Will's Blog

A while back I took apart a Magnavox BH3908 portable TV and promptly turned it into some sort of DIY Oscilloscope . Well another fun thing to do with these things is to hook it up to your stereo and get a music visualizer. Take a look at the video to see what I mean.

There were some more great presentations at Barcamp Boston 5 day 2, here are some comments on the ones I went to. Your Website Sicks! But it can be saved This was a great presentation, he showed a lot of examples showing how things can go wrong when the balance between form and function are skewed. One example he gave was the geeksquad website, which has lots of information but doesn't have an easy way to get an overview of what they do. After the presentation a few people volunteered their websites for critique. He had a lot of great feedback for them including "You have a FAQ section, has anyone ever asked these questions?" - which got a good laugh. There was only time for two, so I didn't have a chance to volunteer this site. He referenced smashingmagazine.com as a good source of design info. Agile Programming Methods This was sort of a crash course on Agile but had some nice group discussion on what tools people are using, and on what parts of Agile m...

Barcamp was a lot of fun, tons of interesting talks and learned a lot too. Here are some notes and reflections from the ones I attended. Unfortunately I hardly got any of the presenters names. Hacking the Brain This was really neat, the guy has a way to turn neurons on and off using light. He has a small worm with about 300 neurons that he tracks with a camera and shines light on to see what the different neurons do. Interesting discussion at the end about the technical limitations he's hitting regarding latency between taking a picture of the worm and being able to calculate where to shine a light. User Experience Design for Developers This guy (Dennis, I think) really seemed to know is stuff. He had some interesting ideas on how to design successful software and some insights that really made the points stick. Here are the notes I took: *The end user is the worst person to ask "What do you need it to do?" *Develop for a specific persona, be very specific....