There is a rudimentary search, but if one wants to have a phone that spells a word or a phrase, then this search dialog is not really helpful. You are also given only five phone numbers at a time and you can not filter these numbers. For example, I would like to ask for phone numbers that does not contain 0 or 1 (which do not have letters associated with them).

The brute force approach was to look at the current five phones, select ones that do not have 0s or 1s and paste them into a website that tries to match a phone number with words (I used dialabc.com). After repeating the process a few times I realized that it was way to slow…

Some time ago I cam across Sikuli and it seems that this was a job for this software. I quickly wrote a script (using their IDE) that found all radio buttons, selected phones next to them, copied them into Notepad, clicked “Next 5 >” button and repeated the procedure. Strangely enough, I did not see a direct way to copy/paste text in Sikuli, and that’s why I had to use keyboard shortcuts.

Once I got the phone numbers in the text file I wrote a trivial perl script to filter out ones that I wanted and create links to dialabc.com that would show what the numbers can spell. The list of links was opened in Firefox using Url lister plugin.

At this point all I had to do was to look at a web page with proposed words and if I did not like them I simply closed the tab, which presented me with the next opened tab. This way I was able to review many numbers quickly and pick the one that I liked.

• Good songs have good background singers (example). This means that providing background or relevant information can enhance overall data presentation.
• Annotation layer is the most important thing that they do (example). This means that providing helpful information along with the visualization helps viewers to understand the information.
• Amanda stressed that it is not yet clear how to balance story with an interactive presentations. I would say RPG games are haunted by this problem as well.

• It does not matter how a presentation is done, or what methods are used, as long as the presentation is clear. Do not limit yourself by pre specifying the method of the presentation.
• Annotate linking lines, because linking lines indicate causality. One needs to differentiate and specify these causalities in order to add meaning to the linking lines.
• Boxes around text are always only add clutter. This is part of a general rule: if it does not add to the presentation, get rid of it.
• Format should be invisible, content should be prominent.
• Simple graphics use a small part of our visual processing capacity. Be aware of it.
• Clutter and confusion are a failure of the design, and it is not failure of data or viewers.
• Maps are examples of a very good design (no boxes around street names).
• Your audience is more like you are than any other group of people (other than your family). This means they are as intelligent as you are.
• A better way to do presentation (E.T. claims it saves 1/3 of time): provide super-graphics (high resolution data) before presentation to allow viewers to use their time to think about it, then follow up with a discussion.
• Use smallest visual ques to indicate importance. This means that if making a word bold is enough, do not make it a bigger font as well.
• Any symbol or mark must convey information. Be aware that an empty space can also be activated (negative space). This is another reason why boxes around text hurt the presentation. They create clutter and activate negative space, while not providing any useful information (text position itself indicates where it is).
• Try to present all the data at once. Do not make people flip back and forth between the data plots if it is at all possible.
• Order by substance not alphabetically.
• Find a good design and copy it.
• Provide evidence that testifies to your credibility. Viewers are looking for it, it will make them believe your presentation.
• Bring real objects to your presentation. As an example E.T. brought first printed editions of books by Euclid (400 years old) and Galileo (also 400 years old).
• No matter how beautiful an interface is, it could be better with less of it.
• Show up early for your presentations.
• Finish your presentation early.

The very first thing I had to do is to change my password on the first login… and, of course, I did not know the requirements for the password length. Could you imagine my confusion when I entered the password, repeated it, and after pressing okay button all I see is a shaking window and cleared password fields. Did I enter the second password wrong? Did I do something else wrong? No hints, no messages, just empty password fields. Is there anything else to say?

Once I got in, I wanted to adjust windows on my screens. To my surprise, I can only resize window by dragging the corner. I can not resize by dragging the side of the window, which is very annoying if I want to extend a window to the left, because it is already against the right edge of the screen. I am used to using keyboard shortcuts to position windows on the screen and then use mouse if I need more adjustments. For windows I am using winsplit-revolution. For Mac I found ShiftIt, which is not as powerful or configurable as winsplit-revolution, but at least it is also free.

Okay, how do I set a keyboard shortcut to start an application? Not clear at all. Long time users of the Mac suggested to use Spotlight, Quicksilver, and, of course, “just click it on the Dock…”. The fact that I need a third party software for such a task is surprising to me. I ended up using Quicksilver.

Default bindings for Home and End keys were especially alien to me. My first response was to adjusting key bindings, and customize keys for Firefox, which allowed me to change accelKey to be control key, just as Firefox on Windows (the same applied to Thunderbird). But at the end I went back to defaults and learned the mac way…

On the bright side I like having shell without a need for cygwin. After using mac for a few month I would say I am 95% as proficient with it as I was with windows (the other 5% being remembering OS specific features such as taking a screen capture, etc.)

// This is a comment.

Simple and precise. Let me explain why. The general format follows this pattern:

1. Comment character(s), such as /*, //, #, %.
2. Space.
3. Comment string, that starts with a capital letter (with rare exceptions).
4. Period.
5. Comment closing character, such as */, –>

1, 3, and possibly 5 must be present in any comment. Let’s focus on the parts that can be present or omitted. I include Space before the comment string to differentiate between a comment line and a commented out code:

// Use it as follows:
// exec(true);
//exec(yFlag);

In the example above, the first two lines are comments, because there is a single space before the comment string. The last line is a commented out line of code.

I use capital letter to start a comment and a period after a comment sentence for multiple reasons. First, it forces to make comments from well formed sentences, which can be easier to understand as compared to incomplete sentences. Second, it tells me where a comment sentence starts and ends. For example, if I see a comment line that does not end with a period, then I can assume the next comment line must continue the same sentence. For example:

// This is one
// comment sentence.

To recap. A space before helps separate at a glance comments from commented out code. Following a formal sentence structure (start with a capital letter and finish with a dot) helps to understand the comments better and provides information about where the comments start and end.

Compiling a few examples for pantheios was not difficult, but getting it to do exactly what I planned, which is to have output to a console and a file at the same time, was a little more challenging. The solution was not obvious from the documentation, and sample name mx.1 did not stand out to me as meaning Mixing different back ends. But after searching in pantheios forums I have found the answer to my question.

At the end of the day Pantheios was my choice. We will see how happy I will be with it after I play with it for a while.