Results tagged “technology” from KPAO

I own a MacBook. Generally I like Apple products. But when it comes to the video output, they get it completely wrong.

The MacBook has a non-standard video port for hooking up an external monitor.

I recently upgraded my iPhoto to the latest release, motivated mostly by the new "Faces" feature. Here's the short summary so that you can get on with your day: meh.

I have four general-purpose computers running three different operating systems on my desk at work. At home I also have four computers, though I "only" run two different operating systems.

At work and at home, the computers are connected together using commercial-grade switched Gigabit Ethernet, with gobs of dedicated NAS-based storage. Both home and work networks are connected to the Internet via good quality dedicated DSL and other technologies. The WiFi signal is strong everywhere. I design networking software for a living, have a degree in computer science,  speak HTTP fluently, and am the primary inventor of a bunch of patents related to computer networking.

So when I want to copy a single, simple file from one computer to another what do I do? Reach for a handy USB-stick, of course! The perfect utility, predictable behavior, and universal support for the FAT-formatted USB storage stick trumps all the networking in the world.

Yes, for some cases 'scp' 'rsync' 'smbtar' and friends can't be beat, especially when you already know how to name and authenticate to the destination (i.e. is it 192.168.5.32 ? smb://fooobar/baz ? \\skippy\flazzle\foo ? sftp://jokers:wild@server.snip.snap.com/home/me ?) None of that matters to the USB stick.

The closest replacement I've seen so far is DropCopy -- but that's not cross platform (yet!?). Someday we will sort all this out. Until then, I always keep a 4G stick handy.

I was talking to my co-blogger David Creemer the other day about how I thought the single most valuable piece of technology created in the era of the personal computer was the clipboard. Copy and Paste is the an essential staple of countless workflows, and it's by far one of the most consistent and reliable ways to share data across applications.

But then sharing this with some friends at work, we talked about the more recent past. What technologies have changed your life in the past 10 or so years? Broadband is number one for me. I've been blessed in that I've gone to school and worked at places with high-speed, always on connections. But until about 8 years ago, I relied on dial-up at home. It used to be faster to drive into work and copy large files down to my computer there than to attempt to download them over my dial-up connection.

And the second big game-changer in the last 10 years is wireless. This coupled with a laptop computer and always-on high-spped broadband has fundamentally changed the way I interact with the computer. Using the computer used to be a batch process: turn it on, boot it up, connect to the internet, do some tasks, shut it down. Now it's always available, always on. Looking up some info, checking email, or IMing a friend is as easy to do as picking up the laptop from the coffee table in front of me. (or more likely, just looking down onto my lap, as it's there most of the time now).

Basically what happened was the cost of internet connectivity has dropped to practically nothing. And when I say cost, I mean several things: monetary of course, but also time, convenience, accessibility, speed, reliablity... really any metric you can measure.

So what's next? Well, I think the desktop -» laptop transition that has happened over the past 10 years will repeat in a laptop -» mobile transition over the next 10. I have seen the future, and it is something that looks a lot like the iPhone. Now it's not just freedom of connectivity at home or work. It's practically anywhere I am. And that's a powerful thing.

Firefox 3 has just been released, and it is really the best web browser out there. You should get it. Now. Go ahead. I'll wait...

OK, still not convinced? If any of my non-techie friends and family are reading this, install it and I will help you with any technical questions you have in using it vs. your current browser.

There are some pretty nice features in Firefox that Safari or IE don't have, but the best one is the address bar. They are keeping track of which links you visit most often and surface those at the top of the auto-complete menu as you type. They also search on all keywords in the URL and title of the page, so it's easier to get to a page in your browser history. I've always been a huge fan of weighted auto-complete lists like this; in fact my one of the designs I'm proudest of was this very feature for addressing messages in Outlook Express for Mac and Entourage. I then designed an auto-complete bar for Yahoo! Messenger 9 that greatly simplified the interface and made it a lot easier to start conversations with people both in your Messenger list and your address book.

But I digress. Download Firefox 3 now.

A while back, The Facebook added instant-messaging (IM) through their web interface. It's a neat little trinket that can connect you to your friends when you are both on the Facebook site. What's more interesting is that the various multi-protocol IM clients have started to support Facebook chat. The latest Adium beta (for Mac OS X), and Pidgin (for Linux) and Trillian (Windows) and probably every other client now support Facebook chat.

Which leads to an interesting question: where do you spend more time managing your list of friends and groups of friends? AIM? Yahoo IM? Probably not -- for many people, the Facebook is their definitive list of friends and acquaintances, and having that list in your IM client is a perfectly natural fit. I use Pidgin on Linux as my primary IM client, and if I "show my offline buddies" (and sort by status to make the list manageable), then I can even hover over any contact to see their most recent Facebook status message. That message is almost always more interesting than a simple IM status too (compare "David is juggling baby geese" vs. "David is away"...).

I know that people folks are slow to change, and IM platforms are especially sticky. But in looking through my IM list, I have only two or three folks left that I communicate with via AIM (the rest are via Yahoo or Facebook). I can easily see AIM going away for me in a year. Will Yahoo Messenger follow AIM down the path of irrelevance? The writing may be on the wall for non-social network instant messaging.

On Friday I moved into the 3rd office space I've had for my job in the past 6 months. The company is building out a new, larger space. But until that is finished sometime this summer, my team has been bouncing around the Valley occupying surplus space at the back of various start-ups.

The surprising thing is how well it works. I have a laptop as my primary computer, so it's pretty easy to set up shop anywhere there is power and Internet connectivity. I have a full-sized keyboard, mouse, and second monitor which all help with productivity, and they're pretty easy to move in one trip.

For my phone, I put my GrandCentral number on my business cards. And to make outgoing calls I've been perfectly happy using Yahoo! Voice or Skype on my computer; the quality is better than the cell phone, and I love the hand-free headset, which let's me continue to work on the computer while I talk.

The only thing I really miss is having a good, ergonomic chair that fits me well. Hmm, maybe I should get one an cart it around with me...

I recently purchased a Motorola T505 Bluetooth speaker phone for my car. It works well enough, but there are these little annoyances that get in the way of truly seamless use. Sometimes my phone will get "stuck" in a mode where it thinks it is still connected to the speakerphone long after I have walked away. The speakerphone refuses to play audio when the phone is in "silent" mode. Sometimes the call pickup or disconnect functions don't work quite right, and so on.

Interestingly, I've noticed these sort of annoyances since the beginning with Bluetooth based products. There are very, very few Bluetooth connections that "just work" and continue to do so. On top of that, the model is fairly complex: many people probably don't understand all of the subtleties of "discover," "pair," "passcode," and "authorize." I don't think any of these concepts are super difficult, but it seems that almost no implementation gets everything right, and I think that is a clue to an underlying problem.

Bluetooth as a specification seems to be very complex for real humans to implement well. It has been around for about a decade, so by this point the basics should be very mature, and I'm sure they are. But all of these annoyances indicate to me that maybe important parts of the specification are too complex or poorly defined. It's easy to point fingers are the implementations and just say that the chip vendors or driver writers or operating system engineers made mistakes. It's also easy to say the the user interface designers did a poor job of integrating the technology into the user experience.

All of those engineers are undoubtedly guilty of making mistakes -- they (we) always do. Unfortunately with some technologies it just seems easier than otherwise to stumble.

A user with an especially attractive handle ("bleachedanus") posted one of my blog entries to Reddit. I didn't ask for this, but it was nice I suppose, and it did give me the opportunity to look at some interesting Reddit user statistics.

The story stayed on the "hot" (front) page for about 10 hours on the "overnight" shift, from approximately 20:00 PDT on a Friday to 06:00 PDT the next day. Because this blog gets comparatively little traffic (sigh) I could easily carve out some analysis by looking at the visits to that one page. I'm restricting my number to just the data from the first night (20h to 00h), as that let's me do an "apples-to-apple" comparisons.

The Reddit link produced about 14,500 unique visits the first night. Reddit visitors overwhelmingly use Firefox (68%), with Safari a distant second (17%), and IE (8%) and Opera (3.5%) behind that. Quite a few people also seem to be using mobile phones to read Reddit (2.5%). Most folks are still on a flavor of MS Windows (56%), but Mac OS X (29%) and Linux (12%) have respectable showings.

More interestingly to me, because I could count the number of times that page was served from the web server, and compare it to Google Adsense and Analytics data, I can make some guesses about the percentages of  browsers that use ad-blocking and JavaScript-blocking software.

The Google Analytics numbers are running about 15% behind the web server logs. Since Google Analytics uses JavaScript to track the visit, I'm guessing that means around 15% of Reddit users have JavaScript blocked by default (probably with the excellent NoScript extension, which I also use) or just block Google Analytics altogether. Probably about one-fifth of Firefox users blocked JavaScript.

Comparing the web server logs to the Google Adsense counts is a bit trickier, as I have to discount the 15% of the NoScript users who won't get the JavaScript-served ads. However I think it's probably reasonable to assume that if someone if selectively blocking JavaScript, they are also blocking most ads (I know I do that too). Only 65% of the visits resulted in a served ad. That means that about 20% of Reddit readers are running some sort of ad blocker without NoScript. (Or in other words, about one-third block ads).

Geographically, the results might be a bit skewed as the link was mostly on the Reddit front page overnight in North America. Still, just looking at the 8 PM to midnight numbers, the vast bulk of the visitors are from the US (79%), with Canada (8.5%), Australia (2.8%), and the UK (2.2%) making up most of the rest.

Finally, of the 18,000 new visitors, only about 2% clicked around the site a bit from the initial landing page. If this were a commercial operation, that would stink. But since we're just a little old country blog I don't mind too much. Also, 1.2% of you Reddit folks are still on dial-up lines -- WTF?

I've been interesting in spam ever since my days working on Claris Emailer and thinking about ways to filter out spam messages. They started off pretty straight-forward, then they started to appear as if they came from you or people you might know, they started putting random expository text in the body to get around keyword filters, and they even used images with text to prevent text parsing altogether.

Today I got a clever one I hadn't seen before. It was clearly a spam message, but it has a "button bar" looking thing at the top that had a button labeled "spam". Viewing the source of the message confirmed that the link in the button was the same as the call-to-action link in the body of the message. Tricky.