Category: Geek

Posted on

Apple Trash Talk

Question I hear a lot: “If the Mac is nearly virus-free / so great / [insert superlative here], why don’t they advertise the hell out of those things?” Fair question. Looks like they’ve started doing just that with a series of Mac vs. PC ads bound to stir the pot and sell a few pooters.

The dilemma is this: When you’re selling a product where the existing userbase has a well-established superiority complex, how do you push your real virtues without coming off snobbish? It’s one thing to sell advantages, another to knock the other guy. Thing is, negativity works. Patrick Coskren, on the MacOS-Talk list (with permission):

In political advertising, everybody says they dislike negative ads, but results show they’re very effective, which is why you see them so much. Perhaps the point of the ads is to attack the near-universal belief that even though Macs may be “easier” and “better” (for particular definitions of easier and better), Windows remains “good enough.” They want to jar people out of the complacency of thinking Windows is good enough, and push them to re-evaluate their platform choice. Windows is dominant (in part) because it’s … the default choice; if people actually make a choice, the chance they’ll choose a Mac is probably higher than the 3% (or whatever) the current market share would suggest. Just like if you’re running against the popular incumbent, it can be effective to go negative.

Apple also pushes the “virus free” message — a delicate button now that viruses are no longer unheard-of on the Mac. Even if it’s true that 99.72% of viruses are Windows-bound, it’s a bit of a glass bubble. Ars Technica’s John Siracusa:

It’s like an airline advertising that it has fewer fatal crashes than its competitors. This just isn’t done — and for good reasons. Putting aside the moral and ethical aspects, which arguably don’t apply to Apple, there are important practical considerations as well. The new “Viruses” TV ad pulls back a slingshot and holds it to Apple’s face. The backlash is inevitable.

If some portion of the virus-free aspect of Mac ownership is due to OS X being “under the radar,” then Apple has just posted a giant “kick me” sign on its back.

Not to make too big a thing out of it. I think the ads are well done overall, and kinda funny.

Music: Brian Eno :: Compact Forest Proposal, Condition 7

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

LightBox, GreyBox

Miles behind rock The trouble with pop-up windows — even benevolent ones — is that they break context. Some users are confused by having multiple browser windows open, and even those who aren’t find themselves one step removed from the page they were viewing.

LightBox nails the problem neatly, using JavaScript to dim the current window and zoom a chunk of content front and center. Elegant and easy, both for viewers and admins. Once installed, invoke by adding rel="lightbox" to any href tag to activate the lightbox. A LightBox plugin for WordPress is available (click image above for demo).

Segue to GreyBox, which uses the same principle, but provides a fully functional browser window in the inset. A GreyBox plugin is also available for WordPress.

Thanks Milan

Music: Bush Tetras :: Too Many Creeps
Posted on

Ubuntista!

Many congratulations to Kurt von Finck, Birdhouse’s resident “backup autopilot” and technology gadfly, who’s just landed a job as Senior Systems Support Analyst for Canonical Ltd., who are responsible for the excellent Ubuntu Linux distribution. Icing on the cake is that the job requires a move for he and his S.O. to Montreal, Canada — a double adventure.

Music: Funkadelic :: One Nation Under A Groove

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Maker Faire 2006

Makerfaire2006 Headed to San Mateo for Make: Magazine’s “Maker Faire” (could strangle them for plopping an “e” on the end of the name) – a confab for hackers and geeks who like to… make stuff. Busting with energy and ideas. Robots of all stripes (of course), flame throwers, Segway hacks, cardboard fabs, neon tube bending, wooden bikes, drive actuator music box, earth-magnet LED tossing, live-circuit graffiti, BBQ grill pool heater, steam-bots, mechanical theremin, painting bots, The Woz playing Segway polo, collaborative sound jams… an incredible day, and Miles didn’t want to leave.

Since my fave image publishing app Image Rodeo seems to have ceased development, decided to try a couple of experiments.

First whack at using Apple’s iWeb to extract sets directly to a non-.Mac gallery. Overall, pretty cool for 1.0, but iWeb doesn’t preserve iPhoto comments as captions (how lame is that?) and forces you to use the big popup slideshow viewer rather than putting each image onto its own page. It also does some URLs-with-spaces stuff that I hated, and had to modify after the fact. Limiting overall, but the built-in template collection is slick.

Next tried Frasier Spiers’ excellent Flickr Export plugin to poot directly from iPhoto to Flickr. Correctly extracts caption data, and gives you all that rich, chocolatey tagging goodness, but without the fancy templates, of course. I’m OK with that. Flickr’s got it all figured out, and as long as there’s a strong bridge from local metadata to remote, I’m buzzing.

Been buzzing with “make” energy all day.

Music: Tom Ze :: Xiquexique

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Where’s Tibet?

Download a copy of Google Earth, be amazed. Try to find a country or region on earth that the application / database doesn’t know about. Give up? Now try “Tibet.” Oops, no results. Zip, nada, squat.

Debate continues on whether Tibet is a country, but let’s leave the political debate about country-hood aside. Country or no, Tibet is still a region that appears on maps. But not on Google maps.

I was finally able to find a Keyhole .kmz file for Tibet, which enabled Google Earth to “see” the country / region.

When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the world.

Google is probably the single most-used information source in the world, and that source has disappeared an entire region / culture / people. Tibet was an autonomous kingdom until it was forcibly invaded and occupied by China. Since that time, the Chinese have destroyed hundreds of Buddhist temples, killed around a million citizens, and forces Tibetan children to speak Chinese in schools (see freetibet.org for info). Now the world’s most important information source won’t even show you where Tibet is on a map. The “do no evil” monolith has disappeared an entire country — not just for Chinese citizens, but for everyone — for profit.

The China fun continues this week, as one of the sites we host at the J-School, China Digital Times, found itself inaccessible from within China in early March. Today we learned that the censors have blocked not just the domain, but the entire IP address of the server. Meaning that the main J-School web site, as well as other domains we host, are all inaccessible from within China as well. I’m currently in the process of sorting out the mess, moving CDT and the other sites onto independent IPs to future-proof against this kind of side-effect.

In the process of trying to explore the extent of the damage, I found that online blockage testing tools such as Harvard’s were nearly worthless, since they themselves were being foiled by Chinese counter measures.

Switching the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo only took a second. It’s a bit trickier to do in Safari. If I used Explorer + Google Toolbar, I’d be ripping it out right now.

Here is a study examining the impact the latest update to the Great Firewall had on the reliability of VPNs at bypassing local restrictions and protecting users against wiretapping by the Chinese government.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Apache v Spaghetti Monster

Some very interesting graphics posted in a ZDNet blog recently comparing the number of system calls made by Windows+IIS vs. Linux+Apache to serve a very simple web page. Short story: Everything you’ve ever heard about the fabulously complicated plate of accreted spaghetti code in Windows is true. Does all that added complexity increase the inherent vulnerability of Windows as a server OS? Probably. But getting to the real-world truth of that claim is nearly impossible without being a genius engineer intimately familiar with both code bases. I only know the images seem to confirm what I already believe. Computerworld aggregates blogged notes and observations on the frightening pics.

Posted on

Google Mini Minus Link Love

First-hand report from an organization using the Google-mini appliance. Mostly run-of-the-mill observations, but it surfaces a limitation of Goog-in-the-enterprise that hadn’t occurred to me: Google’s secret sauce is PageRank, and PageRank depends on link love. But if what you’re indexing is a few thousand Word/Excel/PDF documents that don’t link to each other, there is no link love to be had, and you’re back to Alta Vista days and plain old keyword frequency.

If the interlinking metadata between documents is non-existent, and PageRank is zero on every one of your documents, you’re back to keyword frequency matching.

That’s not really a criticism of the Google appliances themselves, as I’m not sure what could be done about it, but it seems to me a bit like selling an invention known for one special feature… without that feature. Big Macs without the secret sauce.

Music: Captain Beefheart and His Magi :: Grown So Ugly
Posted on

makestreams

I’ve written a brief shell script to automate the task of batch-processing piles of QuickTime movies for use with QuickTime Streaming server. makestreams adds metadata, adds hint tracks, and generates .qtl reference movies for all files in the current directory. Requires the qtmedia and qtref command-line binaries only present in OS X Server.

Music: Can :: Cascade Waltz

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

The Economics of UGC

How do the User Generated Content sites do it? How can Flickr, YouTube and the like possibly make money through limited revenue options while simultaneously giving away absolutely massive piles of storage and bandwidth?

Economies of scale kick in big-time, and there’s still a lot of unused capacity out there, but you have to wonder how sustainable it is to allow users paying very little or nothing at all to dump the entire contents of their Flash memory cards onto Flickr every day. Not to mention the fact that uploading 13 nearly identical pictures of your cat onto Flickr rather than one pollutes the quality of the datastore for all users (I’ve never understood why Flickr doesn’t strongly limit the number of images that can be uploaded per day, forcing people to edit their collections).

Some discussion in TWiT episode 47 about Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr and how they’re now finding it an economic albatross. Photo printing from Flickr is an obvious revenue opportunity, but according to a TWiT insider, 10 million Flickr users generate about 80 print orders per week. News flash: People are there for the community, not for abstracted printing possibilities. But once you invite people to upload their lives into your service, you’re committed, no backing out.

Despite seemingly problematic revenue opps, Yahoo! is continuing their UGC/Web 2.0 purchasing spree: they apparently have an offer on the table to buy Digg. UGC is a critical aspect of Web 2.0, and they can’t afford to miss the boat.

The recent proliferation of free massive storage systems has changed user expectations for all hosting systems. Alex King, on user expectations at FeedLounge:

When I hear someone say “a service like this should be free”, it feels a little like they are saying “your time and investment are worth nothing”. I know it’s not personal, but to make a really great product, you have to invest yourself personally.

Birdhouse struggles with this too. For example, we simply can’t offer a webmail system as good as GMail’s (for any amount of money), and we sure as heck can’t offer 2GB of storage to anyone who comes by and asks. But due to the quality of modern webmail systems like Yahoo’s and Google’s, people just assume that all webmail will be of similar quality. Without truly massive investments and economies of scale, small and medium-sized hosts are stuck offering Web 1.0 technology in a world that already expects Web 2.0 quality and scale.

But it goes beyond webmail: Now that Google and Yahoo (and soon Microsoft) are making quick inroads into the web hosting business, the picture isn’t pretty for smaller hosts. What we can — and do — offer is excellent hand-holding and custom setups that the cookie-cutter monoliths can’t offer. And while the bandwidth and storage we provide may seem puny by comparison, I haven’t met a customer yet who actually felt cramped by our offerings – 500MBs is a huge web site… unless you’re throwing a ton of audio and video around.

I’ve been experimenting with UGC for nine years at the Archive of Misheard Lyrics, and have made money from it. Not big money, but some. But I’ve had the advantage of being able to do it on a high-impressions/low-bandwidth model – lyrics pages are tiny chunks of text in a database. And unlike free-for-alls like Flickr, I exert editorial control over the content, and don’t let just anything onto the site*. I know that UCG can be a workable revenue model, under the right conditions. But how this scales to unlimited free photo/video/audio hosting remains to be seen.

* Although in the past I’ve used volunteer editors, some of whom have let huge numbers of unfunny lyrics into the live pool; the current user voting system (which I guess is a bit Web 2.0 itself) will eventually correct for that.

See also Nick Cubrilovic: The Economics of Online Storage.

Music: The Minutemen :: Futurism Restated

Technorati Tags: