99 replies to this topic

[Bruce Klein]

The 'Life-a-thon' Tote Board



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The Methuselah Mouse Prize is pleased to bring you the MMP Life-a-thon Prize Tracker. Keep track of the prize in real time, and see new donations instantly. Stay abreast of the latest foundation news with our scrolling news ticker, and browse headlines on the latest medical and longevity related breakthroughs with our RSS News feed browser. Use our life-line analysis tool to plot a graph of your expected lifespan, and the predicted effect the prize will have on it.




For those using the Methuselahs Mouse Prize tote board, Dave Gobel has asked that we discuss modification requests and any bugs to this topic.


Links:
Methuselah Mouse - Home Page
Dave Gobel - ImmInst Interview

[Da55id]

Folks, you'd be doing Aaron and the team a tremendous favor to try the tote board out and make it scream and bleed so that we will have the minimum possible bugs as Aaron finishes the final feature or two. Since we're an all volunteer organization it's crucial that we keep drag/release bugs to a minimum.

The tote board is at http://www.methusela...se.org/tote.htm

Thanks so so much in advance for all your hard work!
Dave

[nefastor]

Tested it. Here are the specifics :

IBM PC running under Windows 2000 SP2
Athlon XP 2100+, 256 MB RAM, under permanent load from other network applications.
Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.4.1_02 downloaded from Sun
(full version JavaSDK)

The board runs smoothly except for a little choppy horizontal scrolling on the main tab (but that has to be expected from character-by-character scrolling). Buttons like "contribute" work fine, calling up the web page. Conversion between currency is OK.

There is no information displayed on the "Donors" tab.

About the "Lifeline" tab : I don't quite get it. Could there be a bit more explanations ?

Good job anyway, the board looks awesome, I especially like the "News" tab

Jean

[Da55id]

Thanks very much Jean.

Any other comments. We're especially looking for ideas that would make the toteboard something that folks would find continuously useful and thus want to keep it active all the time.

dg

[reason]

Yes, we want to capture the non-hardcore people, i.e. the ones who wouldn't want to clutter up their desktop/systray with something that isn't giving them something useful. So the newsfeeds are one good approach there -- this becomes something like a customized mini-news-aggregator that also does a memetic sell on the methuselah mouse project.

Ideas appreciated.

Now that I'm done with banners (for now), I really need to put some time into helping Aaron with some of the functionality - like convincing this thing to live in the systray.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[reason]

Quick bug: on a windows system with multiple disk partitions and Java installed in one partition, installing the tote board in another partition means that it can't find the Java install.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[Da55id]

'nother quik bug: The default 1,000 dollars in the lifeline sample donation yields way too many lives saved...400k plus...when you retype the number you get 19000 plus.

Aaron...does having this bug "hitching post" work for you?

dave

[kevin]

probably related behavior:
after typing the 1000 it goes to 19, 439.. with a fund size of 9,850,000...

if you then change the fund size to 1 dollar.. the lives saved increases to over 2 billion and increasing the fund size decreases the number of lives saved..

is this based on a population limit or growth somehow... it's not quite intuitive

getting it to live in the systray with a menu would be ideal.. and although fonts are a personal choice.. I think a sans serif font is cleaner and looks nicer..

I'd probably give saving lives top billing... the greedy aspect of personal extension should be played down..

More suggestions for newsfeeds.. (besides ImmInst's)

The Statesman: Science & Technology - RSS - http://xml.newsisfre...eds/20/5820.xml

[Bruce Klein]

off the cuff ideas...

1. weather and stock prices.... maybe harvested from yahoo... might be to much of a technical challenge

2. live cam of mice.. maybe a pricey challenge..

3. live cam of Dave at his computer

[phacops]

Hi Guys,
Thanks for the bug / quirk list -- I'll get to them this week, in no particular order. I've noticed my donors list shows up empty sometimes as well, and the incorrect 'lives saved conjecture' calculation should be easy to fix.
Look for this (and more :-) in lucky b13.

[Da55id]

BJ Thanks so much for letting this happen here! By the way, if we add a webcam of me, we'll have to get aaron to add a negative fund calculator to the prize amount. oy!

Aaron - here's an idea i've had for 20 years. And no one has EVER done it. A Swiss army knife style utility where the USER CAN decide which knives/screwdrivers etc. he wants and DOESN'T want. So, to take BJ's suggestion of a stock price app, the user could choose to add a tab for stock tracking. add a tab for weather...remove a tab for mice...add a tab for traffic reports...at run time.

I thought of this a long time ago when visicalc began to add so many @functions that I had no earthly use for, and when office apps did the same and became "bloatware" that made my computer run slower and demanded more memory than I truly needed for my work.

dg

[Bruce Klein]

You're very welcome, Dav.

In terms of bloating... that's true.. a focused application is much more practical on our currently limited computer systems.. but this will hopefully become less of a problem with greater bandwidth and power.... for instance, I see something like your tote board as an add on application for ImmInst members who wish to video conference... etc.

Adding things like a chat room.. active topics list... who's online... that's a go.. more perfect seamless networking.. bringing people together.

[Da55id]

bloatware isn't just a compute resource limitation. it's also a human/interface/complexity limitation. having to search through humongous menu trees to hunt and gather the usefulness you're seeking if you find it at all is an enormous pain and limitation to mere mortal who'd like to get more value from their time.

Video would be great. Next year we're gonna have a "gong show" style telethon :-)


dg

[Bruce Klein]

hmm... just a note.. but being able to resize the box to read the news and donors list.. etc. would be nice.

[Da55id]

good point BJ. I think by today or tomorrow Aaron will have the toteboard autoupdating contributions and we'll have the periodic payment capability set up. It would be great if those who've pledged monthly contributions a couple weeks ago could serve as testers of the periodic payment capability. Making the donations is the only way to really know if it's working before we try to kick off the Telethon.

thanks,
Dave

[reason]

Let us know when that's definitively done...

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[phacops]

Hi folks,

As of now, we are ready to test the monthly donations set-up. There is now an option on the donations page to make a one time donation or a monthly amount.

Also, the toteboard should detect new donations within a minute or so of one being placed. The fund total, and donors list will reflect the change, and extra scroll time is given to 'recent' donations (where recent is within the last day or so).

If you launch the toteboard, it should now say b15 in the titlebar.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Bruce Klein]

Thanks Aaron... worked good for me.

[phacops]

Looks like everything's working except for it parsing the webpage pointers.....

Thanks guys!

[Da55id]

Aaron - awesome...

It took about 5 seconds for my name/donation to appear under the donor tab, but a full 4 minutes for it to show up on the scrolling ticker and get added to the total. Any ideas re: the lag? I can't wait for the taddaaaaa sound (option) :-)

Cool Beans guy!

[reason]

Looks good; very slick. A couple of points:

1) it has a 25M footprint in Windows 2000; probably worth looking at optimization later on

2) there's 30 seconds or so of cursor jerkiness after the application starts; it happens on any of the screens

3) the popup box with the news article summary needs a "close window" button...and the "view full article" should probably close the window too.

4) The Bob Gelfond challenge message isn't terribly clear: is that $50,000 each, or $50,000 combined?

5) I'm not immediately sure how to fix this, but the various link buttons take over an existing open instance of a browser in windows; that'll annoy people for sure. They should probably open a new one.

Looking good. Did you get the code sample with the systray running I sent over the other day?

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[kevin]

Yikes.. 25MB.. that's as much as Dreamweaver.. and to be a little nit picky.. in the production version it might be worthwhile to replace startup graphic of 'the claw' holding the DNA spiral with the MMP 'man' logo.

I like the 'NEW' in the scrollbar.. now if you can make it blink... heh

lookin really good I'm acually leaving it running just so I can watch the interest accumulate.. kind of like Las Vegas slot machine...

hmm... Dave.. perhaps you could have a 'gambling tab'.. ahh guess not.. [B)] darn laws and stuff..

[reason]

The new bundled JRE version works for me; I'll test it later on my recalcitrant multi-partition machine at work that was rejecting previous installs because it couldn't find Java.

Another minor UI thing: if you click on a news article, get the popup, close the popup such that the news article is still highlighted, clicking on the highlighted article header doesn't create the popup again.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[reason]

The bundled installer worked on the formerly recalcitrant machine. Good.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[phacops]

The 25M footprint is the unfortunate consequence of using Java -- the JVM requires a substantial amount of memory, so it's not well suited for system utility type processes. On some OS's (Max OS X for example), the JVM only needs to load once, and all java processes use the same JVM. On Windows, it seems to load the JVM separately for each java process.

Anyhoo, b16 is now up and running. This version should play a chime sound whenever a new donation comes in. As well, the recent donations are cycles prominently in the messages panel, along with the challenge grants.

[reason]

New Windows installer to try out before it goes live:

http://www.exratio.c...win32-setup.exe

This one adds a startup shortcut (i.e. log out, log back in, it starts automatically) and some other nice touches. Try it out and see if it works on your win32 machine - extra eyeballs good.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[kevin]

worked great for me.. it would be nice to change the startup graphic to something besides that crippled hand holding the DNA spiral..

[reason]

I'm looking at the download page and thinking it needs some tidying. Some suggestions:

1) Remove the red beta version text

2) Don't mention Java installation for windows users - it'll just confuse them. Move the whole java text (and probably the troubleshooting text) into the mac/linux comments.

3) Remove the smaller download option for windows.

4) Make the download links larger and more obvious.

I'm thinking we need to move the tote board up on the front page somehow, and put an extra link button to it on the left hand menu also.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[Da55id]

I agree with all of Reason's suggestions

[Da55id]

When I rebooted my dial up based win2k system, the toteboard autostarted, but I can't start my dial up until win is fully finished booting up. Thus, the tote board tried to start but complained that it couldn't find the server and exited. When I tried to restart it using the desktop icon, the toteboard wouldn't start at all until I went into the TASK MANAGER and found the tote board memory image, killed it and then clicked the icon (not something a typical user would ever know to do). So, does having the toteboard autostart create a problem with dial up systems in general? or is it just me.