7 posts tagged “geek”
Okay, I admit it. I'm a geek. A Nyerd. I actually bought an iPhone. The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two. I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.
When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress. For me, it was painless and without a single glitch. Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.
I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it. I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into. You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor; Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.
So, the iPhone is awesome. Seriously. It is. Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch. But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.
Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.
Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia. There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.
I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM]. At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk. The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.
I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities. I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon. When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice. Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty. My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.
Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages. I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback. Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.
I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync. I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone. When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new]. When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.
Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.
Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.
This might come as a shock to some folks but some of us don't know as much about our computers as we would like to and when some obvious question that no one nas ever asked before comes up and you figure it out, it's always nice to share with others what you discovered. Some people reading this post might be saying "well, duh!" when they've finished reading it but some folks will appreciate what I'm about to enlighten them about.
First of all, if you're not a Mac OS X user, this post won't interest you. Move on to the next one, unless you have some geeky, maudlin curiosity about how the other [and in my opinion better] 10 percent of computer users lives and breathes. Or, maybe you just want to ask the same question about the PC to find the answer and decide once again that your choice of computer is still better than the Mac, despite what you've heard from your programming friends. By all means, go ahead. Be a PC user. I don't care. If you wanna use a craptacular OS, good right ahead and be my guest. And please don't leave me any comments about Mac vs. PC because I just don't care. Get a job at Microsoft and suck on Bill's tit all the way up to Redmond if you want.
Now that we've gotten rid of the PC punters, has anyone ever wondered if there is any logic to the order that your computer connects to a given network like say, the Internet?
Someone came by my cube at work the other day and asked me if there was any rhyme or reason to the order that Macs connect to a given network, more specifically in most cases meaning the Internet, or as one of our glorious politicians likes to describe it, "the Series of Toobs" or "The Toobs" for short; Don't put a big truck on "The Toobs" either; Senator Ted Stevens says the truck might get stuck on the Toobs.
While I was trying to figure out the cryptic art of file sharing last night I stumbled on a feature that I hadn't noticed in the Network System Preference Panel that answers this very question of what order the OS uses to connect to the Internet given multiple available interfaces.
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences: Click Network and select the Network Port Configurations item from the Show pop-up [PC users: drop down; why is the PC terminology so negative?] that appears below the Location pop-up on the Network preference panel.
On this page, you can check and uncheck Port Configurations that you want or don't want active [Built-In FireWire for Networking? I guess that's a possibility but not for me and Blue-tooth would be a last resort connection option; dow to the bottom for Bluetooth]. I disabled Built-In FireWire by clicking its checkbox to uncheck it.
After enabling what you want to use to connect to the Toobs via a "Network" dragging the items in the list up or down determines the order used for each interface to connect to the network. Logically, if I have an Ethernet cable connected to my computer, I want to use that pipe over my Airport connection because Ethernet is much faster and AirPort or 802.11g/b/a/n is much slower.
So... Built-In Ethernet to the top. AirPort second even though that's the one I'll be using most often at the house followed by Bluetooth and finally Internal Modem for when I go back in tech time to beautiful Prescott Arizona to visit mom and have to slide down the 56K toob known as dial-up. Yuch.
So, if anyone ever asks if there's any logic used to determine which port or interface to use to connect to the Internet or a *network* I can answer that question for a Mac user. I have no idea how this all sorts out on Windows Vista or in XP though. I'm sure someone has already posted this note for PC users somewhere.
One of the most annoying things about taking a screenshot with the old Command + Shift + 4 key equivalent in OS X 10.4 is the fact that the file format now defaults to .png [previous OS versions defaulted the screenshot file to PDF format]. For several years now, I've been typing Command + Shift + 4, then finding and opening the .png on the desktop and then re-saving it as a .jpg file. What a hassle.
I was just looking around online for a solution to this age-old problem as I've done in the past on more than one occasion but this time around, I found a really nifty little trick via a comment to a post on Macintouch. It requires the faint-of-Mac-OS-X-hearted to find and launch the Terminal application in Applications>Utilities and enter some archaic command line text into it but after that, screenshots are saved in whatever format you choose, provided of course that it's supported by QuickTime, according to the Macintouch post [.png, .jpg, .pdf and possibly .bmp, etc.].
Launch the Terminal application in the Applications>Utilities folder and paste in the following text [don't hit Enter after pasting the text and don't copy the carriage return after the text or pasting it to the Terminal app will submit the command prematurely]:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type
Now, at the end of the line you pasted in from the text above enter a single space and then "jpg", "png" or "pdf" without the quotes. Here's some examples of how it would look for three different file formats:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
or...
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
or...
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
When you've got the line configured with the appropriate three character type definition at the end, hit Enter to submit the change to the default file type. After submitting the change, you need to log out and back in. After logging back in again, give the Command + Shift + 4 screenshot trick a whirl. The file format of the resulting screenshot file will be whatever you specified with the last three characters in the Terminal app as mentioned above. This was verified by me when after logging back in, I typed Command + Shift + 4, dragged a box around some small portion of my desktop, released the mouse and a file that ended in .jpg appeared on my desktop.
For me, this is a huge timesaver when reporting bugs. Your mileage may vary. You can thank me later.
Myspace recently surpassed 100 million profiles and as a former measly black box QA engineer of the largely S.F. Bay Area alternative lifestyle-populated Tribe.net social networking site, my co-workers and I watched the meteoric Myspace rise occur as Tribe.net continued to be mostly a failure to launch outside of the Bay Area. There were many good ideas floating around at Tribe in various directions but nothing we did seemed to create that viral growth that the now Fox News-owned Myspace has been experiencing for almost two years now.
Looking back, it appears that the combination of a much younger sign up age, allowing people to hack the HTML and Javascript on their profile pages, adding a Flash-based MP3 player for song upload and playback, as well as providing a myriad of band-focused features for promoting the artist's music and shows via the Myspace events calendar and invitation system, is largely what fueled the incredible growth rate of the site. There are probably some additional unknown factors that are important to the site's growth rate as well but the feature items outlined above, especially the addition of the Flash player and band-focused features, appear to coincide with the incredible growth that started for them about two years ago.
To celebrate the Myspace 100 million user plateau, I thought it might be fun to roast the site a bit and point out some of the many reasons that it continues to underwhelm from a technology perspective. The opinions here are largely speculative as I'm not a web developer or designer and my opinions are based mostly on conversations I've had with extremely talented and capable web designers and engineers about the technologies in use and many Myspace articles I've read online about the site over the years; Some of which may be partially or completely untrue. My apologies in advance for any inaccuracies that may exist herein.
Myspace really has no web 2.0 features what-so-ever and the engine under the hood is notoriously unspectacular from what many people have said about the site's underlying core technology. Here's my best take at the list of technological shortcomings of the site and a web 2.0 feature wish list compilation that was created based upon my experiences using Myspace over the last couple of years:
AJAX [Asynchronous Javascript and XML]: The typical web 2.0 site feature set includes functionality such as widgets or fields that load data without visibly reloading the page, allows the user to freely drag elements around on the page or enter data or search criteria and instantly receive feedback from the server to the page with no visible refresh of the entire page's user interface. The data is populated in the correct location and the rest of the page remains static. There are no AJAX-fied pages, widgets of features on Myspace; It's all web 1.0, centralized portal, old school web site behavior. Every new action requires that the page is refreshed completely. This can be incredibly time consuming when the site is under a heavy load.
Folksonomies and tagging: Many of the new web 2.0 sites like Flickr.com, Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us YouTube and the new Six Apart product Vox in use for this blog provide support for user generated tags that can be associated with various data types such as photos, videos, posts, news articles, blogs, websites or any specific type of item that is featured on a given site. These tags create a user defined "hierarchy" or "taxonomy" of sorts, often called a "folksonomy" that can then be catalogued and searched by tag to view or capture tag related content.
A simple example of tagging can be seen on the site Flickr.com. On Flickr's tags page, words like "sunset" or "architecture" can be clicked on and content tagged with those words is returned in the form or data type of photos, hopefully of sunsets and architecture.
With any tag on Flickr.com, it is also possible to create an RSS feed of photos tagged with a particular word or phrase. This can be useful on another website such as Tribe.net, where a user can publish a feed into an RSS-module, or in an application or online-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, NewsGator, My Yahoo!, or Bloglines, where the tagged photo content can be serialized or "syndicated" newest items first as images are posted to Flickr. When a new photo with the tag "sunset" is added to the site by any Flickr user, that photo is now associated with that particular tag. When the tag specific feed is retrieved by Tribe.net or Bloglines the most recent photos tagged "sunset" are collected. The tagged photo content can then be viewed by the user of the stand-alone RSS reader application or feed aggregation site [Bloglines or Tribe.net as examples] and what is returned are photos taken by Flickr.com users of sunsets.
Of course, the person that uploaded the photo needs to properly tag items and sometimes photos that are not actually sunsets or architecture-related photos might appear in a feed. Additionally, items that don't have that tag associated with them might actually be photos of a sunset or architecture but without the tag, the photo isn't included in what is retrieved as a feed from Flickr. Myspace doesn't currently provide a user interface for tagging any of its data types. More on the Myspace and the RSS issue in the next paragraph...
RSS: Myspace also doesn't currently allow users to syndicate their blogs, photos or any other Myspace data type either. What if Myspace users could syndicate or tag their blog entries, photos, videos, music or groups content on myspace.com so that people could subscribe to or utilize their tagging filters on Myspace user content elsewhere on the web to stay current with their friends or favorite bands activities? Would individual profile users and musicians find that useful? Isn't that the direction that most of these new companies are moving in? Decentralization, RSS feeds, tagging, micro-content and data silos? These kinds of fearures and many others, including desktop application-like behavior in a browser, and a robust web services API like eBay's or Flickr's are the kinds of concepts emerging from more and more web 2.0 sites and this is just the beginning of the madness.
Web services and APIs: Google Mashups are very good examples of Google's web services API [or application programming interface] in action. The Google maps API combines their in-house maps technology and externally accessible web services so that outside developers can create useful new combinations that improve the efficiency of people's daily activities such as searching housing prices in a specific area or finding a restaurant close to your house or hotel. I'm not sure that Myspace or any social networking site other than LinkedIn encourages people to be more efficient in their daily activities though; Probably just the opposite for the most part.
Notes on a couple of interesting web 2.0 applications that some people might not be aware of: Google recently purchased the collaborative, online emulation of Microsoft's Word application, Writely, and another company's spreadsheet app so that they can offer products that are similar to Microsoft's Office suite, but that are free, collaborative [I said that already] and available online so that they can be accessed from anywhere, not just from the computer where the files are saved. Yahoo! bought del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that is barebones yet very popular among geeky types for saving bookmarks just like a bookmark in your browser but available to the rest of the world, or just to you if you choose, at any computer with a browser on the internet that you happen to be using. Social bookmarking is somewhat of a centralizing feature unlike some of the decentralizing applications I've been blathering about here but a very useful site none the less and del.icio.us supports tagging as well. Myspace has no official web services or APIs for any of it's content types and again, no content tagging functionality.
Uploading MP3 files: When I first uploaded songs to my Myspace music profile, there was no descriptive help text or examples that outlined what kinds of MP3 files or what file size limits existed prior to the upload. This was a really serious annoyance because of how long it took Myspace to report an error during the upload process. Basically, files over about 9 MB, I never figured out exactly what the limit is, are too large and the upload process has to be revisited after the file has been re-encoded via an MP3 encoding application from the original file at a lower bit rate that also reduces the file size, and along with it, the sound quality of the music that is uploaded to the site. Guh. No syndication and there's a limit of four songs total for each Myspace Music Profile as well so why would you want to syndicate that?
Search: Myspace currently has one of the worst search implementations I've ever seen. Try searching for someone on the site and it's a virtual crapshoot that you'll actually find them or anything remotely relevant to them on the site. By default it searches the web currently. There is another search field that is somewhat useful if you know who or what you're looking for but it's buried on the right side of the initial search results page, provided that you clicked "Myspace" from the default "Web" search.
Most people don't save what's commonly referred to as a "handle" or custom URL that makes it easier to find them on Myspace as well [e.g., my handle: http://www.myspace.com/beliefsystems]. With a handle I can guess what the Myspace site URL for an music artist like Wolfmother or Ladytron is because they've had chosen a handle like "myspace.com/wolfmother" or "http://myspace.com/ladytron". For people that don't have a saved handle, the user's GUID, or global user id is used and that's typically a fairly lengthy series of semi-serial, semi-randomized or encoded numbers and letters that are saved in the database that refer to a particular user. I know this because this is what Tribe.net does and I've seen this ID in Myspace URLs many times when I visit people's profiles that don't have a custom URL.
On the search front, I did read an article today about a Google/Myspace deal that said Myspace will hand off its search functionality to Google, and Google in turn will pay Myspace's parent company Fox Interactive Media $900 million over the next three years for the privilege of being Myspace and Fox Interactive Media's default search engine. $900 million over three years ain't too shabby for a service that cost Fox News' Fox Interactive Media unit about $580 million dollars to purchase from failed band member and myspace.com co-founder Tom Anderson and his investors. We'll see how well the search integration turns out between the two companies very soon I guess.
Okay, so, I listed a number of reasons why myspace.com sucks and here's the second to last one...
Social distance and reputation: One of the more useful and important concepts of social networking is the concept of social reputation. If you create a social reputation system for users of a site or service for items that were previously bought and sold as anonymous transactions you create a sense of trust between the buyer and seller. Social reputation [hopefully] creates a network of trust that provides a path back to someone you know in your inner circle or "network" so that there's some accountability, depending on how far away from the first ring of friends you go.
This is similar to what we see on auction site eBay with their positive feedback percentage or Slashdot's user score rating system but with social degrees for accountability and reputation as opposed to user feedback. eBay users with very high user feedback are likely to be more trustworthy and Slashdot users with higher scores are likely to be more informative or relevant than some of the more fringe users of the site. The basic idea is to provide a traceable reputation so that the kinds of Myspace news stories we're seeing on the 5 O'Clock news every night related to pedofiles and sexual predators wouldn't occur as often as they do.
Myspace is extremely one dimensional. Everyone that creates an account on the site is by default friends with Tom and there's no concept of social degree or distance. While everyone being friends with Tom makes it very easy for people like me to know the total number of Myspace profiles that exist in the system, it also flattens out the usefulness of social reputation so that you can't see how someone is related to you and decide based upon that additional information whether or not it's a good idea to add them as a friend, meet them in a park for coffee or work with them as a fashion model, etc.
The very last item on the list is simply the technology behind the site.
Usability and load issues: Most everyone I know has commented on how slow or non-functional the site seems to be; probably related to the sheer volume of teenagers, musicians and groupies on at any given time, myself included [a musician not a groupie]. Not to mention all the video pop-ups, pimped out profiles with tiled, sparkling background photos, user customizations and Flash-based plug-ins typically implemented by hacking the HTML of a page to bend it to your will while wreaking havoc on your browser and computer memory. The main reason for many of their failures though is the craptacular technology. Mention Cold Fusion to a web developer or designer and watch him shiver at the thought of actually having to work with it. Cold Fusion... very cold!
Myspace is a great resource for bands and there have been a couple of success stories [the Arctic Monkeys for instance] and it really fluffs the ego getting all kinds of friend requests from people that dig my stuff or event invitations to events that aren't even in my region but one of the most exciting things it's given me is the ability to connect with some of my techno heroes from back in "the good ol days" or bands I was into in the 80s, being a product of that decade unlike so many of the sites users. So, there is some positive feedback on the Myspace experience.
And here some positives: I've found many interesting and compelling new bands that liked my songs or my profile and asked to be friends. I've had people from all over the world send me comments, personal messages or Thanks for the Add photos and text. The mobile SMS notification feature is also something that we discussed implementing at Tribe.net a few times and Myspace has gotten that particular feature right. I should also mention though that after the power outage in L.A. due to the early summer heat wave, Myspace stopped sending me any SMS messages about new personal messages, friend requests or event invitations for a couple of weeks. That feature seems to be working a lot better lately however.
So, I hope Myspace gets on the technology ball, slowly migrates to a more robust technology platform and maybe someday adds a few new web 2.0 features but right now, it doesn't look like any of that is necessary. The sheep are following the herd and the herd seems to be tearing off to Planet Myspace at an astronomical rate and shows no signs of slowing down to close the gate.
Before myspace gets around to it, there might still a market out there for a website that is similar to myspace.com but that does what they do a lot better with robust web 2.0 features like RSS, AJAX, XHTML, a feature rich API, tagging and all of the other Semantic web buzzwords and new web design technologies us geeks are so fond of. And while we're at it, a site that can handle such incredible growth and still keep it together functionally with very little down time, minimal database corruption or loss of user data. Myspace has done pretty well with the database corruption and loss of user data items but downtime's another story...
I remember when myspace's "down page" used to have a PacMan game on it and I sometimes wished that the site would stay down a little longer so that I could play a little more. Too bad it didn't stay down longer. I might still have a job if it did.
The internet 100+ million list [from what I could find with a quick Google search]:
1. Chinese internet users
2. Skype registered users
3. MSN Hotmail users
4. PayPal users
5. YouTube videos served
6. Huawei mobile softswitch users [what the?]
7. HP Laser Jet printers shipped since 1984
8. Indian cell phone users
9. Number of Firefox downloads
10. US broadband users
And of course, Myspace profiles
I was just perusing my overcrowded bloglines account feeds and came across this item about a patent from Apple for a display that has image sensors embedded in it. The image sensors would then have their data stitched together so that users looking directly into the screen would be looking right into the "camera" so to speak. Nifty idea. Difficult to explain. Click the link below to see how Engadget makes more sense of it than I have with a computer-generated rendering of the concept and of course, some text as well:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/26/apple-patent-embeds-thousands-of-cameras-among-lcd-pixels/
Ars Technica's RSS feed via my bloglines account posted an article about a theoretical "cloaking device" like the one used on board attack spaceships by Klingons [no inappropriate jokes about where these guys come from please] to hide their position in space so that Capts. Kirk and Picard couldn't figure out where to shoot at them.
The proposed technology as theorized by professors from the University of Utah and Sydney would employ the principle of anomalous localized resonance via superlenses placed very close to small objects that could mask much of the perceived lightwaves by resonating at the same frequency.
The technology is entirely theoretical at this point and the math has only been done for a particle as small as a speck of dust but future versions may include larger objects. Fascinating stuff tho. Here's the link in case you missed it above:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6744.html
Here's three songs that can be streamed inline that aren't on the magnatune.com site. I think the quality of my music just gets better and better all the time but that's just because I think my poop has no stink. I am a legend in my own mind after all!
