WordPress version 3.0 was released at the end of last week. It’s a little later than the intended May 1 release date, but WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and content management systems on the planet, so it was better to be late than cause issues for thousands of websites.

The update is the result of six months’ work by 218 dedicated contributors, culminating in 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. So what can you expect from WordPress 3.0?

New Installer

WordPress has always been easy to install but it’s become even simpler. Few administrators will have to fiddle with the wp-config.php configuration file: all the MySQL settings can be specified within the installer panels now.

The new installer also allows you to specify the administrator ID and password. I suspect few people ever bothered to change it from the default “admin” in previous versions, so the facility to create your own ID will aid security.

New Interface

The WordPress 3.0 administration panels have received a polish. It’s hardly a radical change from version 2, but it’s lighter and feels slicker.

There are few obvious changes to the interface until you reach the Appearance section.

New Default Theme

RIP Kubrick: you’ve served us well and many websites use you to this day. Kubrick has been replaced by “Twenty Ten,” a new theme that has built-in support for child themes, background alterations, header customization, and drop-down menus.

The theme’s look and widgets can be customized within the administration panel, so I expect many people will never venture beyond the Twenty Ten theme. For those that do, there’s a new “Install Themes” tab that allows you to search for templates by color, type, and features.

Not impressed but then again, if they made a nice one, I’d be out of extra work!

WordPress Multi-user

WordPress MU was a fork that allowed hundreds of blogs to run from a single installation; it has now been merged with the main version 3.0 application. It’s disabled by default, but can be switched on by adding the following line to your wp-config.php file:

This could be the most important feature for web developers: you can create a number of websites using just one installation of WordPress. Updates are easier and hosting space is drastically reduced.

Custom Post Types

Pages and Posts were available in previous versions of WordPress:

• Pages were normally used for static content such as About Us or Contact Us pages.
• Posts would commonly be used for date-stamped news, articles, or blog posts.

WordPress 3.0 supports custom post types. For example, you could have a Product type that’s specifically used for items sold on your website. Product pages can then be treated separately; for example, have their own menu or search box.

Custom post types are configured using PHP rather than within the administration panels. Watch out for a full tutorial on SitePoint shortly.

Other Features

Where do I start? I suggest you visit the WordPress 3.0 Codex page for a comprehensive list.

Should you upgrade now?

I have no hesitation in recommending WordPress 3.0 for a new installation. But what if you’re upgrading from WordPress 2.x?

I’ve rarely experienced problems with the WordPress automated upgrade; it’s a quick one-click process that just works. However, my first attempt failed abysmally and I was left with a broken site. You should note that this was a test installation of 2.8.6 with lots of dodgy code and plugins, but you need to be wary: some themes and plugins are certain to break.

I would recommend updating a local test version of your site before attempting to upgrade the live server. Remember to back up your files and MySQL database, and you can’t go wrong.

If past experience is anything to go by, the WordPress team will almost certainly release 3.0.1 within a few weeks. If you’re especially nervous, you might be advised to wait a little longer …

The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We’re tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it’s often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

From ZDNet

The discussion comes amidst an ongoing war of words between Apple and Adobe over over Apple’s refusal to support Flash Player on its iPad and iPhone devices. In April, for instance, Steve Jobs outlined his criticisms of the Flash development platform in a blog post.

In addition, this is not the first time Adobe has sent out a warning to users over an Apple update. In September, the company said that an Mac OS X update issued in August was shipping with a superceded version of Flash Player. It also noted that the Apple’s update was downgrading people with more recent versions of the player to the earlier edition.

That does not appear to be the case with this week’s Apple update, according to Adobe security response programme manager Wendy Poland.

I still can’t say that I am a Maconvert though Jen has me spinning the apples all over the house.  As a developer, I can’t say I’m in love with Flash either.  What I can say is that there are very specific rules that good web developers and designers abide by, one of which is that cross-domain requests are a very real and very scary threat.  Having taught a semester’s worth of web security and really digging into the issue of XSS, HTTP vulnerabilities and phishing schemes, and all the while developing Flash apps that have these apparent holes, it is easy to think that a malicious developer could easily design around this problem.  So kudos to Apple if in fact they really did fall back to plug up the problem.

I probably shouldn’t take sides.  Adobe has been well aware of the problem but it’s difficult at best to plug up every vulnerability across every platform out there.  Apple is doing what it can to protect its users.

So what’s the point?  The point is – be aware that there is a problem and that it is your responsibility (assuming you’re a developer) to cover it – not just the product makers.

Though quite honestly I don’t use ExtJS in favor of pure handcoding and maybe a smattering of minimal jQuery, it’s still a real formidable framework, though Ext’s (sorry, Sencha’s) exploration into HTML5 and CSS3 is probably the best collaborative work on the web so far.  The best part of it is the basic open source system and Ext Designer, which I only recently tried out for the first time.  jQTouch and Raphaël will still both remain MIT licensed.

According to the post on its site:

We’re choosing Sencha as our name because it evokes next-generation software development and it’s easy to remember, spell and pronounce. Sencha — the name of a popular Japanese green tea — is in the tradition of Java, and represents a new level of development. It feels memorable to us.

I’m real intrigued with Raphaël after my recent batch of Advanced Scripting students churned out some really fantastic HTML5 vector graphics.  Will have to try and carve out a few minutes to play around with it.

In any case, best of luck to the new venture – sounds like a real winner in the making!

Background: I’m a 22-year-old university student with aspirations of practicing rural medicine. I’m also a freelance web/print designer. It’s my sole source of income, and it’s what I do to put myself through school. I don’t have much of a social life because I balance a full-time university schedule with twenty to thirty hours a week of volunteer and paid design work.  I wouldn’t change a thing here. I’m happiest a-codin’ and designin’, and I count myself as pretty lucky to be able to make a living from my hobby while I’m working towards my doc dreams.

I’ve always been a nerdy and creative kid, so I got into computers and art at a fairly young age. I knew I liked designing and I spent a lot of time playing with Python to pick up on basic programming in middle school. In high school, I designed posters and crappy Geocities websites for nearly every extra-curricular club around. So when I was fifteen, I was really excited when my dad asked me if I’d be interested in doing some design work for a good business acquaintance of his, whom I’ll refer to from now on as CFH (for Client From Hell – what else?).  The job involved developing some simple layouts and promotional materials for an industry-specific print career guide. Armed with Publisher and Photoshop, I got to work.

The pay seemed pretty damn great for someone my age, and the idea of getting paid to do something I loved from home seemed pretty attractive compared to the notion of finding a summer retail job, an experience that had bored me out of my mind the previous year.

I did the job, CFH was happy with my work, and I continued working on small projects for him every now and then, past graduating high school and entering university.

In early 2009, I received a scholarship to study abroad for a semester. When CFH heard, he gave me his heartfelt congratulations, attended a goodbye party my parents had for me, and even gave me a generous monetary gift for my travel expenses. He’d become a very supportive family friend at this time, and was often the only non-South Asian face at family gatherings. I was really grateful for his support and thought the world of him. When I returned six months later, CFH let me know that the website I had designed for him had been voted into the global top ten of its field and that he would be branching out to cover a greater range of clientele. I knew that it was making him boatloads of money and I was happy to have been involved in a project that had achieved such status. He asked me if I’d be interested in taking a lead role in helping out with the company’s growth. I agreed enthusiastically, and got to work.

Fast forward to September, when I started as CFH’s primary web designer. The work was substantial, and took up much more of my time than previous projects had, but it was completed on time and he was thrilled with it. Prior to starting, I had let CFH know that I’d be changing our previously casual business relationship, and that I’d be invoicing him all Official-Like from now on since I was going to be using my work as my primary source of employment, and needed to keep good records for tax purposes. At this stage, CFH had started outsourcing all his back-end development work to India because it was cheaper than hiring Canadian-based developers, so I think my invoice took him by surprise as he had thought that web work would be ‘cheaper’ and ‘easier to do’ than print, for whatever reason.  Keep in mind that I was asking for what was essentially cents above minimum wage per hour of work not including the many hours I spent on development, consultation, edits, etc. because I was a little insecure in my legitimacy as a designer due to my lack of formal education in the subject. I now know this to be BS, as my current clients continue to hire me, citing the diversity of skills I offer and the highly creative and efficient nature of my print and web work. Nevertheless, I decided to give CFH a very steep discount because we hadn’t pre-negotiated the terms (even though he was aware of how much time each project was taking me). He took his sweet time with my invoice but finally, and begrudgingly, decided to pay up.

Things get a little ridiculous here.

CFH became increasingly imposing. His phone calls to me became increasingly longer and unrelated, bordering on uncomfortable.

He started demanding additional amounts of work to be done ‘immediately’, and when I’d ask about payment, he’d get irritable and tell me that it was ‘all about the money’ with me, and that he’d pay me as soon as I sent him an invoice via snail mail. Everytime I would mail out an invoice, he’d complain about some charge, and insist that I send him an updated invoice with this or that detail changed. This continued. I didn’t see a cent. I was even paying for stock photos and fonts out of pocket and not being reimbursed like I had earlier been promised. Keep in mind that I was in a particularly delicate position given that this person was my father’s good friend, and regretfully, my pride got in the way of actually saying anything to my father at the time. At the time, I didn’t think things would (could?) get worse.

They did, so in January, I put my foot down. I told CFH I’d no longer be working for him as he had become unbearably imposing, and had unreasonable expectations of me. Primarily, I was concerned because I hadn’t seen a cent from any of this work I’d done since September. He countered this by telling me that I was a rip-off and that he’d found a “professional design agency” that was better equipped to meet his needs. I wished him the best despite the fact that I was disappointed at having let go of my biggest client. I tried not to think about the many hours of work I wouldn’t be seeing a cent for anymore. At the same time, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to put up with his borderline psychotic behaviour, or compromise the quality of my work anymore to meet his increasingly ass-backwards demands (white text on beige?).

Two days later, I received a phone call from CFH. He apologized profusely right off the bat, said that he’d pay his complete owing sum, and that he needed me to come back. He told me that he was extremely unhappy with the quality of, and the speed at which his new designers were completing his work. He begged me to come back, saying that this time he’d be more considerate of my time and reasonable in his expectations of me. I hesitated, but agreed to come back on the terms that he had to agree to the estimate I gave him prior to starting each job. Since my prices were ‘too steep’ for him and he didn’t want to contend with the fact that I could only work in the evenings due to my class schedule, we worked out a system where I would design the main graphical elements and primary pages, and his “professional design agency” would use these elements to develop subsidiary pages for the back-end. He agreed, and I got to work. As a sidenote, I should mention that his “professional design agency” pulled out when they realized the extent of work that needed to be done and his unreasonably demanding nature, but I digress.

So I hadn’t realized that my new agreement with CFH would otherwise translate into a one-way ticket to hell, with him reigning as chief Satanic commander.

His behaviour become fairly unbelievable at this point: he’d call me at 11:30pm and asking to have something by 7am the next morning. He’d whine when I’d decline. He’d have me sit on the phone for hours while directing me to this stock photo or that website to “get inspired by” (i.e. steal). At the time, I was under a lot of stress because I was experiencing a flare-up in an existing neurological condition that was putting me in the emergency room almost every week. I mentioned at one point to CFR that I was scheduled for an MRI in a couple of months, and he suggested that I pay out-of-pocket to get it done privately to avoid the wait. A private MRI has to be done out-of-province, and runs upwards of $1500. I explained that this was not an option for me given that a recent astronomical increase in tuition costs, and my student aid being cut substantially due to the increasing conservatization of my post-secondary institution.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t ‘get’ it, telling me to bug my parents for the money or ‘something’. For the record, I’m completely financially independent, and have no intentions of harassing my parents for money I’m perfectly capable of making myself. My lifestyle ain’t so lavish that it requires a lot of  dough either: I’m a herbivore, don’t go out much, share an apartment with two other people, and ride a bicycle or take public transit everywhere. I use open-source software and recycle hardware whenever possible. Textbooks (which I generally buy secondhand) and tuition are my major expense, so while my living costs might be minimal, they’re still there. I wasn’t sure what part of this CFH couldn’t comprehend. Surely, he’d understand, having himself been a student forty years ago?

April was the final straw. I hadn’t seen a cent since September despite many false exclamations of  “the cheque is in the mail!” and what I now knew to be CFH’s lavish income from MY work.

He even had the nerve to call me to share his excitement about his new ‘keyless’ car, which he eagerly explained cost about as much as a house.

A myriad of other reasons followed, and you should tell me if I’m being a bit too sensitive here: Rape jokes? check. Racist remarks about his Indian developers DESPITE the fact that I’m South Asian too – but ‘not like one of them’, according to him? Check. Pictures of, and forwarded emails from women he was sleeping with? Check. Pervasive questions about my sexuality and personal life? Double-check.

I quit. I fucking quit. I sent a politely-worded e-mail explaining that I would not be working for him anymore. I don’t believe in leaving people in the dark about their behaviour, so I explained very clearly exactly how his behaviour had influenced my decision to leave. CFH responded by saying that he hadn’t “bothered to read my e-mail” but that “as a professional, [he] anticipated that [I] would provide [my] assistance in bringing the new resources up to speed..”. Regarding my invoice, his exact words were: “It shall, of course, be paid, in full, upon receipt” (all those commas, must be, compensating, for, something) seeing as how he was continuing to use my work. I had no problem with this, and made the remaining incomplete files available in their raw form on my server, alongside a detailed explanation of what the new designer/s would need to know. I’m not a vengeful person, so when the new designer got in touch with me, I was quick to direct him to where he needed to be. I just wanted to get paid and get CFH out of my life already.

Things seemed like they were ending on a slightly more positive note. A few days later  I got a call from my father. CFH had taken him out for drinks and then gotten him call me to “tell me” to come back to work for him. CFH had explained to him that I was upset about my pay (I didn’t realize zero dollars was pay?) but that he had ‘forgotten’ that I was now a grown-up with financial responsibilities, and not that same fifteen-year-old who was estatic about getting some spending money from his hobby.

He told my dad that I had left him hanging despite having given me a pretty decent deal; apparently my ‘mental health issues’ and ‘greed’ were getting in the way.

Clearly, this wasn’t just about the money for me anymore, and I realized that CFH’s new designer had probably bailed on him as well as a result of his.. loopiness.  Naturally, I declined. This upset my father initially, though he changed his mind later when I gave him a (heavily censored) account of what had actually happened.

Besides, hadn’t CFH mentioned that he’d be paying me for the work I’d already completed? The invoice was in the mail for the fourth time. Of course, I didn’t set my expectations too high because on May 11, I received  the following message:  “Let me be quite clear about things. Unless you immediately finish the projects you started for [Company Name], we shall not pay your invoice. Enough is enough!”

So now I know better than to expect any pay at all. Over 300 hours logged since September, and not a cent.

CFH continues to use my work and profit from it. I have no legal backing because (1) CFH happens to be a retired lawyer, and (2) I never drew up a physical contract because of the sporadic nature of the work and our long-standing business relationship. My own fault.  The best part? I have to defer my next semester at university to work more, because I couldn’t come up with my minimum tuition payment in time this year – seeing as how my job didn’t pay me, and I had to use my existing funds for things like rent, medication, and food. CFH is well aware of this. Sucks, but I’m not one to dwell in the past recognizing my own mistakes. I’m also far too grateful for things like a roof over my head to feel sorry for myself.

I learnt my lesson and since then, I have had no problem putting what I’ve learnt into practice with my current clients. Keep in mind that these are primarily charitable organizations and student groups with very limited funding – yet they have no problem respecting my time, signing contracts without complaint, agreeing to my terms and putting down a 50% deposit before I do any work.  These clients believe in my right to make a living wage from my work, and that’s exactly how all clients should treat their freelancer.

In closing, please don’t make the same mistakes I did with CFH. I don’t care if you’re making invites for your neighbor’s son’s friend’s girlfriend’s baby shower: always draw up a physical contract, regardless of whether the work is for-pay or not.

It’s a sad fact, but there is no guarantee of sanctity in a long-standing relationship regardless of how long you have had your client. There are people out there whose only motivation is to make as much money as possible while taking credit for your work and screwing you over in the process. A contract gives you some legal backing, and at the very least ensures that both parties understand the terms of service. Deposits are great too, because they ensure that both parties are invested in the project to some extent. Lessons are better learnt earlier rather than later.

And finally, to CFH? I trust Karma.

Amongst them include an upgraded enclosure to unibody aluminum – much beefier than the plastic job my old one has. And the body has a new panel on the base giving it access to the memory slots. Plus they’ve added HDMI which makes it soooo much easier to connect it up with my HDTV (rather than having to put the MBP flipped open right next to it).

But of course the killer one that caught my attention – not because I am so into the 3D idea but simply because of iStream’s involvement with it – is the addition of Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, one of the foundations for Nvidia’s 3D Vision. Killer.

Posted on TUAW
Buy the base model for $699 or the SL Server version for $999 at Apple Store

Sooner or later, I figure I am going to have to make the plunge. I’ve been using a first-generation Android and while I’m happy with it, it really hasn’t lived up to my expectations. Granted it’s pretty memory deficient being a first-gen (CC’s phone runs mondo faster than mine and it’s only a second-gen) but with a little coddling and a mod, it’s done well (better than that stupid WinMo Dash I had before it).

Not to mention that I’m getting an awful lot of pressure from the better half who is dying to do video chat. I have to admit that the overall package is pretty impressive, so maybe for once I’ll be happy with one. At least until I have to keep rebooting it. Ahh technology.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Chen via 52 Weeks of UX

Do you ever feel that your design has become stale and that despite your making lots of little changes to it over time without any big overhaul there is just no way to drastically improve it?

If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as its ever going to be in its current incarnation. Even if you make 100 tweaks you can only get so much improvement; it is as effective as its ever going to be on its current structural foundation.

The local maximum occurs frequently when UX practitioners rely too much on a/b testing or other testing approaches to make improvements. This type of design is typified by Google and Amazon…they do lots and lots of testing, but rarely make large changes. (Except, of course, Google’s homepage background change this week, which was quickly reverted)

While a cycle of smaller improvements is better than the dysfunctional design processes most of us are stuck with, one of the criticisms of this type of extreme optimization is that it’s always and only incremental: you can only make a few small changes at a time and therefore your design evolves slowly. And if you’re doing rigorous testing, by only changing one variable at a time, then you’re only changing one small part of your application in each iteration. This work cycle becomes dependent on how fast you can run tests. For Google and Amazon, who are blessed with millions of visitors per day, this is no problem because they can run tests extremely quickly. For most people building web sites, low traffic volume can be a huge hurdle because it means that tests have to run longer and thus slows down rate of iteration.

To illustrate the notion of local maxima Chen uses the example of a photo upload application, pointing out there are many ways to improve an offering by optimizing what currently exists. You can A/B test the current photo upload page, send out more emails reminding people to upload, add more calls-to-action to upload, etc. It’s easy to both design and test these options.

But after a while these low-hanging fruit get few and far between and as UX designer you have two choices: continue to try ever-increasing alternatives (optimize) that are small enough to test or to try and make a bigger, structural change that really shakes things up (innovate).

Chen points out that other approaches to improving a photo app besides optimization would probably have a higher return. These include:

* Repositioning the product for a stronger value proposition
* Going after a different kind of audience to target their needs
* Recalibrating the “core mechanic” of the product to make uploading photos a natural part of using the product

Because these changes are much larger than a single design element you can effectively test, making a change to them requires making a daring design decision. Someone has to step up and take a chance based on their intuition: what they think will work instead of what testing has proven works.

In order to design through the local maximum we need a balance between the science-minded testing methodology and the intuitive sense designers use when making big changes. We need to intelligently alternate between innovation and optimization, as both are required to design great user experiences.

One strategy we might employ is to optimize until we reach a point of diminishing returns: design until changes just aren’t having a big effect. Then, stop optimizing and return to other kinds of analysis to figure out the next steps. Conduct interviews. Do user testing. Give surveys, ask questions. Find out the biggest existing pain points instead of focusing on tiny design elements at this stage. Focus at the activity-level. What are people trying to accomplish? What are their higher-level goals? What aren’t people doing that we want them to? What big hurdles keep them from taking the next action? This level of insight will allow you to make those bigger changes.

And when the time comes to make the bigger changes, when you decide to jump from your local maximum to some other design possibility, make the decision with conviction. But don’t forget that the optimization has only just begun.

Rather than take a traditional page-design approach, we architected the database and interaction to be slim and exchangeable. First, the database was managed by use of two .NET-based Web Services written in C# that ingested via POST marking transaction success with 32-character IDs, output via XML and with multi-purpose edit functions using switches and variable inputs. Next, the authentication was built on a combination Basic and session-based approach using ASP – quick and efficient and easy to modularize should the system need to be moved to another platform. Finally, the front-end was built on a single HTML page with jQuery and jQuery UI to support the large number of Ajax exchanges and interactive features.

The result is a clean, easy to use, transportable DAM-CMS capable of complex transactions (multi-tiered, synchronous updates), hooks to a Silverlight-based rough cut editor from Southworks, and most of all, easy and quick to modify without affecting the production environment. By deploying a single jQuery-based controller separate from the parser and presentation components, new objects could be introduced to the interface based on a modifiable, dynamic XML document at login (or pushed in real-time, even after the user had logged in).

Some of the things we learned seem pretty silly but in fact were critical to the project completing in such a short amount of time.

First, segregate all the processes – by constructing the database, the web services, and the interface separate from each other, different developers could rapidly deploy all of it and mesh together quickly at stop-points each day. Chandler and I (with a big assist from Srini and Mio) were able to work independently and merge as he completed parts of the web service, or make changes as parts of the interface came together. Likewise, during testing, changes to the interface and sequence could be done in real-time and re-tested within minutes instead of having to go back to the drawing board. This was eased by the fact that issues could be easily attributable and divisible to interface or back-end, and handled separately.

Second, it’s the little things that make a difference. Providing small visual cues – update notifications at the top of the page that disappear, Ajax loader starburts, highlighted labels and input boxes – all give the user information, information that helps them get through difficult or tedious and complex processes (for example, in creating a VOD asset, a user had options that might require upwards of 50 different pieces of information – eliminating unnecessary components on the screen made it easier to get through).

Finally, architect it but be flexible. Changes happen, and while developers and project managers all try to keep scope creep from happening, we all know that in the real world, so does feature change. It is unrealistic to assume that projects will get started 6 months before the deadline. It is also unrealistic to assume that, in such a project with a short deadline, that you’ll remember to include everything. Likewise, it’s also unrealistic to assume that during the process you’ll realize that the planned interface will work – prototyping is great but it takes time and testing that you may not always have. Being able to be flexible by following a basic interface design, using modular builders (in jQuery UI or other framework) and XML-based instruction sets, and providing error catching systems in both the front-end as well as the web services makes the project continue to move, even when not all the parts are correct.

In the end, we had a lot of hiccups and it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped but it did get done and delivered on-time. The client goes to training in 9 hours and there will likely be another round of changes, but that we were able to post a full-featured DAM CMS in such a short amount of time gives us new methods and targets for the future.

by Christopher Mims via Technology Review
How the Internet Porn Business Works>: Researchers set up adult Web sites to study how the industry makes its money and spreads malware.

A first-of-its-kind analysis of the online porn industry reveals the economics, and the vulnerabilities, of the shady world of online adult media.

If you want to know how the online adult industry works, you must become a part of that industry. That’s what five security researchers from The Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and UC Santa Barbara did in an attempt to get a handle on how the adult industry makes money online. And they found that it’s exposing everyone who consumes its wares to previously unsuspected levels of malware.

Peddling Porn in the Name of Science

By setting up their own adult websites, the researchers, who will present their paper on June 7, 2010 at The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard University, discovered that 43% of the clicks that arrived at their own adult website belonged to users whose browsers were vulnerable to a known exploit in either Adobe Flash or handling of the Microsoft Office or Adobe PDF document types.

Lead researcher Glibert Wondracek and his colleagues spent a total of $160 to acquire 47,000 clicks from sellers of adult traffic, known in the industry as traffic brokers, of which 20,000 could have been exploited to build a botnet, according to the researchers. The researchers discovered that they easily could have leveraged their investment for a hefty profit by serving as the vector for a Pay-Per Install affiliate program, which in one instance offered $130 per 1,000 installs to drop malicious code (malware, adware etc.) onto exploited machines.

To assess how much malicious code is being injected into users’ browsers by adult websites, Wondracek et al. custom-built an automated web crawler to download the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23% of those pages “were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads,” five times the prevalence of malware discovered by previous research on the subject.

In a back of the envelope calculation, multiplying 3.23% by the percentage of internet users who view porn (42.7%) or even just the percentage of men who view porn while at work (20%), by the frequency with which porn is accessed, suggests that internet porn is a major vector for infection of vulnerable machines.

The Peculiar Economics of Online Porn

A likely explanation for the high rates of malware on adult websites is the almost total lack of policing or enforcement by the brokers who move traffic between adult websites. According to Wondracek et al.’s analysis of the economy of online porn sites, 9 out of 10 are “free” sites that host image or video galleries and make money by directing traffic to pay sites or even to one another. This traffic is monetized through traffic brokers – the majority of which do not even visit the sites in their affiliate networks, according to experiments conducted by the researchers.

Unlike online ad placements by Google and affiliate marketing schemes by Amazon, adult sites do not rely on code that resides on the sites sending them traffic that could help verify that traffic is generated by humans and not click bots. As a result, the researchers found that it would potentially be quite easy to defraud not only users, but the traffic brokers and for-pay porn sites that enable the vast ecosystem of free adult media sites. (No users or brokers were actually harmed in the course of this research, which was vetted by the legal department of the Technical University of Vienna.)

The intricacies of the elaborate system of traffic arbitrage that have grown up around the world of porn traffic direction on the web are way beyond the scope of this blog post, but it’s possible that the rest of the media world could learn a thing or two from the way that for-pay adult sites have created a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.

On the other hand, it’s just as likely that these techniques wouldn’t work for traditional media, because users don’t appear to be as motivated to read news as to find porn. How else can we explain the fact that in the course of the experiment, users clicked many times on single links that were randomly directing them to anything but the media they were apparently after – a practice widespread among free porn sites?

For years, the only other options were to use images (which then lose the semantics and made it difficult to update over time) or sIFR (which still rocks and can provide much more extended support for very unusual fonts).  Now you can add Font API support with:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }

Produces (though this is an image):

According to Google, the back end system converts the font into a format acceptable to the browser (including MSIE6), serving up only the weights and styles you specify, and can be cache headered in order to optimize/improve performance over the span of the site.  They also work with HTML5 and CSS3, so transformations like rotation and drop shadows still works.  Currently support exists only for Western European languages (Latin-1) but I’m pretty sure that will expand quickly once it takes hold.

Nice job!

Read the Google announcement here.
See the fonts available in the Google Font Directory.

I’d love for fifteen or twenty minutes to go by without my Google Reader barfing out yet another piece of software patent or “HTML5 video codec war” news, but that’s how it is. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the video tag didn’t become standardized until HTML6 or 7.

One serious downside to the lack of consensus is the fact that your browser may very well not have built-in support for some video files embedded with the tag. Firefox, for example, is running with Ogg Theora and won’t be bolting on H.264 support. Apart from patent issues, there’s a $5 million price tag to be paid to MPEG-LA if Mozilla did want to support the codec, and they still wouldn’t be able to include that code in their open source.

But developers love to spin remixes of the Fox, and it only makes sense that someone would take matters into his or her own hands. Enter Maya Posch, who has launched the Wild Fox project on SourceForge. The plan: add H.264 support to Firefox’s stable branch using libavcodec or GStreamer.
Posch feels “that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world.” He continues, “The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries.”

That sounds useful, right? A nice, pre-packaged Firefox build with H.264 support? Sure it does, but there’s a potential pitfall.

While you would probably be able to download and install Wild Fox even in the U.S. and Korea (two of the patent-encumbered countries), Thomas Holwerda of OSNews warns that you’d be doing so at your own risk, saying “MPEG-LA has clearly stated that it will sue unlicensed users (and is clearly not afraid to do so).” Their director of Global Licensing, Allen Harkness, has said “where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability.”

Yes, that means MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox. However, it’s infinitely more likely that they’d target Posch and Wild Fox.

You’ve hired the wrong guy. After reading David Airey’s forget about design and Andrew Maier’s User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director I’ve come to the conclusion that the role “web designer” is a cheap ass effort to fudge a graphic designer into a role requiring two entirely separate fields of knowledge.

Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers. What’s needed to compliment a web team’s graphic designer is someone to account for the complexities of human-computer interaction (HCI). Surely a manager in any field can’t expect staff to adopt a completely opposite, complex knowledge base overnight.

Welcome the missing link: User experience designer.

User experience design is a blend of usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design.

A web-based user experience designer is charged with learning about users and creating interfaces that match website goals and user needs. They deliver interaction specs and simple mockups to the graphic designer as a framework for user-centered visual communication. Then, of course, the web developer makes the interaction work.

Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.”

If you’re going to make the leap into a more complex communication channel, account for its complexities or it’ll bite you in the ass when your competitors “get it.”

I have to say that of everything I’ve seen, I am truly impressed with the quality that has been achieved in online scenarios, including live event video.  Yes, live.  Many people saw the recent big broadcasts of events like NBC’s Winter Olympics and others, some of the first to feature a broad distribution of Smooth.  Having been in online video for the better part of 14 or 15 years, it was truly a day of reckoning to see some of it come to fruition.

There must be something behind this. Last July (2009), YouTube quietly added a feature to its video player that allowed one to watch presumably 3D-enhanced video uploaded by visitors by adding yt3d:enable=true to the tag.  Nvidia has been leading a charge to release video card and monitor combos that support 3D Vision – a software/hardware (glasses) solution that I have to say is pretty cool, albeit pricey (sorry, I’m not a big techbuygeek – I don’t run out and buy the newest stuff just because its there).  With all respect to the latter – there is some really kick ass stuff available on the platform.

But frankly, for me, I still don’t get the hype.  I may be really old school but the fact is that I just don’t get why I would want to watch everything in 3D.  I just don’t see the value or the sparkle. Apparently, I’m not the only one (ok, I never was – my entire department, the very ones who are developing the components, have always questioned it) – even Francis Ford Coppola calls it a “juvenile abomination” and ‘just a way to “make you pay more money”.’  And Roger Ebert says “Hollywood’s current crazy stampede to it is suicidal,” adding nothing to the movie-going experience.

Ha. Figures.

To be fair, the stuff we’re working on is largely for sports, and in a way I can actually see where some types (basketball, hockey, boxing) might actually benefit and get some enhancement from it.  But not everything.

And that’s where the problem is.  Like every other “big thing” (ahem, iPads, iPhones, Android, blah blah blah puke) there is a mad dash to be first simply for the sake of being first, and then a mad clamoring to jump on the bandwagon.  Why? The point being that putting stuff into 3D just for the sake of being 3D and without having content that fits it (or worse, forcing the content to be) is just plain stupid.  Let’s leave 3D (and all it’s contingent hardware and software reqs) to content that suits it.  Like horror flicks.

Content is king.  Still is.  Always will be.  But don’t f— it up by trying to enhance it with something totally unnecessary.  Chrome on a pencil doesn’t make it write any better, and doesn’t even necessarily make it any prettier.  It just makes it clunky and prone to fingerprints.  Same thing with 3D.  Keep it in check and keep it special instead of the norm and we’ll all benefit.

My friends think I’m crazy … overreacting. I’ve gone and done it, though.

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.

My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn’t feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don’t trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect it.

What’s the big deal? Like me, you might be thinking, “I have nothing to hide. Who cares if Facebook collects personal information and sells it?” That’s a fair statement; pretty much every large company we do business with today does that. The problem here is that Facebook tells us that we can trust it, but then it repeatedly changes the rules on us to suit its own needs. Facebook is within its legal rights to do this, but that doesn’t make it right.

I have a friend whose identity was stolen a few weeks ago via a Facebook exploit, and he’s in a living hell now. Facebook’s new Instant Personalization pilot is so controversial that it’s being debated on the floor of the US Senate, and the latest change — switching your interests to keyword links that you have to individually opt out of — is a completely transparent user-hostile move. A few months ago, Facebook changed the privacy defaults to be completely public (in other words, not at all private) and pitched it as an improvement to their privacy controls. In fact, those privacy controls are so convoluted (and it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t intentional) that even when you think you’ve got it locked down, there’s a good chance that your friends don’t, and they could be sharing information about you.

Google’s mission statement is to “organize the world’s information,” and their motto is, “Don’t be evil.” What’s Facebook’s mission? Where do they stand on being evil?

Actually, we know Facebook’s mission statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Of course, back in 2008, it was: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” It’s certainly not “to be the best place in the world to connect and share with friends and family,” even though that’s what Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, claimed it is in a recent New York Times article.

Though Mr. Schrage points people to view his Facebook profile and compare it with Mark Zuckerberg’s, at the time writing his profile comes up as a missing page. What happened, Elliot, share a little too much information, maybe? If you need to get a better understanding of your privacy policies, check out this info graphic in the New York Times that shows the more than 170 possible options you can set.

Given the changes Facebook has made over the past couple of years, what new surprises do the folks there have in store for us? Clearly Facebook feels the power of having such a dominant online community. As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So, yeah, I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while. First, I want to see if it’s possible to live without the big FB. Then I’ll decide whether it’s a good idea to live with it. I already know which way I’m leaning.

Of course, even if I do decide to completely delete my Facebook account, Facebook will keep my personal data and continue to mine it.

I don’t expect anyone to follow my lead. I do, however, urge you to think about whether you think Facebook is deserving of our trust. Is Facebook a good steward of our online (and increasingly offline) identities and information?

If Facebook was a person, it would be one who can’t keep a secret and talks about you behind your back.

Would you stay friends with a person like that?

Jason Clarke did it first, and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook.

For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they’re broadcasting their status to “friends of friends”.

Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings?

There’s a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that’s where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don’t like large, successful anything.

But today’s Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a super-friendly, smiley-happy face for newcomers and non-geeks. On the other hand, to prevent your personal information from getting all over the place, you need to be a super-educated and “paranoid” geek.

Since when did privacy become “for geeks only”?

And it’s also a matter of trust; Facebook has an interesting habit of opting users in to all sorts of new schemes. I suddenly found out I was included in their information sharing scheme with other sites. I just randomly discovered this. I’m just plain sick and tired of having to watch over Facebook’s shoulder every day, trying to figure out what they added or changed to make my information more broadly available.

The bottom line is that it’s just not worth it, at least for me. Goodbye, Facebook.

Read UNLV’s President recommends which programs should be cut via ktnv.com and the full 15 page dipshit report here.

[05/10/10 @ 2:30p PST] The plot (and plight) thickens as I have tried for two days now to access the Dept. of Informatics web page to no avail.  Has it already been deleted by OIT?  What the hell is that all about?

On a personal note, all decency aside, President Smatresk, the Faculty Senate and the JET and PRC can all go F themselves.  I spent a bit of time soul-searching last night, thinking I may try to channel my energy and desire to work on a PhD and work into a different program, but the more I thought about it, the more I got pissed at UNLV and Nevada as a whole for being so grossly short-sighted, so now I’d rather go spend my tuition dollars somewhere else where the administration (and government) actually thinks about what the importance of a program is rather than purely considering current dollars.  Nothing like a budget deficit to put yourselves into an even faster tailspin, and only increases my spite towards programs that I think should have been looked at more closely but weren’t even considered.

I have always told my students that the best way to get backup help is to go to the bookstore, site down, and read 10 pages out of each book on the topic, and find the one that “speaks” to them. A teacher’s recommended text, the school’s required textbook, it’s rare that student find them legible or helpful (I think my logic teacher went out of her way to find the most confusing book on Earth). Find the book that they understand and start working. Work every day. Work at least 15 minutes or 30 minutes every single day, doing the exercises over and over, changing little things, until the whole concept is solved.

But not every great book can be found at the store. Of course there are the online standard – w3schools.com for example – and the plethora of smaller resources. But it is always a treat to find an online resource that has both extensive resources and is also an easy, if not opinionated, read.

Such is “Eloquent Javascript,” authored by Marijin Haverbeke. I remember coming across it a few years ago but a posting on DownloadSquad reminded me of it. It is available in its entire text online (in HTML) as well as via downloadable PDF. As with most good resources, I recommend grabbing the PDF (and if you’re ambitious, a local copy of the HTML) before the perishability of Web documents steals it away.

[authored by Matthew Carpenter at Six Revisions, images courtesy of Six Revisions]

When it comes to expanding per-project revenue, service businesses are at an immediate disadvantage. As our “product” is essentially our time, increasing income on a per-project basis almost always comes with extra work and an increased time commitment. Office hours increase, personal time slips away, and before we know it, the “extra” $300 weekly income has turned into little more than lost time.

Product-based businesses have a distinct advantage when it comes to increasing revenue. Rather than increasing per-hour costs or per-project estimates, all that’s required is an increase in scale. Expand your operation, ship more units, and earn more money. While service businesses can take a similar approach–more employees, more projects, and relatively more income–scale can again become a problem.

These ten approaches to per-project earnings could help you boost total revenue and profits. Of course, they’re not foolproof, and some businesses will inevitably invest time into a strategy only to have it prove ineffective. However, they do work, and with the right balance of time investment and experimentation, they could become the changes that drastically increase your per-project, per-client, and per-hour revenue.

1. Don’t take on stressful or high-risk projects

Risk is a part of business. While service businesses operate at a slightly lower level of risk than a major product-based business or global company, they’re still taking cost-related risks whenever they accept a new project. The amount of time required could surpass expectations, the project’s complexity could be deceptive and surprising, or the entire project could be a stress-test disguised as something simple.

Whenever certain revenue is the goal, take on projects that offer security and relatively smooth income. Increasing revenue can be as simple as taking on more work, which is made easier when you’re not juggling complex projects.

2. Keep a network of contracted designers for project overflow

There are hundreds of reasons to network with other designers, and managing work overload and excess projects is just one of them. As with any business operating at 100% capacity, there are going to be times when your clients will expect you to take on work that’s simply not possible. Rather than scrambling to find new designers, managers, or developers, it’s best to keep a relatively wide network of professionals ready to offer contracted work to.

This selective and optimized outsourcing also gives you an opportunity to increase overall revenues. While your design team works directly on clients projects – earning on an input basis – outsourced design teams can bring in a relatively stable per-project income for you.

3. Use affiliate programs to help clients with hosting

If your design business specializes in local businesses and low-tech companies, it’s not unlikely that your clients will need their own hosting space or dedicated server. While it’s unwise to take care of hosting entirely on your own – problems can often arise, and client support is not a business that you want to be involved in – passing clients on to an affiliated hosting company is never a bad idea.

A range of hosting providers offer affiliate programs, some of which are more lucrative than others. Whenever possible, aim to provide hosting that meets a clients needs, not those of your business. It’s worth eating a small commission to keep a major client, and it’s never worth selling out a client for a one-off hosting kickback.

4. Don’t use a reseller hosting program for clients

Reseller hosting programs are often viewed as an ultra-simple passive income solution for web designers. Unfortunately, they’re about as far from passive as anything can be. Whenever you take responsibility for web hosting, you also inherit every problem that would otherwise be directed to the web hosting company.

Every second of downtime becomes your concern, every connection speed issue becomes a phone call  to your office, and every time a client forgets their cPanel password, you’re the person that’s called for support. Focus on low-maintenance revenue increases, not income streams like reseller hosting which require ongoing support.

5. Market yourself as a premium provider

Don’t want to deal with clients that pay poorly? Then don’t market to them.

Whether you’re a freelance designer or part of an established design business, the audience that you market your services to is by far the largest influence on your per-project income. Audiences that have come to expect low-cost services will expect the same from you, and explaining a premium cost structure instantly compromises your ability to offer services.

Study the market that your business operates in, and approach premium clients with your services. Most businesses don’t mind paying a higher price for high quality services, and if you can back up your promises, those clients can be great long-term assets.

6. Network other creatives and online professionals

Networking gives you an opportunity to hand off work to extra designers in the event of a quantity crisis. It also gives you an opportunity to market your services to other online workers, increasing your professional network and creating another stream of incoming clients.

However, there’s another benefit to networking, one that can do wonders for per-project earnings. Most online services businesses are happy to pay for business leads, or at least offer a commission for valuable projects. Create a professional network between yourself and some online marketers, copywriters, and other service businesses that are beneficial to new businesses.

That way, when you’re approached by a new client, you can offer them extra value through related services, and yourself more per-project income through related commissions. Win-win.

7. Offer extra services in project updates and pitches

There’s nothing wrong with a friendly, non-pushy upsell. By including an ‘extra services’ rate card or list of related products or services with every project email, you’ll find your business increasing and your professional relationships extending. Most clients want your web design services to increase their long-term business income, and extending projects to incorporate long-term marketing, design, or website upgrades can often do just that.

8. Aim for ongoing business relationships

Short-term projects can be a hassle. While they’re often worthwhile from an earnings perspective, the amount of stress and unnecessary headaches that come with them can drive a sane business owner crazy.

There are two ways to deal with short-term projects effectively. The first, and most effective method, is to ignore them completely and focus entirely on long-term projects and ongoing work. The second method is to make your short-term work more immediately profitable and effective. Charge higher rates for short-term projects, let your clients understand that you work with other clients too, and create accommodating timeframes your yourself.

9. Prioritize clients that have long-term growth potential

When seeking out new clients, it’s tempting to fall for the “take all” approach where you let accept almost any project, so long as it meets your income criteria. While this strategy is great for filling out a schedule, it almost never works effectively for maximizing per-project income and total revenue.

Opportunity cost is a true nightmare for a service business. Product-based companies can pass over opportunities only to focus on scale, but service businesses with set resources and time allotments are always stuck with the projects that they’ve taken. Taking each and every project that’s offered to you leaves you with no room to focus on the most profitable and valuable clients.

Whenever possible, prioritize new clients that have massive growth potential. The brand new marketing firm with a dedicated owner is more likely to need your ongoing services than an aging local business with relatively low online needs. Give time to clients that have huge potential to expand, and you’ll end up getting it back again in projects that are lucrative, long-term, and very secure.

10. Say “No” more often

Saying “yes” wins you clients, opportunities, and information, but it also locks you into deals that might not work in your favor. Despite the old “customer is always right” maxim, the reality of service businesses, particularly design businesses, is that the client often isn’t right. Design is subjective, and when a project comes coupled with a client that just doesn’t know what they want, things can become a major headache.

Increasing per-project revenue isn’t just about optimizing what projects you do have, but making sure you pick the right projects not to have. Every potential opportunity can be a drag for your business – an ongoing annoyance that brings in income but leaves you shut out of more lucrative products. Fight away per-project time-killers by saying “no” more often. It hurts at first, but the more you do it, the more effective your business will become.

Have you ever experimented with different revenue streams or per-project income strategies? There are hundreds of ways to increase per-project earnings, and we’ve just scratched the surface!

I am, along with the tenured and professional faculty of the Department, urging all students, and anyone who might agree and offer opinion, to write to the President, the university committees and the Board of Regents, urging them to reconsider keeping the department.

Update: selected letters written by students speaking out about the proposed cuts are here.

But I expect myself to be a leader of sorts, an instructor by example, and hence I am posting my letter here, openly, so that anyone who does not understand the dilemma might find it worthy of opinion.  For those who do not know what informatics is, you can read about it on the UNLV Informatics Web Site, but more importantly, here is a succinct explanation from Michael Dunn, the founding Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, where Informatics as an academic college was incepted and created.  He says:

• Informatics studies the application of Information Technology to the arts, sciences and professions, and its uses in organizations and societies at large.
• Informatics is a response to the data/information/knowledge gaps caused by billions and billions of bits
• Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. The purpose of informatics consists in developing optimal methods and means of presentation (recording), collection, analytical-synthetic processing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of scientific information. Informatics deals with logical (semantic) information, but is not involved in qualitative estimation of this information. Such an estimate can be carried on by specialists alone, in the specific fields of science or practical activity.

Below is the letter that was posted on the UNLV website, posted here.

Sent via UNLV Official on March 22, 2010

Colleagues:

I have received a set of recommendations from Executive Vice President and Provost Bowers and Vice President for Research Smith to start the conversation on how we can reduce the academic budget by $4 million. This list (see below) was made after consultation with our deans and after reviewing various measures of productivity and cost. I thank them for their hard work on this thankless task. This was an extremely difficult set of recommendations to generate, and includes departmental elimination, sub-unit elimination and recommendations for differential tuition (which may ultimately reduce our cumulative need for cuts). The list includes more programs to be reviewed than we plan to cut at this time, thus allowing the Presidential Review Committee (PRC) the opportunity to offer their guidance on maintaining core institutional strengths.

This material has been transmitted to the PRC, chaired by Dr. Gregory Brown, formed jointly by the Faculty Senate and Administration. The PRC charge will be to review this list, along with cuts from the other VP areas, and to deliver a prioritized set of recommendations for program elimination and other savings or revenue enhancing measures by the third week of April. Their recommendations will be reviewed by the Deans and Cabinet, our student governance groups, and the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee before we make final program elimination recommendations to the Board of Regents.

In addition to these “vertical” cuts, we have extended the hiring freeze on all current searches, with the exception of grant funded hires, self funded programs and areas that are absolutely essential for business continuity. Savings in these areas and our VSIP program may help mitigate the need for further cuts later this year. We are all deeply saddened by the need to resort to such drastic measures. If there are any other viable options for UNLV we will pursue them, but I expect little relief, and fear that without significant legislative intervention we will be forced to cut again next year. As we make these cuts, we will honor noticing periods and tenure, allow students to graduate from eliminated programs in a timely fashion, and hope to minimize the disruptive impacts these cuts have on faculty, staff and students.

I understand how much turmoil and distraction our budget situation has created on campus. For programs not on this list I ask you to focus on our mission by providing a strong education to our students and by pursuing scholarly growth so that we emerge from this as a stronger and more focused institution.

Sincerely,

Neal Smatresk
President

---

March 22, 2010

President Neal J. Smatresk Office of the President University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

Dear President Smatresk:

It gives me no pleasure to either write or transmit this letter to you. Indeed, no one who loves and respects higher education could feel anything other than sadness in doing so. However, as you know more than anyone, over the past three years UNLV has had its state funding reduced by 30.9 per cent. No institution can continue to function normally when given such a dramatic reduction in resources. UNLV has made a large number of “horizontal” cuts university-wide but such cuts can no longer achieve the significant expenditure reductions required of us by the state. The University must now look to “vertical” cuts in departments and programs in order to achieve these results. As you have requested, I am transmitting to you recommendations for the Division of Academic Affairs in three areas: (1) unit and subunit eliminations, (2) additional administrative reductions, (3) departments and programs in which differential tuition has the potential to be successfully applied.

The Process
As you have mandated, each vice president, including the Executive Vice President and Provost, will be making recommendations for reductions and outright eliminations in their divisions. The target for Academic Affairs at this time is $4 million. In order to achieve shared governance between administration and faculty, the attached list represents a budget figure higher than the target. This allows the faculty committees to evaluate each proposal and to have a real voice in making these decisions, not simply a take it or leave it option.

Because any reductions in Academic Affairs will also affect research productivity, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Ron Smith was asked to sit in on my individual meetings with the deans. At these meetings deans were asked to provide possible eliminations and reductions in their colleges and schools. None of them were happy to do so, of course. It should not be assumed that any of these recommendations were initiated or supported by the relevant dean. The list that I am transmitting to you will not be met pleasurably by any of them. This list will be given by you to the joint presidential-Faculty Senate committee, the Presidential Review Committee, who will review these recommendations and forward those that they believe necessary to meet our state fund reductions. A similar process will be followed by the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee. The recommendations will all go to you for decision, some of which may also require further NSHE Board of Regents approval. To the extent that there is any silver lining in this, it is that you have pledged to protect tenure and any tenured faculty displaced by these decisions will be reassigned.

These recommendations have been guided by factors including, but not limited to, cost, graduation rates, number of majors, student credit hours and FTE produced, scholarship/research/creative activities, external funding, and importance to the University’s mission.

Units To Consider for Elimination

• Educational Leadership
• Informatics
• Management Information Systems
• Marriage and Family Therapy
• Recreation and Sport Management (including Professional Golf Management)
• Sports Education Leadership
• Teaching and Learning Center
• Women’s Studies

Subunits To Consider for Elimination

• Clinical Laboratory Sciences
• Construction Engineering Management
• English Language Center
• Entertainment Engineering
• Gerontology and Senior Theatre
• Landscape Architecture
• Urban Affairs Advising Center
• Urban Horticulture Program

Further Administrative Reductions To Be Considered

• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Affairs position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Resources position
• Executive Vice President and Provost/Academic Success Center: Eliminate 1 advisor and 1 classified position
• College of Education: Eliminate 1 associate dean position
• College of Education: Not seek NCATE accreditation
• College of Hotel Administration: Reduce to only two academic departments
• School of Nursing: Return to campuswide semester instead of trimester system
• College of Sciences: Reduce costs of Department of Geoscience
• College of Urban Affairs: Combine School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Department of Communication Studies

Differential Tuition and Registration Fees
There are some programs nationally that are either extremely popular or extremely expensive to operate in which the market will bear differential tuition/registration fees. This tuition/fee is an additional revenue source that can be used to bring down the costs of delivering such instruction to the institution. Not all programs and departments can successfully implement differential tuition/fees (i.e., those in Liberal Arts come to mind) and that is not a possibility for them. For those programs that can implement differential tuition/fee structures, the additional tuition/fee must be sufficient to offset the additional costs of instruction. The following colleges and schools are among those nationally that charge differential tuition/fees and, should NSHE and UNLV determine to pursue that tack, extensive research will be required to determine the appropriate price point for each of them. There may be others that are not on this list that can be further discussed by the faculty committees reviewing these proposals.

• School of Architecture
• College of Business
• College of Engineering
• College of Hotel Administration
• School of Nursing
• Department of Physical Therapy

Conclusion
None of us are unmindful of the effects that these proposals will have on our campus, our colleagues, our staff, and most of all, our students, if they are adopted. However, these proposals are merely proposals at this point and we should look forward to the continuing discussions that will occur in the faculty committees and with students prior to final decisions being made.

Regretfully,

Michael W. Bowers
Executive Vice President and Provost

I seem to recall a president who went to war after misrepresenting that someone was hiding WMDs and incited a big country to invade a smaller one halfway across the globe, needlessly killing several thousand soldiers and just generally being a retarded jerk.

Okay so maybe this isn’t a war but killing education based on misinformation and misrepresentation is bad enough.  LVRJ forgot to take into account that INF is the fastest growing degree at UNLV (over 200% the current school term), that it is the program that covers little things like cybersecurity (preventing hackerman Chang from getting into DoD computers) and HCI (making sure your iPhone has all those touchy-feely gizmos) and realize that LVRJ is suggesting that we should cut one of the few departments that teach for jobs that are still in demand. Nice. All because of not checking facts.

The University readily publishes current, accurate data.  The Provost’s 2009 Joint Evaluation Taskforce (JET) report on the Engineering program for example, reports “…this program is highly multidisciplinary and has a very high enrollment of women and other underrepresented groups. The program only has 2 tenure-track faculty.”  Furthermore, “[W]hile approved by the Board of Regents as an independent school, the program has no support staff and pays for an administrative assistant through course buyouts.”

Write to LVRJ and demand a retraction, correction and proof! People/colleagues, we are about to die a quick and painful death here and we need to fight. In 2010, informatics is a critical program both for the university as well as Las Vegas and the last thing we need is someone with erroneous information deciding our future!

Below is the comment I submitted to LVRJ (though who knows if it will actually get posted) – I ask and urge and plead for anyone who gives a crap that the paper seems to have it out for programs who make a difference to fight back…

LVRJ misreported that Informatics is the most expensive program – that was the case when it first started but is currently inline with other engineering programs.

It was also highly misrepresented and mischaracterized. The 2009 provost report actually recommends HIRING more staff because it is a fast growing field and covers a wide range of cognate areas, in addition to the extremely high ratio of sponsored research contracts and the awards it has received. The program is still small because it is brand new (started in 2005).

It was reported as “most expensive” because the report was based on 2006’s FTE (full-time enrollment) divided by the cost of faculty. Informatics has a low FTE because a high percentage of the students, especially at the graduate level, are non-traditional students who work full-time jobs like myself and cannot attend school full-time. There are only four tenured staff and the enrollment in the program increased 200% in the last year.

On top of the, the earlier LVRJ article that listed the top 20 most expensive programs had an interesting common thread – they were all engineering and computer based programs – and the ones whose fields still have jobs in demand!

To see more accurate reporting, go to the UNLV Provost Joint Evaluation Team (JET) web page and see the 2009 reports. Shame on LVRJ for the bad reporting.

And don’t get me started on why the state is cutting education funding in the first place. Sure the University can use streamlining, but are we setting up the state to lose what edge it has?

Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know:

The mission of the School of Informatics is to provide an academic path for students who are interested in pursuing a career that combines computing and information technology with another academic discipline. The curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, and recognizes that the human, information, and technology dimensions of problem solving are equal contributors in advanced informatics applications areas. The School of Informatics will produce graduates that become successful and internationally competitive educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders in the global information economy.

Read the rest of my op-ed here…

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

Take everything you know about the internet. Now fucking forget it.

The internet is an infant. It’s a pile of crap. I’m tempted to call it defective. The W3C is worse than the UN. We need to make progress. We need to push forward. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and search out possibilities for expanding our horizons. We need to step out of the boxes we’ve sealed around us. There’s a world outside the crazy “best practices” created to overcome horrific shortcomings of CSS. We are not confined to the way things are.

When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don’t settle, don’t give up, don’t get stuck in a box built by other people’s misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.

So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

[more here on CNET]

Can’t take credit – shot courtesy of FoodPornDaily (rockin’ site I must say)…

But I thought you weren’t supposed to mix apples and oranges.

[posts here, here and here]

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

So I set up a WP instance for her to play around with and it looks like she’s digging it. She’s worried that she’s going to lose some of the benefits of using the Google-based platform but I think that with the stats she has (trust me, she’s way beyond what MatSays will ever do) she doesn’t really need to worry.

The one downer note – the import function works great but it puts Blogger tags as WP categories so you might have to massage the DB by hand a bit. Wonder if they are aware of that little bug.

Scratches on discs happen. After one of our favorite DVDs started to skip after receiving a few too many scratches we started to look for a solution to salvage it. Sure there are DVD scratch removal devices that you can buy, but why waste money when there is a solution to be found right in our own homes? Using toothpaste, a banana, a rag and window cleaner we will show you how to remove scratches from a DVD and with any luck the unplayable will become playable.

What You Need

Equipment:
toothpaste
clean rag
banana
window cleaner

Instructions

1. The first thing you do is apply toothpaste on the scratched surface of the DVD. Next, rub the toothpaste gently into the DVD using the rag. Let this sit for about a minute.

2. Remove the toothpaste from the DVD using the rag. Then take the cut banana and in small circular motions rub the banana into the DVD. After you have applied the banana to the DVD, you will then take the peel and use this to rub the DVD in small circular motions.

3. Clean the DVD using the rag. Make sure to remove all the traces of the banana and peel. Spray window cleaner onto the surface of the DVD and continue cleaning the DVD. If you are lucky, your formerly unplayable DVD has now been salvaged!

Additional Notes: We experimented with using just toothpaste and just the banana, but we received the best results from using the toothpaste first and following it with the banana.

So the real juice behind our success in 9 years is our ability to think outside the box. Honestly I can’t stand that expression but the reason I am not hunting for another metaphor is because everyone understands it. So what am I getting at? Back to the post I was reading.

The gem from the post was “know what the box is.” It sounds simple enough and certainly something we almost take as a given. But do you really?

A week ago my team was contracted to do a job for a prominent division of a Fortune 100 company. The job was to construct an SMF-based Silverlight media player that would, in short, deliver live and/or on-demand Smooth or Windows Media content with a bunch of social tools, a very slimmed down interface with a universal style and the catch is that it needed to use initParams and/or an externalized XML to direct it (with order of operations precedence), blah blah blah on and on. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the portability meant that we needed to reduce the configurable parameters as much as possible, make sure that delivery could occur both inside and outside a firewalled intranet, and that it was CMS supported. Anyway, the designer did the nice, clean XAML, the developer got the app interface done, I finished off the CMS and reporting components. All in 2 days.

And along comes the first gig – only a week from today – and another group in my company asked – so what happens if we’re streaming Smooth over satellite and we drop the link? How do we fail over to, say, an origin-based WM encode? Hmmm, didn’t really think about that one. It’s not that we wouldn’t normally, but historically we’ve always used ASX files or our own mediaFeedXML format to handle failover, but in this case we didn’t even really think about it, because (I guess) we don’t work operations on a regular basis and hence don’t really make those considerations.

My point is that we approached the job thinking we had covered the details but in fact we were missing part of the equation – we didn’t really know the box, inasmuch as we thought we did. And it took a single email from another team to point it out. Problem has since been solved but it makes me wonder, now, if we neglected anything else.

In the blog post author’s (Tom Stewart) words:

How often have you been told to ‘think outside the box’? I don’t know about you but I find that very hard to do. It’s as helpful as saying, ‘now come up with a great idea’. So my approach involves ‘knowing the box’. Identify all the constraints and limits you can.

Same holds true for design. Inspiration and production comes from knowing the box – knowing the customer, knowing the intent, knowing the content, knowing the delivery. Before tackling that really great job or that really great idea that you get your head wrapped around what it is you’re really designing against. Knowing that, and being able to step outside of the proverbial space, will only serve to make the end result better.

[sooner or later, when I'm allowed to and if I remember, I'll post about that player]

I’ll give it to the Quince company – they make nice interfaces. Really nice interfaces. Smooth, sleek and all that. But when it comes to devices, it’s sometimes a hit or miss. Google, on the other hand, well…they’re still playing a lot of catch-up. Google is a great big brother data collection/aggregation company but for all the work put into Android, especially into v2, it’s still just not the same.  Jennifer, a long time Mac-head, battled with me for the better part of 11 years.  If you walk into our home/MadeByGirl offices now, however, it’s nothing but one-bite fruit machines all over the place.  And though I hate some things (ok, code-writing is just an abomination and I STILL can’t get used to the command keys, something about Ctrl and Alt just fit my fingers well). And I suspect that the next few objets d’art that materialize will also be sleek and ringing “ta-da” when turned on.

Take the Kindle.  Now that’s a device with purpose.  Why is it so popular?  Because it has one purpose and one purpose only.  And it does it well.  Hey, if they added on a couple of other features, awesome, but it’s when it becomes overbuilt, that’s when it starts to become pointless.  Just like that, the iPod.  One purpose from inception, super design, awesome and intuitive interface, good UX, sells millions billions.

My G1, on the other hand, I am quickly learning that I wish it were just a freakin’ phone.  My very first Sprint mobile (circa 1993) was a somewhat bricky Samsung with a rocker switch and I loved it.  Hell, I wish I still had it – the roller switch was just so easy to use (compared to this pinhead sized trackball thing).  And for all the touchscreen love, I still miss that the phone was just to make calls.  Yes, I post from my phone, send text and all that other crap, but at some point I just started deleting apps because there really was no point to it.  Which is my point.

The iPad brings in a new level of “I really don’t know what I want to be.”  On the one hand, it’s very limited, but at the same time it’s pretty extreme.  I, like a lot of people, don’t seem to know where it will fit in.  Maybe I just need to use one for a while.  Or not use it as it sits idly on my coffee table, eventually becoming a very expensive coaster with a nice user interface.  Jobs had a lot of failures in the past but maybe we just don’t understand the impetus   crazy, drunken idea   motivation business model behind it quite yet (like Lisa).  Maybe the idea behind “just leave them all over like computerized notepads” really does have something behind it.

So back to Google – are we just plunking that idea on a browser?  As if every time Jennifer tells me to put the freakin laptop away while she’s trying to watch “Millionaire Matchmaker” and share a moment isn’t bad enough, but to have Google in my pocket, on the laptop screen, on my neighborhood gas pump (ok, that hasn’t materialized in my neck of the woods yet), and now on my coffee table too?  Right next to an iPad?  Does this mean that in 5 years, all the books in my custom-made bookshelf will be replaced with digital tablets (that I have to label with a Brother p-Touch – now there’s a device with purpose – one job, one UI, no complications)?

The age of computerization is nice.  It is.  But put the shit   screen   thing down and pick up a book.  A real book with paper and ink.  Enjoy it…it’s the original UI.

This past week, I was listening (as always) to a (fantastic) KNPR program by Sean Carroll on the Mysteries of Time. In it, he was describing two schools of thought on the age old question of why it is that as we get older, time seems to pass quicker. The short of it was this:

One group of researchers says that the speed at which our brain impulses fire and travel slows down as we get older and consequently our impression of time actually slows down. They’ve done several studies, but in a non-empirical study by NPR, several older (over 70 years old) and younger (around 20 years old) were asked to close their eyes and guess when a minute had passed. Interestingly, the younger group was generally spot on – with guesses ranging between 55 and 65 seconds. But the older group was much the opposite – instead their guesses averaged about 90 seconds. Big difference. So researchers say that in the same vein that the brain slows time down, more things happen within that timespan (imaging cars passing and honking each time – since your impression of a minute is longer, you would count more cars passing by within your minute).

The second group says that your brain is like a hard drive…it only has so much capacity for thought. When we’re younger, we tend to fill up that space with details of every first impression – our first birthday, our first date, etc – and that as we get older we get more efficient at filtering, which is short for not bothering to remember (on a side note, guys, remember this – that’s why you can’t remember what your wife said 10 minutes ago but you can remember the first date). Basically our brains cycle memories – we hit a birthday and your brain tells itself “oh, I remember this from before so I don’t need to bother wasting space again,” and so as we are less able to remember details from a short time ago, our impression is that things have sped up.

So of course my thought is – it actually must be a little of both. I certainly know that I can’t remember what Jennifer told me (much to her chagrin) 10 minutes ago, but I can remember stupid Jeopardy trivia that I learned in fifth grade reading the Guiness Book of World Records (which I picked up at the dentists office on Monday and was sadly dismayed – not the same book I grew up with – when did it become so picture book dumbed-down). I tested myself a couple of times to guess the minute but I was pretty close – 63 seconds the first time and 61 the second, so maybe it’s less that one.

But to that I add a third theory – totally not based on science, totally my own humble opinion – but maybe time speeds up because we are afraid. A little secret about me – I actually have only one phobia – getting old. My whole life, I was generally not afraid of very much – I love to fly (planes put me to sleep), heights don’t bother me (will cliff dive on command), and bugs, snakes, creepy critters and the like have no effect on me. But getting old – that’s a whole other story.

So my thought is that I’d bet many people are like me but don’t admit it, at least not openly. And maybe the time that seems to be speeding up is kind of like being in a movie where a couple of police officers are racing the clock to diffuse a bomb and the situation gets more and more frantic (except in the movies, they always make it). The “theory” is that as we get older, we realize we have less and less time, and in our frantic haste to accomplish more (let’s face it – I realize it would be a little pointless to try and finish my PhD when I am 60 so I am rushing to do it now) we get more and more frazzled, we take in less and less of life, and it just seems to hurtle forward faster and faster, like a missile catapulting to doom.

The point is that any one of these is just pretty much sad. I guess the slowing neuron activity is one thing but the idea of being able to remember less not because I don’t have the capacity but because my brain is tricking me into not bothering, or feeling that I have less and less time in my life is pretty distressing. So to that I offer the saving grace…it’s old school and it’s hokey but it’s the truth. Enjoy your life – enjoy every minute of every day and make it count. Remember the things that your loved ones tell you, that you do with your family, the things that make you proud of being alive, and how happy waking up to a sunny day makes you. Be thankful, be appreciative, be sharp and mindful of how you contribute to the world and how your life affects others. Know that at the end of the day you made someone else’s life, not just your own, better. And when you start reaching that speeding bullet point in life, just breathe a little and say – at least I got it all in.

The original

The sequel

Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

But I digress, here’s the report…

It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

“To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

Horrified, he deleted and explained:

I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

Battery never dies, dependable, can’t compute as fast but really great tactility.  And at least a couple hundos less than whatever Apple comes up with.

Update February 3 – thanks, Mark

and…

Waiting for Jen at UNLV Starbucks after class

Last week, YouTube announced beta HTML 5 video support: once you’ve activated the beta, you’ll see videos using a native browser element rather than the Flash plugin. The new player only works with a recent version of either Safari or Chrome (or Chrome Frame in IE), as the video is encoded with the H.264 codec, which isn’t supported in Firefox. A day after YouTube’s announcement, Vimeo made a similar one. They also now provide preliminary support for the HTML video element with a new HTML player.

Superficially this seems like a victory for the “open” Web, right? A few major sites, representing a significant percentage of online video, begin to move away from a proprietary technology (Flash) and towards an open standard (HTML 5). But when you look a little deeper it turns out to not be so simple. Both YouTube and Vimeo have chosen to provide their HTML video encoded with the H.264 codec, which is patent-encumbered. Apple has a big stake in H.264, so Safari supports it, and Google has paid a licensing fee to include an H.264 decoder in Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t support H.264: it will only play HTML video encoded with the Ogg Theora codec. This is partly for ideological reasons, as the Theora codec is open source and therefore inline with Mozilla’s principles. But there’s more to it than just ideology. In reply to YouTube’s announcement, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering, Mike Shaver, published a blog post explaining why Mozilla is sticking to its guns with Theora. He points to H.264’s licensing fees not only as a justification for Mozilla’s decision not to support the format, but also as a more dire threat: “[...] if H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers, those bringing the web to new devices or platforms, and those who would build tools to help content and application development.” Mozilla’s Open Source Evangelist, Christopher Blizzard, also had a lot to say on the topic, likening the situation to what happened years ago with the GIF format (and, to a lesser extent, with MP3).

It’s important to remember that the current level of browser support for web standards comes, in large part, from Firefox’s ability to compete on a level playing field with other browsers, and from the Mozilla team’s dedication to open standards. When big sites like YouTube begin positioning a proprietary format as the de facto standard for HTML video, they significantly impede the ability of free-as-in-speech browsers like Firefox to rival their competitors in functionality, which hurts interoperability and innovation on the Web as a whole. Meanwhile, though Chrome and Safari may be excellent browsers, and while their support for modern standards-based HTML and CSS should be applauded, in this respect their choice of a proprietary video format is more reminiscent of IE, circa the mid-90’s.

The fact that YouTube and Vimeo are trumpeting their new HTML 5 video support as an open standards victory is misleading to say the least. And it does lead to confusion: as pointed out by Christopher Blizzard, more than a few people on Twitter seem to think that Firefox’s lack of support for YouTube’s HTML 5 video should be taken to mean that Firefox doesn’t support HTML 5!

YouTube stated that it was launching the new feature in response to a user survey in which “Support HTML5 open web video with open formats” was the most requested feature. It seems that YouTube might only have been paying attention to the first half of the sentence: HTML 5 video, yes; open formats, eh, not so much.

So what do you think? Is it the job of YouTube and other sites like it to lead the way in providing video in an open format? Or should Chrome and Safari lead the way by supporting those formats first? Or are Mozilla being hopeless idealists?

Archi’s Bistro…spring rolls. Not the best I’ve ever had but still pretty decent.

From a visual perspective, it fills that little void by replacing the static window blahs in my second monitor with a fullscreen slideshow, complete with bios, photos, and a whole lot of social gaming tricks that I have to say are very well thought out and very easy to use. It does all this while the music plays continuously and the photos keep sliding in

And it’s not Flash (no love lost there). And of course you can buy the music (the true Long Tail in action here). Awesome. On a side note, as CC and I were commenting, we had a good laugh about a miserably failed project we did in 2003 with the then-Death Row Records that had a similar premise but way before social media was the buzz, before Ajax and jQuery frameworks existed, but was nonetheless pretty hot conceptually (though definitely not as good looking).

Anyway, for all my IMD414 students – this is the kind of thing you should be striving for and exactly what we’ll be talking about this quarter. Nice timing.

Dragging my ass to work…another day, another dollar.