April 19, 2004

Adobe to Apple: Touché

Right on the heals of Apple’s announcement of Motion, Adobe announces After Effects 6.5. Nothing earth-shattering, but certainly some things that show they’re paying attention — like the 250 text Animation Presets; which sounds similar to what Apple is pushing in Motion and LiveType. Bonus: G5 and OpenGL optimization show that they’re still at least somewhat concerned about the Mac platform.

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Apple in Motion

Today (a Sunday, I know), Apple drops some major announcements to kick off NAB. Along with updating the rest of its pro digital production apps (FCP HD, DVD Studio Pro 3, Shake 3.5), and adding a new high-end storage solution (Xsan), Apple ads a new app to the mix: Motion. Motion fills in the gaps between Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro and Shake — taking on the growing motion graphics market (and apparently trying to keep FCP in editing, DVD Studio Pro in DVD creation and Shake in compositing).

Avid and Adobe can’t be too happy right now — which begs the question: how far will Apple go with its software ventures before it starts losing major 3rd party software vendors? Can Apple really survive if Adobe decides it has had enough of Steve Jobs’ antics? I’m sure Motion is a great compliment to Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Shake, but I like After Effects and can’t live without Photoshop, so if Adobe hits the road, I’ll either have to go dual-platform or (I hate to even think it) make a switch to Windows. If Apple thinks they have something that can take on Photoshop, let’s see it. Nothing out there right now even comes close. Apple is good, but Photoshop has a lot of history behind it; decades of development, and engineering refinements.

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April 08, 2004

FargoBoy to leave Fargo.

That’s right. This young twenty-something is leaving the Great State of North Dakota for a new adventure. Tomorrow will be my last day working for H2M, where I’ve been working for nearly six years now, and in June I will head to Savannah, Georgia to pursue an M.A. in Broadcast Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I know I will miss Fargo-Moorhead, the midwest, and the people I’ve gotten to know here, but I am looking forward to my new adventure.

And, since I am no longer employed, I am available to work on freelance projects. If any of you FargoBoy readers are in the market for some design work, drop me an email at: design @ fargoboy.com.

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February 15, 2004

The Truth About Digital Cameras

Fazal Majid has a terrific article explaining some of the troubles that plague the current generation of digital cameras.

The problem with megapixels as a measure of camera performance is that not all pixels are born equal. No amount of pixels will compensate for a fuzzy lens, but even with a perfect lens, there are two factors that make the difference: noise and interpolation.

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February 11, 2004

After Effects on Steroids

After Effects already has the capabilities of rendering across a network to other computers set up as Render Nodes, but the announcement by Adobe that the next version will allow grid-based rendering is very cool. I know that in my office, I’m the only one using After Effects, and there is a fair amount of extra processor cycles sitting idle on the network that would speed up my renders substantially. Of course, a new G5 with a rack full of Xserve G5s would do the trick nicely too, but I don’t think the company will swing for that.

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January 30, 2004

Splitting at the seems with good links

I don’t know how many more good links one person can take. Here’s a couple from today that will warrant a second look.

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January 13, 2004

Adobe: Hand Over The Cash

Adobe, Ulead and Jasc have a new chunk of code in the latest versions of their image editing software, including Adobe Photoshop CS, that tries to prevent you from devious doings. No, I’m not talking about pirating software, I’m talking about pirating…money. Some third-party software developer has taken it upon itself to get its anti-counterfitting software embedded in these major image editing applications. So now, if you try to scan money or open an image containing a significant portion of a bill, you’ll get an error message.

This is a problem for me. I don’t counterfit money, and have no intention of doing so. However, images of money show up almost daily in the design work my company does for the gaming and retail industries — for ads about cash prizes, big sales, etc. If all of a sudden, I can’t open an ad in my brand new version of Photoshop, I’m sunk. There are entire stock photo libraries dedicated to currency photography. How can Adobe & friends overlook these issues to try to deter a few bad eggs that will find a way around their efforts anyway?!

I’m still using Photoshop 7 for a number of reasons, and if Adobe wants me to upgrade, they’ll need to start addressing the needs of their user base, instead of just adding features that few use, making the application slower, or assuming the user is a criminal — the RIAA does that enough for everybody.

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January 12, 2004

Terabytes

Okay, so it is still in a 5.25-inch enclosure, I’m still excited about LaCie’s new 1TB FireWire 800 (and USB 2) Bigger Disk. LaCie doesn’t list a price anywhere, but their 500GB is only $600 (it was $1000 when it was announced last year). I figure it will probably cost around $2,000 (the same $2/GB that the 500GB Big Disk cost when it was released). Next year: 2TB in a FireWire enclosure for $1.50/GB? I’m still waiting for 1TB 3.5-inch 7200 RPM SATA drives. It will happen.

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January 11, 2004

Apple + HP = ?

I was way too busy finishing up ADDY entries on Friday afternoon to notice Apple and HP’s announcement. But will anybody buy an Apple iPod in HP clothing? I guess if they want a blue one with an HP logo, they might, but the whole situation seems a little odd to me.

Steve Jobs isn’t typically one to share nicely with the PC side of things. Heck, when iTunes for Windows was released, the announcement posters even read “Hell Froze Over.” So is Steve changing his ego-driven ways for the betterment of Apple and their latest music biz bid? We’ll see. Dominey has an excellent write-up on the subject.

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December 18, 2003

Bad Software Design Decisions

I don’t know if today’s major software developers are getting lazy, dumb or just want to irritate their user base to the point of obsurdity. Hardware design and innovation has been kicking ass for over a decade. Moore’s Law, the doubling of processor speed every 18 months, has been keeping pace, and looks to for at least another decade before sputtering out.

The big software companies just haven’t been able to keep up. The closest, I would say, is Apple, with tons of amazing software coming out of there in just the last few years. Of course, Apple is using software to sell their hardware, so they’ve got reason to make it work well. There are bugs and irritating qualities in OS X, Final Cut Pro and the like, but for the most part, they run amazingly well.

Two companies that need to get their act together: Macromedia and Adobe. Huge companies working on huge software. As a professional designer, applications from these companies are my life. Still, I have had to convince my boss every year or two that we needed to upgrade because the latest and greatest was just that. Lately, with a slough of new versions coming out, I start the process again — find out what’s so great, and convince the boss how this will make the work that I do better, make me more productive, or both. The problem is, this time, I’m not very convinced myself — and it isn’t me. It’s the software.

After taking the time to download and test Macromedia’s new MX 2004 suite — new Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash — I wanted to shake my monitor. My biggest beef with the previous MX app incarnations? Slow and buggy. I don’t use most of the bells and whistles they put in those old versions, so I didn’t care much about the long list of new ones added to MX ‘04. What I did care about was that the new apps were even slower than the previous versions! Slower! Why should I care about new bells and whistles if it take fifteen seconds to open every file? Or to save a file? How about just typing copy into a Dreamweaver layout? I feel like I’m working on my 286 PC in Word 2.0 again — type a line…wait…repeat. My 200MHz machine with Dreamweaver 2 could type in real time. I’ve got two 1GHz processors and 10 times the RAM in my current box, and I have to wait for characters to appear on the screen? And forget about doing custom CSS-based design in Dreamweaver. Heck, forget about doing it by hand and trying to look at it in Dreamweaver! These are basic things that we should expect a professional Web development application to be able to do.

Flash was so slow that I don’t have enough time to get into it. And Flash movies still play like crap on a Mac. It can’t be that hard to write a decent player. Apple has spent a lot of time and effort making OS X’s graphics system blazingly fast. OpenGL, Quartz Extreme, blah blah blah — surely somebody at Macromedia must have heard of these.

Adobe, don’t gloat too much. You’re apps are ten times better than Macromedia’s. They are actually professional quality. But you’ve had longer to work on them. My question: why, when processors are getting faster and we’re giving you more RAM to work with, do you squander it away and make your apps slower than their previous verions? Illustrator has gotten slower with every release since version 8. InDesign is dog slow. And now Photoshop, your shining star, is losing its lustre. You know you can do better. You’re not Macromedia, you don’t have to settle for crappy software just to get it out the door. We’re here for you. We’ll wait. Just give it to us right the first time. We’ll make it worth your while.

The worst of the worst in all of this is, of course, Microsoft. They’ve been doing this for years. Is Microsoft Office really that much better since Office 95? It has a bunch of fancy new features, requires a lot more resources, and plays a little nicer, but overall functionality really hasn’t changed much. Same thing for Outlook, Exchange, Windows, etc. It all comes back to features over performance. The problem with working for the lowest common denominator, but still pandering to specific groups, is that you get bloatware. Something for everybody, but it ends up buggy, slow, and — in Microsoft’s case — insecure.

Now look at Apple. When they start trying to do too much with their software, they break it up into separate pieces. iLife could have been one big, bloated package. Instead, we have iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto on their own, each doing its little job the best it can. There is a lot of power built into those little apps. Now, look at their pro apps. Final Cut Pro is getting to be huge. It needs to be for certain power users, but they don’t want to lose niche customers because their main app is too big, awkward or expensive. So they release Final Cut Express for people who just want to edit on DV, but need something more powerful than iMovie. Then they release Soundtrack for audio geeks who just want to mess around with music and don’t need the added features in Final Cut Pro or Logic Platinum. Do iCal, Address Book and Mail all work together? Yes. How about iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto? You betcha! Are they all shoved together in one monster app? No. This is a Good Thing™. People that say otherwise aren’t paying attention.

Okay, I feel a little better now. Maybe I’ll go out and play in the snow, and realize that it isn’t as bad as it seems. [Sigh]

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November 23, 2003

I fear I may be an übergeek

I scored a 169 on MSNBC’s Digital IQ test. 110+ is considered geeky. 80+ is average. What’s probably even geekier of me is that I was knew all the answers I could have given to score higher, and that, for a moment, I thought about how getting a laptop with WiFi would legitimately up my geek quotient. Sad. Just plain sad. Still, a new PowerBook would be nice. What’s your digital IQ? If anybody has gotten over 230 (by whatever means), let me know.

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October 23, 2003

Senate approves anti-SPAM bill

A big first step in regulating the insane amount of junk email being thrown around the Internet is on its way to becoming U.S. law. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act. It basically has as system of fines in place from $100 to $3 million, and authorizes a national do-not-spam registry.

Those really nasty spammers may even do time.

Additional criminal provisions, authored by Senators Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, and Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, were added into the Burns-Wyden bill through an amendment on the Senate floor. The Hatch-Leahy criminal provisions create several criminal penalties, ranging up to five years in prison, for some common spamming practices, including the following:
  • hacking into someone else’s computer to send spam;
  • using open relays to send bulk spam with an intent to deceive;
  • falsifying header information in bulk spam;
  • registering for five or more e-mail accounts using false registration information, and using these accounts to send bulk spam.
Who know is this will actually have an effect on how much SPAM gets sent, or if it will just push the the distribution of it off-shore (or at least the origination of it — spammers will probably still hack/abuse U.S. mail servers).

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October 20, 2003

Wanna feel old?

Okay all you geezer gamers out there (25 years old+) — you know who you are — check this out. Electronic Gaming Monthly had kids 10-13 play old-school video games from the 70s and 80s (Pong, Space Invaders, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., etc.) and comment on them. Makes me feel old, and want to use the term whippersnapper.

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September 30, 2003

Die Spammers, die!

This Wired article hits a little too close to home for me. Michelle Delio writes about the unfortunate luck of designer Andy Markley, whose domain was abused by a spammer. It essentially ruined his online identity for a while, until he was persistent (and lucky) enough to catch the bastard.

I’ve had similar luck, only with a clients’ domain. Not fun. The fact that the current Internet email system allows for this type of abuse is an atrocity. I mean, I can send email to anybody using any email address I want to (president@whitehouse.gov, bgates@microsoft.com, etc.), and the only way anybody can tell it isn’t legit’ is by peaking through cryptic mail headers, and using extremely-geeky network tools. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.

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September 29, 2003

Updates at Adobe

Adobe is following a trend, and naming its upcoming software releases with an across-the-board two-letter suffix: CS (like Macromedia’s MX or Microsoft’s XP). CS stands for Creative Suite. Sure. Whatever. It basically means they didn’t want to drive Illustrator further into double-digit version numbers, so start every product over at CS v.1. Or CS 2004. Or CS MX XP BBB 2003 v.1.002. Whatever. Good for them. It means one thing for me: new Photoshop! InDesign 2 works well enough for what I use it for, and I prefer Macromedia FreeHand to Adobe Illustrator anyway, but everytime somebody mentions an update to that pixel-pushers’ playground, Photoshop, the corners of my mouth twitch upward slightly, my eyes light up (and my left foot aches a little, but I think that may be something else; probably need to get that checked out).

This new Photoshop has one new feature I’ve been wanting for years: Match Color. This lets you match the color in one image to the color in another. Have two photos of the same subject but your lighting changed, or some camera setting went crazy, Match Color will (supposedly) fix it for you with the click of a button. If it works even half as well as they say it does, I’ll be happy.

Couple of other highlights…

Now if only I had a new dual-G5 to run all these fun, new tools on. [sigh]

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September 26, 2003

Corncob CDs and a button nose

This is cool. Scientists in Japan have made 10 optical discs out of a corncob. The effort is in trying to produce an ecologically-friendly, disposable disk. Just knowing how many CDs I end up tossing, this is decidedly, a good thing.

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September 25, 2003

Stuff I’ve missed

Here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve neglected to post about during my little hiatus. Enjoy.

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August 15, 2003

My next digital camera is a Sony

Sony released the details of the 8MP successor to their 5MP DSC-F717 digital camera, and DP Review has a preview of the pre-release model.

I’ve had the opportunity to shoot with the DSC-F717 recently, and was rather amazed at the features and quality. Having a F2.0 max aperture with a digital camera that also has a decent zoom is awesome; especially if you shoot indoors a lot. My little Nikon Coolpix 880 has neither, and takes nice 3MP outdoor shots, but when I try to use it indoors it just looks lousy (with or without the flash).

Sony’s new 8MP DSC-F828 sports a new type of CCD that captures red, green, blue and “emerald” (for added color quality, apparently). It also includes slots for Sony’s Memory Stick format, Compact Flash Type I/II and IBM’s Microdrive format — a nice feature for somebody who has already dropped a lot on standard Compact Flash cards.

One more thing to save my pennies for. [sigh]

(FargoBoy.com note: entry #300!)

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August 07, 2003

First real legal test of the GPL

IBM is countersuing SCO, whose recent legal actions against the Linux community have been rather brazen. IBM asserts that because SCO released a GPLed version of Linux, they cannot claim proprietary rights to the code included (the base of their suits against IBM, Red Hat, etc.). This will be the first real legal test of Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) since its creation in 80s. On the line: the entire open source software movement. This is going to get ugly, but so far SCO has little to back up its claims. This all seems like an exercise by recent-SCO-licensee Microsoft to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, & doubt) about using open source software in enterprise solutions.

The basis of IBM’s counterclaim:

By distributing products under the GPL, SCO agreed, among other things, not to assert—indeed, it is prohibited from asserting—certain proprietary rights (such as the right to collect license fees) over any source code distributed under the terms of the GPL. SCO also agreed not to restrict further distribution of any source code distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL

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July 31, 2003

Web form rant

Steven Frank over at Panic was venting his frustration with Safari’s over-eager caching today. He was trying to put some things on eBay, and when trying to edit descriptions on some of the items, it would bring up an earlier item’s description — making him re-type one listing from scratch. For the caching problem, you can use Safari Enhancer to disable Safari’s cache entirely, but his comments brought up an even bigger problem with present-day web browsers.

As using web browsers to input large amounts of type becomes more prevelant — for blogging, filling out lengthy forms, web apps, and Steven’s eBay incident — browser makers (or some other entrepreneurial software maker) will need to address the fact that it is too easy to lose that data, usually at no fault of the user.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a MovableType New Entry window open, been browsing around for a URL or whatever, and accidentally close the wrong window, have my session time out (so instead of posting my entry it sends me to a login page) or have my browser crash. I’ve started writing my posts in BBEdit or Entourage (which is excellent at saving your document if the app or system crashes).

If nothing else, an alert box asking if you really want to close a window with a partially filled-out form on it would be nice.

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July 21, 2003

Insecure computing on public PCs

As if I weren’t paranoid enough about entering in personal information on the web, here’s an Ars Technica news bit about a guy that used keystroke capturing software to nab login info from unsuspecting people at Kinko’s. Be careful out there.

For 2 years or so a 25 year old New Yorker used keystroke logging software installed on a battery of Kinko’s PCs to obtain a cache of online banking usernames and passwords. He then used these people’s financial information to open accounts and transfer money from their original accounts.

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July 16, 2003

MT: Beyond the Blog

The talk of the town right now seems to be about using Ben & Mena’s MovableType for more than just blogs:

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Browsers dieing left and right

This is a morbid summer for aging web browsers. First, Microsoft kills Internet Explorer for the Mac. Now, AOL has killed Netscape.

While I don’t think this will have a big impact on web standards, it does beg the question: what direction will web development and browsing tools take in the future? With a glut of small wireless devices capable of accessing the web coming out, I see the “browser” market becoming more fragmented; or, oddly, less relevant. If future web development keeps following the road toward true separation of content, code and style with XML, CSS and the like, it shouldn’t matter what browser you use, as long as it supports the standards. There will also be a flood of Internet tools beyond the browser used to enhance non-computing aspects of our daily lives. Should be interesting, anyway.

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Gruber on Google ads, Google ads on Gruber

John Gruber, the self-proclaimed Mac pundit of Daring Fireball, has been testing Google’s new AdSense program which places (supposedly) content-related text ads on your site and pays you per click (not per impression).

His rather lengthy post covers quite a range of topics, including how hairpiece design and web design coincide, independent versus corporate writing, professional versus amateur writing, the ugliness of text ads versus the distraction of animated ads, how Apple is not an iPod company, and the superior intelligence of his readers. While slightly odd, this unusual article is a must read (as I have found most of Gruber’s writing to be).

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June 18, 2003

URI Design

Found this while I was using the W3C validator today: my document came up as valid XHTML, and the validator offered up a link to a random W3C Style article by father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. “Cool URIs don’t change” discusses naming conventions for URIs on web pages — specifically how best to name things so that you can keep your links the same for a hundred years even if you switch servers, software or personnel.

When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.

When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated — emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.

Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.

This is something that I have tried to do well (with moderate success) ever since I started building websites, but I still end up having to change URIs on sites when I change scripting languages (.html to .php for instance), and old links become broken. One of these days I’ll figure out how to manipulate Apache to allow the old links to show the new files, or have a naming system in place that can be kept regardless of what my files are named or where they are in my directory tree (the URI utopia TBL speaks of in his article).

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May 23, 2003

Button Blogging with TypePad & MovableType

Yesterday, Six Apart let loose some pertinent information (complete with screenshots) about their new TypePad personal publishing service. The screenshots alone are enough to turn heads, but in a defiant move, Six Apart CEO Mena G. Troff revealed today the glory that will be TypePad: Button-based Blogging. The web will never be the same. (via Anil)

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May 20, 2003

Open Letter to Walker Art Center

Steve Dietz was let go as the new media curator at the Walker Art Center a few weeks ago due to “funding cutbacks.” Sarah Cook, a former WAC intern and new media curator, has written a open letter to WAC Director, Kathy Halbreich expressing the importance of the work Mr. Dietz had done, the impact it had on the new media community worldwide, and a plea for his re-instatement. Please read the letter, and, if you agree, sign it. (via Mike Cina on K10K)

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Minnesota Blogs

Found a list of Minnesota bloggers today. While this is undoubtedly a partial list, it is still longer than any list I have seen of North Dakota bloggers. So far, the best one I found on this particular list is Alt Text. Good commentary on design, blogging, as well as some nice photography.

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May 19, 2003

Jason Fried (37signals) Interview

waffle: under the iron has an interview of Jason Fried from 37signals that is worth reading. Jason helped found the company, and is their champion of simplicity and good UI design. The interview covers topics of 37signals’ origin, evolution, future, and things of interest to Jason himself. Here is a taste of the interview (details on his background in Finance):

I think financial tables are beautiful. That’s how I got started in design. My dad is an investor and I always remember him bringing home those glossy annual reports. I used to thumb through them all — pretending I know what they hell they said. But, it was the financial tables that always caught my attention. The clean lines, the orderly data, the information design, the numbers, the structure.

And they still do.

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May 16, 2003

MIT Hacks

MIT Press has released a new book that chronicles various creative student pranks over the years. A tradition at MIT, some of their more creative hacks include putting a replica Campus Police car on top of MIT’s Great Dome and turning the side of a building into a giant sound VU meter to coincide with an Independance Day Boston Pops performance. MIT has a site dedicated to their hack history at hacks.mit.edu.

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April 23, 2003

TypePad, Ito, Anil added to Six Apart line-up

Ben and Mena have been busy over at Six Apart lately. The blogging power-couple have added Anil Dash (Six Apart announcement) - (Anil’s blog) as a V.P., received some financial backing from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Co., and launched a new MovableType-based service called TypePad™.

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April 08, 2003

Quark Announcement Translation

John Gruber offers his “PR-to-English” translation of last week’s QuarkXpress 6 Feature Overview announcement. For you Quark or former Quark users out there, you may get a kick out of it. Here’s a sample translation:

PR Speak:
PDF creation technology has been incorporated into QuarkXPress 6, allowing users to output PDF files directly from QuarkXPress without having to purchase a license for third-party software.

English:
Dear Adobe,

Fuck you.

Best regards,

Quark.

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April 02, 2003

BBEdit 7: Only $250,000

Probably the best April Fool’s Day post this year (not including David Hyatt’s announcement that Safari is eliminating <TABLE> support) was Bare Bones Software’s new purchasing option for BBEdit 7:

Now available is the option to purchase a single user license of BBEdit with hand delivery by a Bare Bones Software employee and one full year of personal service (including unlimited feature additions, ripping the cellophane off the CD, reading the manual aloud, and more). This opportunity is only available for a limited time, at the special price of US$250,000.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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April 01, 2003

SXSW: Anil discusses his panel

Anil Dash, one of the panelists from the Beyond the Blog panel at this years SXSW Interactive, discusses in greater detail his comments from the session. He is convinced that he’ll be reading 10,000 blogs daily in five years (or at least an software-aggregated and prioritized selection of those 10,000 based on his personal tastes and contacts). FargoBoy.com is destined to be 10,001 on his list shortly thereafter. Really. Heath has a transcript of the panel for a better idea of how that topic was discussed.

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March 14, 2003

The Tyranny of Email

Ole Eichhorn has provided some insight as to how email (among other interruptions) can hinder productivity.

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.  It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into “right brain mode”, and really focus on a problem.  Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three.  (This is why good programmers often work late at night.  They don’t get interrupted as much…)

He mentions that this theory applies beyond programmers, and I know that as a designer/developer, I can relate. This is why my most productive hours are just after the rest of the office goes home, and right after Jenny goes to sleep.

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March 12, 2003

SXSW: Matthew Mullenweg’s Photos

Matthew Mullenweg has posted tons of SXSW photos over on his site (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday).

If you look very, very carefully, you can see me in a few of them.

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SXSW: Transcripts

Heath Row (his real name) has done an incredible job of transcribing the various SXSW panels he attended. If you missed out on SXSW, or didn’t take nearly as many notes as Heath (um…yeah…guilty), this is a must-read. I’d love to find a transcript of Joshua Davis’ keynote — it was incredible, but I’ll can’t remember half of it. (via Anil)

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March 09, 2003

SXSW: Steve Champeon

Steve’s panel was pretty interesting this morning — discussing the graceful degradation of websites from a standpoint of “Progressive Enhancement” instead of degradation of design. Basically, his perspective meant building sites to work on any platform (including upcoming wireless platforms that don‘t necessarily play by the rules), and then adding embellishments that people with more powerful browsers can use as appropriate.

The discussion also reminded me that I should probably be using TITLE attributes in my “Anchor” tags.

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February 24, 2003

500GB FireWire drive

How did I miss this? LaCie has a 500GB FireWire hard drive out. Granted it is a 5.25” drive, and only 5400RPM, but that’s still impressive. At $2/GB it is a little pricey compared to available 120GB drives, but not too much more than the 180GB-250GB competition. Now that more systems are starting to support bigger ATA drives, expect more drives in the 300GB - 500GB range to start popping up. I think I’ll probably go nuts the first time I see a 1TB+ 3.5” hard drive.

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February 14, 2003

D: All Things Digital

A tech conference that actually sounds worthwhile. Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher are going to host the conference at the end of May. It is already drawing big-name tech industry guests like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Meg Whitman, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Also on the schedule is a copyright debate with MPAA and RIAA chiefs Jack “Boston Strangler” Valenti and Hilary Rosen (good interview with her in February’s issue of Wired — not available online yet).

The best part about this conference: PowerPoint is banned from the premises. All those folks are actually going to have to think about what they’re talking about. Here’s Walt’s take on it:

Despite Wall Street’s whims, technology is unstoppable. It will affect all economies, all countries, all politics, all society. We’ve created this conference to wrestle with the benefits, distortions and challenges this will create, for people both in and outside the technology industry.

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January 30, 2003

Gordo Bobbett’s Multimedia Resources

If you deal with creating multimedia for the masses or just yourself, check out Gordo Bobbett’s Multimedia Resources for some very helpful links for Mac, Unix and Windows-based multimedia developers. There is a surprising number of utilities out there that could prove quite useful. (via MrBarrett.com)

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January 14, 2003

MS Phone = MS Car?

This story about Geoff Einon nearly freezing to death while trying to get his Microsoft Phone to boot sounds eerliy like the Microsoft Car comments that General Motors made a few years back. Not a good thing.

More painfully, it soon became apparent that my right leg was no longer working and not available to support locomotion. To summon assistance I extracted my new SPV from my pocket and turned it on. Since the SPV uses a typical Microsoft operating system (and in contrast with my iPaq which comes to life instantaneously), the SPV takes about a minute or so to boot up. I spent this time pondering my fate and speculating whether the mile or so trip down the mountain would qualify me for a helicopter or skidoo ride.

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Lightning Quick DNS

I’m a little amazed right now. I registered a domain this morning for work, pointed it to our DNS servers, set up the site on our web server, and uploaded a temporary page via FTP. The first time I typed in the address in a browser, it came up — less than an hour after I registered it. Certainly less than the day or two it has historically taken to propagate. Cool.

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January 13, 2003

TiVo is a “God Box”

FCC Chairman Michael Powell gives TiVo a big boost at CES, calling it a “God Box” and wishing he could share his saved shows with his sister — something Hollywood studios are suing TiVo competitor RelplayTV for. (via BoingBoing)

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December 16, 2002

Frugal Froogle

Just in time for holiday shopping: Google’s Froogle (beta) shopping site search engine. (via MacCentral)

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December 13, 2002

Google’s 2002 Zeitgeist

Google has released their 2002 Zeitgeist (The term is defined in English by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary as “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”) based upon Google search queries. Spiderman tops Top 20 Gaining Queries list.

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December 10, 2002

Spectrum Policy

Larry Lessig’s next big battle is going to be pulled out of thin air. Or rather, about pulling things out of thin air. He is fighting the good fight convincing the FCC that changing spectrum policy should move more toward making it a commons (good for Wi-Fi) rather than property to be auctioned off to the highest bidder (good for the highest bidder, bad for consumers). Watch this battle closely; it should get interesting.

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November 25, 2002

Microsoft eats dog food

Here’s a Microsoft internal whitepaper describing the process they went through converting Hotmail’s servers from FreeBSD and Solaris UNIX to Windows 2000 Server. Their conclusion: “A Microsoft property should eat its own dogfood.” There are some truly great, objective comments on Windows versus UNIX in the server environment. (via The Register)

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Macromedia Director MX

Macromedia is announcing Director MX today. Mac OS X compatible (app and content created with), DVD publishing capabilities (of some sort), and better Flash integration.

I haven’t used Director since college, and I probably won’t find a need for it in the immediate future, but it does still have some cool aspects to it, and Macromedia certainly isn’t just setting it aside with this MX version.

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November 15, 2002

72-mile WiFi

Hans Werner-Braun, at San Diego’s Supercomputer Center, has built an FCC-compliant, 1Mbps 72-mile WiFi connection. The potential for this is staggering. Anything over a couple of hundred feet is really nice these days. (Via Boing Boing)

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November 14, 2002

Self-destructing DVDs

A bizarre new form of DVD digital rights management: DVDs impregnated with a dye that reacts with air to render the disc unplayable in eight hours. The disc is being distributed — in airtight packages — as a promotional item with a CD, containing a video about the band.

This actually seems pretty cool. Reminds me of Mission: Impossible! You definitely need to mark something on the packaging though — otherwise people may just rip it open to see what it is, not put it in their players for eight hours, and miss out on whatever was on the disk.

(Via Boing Boing)

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Contribute

Macromedia appears to be listening. Ever since Dreamweaver MX came out (with its $400 price tag), I’ve been hoping for a simplified, less-expensive version that my clients can use to update their sites without suffering from sticker shock (most of my clients have relatively small sites), or being overwhelmed by the feature-packed Dreamweaver MX. Macromedia’s recently announced Contribute seems to be the answer to this. While some of its processes seem a little too similar to MS FrontPage, the end result is far superior. In Contribute, you browse for the document you wish to edit, click edit, and click publish to upload — similar to how FrontPage “publishes” pages. However, Contribute uses the Dreamweaver HTML engine and has settings to prevent any corruption or changes to custom scripting or certain page elements.

The only problem for me right now is that they are only releasing the Windows version initially — a MacOS X version is “coming soon.”

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October 27, 2002

For Web Developers

Five-Part article on Software Development by DevShed. It has some good points for anybody working with the technical aspects of web development and design. (via Camworld)

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October 21, 2002

MT turns 1

MoveableType, the software guts of FargoBoy.com and many other similar sites, is celebrating its one-year anniversary. Congrats to Ben & Mena for sticking with it and continuing to improve upon it.

Here’s a great SXSW recent interview of Mena.

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Lookout Outlook

It is about time that somebody really gives Microsoft Outlook some competition. Mitch Kapor, and crew, are developing an entire open source entity dedicated to bringing a better, more secure “Interpersonal Information Manager” for individuals, small businesses and whoever else wishes to work off the code base.

The 1.0 release slated for end of 2003, beginning of 2004: keep your eyes on this one. (Via BoingBoing)

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October 18, 2002

Really Super Disks

When I hear about super-high-density, teeny-tiny optical disks, it reminds me of James Bond movies of years past: Hollywood’s version of hi-tech. Well now, it seems, Silicon Valley (or at least Philips) is catching up. The potential for a recordable, rewritable optical disc with a 4GB capacity that’s only 3cm (about 1 inch) in diameter is astounding. Digital video and still cameras with increasingly smaller form factors will have an even smaller, sturdier medium. You could record or playback tons of video, music or photos on portable devices.

Imagine projecting hi-res digital presentations with video from a cell phone/PDA using one of these disks and a Bluetooth- or WiFi-enabled cell phone/PDA & projector. Imagine portable gaming systems that rival current set-top game stations. Imagine an MP3 player with two days of high-quality MP3s with the form-factor of a watch (could also have odometer, precision time display, pulse meter and wireless earbud speakers). Cool. (Via BoingBoing)

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October 16, 2002

Re-writable DVD format differences explained

ArsTechnica’s review of the Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD-RW drive (the same drive as the “superdrive” in my Dual-1GHz G4 tower), also briefly discusses the differences between the three currently competing DVD re-writable formats (DVD-RAM, DVD-RW & DVD+RW). If you’re interested in DVD Authoring or even using DVD as a backup medium, you should check it out.

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What the Wiki?!

I’ve seen the term WiKi around, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. I’m still not sure what it is, but this entry by Steven Frank of Panic helped me out a little.

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September 27, 2002

FrontPage = Evil

Still don’t think that Microsoft FrontPage is the work of the devil?

Todd, we feel your pain. My co-worker recently had to use FrontPage for a client’s forms (the client is a Microsoft instructor, so there wasn’t much of a choice). We figured, fine, we’ll build the forms in FrontPage because we couldn’t use CGI on his server (only FrontPage Extensions). It didn’t stop there though — once you have FrontPage Extensions active on his server, you have to use FrontPage for file transfer — no FTP. So now, the client makes changes to the site in Dreamweaver, and uses FrontPage as a glorified FTP app.

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September 25, 2002

Digital inches closer to film

Canon now has an 11 megapixel pro digital camera — the EOS-1Ds. It uses new CMOS technology develolped by Canon that allows them to have an image sensor the same size and dimensions of 35mm film. This cures some of the distortion issues previous cameras have had matching up lenses intended for film on a digital camera like the Canon EOS-1D or the Nikon D1.

Here’s some more info on Canon’s UK site. (Link via BD4D)

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September 24, 2002

The Invisible Keyboard: Big News for Small Things

The Invisible Keyboard, a laser-projected keyboard that captures finger movement, is the next big thing for mobile and palmtop devices. Expect this to take off as the technology becomes more refined, and cheaper to build.

Of interest, the creator of the technology has five degrees from MIT. I’d hate to see the size of his student loan payments.

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September 23, 2002

I want one. No, two.

Drivezilla. That is, Western Digital’s new line of fast, 7200-RPM monster hard drives. 200GB of smokin’-hot hard drive. Technically, you could fit four into the new G4 enclosures — that would be nice: 800GB of internal storage. Of course, these gargantuan drives are available at a premium until the competition can catch up.

According to the ZDNet article, Techical Committee T13 is developing a new ATA standard that would allow for drive sizes up to 144 petabytes. Yeah, I want one of those too. The current limit is 137GB on most ATA controllers, so WD has a custom solution they are sending out with the new 200GB drives until T13 releases new ATA specs, and board manufacturers start mass producing them.

Drive makers will surely need the new interface, as developments push areal densities to 100GB per platter. Such density could allow desktop drives to reach 400GB of storage by the end of next year.

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September 19, 2002

Sun offers Desktop Linux Box

Sun is offering a desktop computer, at supposedly half the cost of a comparable Windows system, with Linux on it. The catch is that you have to purchase it in quantities of >100, as well as purchasing a companion server. Roger Kay talks about Sun’s reason for this new development:

“Microsoft found a big bubble of oxygen it’s breathing that nobody else gets to breathe. It just begs for poking.”

I think that Sun is just a little oxygen-starved.

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August 30, 2002

Broadband = Porno

“So there you have it. South Korea is the number one broadband nation thanks to porno. “ (According to Australia’s Communications Minister.)

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August 29, 2002

Netscape @ 3.4% market share

The Netscape browser only has 3.4% left of the browser market share. I know that I’ve been using IE 5.2 for OS X pretty much exclusively (aside from some server administration stuff with Opera, and some testing in Mozilla). Netscape’s latest attempts at a browser (6 and the preview of 7) have been over-cluttered and buggy despite the valient efforts of the Mozilla open-source project. As a developer, knowing that most of my audience is using IE makes it a little easier to troubleshoot — although it is essential to make sure web projects degrade nicely to other browsers and devices.

Ten years from now, I would be suprised if the majority of web traffic would be through a browser on a desktop PC. I think that the combination of wireless internet appliances that will be coming out in the next few years is going to really change the nature of the web. The desktop won’t go away thought; I’m pretty sure Apple’s “Digital Hub” strategy is right on track.

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August 28, 2002

File Naming & Structure

Todd Dominey brought up the topic of file naming and structure over at WhatDoIKnow.org yesterday. I think that every designer and organization struggles with this. I’ve tried my best to organize my files by client and job and file types, but there get to be so many versions and random files that don’t fit into my folder structure that end up all over my desktop or in some random folder.

Once you do find a place to put your files, naming them something that you’ll remember and be able to differenciate from similar files becomes a task in itself. I’ve got hyphens, numbers and underscores popping up everywhere.

Part of my problem is a large hard drive that doesn’t require me to watch my bytes as closely. I’ve got gigabytes of duplicate or obsolete files lying around, hiding in the corners of my hard drive. In my transition from OS 9 to X, I have tons of beta software, old utilities, new utilities, and random clutter that I don’t have the patience to wade through. Eventually, I’ll save what I need, wipe the sucker clean, and install a clean copy of OS X with only the apps that have proven themselves useful…and the fun will start all over again. Yeah.

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August 26, 2002

We Blog

Meg’s book, “We Blog”, is finally out. I’m currently trying to find $4.01 more to buy with it on Amazon so I can get it all shipped for free. Any suggestions?

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August 21, 2002

10 Tips on Web Writing

Mark Bernstein has written an article over at A List Apart about writing the living web. Interesting read.

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August 19, 2002

A few good articles @ ZDNet today

ZDNet has a few notable articles today. One titled “The Truth about the DMCA” discusses the limited reach of the DMCA, and why some of its powers are blown out of proportion by copyright holders.

Two others discuss the value of the recently announced revised G4 lineup, and the special deal on a household upgrade (5 machines) to Mac OS X 10.2 ($129 single, $199 for up-to-five).

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July 16, 2002

Screw Shareholders

Okay, this may not be the best thought process, but I feel like the current economic situation in the U.S. (the fall of Enron, WorldCom, etc. due to cooking the books) is in part due to making decisions to make stock holders happy but not necessarily to make to company better off.

Take Apple for instance. Bruce Raabe of Collins & Co. in San Francisco says, “I don’t know what [Steve Jobs] is delivering, but it’s not shareholder value.” His remarks are on the announcement of Apple making only a $32 million profit this quarter, with revenues down three percent from last year. Quite frankly, being one of only two computer companies making a profit right now is significant (Dell is the other company). This is good for the company, but not necessarily great for the shareholders (at least today). With a couple of billion dollars in the bank, and a steady profit adding to that, Apple is poised to give its stockholders the value they are looking for in the long term. You know what? Now might just be an opportune time to buy.

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July 03, 2002

Macromedia goes to the Opera

Macromedia is going to be integrating the Opera browser into some of their future products (I would imagine the next revs of the Studio MX applications will include it). I know that Dreamweaver could benefit from a better browser engine, and Opera’s is top-notch. I still use IE 5 for OS X for my main browser, but I do use Opera as a develoment browser — it allows me to access the web interface on my server securely (unsigned 128-bit SSL certificate). No other Mac browser (IE, Mozilla, Netscape, or OmniWeb) allows me to do so efficiently (either rediculously slow or not securely). It seems to have a nice HTML engine and has the right features for a developmental browser (Mozilla ain’t bad, either). But even as a developer, I still do most of my browsing as a normal web user, and appreciate a browser that tailors to those needs. Sadly, Microsoft has been the only one who has really understood this, and so the rest of the browsers suffer with low market shares and the public lacks a legitimate choice.

This is why Microsoft won the browser wars — although having that little OS monopoly certainly helped. They simply have enough resources and enough really smart product managers (upper management tactics still leave much to be desired) to produce a superior consumer/corporate product.

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July 01, 2002

DVD market continues to grow

Back in 1999, I conducted a feasibility study for the development of a DVD production studio (specific to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area) in a technical writing class. My research at that time astounded me — the market and technology had incredible potential, which I indicated in my final paper. Just to see how far we’ve come and how much potential is still there, is amazing.

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Broadband makes a leap…backwards

The FCC is going to make it even harder on independent local and national broadband providers. The big cable and telecom companies aren’t playing nice now — I’d hate to see what it would look like if this passes.

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June 25, 2002

This Guy Needs a Mac

Gary Wilke is a key candidate for Apple’s “Switch” campaign. (link via Camworld)

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High-end hardware

I want one. Too bad 3DLabs, as usual, is completely ignoring the Mac market. I’ve got a beautiful Dual-1GHz G4 tower with a 4x-AGP slot begging for one of these cards to slip right in…but no…they don’t support the Mac. All they would need is drivers…but no. No card for you. Close to half of the DCC (digital content creation) market, potentially 3DLabs’ market, is running on Macs, and more professionals are starting to use it now that OS X is becoming viable for doing 3D work on the same box as digital compositing, video editing and email/office work. Perhaps it is time they considered the Mac market. nVidia gave it a chance and is now the default for all shipping G4 towers from Apple.

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June 24, 2002

Microsafe?

Here’s Microsoft’s latest initiative on safety: Palladium. Approach with caution.

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June 21, 2002

Usability at home

Tonight, Jenny reminded me that usability can be a critical aspect of a computer. Of course, she mentions this because there isn’t an OS X print driver for my Epson Color Stylus Photo 1200 printer, and therefore she can’t easily print anything without booting into OS 9 (same with my scanners, but that may be due to laziness on my part not finding new drivers). As someone who is always tinkering with the latest & greatest betas/utilities/apps/etc., my home computer is in a constant state of disrepair. This makes my computer, as a general rule, unusable. Damn.

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June 20, 2002

ISPs Caught in the Middle

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are being caught in the middle of a battle between their customers (people who host websites with them) and various groups from the software and content creation industries. This places a large burdon on smaller ISPs who can’t spend time policing customer sites and servers, as well as undermines their customers’ trust.

I’ve seen multiple instances of people who have a leased dedicated server at an ISP, and host a number of smaller sites on it, have their servers taken down because someone found an open relay or a buggy email script on it and used it to send SPAM. This was not the customer or anybody they had on the server, but some malicious spammer who by chance had found the IP and abused the open relay or script. Somebody had traced the email back to the server, found the owner of the IP block and submitted a complaint letter. No notice was given to the customer that they should check for an open relay or script before the ISP shut down the server. Server admins have enough troubleshooting to worry about without all of a sudden having their servers dissappear. And the customers, not the ISPs, should be given notice first.

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June 10, 2002

Blog war?

Interesting NY Times article (reg. required) about blogs becoming mainstream, and the effect it is having on old-school & new-school bloggers alike. The article includes quotes from Cam, Dave & Kottke.

In truth, a lot of the “tech bloggers” described in the article created the tools to make it easier for the mainstream public to blog — which is a good thing. I think that we’ll find that more and more people will maintain blogs simply to keep and share their personal thoughts with themselves and close friends. Some of the better written and more interesting ones will get linked up and followed by a larger group, while others will fade away when then next great thing comes out or they get bored of it. Blogging is a fad…for some. Blogging is an entire change of philosophy for many. Mostly, blogging is the evolution of the Internet’s role as a communications medium. It will continue in its current form, and in future forms, for years to come and the world is better for it. I know I am; both as a reader and writer of blogs.

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June 07, 2002

Security through obsolescence

People are using antiquated server software to foil nefarious hackers. People sometimes forget that stability and security are critical for servers — not necessarily new and feature-packed. Fargoboy.com is hosted on a slightly-older system, and has been fairly secure (aside from some open-relay issues that should be resolved now). (via The USA Register)

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June 04, 2002

The Internet was created for public good

Howard Rheingold: “The Web was not created by VCs; it was created by thousands of people, because it was a cool thing to do: a public good. (via Kottke)

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May 29, 2002

Digital Frustrations

Today has been a bad day for my desktop. Through whatever experimental applications and utilities I’ve added, and the preference tweeking and command-line tomfoolery I’ve done, my formerly-stable desktop machine at work is now crash-prone with half of my networking services not working (printing & file sharing for starters), and certain key functions in my production apps not working. This proves that nothing is fool-proof for a determined-enough fool. I’ve been itching for a clean install for a week or two though; now seems like a good time for that.

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May 28, 2002

Borges & Googles

The new Google Labs project passes the Borges test. I’ve never heard of Borges before, but after clicking around, his work sounds really interesting.

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Give Me Speed

Rumor: 1.5GHz PowerMac G4s @ MWNY. Faster RAM & bus speeds. G5s in Q3 2003? Maybe.

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