Author: shacker

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How to Convince a Client They Don’t Need a Splash Page

An old topic, but thought this was funny and to-the-point. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, in an article at Marketing Sherpa:

When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

Here’s a bunch more reasons why Flash intros don’t work. Start with the fact that 80% of users say they hate them, and 25% say they just click away from the page as soon as they see one.

Music: Tim Buckley :: Phantasmagoria In Two
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Everything Louder Than Everything Else

Back in January 2004, Wired ran a piece on how the average volume level of commercial CDs has been steadily rising for the past two decades (Pump Up the Volume). Check out the visual waveforms on that page comparing AC/DC’s 1980 “Back in Black” to Celine Dion’s 2003 “I Drove all Night.” Amazing difference.

Compression is the act of reducing dynamic range during the mastering stage. Rather than making the overall volume louder, the loud/quiet peaks and valleys are brought closer together so there’s less delta in the waveform. The result is that the average volume is greater, even though the loudest sounds aren’t louder (though engineers do push the total volume to the max — at customer insistence — as well). Just as TV commercials seem louder than normal programming — their average volumes are higher, even though peak loudness is not.

In the days of LPs, pushing recorded volumes too far could result in the needle jumping out of the groove, and pressing plants would reject recordings that included clipping artifacts. After the advent of the CD, the needle problem went away. Artists quickly realized that louder overall volumes made a bigger impression on listeners … so louder music had a higher chance of becoming a hit. But despite the “impact” that louder music makes, the ultimate result for listeners is fatigue. Human auditory perception just wasn’t designed to listen to sound bereft of dynamic range.

Today, audio engineers are “exhausted” from trying to resist clients who insist on high compression levels. Either they do it, or the artist goes to an engineer who will. What’s unusual is that the vice president of a major label (Angelo Montrone of A&R) recently wrote an embattled plea to an industry newsletter, basically asking engineers to stop the madness.

Austin 360’s Everything Louder Than Everything Else summarizes the letter and provides an excellent overview of compression and its effect on humans. What I found particularly interesting was this cultural theory on why huge compression has become the norm:

So why aren’t more people noticing this sort of thing? One word: lifestyle. We listen to music in completely different ways than we did 20 or 30 years ago. For most people, music is listened to on the go, in cars, on headphones while running, on computers at work. Music has to compete with the sound of your car’s engine, has to punch through the background noise of street traffic or a loud office. “Ours is a culture of competition,” Wofford says. “Maybe labels think the music has to be super aggressive, super bright, like a kid screaming in a supermarket, to get your attention.”

via grahams

Music: The Mountain Goats :: Maybe Sprout Wings
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Apollo

Attended a fascinating – but somewhat puzzling – focus group sponsored by Adobe tonight. Apollo is an upcoming Adobe product* that’s sort of difficult to put a finger on. Blurring the line between web and desktop applications, online and offline use, Apollo is a desktop run-time for any combination of HTML, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, which can be packaged up into a downloadable cross-platform application that runs without aid of a browser. Fairly good description of the platform here.

Adobe seems to be putting a fair amount of emphasis on Apollo’s off-line capabilities, which are interesting, but what device isn’t connected 24/7 now? With everything going online – Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Basecamp, all the “rich” Web 2.0 Ajax stuff, Apollo is being introduced at an awkward time. How is it that Adobe is returning to the desktop right when everything is moving to the web? The desktop is becoming less relevant every day. I’m thinking the big markets for this will be car dashboard displays, kiosks, point-of-sale devices, handhelds, and cell phones. Personally, it’s hard to imagine developing any HTML/Flash/PDF system that I would also feel strongly should also be available as a standalone desktop application. But I could be wrong – look at the popularity of both Apple’s and Yahoo’s “widgets” systems (Apollo is like widgets plus BALCO).

If there was ever a product that needed a focus group to hone its message and understand its market, this was it. The eight web developers in the room had very different takes on what Apollo was, what it could do, or what it could mean to the web. Still, some very cool demos, and I have to admit it’s nice to be able to drop the browser chrome completely, go full-screen, use window transparency, etc.

Like Java, Apollo apps have the ability to access resources on the local machine (a developer demo’d a file manager like the OS X Finder, but running on Windows). Didn’t hear much about security (no time), but clearly it will be an issue for Apollo. Also, no PHP/CF/ASP services available, unless developers also create a server back-end for it to talk to.

Whether it has the potential to explode or will fizzle on the vine is anyone’s guess. Its amorphousness may make it hard to explain to users. If tonight’s session was any indication, it may be tough to explain to developers as well. A key to success will be in making it dirt-simple to generate Apollo apps. I would expect HTML or Flash developers to be able to drag a .swf or folder full of .html docs onto an icon and have an Apollo app be spit out the other end, or to export to Apollo directly from Dreamweaver, Acrobat, or Flash. Another Adobe-length learning curve could kill this thing.

Anyway, pretty cool tech. I just worry that the browser already “owns” cross-platform app space, and that it will be hard for Adobe to find a sweet spot for this.

* No, I’m not breaking any NDAs here.

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Inca Rag/Name Game
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How To Steal an Election

Princeton researchers have successfully cracked a Diebold electronic voting machine and produced a clear – and extremely chilling – demonstration video.

  • Any voter can insert an altered memory card containing vote manipulation software.
  • The lock protecting the card can be picked without a key in under 10 seconds.
  • The crack can delete itself from memory when the election is over, leaving no trace it was ever resident in memory (but with the altered votes intact).

It’s not about what John Q. Public might do in a voting booth – it’s about what a corrupt candidate or PAC with a bunch of money and lots of motivation might do. This is what we get when we build public policy atop closed / proprietary / corporate processes.

More info at itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting. Discussion at Gizmodo.

via Aldoblog

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Neuron Galaxy

Braincell-Universe

I’ve always been fascinated by the way branching systems reveal similar structures and layouts throughout the universe. An x-ray of your lungs looks much like a tree and its roots, hanging upside down. A systems of bifurcating creeks, streams, and rivers looks a lot like a social network. I’ve heard the term “chreodic theory” applied to the study of bifurcating systems, though Wikipedia doesn’t have much on the topic, and points out that the study is more descriptive than predictive – interesting but not terribly useful. This image above shows a brain cell on the left, a few micrometers wide. On the right, a simulated view of how the universe grew and evolved. Full-size view.

Music: Matching Mole :: Instant Kitten
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Deleting the Impossible

It finally happened – a customer managed to give a pair of files some impossible names:


\*\*somefile_&name.mov
\*another_file.mov

(how they accomplished this is anyone’s guess) and then complained that they couldn’t delete or rename them. Which is true — the mv, rm, stat, and file commands all complained that they couldn’t stat the files, no matter how I quoted their names. Remembered reading once that you could nuke such files via inode, but had never had cause to try it. Sure enough: “ls -il” gives you the inode number in the filesystem. You can then use:

find . -inum [inode_number] -exec rm -i {} \;

There’s always a side door.

Music: Otis Redding :: Security
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CMS – Build vs. Buy

A few months ago, I posted about the newsinitiative site I had spent most of the summer working on*, and mentioned that we had decided to build our own content management system for it from scratch. Promised to say more about the CMS “build vs. buy**” decision process we went through, but never got around to it. After installing Search Meter for WordPress a month ago, discovered that people have actually been searching this site for more info on that decision.

CMSs are a funny category of software. When you go to choose a word processor, you’ve got three or four serious options to consider (but it generally comes down to Word). Image editor? Maybe a dozen (but it generally comes down to Photoshop). There are usually more options for server-side web application software. Survey package? Maybe a dozen. Blogging platform? Again, maybe a dozen (but it generally comes down to Movable Type and WordPress). But the game changes immensely when you start looking at content management systems.

Continue reading “CMS – Build vs. Buy”

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Diplomatic Immunity

Diplomats from other countries living in the U.S. enjoy a certain level of immunity from local laws, e.g. they can park wherever they want, damn the tickets. Whether diplomats choose to use the privilege seems to have a direct correlation to corruption levels in their home countries. The Economist on parking tickets issued to U.N. diplomats living in New York:

For instance, between 1997 and 2002 diplomats from Chad averaged 124 unpaid parking violations; diplomats from Canada and the United Kingdom had none. The results from 146 countries were strikingly similar to the Transparency International corruption index, which rates countries by their level of perceived sleaze. In the case of parking violations, diplomats from countries with low levels of corruption behaved well, even when they could get away with breaking the rules. The culture of their home country was imported to New York, and they acted accordingly.

But the sword of immunity cuts both ways – American diplomats in London have apparently stopped paying the congestion charge for bringing a car into central London, racking up unpaid charges of $.75 million as of August. If the “corruption levels of home country” theory/pattern holds, what does that say?

Music: Otis Redding :: Pounds And Hundreds
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iTox

Greenpeace has built a site based on the look and feel of apple.com, but chock-full of information on the environmental impact of Apple’s products and flimsy reclamation program. I’m not sure it’s fair to single out one computer manufacturer, since the entire industry is toxic. But targeting Apple does help to make the point more tangible. Apple is renowned for their elegant but excessive packaging, and its left-leaning userbase probably assumes that just because Apple is “alternative” it must ipso facto be doing good stuff environmentally. Thought this was a very good point:

You can’t recycle toxic waste If Apple doesn’t drop the toxics from its products, it doesn’t matter how good a recycling program they have. Because toxics make recycling more hazardous.

I like this idea too:

We’re not asking for just “good enough.” We want Apple to do that “amaze us” thing that Steve does at MacWorld: go beyond the minimum and make Apple a green leader.

Apple has responded to environmental criticism in the past, and has even been named one of the Top 10 Environmentally Progressive Companies. Not sure how that squares with Greenpeace ranking Apple the fourth worst…

Anyway, the site is really nicely done, and drives the message home to Mac owners. It’s too easy to push uncomfortable truths under the rug when you’re involved in a love affair.

Music: Seeds :: Up In Her Room