...more recent posts
Great munin tutorial I'm sure I'll need to refer to again.
In Microsoft Word (from Office 2004 Mac edition, at least) if you try to sum a column of numbers with either =SUM(above) or =SUM(below) it will just stop counting at 85 rows no matter how many rows you have! And it gives no error! Holy shit. What a pile of crap. Why can't they be sued for something like this? I wonder how many people have billed incorrectly because of this bug?
Very clever javascript date library: datejs.
Full Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack coming to the S60 mobile environment (Nokia is calling it PAMP.)
In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.This is exactly what I thought the iPhone was going to allow, and the reason for my initial jaw droppery over that device. Now if only the N95 wasn't like $1000!
Crap. Spent all morning trying to (re) install MySQL server on my somewhat new OS X 10.5 system (the 10.4 mysql package does work.) What a pain. Still not sure what the issue was, but it kept ending on startup. The useful clue I found was to look in the file ending with .err in the mysql data directory. This is where error messages get written, and indeed it informed me that I already had something (another instance of mysqld) running on port 3306. So I just killed that and then restarted the new server. Would have been more helpful if that error was directed to stdout as well as the file but I guess you can't have everything.
Been buried since early morning, so didn't get a chance to even look at my RSS until now. Amazon released Kindle, an eBook reader. It's really strange. Described as "the iPod of reading." Has an EVDO cellular modem in it to connect with Amazon. It costs $399, but has no monthly charge. $9.99 to download a book. All first chapters free.
And it will surf the web ("basic" web surfing, so might not that great yet) and do email. And $.99/ month for blog subscriptions (RSS?)
This is not going to work, but really interesting / strange / frightening business model to give away the computer and the wireless connection, but then sit as gatekeeper and charge for everything.
Drag and drop sortable lists with javascript and CSS. Been possible for a while, but this is a nice resource. And this is probably the last major piece I still need to integrate in Geneva.
CBS to blanket a big chunk of midtown with free (ad supported) WiFi:
CBS Corporation has announced today that it will "light up" midtown Manhattan with the creation of the "CBS Mobile Zone," a wireless high-speed network enabling New Yorkers with Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones, laptops or other devices to access the Internet for free, and make voice over internet (VOI) calls.
The zone will be from Times Square to Central Park South and from 6th Avenue to 8th Avenue and is a test in partnership with the MTA.
You might be asking what CBS gets out of the deal - ad impressions! New Yorkers who access the "CBS Mobile Zone," will be greeted by an ad-supported homepage that includes hyperlocal content such as breaking local and national news, sports highlights, weather reports, music discovery, wallpapers, ringtones, maps, a social network and the ability to search for nearby restaurants, shops and entertainment complete with geographically- targeted community reviews. Citi and Salesgenie.com(TM) have signed on to be early sponsors of the Wi-Fi HotZone.
In a complete shock that doesn't actually make much difference in my life, Bruce Chizen has stepped down as CEO of Adobe. Wow. A few years ago I was pretty sure Adobe was on a road to no where. And they still might be, but they've made a lot of what seem like good moves to me since then. And now they are poised to really duke it out and be a big force in the future direction of not just the web, but computing itself. Why would anyone step down at this point?
I guess there could be a ton of personal reasons, but it's hard to figure there is a better or more interesting job out there.
htmlSQL : "a PHP class to query the web by an SQL-like language." That is just so wrong. Yet it's perfect. As they say, if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. So since I'm comfortable in SQL this seems very useful. Still I know it's just so wrong.
I thought I had blogged about Opera adding support for HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags which replace the very messy <embed> situation we have now (which is one of the big reasons that embedding video in a web page is mostly done with Flash at the moment.) But I can't find it, so I guess it was one of those many things I almost blogged about but never actually got around to posting. Anyway, yesterday WebKit annouced support as well (WebKit is the rendering engine at the heart of Apple's Safari browser, as well as the open source KHTML - from which Safari was born - plus Nokia's mobile browser and now Google's mobile browser in their new Android mobile OS platform.) And there is some really straightforward javascriptable capabilities:
<script>
function playPause() {
var myVideo = document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0];
if (myVideo.paused)
myVideo.play();
else
myVideo.pause();
}
</script>
<input type=button onclick="playPause()" value="Play/Pause"/>
Nice. I've tried playing around with scripting the embedded quicktime player, and it's a real pain. This seems much better. I've been wondering for a while why Apple has let Flash get such a lead here. I think a lot of developers would rather an HTML / javascript solution, but you basically are forced to use Flash now because it just works.
The premise is that web design is in a polarized state where some people are technicians with skills centering around HTML and CSS (and maybe javascript,) while others are designers with skills in more traditional graphic design like layout, typography, and color selection - and very few "web designers" have feet in both camps. And further, this might be a major reason for poor design on the web - or at least for the dearth of incredible design.
This post walks through a lot of contemporary thinking on both sides of the argument and is packed with links to other great articles and resources. Highly recommended for anyone involved in any way with web design.
Great one hour video of a Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright, "an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages," on the conceptual precursors to the web. We've been building this thing for a long time.
The interesting cast of characters includes Charles Cutter, H.G. Wells, Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Eugene Garfield, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Andries Van Dam, and Tim Berners-Lee.
Here's Alex Wright's website.
The influence of web applications has made its way into the user experiences of operating systems accelerating the acceptance, by users, of user experiences that can be best developed using web application development stacks (or portable runtimes such as Flash, Slingshot, etc.). This will push the client operating system to a position of irrelevance in time. Yeah, I'll need an OS to run my device, but I won't care which OS because developers are moving up the stack on the edge device just as they've moved up the stack on the server.Interesting.
Fascinating email from 2003 where Alan Kay defines his 1967 coinage of "object oriented" programming.
It is surprising to me how difficult it has been (for me, and I'm sure others as well) to grasp this whole way of thinking. You can hear Kay having this same struggle on a different level when he says "I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then...."
I'm starting to "get it" though. The key to making progress towards understanding is to have the right problem. When my program (which I call Geneva because that's where I had the main idea) was smaller I had no way to grasp what all the fuss was about object orientation. But now that it is much larger, and in some ways unwieldy and even a little bit out of control, I've begun to actually understand (rather than just being able to recite some rote definition of OO.) Having the right problem to carry you through to understanding is key, in the sense that real understanding is similar to discovering the concept for the first time. And you can't discover something if you're not working on a problem.
You learn what you need to know, I guess, and by definition no more. Anyway, back to work.
Looks like Nokia has developed a tactile response on screen keyboard. Basically they put little keys underneath the screen. Interestingly, Nokia concedes that you don't actually type faster than with a traditional on screen keyboard, but they claim it's more satisfying. Apple filed a patent application for something that sounds similar last month.
Big article on the front page of the NYT business section about Andrew Rubin - formerly of Apple, WebTV, Danger (creators of the Sidekick,) and now director of mobile platforms at Google. In other words, he's in charge of the Google phone, which isn't itself a phone but a mobile operating system (a modified version of Linux) that phone handset manufacturers can use to run their products. There isn't any information in the article about the phone because Google is still not talking about it, but if we believe the Wall St. Journal an announcement from them is very near. There will be a ton of press about this, so I guess the Times is just jumping to the head of the line with this background piece on the man running the show.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this, but no time to get them down. Maybe I'll leave some comments here over the next few days. But one thing that really struck me, although it's not touched on in the article, is the extent to which Google and Apple, while competing with each other, may create the perfect storm which disrupts the rather staid telecom industry.
The speculation, especially given Rubin's background, and Google's track record with open eco systems, is that the Google mobile OS will be *very* open to 3rd party development. Telecoms don't necessarily like open products because they are dinosaurs intent on bringing their own destruction with the unholy alliance of closed platforms and user hostile product designs. Apple tends towards the closed side, but is very strong on design (both physical and UI.) I think this might lead to an interesting struggle where the consumer will be the winner.
If it wasn't for Apple and the iPhone, I think the telecoms might line up against Google, and just not permit phones running the Google operating system to connect to their networks. But because of the iPhone's success I think they will be more open to it as the non AT&T operators search for a counter to AT&T's iPhone exclusive. So that's one win. But then, in the other direction, it may well be the case that the openness of the Google platform will tip Apple - which presently seems to be trying to exactly straddle the line - over into the more open camp. Another win for consumers. We get better phones, with better design, more open to outside development - and the cellular operators wind up with less control. I like.
Stephen Fry has a new column in the Guardian, Welcome To Dork Talk, and I couldn't agree more with his first effort:
I hope you'll believe I'm not an unthinking slave to Cupertino. Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It's true of cars and cookers, and it's true of computers. It's true of office blocks and houses, and it's true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus - these are the enemy.I found this via Daring Fireball who adds some nice thoughts of his own.
I would never have predicted this:
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:Tog is the man, and they did an incredible amount of user testing (as opposed to just thinking about it,) so I'm sure this is right. On the other hand, I know I'm faster with keyboard shortcuts than the mouse, and I don't think it's amnesia. (via daring fireball)
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers' belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.