Author: shacker

It’s up! (See One Last Look). Not perfect, and still a few items on my to-do list, but the new J-School web site is finally live, just in time for the new school year. A very different animal from the old one. All font tags are gone. Layout tables are gone. The major pages all pass XHTML validation (eventually the whole site will validate). We finally have a complete templating system (I ultimately decided to go with Smarty templates rather than adopt or build a CMS). Loads of new features, lots more anti-spam controls. Much less manual work to maintain the homepage (due to better separation of content types). Lots of things that were previously almost invisible are now surfaced via fly-out menus. Decent degradation with CSS and/or JavaScript disabled. Homepage now much more graphical (the main image is on a 15-minute rotation), less text-heavy overall. Lots more interface between back-end / intranet databases and public views (e.g. current and historical course offerings). And so on.

Amazing to look back over my Basecamp entries from the past year — 178 items checked off, 5 to go (mainly small fixes plus some work to do accessibility). Seemed like for months, I was adding three items for every one I checked off. Now, finally, it’s like a permanently attached monkey has been pried from my back.

Feedback welcome.

Many thanks to Andrew Devigal of Devigal Design (who also teaches design in our multimedia skills classes).

Come November, I will have been at the J-School for five years. I remember thinking when I started that setting the school up with a modern site would be one of my first tasks. Things didn’t quite work out that way. Spent a couple of months whittling the site down to essentials (it was over 90% orphans, and contained gigabytes of uncompressed images and video when I inherited it). Then the school needed an intranet, so I built that. Then they needed a jobs database, an alumni database, a multimedia tutorials collection, a spam-proof email contact form system, a brochure request system. An events publishing system. Integration with FileMaker databases. A webcasting system. A system to gather and post links to published student and faculty stories. An integrated mailing list system. A search interface. A courses and class scheduling database. An equipment checkout system. A staff and faculty calendaring system. Discussion boards. Weblogs. Lots and lots of weblogs. An online quiz system. A publishing system for the writing-intensive J-200 courses. And then there were the classes — co-teaching in multimedia skills, schlepping projectors and cameras around, helping out here and there. Doing desktop support for faculty and staff. Helping an unending parade of students with misc tech questions. Last summer was spent helping the entire school convert from Windows to Mac OS X. Spent most of this summer helping build a content management system for News21.

And so it goes. Days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years. After enough time had passed, I entered a state of resignation, accepted the 1997-era web site as a fact of life, and kind of stopped seeing it for what it was. I couldn’t find two-hour blocks to take care of all the small stuff, let alone find the hundreds of hours it would take to completely replace all the plumbing. But over the past year, working in the margins, I was able to secure funding for a new design, doubled up on my quota of interns, and slowly chipped away at it in the background.

A few weeks ago I wrapped up the work on News21 and have been going full-tilt boogie on getting the new site ready for launch. And now we’re on the brink. Take one last look, because tomorrow night this old jalopy goes bye-bye. If you read this after Tuesday night, the screenshot above will be all that remains.

Never thought I’d say it, but I’m going to miss the old dog. Kinda.

All that stands between today’s “strong” encryption and a total breakdown of security on the internet is the fact that brute force methods for cracking keys simply take too long. But quantum computers don’t process problems serially – they “sift” to find immediate solutions to mathematically hard problems. Therefore, the existence of a practical quantum computer could have huge ramifications for virtually all systems that rely on hard encryption for security (your online banking system, for example). Though still largely theoretical, the day of reckoning for traditional encryption is starting to look a little closer.

New Scientist: A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology, researchers say. A quantum bit, or “qubit”, is analogous to the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing “0” and “1”, quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.

As it stands, human brains are slow, but compute in a massively parallel fasion. Computers are very fast, but pretty much attack problems serially (have to process one instruction at a time). Combine a computer’s inherent speed with publicly-available massively parallel computing (still theoretical, but on the horizon), factor in the infallibility of computer memory compared to human memory, and the world changes in ways we can’t begin to imagine. (cf: Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines).

via Paul Conant