Archive for the 'Psychology' Category

I've watched some great videos on Google Video in the last few days:

• "All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google
• Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Lessons From Advogato - Some very interesting insights on Trust Networks and specifically on Advogato, of course.
• The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less - An extremely counter-intuitive lecture on why more choices may make us more frustrated and depressed than ever and why 28% of Americans are willing to donate their organs when they die, versus to 90% of the Europeans.
• Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class
• Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL - I'm not sure that a pro DBA can learn much from this lecture, but I've certainly learned a lot and will probably revisit it sometimes.
• Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness - It's a unique lesson from a Buddhist teacher on happines and it paints a stark contrast between our society's bullshit that's ought to make us happy versus real inner peace and joy.
• Aspect Oriented Programming: Radical Research in Modularity - AOP is an interesting concept and I think it may have its benefits in case of larger systems, but I'm not convinced that it's viable due to the increased complexity that it adds to the system.
• Best Practices in Javascript Library Design - A lecture from John Resig himself.

• Daniel Goleman: Why aren't we all Good Samaritans?

Three Unforgivable Usability Sins

It's a stellar article on usability defects that make user's and related parties' life hell. I was pretty conscious about all these mistakes except blaming error mesages.

I used a web based payment service of my ISP several months ago that asked me for the date on my last bill that I got from them. After inputting the date in yyyy.mm.dd. format as it was present on the bill and the validation failed, I tried it without the ending dot and I succeeded. I found 2 more similar usability errors related to their messy form and reported to them. I got no response ever since and eventually stopped using their payment service. They should fire their customer service.

Unfortunately, most developers don't have a clue on usability engineering and that's the reason why there are so many crappy applications, but in the above case one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist just to make such a straightforward input validation a little more flexible. I guess most geeks prefer relating to machines more than relating to people and that's why they suck at usability.

Not Invented Here

It's an interesting concept that can deeply affect the evolution of our technologies. Despite .NET coming from Microsoft, I think it's a great platform so I deliberately use Mono for various projects. I think Miguel knew that there will be a group of people that will pretty much dislike the whole idea because of its origins from Microsoft, but he took his chance and here Mono is. I was much more prone to Not Invented Here in the past, but I think there's really more to lose than to win if you apply it.

Empathy: Could It Be What You're Missing?

Do you suffer from epathy deficit disorder? Read this article to find out!

The Courage to Live Consciously is probably the most inspiring and insightful self improvement article I've ever read.

Once in a while I find a site with full of life wisdom which makes me think in new, better ways. I officially welcome Pick the Brain among my feeds!

I've always believed that truly taking care of things absolutely makes a difference in any field. I've interacted many times with customer services to help them and they didn't even bothered to thank my help. As a result I developed negative images associated with them and their value lowered greatly in my mind.

Here's a short, but very relevant post about this topic.

I've just redone the Jung Typology Test yesterday and it turned out that my preferences regarding my Myers-Briggs type are considerably stronger than one and half years ago. I think I've matured since than and I know myself better so my answers reflect my personality better this time. I think the MBTI is a very good way of modelling people's personalities.

Based on my results, I chose the right profession. Good to know that. ;)

• 7 Helpful Tips To Immediately Increase Your Confidence

• Power Napping - Improved Mental And Physical Performence
• The mind, as it evolves - Depression as a survival tool? Some new treatments assume so.
• Nautilus & Metadata, love at first sight
• Why do men ignore nagging wives? It's all science
• thePeoplesToolbox - Tools for programmers and web designers
• Insecurity may drain your immune system
• Brain Diseases I Wish I Had - I personally would rather not have these diseases because their accompanying side effects, but it's an extremely interesting read.
• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta - Space tourist and billionaire programmer Charles Simonyi designed Microsoft Office. Now he wants to reprogram software.
• Miguel: Compiler Updates - C# 3.0
• 22 Ways to Reduce Eye Strain at Your Computer
• Zero Install: An executable critique of native package systems

• We should be more aware of our cognitive biases.
• What about speeding up opening documents using D-Bus?
• The Cathedral of Santa Eulalia is a beautiful building.