What I really want is a push queue for documents and other data fragments. I’ll call it “Q”, both for the obvious phonic match as well as to score a little ST:TNG joke plus make a Cleveland arena reference. The latter two work because I sort of envision the application as being a very powerful being as well as a large gathering place for data.

The way I envision it, I drag a file onto the main Q window and it’s added to the general pool. Every item in Q can be labeled, tagged, commented, and otherwise meta’d half to death. The queue can be sorted or filtered on any number of things—file creation or modification date, Q addition date, file name, containing folder, tags, labels, and so forth. Also, every item can be assigned a due date.

When I double-click on anything in Q, it opens the original file just as if I’d double-clicked its Finder icon. (I’m an OS X user, but translate “Finder icon” to whatever the equivalent words are in your OS of choice.) So really, Q is maintaining a pool of aliases to the original files, plus any associated metadata. In that sense, it’s like iTunes set to not copy added music to the iTunes Music folder in your home directory. Yes, some people run it that way. And like iTunes, the ability to create smart lists based on tags and comments and such would be really awesome.

I’d find Q deeply useful because as new tasks come in/up, I could drag in whatever file(s) relate to those tasks so that I don’t lose track of what I have to do, quickly tag them and set a due date, and continue with whatever I was working on. There’s room for tons of even more useful features like synchronization across multiple computers, the ability to accept any fragment of data at all as opposed to files, and more, but the core need is a task queue.

To illustrate this with some examples from my recent workflow, I would drag in a copy or two of the IRS W-9 form, a couple of e-mail messages, an invoice, and a Word document containing a set of interview questions. The W-9s would get tagged by the clients’ names, the invoice would be tagged and flagged, and so on. The real key here is that they’d be add-sorted by default, so I can work on them first-come-first-served. Of course, other approaches would be possible with other sorts and filtering.

It seems like, with all the GTD mania floating around, someone would have come up with this solution already, but my searches have so far been fruitless. I tried a couple of applications that seemed like they might be close to what I want, but they weren’t. Am I just using the wrong search terms, or is this something that just doesn’t exist yet?

So, to more or less rip off Roger’s format, please comment to say:

1. Who are you (name and occupation)? Who who, who who?
2. Where are you from? (Feel free to add yourself to the Frappr map!)
3. How long have you been visiting this site, either directly or via RSS?
4. What was it that first brought you to meyerweb?
5. What would you like to read more (or less) about here on meyerweb, or read/hear from me in general? Be as general or specific as you like.

Please note that, thanks to my spam defenses, any first-time commenters will have their contributions held in moderation until I approve them. I’ll try to stay on top of that, but I will have to sleep on occasion, so you may have to be patient. Apologies.

There’s more to this than just a simple evolution, I admit. The first major change is the addition of navigation links across the top of each page. For some time now, a lot of the material that people come here to find was buried, difficult to find unless you knew where you were going, or else on what terms to search. By pointing directly to the topic areas I think will most interest visitors, I believe the site is now much easier to use.

The second major change is the layout of “metainformation” for each post (and comments on posts). In this area, I was heavily influenced by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction 7.0, and I definitely owe him a debt of gratitude and inspiration. As will be evident from even a casual comparison of the two sites, I took a general design idea Khoi uses and adapted it to my particular situation. I think it works rather well.

The third notable change is a feature addition that I’ve been planning to add for a couple of months now. New to the site is a Syndication Feeds page which brings together (dare I say it aggregates?) all of meyerweb’s RSS feeds. The real step forward here is the debut of two new “Thoughts From Eric” feeds, including a feed of just technical posts and a feed of just personal posts. Now all of you who just come here for the technical stuff, and couldn’t care less about the person behind the site, can restrict your feed to screen out the worthless drivel. Similarly, those of you who know me personally but don’t understand the eye-glazing technical stuff can filter out the confusing nerdity.

Even better, each of the three “Thoughts From Eric” feeds (including the traditional “show me everything!” feed) comes in one of two flavors: summary or full content. At long last, I’ll find out if providing full-content feeds drives my bandwidth consumption up, or eases it down.

I’ve also established a new Redesign Watch feed, which is something I know will be of interest to many visitors.

I made other small refinements throughout, and odds are I’ll continue to tinker for a little while. Overall, though, I feel I met my goal of making meyerweb a more friendly site to visit, and a more feature-rich environment. Explore, and enjoy.

The general idea is to pick a two-word combination you can easily remember. For example, suppose you’re a big fan of pizza and Pepsi, and would have no trouble remembering those words. Perfect: use them the basis of your password. No, you don’t make it “pizzaPepsi”—instead, you interleave the words. That would yield “pPiezpzsai”. It looks fairly random, and yet is very easy to recreate because the seed words are so easy to remember. If you have trouble remembering the exact sequence of letters, you can just write the words down on a piece of scrap paper and follow along.

In cases where your two words have different lengths, you can always tack on numbers. For example, maybe your seed words are “milkshake” and “fries”. That would normally yield “mfirlikesshake”, which is okay, but you could tack the numbers “123″ onto “fries” to get “mfirlikessh1a2k3e”. Alternatively, you could put the numbers at the beginning, so you get “m1i2l3kfsrhiaekse”.

I’ve found that when I start using a new password created this way, it takes me a few days to adapt to it. I usually have the seed words written down some place handy during that training period. Then my fingers take over, and from then on I can type it blindfolded in less than a second. I don’t even think about the actual characters I’m typing: I just start, and the muscle memory kicks in.

So if you’re looking for a way to generate harder-to-crack passwords, there’s one possibility. How about you—do you have any nifty human-friendly password-creation recipes?

Now, suppose the Disney database stores that biometric data. Now they have that data tied to a credit card number, purchasing patterns in the parks, probably a home address and phone number, and so on. Interesting. Guess what? As of 2 January 2005, Disney is doing that for all passes: day passes, park hopper passes, all kinds of passes. Every kind of pass. Get a pass, get your fingers scanned. (Okay, yes, you can opt out and be required to show photo ID, but how many people will bother?)

That’s a whole lot of biometric data associated with a whole lot of consumer data. Interesting, don’t you think?

Then, several days later, I flipped the comments back on. In fifteen seconds, I had four more comment spams, and these got past the spam filter, as inevitably they will, sooner or later. So I flipped the comments back off. Now I’m feeling a profound disinclination to ever re-enable them. Yes, that’s letting the bastards win, but I only have so much energy to fight them.

So that’s why comments have been turned off. No estimates regarding when they’ll be back.

But I was looking to keep myself occupied for a few minutes, and I have very few games installed on the laptop, so Big Bang Chess got the nod. I immediately cranked the AI setting all the way over to the left (thus elevating fast thinking above smart thinking) and started playing. As I blew through a few quick matches, it occurred to me that there are a few things that a computer chess game could do to make me more interested.

Human-like turn lengths for the AI.

One of the things that most often frustrates me about computer chess is that the AI will make a move within seconds of my making a move. More often, it will do so immediately. Then I sit there, thinking my slow organic thoughts, feeling vaguely stupid for being such a slowpoke even though I know there’s no direct comparison. Eventually, I make a move. Instantly, the computer makes its move. My first reaction is, “That was awfully quick. Was he waiting for the move I just made? Did I just walk into a trap? What am I missing?” And then I go hunting around the board, not sure where to look, not sure that there’s even anything to see.

I’m aware that the computer needs only a fraction of a second to run through possible moves and pick one. If it’s a really advanced system, it may take 20 or 30 seconds as it looks five moves ahead. If the computer took a human amount of time before moving, say a few minutes, I’d feel more at ease. Yes, I know that means having the computer pick a move and then do absolutely nothing for a few minutes. I don’t care. This is purely a matter of acting in a manner that makes me more comfortable, and therefore more likely to enjoy the entire process. The UI could have a “go ahead and move” button tucked away in a corner for me to use if I ever got tired of waiting.

I realized this was what I wanted when I asked myself why I was setting the AI to be quick at the expense of being smart. Aside from making it more likely that I’d win, I realized it was because I felt like if the computer was going to move at a speed that, subjectively, seemed reckless and devoid of consideration, then its moves should reflect that. And they do. But even if I set the AI to be as smart as possible, it’s still going to seem to me like it’s moving without putting much thought into its game.

So put up a picture of an opponent who looks around the board, holds a chin in his or her hand as if pondering deep thoughts, leans back in reflection, and generally acts like it’s still thinking even though it picked a move three minutes ago. It will make the game more enjoyable.

An option to show all of the squares that any enemy piece can reach.

Part of my problem in chess is that I don’t have the patience to figure out whether a given square I’m considering occupying (or piece I’m thinking about taking) is already covered. That’s largely due to all the possible ways a square can be covered. Is there a knight within striking distance? Can a bishop jump over from the other side of the board? And so on. It isn’t that I can’t manage this mental feat. It’s just that I have little interest in doing so for every single last square that interests me, turn after turn. So if a game tinted all enemy-reachable squares red, for example, I’d have a much better grasp of the strategic situation.

This would obviously be an option in the preferences, albeit one I’d never disable. Having a similar “tint all squares my pieces can reach” option would be cool, too. It would be even better if the amount of tinting of a square was based on the number of pieces that could move to it.

This kind of visualization would keep me from making stupid mistakes, and mean a lot less use of the “Undo move” option. Who knows? Maybe with enough play in that mode, I’d eventually reach the point where I didn’t need the help.

The ability to somehow create variant games.

Back in high school, I was a member of the chess club, mostly because a lot of my friends were members. Also because I still bought into the idea that the really smart people played chess, and I wanted to be really smart. We had a few variant games that I remember fondly, and it would be fun to have them reborn. My favorite was Nuclear Chess. In that one, any piece could instead of moving choose to self-detonate, destroying itself and any pieces in adjacent squares. (Of course, if you did that with your King, you lost the game—unless you took out the opposing King, in which case it was a tie.) And then there was Thermonuclear Chess, where any piece could make a normal move and then immediately detonate.

They were quick games. Lots of fun, too. The nature of the game changes dramatically when you have to make sure an opposing piece can’t just plow into your pawn line and immediately detonate, thus wiping out your King in the process.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how one could open up a chess game’s architecture to allow the creation of variants like that, but I’d love to see it happen.

Just some random thoughts on a game I don’t really like. If you want to talk Checkers, though…

So the bookmarklet takes your ‘master password’, crosses it with the domain of the site, and generates an MD5-based result. So let’s assume meyerweb had accounts. You would fire off the bookmarklet, which would ask you type in your master password. So let’s say your master password is ‘passwd’; this is combined with www.meyerweb.com and the resulting password is 68573552. On the other hand, if you just use meyerweb.com, the result is 92938a6e

Now, while those aren’t the most secure possible passwords, they’re a lot more secure than ‘passwd’. So I’d like to make use of this bookmarklet. Fine, great. The problem is what you just saw: the generated password changes if the full host and domain name bit changes. This could be a problem if, say, amazon.com suddenly starts routing all logins to a server named login.amazon.com… or vice versa. So I’d like to adapt the bookmarklet so it grabs just the domain and TLD (I probably got those terms wrong; I usually do) of a URL. Problem is, I can’t write regular expressions for squat. I don’t even understand how the regexp in the existing bookmarklet works.

So, a little help, please? Given the form http://www.domain.tld/blah/foo/wow.xyz, I want the regexp to return just domain.tld. Just leave a solution in the comments, and you’ll earn the respect and adulation of your peers. At least those of them who read the comments.

Let the “valid and well-formed” jokes commence.

It was, of course, too obvious an idea for me to have had it first: Why Not? has a post proposing the same idea just over a year ago. The followup comments pretty much covered all the related ideas that came up as well.

So while it turns out I don’t get points for having the idea first, the question still remains: why don’t ATM cards (and the ATMs themselves) offer this capability?

Update: I forgot to enable comments, so a few people have e-mailed me to say that Bank of America ATMs do in fact let you set your language preferences, along with several other options. Apparently these settings only carry to other BoA ATMs, so I suspect it’s data being stored in their database instead of being written onto the card itself. It would be nicer if the card could carry that information and have it recognized by all ATMs, but I suppose we get these things one step at a time.

• I can’t believe what great friends we have. At a Sunday afternoon party at the gotomedia pad, we were joined by college friends from Oregon, others who live a four-hour drive from San Francisco, and another from Cleveland. You read that right: one of our local friends flew out to the Bay Area to be at the party. Well, that and to take a vacation in California, but still! And that doesn’t even count the WaSP folks who also attended, like Simon, Porter, and Molly, who came from Kansas, Washington DC, and Arizona respectively.

  It was at the same party that I finally met Porter’s wife, so I can now stop referring to her as “Porter’s imaginary spouse.”

• If there’s one thing I envy about San Francisco, it’s the BART system. You can get darned near anywhere, and it makes commuting from the city over to Oakland a snap. This is particularly true when your hotel is on a stop, and so is the place you’re headed. Despite this, I still got turned around in downtown Oakland and was very nearly late for the second day of training. The only reason I was able to find the place at all was that we’d walked over to the training facility the day before, so I was able to identify and use landmarks to reconstruct our path, and thus find the labs.

• It turns out the BART ticket machines run on Windows. I found this out by the usual method, of course.

• In a conversation about the presidential campaign and Ohio being considered a key battleground state because of its employment situation and political complexity, one of my hosts opined, “The Bay Area pretty much spans the political spectrum from liberal to extremely liberal.”

• At the WaSP and Friends after-dinner party on Tuesday, Tantek publicly announced his departure from Microsoft. He refused to say where he was going next, although we’ve since learned that he’s headed to Technorati. By Wednesday evening, I’d actually come to that conclusion without having seen the post, but of course I didn’t manage to post until now, so I look like a poser instead of eerily prescient… although if you’d take the word of a VP at Macromedia, he could attest to my prediction.

  Like others, in a way I’m sorry to see Microsoft losing such a passionate, intelligent, and committed standards advocate. We could speculate all day as to whether or not there’s even room for people like him, but one could assume the same about AOL, and they funded a whole standards team for a few years. In any case, Tantek firmly believes this is the right thing for him to do and seems happy with the life change it represents, so I can’t be anything but happy for him. I can’t wait to see what he does at Technorati (and really hope the service stabilizes in the near future).

• I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday evening talking, at various stages, with Rebecca Blood about the Web, adoption, growing up in the Midwest, and more. On my flight home Thursday, I was delighted to discover a mini-profile of her in a Time article titled “Meet Joe Blog.” It’s kind of a weird feeling to open a national magazine and read about someone you’d talked to just two days before.

• Not only did Metagrrrl spend some time with my laptop at the party, so did Min Jung Kim. Geez, this thing gets more action than I ever did.

• At one point during the party, someone was copying a movie to his or her laptop. I observed this activity for a few moments, then turned to Jonas Luster (who managed to get a picture of me drinking some MS kool-aid) and said, “You know, in Soviet America, the movies rip YOU!”

  Okay, maybe you had to be there.

Ordinarily I’d have let this slide, as I don’t intend to make this an employment board, except the combination of CSS skills and the name FASA really caught my eye and my inner geek forced me to post.

Some changes that may or may not be of interest to you:

• By default, comment posting will be disabled but trackbacks will be permitted. I expect things to stay that way until I decide what my policy will be regarding anonymous posting, comment spammers, and the like. I’ll open up commenting on the occasional question post—I expect to put up one later today, in fact—but I won’t be opening up every post for comments. I’ve taken note of how that’s gone at some other sites, and have rarely liked what I’ve seen.
• All feeds will continue to use excerpts; I will not be publishing full-content feeds, mostly because if I did y’all would saturate the outgoing pipes. Yes, dammit, bandwidth does still matter.
• Both RSS feeds have lost their word-count and category information. As soon as I figure out how to recreate those in WordPress, they’ll be back. I had them figured out for WP1.0.2, but the very same functions seem to silently fail in WP1.2 beta, which is what I’m using. I’ll get it worked out eventually.
• The RSS2.0 feed now includes <pubDate> elements for your sorting pleasure. FeedDemon users of the world, rejoice.
• About 300 back-catalog posts (roughly speaking, December 1999 through October 2002) all got dumped into the “General” category. You might not want to try to read that category all in one shot.
• I’ll likely fiddle with the categorization of old posts as I come across them, so don’t do anything that depends on a post being in a particular category. No, I have no idea what that might be.
• The old archive pages still exist, so your permalinks won’t break. If you want to update them to the new URIs, that would be appreciated, but if not, no big deal.
• The vast majority of posts, including posts up through last month, show as having been published precisely at midnight. That’s because the old archive file didn’t carry time information for those posts, not because I’m an obsessive-compulsive night owl.
• Posts now show their categories, and clicking on said category names gets you a list of every post in the category. Right now, that means a page that shows the full post content for every post in the category. I plan to create a condensed-summary category view at some point.
• I’ll probably also continue fiddling with the layout, displayed information, and various other aspects of the post and archive pages. Just don’t refer to a particular layout idea in a debate unless you grab a screenshot, that’s all.

That’s about it. I just thought some of you out there would be interested in the details.

• Like you haven’t seen it already, but hey: Dave Shea‘s A Roadmap to Standards. It’s definitely worth reading, and I’m not just saying that because somewhere near the end he recommends more than half my book catalog.
• Seeing itself might get a massive upgrade in the near future thanks to laser light and mirrors. Hmmm… how much fun would it be to have a complete CSS reference overlaying the world? Yeah—not very.
• It occurs to me that Simon St. Laurent might be interested in the possibilites that a full-color personal display might bring filtering the world, considering the thoughts he had with regard to this DVD player.
• You could, of course, view DVD alterations as a way of correcting or filtering a piece of work to conform to your worldview. Sometimes, as the British Medical Journal points out, corrections can be a good thing.
• And I wonder what Jack Valenti thinks of a DVD player that alters copyrighted material?
• Ro collected 300 images from around the Web and they’re… well… familiar. It’s almost an art piece. I like the use of negative letter-spacing for the title.
• A note for OS X users: Panic, creators of the inestimable Transmit, have released Stattoo. Looks veeeery interesting, although it’s so rare for me to have any appreciable portion of my desktop visible that I’m not sure how much use I’d get out of it.
• Now here’s a tool we all can use: a list of the changeover points from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time all over the world. And you can even find the change points for the last five years. Woohoo!
• Elena, the radioactive Russian rider, had to remove her photojournal because a few million too many people went to check it out. Thankfully, there are a number of mirrors available.
• Of course, if you wanted to get close to the high-Geiger action yourself, you could join a Chernobyl tour. I didn’t see any mention of oversized earthworms or Matthew Broderick, though.
• Tom proposes a geographical metaphor to measure your memetic cluefulness. I put myself somewhere near Bingen, mostly because I like the sound of the word “Bingen.”
• You may as well join the memtic herd, think of badgers, and then visit Kenya. How long will you be able to stay?