Nice productivity tip for geeks with time-sucking surf habits.
via mandric
lynda.com
An unheard-of week at work – students gone, most staff gone, pushed aside half a dozen simmering commitments and immersed myself in a week of intensive Flash training. Flash is a skill I’ve wanted to pick up since forever, but have never cleared time for. It’s not the kind of thing you can pick up by dabbling – you have to throw yourself at it, give yourself over to its strange logic, swim in its strange waters for a while. Things that are trivially simple in HTML become nuttily difficult in Flash… but with juicy pay-offs.
Used two books as references, but spent most of my time at lynda.com – a site stocking more than 16,000 online training videos on piles of common software. Haven’t checked out their non-Flash coverage, but was blown away by the clarity and thoroughness of the Flash training. $25/month gets you access to all-you-can-eat, on any topic. Killer deal.
Anyway, great to finally have general comfort with the program after all these years. And before you ask, the answer is no — this doesn’t change my overall feelings about Flash. My caveats remain: Use it judiciously, use it only where standards-based development won’t get you where you’re going, be mindful of accessibility and search issues, etc.
Music: Kalama’s Quartet :: Lei E Hula
Table of Contents
McSweeney’s has apparently gotten their hands on an early version of the table of contents for the iPhone manual.
VIII. Using the iPhone to manage your calendar
…
XV. Using the iPhone to better understand the coming synergies between Disney and Apple, and the fact that no conflicts involving the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will ensue
…
XXIV. How to change the iPhone’s battery
Music: Duckmandu :: California Ãœber Alles
Negative Space
Dangling participles left after today’s introduction of the iPhone. What exactly does Apple mean by “Runs OS X?” A stripped down version, or the Full Monty? If a stripped down version, where else might this “OS X Lite” run? Where is the SDK? What will it take to recompile existing OS X software for it? Has it got Java? Why GSM rather than CDMA? Will Widgets run as-is? Why have they hitched their wagon to a single carrier, rather than selling an unlocked phone? Does it include a corkscrew?
Sometimes it seems like Apple puts as much effort into deciding exactly how transparent / opaque they should be as they do into design. Negative information space surrounding a visible hub, carefully sculpted to encourage speculation.
Just switched to Sprint a few months ago, and am locked in for the long haul. Shame too, since Cingular offered a similar discount to UC employees; could easily have swung that way. Wearing a phone on one hip and an iPod on the other strangely seems much more awkward today than it did yesterday.
Two good reads:
Tom Evslin: Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry – Too Bad.
Imran Ali, with both dancing praise and concerns about openness (or lack thereof): Yay! iPhone!
Music: The John Doe Thing :: Tragedy by Definition
Earthlink Dropping 80% of Email
Robert Cringely on the devastating effect botnets are having on large ISPs:
Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain.
If you study the terms and conditions of your ISP’s service contract, you’re increasingly likely to find a caveat to the effect of “We do not guarantee the delivery of any email message.” AOL’s EULA has been saying this for years, but the practice is spreading.
The botnets are winning. There’s even a front-page story in the NY Times about the subject today.
Music: The Residents :: Breath and Length
Google Inner Space
John Battelle speculates about another way Google could apply their Google Earth technology — imagine the vast libraries of electron microscope photography that’s been amassed in the fields of biology and physics, or all of the micro-camera footage captured by doctors traveling through patients’ blood streams and colons, being applied as a sort of MicroSpace or InnerSpace mapping service, allowing anyone anywhere to “fly” through the micro-world of virtually anything. It’s a fascinating idea.
Music: The Streets :: The Irony Of It All
SoftRAID
Returned from vacation to a struggling XServe (at work, not Birdhouse) — the main boot drive had quietly filled to capacity, and for some reason the email alert system had not kicked in. Fortunately we had recently decided to upgrade the server to a RAID 1 configuration. I had ordered a pair of 500GB Apple Drive Modules before I left, and the delivery dude arrived right as we were in the middle of clearing up space. The universe smiles.
I had done some research on software RAID solutions for OS X Server, and was hearing great things about SoftRAID. Yes, OS X includes built-in RAID software, but this comparison between Apple’s RAID and SoftRAID had me sold.
There are a zillion ways to set things up, but the process turned out to be incredibly smooth. Disabled services to prevent data changing during the upgrade, installed the drives into bays #3 and #4 in the XServe, initialized and grouped them to RAID 1 with SoftRAID, used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the existing drive onto the new volume, set the new RAID volume as the startup disk in system preferences, shut down, ejected the original drive, and brought the system back up. The whole process took two hours, and everything was running like butter. Well worth $129.
Music: Blind Willie McTell :: It’s A Good Little Thing
YouTube Pushes Bad Code
Zeigen asks why YouTube offers up video embedding code based on the long-deprecated (actually non-existent) EMBED tag rather than OBJECT. You can hack the provided code to be standards compliant, but why are they doing this?
Ostensibly, the embed tag is used to make older browsers happy – browsers so old they don’t understand OBJECT. But at this point we’re talking about a very tiny slice of the market. Of course you can always “embed” EMBED inside of OBJECT for max compatibility. But it’s time for YouTube to get with the program and sacrifice a tiny percentage of older browsers for simple compliance.
Music: Marc Ribot :: Truth Is Marching In
Wikia Search
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching a new kind of search engine – one based not on algorithms, but on the power of human collaboration. “[Search] is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability [and] lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.”
Of course Wikia will be subject to the same games that spammers and SEO types play with conventional search results. As with Wikipedia, the quality of the results will be dependent on their being lots more good guys than bad guys monitoring and managing the content. But Wikipedia has shown that a helluvalotof people care; can and will pull together to make the model work.
Music: Robert Wyatt :: Shipbuilding
Seven Habits of Highly Successful Web Sites
“I picked out seven recent extremely popular websites. While perhaps not having the mindshare of a “Basecamp” or a “Ning”, these websites do have the benefit of having tons of actual users. Here they are, ranked roughly in order of popularity:”
- MySpace
- Wikipedia (basically tied)
- Flickr (pronounced flick-her)
- Digg
- Del.icio.us (pronounced dell-dot-icky-oh-dot-you-ess)
- Google Maps (no popularity data available but I bet it’s pretty popular)
“I looked at all these websites to see what they have in common. Here’s what I discovered.”
- Be Ugly
- Don’t Have Features
- Let Users Do Your Job
- Ignore Standards
- Build to Flip
Hmmm, seems like Five Habits of Seven Successful Web Sites, but some entertaining observations inside.
Music: Dr.Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band :: Sour & Sweet