Thinking of a Recorder Upgrade

About missing yesterday: I was pretty much offline the whole day, with no time to blog. Posting will probably be slightly less regular for now, since I have more things to do these days.

Remember my research on digital voice recorders? That was last week. I didn't do very well. Apparently I neglected to find the Roland EDIROL R-09HR, which is an improved version of the R-09 I got last week. It includes a built-in preview speaker, a remote control, editing software, and more sampling frequencies (higher ones).

The higher sampling frequencies aren't particularly useful for me at the moment -- the highest I plan to go is 16-bit wave at 44.1 kHz, or CD-quality -- but the speaker, remote, and software would be useful to have.

There is a problem, though: Best Buy doesn't have the new model yet. Their customer support department (I sent a message through their website) doesn't know about future product lines. I remembered about Guitar Center last night and checked their website to find that they also sell the R-09, and sent another message. I got a response a few hours ago saying to check with my local store.

Fortunately we were near that store earlier today (before I got an answer, actually) and had stopped in to ask. The salesman I queried didn't know anything more specific than "it hasn't shipped yet". He gave me a vague time-frame of a month or two. (The stop made me half an hour late to a workshop with the robotics team this evening, too. My mom decided we needed to try the wall of digital keyboards... OK, I also got carried away. ;-)

I found a listing on eBay for the R-09HR, priced $20 more than the R-09 unit I got last week, which gave me a release date of March 28 for the new model. That was a month ago. Why hasn't it shipped yet? Strange... Oh wait, the seller was in Japan, where Edirol Corporation is based. Duh...

Anyway, my current plan is to find a time to stop by Best Buy and see if the store I got my current unit from will take it back around the end of next month and give me credit toward the new model. Better yet, I'll ask if they can pre-order one for me. Beyond that, I don't know what to do until it hits shelves.

Anyone else have a better idea? (Shopping on eBay isn't an option, I'll state right now. I'd be using my mom's credit card, and she doesn't trust eBay.)

Update (05/21): It's coming in a month or so!

Chicago Trip Recap

Looks like I was right about my next post after the trip, eh?

I got back from Chicago late last night. The train was nearly 30 minutes early, but the delay in baggage handling made up for it; we waited about 20 minutes in front of the carousel before it even started turning. (It was made slightly better by the fact that we could see into the baggage room; the flaps on the carousel were pretty broken.)

All told, I think it was a pretty fun trip. There were only a couple things about it I didn't particularly like.

The first thing I didn't like was one of the pieces the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) played in the concert we went to Thursday night. It was some contemporary piece by a Korean composer named Unsuk Chin. I wasn't the only one who found it, shall we say, unappealing. (Worse, she was there at the performance. Yipe!) No, I'm not a big fan of contemporary music. Of any kind.

The second thing I didn't like was also a piece, this time in the violin recital I went to with our conductor and one other student -- the recital option wasn't very popular last year, either. That was a piece by a Finnish composer -- name of Kaija Saariaho -- written for solo violin. It was more contemporary music, composed in 1994 as a memorial tribute to Witold Lutoslawski (who passed away less than two weeks before the piece's premiere -- quite fast work). As I said, I'm not very fond of contemporary music.

Third came Verdi's Requiem, which we went to as a group on Saturday night. Obviously Verdi isn't a contemporary composer. It just wasn't what I had been expecting, and it wasn't particularly entertaining. It somehow reminded me of Gregorian chant, I think because the soloist(s) would sing a line and then be echoed in chorus and round by the choir. It was largely monotonous. However, I think that was the only concert I truly felt had been wasted time.

The fourth thing I didn't like (wow, were there that many?) was sleeping on the floor. Well, it was perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't exactly call it a dislike, since I slept relatively well, but coming home to my bed was nice. There would have been two of us on the floor, but a couple of my roommates were good enough friends (and small enough, as they were freshmen) to share a bed. I could have insisted on getting a bed at least one night -- my birthday was Friday, hold the singing, please :-P -- but I hate kicking people out of their accommodations, and I was used to the floor by then.

Now why did I do the bad stuff first? On to what I enjoyed, immediately!

Aside from that second piece at the symphony concert, I enjoyed listening to Wagner's Prelude and Libestod from Tristan und Isolde (which was slow, but still reasonably interesting) and Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14. The Berlioz was the best part of that concert, in my opinion. And well it should have been -- the concert was billed around that piece.

Friday morning saw a trip to the Sears Tower for breakfast and a walk around the Skydeck. I took some pictures up there, one of which can be seen to the right. Isn't it a great view? (The rest of the pictures will have to wait a while; I'm running out of disk storage at the moment, and the card they're on has gobs of free space.) There were also some displays up there (the Skydeck is on the Sears Tower's 99th floor) including such notable personalities as L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz), Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (better known as The Blues Brothers), Studs Terkel (upon whose work the musical Working is based, and which I will be participating in late this Spring), and even Oprah Winfrey (whom I include here only because I've heard her name, not because I really care one way or the other). A lot of great stuff has happened in Chicago; I think there was even a film crew out while we were there (one of the other sightseeing groups mentioned something to that effect).

We played a concert at Navy Pier around noon. The wind ensemble played outside and got rained on, which meant their performance was cut short (I got only pictures of them, before it rained). Then we in the orchestra set up our performance inside the very noisy mall. I got a full recording of that, enlisting a chaperon to hold the recorder. As a result of that, there is some chatter in it, but mostly during the pauses, which means it can just be edited out when I get some software to do so.

Friday afternoon we (well, just a small group of us -- around ten) toured a string instrument maker's shop (William Harris Lee & Co.) and tried out a few of their hand-made instruments. They might even have a sale coming because of that; one of our group fell in love with the cello she tried. I grabbed a 1:40 sound bite of the room while people were playing (after I had done my own tryouts of violins), but I don't think I'll upload it right now. I have to do some thinking about what to do with those recordings.

Oh yeah, that reminds me that I really like the Roland EDIROL R-09. I think I'll keep it. I also used it to record our concert at Navy Pier on Friday and the clinics Saturday morning. I'm just blown away by the sound quality of that little box. My only wishes right now are for sound-isolated headphones (to set input levels and monitor) and an external microphone (to reduce handling noise). A case would be useful, but is not a priority. (Priorities are actually the same as the order I used here: headphones, external mic, case.)

Friday afternoon was me studying lines in my room, then Friday evening was the violin recital I loved so much. It was at Ravinia Park, which meant a 45-minute train ride each way, but the performance (a certain Jessica Lee, violinist) was exemplary. The only thing I didn't like was the contemporary piece. Well, and the half-mile walk in the rain -- with no rain jacket -- because we got off the train one stop too late. It was just the three of us: me, our conductor, and a flute-player. The rosin dust cloud at the last bow stroke was incredible!

Saturday morning was our own breakfast (like most of the meals on the trip) and the clinics. I recorded over two hours of 320 kbps MP3 audio footage that morning. There are 300 megabytes there, but I don't know what to do with the recordings. If nothing else, they make good documentation. Maybe with some editing, I could turn out a CD-length copy of each one. Hmm...

Saturday afternoon was my downtime, spent reviewing recordings in the hotel room and watching a movie. I think it was 2 Fast 2 Furious, since the Wikipedia article's plot summary matches what I watched. (The only word I could get out of the horizontally-squished, accelerated credits was "Furious", so I had to do some sleuthing to figure it out.) Saturday evening was the pretty-boring -- but still technically impressive -- Requiem concert (which included recognition of the Midwest Young Artists' graduating class for this year), followed by a short hang-out in the floor lobby at the hotel before the rest of the group got kicked out around midnight by a burly security guard.

Sunday morning was a good sleep-in and then packing. I'd packed Saturday night, so I didn't have much to do. It was, for me, just getting up, getting dressed, and tidying up my stuff. We checked out around 11:00 and took our shuttle to Union Station, where we got lunch and boarded the train.

The rest of the trip was either sleeping or train rides, neither of which were particularly interesting.

A few memorable things happened. First was the accident on the Red Line, in which a semi crashed into an elevated-train station. Some of our group were in the area at the time and were evacuated from the train they were on, getting redirected to bus transit.

Second was the rain on the way to Ravinia. I mentioned this above, but I'll go into more detail here. We got off the Metra train one stop too far and had to walk back to Ravinia Park for the recital on Friday night. It was raining pretty hard, and the trip was a bit longer than we'd anticipated. The only one of us with a rain jacket was, of course, our conductor. By the time we got to the recital, we were sufficiently damp. On the way back we got smart and took the train from the nearer station.

Third, after the White Sox game was rained out (also Friday night), some of our group got into a pull-up contest with some Chicago teens (14-16) and won a hip-hop CD. They played it in our floor lobby later that evening. I'm not much for hip-hop, but at least some of the lyrics were reasonable.

So that about wraps up the trip. I think it was worth the time. Now I just have to get used to
my school stuff again. Oh, those five days were bliss...

Enhance Web Form Usability with JavaScript

This is my last canned post for the week. I wrote it on Wednesday, before leaving for Chicago on Thursday morning. I'm getting back tonight, so hopefully a fresh post will arrive sometime tomorrow. I didn't can any more, so I better be up for writing. Probably a recap of my trip.

Earlier this month, I had the dubious pleasure of filling out applications to a couple of summer programs. The first was at the University of Chicago, studying Greek drama -- in Greece -- for three weeks. The other was at Northwestern University, studying theater -- just in Chicago -- for five weeks. Both applications were completed online, with supplemental materials submitted in other ways (email, postal mail, etc.).

I noticed a big difference between the two applications. In terms of usability, they were like night and day. The comparison is almost like trying to compare apples and oranges; there's just no way to reconcile the differences.

Northwestern University's was very easy to use. It utilized the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript quite well to create a highly usable and nearly frictionless form to fill out. Phone number inputs moved the caret to the next box automatically when the correct number of digits had been typed; sections expanded and collapsed depending upon other options; the whole nine yards. It was not just an application; I actually enjoyed watching the care Northwestern's development team had put into the one-page form.

The University of Chicago, on the other hand, had a rather annoying multi-page (six, to be exact, counting confirmation and registration fee payment pages) process, and no JavaScript helped along the way. Not only that, but the essay I had carefully constructed in Microsoft Word (for a change) blew up when copied and pasted into the textbox provided in the form. It kept all the letters and everything, but all the special "smart quotes" that Word makes by default got turned into question-mark strings when I saved, and then returned to, the page. I had to spend about ten minutes figuring out how to keep that from happening. Proper encoding would have been nice. (Or whatever the problem was; I was too focused to pay much attention.)

So, while the two forms are kind of like apples and oranges (only one of them had an essay input), the JavaScript assistance was still quite welcome on Northwestern's site. It's a perfect example of how JavaScript can be used in a way that the average user probably won't consciously notice as script at all. Well done, Northwestern! UChicago, we'll take a look at your form again next year, eh?

Just so y'all know, I got accepted to the UChicago program this past week, before I left (for Chicago, even; not that I'll be anywhere near either school). Still haven't heard anything from Northwestern. I'm crossing my fingers; this is the only year I can do that program. UChicago's can wait a year (can't do both, as they overlap).

I Really Dislike This Branding Thing

This is a canned post, written before I left for Chicago two days ago. I get back tomorrow night, worry not!

All right, it's time for another rant. This time, it's about brand labels.

I don't know if you've noticed, but it seems that sometimes the label on a piece of clothing (or accessory; pretty much anything falls under this umbrella, actually -- including electronics) is more important than the thing itself. It drives me crazy.

Oftentimes I've noticed that "no-name" brands have better quality than the label does, at a lower cost. What's up with that? I have never understood the thing we have in American society with buying a name rather than a product. (Are you from another country? How's the label situation there?) All I care about is the thing, the tangible, useful (hopefully ;-) product I'm paying money for and will use. I couldn't care less who makes it, unless the brand really provides something better than the competition.

Take my shopping for digital voice recorders, for example. Sony, Olympus, and Roland are all well-known brands. Roland is, in my mother's words, "the Cadillac of those things," not that it matters to me so long as it does what I want for a reasonable price. Olympus is a good brand, I know; my mom's first digital camera (and the first one I ever used) was an Olympus, but despite that I don't like the format their recorders use and find Sony's to be preferable. Sony's not (arguably) as big a brand as Olympus or Roland, but their products are quite good. I didn't see anyone complaining about their durability (people said the Roland recorder I'm thinking about feels flimsy).

The point here is that brands seem to carry more weight than they should. I don't have a solution for the problem; I'm just pointing out that it exists, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a clothing example (the original inspiration for this post). Oh well, at least I expressed my sentiments. (If you don't think this is a problem, you're welcome to sound off in the comments. Hint hint. :-)

Useless Apologies

This is a canned post, written before I left for Chicago yesterday.

Apologies have their uses. When one makes a mistake, messes someone else up, causes harm to another person or someone else's property, etc., it's nice to be able to say you're sorry. But apologies don't extend, as far as I'm concerned, to events beyond the speaker's control.

Example

When I was shopping for my Roland EDIROL R-09 the other day, we first went to the wrong store (Best Buy has a lot of locations here in Minneapolis, the site of their corporate headquarters). I said it was the wrong store, but my mom (my ride) insisted that it was right. We went in, asked about the voice recorder department, went back, looked, consulted with another salesperson, and were astonished to learn that the store didn't have the R-09. Then we asked which location it was.

I was right! So we went to the other store, got the recorder, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Before we left the first store, though, the saleswoman we were asking apologized profusely for our coming to the wrong store. No matter that sounded like our mistake was a common one (the two locations are often confused, apparently; they're a mere two miles apart). There was nothing she could have done to influence our choice. No input, no knowledge of the problem beforehand, no way to issue a correction. Why did she apologize?

Yes, my mother and I were good-naturedly needling each other about the mistake -- mostly me, because I had been correct :D -- but was that why the saleswoman was so sorry about our mistake? Perhaps I was acting too belligerent. I have noticed a trend around here (I think it's a Midwest thing) that sarcasm is often taken as fact by people outside the primary group in which the sarcasm is taking place. This is by no means the only instance. Maybe she thought I was mad at my mother? I don't know. (I wasn't, not at all!)

This kind of thing drives me bonkers the same way it does when waitresses and waiters at Oriental restaurants thank me when they fill my water glass (or whatever beverage I have). That's a subject for another post -- maybe; it might be too small a topic -- but these kinds of things make no sense to me at all.

Chicago Orchestra Trip

Well, wish me luck! I'm leaving for the train station in a few minutes to go to Chicago for four days. It's a trip with the orchestra at my local high school, where I play violin. (Same school as my robotics team, yes. Remember that trip? Probably no from-the-road posts this time; I'm not bringing my computer.)

We're going to a symphony concert, playing our own mini-performances (we'll have two groups, each with their own concert), sightseeing (including the Sears Tower), having clinics with members of Chicago orchestras (I FAIL; see update below), and generally enjoying the city. It'll be a busy four days, though that's mostly crammed into three days due to the eight-hour train rides (plus time for boarding and disembarkation). Probably no time for or access to a computer, unfortunately. I don't look forward to catching up on Monday (after a late arrival Sunday night), either.

Nevertheless, I think it will be a fun trip. We went to Philadelphia last year, and I had fun. That's where I met the friend who introduced me to the robotics team. The team captain is coming this year, and he's in my room. Maybe some time to chat there.

As with Milwaukee, I've prepared a few posts in advance so there won't be a paucity of content on this site. More back-burner stuff that's not time-sensitive. I think I have a post scheduled for every day I'm gone, but I don't have time to check; it's time to leave, well, now. If there's a gap, you know why. I had a million and one things to do yesterday.

I should also mention, I turned on comment moderation temporarily to prevent any spam while I'm away and can't delete it. Any comments you leave will be visible after I get back, when I go through the moderation queue. Late Sunday night (if I'm lucky and not tired then) or Monday, Central Time.

See you in four days! Try and enjoy the canned words, huh? :-)

Update (04/28): Whoops, the conductor for our clinics wasn't a Chicago Symphony Orchestra musician. He was the conductor for a local arts program. Oh well, can't get everything right.

Researching Digital Voice Recorders

I've been having so much fun lately. Not really. Researching products, whether on the Internet (as I've been doing for the last few days) or in real life (which I've done in the past), is a pain. Specs for one company's product are formatted completely differently from another's, similar devices turn out to be completely different on close examination, etc. Bah!

The backstory here is that I've been researching digital voice recorders. I have been thinking about getting one for a few months now, as a way of preserving all the stories my parents and grandparents tell (but only when we have company). I've been pondering since before my last post on the subject of anecdotes, and recently the thoughts have taken a more proactive path.

Beginning with a simple search of Google Product Search for [digital voice recorder], I've since found dozens of models, each with different pros and cons. Looking at the specs for each, I devised a list of requirements:

• MP3/WAV format
• Not WMA!!!
  
• Stereo recording
• Easy recorder-to-computer transfer
• Removable storage, preferably Secure Digital
• Large internal storage (as an alternative to removable media)

Simple baseline requirements, really. I immediately ruled out a bunch of the products I had discovered.

Olympus has a large selection of digital voice recorders, but they all record to WMA and are compatible only with Windows machines. The few with removable storage capabilities use Olympus's xD cards, which I don't have (and don't wish to purchase, as that would be their only use). So Olympus is totally out.

A lot of voice recorders turned up in my search were microcassette devices, which I don't want (tapes? seriously). Those were mostly at Target's website.

I hit one jackpot when I discovered Sony's ICD-UX80. Two gigabytes of internal memory, recording in stereo to MP3, alkaline batteries... Thought I had it made. But then I discovered another one (no, not a different Sony model).

What I found was the Roland EDIROL R-09.

Removable media, in Secure Digital! Stereo! WAV (and MP3)! Small! Perfect! Sure it's nearly three times the price of the Sony, but it has theoretically unlimited storage. It also runs on AA batteries, which we already have lying around in rechargeable form (the Sony runs on AAAs).

I found a bunch of glowing reviews for the R-09. There were a few neutral ones -- mostly complaints about sound quality and durability -- but those were pretty isolated. Only three out of 17 reviews were lower than 4 stars (out of five).

Basically, this is where I should take a picture of the thing and superimpose "WANT" on it. I won't though; copyrights, time, tools (not at my own computer right now, so no GIMP), blah blah blah. But I am planning to go and play with one at Best Buy this afternoon, where they have it in-stock (as of last night). No, probably no review until after my trip to Chicago, if I even buy an R-09.

So, final "at home" post before my trip. I'll post an announcement-type post with more details on the trip itself tomorrow morning before I leave.

Update (17:16): Bought a Roland EDIROL R-09 this afternoon. I'm taking it to Chicago. I have a month to figure out if I like it or not, so we'll see how it goes.

Update (05/21): After finding out that my research was incomplete at the end of last month (and forgetting to update this post; d'oh!), I just completed arrangements to get a newer version of the R-09 in a month or so.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats (Plus a Brief Explanation for Missing Yesterday)

Yes, I know I missed yesterday. I went to a social gathering for Passover (here, I'll give the English version -- not that I know Hebrew anyway, yet :-) that went a lot later than I had expected. Not only did I miss blogging, but I also missed homework, which is arguably (ha-HA!) more important than this site. Daily posting is more difficult when my already crowded computing (and real-life) schedule becomes even more crowded with one-off events. Hopefully I can get a bunch written tomorrow so this place won't go dead over the weekend when I'm away. On to the relatively short post now, with one minute to spare...

I saw this video shared on FriendFeed (in a rather roundabout way) a while ago, and I'm pretty sure most of the people who read my blog probably don't even have accounts over there. With that in mind, I thought this one was so amusing and well-done it had to be blogged. The clip is titled "An Engineer's Guide to Cats"; before I commentate and ruin the whole thing, just watch it:

For some reason I just find that to be really amusing. I'm not an engineer by any definition of the word, but I do find myself occasionally being very analytical. That's exactly what these guys did for the video.

Sorry I can't offer more of an opinion, but it's late and I have to be up really early tomorrow. And I still have a bunch of stuff to do. Blogging is going to have to be moved down a notch in priority for a little while, unfortunately.

WOT 3.0 Review

I decided against delaying this post until next weekend, because this way it comes before the press release and will inform people (potentially) before the new version is pushed out.

I've been sitting on the new version of WOT for a little while now, after having been invited to the beta-test team (thanks guys!) on April 15. Almost a week has gone by (well, five days), and I feel I have played around with it enough to form a reasonably complete opinion.

The Good

First of all, I'd like to say that the new rating icon is wonderful and much better than the one in the previous version. That little bust (it was head and shoulders, to be precise) was really difficult to use, since there was no centerline to judge from. The dot is much easier to use!

The rating bar now changes from appearing convex to appearing concave when you rate that particular component. (One could also say it dims, but either description works, in my opinion.) It makes a good at-a-glance indicator of whether or not a particular category will carry your input. There is also a message displayed beneath each component's bar if your rating differs from the averaged value from other WOT users, enticing you to leave a comment on the site.

That brings me to a little sidebar here. The WOT site has undergone a major overhaul, now appearing much more like McAfee SiteAdvisor's (rel="nofollow"; sorry, McAfee) in the information provided. The new website scorecard feature is what I'm talking about. There is data on popularity, a link to the WHOIS entry for that domain, detailed rating information with graphics that mirror the add-on's rating popup, and a section for comments and (something SiteAdvisor doesn't do) references.

This new "references" feature is particularly interesting. It takes mentions of a site from Digg, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and a multitude of other places and displays a summary of that activity right on the domain's scorecard. Sites mentioned in Wikipedia, for example, are rather unlikely to be bad; domains bookmarked on del.icio.us or submitted to Digg are much less likely to be spam. I think it's an especially good new feature.

Besides the "references", the comments provide a space for users to provide free-form feedback about the site. There are a bunch of categories to place your comment in, ranging from "Useful, informative" and "Entertaining" to "Spam" and "Browser exploit". The categories of comments are summarized and graphed (!) above the comment display area to give a general idea of the overall user feel for the site.

The Not-Quite-Perfect

With all these improvements, it's hard to imagine that there could be things missing, but there are. (Hey, I'm not paid to write this. I can say whatever I want! :-)

Most importantly, I would like to see a way for webmasters such as myself to claim their sites. That is one thing I think McAfee SiteAdvisor does well. In fact, it would be doubly useful if WOT allowed verification via <meta /> tags in the site header as an alternative to file upload. Google Webmaster Tools (or Google Sitemaps, as it was called before) has both options, and for free hosts that don't allow file uploads (<cough>Blogger</cough>) the meta tag option is very useful.

Now that I think more about it, the only other thing I can think of is a minor interface change. In the old version of WOT, clicking in the border to the side of a rating bar caused a rating of 100 or 0, but now those ratings are difficult to enter as the borders are no longer clickable areas. If there's still time, I'd love to have that back. For some sites, a rating of 97 or 4 is insufficient.

The Optimistic Conclusion

All told, the WOT 3.0 upgrade is definitely worthwhile. You can grab the update from the beta page if you don't want to wait for the release. With the last two updates, I'm looking forward to WOT 4.0 coming out, whenever that happens. What will they think of next?

Update (04/23): Sami Tolvanen, one of the WOT founders, comments below that the clickable borders have been restored in the latest version of WOT 3.0, which is also now out of beta. Thanks for letting me know, Sami; and you're quite welcome for the review. :-)

The Evolution of Dance

I didn't have time to write a post this morning, so I'll do it now, in the afternoon. Better late than never... Not that this one would draw major traffic anyway, no matter when it's posted.

All right, it's the weekend. I don't really have anything new to report -- well, nothing that I find exciting, at any rate. A lot of things have happened this week, to be sure, but none of the events really caught my attention beyond the usual read-it-star-it-share-it-move-on in Google Reader (or the read-it-close-it-Like-it-keep-going in FriendFeed).

So I thought I'd take advantage of this uninteresting period to dig through my YouTube favorites and pull out a couple entertaining videos I've seen over the last several months. One came from a recommendation (I think) -- that's today's -- and the other was posted on FriendFeed a while back. The one I saw on FriendFeed will be tomorrow's post if nothing interesting comes up.

On to the video. You've probably seen it by now. It's the #1 most viewed video on YouTube, having been watched nearly (as I write this) 85,000,000 times. I present Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance":

It's a six-minute clip, as can be seen by the counter in YouTube's player. The dimensions are 425px by 355px... Oh, who am I kidding? This isn't a scientific analysis; this is commentary!

I only saw this after it had become immensely popular. Always behind on memes, I am. Such is my nature.

The video was amusing to me then, and it still is. As I recall I was babysitting my two-year-old nephew the day I discovered it. YouTube makes a great time-waster for those periods of an hour or two when I would get the job of entertaining him. That was just one of the videos we watched that day, but I think it was my favorite.

Most of the songs are familiar to me, in melody. A few are obscure, and there are several for which I don't even know the artist -- but for the most part, they're known. The dance moves are also mostly familiar.

So, hope this made a good diversion. I'm trying to save some ideas for scheduled posts that I can set up for next weekend, when I'll be out of town (in Chicago, on an orchestra trip). More on that next week, probably Wednesday or Thursday morning.

If you've watched this video again and again, and now hate the guts of anyone who shows it to you one more time, I sincerely hope you'll forgive me. I've avoided posting the Numa Numa Dance because I know everyone's really tired of it, but this one doesn't seem to have become quite as large a phenomenon. At the very least, nobody rolls their eyes when it's mentioned (that I've spoken with). And at least some thought went into this video...

The Sins of the Few Cause the Punishment of the Many

Finally, I've decided to blog about this issue. It starts in elementary school, and continues on a larger and larger scale as we go through life. I'll start off with an anecdote.

The setting is a third-grade classroom (no, this is not a reference to Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes). The class is small, only about ten students. One of them is acting up. The teacher, in an effort to get him to behave, threatens to revoke the entire class's recess period if he doesn't settle down.

What's wrong with this? The actions of one student could result in the punishment of the entire class. I can remember that actually happening at least once, being kept inside because one kid was misbehaving.

That is perhaps a good way to teach about dependency -- most people in the world rely on other people in their community -- but it isn't the best way, in my opinion. It would be better for discipline to simply keep the one student in for recess and let them watch their classmates, and more importantly their friends, have fun without them. I believe that would be a better way to teach about consequences.

For me, that was years ago, in the mid- to late-1990s. Fast-forward to 2008. I still see this sort of thing happening. High school, the Internet, whatever. (I can't speak for the office environment yet.) They all use this technique -- "group dynamics" it's called -- to enforce rules. The music teacher at my local high school, where I go to play in the orchestra, says that the entire class will have to stay after school if the two percussionists in the back (for example) don't stop goofing off and start paying attention.

Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress brought up the topic of national censorship yesterday, and I noticed a distinct trend. Her very point was that a few disparate bloggers on WordPress.com are responsible for getting the entire domain blocked in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, and China. There are three million blogs on WordPress.com, and the actions of a few stupid, irresponsible idiots (pardon my French) are getting them all removed from the view of millions of potential readers.

Once again, we see group dynamics at work. It should be the individual blogs getting blocked, and their authors being sued or otherwise punished (fined, jailed, whatever). The 3,000,000+ other blogs should remain untouched. Once again, I find punishing the whole class for the misbehavior of one or two students to be a very bad way of dealing with bad behavior.

To answer Lorelle's question, I am concerned about WordPress.com being banned. I'm concerned when Blogspot.com is banned (that's where I'm hosted right now). National censorship of entire websites happens all the time. The news has carried far too many stories on things like: Iran blocking YouTube, Indonesia blocking YouTube, China blocking WordPress.com and the BBC, Pakistan blocking YouTube, and a bunch of other things that are usually temporary, but all-too-often permanent. (Those aren't necessarily all real examples; I forget who blocked what.) When the changes spill out to other countries, that's worse; Pakistan misconfigured a block and it spilled to the rest of the globe.

But I can only be concerned about things I hear. If I don't know that WordPress.com is about to be (or currently) banned, I can't very well complain about it.

Lorelle's post was the source of inspiration for this one, and I thank her for it. I certainly hope that the world will soon stop making the group responsible for the individual's actions, and instead begin making the individual responsible for h(is|er) own behavior.

Profile Duplication Equals Time Wasted

With the explosion of social sites, Internet users can be asked to fill out, and keep updated, dozens of profiles all over the Web. For light surfers, who use maybe three sites (say, Digg, Twitter, and Facebook), keeping things up-to-date is simple. There are only three forms sites (Facebook has a bunch of different pages for its profiles) to visit when something changes.

People like me, however, end up amassing a whole bunch of pages to update. Right now I think I'm somewhere between 25 and 50 profiles, plus countless sites and profiles-that-aren't-for-sites that I am no doubt forgetting. That's a lot of places to go if I, say, move myself or my blog (for instance). And inevitably, several pages would be overlooked and the information staled. (Don't tell me I'm the only one; I'll bet Robert Scoble, Steven Hodson, Louis Gray, and countless other "social media gurus" all have the same problem.)

This applies to location, "homepage," "blog," etc., image, interests, and any other bit of information (including short blurbs like Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, etc. provide space for) shared in a social profile. What am I to do if I want to change something? Remember every single site I signed up for? Madness! Searching for my nickname doesn't help completely, because some profiles just don't make it into Google.

The time required to figure out the list of sites that need updating, then actually updating them, then figuring out the ones that were overlooked, then most likely forgetting about some that were already updated and going there again only to find that to be the case... Well, I won't calculate it. It's a lot. I know; I just changed avatars not too long ago.

That's one of the things that put this issue in my mind. I'd been using the same graphic for so long, I couldn't even remember where it had been uploaded. I probably still left some sites with my old avatar, but how am I to remember them all? Only time will help me find them and fix the image.

Really, though, none of this should be necessary. The fact that the disparate profiles are hard to update is only part of the problem. Entering redundant information takes up time, too. Putting in my email address, blog URL, nickname, location, and any other data requested by the site should only have to be done once, and I think there's already a way for that to happen. It's just that not very many places support it yet.

Unless I am mistaken, OpenID authentication has profile data built in. Name, email address, location, phone number, address, picture, and all that jazz are stored in one's OpenID profile (unless, like me, you have Blogger, in which case I have no idea what's available). So why don't we leverage this capability? More sites should be supporting OpenID anyway, because it's just more convenient for everybody.

Correct me if I'm completely wrong and OpenID doesn't support profile data. I'm almost positive I saw profile management available from one of the other providers I tried (actually, I'm still trying to get that account deleted; I never used it and the site is semi-broken). But I could be remembering incorrectly.

If I'm right, though, still let me know. Confirmation makes me happy, frankly, and I'd love to hear your ideas for expanding or improving upon my little idea here. (I'm not even sure it's original; someone else has surely come up with this obvious solution before.) Thoughts?

Portable Computing

I really have no right to talk about this subject, as I have never actually done it. I thought it might make for a good hypothetical post, though, especially since I don't have any other good ideas right now. What can I say, it's on my mind. That's because of where I was when I wrote this.

I'm thinking about portable computing right now because I keep everything on my hard drive. Well, stuff that isn't email or associated with a Web service. Applications and stuff all live on my computer. When I go somewhere else, I can't get at the FTP accounts stored in FileZilla (except for the one or two whose passwords I know by heart) or my Firefox data (stored passwords, which I don't usually need anyway; history; extensions).

Is that bad? Depends. On the one hand other copies of Firefox run a lot faster without all the extensions, but the one I'm using right now is at version 2.0.0.4. No organization I've seen bothers keeping Firefox up-to-date. The current version is 2.0.0.13 2.0.0.14 (updated again today, actually), and that could open me (and all the students and faculty) up to security holes, and I don't like that. Trying to upgrade gets me an error message due to students getting limited accounts.

Aside from the lack of updates, I also don't have any of the comforts of home. That is, I don't have my theme (which is currently a glorious black space theme) or my extensions (which do everything from notifying me of new email to keeping me apprised of visitors to this site to making sure I'm not trusting a bad site). I have no history, no bookmarks (which are actually in Google Bookmarks anyway). I also don't have OpenDNS shortcuts, but that would require configuration changes to the computer's operating system anyway.

Most of these annoyances would be solved if I simply got a USB thumb drive and loaded portable versions of my applications onto it. Transfer the settings files and I'd be good to go. Firefox, Notepad++, and FileZilla already have portable versions, I know for sure, and those are the only applications I really find myself wanting. I don't even use FileZilla that much anyway; I'm only thinking about it because I wanted to try something with it to fix a bum plugin on CodingExperiments.com.

With Notepad++, I'd probably want to have Apache, MySQL, and PHP along, too, so I could work on website development. I know there are portable server installations, too. Those could be added to the list if I got a reasonably sized drive (I'm thinking 16 GB at the moment, plus 500 GB of RAID 1 storage to leave at home for archival).

I could also bring along my computer, I guess. It is a laptop. But it's ailing with power jack issues, which make it really annoying to use if it's not left alone on a table (which it is at home). So the trade-off is not having my settings. I can live with it, really. I only spend an hour or two on foreign computers a week. Planning for the future, though, is something I should do. I won't have my own computer forever; it'll be going back at the end of this school year. And no, my idea of bringing a USB flash drive with me is not new; I'm just writing about it myself for the first time.

Microsoft Word's Grammar Checker

Just in case you haven't noticed, I generally like to hold my writing up to high standards. Perfect spellingg, Ccapitalization, punctuation, etc. are all things I aspire to. (Ending sentences with prepositions is fine by me, though. ;-)

From all those feeds I subscribe to in Google Reader, one of them brought me an amusing screenshot that shows Microsoft Word's grammar checker mid-mistake. I shared that item and it showed up in my FriendFeed, where my mother (who just started using the site) saw and commented on it.

Incidentally, I just started sharing things in Google Reader in addition to starring. Stars will become private again, and I've removed that widget from the sidebar as stuff I really want to share now shows up as part of the FriendFeed item. But back to my main point...

The discussion arising from her one comment, made while I was encouraging her to try out FriendFeed, sparked a total of ten others, not counting the one I made at the end (which was unrelated). The points made basically added up to a general consensus that Word's grammar checker is OK, and it's allowed to mess up.

Computerizing tasks is always hard, and that's why we have human intervention in so many things that could be automated but aren't fully so. That human layer adds the opportunity to catch mistakes made by the algorithms employed by the machine. English grammar (sorry, I'm biased; I've only ever used the English checker) is complicated, even for us humans. Writing algorithms to detect and correct errors is a monumental task, and one which is bound to entail some glitches.

Interestingly, the original question ("Could any of you programmers tell me how you would write an algorithm to determine which form of "coaching" the writer implies?" - msbroida) was never answered, but the discussion was interesting enough.

So can we fault Microsoft Word for making mistakes? No. It's just a program, and programs are only as good as the code that comprises them, which in turn is only as good as the programmer(s) who write(s) it. (Resisting the urge to use regex tricks like /programmers? who writes?/ is hard, but nobody would get it.)

Add the complexity of the English language to the complexity of writing any syntax checker and multiply it times the number of exceptions to the rules of English, and you get a pretty difficult task. What's important is training people to not blindly trust software tools like this, and making sure they don't have a problem with questioning the program if they think it's wrong.

It also couldn't hurt to turn these things off by default, to give people a chance to learn for themselves the difference between "your" and "you're"... ;-)

Alert Thingy v1.1: Better, Somewhat

Yesterday, when Alert Thingy for FriendFeed came out at v1.0, there was a lot of buzz in the FriendFeed community (two examples) about all the things that were annoying about the program. The developers listened to the feedback and drew up a list, getting up early this morning to implement the highest-priority requests. It was released not too long ago -- not more than an hour.

First and foremost, the new version can be made opaque. The translucency was very annoying to read sometimes; I personally have twhirl set to be opaque when active, and I would love to have Alert Thingy eventually support going semi-transparent when it doesn't have focus. For now, I'm happy to have it opaque.

Second, comments are now collapsed by default, like the site. It seems that only the three most recent comments are shown, though; the first few are omitted. Since Alert Thingy's purpose is to bring new stuff to light, only showing recent comments works fine. They can be expanded out to the full thread by clicking a link to the right of "Like" and "Comment".

Aside from those, the only other change I've noticed so far is a tweak to the comment tag line. It now appends "...via AlertThingy" instead of "(via Alert Thingy)". I do wonder about the removal of the space; whether or not it was intentional isn't obvious.

If the app is going to be updated daily or (more realistically) weekly for the next several releases, that will make for quick iteration and speedy implementation of requested features.

I actually noticed something new with this version. I'm pretty sure it was a bug in the previous release. Time stamps are in the wrong timezone; I get times five hours ahead of where I'm at now. Alert Thingy must use UTC for everything, rather than reading an offset from the system. It's tolerable; I'm used to UTC times from Wikipedia.

And one more thing, now that I remember. I was playing a full-screen game this morning when Alert Thingy popped up and stole focus. I'm not sure about the status of that in the new version. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Well, that's it for now. I'll bet howard/baines has more coming. I'm probably not anywhere near being done blogging about Alert Thingy.

Update (11:39): Focus-stealing has indeed been fixed. Confirmed a few moments ago using the same game as this morning.

First Look: Alert Thingy for FriendFeed

It's been a couple weeks since I last blogged about FriendFeed. Today is the perfect day to write about it again. This morning, an Adobe AIR client for FriendFeed was launched.

I already use twhirl for my Twitter account, and have for weeks now. I don't want to go back to the website; twhirl is that much better. The new FriendFeed client is refreshing, and a wonderful sidekick to twhirl. I do have a couple things to say about it in the aim of making it better.

Alert Thingy, developed by howard/baines, is locked in a semi-transparent display mode. There are no color or display settings; you're stuck with translucent black. The text is a bit funny-looking, though that's probably an AIR thing. I've seen twhirl users report similar problems.

I first saw rumors of Alert Thingy two weeks ago on FriendFeed, when Bret Taylor (one of FriendFeed's co-founders) posted a link about it, complete with a screenshot. There has been a lot of buzz about it since then, and it finally launched around 12:30 UTC today. There's even a TechCrunch post about it.

But anyway, on to my review. Aside from the aesthetic issues, Alert Thingy displays all the information available on the FriendFeed site, including Likes and comments. One can post comments from the app, which are (at the moment) added along with a small "(via Alert Thingy)" tag line. There's been some discussion about adding a "from" bit a la Twitter, but so far no changes to FriendFeed.

Liking (but sadly not un-Liking) is also available from Alert Thingy. A sound effect plays whenever new items appear or old items bubble back up (due to a comment or Like), accompanied by a notification in the lower right corner of the screen. I can foresee a potential conflict between Alert Thingy and twhirl if both happen to check for and find new items at the same time, but that's an edge case. I won't worry about it, because neither feed is that busy. It would help to know how often Alert Thingy refreshes... There are basically no settings right now.

I do have one major gripe about it, though. FriendFeed's API may or may not return items hidden using the interface on the site -- the documentation just says that fetching the main feed returns what would be visible on the site homepage -- but Alert Thingy displays everything. For the record, so does twhirl, but somehow it's more noticeable in Alert Thingy. Perhaps I'm just used to the hidden stuff being hidden?

One more thing: All comments are displayed. The site has expandable comments, and I think Alert Thingy would do well to emulate that interface. Displaying all comments on every story seems to overwhelm the window, which I cannot resize at the moment (not sure if it's a bug with Alert Thingy or AIR). And speaking of the comments, it doesn't appear that hyperlinks are hyperlinked yet.

Overall, though, I like this new toy, and I can see it becoming the main way I use FriendFeed in the future. It's just that a couple things have to happen first. Number one, I have to get used to the interface. Number two, Alert Thingy does need to get a few refinements. But how could I expect a perfect app two hours after release? ;-)

Update (15:00): I'm not the only one who's expressed some concerns about Alert Thingy. Steven Hodson posted about the opacity and text size issues on FriendFeed Watch, and there's been a steady stream of comments coming in to the major FriendFeed items themselves.

Update (04/14): Updated to v1.1, with fixes to the opacity and comment-verbosity complaints. Moving right along... :-)

Webapp Keyboard Focus Issues

I've found a pretty frequent problem with keyboard-enabled webapps. Gmail, Google Reader, Remember The Milk, and a whole bunch of other services (Google Calendar, for instance) all fit into this category.

It seems that nearly all keyboard shortcut-enabled webapps have one big annoyance in common (no, not AJAX): The shortcuts lose focus in certain scenarios.

The three apps I'm most concerned with are, of course, Gmail, Google Reader, and RTM. I do use them the most, after all.

I've found tab-switching to be the number one cause of focus switching. Keyboard entry is sent to the browser chrome or something, rather than the page. I've noticed that switching tabs with the keyboard (using Firefox's Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab keystrokes) is much less likely to cause a problem than clicking the other tab.

At this point, I should mention that I haven't checked other browsers for trouble; I've only been observing Firefox 2.0.0.x.

Yet, the problem does not seem to be webapp-specific. I have trouble with Home, Page Down, Page Up, and End when switching tabs, too. I'll switch to a new tab, hit Home or End (usually), and nothing will happen. I go back to the previous tab and find that the keypress was actioned there. Harrumph.

I really have no idea whose problem this is -- app developers' or Mozilla's -- but it's certainly annoying. When I'm trying to copy data from one site to another, without a clean import/export interface, I would prefer to not have to click in the page to get the shortcuts to work again.

Anybody have a definitive answer as to why this happens?

Don't Ignore Me, Reddit!

It doesn't show up in my FriendFeed. If you try to access it, you'll get an error. It's invisible to everyone, including myself. What am I talking about?

I'm talking about my reddit account. Yes, reddit, that other social news site. Note that the link goes to a 404 Not Found error page. I registered a while ago; it's got to have been about a month now. I've sent three emails via the feedback section, each time being told I'd hear back shortly. Nothing has ever come back.

As a result of the missing profile page, I have been unable to add reddit to my FriendFeed, and I haven't been able to check up on what I've submitted and voted on. The lack of ability to access my own profile has made me pretty much ignore the site. If nobody can see what I'm doing, why should I bother?

StumbleUpon and Digg are accounts I use with a modicum of regularity, and both of them have my profile up and running. What I do on either site is pulled into FriendFeed for all my subscribers to see. But reddit doesn't even indicate that my account exists.

To be ignored once is tolerable, if not respect-inducing. To be ignored twice is a minor faux pas. To be ignored three times over the course of three or four weeks, however, is inexcusable, especially given the severity of my problem.

Have I been writing too politely in the feedback form? Am I supposed to make comments from the point of view of a troll? Did I use an excessively complex vocabulary? Or was my message simply marked as spam? Since I was given a success message, I would tend to doubt that last possibility. The others, I cannot refute.

Am I missing something? Was there supposed to be a message asking me to confirm my email address? (I never received one.) I have triple-checked the address in my profile; unless I'm unknowingly dyslexic, it's 100% correct as far as I can tell. Of course, I have no standard against which to judge my experience.

So, if you have a reddit account, did it have a profile page immediately after registering? Or did you have to wait a while and gain some karma first?

This problem has officially reached the point of becoming intolerable. reddit, you guys need to stop ignoring my messages!

Update (05/05): Last night I got an email from reddit explaining that the problem is due to a caching bug they still haven't been able to track down. Alexis (the sender of the message) also apologized for the delayed response and sympathized with my frustration -- she's also a FriendFeed fan. According to her email, it shouldn't be much longer now before my reddit account is fully functional. :-) Thanks, Alexis!

Update (05/11): My account's been working perfectly for a couple days now. Problem solved!

Email Not Reliable on One Server

Classmates, you can go direct to the webmail reload script if you're interested. :-)

Oh noes, I'z opening the school email can of worms again! I got the idea for this post from the frequent outages I experienced from my school's mail server in the past month or so. There hasn't been one in the last few days, which is good, but doesn't guarantee against more downing.

So anyway, coming back to the computer after a meal break to find the email page's tab headed with "Problem Loading Page..." started to become routine. "School email server's down again? Oh well, check again in the morning." In a truly reliable system, that would be, "School email server's down?! That never happens!!!"

Actually, the latter quote is basically what I think when Gmail goes down. I haven't had an outage since early last year, and before that they were quite infrequent and quickly resolved. Lately, my school's system has been going down frequently (though not so much any more) and for long periods. Think several hours. It usually failed at night, when there were no techs around to fix it.

As far as I know, there's only one server powering the entire thing, front-end and back-end. If it croaks, nobody can do anything. (I actually never tried sending mail while the interface was down for fear it wouldn't get there.) Gmail has thousands of servers, and techs around 24/7 to fix problems. Believe it or not, I'm not really complaining, not this time. I understand that my school's tech team is only a few people, and that they can't be expected to keep a constant vigil over the servers.

I do have a suspicion, though. I started setting Firefox to auto-reload the page every two minutes using Tab Mix Plus just before the onslaught. I eventually wrote myself a Greasemonkey script (any of my classmates could find this useful, and I'm thinking about adding more features) to do the same thing, only automatically so it didn't have to be reset every time I closed and restarted the browser. It had the same two-minute interval, and the server crashes continued.

Eventually I just updated the script to reload every three minutes instead, and the outages seem to have abated. My guess is that I inadvertently either caused a mini-DoS attack on the server or tripped a rate-limiter that was temporarily blocking my IP address. I am more suspicious of the latter possibility, since it is unlikely that one request every 120 seconds would overwhelm a Web server.

If I'm right about the rate-limiter, let me just point out that Google doesn't limit Gmail requests. I have a ping going once a minute from Gmail Manager, a browser extension that checks my mail and pops up notifications. If it was the unlikely DoS alternative, I think it's just time to get a new server, or move some accounts off to another machine (if it's a shared server).

My point is that one server just doesn't cut it these days. Hardware failures and software crashes are quite common. If one server can't handle the load, add a backup. That's what I would do.

Microsoft, Lay Off Yahoo!

This is not a business analysis. I am not using any fancy tools or statistical programs to calculate what might happen if Microsoft acquires Yahoo!. All I'm writing is straight opinion, with some links to other posts I've read on the subject.

First, I'll cut to the chase: I do not want Yahoo! bought by Microsoft. Ever. End of story.

Obviously not really, or else I would have just tweeted about this. ;-)

I used to use only Microsoft products several years ago, back when the Internet was a new thing to me. At twelve, I didn't really care what I used as long as it worked. I searched using MSN Search in Internet Explorer 6, while my mom used Google. I used Outlook Express (and later Outlook) for my email.

Strange, isn't it, that a hardcore Google fan and Firefox user like myself once surfed on Microsoft's terms? Let's just say I saw the light. It was actually i80and who told me about Firefox in the first place and got me to install it. I eventually used some program (I forget what) to alter the Windows Registry and change "Microsoft Internet Explorer" to "Microsoft Big Security Hazard" in the IE title bar. That was before I came up with Suckernet Exploder, but I digress.

Fast-forward to my first hard disk crash (or not -- the disk was still working -- but it gave me a scare anyway and I ditched that computer for a school laptop the next year). I had switched to Firefox for browsing, but still used Outlook for email. After the crash, I quickly switched to Gmail full-time, telling everyone I emailed I was switching addresses. (Gmail did not have Mail Fetcher at that time.)

Once using Firefox and Gmail, I branched out to other places and services, using Google to search the Web for instance. I realized that all the other sites were just easier to use and better than Microsoft's offerings, not that I could quantify or qualify the differences.

At this point, it should be known that I started blogging on MSN Spaces, which became Windows Live Spaces, which became horrible in my opinion (the whole Windows Live thing was stupid, I think). I moved here to Blogger and have been much happier.

Now, while I am certainly not a super-fan of Yahoo!, I have a gut feeling that, should Microsoft acquire them, Yahoo! will go down the tubes. Look at the new Hotmail, for instance. It barely functions in Firefox.

I've seen what happened with Windows Vista, and I don't want the playing field of Internet services narrowed to two major players. Three is fine. Yahoo! and Google keep each other on their toes (I naturally think Google is doing better ;-) and Microsoft sits there playing catch-up to everyone else.

Yahoo! has actually done some good things. They have suggestions in their search box, for instance, which I still have to get on Google via a browser extension. Microsoft's search products are just annoying to me, perhaps because they're still so limited. And the visual design doesn't help.

So aside from the product implications, let me take a look at how Microsoft has been trying to conduct the acquisition. Back on February 1, Microsoft first offered Yahoo! $44.6 billion. They were turned down. They've since sent a letter to Yahoo!, earlier this month, which basically threatened a hostile takeover if Yahoo! didn't cooperate in the next three weeks (now down to a little over two weeks).

Yahoo! again turned them down.

What have we learned? Bullying doesn't work. I hope that when Microsoft takes their discussion to the Yahoo! shareholders in two weeks' time, they also fail to come to an agreement and the deal falls through. (I don't see Yahoo! agreeing to sell in the next couple of weeks, so I'm figuring they'll just keep shut until the deadline.)

In short, my opinion on a "Microhoo!" (as the proposed merger has been called) is, "Nnnnnnnnoooooooo!!!!!!!!" I hope it doesn't come to pass. Ever.

If you're hungry for other opinions or more facts, here are some good articles and blog posts I've read on this subject in the past:

• Microsoft puts Yahoo in a headlock and applies noogies. Wants lunch money in 3 weeks — or else (VentureBeat)
• Microsoft Sends Letter to Yahoo! Board of Directors (Microsoft.com)
• Yahoo Again Rebuffs Microsoft (PC World)
• Microsoft, Just Walk on By (Mini-Microsoft)

Technobabbles Strips for a Day

You might notice something different about this site for the next 24 hours or so if you're a regular reader. The page looks different, doesn't it? I'll explain why right now.

See, I have a feed subscription to someone named Dustin Diaz, who runs his own blog. He started CSS Naked Day in 2006, and had another one last year with over 1,600 participants. This year, April 9th is the date, and I'm participating as well.

CSS Naked Day shows off how much CSS has changed Web design. Sites that use standards-compliant and semantic markup will be perfectly functional without styles. Those that abuse tags to get certain effects might not be so lucky. For more details, visit the Day's site.

I removed the CSS for a minute or two on April 8th as a test to see how it would look during the event. If you visited during that short time, around 05:30 that morning (CDT), you would have seen a CSS-free page. It looks the same right now. Technobabbles' look will be back to normal around midnight April 10th.

I'll admit I did leave a few snippets of styling in place -- inline styles in posts and sidebar modules (which are at the bottom for this one day due to the lack of CSS) would be too difficult to find, remove, and then restore for one day. There are hundreds of them. I also don't have much control over the styles imported by sidebar widgets, so they will look normal, if a bit stretched.

For those of you reading in a feed reader, why don't you click through and take a look at how the site looks without any styles?

Google App Engine Launches

Apparently, TechCrunch's speculation that Google would be launching BigTable as a Web service was well-founded. Last night, BigTable -- along with a bunch of other amenities -- went live as part of Google App Engine, a service that could potentially compete with Amazon Web Services' EC2, S3, and SimpleDB offerings.

What happened last night was a preview launch, open to the first 10,000 developers who signed up for the service. By 09:30 (UTC), all the open slots had been taken, relegating me to the waiting list. It's perfectly fine, because I couldn't even start to play around with the service yet, much less use it for something practical.

The problem there is the fact that the service only supports Python as the development language right now. Google states (through the use of the word "currently" in the relevant FAQ entry and more explicitly in the documentation) that it's only a temporary limitation and that they hope to support other languages in the future, but it means that I have to learn a whole new language if I want to play around with the service right now. (Not that I can until I get my invitation...)

The Google App Engine features are as follows:

• dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
• persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
• a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

Contrary to what some people have thought, users of applications built on this platform do not have to use Google Account logins; it's just another API available from the environment, and doesn't preclude implementing a home-grown authentication system.

Google says the service should be able to absorb large traffic spikes with no trouble whatsoever. I believe it, if only because this platform is basically the same suite of tools Google uses to run its own applications.

One thing that bugs me -- besides the Python-only issue -- is the fact that Google App Engine uses a query language called GQL (I'm guessing the G stands for "Google") rather than industry-standard SQL. I suppose it's OK, though, because strictly speaking, BigTable is not a relational database. SQL-style JOIN queries are not supported, and GQL can be used with multiple types of data (it's used for the entire data store within App Engine).

So what are the limitations on the service as it's currently available? Well, aside from the waiting list, Google has some quite generous quotas in place (text from the Google App Engine Blog):

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

500MB is about half of a free Picasa Web Albums account; for reference, I'm still using less than 170MB of my quota there, even with all the images I've uploaded from Picasa and Blogger. 10GB is a huge amount of bandwidth for one day. Five million pageviews a month is about ten times the popularity of Matt Cutts' blog, and he's fairly well-read.

So how would I use this service? I'm not sure I would right now, seeing as how I don't have any ideas for using it. I've considered Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for running my own wiki, rather than just going to a conventional host, but haven't yet figured out how I'd do it. Google's new offering doesn't seem like it would work any better, and might actually be impossible for a while because MediaWiki (my preferred wiki engine) is written in PHP.

Matt Cutts thinks this new service will make it easier than ever to launch a startup; Garett Rogers is of the opinion that Google App Engine is a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services' offerings. I agree with Matt, but disagree with Garett and the other bloggers who think Google's service is comparable to Amazon's services. Google App Engine is designed to be the entire app, data storage, processing, and serving; Amazon offers building blocks you can use individually through your own server or from within EC2.

I find it quite Googley that the basic plan for Google App Engine will be free to use. The current preview limitations will be free even after pricing is announced. Amazon has no free offerings (but thankfully no minimum; minimum charges are anachronisms anyway).

As an aside, jQuery developer John Resig tweeted something funny about App Engine last night:

Haha! You can register apps that you don't own, on App Engine. I now 'own' the official App Gallery and @natekoechley's shoutout app.

That's rather interesting, and might highlight a security problem with Google's newest product. I'm sure it'll be discovered, localized, and fixed in pretty short order.

Also, Jaiku announced this morning that it will be moving to App Engine in the near future. If nothing else, it will relieve the Jaiku team of having to worry about scaling the system. Congratulations, guys!

What do you think of the new service?

[Image composited from two logos found on Google App Engine sites]

Possible Rationale for Google Talk Labs Edition

Google Blogoscoped's post about Google Talk Labs Edition just came out early this morning, and it had an interesting idea in it. Philipp thinks Google might actually be using the new client as a desktop wrapper for the existing Google Talk Gadget, removing one version of the client that needs to be maintained while still providing a desktop feel for those users who want it.

Philipp, your idea is very intriguing to me. In and of itself, it is quite insightful; the ramifications of it if true, though, wouldn't make me happy. :-/

I have been hoping that Google would release an updated client including group chat and emoticons. I was also hoping that it would keep all the current features, which it appears not to have done. File transfer and voice chat are gone from the Labs client, though there is an entry in the FAQ for the new edition that says:

Some features from the original Google Talk client are missing. What happened to them?

Google Talk, Labs Edition is an experimental release that brings some of the great features of the Google Talk Gadget to the desktop. Some features like voice calling and file transfer from the Google Talk client did not make it into this version. If you need to use voice calling or file transfer, you can download the original Google Talk client here: http://www.google.com/talk

So perhaps they will come back in a later version, hopefully along with their debut in the Web-based interfaces. Having the Gadget support voice chat should be simple enough (it's Flash-based, and Flash supports microphone/camera input), and Gmail could build on that if Google writes a library for the voice chat instead of just compiling it into the Gadget. File transfer could be a little harder; but come on, this is Google we're talking about! (Besides, I'm not a Flash developer, so I don't know all the tricks that are possible. :-)

What we have is an idea, from someone unconnected with Google. The coming weeks and months should provide us with an answer as to whether or not it is accurate. I hope not (sorry, Philipp)!

Strange Bug Reports on Blogger Post Scheduling

Thought I'd continue talking about Blogger this morning. :-)

Lately, there have been several comments to the Scheduled Posts announcement on the Blogger in Draft blog that indicate it doesn't work for everyone.

Personally, I haven't had any problems. I often write my posts the night before they publish, just in case I get a last-minute idea, or am away from the computer in the morning (which is indeed possible). Other comments indicate agreement with my statement. I wonder if the Blogger servers are being a bit wonky...

There were some issues (now fixed) with the scheduling feature back when it was first saved to draft (as the Blogger in Draft team likes to call the act of releasing a feature to Blogger in Draft), but those were fixed a long time ago. I was even experiencing the problem, too. This recent streak of bug reports is weird...

Blogger Gets OpenID Controls!

I logged into Blogger early this morning to write my post for the day and was prowling around in the Settings panels trying to find an option to turn on enclosure fields (in case I ever decide I want to do a podcast episode or two, you know). Lo and behold, I saw a new tab, labeled OpenID! Here's what was on it:



I remember the Blogger in Draft team promising to add a feature to manage authorized websites back when the OpenID provisioning was turned on. Looks like they did it!

Yes, I know, I'm getting excited by a new tab. Big deal, right? Wrong! Until now, clicking the "Yes, Always" button on the OpenID authorization screen sent that site to a black hole of URLs that was irretrievable, and impossible to alter by removing something (sites could be added to the list, but not removed). Now you can remove a site's authorization to always confirm that you own your blog address.

To the Blogger development team: Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! :-)

Google Talk Labs Edition?!

I know I've been asking about an update for the Google Talk client (not the Gadget, not Gmail Chat; the actual application that one can download and install on a PC). I've been wondering for a long time if such an update would ever be issued. Yesterday, my question was answered. Yesterday, Google released Google Talk Labs Edition.

It is most certainly not what I had in mind for an update. Far from improving existing features, the new release actually removes features. Specifically, voice chat and file transfers are gone in the Labs version. It adds group chat and enhanced emoticons like Gmail Chat and the Gadget have had for months (plus tabs, which only the Gadget has right now), but the two removed features make it no different from a standalone version of the Gadget.

What was Google's objective in releasing this new version? I have a feeling it was merely to let users know that the Google Talk client is not dead. The lack of additions to -- and in fact, removal of -- what were core features unique to the desktop client tells me, at least, that it's just a version intended to increase confidence in the continuation of the Google Talk brand.

Personally, I already use Pidgin for my IM needs. Neither file sharing nor voice chat are supported in Pidgin's Google Talk setup -- the former because of an incompatibility, the latter because Pidgin doesn't have the code to do it yet -- so I won't miss anything if I switch to the new Labs client. I don't have any friends who use the official client, either. Everyone I know on Google Talk uses either Pidgin, Finch (text-only Pidgin), Gmail Chat, or the Talk Gadget. No feature loss for me, realistically.

In principle, I would like Google to continue to expand the capabilities of Google Talk, not reduce them. It is possible to do voice chat within Flash applications, at the very least, and other Web-based IM services (like Meebo) already have audio and video chat capabilities. I would expect Google to be an industry leader in developing efficient, feature-rich applications for the Internet, and usually they deliver. (Witness Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, et al.) Google Talk seems to be a rare exception (along with the badly neglected Google Browser Sync Firefox extension).

Oh well, at least I have my health (and a perfectly fine means of using Google Talk without using Google Talk proper). What do you think of this new release?

Update (04/07): Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped had an idea regarding why the new client is what it is. See my take and get a link in this post.

New: Graph by Week and Month in Google Analytics

This is an exciting one! Google Analytics has just gotten the ability to change graphs to display points by week or month instead of just by day. Google Operating System reports that there is also an hourly option, which is only available on select reports such as Visitors.

The Google Analytics Blog has a neat series of screenshots that displays the difference between the different views. They say the new graphing features are designed to help expose hidden trends in the data; the day view can get awfully crowded with points and short-term trends can be hard to see.

I think it's a good addition. Using the hourly graph, I discovered that traffic to this site, for example, surges during the afternoon, peaking around 15:00. Combined with the last set of graphing enhancements, these new features promise to give Google Analytics additional "slicing and dicing" capabilities, which is always good. Stats junkies like me need things like this to just play with. ;-) Don't worry, it's useful too. :-D

Windows Vista: Problems and Advice for Microsoft

I've been sitting on this post idea for a while, since about the beginning of last month, if not a few days before that. In that time I've tried to come up with some good answers to the question Chris Pirillo posed at the end of his "Windows Vista's Rants" video (it starts around 16:30 into the clip). Here are my thoughts on Vista (rather than that video) and, if I'm lucky, a few good ideas that Microsoft would do well to take to heart.

The Complaints

Don't take this post the wrong way; I haven't forgiven Vista in the least for any of its annoyances. I still think the UI design is atrocious hideous (changed on 05/13; more accurately describes my reaction); I still dislike the idea of the UAC dialogs; I still wonder why Microsoft builds everything but the kitchen sink into the operating system. (I can't actually fault them for that; Firefox includes a kitchen sink. ;-)

There is no reason for me, personally, to upgrade my existing operating system. I'm comfortable with the way it works, I know what problems can arise, and all the hardware I've ever seen works perfectly in XP. What's more, some of the programs I use don't work under Vista, which means hunting down replacements.

Aside from software issues, Vista's interface is just plain ugly. Nobody I've talked to about the system, from friends to robotics club members to even my dad (my mom couldn't care less about computers, unfortunately, and my grandmother uses OS X now) has anything good to say about it. All the time Microsoft spent designing the glitzy (and ugly, again) Aero interface could have been spent working on other things like WinFS that were dropped so the new OS could be shipped less than three years late. I prefer the XP look to anything else I've seen (the Mac design could work, if the buttons were moved to the right). There's no option to go back to it in Vista that I know of.

Note that I haven't even mentioned the countless hardware compatibility issues.

But as Chris Pirillo said, we know it sucks. There's no need for any more bashing. I officially declare this post's bash section finished. From here, it's suggestions and thoughts on how to improve the situation.

The Ideas

So what can Microsoft (or OEMs, or both) do to help consumers through Vista until Windows 7 (hopefully much-improved over the current new version!) is released? The options are quite likely endless, and I only came up with a few; but that's the power of the crowd. The more people who answer this question, the better.

Option one is to simply keep selling Windows XP until a decent replacement is available. Microsoft obviously doesn't want to do that because of the hassle of maintaining two mountains of code. People have already adopted Vista in some measure, so yanking it wouldn't free Microsoft from having to provide updates.

Option two is to offer the option, as part of a Vista installation, to downgrade the system for free. Again this would mean maintaining XP alongside Vista, but if Microsoft wants to keep its customers happy, they have to adhere to the age-old business doctrine: "The customer is always right."

Option three involves updating Vista as much as possible, improving compatibility with old software and adding options to make the interface more like XP. I have at least some confidence that the hardware issues will gradually fade away as time goes on, since peripheral device developers are continuing to upgrade their drivers.

Conclusion

These are just a few ideas, brainstormed in the space of a couple dozen minutes while I was pondering what to write this morning. I have by no means come up with everything possible, or even anything useful (that's the risk you run by reading a personal blog ;-). My ideas are based upon my specific feelings regarding Vista, and might not satisfy anyone else. Obviously I hope that Microsoft will read them and use them, but I have doubts about that happening. Microsoft's response to feedback lately has been less than passionate.

I think there is hope for Vista yet, if Microsoft makes the right choices. Sitting back and letting the new operating system take hold in the marketplace by itself obviously isn't converting very many people. By pro-actively responding to user complaints and implementing fixes for common hardware and software issues, Microsoft could convince people to move to the new version of Windows.

This is my last year at my current school, and I will be needing to send back my laptop after graduation in June. I'm considering purchasing a laptop of my own, one that doesn't have any restrictions as to what I can do with it, for use over the next few years, but I refuse to buy anything pre-loaded with that Vista crapware (pardon my French). It's either XP or Linux with Wine and/or mono to run my Windows programs. That is, unless Microsoft makes some serious improvements to Windows Vista very, very soon.

So do you have any ideas that I didn't come up with? (Improvements to mine are welcome, too. :-) Share your feelings in the comments; I always love to hear my readers' reactions!

Why I Oppose Microsoft's OOXML

It was recently announced that the ISO has approved a draft standard based on Microsoft's OOXML format, which was developed for Microsoft Office 2007 as a smaller alternative to the original binary-format files used in previous versions of the suite.

I am personally opposed to Microsoft's format becoming a standard. That's a simple fact. The reasoning is more complex, and has (I freely admit) been influenced over the last several months by articles I have read on the subject.

A good deal of those articles were (and are) hosted at NoOOXML, which also hosts a petition against the standard. The issues with the standard are numerous; I won't try to cover here what the great material at NoOOXML has already put so eloquently. All I'm trying to do is raise awareness of the issue.

The first bone comes in the shape of a preexisting standard, known as ODF, or Open Document Format. ODF is another XML-based format that was approved by the ISO and used in products like OpenOffice.org. Open-source stuff.

Microsoft noticed that businesses and governments around the world were starting to switch from its proprietary formats to the open standard. The file sizes were smaller, etc. etc. Microsoft decided to create its own XML-based standard for Office 2007, rather than using the existing one.

At this point, it is important to note the differences between the two formats. Courtesy of NoOOXML, here's a short list of problems with Microsoft's format, links preserved for easy info:

• Wrong goal
• Binary Space
• 1900 bug
• Patents
• Accessibility
• Global relevance
• User needs
• Open Standards
• Conversion Issues
• Rice Pudding
• Only Latin URLs

A couple of those aren't really obvious, so let me clarify. "Rice Pudding" refers to the length of the standard and the indications that ECMA didn't do a proper review of the standard. "Conversion Issues" refers to the lack of backward-compatibility with the existing ODF standard. "1900 bug" is a reference to the bug in Excel (and therefore OOXML) that causes January 1, 1900, to be reported as Sunday, while it was in fact a Monday.

Anyway, moving on from the list (I think the rest are pretty self-explanatory), there is also some contention about why OOXML was fast-tracked through the approval process. Rumors that Microsoft "stuffed" voting in some countries to guarantee approval by that committee, and other unpleasantness. Regardless of that, there are some other points to be brought up.

The OOXML standard is supposedly written to be fully implementable only on the Windows platform, meaning that Linux and Macintosh users would be unable to use the formats. Users who adopt the OOXML file format would be stuck on Windows from day one.

Another issue brought up on the NoOOXML site is the binary data integration, which Microsoft supposedly uses for "backwards compatibility" purposes. The details of those binary chunks are not published for third parties, making Microsoft the only developer with full knowledge of how to utilize the feature.

I could sit here typing out arguments for hours, but I'll let you head to NoOOXML for more information if you want it. From here, my post will turn into (even more) pure opinion.

Above arguments aside, I don't see that there has been any input from other companies or organizations. Microsoft has been the sole developer of the OOXML standard. In contrast, the ODF specifications were initially developed by Sun Microsystems, then development was taken over by the Open Office XML technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium. To my knowledge, there are no patents on ODF; Microsoft can charge for licenses to implement OOXML.

As I've said already, the list goes on and on. I'm keeping the badge I have in my sidebar for the time being. Perhaps I'll even move that module up higher on the page (with the other things promoted in it) to raise awareness.

My sentiments are perhaps best summed up by this quote from my friend i80and, who posted it to Twitter:

Aw, man! OOXML has been accepted as a standard!

Indeed, that was the final straw that caused this blog post's list entry to appear in my topic queue. (He obviously didn't tag the acronym; I did that for this post.)

I wonder if writing this a few months earlier would have had any noticeable effect. Fortunately there's still two months for an appeal.

So what are your opinions on the OOXML controversy? I'd love to hear them in the comments!

My Take on April Fools' Day

So the last couple days have been full of lots of jokes and pranks, at least in the technology world. Google pulled several, including a Gmail hoax I actually found amusing, and a slew of other sites posted their own jokes.

Notice that I didn't pull any pranks of my own. The reasoning for that is twofold. First, I didn't really have any good ideas. Second, the whole boatload of other pranks out there requires that some bloggers stick to their usual routine.

You see, I view April Fools' Day as just another day. There is a bit of annoyance when people make jokes that aren't easily distinguishable as such. The date, April 1, when applied to anything written online, means you should take what you're reading with a large grain of salt. Chances are it's a joke.

Fortunately, most (if not all) Internet big-timers are back to their usual business by now. That means I can turn on my feed-reading eyes for real and not worry about being hoodwinked. Maybe.

Actually, the one day of joking around is kind of fun. I saw some pretty cool pranks (Matt Cutts was right up there with his iPhone-plugs-into-anything hoax). The real irritation came from the fact that all this started on March 31. April Fools' Day has gotten too big for one day, apparently. Now it's two days. That's twice the amount of time one must go not being able to trust anything one reads online.

So to summarize, I like April Fools' Day pranks in moderation, when they're confined to the actual Day. And a prompt admission right after the fact couldn't hurt.

Incidentally, since the Day started a day early, the Google Gears API Blog seemed to feel it necessary to post that no, the announcements about Google Docs getting offline access were not an elaborate hoax complete with video. That's what you get for announcing something near the day your company is known for, eh? That in and of itself was funny, and scary at the same time. Google Blogoscoped included the Google Docs offline announcement on a list of April Fools' Day pranks, which scared the heck out of me when I read it before I remembered that it had been announced before the Day and had already been covered by several reputable news outlets. Fortunately my confidence was well-placed. I might have had to alter my own coverage to add a note that it was a big joke from Google...

Gmail April Fools' 2008: "Custom Time"

So when my Internet connection decided to finally come back up this morning after a four-hour outage, I loaded Gmail to find a link reading "New! Gmail Custom Time" in my account. After reading the linked page, I instantly knew it was Google's 2008 April Fools' Day joke for Gmail.

First, take the heading: "Introducing Gmail Custom Time™: Be on time. Every time.*" (The asterisk refers to a note at the bottom of the page that "Every time" is used to loosely represent the number 10; see the page for more explanation.)

The instructions give it away even more:

Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

I've messed with message times by changing my computer clock in the past, but that was back when I still used a desktop client. This kind of feature joke is what makes me love Google. Last year's Gmail Paper hoax was equally amusing.

While I'm at it, how about a look at the screenshot Google posted? It's definitely not present in my version of the application... (That was a sure-fire way to confirm the hoax, because the new feature links only appear after a complete roll-out.)



Another problem here is that the recipient might not use Gmail, in which case how does Google control the status of the email once it arrives in their inbox? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I have one more thing to gripe about: It makes my user bar into two lines! The link text is so long it causes an unintended line break:



I know it's my "low" (1024x768) screen resolution. I can just hear everyone saying, "Go widescreen already, dude!" Well, I have news for you: I don't want to use widescreen, and I don't have a choice anyway because I have to use the computer I have, which is on loan from my school.

Anyway, despite the little glitches, it's still a well-crafted joke, probably made in someone's 20% time. Whoever you are, thanks!

Google Blogoscoped has a big list of Google April Fools' Day jokes for 2008, though it includes things like the Google Docs Offline announcement, which I don't think was a joke. After all, Gmail was launched on April 1 and everyone thought Google was kidding. Despite appreciating the humor, I don't think I can trust anything I see today 100%... All this seemed to start a day early, actually, on March 31. April Fools' Day is now two days, apparently.