End user education

Schneier has an interesting article on his blog about end user education.

Graph of attacks in real time

A map of the world showing the source of attacks and statistics about past attack rates.

http://www.sicherheitstacho.eu/

Open source eye tracker

Open source code and open source construction directions for building an eye tracker.
http://code.google.com/p/experteyes/

Adding \smiley to latex

\usepackage{wasysym}

Adds \smiley and \frownie along with a bunch of other commands to your latex document.

Translating SMI BeGaze error messages

I’m just starting to work with SMI BeGaze and have already run into some non-intuitive messages and problems that took some figuring out. The following is a continuously updated blog post of different confusion points I’ve had and the eventual solution:

This version of BeGase only allows 2 gaze data files per experiment

Translation: You put in the wrong license usb dongle.

If you use the Experiment Center dongle the BeGaze software thinks it is in some sort of evaluation mode and will only allow you to work with a small amount of data. You have to use the correct license key.

Audio not playing or not visible when you know it is there

You know you recorded audio but for some reason BeGaze doesn’t show the audio track and when you play back the video it doesn’t play any audio.

Solution: If you hide the webcam video on the left sidebar the audio also vanishes. To get audio back just expand the “Webcam” tab on the left sidebar. Note that hiding this box makes BeGaze process data a bit faster.

BeGaze does this because the audio isn’t associated with the screen recording, its associated with the webcam file. When you tell BeGaze to hide the webcam it hides the audio as well.

Congradulations Dr. Janice

Janice Tsai successfully defended today. Congratulations!

Don’t program on fridays

I just found an interesting paper on the number of bugs programmers create and fix at different points during the week. His conclusion is that changes to code which result in a bug are most often made on Fridays so don’t code on Friday.

Playing at creating new domains

Finally got around to registering kamivaniea.com. Hopefully when I get some time I’ll put up a decent web page here. For now though, my official home pages is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kami/.

Datadvantages and the MOMA

I just ran across this data management application from Varonis called Datadvantages. They appear to be doing some very interesting things with file control management interfaces. Their application not only gives administrators the ability to view who can access what in a very fine grain manner they also provide a recommendation service. The recommendations suggest access rights that should be granted or removed based on the system’s heuristics. Based on their marketing documentation it looks like their recommendations are primarily based on frequency of use and the relations between people. If anyone has a better understanding of what the recommendation capabilities of this interface are I would be interested to hear about it.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York had some very interesting though common access control issues when it came to their data. In addition to the general problem of having a large number of users accessing a large number of files the MOMA also has business relations with many other organizations. They also have a need to archive all data that isn’t being used. For there access issues they ended up turning to Datadvantages which seems to be working well for them.

A Computer World article had this to say about the MOMA’s installation of Datadvantages:

Granting or revoking permissions for data access is challenging because the user repository and data file server information are in constant flux. Moreover, once permissions are granted, they are rarely revoked because doing so may have unpredictable consequences on authorized use. This often results in overly permissive access rights for most data users.

How to use color in information visualization

NASA has a nice page on using color in information visualizations.

http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/