I used to think that Bill Clinton was the first black president, but of course that loose fact could easily be replaced if we had a real first black president. Until The Colbert Report Threat Down last night revealed a little known fact about the history of the USA; the title has already been taken by Warren Gansta Harding.

<a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=172954" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview ('/outbound/www.comedycentral.com');" >Secret Negro Presidents</a>.

That’s it, I’m moving to Canada!

Activity is the new download

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 19:07:09 GMT

So hip, just like silver is the new gold

Last week I began some work on some ideas for a richer, interactive user notification system for Thunderbird.

Status Bar

Currently the status bar acts as one of the only notification systems to the user. However the status bar is a steady stream of temporal plain text messages. The messages are helpful if you understand what they are indicating, otherwise to most people they only convey general activity happening. In general the messages end up lacking meaning because there is too much information running by.

A First Approach

Initially I took an approach of an interactive status bar that looked a little bit like the awesome bar replacing the status bar. Instead of just giving plain text messages we could make richer messages with visualizations.

Linked Messages
Progress Meters

The linked message could open thunderbird up to the account or message they were referring to. Next is to add some access to status history where people can see a list of what Thunderbird had done and perform actions (like restart) on those past activities.

History of Activity
Interactive History Items

The New Download

After seeing the amazing work that has been done on the download manager in firefox it seemed like a good second approach to the problem could be to reuse much of what they’ve done.

The download manager in firefox is solving a similar set of problems. We want to allow people to watch the progress of a specific set of (likely asynchronous) activities. We also want to ensure that people can view the list of past activities in case they want to manage them.

Should we continue using a simple text status message? The progress bar included in the status bar gives a visualization for time to complete an action. But do we need to help people visualize what is happening in the background?

And then instead of an inline popup for the history list we open up the download manager window which allows for searching and management of items inside the list.

Nothing is set yet, most likely a final version will be taking bits of both approaches. Still lots of work to go, more comments and ideas are always appreciated!

Standard8 has your name

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:07:30 GMT

Obviously after kicking so much ass there was nothing left for mr. banner to do but take names.

What used to be an awkward set of instructions is about to become as simple as a checkbox.

And yes this isn’t quite the feature that gets everyone laid (hopefully at least a couple people get laid). But it’s an excellent intermediary step toward getting some more testing on the Mac OS X System Address Book connection that should be available in the next alpha. Likely in a month or so when Mark is done with your name he will have replaced this system with an even better experience.

What is the connection experience?

It’s well beyond time to be thinking about what it means to have the OS X Address Book connected to Thunderbird. There’s a long road ahead. What is the end game here?

Should all contacts be stored in the System Address Book or the Thunderbird Address Book? Would that kind of change mean something for Windows? What would that mean for Linux?

If we want to sync your contacts with your iPhone or other iAppleDevices then we should be storing our data in the OS X Address Book, however we should also be careful of another systems limitations.

I like to think of the future of the Thunderbird address book as providing an overlay on top of other address book systems like the OS X System Address Book or an LDAP type address book. We want our data to be compatible with those different basic remote and local storage services. However we also want to do more interesting things with your contacts than what most LDAP systems offer.

If I were to steal the look and feel of GNOME Mobile platform diagram (which I like a lot) it might come out looking something like this for the Thunderbird Address Book Overlay. Underneath is a system address book, ldap, or local thunderbird address book providing the basics of storage. Then above that layer is where we can begin doing interesting things with your Thunderbird Address Book. Going beyond just emails and names and perhaps linking with different kinds of accounts your friends have.

You had me at hello

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:07:53 GMT

I spent some time on Friday and Monday writing a script to do some analysis of the Enron Email Dataset. I’m working on a new type of message list view for thunderbird, well a whole new layout actually, but for the message view I wanted to have an idea of message size and content.

Email Data

It turns out that decent email data is relatively hard to come by. Because of privacy concerns it’s nearly impossible to have access to a companies email where you can see the full exchange between a number of different people. Luckily the Enron dataset has become publicly available exactly for this kind of research into email problems.

The enron dataset is broken down into directories for many of the people involved and sub-directories of their emails.

maildir
- taylor-m
  - all_documents
  - archive
  - australia_trading
  - boat
  - brazil_trading
  - …
- mclaughlin-e
  - all_documents
  - calendar
  - contacts
  - deleted_items
  - discussion_threads
  - …
- …

The script I wrote is designed to read in email files in the directory and analyze the message body for its content. Then is spurts out the numbers with median and averages computed.

Mail Trends

If you’ve seen Mail Trends, you know that Mihai Parparita analyzed the enron emails for time, size, threading, and people comparisons. If you download the code you can run it against your own email and will likely see some amazing results (someone should pull this into Thunderbird!).

However the information I was looking for was not available in the mail trends analysis. Mail trends analyzes only email headers to create relationship statistics between emails. And while it does have the size of messages in terms of KB I was looking for the size of message in terms of the number of words.

You had me at Hello?

I’ve had this hypothesis or assumption that within the first 2 sentences of an email I can tell what it’s going to be about without reading the rest. Please try this out on your own! Read the first two sentences of any email and take a second to think if you can at least prioritize your response required for the message.

Combine this assumption with the my other assumption that it’s more important for me to process my mails than it is for me to actually read the entirety of any message. I know people are probably thinking, “you should read the whole message”; but in all honesty more than half the messages I get aren’t important to me at all so reading them would just waste time. This second part of my hypothesis stems from ideas like Inbox Zero and GTD where processing all those “things” is the most important part to being productive.

45 is Median Number of Words Per Message

Analyzing all those emails gave a bit of a statistics problem. On average it turned out to be something like 120 words per message. This high average number came from a few outliers of 500+ word messages that were skewing the results towards the high end, when the numbers should really be reflecting the low end where more results were present. So on average the median number of words per email message was 45. That’s the average of all the medians… rounded. Probably should have just included the standard deviation and called it quits.

I didn’t analyze the kinds of words or their length, which would be something else that’s pretty interesting to know. A next step could be to simply analyze the number of characters per message, that could give interesting hints on how to display the message in it’s entirety.

Back to the Message List View

Here’s a rough breakdown of what GMail gives me when I look at any given message. It’s just enough to understand who this message is from and what it’s probably about.

It’s possible with the [x] checkbox and the actions menu that I could process this mail and move on. However usually I end up opening every message to make sure there’s nothing else I should see. I’m not sure if that’s because I really need to read the rest of the message or what.

So my question continues to be this: Given a little bit more of the message itself, or a little bit more of the context of the message… is there a better way for me to process my emails? I have some mockups and ideas on how I think it could be done, but they need more refining. Will post soon.

Some Signature Updates

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:07:53 GMT

Some news for the Thunderbird signatures in email. I’ve updated the Message Signatures wiki page with some new possible directions.

Signature Manager

One still missing piece has been adding a signature manager. Previously I mentioned that we could create a new dialog window for managing signatures, however several comments posted and emailed made me want to look into other possibilities.

So here’s a mockup of a possible layout for the Signature manager to be in the Thunderbird preferences, under the Composition tab. (tabs within tabs… whoo hoo!)

Script Signatures

I keep offering a possible script signature in different mockups and yet there hasn’t been any mention of how you’d add a script signature yourself. My feeling is that we can leave script signatures up to extensions and extension developers. It might be nice to offer a script signature by default and perhaps this would lead more people to try out extensions that provide script signatures, however I don’t have a plan to create a default interface for them yet.

Signature Add-ons

Here’s a pretty simple way to introduce signature add-ons specifically to the signature preferences. There are some open ended pieces of this that need to be worked out. What does the add-on manager look like when it opens up from a link like this?

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated as always.

Tabulation

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:07:53 GMT

Lately I’ve been asking a lot of different people, “Why do you use tabs?”, in reference to tabbed web browsers. I wanted to do some quick and dirty research on the design and usage behind tabs; some of this is obvious yet it helps to have it written out.

So here’s a bit of what I’ve found people claim to use tabs for. I’ve arranged the information into what I felt were 4 distinct types of usage. I’d love to hear about other usage that doesn’t fit into these categories or other categories people have observed.

Defer Action

Often people want to defer an action until a later time. In a web browser they will open a link in tab that they’d like to read a little bit later. This was reported to occur on news or information sites where a person is reading a single page but wants to branch off to other links after reading. After completing the tab in their current focus the person would begin processing the other tabs lined up for later.

Lightweight Bookmark

Similar to deferring an action, people mentioned that tabs were a way of keeping certain pages around for an indefinite period of time. These pages weren’t necessarily going to be processed right away but they didn’t want to be lost. When asked if they bookmarked these page people responded that these pages were transitive reference type pages (i.e. they needed them to continuously use them for a certain project) and so tabbing seemed to be a way to bookmark things in a lightweight fashion. This especially made sense when tabs are saved within a session; people reported opening lots of tabs (hundreds) and then closing Firefox down completely only to reopen them all later.

Collect Related Information

Many people cited using tabs specifically to collect information on the same subject. Often this kind of collection was research for a composition like a blog post. Some people claimed to do this in a very formal fashion of opening up a fresh window for a blog post and then creating new tabs in that window for research related to the blog post. While others referenced doing an important activity in one window and having a set of windows with tabs in them for researching ideas around that important activity. This type of collection is similar to the lightweight bookmark except that most of the tabs were intended for a very finite period of time such as using the page to link to.

Switch Context and Keep Current State

Many people also talked about how they would “Adventure off” into other tabs to follow something that was either more important or more interesting but they really wanted to keep their exact place they were. This is very similar to the defer action, you could say this is the after state of the defer action. The only difference here is that the person is intentionally keeping the first tab around in it’s exact state where the defer might lead to closing tabs as they are finished. A common example was a quick interruption that called for searching for something unrelated to what they were doing. People would open a new tab, complete their search and then close that tab to go back to what they were doing.

Some Related Links for you to open up in Tabs

What does this mean for Thunderbird?

This information isn’t for figuring out how tabs work in firefox and then squeezing that idea into thunderbird. It is merely here to create a common language reference for talking about tabs and their usage. Hopefully people could see new ideas on how tabs can be used from understanding how they are used in other contexts. There currently exists an implementation of tabs in Thunderbird but it will not be the same as it is now by the 3.0 release.

War Plan Red

Sun, 18 May 2008 07:06:12 GMT

Dear friendly neighbors to the north. Only Defence Scheme No.1 can save you now for I will soon be en route.

A Great Invention

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ranks Poutine as #10 in The 50 Greatest Canadian Inventions, impressive. And I intend to eat a lot of poutine while I’m up in Montreal this weekend. In fact I hope to stop at Au Pied de Cochon for their famous varieties.

hopefully I’ll see this sweatshirt that I can’t seem to find anywhere