Tufte-Jekyll

Old Blog, New Digs

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 16:00:00 -0400

Over 6 years ago, I embarked in the sometimes frustrating, but fun, endeavor of making a blog that was my own; before the heyday of Medium, and after the glory days of Wix and Freewebs. It was my first time hosting my “own” website, navigating the unfortunate complexities of domain registration, web hosting, and web design. At that time, I stuck with a classic Wordpress approach. An approach that brought some nice cogs for customization, but occasional fretting about updating plugins, reviewing spam comments, and difficulties in custom styling.

I will suggest to someone new to the world of the blogging that you initially put some time into working in a content management system (CMS), like Wordpress. There’s definitely some tricks to the trade that it brought me, though I have trouble highlighting if it brought me much more understanding outside of the early days I had with Freewebs, Neopets, and Myspace custom html. Ultimately, Wordpress was always going to be a stepping stone for me. And now, it was on to static site generation.

Hugo

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The website with the sleek and simple Hugo design.

Almost a year ago, I finally got around to updating the website. As you can see, outside of a handful of pages and some aging blog posts; not much had been done. So I turned to Hugo for a better template. Since 2013, the world had shifted into what I consider a more “hipster” try-out-my-method scene of static website generation. With GitHub and the world of unlimited customization, it’s definitely become the new thing to have your own website with some slick design and even for it to tie in with simple markup language, like Markdown.

Hugo was great! It did everything for me. Kept things fairly simple and generated the entire website I had to post to the server. But why change? Why in less than a year? Honestly, a mixure of boredom, lack of support in making it better (Hugo doesn’t seem as in favor anymore), and something new that caught my eye. Well, “new” is always relative, and we’ll see if this blog post ages as well as the others. 😉

Jekyll and Tufte

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The new big thing: my Jekyll website.

Jekyll has a strong support network with numerous answers to my constant questions on StackOverflow. It also has quite the interesting plugin support for LaTeX, which is a language I’ve definitely explored a bit more after my graduate studies. It uses a variant of Markdown called Kramdown, as well.

I got incredibly pumped when I found this Git repo by Clay Harmon called “Tufte-Jekyll” and took a look at the example website. I’ve always been impressed by the interactive feel of Genius.com, where you can click a lyric and find some suggestion on the true meaning. Tufte-Jekyll does a good job of making that margin and footnote feel come to life in a way that I can utilize.

Note that the theme hasn’t really been touched in 3 years as of April 2019, so it may require some hand-holding and some band-aids here and there, but I’m excited for the future of this blog! And hopefully you are too!

Some notes on getting started with Jekyll

(1) I found this Jekyll tutorial quite helpful.
(2) Blog post on setting up Google Analytics
(3) At one point, I had an error pop-up. This helped me.
(4) A solid cheatsheet for Jekyll
(5) Another helpful blog post
(6) Post on adding tags to Jekyll

Default Effect and Usability

Sat, 19 Jul 2014 18:00:00 -0400

I had a conversation today about how the definition of college has changed in my 5 years at RIT. I will not expand on this topic, but topics that seem very sensical today may have been quite nonsensical half a decade ago. In the ’90s, I recall seeing engineering as being about the designer of the new big “invention,” and I always envisioned this as an individual invents the new big idea or gadget. Today, I see engineering as the new big idea, but instead of invention, I think as ideas owned by start-ups. The definition of engineering in my head has changed from individual design to team design (i.e., the app age). I do question if this is a result of a changing world view (did college change me or did the world change around me?)

A recent discussion has been on how Google took years to address a battery draining issue in its browser. In the Ars Technica article, they reference a post by a previous Google engineer, Mike Belshe, questioning the default “internal timer on wait-event functions” on a Windows machine being 15 ms, which in today’s standards is very long indeed considering the processors today versus the processors of yesteryear. This conversation really calls to point on whether there are other default settings out there in the science, engineering, or humanities worlds that are outdated or underanalyzed because they are accepted as the ‘norm.’

⊕Applebee’s in Saugus, Massachusetts (Wikimedia)

⊕As of SEC filings in Feb 2013, Applebee’s had 2,011 franchised restaurants in 49 states within the U.S., 1 U.S. territory, and 15 countries outside of the United States.

⊕As of SEC filings in Feb 2019, Applebee’s had 1,768 franchised restaurants in all 50 U.S. states, 2 U.S. territories, and 13 countries outside of the United States.

As an engineer, I’ve been taught to question the way the world works and ask whether it is the best that it can be. It has been shown that setting the default has a significant effect on the decisions that users make (Default effect). A tough topic in the realm of engineering (like any field) is ethics and this is where the default can be important. For instance, Applebee’s and Chili’s new tabletop tablets have a default of 20% tip (despite the average being somewhere above 15%, but well below 20% – tipping in the U.S.). A similar tipping trend has been shown in adding tablets in NYC taxis (where the defaults are 20%, 25%, and 30%). These tabletop tablets have become a trend in the industry, as Red Robin and Uno Chicago Grill will also have the devices. Companies, not consumers, design technology. On the other hand, sometimes you wonder if the tip should really be quantified as a portion of the check, or based on the time you are at the restaurant.

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Jeeves (Flickr) was the mascot for AskJeeves when I was a kid. He has since retired in 2006, but he still exists in the U.K., probably unaware of what they’ve changed his company into.

You may argue at this point in the name of waiters/waitresses and how the company is looking out for them. The default that I would argue the majority of the population is against is the default to install the Ask browser toolbar when installing or updating Java. One company found that 40% of people who had the Ask toolbar had it installed through the Java install. The article also examines that the Ask toolbar will install itself 10 minutes after the Java install to prevent the user from taking immediate action (PCWorld). (There’s a petition out to Oracle about this.)

When designing software, we need to keep usability in mind. But as the understanding of human-computer interaction grows, we need to engineer ethics into our creations. We need to keep defaults in mind too, as they direct human behavior. Do they really have to set the default value for the newsletter subscription of every website sign-up to “Yes”? Shouldn’t we provide the user the ability to understand why the default value is as it is, or place no default value in the first place?

A set of experiments in this paper at Aalborg University found that we are more prone to accept the defaults when the interface is familiar (consider any ‘typical’ software installation or website sign-up). An argument made here is that users in unfamiliar situations may employ prospect theory, a decision-making process where you choose based on the information of gains and losses given (e.g., this seems to be the typical tip for a taxi, so let me choose the higher one). The designers place bias into a question by suggesting a single default or multiple defaults (as the NYC taxi example shows). Imagine if a designer were to place a default donation of 20% of your next online order to a political candidate. Where do we draw the line on designers suggesting defaults? And when do we start educating our customers on what other consumers choose and why you would choose one option over the other?

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” – Potter Stewart

UPDATE 1 (1/12/2015)

Recently in the news, there was some discussion on taxi fares. I Quant NY did some great analysis on NYC taxi fare data. The post comments on the fact that an official misinterpreted riders’ behavior for the effects of software that enabled the default effect. These taxi services have unclear and inconsistent methods for calculating tips.

Further update (7/9/2017)

There’s a small clip in a 2016 Data Stories podcast referencing this story.

UPDATE 2 (2/8/2015)

A Forbes article talks about default tipping, citing a concept called “What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)”. The author discusses the new reality of using payment apps, and how their spread could mean more and more examples of this.

An edit was made to this page on April 6, 2019 to comply with new Jekyll theme.

iClicker Unreadable Error

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:00:00 -0500

Going into the spring quarter of my fourth year, I have to take a freshman level class. This requires use of a device known as an iclicker, a feedback tool used in larger lectures. My initial problem is my Remote ID is unreadable (there are meant to be 8 characters beneath the barcode):

⊕Lookup Tool on iClicker’s website provided a method to find out the ID from registration information. I last used this in fall of my freshman year. Somewhere between Fall of 2009 and Spring of 2013, iclicker lost my profile information and I was unable to recover it using their Lookup Tool.

To solve this, I thought, “Hey! Why not use the barcode?”. I found a barcode reader app that reads the raw data that the barcode encodes. My choice: “Barcode Scanner” by ZXing Team. Initially, however, it is unable to read the botched barcode.

I next use GIMP to do a nice redraw of the barcode itself:

I use the app and voila, the ID is spit out to me:

There truly is an app for everything.