Yeah, right. And kids do.

When one says, “guns don’t kill people”, it’s worth examining whether the same killing would have taken place in the absense of a gun. In gang wars, the answer would be yes, of course. But in many of the recent killings by school children, or — the horror — toddlers, it’s hard to argue that the answer could even remotely be ‘yes’.

Today’s killing of a 5-year old girl by her 3-year old brother might never have happened if the gun used for the killing were not available to the brother. Morgan King was even younger than Kayla Rolland at the time of her very untimely death (Kayla was thus far the youngest victim of firearm-related deaths.)

With elections around the corner, and everyone debating apparently more important issues, I hope you aren’t forgotten, Morgan.

R.I.P.

In the tradition of writing gadgets for Google Desktop and other Google properties, here’s one more from me: the Google Calendar Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard.

Since my switch to the Mac, I’ve been missing Google Desktop and using Dashboard more and more. And a calendar’s a nice thing to keep an eye on from time to time. So, without much further ado, here’s the gadget, oops, widget!

Synergy, a mouse and keyboard sharing utility, has proven insanely useful to us users of multiple machines on a single desk. Think of it as a software KVM switch, but minus the “V” (for video.) You can arrange multiple machines side-by-side and Synergy seamlessly moves the mouse pointer and keyboard input from one machine to another at desktop boundaries. It’s a great idea and a great tool.

I use QuickSynergy on my PowerBook and Mac Mini, but later happened to look at the official GUI client on my friend’s Windows laptop. It’s not often that a user interface provokes a blog post on a Monday morning, but this was it.

Here are the screenshots:

You will notice that QuickSynergy has exactly one dialog box (with two tabs, one to use when running as a server, and another when running as a client) plus one About dialog. Synergy has a total of 9 dialog boxes (plus one About dialog.) The question, I wish, the developers had asked themselves, was whether throwing in a dialog box for every single configurable parameter was the right thing to do. It seems like the UI Designer(s) simply gave up on trying to understand the users’ needs, and instead just threw everything out to the user: “here, now there’s a dialog box for every single line in the configuration file, go figure it all out.” In my opinion, that’s the designer shirking his or her responsibility of actually designing.

I wonder how many regular users would ever want to change some of the arcane options. And if there was a savvy user that wanted to, she could just edit the config file! Even as a Computer Science Ph.D. student, I have no idea what the “Relative Mouse Moves” option means, or why I should care about it. (If you say RTFM, that’s already the sign of a bad interface.)

QuickSynergy On Mac OS X	Synergy On Windows

Notice how, in the configuration screen, QuickSynergy simply shows you one screen with four text fields on the four sides, whereas Synergy expects you to enter the positions as “Machine X is to Direction Y of Machine Z.” The first way is so much more natural, but guess why the Synergy implements the second way? Because the configuration file is written that way.

These are clearly two very different styles of GUI design (though I would strongly argue that a text field for editing a configuration file does not count as a “GUI”, it’s simply a command-line interface (CLI) inside a text field.) Quick Synergy puts the user first, and is designed to let the user work naturally with his/her mental model of a keyboard/mouse layout. Synergy starts from the configuration file and slaps on a UI on top of it. Thus, Quick Synergy comes closer to the user, while Synergy stays closer to the machine.

UI Design is not about letting users edit configuration files, it’s about letting them do what they started out to do. That a config file needs to be edited to make that happen is a side story.

Now proven scientifically. Take, for instance, sleep. Nobody ever doubted that sleep was a necessity, but now I have scientific evidence to back me up when I’m caught napping in the middle of the day. I’m sleeping to stay fit, of course! They say, and I quote:

Even two or three nights of shortened sleep can have quite significant effects, he says, disrupting the normal hormonal balance and making more likely a series of long-term consequences, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. [...]

For adolescents, he suggests allowing them to sleep in at weekends, but not for more than two to three hours, as that can disrupt the normal rhythms.

And I drink to increase my income, if this little bit of research is to be believed. According to the authors,

“Drinkers may be able to socialize more with clients and co-workers, giving drinkers an advantage in important relationships,” the researchers said. “Drinking may also provide individuals with opportunities to learn people, business, and social skills.”

Update:
And chocolate! How can I forget chocolate! Though I do think that the term flavonoids seems more marketing-speak than genuine scientific terminology. But I’m no expert — I’m biting into this delectable delicacies purely on medical advice.

The fourth and final thing that’s good for everyone needs no scientific evidence, really. ;-)

If you’ve recovered from that tongue-twister of a title (there I go again!), here’s the news! A high-schooler’s parent in Houston is asking the school to ban ‘Fahrenheit 451‘, Ray Bradbury’s book (and later, a movie) about the horrors of a government that burns books and controls all knowledge. The grounds for the objection are the language used in the book. C’mon, the language used by high schoolers these days is nothing compared to what’s in the book. And oh, by the way, the guy, Alton Verm, says he hasn’t even read the book about whose content he’s objecting. Someone please tell me this is the 1^st of April.

The irony (apart from the obvious irony in someone trying to ban a book about banning books) is that this happened just after Banned Books Week.

Update: A friend pointed me to a similar case where an art teacher got fired for taking her students to an art museum where a student was offended by a naked statue.

If this is reason enough to fire a 28-year-veteran school teacher, I think these easily-offended students should just spend their childhood in the confines of their home, snug in their overprotective nests with their parents. After all, there’s so much else to be offended about in this world. At least that way, the rest of them would be able to explore, appreciate, and understand life, without getting their teachers fired for doing their job.

Update 2: There seem to be far too many of these occurrences these days. A Christian parent from Georgia wants to ban the Harry Potter series from her kids’ school’s media center. The reason? “I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop.” I kid you not.

And one element that’s common in almost all these frivolous complaints is this:

“She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”

I’ll end this short post here, so you may quickly go to either have a hearty laugh, or weep quietly at the anti-intellectualism in society today.