[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Alan James Salmoni
Member since: 2004-12-14 09:38:36
Last Login: 2008-11-08 10:18:45
Homepage: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/medicine/dermatology/staff/salmoni
Notes:
I am an independent interaction designer with training in HCI and statistics. I like open source and free software so much that I released my own stuff. My programs are SalStat, a Python and wxPython based application for statistical analysis, and TrackBrowser, a web browser designed to record user behaviour. I built the latter for my professional work.
In real life, I am a usability specialist with my own firm, user:number 1 which is fun. I have a PhD in human-computer interaction from Cardiff University and a few years experience in this field since.
I am also into photography and should have my gallery website up soon. It's custom made which takes more time than a cookie-cutter CMS for pictures. The design of it is the fun thing.
Just an idea for a new captcha system. How's about if you could access a large photographic resource (e.g., Flickr, Picasa), and a thumbnail of the picture is shown to the user. The user then has to guess one of the tags belonging to the picture. If they do, then they pass.
This cannot fight against brute force (I would imagine some tags will be quite common so some research would produce a frequency-based word list that could do this), mistakes would be expected (eg, the photo owner might put in random tags that make no sense to anyone else) and human-based captcha solving will easily get around it, but it's something to consider. Another crack would be to take the thumbnail and compare it against a DB of flickr pictures, but realistically, that's a large job. I wonder if Flickrs API can do that? To defend against this, the thumbnail could be altered somehow (eg, desaturated, change the colour balance etc) so that in machine terms, the images are different but in human terms they mean the same thing.
I'm still in the Philippines, still running an interaction design company, and having such a time that my dreams consist of writing algorithms (they are to calm me down).
The big program is still being developed and we're reconsidering UI toolkits. wxPython is wonderful and powerful, but it moves very fast and doesn't offer what I really need (embedded browser for rich interactive experiences, ie, Javascript). I understand that there are bindings to webkit and gecko, but these are not complete or reliable enough for production code. We're also considering XULrunner which does this but offers a less rich basic widget set.
I'm totally in love with her: My life has just changed for ever...
But not much to show for it. My wife and I are expecting our first child next Friday. This will be a nervous week indeed.
For my statistics project, I wrote a Python module to import SPSS files and was wondering whether anyone would be interested in it if I released it as open source. It's one piece of code that would greatly benefit from community testing. So far, it seems to work on the SPSS files I have without problem but SPSS have added extra things to the format. Cleverly (or rather obviously, but nice to know that they've done it), older versions of the software can still read the new formats, but they just ignore the extra bits that the new formats have. My software does just that: it ignores all the extra bits, though I suspect that there may be some cases where my software misses completely. For example, the architecture: I believe mine only reads one endian.
But it could be useful for some people. There are already FOSS versions in R and PSPP (I think the R version came from the PSPP code) but they are in C and a Python version might be useful. I wonder if SciPy has it? Currently, it can import via COM, but that is Windows only so of limited application. A pure Python module would have no such restrictions. Scientists using Python might appreciate being able to cut one more string to SPSS so I think I will release it. If anyone here is interested, let me know and it could be the spur that motivates me to release it!
I've started a usability consultancy officially instead of doing work ad hoc. This should be fun as I have to learn marketing very quickly indeed. In the Philippines, I think there is one independent consultant who is serious about the work (ie, has advertising) and a few others who seem to do it as a sideline. However, in nearby Hong Kong, there are two that I can find: Apogee and Customer Input. Looking through Google adwords shows that there is only a small market in HK compared to say the UK. However, we will be operating internationally so the location is of less importance. It does create some difficulties in terms of meeting the clients, but for general applications, I can easily get a good sample of users of varying abilities. It's also about time to put my remote testing experience to, erm, the test.
I'm also toying with the idea of joining the UPA whom I gave a talk for some while ago, but I need to check whether I will get my money's worth. It could be good for being noticed by potential customers.
5 Jun 2008 (updated 5 Jun 2008 at 12:17 UTC) »
When it's a bit more solid, I will probably release it under the AGPL.
llkc - I guess I didn't explain well. My idea isn't an interactive debugger, though there are elements of that in it. The best thing is to produce the code.
In other news, I should (hopefully, all being well!) be doing some consultancy soon. I'm not sure of the size of the job, but it sounds like a good one (ie, interesting and a challenge).
salmoni certified others as follows:
Others have certified salmoni as follows:
[ Certification disabled because you're not logged in. ]
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
del.icio.us
Digg
Google bookmark
reddit
Simpy
StumbleUpon
Furl
Newsvine
Technorati
Tailrank