Here’s a short video that beautifully explains the early history of the Internet through infographics.
Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
The History of the Internet
Monday, March 1st, 2010
To iPad or not to iPad
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
The big announcement has come and gone. Now, the decision must be made, to iPad or not to iPad. At the heart of this process is imagining, assessing, daydreaming and countless other words that describe the delightful distractions involved in making a discretionary purchase that one must justify to oneself, and one’s wife. 
aside: when pondering such important matters, it’s always important to do it in the 3rd person - for objectivity of course.
One might imagine using an iPad in the morning and evening to read emails, browse blogs and online news sources at home, activities presently performed on one’s iPhone but better suited to a larger screen. Scrolling using a mouse or even the trackpad don’t exactly feel natural.
However, one is likely hesitant to commit to purchasing an iPad. Truth be told, this author longs to hold one at the local Apple store, only then can a final decision be reached. It might have been an easier decision if the iPad had come equipped with built in iSight. A model for CDMA networks would have also helped encourage the purchase of something other than the WiFi only model. As for other features, one can with confidence (or lots of hope) believe Apple will deliver multitasking on the device at some point.
At the end of the day, this a significant leap forward not in what it delivers with this first version, but in the promise this device holds for the future. Imagine one’s technologically challenged mother, not computer savvy using this device to satisfy her basic communications needs through interactions that feel natural. Those astounding interactions that many have observed in awe as young children quickly understand on the iPhone; this device will succeed on the back of interactions like that for browsing pictures.
Alas, this decision will likely be borne out of the total collapse of any inner fortitude that may attempt to provide resistance to the siren song that many Apple products emit. If the iPad sings it’s lustful song, this sailor is likely to jump in the water and swim in the magic.
What husbands and wives search for on Google compared to boyfriends and girlfriends
Monday, January 11th, 2010
There is an interesting post at Predictably Irrational on leveraging Google’s auto-suggest functionality to gain insights into what people care about regarding particular subjects.
The post explored leveraging the searches of other users to gain insight into what boyfriends and girlfriends might care about most. I figured i’d take it a step further and perform the same experiment for married people, contrasting it to those of the original experiment. I threw the results into a grid for a little more insight. Here it is …
Creating an Alias in Terminal on Mac OSX 10.5
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
This is a cool way to quickly execute commonly used commands in shell. In this particular example, I show you how to quickly navigate to a commonly used folder.
Make sure you are in your root directory./Users/yourUsername
Create a file called .profile. I prefer to use vi for this purpose.
$ vi .profile
If you’re new to vi, here are the basic commands you will need to remember for this task.
* : x [return] to close and save the file
* i to insert text before the cursor until you press [esc]
More basic vi commands
Now it’s time to create the alias, type in the following into your new file,
alias yourLabel=”/path/to/commonly/”Used Directory”
Close and save the file. Now, make sure to restart Terminal, or the changes will not be reflected. Once you have restarted Terminal, simply type in the alias …
$ yourLabel
… and voila!
HTML5 and the death of XHTML
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
There’s been conversation of late regarding the announcement that the XHTML2 group is expected to stop work at the end of 2009. The plan is to increase resources on HTML5. I’ve been hearing buzz about HTML5 for some time now, but had never really delved into it much due to the time commitments required by my job, where it’s more important that stuff works on current and legacy browsers. I also knew that browsers had not yet begun implementing support for HTML5. The announcement got me reading a little more on the holiday weekend. I found the article HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight? It’s a great article that brings up the argument that some companies like Microsoft may implement support for the standard because it could potentially undermine their business.
In my experience in providing a web based solution to small businesses, they are likely to adopt a browser that will work for them. We’ve done it in the past. Many are not even aware that there are other options. The impact of upgrading a browser in smaller organizations, which still make up the long tail of American business, is not that significant. The same level of red tape that exists at corporations with big IT departments are unlikely to exists. If I tell a customer they can obtain offline access to an application and still browse the web like they do, they are likely to switch browsers because the value proposition is such that they see something to gain.
I propose that lack of support by Microsoft and other companies for the standard would only undermine their business. People will find alternatives. Companies will provide alternatives. Quickbooks Online does not work on Macs because it requires Active X. The solution … try to find something else. Finding the solution that does what I need is far simpler in a world where the Internet makes the distribution of solutions extremely cost effective; the competitive landscape will continue to increase for the foreseeable future as the world is transformed through new ideas. HTML5 looks to be a significant and exciting step in that process.
Clay Shirky Talk
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
Clay Shirky is amazing! In this chat, he continues to explore the impact of the Internet on the media landscape that touches us everyday. As the medium for all other media, the Internet has enabled an environment previously unseen in human history. Consumers are now also producers. Massive use of technologically “boring” tools enable new and exciting forms of communication. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be alive!
Messaging: Wordpress iPhone App
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
I installed the Wordpress iPhone app in order to obtain a little more flexibility on how I publish content … and also because the experience designer inside me foams at the mouth at the prospect of performing a task in a new way. The app is great. It empowers users to publish to blogs hosted by Wordpress or on their own servers.
In attempting to connect to this blog, I encountered an error. One of my pet peeves is poor error messaging. If an application is going to stop me from accomplishing a task, i’d like a little guidance as to how I may help myself to overcome the nuisance without having to resort to some knowledge base or Google, the great knowledge base of the internets. I’m looking at you and your cryptic, code bearing, 0×1278365 messages - Microsoft.
To my most pleasant surprise, the message provided by the Wordpress App allowed me to fix the problem with relative ease. Here it is:
The message clearly states the problem and how to fix it. However, things can usually be improved or done differently. So, how might one improve on this message?
Part of the challenge here is that this message was presented on my iPhone, meaning I can’t easily copy and paste the URL to get to the desired location. The lazy person in me rather not attempt to type the URL … missed a letter, doh! A more useful message might be one directing me to the correct location within the application, namely Settings > Writing.
Messaging is critical to more usable applications. It’s not uncommon for users to encounter errors. Use those opportunities to efficiently communicate with users and walk them through a potentially stressful experience. It will only make the experience stronger and everyone can quickly get back to accomplishing their tasks - usually something other than dealing with errors.
Web 2.0 Expo: Next Generation of Browsers
Monday, April 6th, 2009
Today was an interesting day of at Web 2.0 Expo. There were 2 sessions in particular that caught my attention because they clearly mark the next step in the transition from the desktop to the “cloud.” One of these sessions was the Chrome Developer Session by Ojan Vanfai, one of the project engineers from Google. Given the affirmation that ”Google’s main hope (being) to see web applications succeed,” they have built a new javascript engine for the browser called V8. The engine is open source, as is a version of the product called Chromium; I think this will go a long way to addressing privacy concerns by providing transparency to the product. Chrome uses the web-kit rendering engine also used by Safari. The product also comes with WebKit Developer Tools, think Firebug. Both Mac and Linux versions of the product were in development.
The other really interesting session was that by Pete LePage from Microsoft’s IE8 team; there’s a pdf copy of the presentation slides available. Like Chrome, IE8 seems also poised to provide a platform for web based applications. While this was not explicitly stated, it was clearly evident from the presentation. IE8 includes native support for JSON. They too have also built a Web Developer tool very reminiscent to Firebug. IE8 has a new rendering engine which is much more standards compliant …. yeeeeaaaay! It has a button that allows users to switch between the IE7 and IE8 rendering engines. Pete mentioned this was meant to be easy so that “your mom” could do it. Personally, I think this is a stretch. He implored designers and developers to test their websites as there are Pete did a great job of sidestepping the all too common complaints regarding rendering engine issues pertaining to standards.
Using iPhoto to Adjust an Image
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I normally edit photos using Photoshop. However, I understand the average user is not going to spend the money, especially in this slowing economy, to obtain a professional photo editing tool to edit their everyday photos. In that spirit, I want to begin messing around with more accessible photo editing tools. Here’s my first pass.
Note: I highly recommend you click on the images and check out the larger versions of the images.
First the original,
And then the edit,
I tried to bring out the greens and darken the water a bit. I increased the contrast to bring out the detail in the gravel. The goal was to add some dimensionality and depth to the image. Here are some detail shots (original on the left, edits on the right) …
iPhoto did a nice job with the photos. However, I really missed being able to mask pieces of the image.
Web 2.0 Expo: Jason Fried
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
paraphrased …
“Think of yourself as a museum curator. A museum curator’s job is to say no. If their job was to say yes, they’d manage a warehouse. Don’t be a warehouser. Say ‘no’ to more things that you say ‘yes.’ Build a curated collection of features.”
