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html tags that cannot accept css in Actionscript 3

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 2, 2010

Painful! Painful! It amazes me how little effort is sometimes put into documentation and today I found another example in Actionscript 3.0. (This is another reason I love codeigniter: great user-friendly manual! but that is another story). The actionscript goal was as follows: to change text characteristics by applying css to a textField. I was thinking I would use the “b” and “i” tags (old school bold and italics) as my target tags. The only problem was that when applied nothing happened. Nothing, the “b” and “i” tags retained their original styling and my css was as if it was not applied. I spent time checking to make sure I applied it, time checking to make sure the tags where really there, and time looking through the manual to discover anything…

The tests proved that the tags where there and that the css was applied but I was still having the issue. So I just tried other tags and to my slight surprise the other tags worked. It appears that actionscript will not style “b” and “i” tags but will style “em” and “strong” tags. It will still interpet the “b” and “i” tags and apply their default styling it just will not let you overwrite those defaults with css. Sounds like either a bug or an undocumented exclusion… Either way very annoing and the manual is very unfriendly and slow. In fact online help through their livdocs was faster than through the program… Great manuals designed to be usable make or break software in the long run and this cannot be a good sign for Adobe. I’ve been playing/using flash since 2000 and their CS5 manual/help is much worse in terms of usability than their help was in 2000.

If you want to see a demo showing this issue try out the code below:

...
 
var newStyle:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
var styleObj:Object = new Object();
styleObj.fontStyle = 'normal';
styleObj.color = '#660066';
styleObj.display = 'inline';
 
newStyle.setStyle("b", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("i", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("strong", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("em", styleObj);
 
text_field.styleSheet = newStyle;
text_field.htmlText = '<b>Hi</b> <i>World!</i> <strong>Hi</strong> <em>World!</em>';
 
...

The output should look something like this:
Hi World! Hi World!

Posted in Actionscript | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com part 2

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: October 26, 2009

MediaTemple logoIt has been some time since the first post on this subject on Mar 4, 2009. I had concluded that the issue was a silent failure (i.e., there is no direct feedback) of not enough PHP memory to run Wordpress with several plugins on 1and1. I like running plugins and therefore this situation was unacceptable. I look around for a new host for around the same price $15 a month (I had the developer package at 1and1). I decided on MediaTemple and there (GS) or grid-service package. I found a coupon and am only paying $16 a month. I am much happier with them as they are a first class hoster. If you are in the same situation I would suggest doing the same. This site is currently on MediaTemple and I have lots of plugins running and the site is still snappy. If you do purchase from them please use my referral link: thanks!.

Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.comWordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com
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word 2007 spell checking inside tables

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: October 16, 2009

Word 2007 Logo

I ran across an issue today in Microsoft Word 2007 where the text inside my tables was noticeably not being spell check (i.e., words like aaa or woords were not considered misspelled). To make a long story short, it turns out that the style used for the text had spell checking turned off. This is a little known option located in a misplaced location. The location is the Language Window which is, in my opinion, mismatched as I do not think of spelling as a property belonging to language options but as a property belonging to the paragraph of text (working within the list presented by the context or second mouse button click menu). Furthermore the Language Window cannot be directly called from the text’s context menu but only from the text style’s context menu.

To see if this solves to your spell check situation try these steps:

From the text’s style:

  1. Second mouse button click on the text style used inside the table (the highlight style either listed in the Style section of the Home Ribbon tab or from the expanded Style list
  2. Click on the Modify… option  (opens Modify Style Window)
  3. Click the Format button (bottom left corner)
  4. Click on the Language… option (opens Language Window)
  5. Uncheck “Do not check spelling or grammer” checkbox.
  6. Click Ok, Click Ok (exit Language and Modify Style Windows)
  7. Click Office Button (round upper left bottom)
  8. Click on the Word Options option (opens Word Options Window)
  9. Choose Proofing tab (side bar)
  10. Click Recheck Document button
  11. Click Ok (exit Word Options Window)

If this was the cause of your spell check problem the text will now be spell check!

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Visualization for Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 20, 2009

One of my summer project (2009) is to supervisor someone for awhile on a projected I designed. This year’s project is entited “Visualization for Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items” (title did take a while to invent). The official project paragraph is below along with a mockup of the idea we are implimenting.

“When information is sent from robots or remote sensors to a computer interface that representing the information as items on a geographic information system (GIS) map, the items can often be effectively co-located. Items effectively co-located present a visual issue because the items visually overlap to the point that only one item is truly visible. The long-term objective of the Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items project is to develop graceful and useful methods to visually display these items. This particular project will focus on identifying when items are effectively co-located and then developing and implementing one or more methods to visually present these items.”

Visualization for Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items

Visualization mockup depicting an "stack" of items and the corrisponding "unstacking" visualization.

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HFES Submission Process not so Human Friendly

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 19, 2009

HFES logoWe (i.e., Dr. Adams and I) just had our HFES journal paper “unsubmit” because our “submission exceeds the recommended figure/table count.” I had to laugh when I read it. The instruct sheet says this about figure/table count:

“[papers] typically have no more than 8 tables and/or figures and a reference section of no more than 1,500 words.”

So let’s follow this logic…

  • These instructions use the word “typically”, meaning “on average” or “normally”.
  • “typically” is not a limit or a max, but an average, which means some papers are more and some are less.
  • We submitted a paper with 13 tables and figures so we were more than average by 5, but some HFES  papers I have read only have 3 figure/tables, which is less by 5.
  • However, our paper is unsubmitted because it “exceeds the recommended figure/table count.”
  • However, recommended means a suggested or endorsed position, not a limit or a requirement.
  • Therefore, our paper was unsubmitted because we did not follow their suggestion on keeping the table/figure count to more than an “average”?

Does anyone else see this funny logic? And this is supposed to be a journal on how to make this better for humans and this submission process is desperately in need of some human factors!

Take home lesson:

If you are going to put a limit such that things beyond the limit are not acceptable then you need to explicitly say so! If HFES had stated on their instruction page that papers typically have X table/figures and cannot exceed Y table/figures, then we would have written our paper with less than Y table/figures and all would be well. Instead, I have to rewrite parts of the paper to remove 6 figures because we are guessing that 8 is the limit.

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Out of Space? Scattered Files? Use WinDirStat

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 11, 2009

At Vanderbilt I work almost exclusively from my own Dell Inspiron E1705 labtop. I started using my own laptop so that I could sit in a room with windows and because being a Grad Student I often had to take work home. However, my laptop is getting dated and it is running out of hard drive space because of all the production programs I have installed (e.g., Visual Studio, QT, Adobe CS4, Mircosoft Office, RUNAWAY – The dream of the turtle).

Out of Space? Yes, yes I am…

One day I wanted to see where all my space was being used and I found this great open source program: WinDirStat. Below is a shapshot of my hard drive usage with WinDirStat. I’ve also used it on our home PC to find everywhere we had backup our pictures using this color coding for files types (way cool). The User directory is large because I have over 4GB of Vanderbilt papers, projects, with 2GB for my Ph.D. Thesis directory. Well it looks like the problem is that I just need a bigger hard drive or a new laptop :) . However, it will have to wait until after I start my post-Ph.D. job.

Snapshot of my hard drive usage with WinDirStat

Snapshot of my hard drive usage with WinDirStat

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Setting up Komodo Edit 5

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 6, 2009
Komodo Edit Logo

Komodo Edit Logo

I starting using Komodo IDE as my PHP editor over Dreamweaver in 2006? I was tired of Dreamweaver not having features like “looking function definition” which jumps to where the php function is defined in some other file. I tried a few other editors and they just didn’t feel as intutive. Since Komodo has created an open source (read free) version call Komodo Edit and have been using that and having missed the edit features. There are a number of things I do to make the Edit program feel more like home. First I install a few extensions…

Best Extensions:

  • Source Tree must have for quickly jumping around and viewing code
  • HTML Toolkit great for auto-completing HTML/XML tags and previewing css images
  • Remote Drive Tree great for editing files you usally do not have local copies of (e.g., php.ini)
  • TODO Helper finds all your TODO statements so you don’t forget them
Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Ph.D. Thesis: Information Abstraction Visualization for Human-Robot Interaction

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 5, 2009
Vanderbilt School of Engineering

Vanderbilt School of Engineering

Future emergency incident responses, including Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE), will incorporate robots. The ability to interact with robots and understand the resulting volumes of information requires a system of human-robot interfaces employing directable visualizations that provide information immediacy, relevancy, and sharing appropriate for each human’s responsibilities.
This dissertation conducted two modified Cognitive Tasks Analyses (CTA) on the CBRNE incident response. The Cognitive Information Flow Analysis (CIFA) was developed to combine CTA results and to analyze the path of information as it passes through and is transformed by the system at different human-robot interaction (HRI) user levels. These analyses (i.e., modified CTAs and CIFA) collectively informed the HRI design and development.

The primary contributions of this dissertation are the development and evaluation of two novel visualization techniques that present immediate, relevant, and shared information provided by the robots to the human users in the system of human-robot interfaces. The General Visualization Abstraction (GVA) algorithm, the first technique, is designed to provide information immediacy and relevancy by displaying the most useful information at any given moment determined by rewarding information that is either historically and currently relevant or novel and emerging. The Decision Information Abstracted to a Relevant Encapsulation (DIARE) concept, the second technique, supports decision-making by representing prior event information as a defined volume in the visualization’s information space and encapsulates the volume into an explicit and visual object that can be shared across time and users.

User evaluations were conducted for both visualization techniques. The GVA algorithm’s evaluation results indicate that it can reduce cognitive workload, increase situational awareness, and improve performance for two different HRI user levels. The DIARE concept results indicate that participants were able to rapidly ascertain what had happened previously with great accuracy and good memory recall. Together, these two visualization techniques can assist decision-makers using directable visualizations, such as those used in HRI, by offering an effective method of sharing and providing real-time, relevant information.

Related Papers:

Curtis M. Humphrey. Information Abstraction Visualization for Human-Robot Interaction. PhD thesis,Vanderbilt University, August 2009

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Designing a System of User Interfaces for Controlling Robots for Emergency Incident Response

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 5, 2009
System of User Interfaces

System of User Interfaces

The emergency response incidents (e.g., Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) incidents or weapons of mass destruction) are evolving from a response involving humans (e.g. first responders, government officials, civilians) with equipment (e.g. protective suits, vehicles, sensors) to a response system combining humans and thinking machines (e.g. robots, information technology). The difference between equipment (e.g. fire engines, radios, maps) and thinking machines (e.g. robots, computerized decision support systems) is that machines incorporate some cognitive abilities. If the emergency response system is to take effective advantage of emerging technology, the response activity needs to be understood in a way that facilitates the incorporation of these thinking machines and the development of effective human machine interactions. The incorporation of new thinking machines into the emergency response system is resulting in a shift, abet slowly, to a new paradigm.

The long-term objective is to design and develop a system of robots and associated human-robot interfaces (HRI) appropriate technology for all responders throughout the human response command hierarchy by first understanding the human activities, rather than starting with the technology design and then evaluating its effectiveness after development.

Remote Operator Interface an Operator/Supervisor

Remote Operator Interface an Operator/Supervisor Interaction Role

Operations Chief Interface an Abstract Supervisor Interaction Role

Operations Chief Interface an Abstract Supervisor

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Visualization of Multiple Robots During Team Activities

By Curtis M. Humphrey | Published: June 5, 2009
Team Visualization Interface

Team Visualization Interface

As robotic systems encompass larger numbers of individual robotic agents, interface design must provide better visual representations that account for factors affecting situational awareness. This project investigated different robotic team visualizations that varied in how much information was displayed: only individual robots, individual robots connected via a semitransparent team shape, and a solid team shape. The evaluation results revealed that the two visualizations that utilized a team shape were strongly preferred over the visualization that displayed only individual robots.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., Gordon, S. M., & Adams, J. A. (2006). Visualization of Multiple Robots During Team Activities. In Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings (Vol. 50, pp. 651-655).

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