Two years ago I fell in love with this photo.

I can’t even remember where I saw it first but I loved it. So I spent an afternoon looking around for a large copy. I did all the typical things, you do when looking for a photo. Google image search, tin eye. As you might know, the internet is a busy place filled with photos and badly organized.

I did find some pages about it through. The pages said it was from Life magazine 1985. Makes sense, looks exactly like something I would see in Life magazine.

Most people on the internet link to it from FFFOUND. So I assume it blew up there. FFFOUND links to “this isn’t happiness” which is on Tumblr. They link to “calvinscanadiancaveofcool” which still exists, but not the page I wanted. “Calvinscanadiancaveofcool” posted it in 2009/06 based on the url. He has a presence on Tumblr and Blogspot but I wasn’t able to find his email to ask where he got it from.

Dead end on search.

But, it was on Life Magazine.

So I looked at how Life magazine archives and sells their photos. After contacting a couple of people in the industry and learning how it worked, I was directed to Corbis photography as a potentially reseller.

Going there, I actually found a similar photo. So similar it must have been from the same day and photographer. So I was close, why didn’t they have the photo I wanted only a photo that wasn’t as nice.

Stock photo ID: 42-32054467

Even though they didn’t have what I wanted, they did have real information about the photographer! I could now google him.

Photographer

Googling him, I found his online presence and tried to contact him through his website. Unfortunately, he has passed away. But his son now runs his archive. He believed the photo to be on the west coast (of USA), and would check for me in the summer (6 months from then).

One possibility is going through a good library that indexes magazine articles by subject. There are some dates on the agency photos but LIFE told me their story was 1979 while it didn’t use this photo. A blog lists it as same mag in 1985 which is wrong.

Google lets you sort by time range but then it probably starts in the 90s or so, while people were on USENET earlier & sites like AOL.

Libraries will do searches over the phone, but I don’t know to this extent. My father often placed photos on other international mags too.

So it wasn’t in Life, and the year wasn’t even right. I waited 6 months until he was on the west coast and could look through the negatives for me.

Meanwhile, Libraries

Meanwhile, both me and photographer were contacting librarians to have them look through archives so we could find the photo that way. The theory was that if we could find out for sure it was printed somewhere, we could actually get them to find a high quality version of what they had printed. Librarians were unable to find any copy in any magazine for any year. Complete dead end.

6 Months later

The photographer got back to me. He thinks the negative might ahve been lost in riots in paris. (maybe one of the best lines in an email I’ve ever gotten).

I also have a photo clearance / copyright company looking for that photo and it’s been hectic lately. I did talk to TIME LIFE and they had no exact copies they knew of, they said the referenced dated issue in some blog credits were not the issue, if memory serves I think they said they used a similar one in LIFE about 1978. If you could find that through a library it would probably give an approximate year to look at other sources, most of the top magazines such as Stern (Germany), Paris Match, Sunday London Times magazine, Saturday Evening Post, etc., and sometimes he’s have similar work in other TIME imprints such as Fortune, TIME magazine, etc..

Also one blog credited it to LIFE about 1985 or so and to Sygma / John Bryson but Corbis Sygma also says they can’t find the exact one, we do have similar on the agencies though, did you see them and Getty / TIME LIFE? It’s not impossible Corbis lost or misplaced it when they took over Sygma and near riots broke out in the Paris office.

Reddit

6 more months later. The photo was posted on reddit. And was hugely popular. It is amazing, because that means for like 6 hours, everyone is looking at the same thing.

I had a brief window where

http://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/2u70vn/anna_fisher_astronaut_on_the_cover_of_life/

If you read the thread, you’ll see we found someone who knew Anna fischer. A family friend of her reads reddit.

But we didn’t find the photo. Current theory is that the photo was discarded because it wasn’t technically correct. And at some point someone uploaded the negative to the internet. There isn’t any clear reason why it is labeled as life magazine or whatever year.

So the search continues. I really like the idea this photo is hidden away somewhere in an attic and someone doesn’t know people want to see it.

Marc Andreessen recently posted that YO represent one bit of information sent to a user through an app.

But as Claude Shannon famously said, “Marc, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: Information is the negative reciprocal value of probability.”

YO is at least two bytes.

I have 1000 friends on Facebook. So at minimum just the name of which friend sent me a YO is an index in to an array which has 1000. 2^10 is 1024, so 10 bits.

The day has 24 hours or 1500 minutes. Forget seconds. I can see down to the minute when you sent me a YO. Now 1:23 is pretty close to 1:24 but even if you only have a resolution of 20 minutes, you have 1500/20 => 75 chunks. Minimum 6 bits of information.

Some time slots are way more meaningful than others. If i YO you 5 minutes after a meeting starts, it means something. If I YO you at 1am, I’m probably thinking something else entirely.

Choosing not to send an email or text is information. I’m forcing you to do work to reply. And I’m suggesting I have no textual information to send. 2 more bits sounds about right.

And as Marc points out, the ABSENCE of a YO is also information. And the absence of a YO is different types of information throughout the day. Absence at 10am is different than absence at 8pm. So instead of being 1 bit, I’m going to put that at at least 3 bits. Because as anyone knows, waiting for an important phone call is a big deal.

Also, in the case of the people calling each other and hanging up. Being not willing to spend money on you via text messages or phone minutes is also more signal. 1 bit.

All in all, I figure YO is about 2 BYTES. Minimum.

Social actually has a lot of small details to it. Those details start to add up.

Claude Shannon was the father of information theory if you want to read more.

Recently my cofounder had drinks with someone who works at apple in marketing. All credit belongs to them.

Designing an app icon? Want to have a memorable brand? Drag your app in to a folder with 3 other apps. Does you app icon still stand out? If no, redo the icon.

Try this test with Path, Threes, or 4sq. You will realize that each has an extremely simple and memorable icon.

Designers already know this

They are already testing their designs under the worst case scenarios. Facebook blogged that they didn’t do a new newsfeed because they have users with small screens and no contrast. Artists and Photographers will often flip their painting upside down in order to see the shapes and reset their brain

Back up from your work, and you’ll do better work.

There are only four decisions regarding the UX of WUT. It is an incredibly simple application.

Most of my friends who looked at it asked for new features. Comments, favs, a newsfeed. One of my friends asked me to take away one of the features.

It took me off guard.

Here is an app that barely has any interaction at all, and he was suggesting that we reduce it further. Maybe one of the four decisions we had made could be improved? Maybe adding things to the app wasn’t going to work out, maybe we had to alter one of the decisions we had already made.

Changing decisions

Humans have a hard time changing decisions they make. It take cognitive effort to make decisions and we run out of it as the day goes by. Also, once we make a decision, we have a bias that says we want to stay consistent to that decision. (consistency bias and sunk cost)

Easy and hard

Looking at a product and saying what you should add, when you have a list of features you know about from other apps is easy.

Realizing that some of the features might need to be removed is hard. Re-analyzing decisions made is a process of forcing yourself to assume you are wrong.

Discussion on HN

In the last two years I think we have all seen this line from time to time. Everytime Apple does anything, they have a large number of people who disagree with them. Almost every article following Steve’s death talked about the possibility of the death of Apple’s design roots or ability to design amazing products.

I read these articles and they exhaust me.

When someone uses that sentence, I don’t think they are aware of how it comes off. It sounds like they are trying to brag about their sense of style. By invoking what Steve Jobs would have done, it sounds like they are saying “I have as much taste as Steve Jobs and I represent him after death by complaining about the same things he would have complained about.”

You don’t represent Steve Jobs. That isn’t how it works.

If you don’t think something is well designed, say so and back it up with a better design. Do not drag a dead person into the conversation as support and speak for them. That is just bad taste.

Winston Churchill would have loved this blog post.

Originally posted here

Today I gamified my shell.

Ok, stop laughing, I only spent 2 hours working on it.

I wanted to actually learn the aliases I’ve carefully setup. I always think up new aliases, but immediately forget them, and continue on exactly as before.

Feature spec.

I want feedback every time I should use an alias. The feedback needs to be immediate. More important than that, I don’t want to be distracted by anything flashy. The notification must be small and persistent.

I boiled down the feature set to this:

• look at the aliases defined
• look at the last command executed
• provide information about what should have written

I chose to use the right hand side of my terminal prompt to display the information. The nice thing about it is that it runs every time I finish executing a command. It is persistent and updated. And the code is fast enough that it gets out of my way.

Alternatives I choose not to do.

• Growl: too splashy and flashy for how often I execute commands.
• Sounds: would have driven me nuts when playing music.

Gamification

The notifications worked, but why do something reasonable when you have the opportunity to do something ridiculous.

I assigned points to successful habits and mistakes. As a first stab, I incremented my score every time I wrote a correctly formatted command and lost 50 points when I made a mistake.

It also keeps my high score, the last command I typed, and the last command I got wrong.

Code

You can get the code here

Realiaser

Update: After a weekend.

I’ve only had it for the weekend and my high score never goes above about 50-70 points.

I have an alias for git status which is the death of me.

alias gs='git status'

I keep loosing all my points because of it.

Update: After a week

I’ve learned 5 new aliases which I now use daily. Mostly around Git. I haven’t estimated my benefits yet but my score is about to break 1000.

I’m going to add a bunch more aliases.

Update: After 1 week + 1 day.

After creating 10 new aliases, my score dropped almost 700 points in 1 hour. But I’m noticing and remembering.

Adding too many aliases at once was a mistake.

I had a feeling I type too much. But I wasn’t sure how. So like any programmer, I got a computer to figure it out for me.

What did I type? Is there a history of everything I’ve typed? Something I can mine for interesting data?

~ wc ~/.zsh_history
17185   85023  723154 /Users/paul/.zsh_history

That is a bunch of data. And once I turned off de-duplication, for this experiment, it became a bunch more.

What do I type?

What shouldn’t I type? As it turns out, the answer is ‘git’. I’ve typed ‘git’ 6642 times, which is 6642 too many. A lot more than any other command.

git 6642
cd 988
gap 524
rm 487
ruby 452
ls 427
rails 407
rake 315
gem 268
mate 262

Here is the frequency graph of how I used my commands.

583 commands appear > 1 times
217 commands appear > 2 times
110 commands appear > 5 times
78 commands appear > 10 times
58 commands appear > 20 times
32 commands appear > 50 times
23 commands appear > 100 times
11 commands appear > 250 times

There are 32 commands which I’ve typed more than 50 times, many of which could use a great alias. The other 500+ commands, not so worried about those because I don’t use them very much.

How do I do this?

Huffshell is a gem which will looks at your history and generate a command tree based on what you type. It will also make basic suggestions for improvements.

Surprises Patterns

Huffshell even shows me there are patterns in my commit messages. I think about my changes primarily in terms of adding features or code and secondarily in terms of removing.

git 5141
  commit 3734
    -m 3726
      "add 538
      "remove 259
      "can 161
      "fix 128
      "change 110
      "bump 104
      "move 102
      "make 100
      "show 84

I don’t learn or relearn unless I’m forced to. Today I’m forcing myself to relearn my control key. I’ve turned it off completely. It does nothing.

Hopefully, in a couple weeks I’ll be completely reliant on the Caps Lock key, as a replacement. I’ve had it mapped for years, but never trained myself to use it.

I still love forums.

A lot.

Like, i think about how much time people can spend in forums, and how devoted they get to forums, and it blows my mind.

I love it.

standard social network friend stuff first time you do anything you get a ‘badge” call newbie

• gets you initiated to badges
• confirms your action first time out in the night you get another 1st stop badge, encourages more activity throughout the night?

get points for combos? or just every badge thing you get? more to come.

This blog is written in Sinatra, it is like Rails but without a ton of stuff I’m used to. I’m forced to work without migrations, view helpers, form builders. The good stuff.

But every time I hear myself complaining, I hear the way people have talked about Java to me. Connection Pools, JVM, massive scaling, byte code, and other crud that has been in java forever but only recently got in to rails.

Is every successive generation of technology a re-implementation of the smallest cell of useful functionality? Is Sinatra growing towards rails, rails growing towards java, java towards oblivion.

I love programming