Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
After more than a decade of hard-core devotion, mneptok is starting to question his Mac allegiance. Yep, Linux just keeps getting better as a desktop OS, and yes, you can save money on hardware, but I’m not about to give up iTunes, FinalCut, or Entourage. We pay a premium to use Macs, and IMO, we get much more than our money’s worth.
This is a map of how you read a web page. Not you you, but the aggregate “you.” Eyetrack originally started as an attempt to scientifically determine how people read newspapers, and worked by attaching a motion-sensitive device to people’s heads. Updated versions of the study track people’s eye movements as they read web sites by focusing lasers on their eyeballs.
The test equipment is able to draw visual paths showing actual eye movement, and there are some interesting surprises. People don’t scan up and down, or left to right. They start in the upper left corner and hover there for a while, looking for the most important information, then sort of zig-zag up and down, back and forth over the page, finishing in the upper right.
Of interest to both editors and designers: As people zig-zag, they don’t take in complete sentences, or even complete headlines; generally only the first few words of a headline are read before moving on. This heatmap is an aggregate view of how multiple test subjects focused on a blurb, the eye hovering primarily at the left side.
More potential surprises: Smaller type is more likely than large type to draw people into stories. If a headline is much larger than the blurb it accompanies, the blurb won’t get read — the headline is interpreted as self-sufficient. Underlined links and horizontal rules serve as barriers that discourage people from taking in the content directly below them. People do read “below the fold,” but scan content lower on the page very quickly, giving even less time to headlines and blurbs.
The power of images? People actually focus on text before images when both are present (although other studies contradict this). People often try to click on images, even when they’re not clickable. Bold-faced paragraphs leading into article bodies do get read.
No surprise: People ignore ads, and if they do see them, ads get about 0.5-1.5 seconds of attention per. Big ads are “seen” more than small ads.
Google News aggregates vast numbers of news sites, and collects detailed stats on them in the process. Marumushi’s newsmap takes that data and displays it in a Flash-based, database-backed, Mondrian-inspired visual aggregator. The size of blocks on the map represents the number of publications out there covering the topic in some way, relative to other topics. The color of each block represents the broad category to which it belongs (business, technology, nation, etc.), and the shade of that color represents time delta (I don’t really understand this aspect — time since last scan? time the story has been on the map?). Roll over any block for a summary of the number of publications converging on that topic. Kind of a visual, interactive snapshot of the news Zeitgeist at any given moment.
Not sure I’d want to use this as a primary news portal, but it does offer a quick way to tap the mindset of the world’s collective publication editors.
You’re over 30. You were there. You may have worked hard not to remember that you remember, but you do remember. Visiting people’s homes while collecting on your paper route, stepping into the foyer only to be mesmerized by pointless wall hangings –tools from the shed and driftwood embedded in macrame, lamps fashioned from garden tools, dust embedded in the cheap paint, space-age acrylic tables and chairs through which you could more clearly see the hideously clashing colors of the hand-woven shag rug… And you remember sitting in the dentist’s office reading how-to manuals distributed by Sunset magazine…
I’m as much a fan of great 70s design as the next guy, but let us not forget how much craptastic home-spun junk littered people’s homes in the decade, and how it all finally piled up in garages (and ultimately at garage sales) in the 80s.
James Lileks, of The Gallery of Regrettable Food fame, has published a second volume, Interior Desecrations, chronicling the joyous garbage of DIY suburban 70s decor. Scrumptious.
Of course, it’s an old-timey meat-grinder painted avocado green, stuffed with fake vegetables, and mounted on a plaque you bought at Escutcheons ‘N’ Things. But, you may ask . . . how do I make it?
Added a system status log for birdhouse hosting. All public info on status of / changes to the server environment will be posted there (customers will still receive email as well). Currently hosted here, but will move this to another machine before long so that it’s available in the event of an outage.
Now in the 2nd week of a Unix Systems Administration class, working toward my certification. This section is 10 full Saturdays in a row. Installing Solaris on x86 last week was a bust — hardware compatibility problems throughout the lab. But issues were worked out for today’s session, and we’re up and running. Installed gcc and started adding utilities, both from packages and from source, started customizing the environment. Not too different from working in OS X, BeOS, or Linux, but good to get hands-on Solaris experience, and there’s always so much more to learn. Half lecture and half lab. The sessions fly, packed with info, juicy bits and real-world sysadmin anecdotes.
OK geeks, help me out, for I am vexed.
FireFox 1 is out, and it’s great. In FireFox tradition, it’s very strict about web standards. I like that. But it also means that if a server sends a particular MIME type for a file, the browser handles it as such. Most browsers ignore the MIME type for .css files, and just handle them. But if FireFox hears from the server that a .css file has a type of text/plain rather than text/css, it will refuse to render it, and you’ll see the complaint in its console.
Continue reading “MIME Vexation”
I’m starting a list of “Things to do before I die.” Skydiving was on the list before I learned that a childhood friend had had a terrible skydiving accident, broke his back badly, spent years in therapy, and is now a couple inches shorter.
The main item remaining on the list is to take a canopy tour: Strap into a harness and swing through the treelines of a rainforest, gliding on ziplines, rappelling down cliffs, climbing up through hollow trees, hanging out with monkeys and forest birds…
Canopy tours are offered all over the world — Mexico, South Africa, Jamaica, Costa Rica. Most of the tours advertised on the web are short — a few hours. But my father has a friend leading 7-day canopy tours in Costa Rica, where you pack in food, eat lala from the forest, sleep on platforms in the trees, seldom touch the ground.
For the record, this is my dream vacation.
Miles swapped toys with some friends, came home with a whistling jungle toy and a waddling duck on a stick. Amy decided to have some fun: placed a trail of coffee beans on the bathroom floor and called him in. “Miles, look what the duck made!” Unexpectedly, he looked crestfallen. Later, didn’t want to play with the duck anymore. “Why don’t you want to play with the duck, Miles?”
“Duck poopy.”
Just completed a transition of birdhouse hosting to a new machine (in the same data center) with a greatly increased monthly bandwidth ceiling, and have been able to raise bandwidth caps for all customer account levels.
Also took the opportunity to upgrade SpamAssassin to version 3, which, among other enhancements, supports SURBLs — Spam URI Realtime Blocklists. SURBLs essentially use the same logic as Movable Type’s blacklisting system – rather than trying to analyze content or block sender addresses or IPs (which are moving targets), SURBLs hit spammers where it hurts by blocking messages that include blacklisted URLs.
The downside of using SURBLs alone is that messages containing URLs that are not yet blacklisted slip through the net. But by combining SURBL scanning with content analysis, and by using distributed/collaborative blacklisting systems, you end up way ahead of the game.
Had to modify some of my customer’s SpamAssassin rulesets to work with the new syntax in SA3, but now that we’re dialed in, spam blocking seems to be more effective than ever – we’re catching about 98-99% of unwanted mail prior to delivery. w00t!