POST ARCHIVE
- HTML5 Video on IE9
There’s been a whole slew of articles written about HTML5 performance on the upcoming IE9 including initial reports that it would only support WebM (when the user has the VP8 codec already installed) but as of now, it appears that there will be H.264 support in an unspecified format. Makes development a real bitch. Either way, what I really found interesting across the board is that any article that talks about fallbacks for Internet Explorer mentions Flash.
Why? Even in this age where we know Flash is starting to lose ground to DOM-based solutions using HTML (sometimes 5 but not exclusively) combined with some slick coding or a framework (like jQuery), why do developers still end up falling back to Flash whenever animation or video is mentioned? Particularly with IE, why wouldn’t we fall back to Silverlight instead? I dunno, just seems like a more logical route to take.
- Creating Effective Semantic Markup
by Mani Sheriar | November 13, 2009 | Script Junkie
[cross section]
![[image from article]](http://www.matsays.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ee730276.home-styleden-usMSDN.10.jpg "ee730276.home-styled(en-us,MSDN.10)")
What Are Web Standards?
One of my favorite descriptions of Web standards comes from Russ Weakley, of MaxDesign:
“The term web standards can mean different things to different people. For some, it is “table-free sites”, for others it is “using valid code”. However, web standards are much broader than that. A site built to web standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, MathML, SVG etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc).
In other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, usable and search engine friendly..”
To me, more than anything else, Web standards mean a total separation of style and content, as well as content that is accessible across all platforms, browsers, and devices and available to the widest possible spectrum of users and user agents.
Why Should You Care?
As a person writing front-end or back-end code, you have several reasons to care about the quality of the (X)HTML you create. Among them, writing high-quality code can do the following:
- Make it easier (and thus faster and cheaper) for yourself or others in the future to update, add on to, or redesign the site or application you’re working on
- Reap the well-touted benefits of faster downloads, higher SEO rankings, better accessibility, and future-proofing
- Gain the respect of your colleagues and clients (which, you know, can help you make a living)
And, my personal favorite if you are a back-end person:
- Make front-end colleagues love you and love working with you (which, again, can translate into more work and thus more money, because folks like me are going to be much more stoked about working with you again).
How Do You Do It?
I like to try to write my code as if I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. I enjoy the idea that anyone with a modicum of coding knowledge could come in, get up to speed, and take over where I left off in a minimal amount of time (and with minimal frustration). I accomplish this in a few ways …
Envision the Unstyled Document
When I am writing my (X)HTML and I come across any question in my mind about the best way to code something (whether to use a blockquote or a div, a definition list or a table, a heading or bolded text), I ask myself one surprisingly simple question, which almost always yields the proper response: “How would I code this if I were doing so for a text-only browser?” Of course, on some level you need to consider your design, but as a designer, I say to you consider it very little when you are writing your markup. Consider it in terms of the containers and the minimal hooks for CSS that you might need to accomplish your layout, but otherwise, when it comes to figuring out the semantics of your actual tags, don’t consider it at all.
Read the rest of this article at the source.
- University Scans Student ID Cards to Take Attendance at Lectures
As both a private college and university instructor, I’ve frankly often deliberated on this issue. At the college, attendance is taken and tracked, while at the university it is not. It isn’t a question of trust or control, it has to do with the learning process and test scores and their effects on both cumulative education as well as Federal funding.
As a student (neither undergrad nor graduate), I don’t think I’ve ever been under an attendance-taking process but I’m still intrigued at that question: Would required attendance actually improve learning?
And the follow-up question: What other processes would help to enhance it in either case?
Weigh in please!
Original article by Lee Bains on Switched:
High schoolers have long grown broad-smiled and wide-eyed when regaled with their older friends’ college stories — parties, sleeping late, football games, and, amazingly to think, no attendance requirements. While those youngsters need not fear that all-night ragers and tailgating will fade into obscurity anytime soon, it may be a different story with class attendance. At least one college, Northern Arizona University, has begun using electronic scanners to track students’ attendance at lectures.
“We do have to say to a lot of students that it really is important that you do show up to class,” NAU associate professor Brandon Cruickshank told NPR. “You are not going to do well if you’re not here.” Buttressed by the arguments of professors like Cruickshank, NAU has decided that, starting today (the first day of the academic year), students will be required to swipe their ID cards upon arrival at large lecture classes. Citing low graduation rates and large numbers of five-year students, the university may be secure in its decision, but many of its students are not.“I don’t see why we need to be told what to do anymore,” junior Rachel Brackett told NPR. “I feel like it’s a move toward… treating us as though we were juveniles.” While we are pretty sure that, as college students, we would have reacted in a similar way, we are absolutely sure that, when we were college freshmen, we sometimes ignored the pleas of professors like Cruickshank, and inevitably paid the consequences. Take that for what it’s worth, kiddies. It will be on the exam.
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“[HTML5] is in its infancy right now, but I think the browser will be the next widely recognized artistic medium. It allows such a larger dialog with the viewer. There’s actual two-way communication going on between the art and the observer.”
Chris Milk in Wired
- Royalty-free H.264 is a big win for HTML5, big loss for Flash
reblogged from Chris Rawson via TUAW
So far, one of the main arguments against widespread implementation of HTML5 video has been the uncertain licensing future of the H.264 standard. Proponents of Flash video and organizations committed to license-free software, like the Mozilla foundation, said that while H.264 was currently royalty-free (and would remain so until 2015), there was no guarantee that MPEG LA wouldn’t start charging licensing fees later on.In that event, if HTML5 had supplanted Flash as the de facto standard for video on the web, it would have meant that organizations and possibly even end users would have found themselves saddled with onerous fees after 2015.
That theoretical stumbling block has disappeared. MPEG LA has announced that H.264 will be royalty-free forever so long as video encoded with the standard is free to end users. This means sites like YouTube and vimeo will never be charged licensing fees to serve video on the web; presumably, it also means that Apple will continue to pay licensing fees to sell videos in the iTunes Store.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser doesn’t currently support HTML5 video (via H.264, that is -Ed); the uncertainty of H.264′s licensing future meant Mozilla wanted to stick with Ogg Theora, a video codec Mozilla believed would be unencumbered by patenting issues. With MPEG LA’s announcement that H.264 will be royalty-free in perpetuity, it’s likely only a matter of time before Firefox joins browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 9 in fully supporting HTML5.
This is good news for almost everyone except Adobe. Adobe’s main argument against moving away from the current Flash-dominated web video landscape to one with a truly open standard like HTML5 is now invalid. While Flash may continue to hold onto its grip on interactive web content, MPEG LA’s announcement likely points to an end to Flash’s dominance in video. This is also the last nail in the coffin for any possibility of Flash running in iOS — with possibly the biggest obstacle to widespread implementation of HTML5 video now gone, there’s zero incentive for Apple to hitch its wagon to Flash.
[also see this article at Macworld]
- iBenz
OK, I admit I’ve always had a preference for Mercedes. Now this. Oh man, I need one. Maybe I’m not the biggest Apple fan but daaannng…
via Bornrich:
Brabus, one of the most respected tuning companies in the world, has now unveiled its latest creation, the Brabus iBusiness. Based on the Mercedes-Benz S600, the Brabus iBusiness four-seater luxury sedan packs in a range of multimedia features, including two iPads in the rear seats with Bluetooth keyboards and mouse, an ultra-small Mac minicomputer under the rear shelf and a 64GB Apple iPod Touch. The German super tuners have fitted the Mercedes S600 iBusiness with a 15.2-inch TFT display with 16:9 aspect ratio and USB 2.0 ports in the rear compartment to hook up peripherals to the Mac. You can connect to the internet via UMTS and HSDPA. The two iPads control the complete BRABUS multimedia system and the car’s standard S-Class COMAND system with all functions such as radio, navigation system and telephone.
- HTML5 Video for iPad (p3)
OK, so roll ahead, here’s the end solution. With a very small amount of very simple jQuery, the player will pop to full screen over the existing page elements, and has instant replay and GO LIVE capabilities when in live mode. The scrubber control in VOD mode is not fluid because seek capability is limited. And wouldn’t you know, volume control and bitrate metering for m3u8 segmented dynamic video is not supported on iPad at all (thanks Ken Hanson for helping me out of the frustration and leading me back in the right direction).
iStreamPlanet HTML5 Video for iPad solution with dynamic stream capability
My efforts to keep updating the progress failed – deadlines and classes thwarted me to death, but hopefully I’ll catch up one of these days. In any case, I had to revise the HTML a bit and add in the jQuery…without giving away the farm, here’s some of it. (more…)
- HTML5 Video for iPad (p2)
A couple of things to remember when designing your layout is that you’re working with some slightly odd dimensions. Consequently you’ll want to plan your visual layout to maximize visibility, and carry those to the bitrate profiles when encoding.
In landscape mode, the window dimensions are 981×661, which gives you enough space to do a “fullscreen” (really “full page”) when you’re showing 16:9 (and still have room for the controls) but if your video is 4:3 you may want to reduce the video to 816×612 which will still give you room for the controls. Remember that unlike mouse hover controls that have become the standard over the last couple of years, iPad doesn’t have a “hover” state so your controls have to be visible pretty much all the time. Still, since you really only have a minimal number to play with, you could work on alternate layouts.
In portrait mode, the inner dimensions grow to 980×1208 which gives you a lot of room to work with but since many users would opt to go with the largest viewable video window, it’s probably unlikely that they’d choose to watch the video in portrait mode unless you provide some compelling, potentially interactive content.
Some things to consider:
- Do I expect to allow multiples sizes (standard and “fullscreen”) or just one?
- Do I intend to have banner advertising? Is it being triggered by the video? Can I use spiders or overlays instead? Do I need a 728×90 or can some other size work better?
- Will my delivery page have content other than the player?
- How will the video interact with other content on the page?
- How does the shrinkage when moving to portrait mode affect the hit range of the controls? Do I need to enlarge them in that mode?
Next we’ll look at some of the possible solutions depending on the case scenarios.
- HTML5 Video on iPad
Yesterday I embarked on developing an HTML5 <video> player specifically for iPad with live HTTP video (m3u8). I had been toying with both OVP and Projekktor for about a week but the minute I opened it on the iPad, everything went to hell. Fortunately, the notes on Apple’s website got me back on track and now I’m sitting on a pretty good solution. Admittedly I ended up using jQuery to smooth out the user experience with small animations and queues to the user when the playback lags, but nowadays, its almost expected.
Over the next couple of days I plan to write about what went into getting it to work and some of the interesting notes that I’ve compiled with this struggle to get the product up. By far the worst problem with <video> is that there is so little compatibility across platforms. The biggest thing was to keep the player from reverting back to Quicktime when it opened the TS files, which is more or less the fallback. The second was to provide some semblance of design – not just the basic <video> controls.
I have to say that I am impressed with both OVP and Projekktor though neither were able to conform to these specs. OVP is excellent for its flexibility while Projekktor is super easy to implement. I’ll probably write about these more as I continue to work with them.
So for starters…get your head wrapped around the idea of starting from the basics – a simple HTML5 page with minimal styling, jQuery and a basic video tag:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>My HTML5 Live Stream Player</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery- 1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="style.css"/> </head> <body> <video id="video-player" class="video-class" width="640" height="360" src="path-to-m3u8" poster=""></video> <div id="video-timeline" class="video-class"> <div id="played"> <div id="playThumb"></div> </div> </div> <div id="video-controls" class="video-class"> <div id="btnGroup1"> <div id="btn-Replay"></div> <div id="btn-Previous"></div> <div id="btn-PlayPause"></div> <div id="btn-Next"></div> </div> <div id="btnGroup2"> <div id="btn-FullScreen"></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> </body>Add some basic styling to style.css
/* style.css */ html, body { padding: 0; margin: 0; } body { background: #333; color: #fff; } .video-class { width: 640px; position: relative; margin: 0px auto; } #btnGroup1 { position: absolute; left: 0px; height: 44px; } #btnGroup2 { position: absolute; right: 0px; height: 44px; } #btnGroup1 div { float: left; margin-right: 2px; width: 44px; height: 44px; } #btnGroup2 div { float: right; margin-left: 2px; width: 44px; height: 44px; }And start up the jQuery with a few listeners and function shells in script.js
var myVideo; $(document).ready(function(){ myVideo = $('video')[0]; addListeners(); }); function addListeners(){ } function togglePlayPause(){ } function toggleFullScreen(){ } function showTimeline(){ }Tomorrow (or Friday) more on how to style the buttons and get your functions working with the element.
- Future of the Internet
by Dan Redding at Smashing Magazine. Read this fantastic article in its entirety here.
“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure
The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. It’s transformative: it has transformed the vast globe into a ‘global village’ and it has drawn human communication away from print-based media and into a post-Gutenberg digital era. Right now, its perils are equal to its potential. The debate over ‘net neutrality’ is at a fever pitch. There is a tug-of-war going on between an ‘open web’ and a more governed form of the web (like the Apple-approved apps on the iPad/iPhone) that has more security but less freedom.
An illustration of a computer from a 1958 IBM promotional brochure titled ‘World of Numbers’
So what’s the next step in its evolution, and what’s the big picture? What does the Internet mean as an extension of human communication, of the human mind? And forget tomorrow — where will the web be in fifty years, or a hundred? Will the Internet help make the world look like something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report? Let’s just pray it doesn’t have anything to do with The Matrix sequels, because those movies really sucked.
- Typography Tools
I’ve been a lazy bastard. OK, not really lazy, just busy. Same thing sometimes. Anyway, here’s a couple of typography tools that jumped out at me in my surfing ventures…
Typograph
A down and dirty CSS writer that will help you visualize the scaling of your basic textual layout with a drag and drop interface. Easy to use, clean, and best of all, explains what it is doing in a pretty ingenious format (an essay on the screen). http://lamb.cc/typograph/
Google Font Preview
With the continued expansion of the Google Font API which allow you to use nice typography outside of the “web safe” fonts, this page will help you see what the text will look like and provide you the CSS (with import) for it. http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview
And a real quick mention to 52 Weeks of UX, whose always had good, informative and brief articles on user experience, particularly for the last few, like this one on the five W’s of UX.
And a finger bird to UNLV and NSHE who not only decided to axe Informatics and several other schools, but to charge the students in those departments a premium (called the “Program Elimination Bridge Fee” – see here) for being able to take classes because of their decision to axe them ($5 extra per credit – not a lot but it’s the principle). You’d think that at the very least we could get a discount for the inconvenience of having even fewer available classes and a time limit to finish (and no continuation to the PhD program). If it weren’t for the fact that I were on the payroll still, I think I’d probably lambaste the stupidity of that situation harder but I figure that Nevada is so screwed up already, I shouldn’t expect any more from the state’s largest institution of higher learning.
- WordPress 3.0
I’ve been waiting in anticipation for the release of WP3.0 and now that it went full-bore, I’ve been way to busy to mess around with it. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to spending a few hours this weekend checking out the changes. In the meantime, here’s a good post from Craig Buckler at Sitepoint …
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.phpconfiguration 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.phpfile:define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
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 …
- Innovation
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.
- Apple v. Adobe, The Re-Match
ZDNet reports that the battle between Apple and Adobe continues with the latest OSX update 10.6.4. Reportedly the update provides an older version of Flash that Adobe claims to be less secure and outdated. Apple counters that its installation corrects issues in (more current versions of) Flash that open up cross-domain request vulnerabilities.
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.
- ExtJS = Sencha
So amongst some of the other hidden news of the day, the former ExtJS has now re-branded itself as Sencha. Joining forces withthe jQTouch and Raphaël projects, brainchilds of David Kaneda (rock-star UX/UI dude) and Dmitry Baranovskiy, I expect to see real great things from the new child.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!
- A Cautionary Tale
via anonymous donor in one of my favorite tumblogs – Clients From Hell – but one of the most well written accounts for up-and-coming (meaning student and novice) web developers…
I’m sure none of you are strangers to being asked to do favours for friends and family. I’m here to tell you that while there’s nothing wrong with doing a favour for someone you love now and then, always draw up a contract and terms of service, no matter how small or minimal the project. I don’t care if you’re doing it for free – make them sign a contract. In this case, I assume complete responsibility for the following situation because I mistakenly worked from trust. I should also warn you that this reads more like a bad romance than anything else, but hey, I wouldn’t wish the following on anyone.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. (more…)
- MacMini Update
While waiting for Apple Store to get their s— in gear so I can pre-order the iPhone for J, I’m reading that lost in the hoopla, Apple also snuck in an update to the Mini. Personally I love Mini’s – small, compact, and powerful for the price, but these new updates throw it over the top.
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
- Are you an (iPhone) preemie?
Tomorrow morning the iPhone 4 goes on pre-order. Are your fingers poised over the keys to make that pre-order or are you going to wait for it to go in store and check it out first?
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.
- The Local Maximum
From 52 Weeks of UX
Photo courtesy of Andrew Chen via 52 Weeks of UXDo 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 productBecause 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.
- Economics of Internet Porn
[MatSays: though most of this is can be filed as a head-slapper "duh" it does nonetheless pose some interesting research statistics - basically stuff that pretty much every adult webmaster already knows but didn't have solid evidence or numbers to back it up and really didn't want everyone else to know]
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?
- Google Font API & Google Font Directory
Yesterday Google announced a new initiative to provide extended web font support through the Google Font API and the Google Font Directory.The Font API provides a cross-browser methodology for using any of the fonts in the Font Directory in a web page with a simple line of HTML. The result – richer, textually styled web pages with SEO semantics intact, crisp scaling in browser zoom mode and accessibility to screen readers.
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.
- The Ten Commandments Of User Experience
At least according to Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave at SXSW [via Slideshare]
- Developer wants to stick an H.264 fork in Firefox
by Lee Matthews via DownloadSquad
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.
- Fire the “web designer”
brian cray via sebastianwaters:
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.”
- 3D is coming, jury is still out
It’s no secret that 3D is probably the “next big thing” for video, both broadcast and online. After the plethora of 3D-enhanced box office movies the past couple of years, television is jumping into the melee and online providers are quick to follow suit. At iStreamPlanet we’ve been working with a couple of partners to provide true high-definition stereoscopic 3D workflows for clients by combining all sorts of new technologies, including Smooth Streaming, Silverlight and others (that I’m pretty sure I can’t talk about – I’m sure an NDA is flying around legal somewhere).
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.
- A Farewell to Facebook
By Jason Clark via DownloadSquad
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. (more…)
- UNLV Proves Shortsightedness
Inevitably, Informatics gets the ax. In its unbelievable short-sightedness, the program has been cut. If it weren’t for the fact that I have gone this far, I probably would just drop out now. Maybe I still will. At the very least, I see no point in continuing to try and beat dead horse by continuing to teach at a university that has now let so many people down.
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.
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One thing I love about summer…I finally get to devote some attention to my posting
- Eloquent Javascript
Being a teacher is both wonderful and exhausting. I love being around students – it is truly fun to watch them find their way through this maze we call Web design and their own enthusiasm keeps me on my toes. But at the same time it is exhausting, particularly when after repeated attempts to explain something from every angle I can think of, the idea still doesn’t sink in.
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.
- 10 Ways Designers Can Earn More from Projects
Took me years (unlike the 18-year old author) to learn the advice dished out in this incredibly good post – every once in a while, take stock of where you stand as a designer and keep these in mind.
[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. (more…)
- Save UNLV Informatics
We have reached mission critical now. UNLV’s President announced yesterday that he has received the list of proposed cuts in order to balance the budget for the next fiscal year, seeking a $4 million elimination of expenses. Amongst the recommendations was to eliminate the ENTIRE Department of Informatics…my program is about to die a very untimely death.
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.
- Stupid is as stupid does, and the LVRJ sucks
So in a Saturday, March 6 followup to the first article, the Las Vegas Review-Journal now reports that the Informatics school is the most expensive program at UNLV. Right. Does anyone actually know what Informatics is or question the accuracy of that claim (note that they didn’t say where they got it from)?
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.
- Hahaha
- More Grumbling on Tumblr
Just trying things on for size but getting into Tumblr and digging it. It’s all the posts from here plus several more including short commentaries and reblogs. See it at http://matsays.tumblr.com.
- State of Nevada decides stupid is a good thing
completely understand when recession hits and states start to look for ways to reduce deficits, it never ceases to amaze me that education is almost inevitably one of the first to be cut. In Nevada, where we are already near the bottom in elementary and secondary education, the University system (UNLV and UNR) have nonetheless continued, despite double digit cuts last year, managed to survive and prosper. But now the State, under the wily direction of Gov. Gibbons (blah) has dictated another $9 million in cuts at UNLV. Amongst the proposed options is to cut the most expensive departments, but if you look at the list of the 20 most expensive departments – they’re the very ones that are in demand right now. Cutting those departments would be tantamount to saying, we can be human but we don’t really need the opposable thumbs.
Read the rest of my op-ed here…
- The main thing is not to install Flash!
[via DownloadSquad by Jay Hathaway]
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.
- dcurtis Manifesto
Well said. Original here.
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.
- Powered by Google
Yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted Google Energy’s request to purchase and resell wholesale energy. Google Energy was formed in December for this purpose. Google claims that the group was formed to regulate its own energy costs, but with the grant specifically allowing the reselling of purchased bulk energy, it opens the doors for Google to compete in a wholly new market selling to consumers even.
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?
- Lifepix #004
I told Jen I would make fresh potstickers for dinner on the weekend but she asked me to make this instead. Ever try to roll that rice paper stuff? Maybe we’ll have to do some Archi’s take out.
Can’t take credit – shot courtesy of FoodPornDaily (rockin’ site I must say)…
- The Power of Oranges
Marketing and social media firm Imperial Leisure has an advertisement featuring 2380 slices of Jaffa oranges to power an iPhone, to promote the sale of Jaffa oranges. Per TUAWM, “Talk about thinking outside of the box, or in this case, the crate.” And I suppose you wouldn’t get a cold for at least a year after that.
But I thought you weren’t supposed to mix apples and oranges.
- Buzz and other social intrusions
Set aside the fact that there’s already a lawsuit against Google Buzz, but at what point does social networking become just too much? Not being an avid user of Facebook or Twitter, sometimes I give off a pretty negative impression of both and others but I am trying (for Jen’s sake). I don’t use Gmail so I haven’t gotten into the whole Buzz thang – not that I would have anyway. So after much deliberation and thought I came to the conclusion that it’s just me. What my deal is is that I avoid the “friendsy” social networking but I do in fact utilize others – like LinkedIn. I would gather that it’s because it is less socially oriented and more professionally oriented.
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).
- A Win for WordPress
I think (after four years), that WordPress may have finally won Jen over. While there are many nice things about Blogger, the total UX of the authoring side is just tedious at best, and the tools for image modification never seem to work right. Albeit that there is a direct shot between the Blogger platform and Picasa vis-a-vis Google, which definitely speeds up the uploading process, but double the time to lay it out and for image intensive blogs like MadeByGirl, it’s just wasteful and frustrating. Plus it throws inordinate amounts of unnecessary code (not that WP doesn’t as well, but it’s pretty trimmed down – last night I manually corrected Jen’s post and cut out 20 nested <div>s with identical styling plus another 18 that were there for no apparent reason).
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.
- World of the Weird: Bananas Fix DVDs
Crazy and I don’t even want to know how “they” figured this out but I thought it was funny, crazy, interesting and useful enough to bother reposting…from Unplggd‘s Home Hacks:
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 cleanerInstructions
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.
- After a hellish day, the world is all right
Despite the sprinkles and symbolic logic, sometimes The Strip can be surprisingly beautiful. Shot from north side of SEB at dusk.
- The Box
I was reading a blog post last night that was dishing advice for (web) designers on how to find solutions and inspiration when approaching new sites…nothing earth shattering really, all except one. But first, a digression. I work for an unusual company. It’s unusual in that the real value behind our work is the ability to solve somewhat complex problems under severe time constraints with fairly elegant solutions both visually as well as with respect to network and MIS limitations, all with restrictive resources in terms of manpower and horsepower.
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 logician I will never be
Four weeks into INF760 and it is very apparent that I may be in over my head. Here’s proof (no pun intended) that logic isn’t my strong suit. Ever take a class where you knew from day 1 that you might just fail but were compelled to take it out of the pure challenge of it?
- When does a device go too far? A cat is not a tiger…
In the fallout advent days since the overhype release of the iDon’tKnowWhatIAmNow, even Google is still chasing after that market with nightly builds of the Chromium UI which appear, for all intensive purposes, poised to take on the Fruit Tablet. But this, frankly, is just getting out of hand.
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.
- In My Rush Time Got Rushed
Mondays are always hectic for me. I drag my weekend-abused body into the office around 7am, and after a generally difficult start of the week, I head out at 3:30 to my 4pm Advanced Theory of Informatics class at UNLV. The class is 75 minutes of massive note-taking (say 12-13 pages on average with just a few too many proofs for my comfort level). At 5:15pm I dash out the door for a 30 minute battle with traffic to make it down to Art Institute in Green Valley (always 15 minutes late, but I’m sure my students don’t mind) for a 5:30 Dynamic Design class that runs until 10pm, after which I run home and slam through the daily end-of-day MadeByGirl routines to make it to bed so Jen can get up for class early on Tuesdays.
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.
- WordPress for Android … Finally
Not that wpToGo wasn’t good but I’m relieved that WordPress for Android has finally surfaced. The interface is obviously similar but for the utilitarian aspect of now being able to change pages as well as posts and approve comments while not at the desk (which I am really trying to do less and less of) is awesome. Nice going!
- Bacon
Life needs a little levity. Matthew Inman – you rock (or at least your warped sense of humor does).
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Yummy Delicious
Meanwhile on Flickr ... [Web Design Pool]
Reading Recommendations
- Art & Science of CSS by Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams & David Johnson
- Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank
- The Long Tail (updated version) by Jason Baeird
- Beautiful Web Design by Chris Anderson
- The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain - The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Overcoat and Other Short Stories
by Nikolai Gogol - We The Living by Ayn Rand
- Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger
- Danny The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
- Successful Freelancing by Miles Burke
- PHP for the World Wide Web by Larry Ullman
- Advanced PHP for the World Wide Web
by Larry Ullman
Soapbox
Sep 2, 2010 10:08 - 0 Comments
HTML5 Video on IE9
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IMD414 Dynamic Design
Jun 14, 2010 14:36 - 0 Comments
The Local Maximum
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- The Box
- When does a device go too far? A cat is not a tiger…
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- Sunday Night Football and Silverlight
INF400 Web Security
Mar 24, 2010 22:16 - 0 Comments
Save UNLV Informatics
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- The main thing is not to install Flash!
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