Some Twitter Stats…meaning also how much activity goes into my FB feed now…

So I thought this was quite interesting as people claim that I am twittering all day.  In truth if you look at this graph, the cluster of my tweets are all after 8PM. Meaning, I don’t really tweet all day, just in a huge cluster at night.  Consider it like Leno or Letterman only in primetime.

And if you look closely, my overall tweeting has diminished greatly since hitting a peak in Jan of 2009.

One other trend that isn’t showing is that I’ve pretty much stopped using tweetdeck and go back and forth between peoplebrowsr and seesmic now.  I’m also not tweeting much from mobile, at all.

So this blogpost is off cycle for me (in the morning) but I thought it was interesting anyway.

Kindle vs iPad: My take after the media blitz

So being that I have to eventually salivate over an iPad, but already have a Kindle 2, I’m going to venture this review based on browsing the web, watching Steve Jobs’s introduction of the product and just my general sense.

1) The iPad will be a big hit.

2) The kindle is already a hit and will not be supplanted by the iPad once people reach the heart of summer and go down to the beach and have the shiny reflective surface blind them mercilessly when then are trying to show it off.

3)Kindle app store…wtf.  With that slow display and limited input capability?  Do you really expect a user to use the toggle switch to traverse practice tests in a textbook and supply answers?

4) The kindle is a dedicated reading device that has and will change how we read books.

5) The iPad is a huge highly capable iPod Touch and will eat into mac computer sales.  I probably will get one after the 3G version comes out so that I always have a backup network to get to in a pinch, but what I probably will do is walk around with my Kindle and my iPad in my backpack and leave my macbook home for doing intensive stuff (like editing video, concentrated writing, et cetera).

6) If the kindle app for the ipod touch works as described (as the other 140,000 app store apps are expected to), why do I care if I’m holding my iPad or my Kindle if they sync the same purchase between the two from Amazon?

7) I now can line up my lightscribe pen, my droid, my kindle 2, an iPad, my apple TV and my MacBook in a row and take a picture just because each one is slightly bigger than the next.

8 ) The reason I think that the iPad will eat into laptop sales rather than Kindle sales is because if iWork on the iPad is for real, you now have a productivity suite in your hands that is desktop quality and capable in a useful form factor.  If you keep docs on iWork.com or even on your iDisk on me.com you can get to any piece of work, download it and then show or edit it.

9) I was walking around the mall behind my wife today while she went up and down aisles in Filene’s basement in Watertown.  my Kindle 2 was paperback book sized.  An iPad would be TOO BIG to stand around and and act semi-attentive.  Heck my kindle 2 gets looks from people and a kindle dx would be too big also.

10) What I didn’t see (which may be there) is if the Music App on the iPad can broadcast/stream to my apple TV like itunes on my macbook (not the streaming on the appleTV, the reverse where you can tell the macbook to use the appleTV as its speakers).  If it can, I could see how useful (sitting on the couch like Steve Jobs) browsing/reading while my selection of music goes to my Apple TV and my surround system.

That’s my take on it.  Kind of disjoint.  I might get one in 90 days or so when the 3G version comes out…or wait till my birthday in the summer…or wait till Christmas.  Although if I wait till Christmas, I’ll wait until January to see if they do an update at MacWorld or some other venue.

A Marketing Experiment via tweets…

With all the SEO experts, social media experts, marketing gurus and whatnot, I thought I’d try something.  I’ve scheduled 4 tweets on peoplebrowser to appear every 5040 minutes, each one about 20 minutes apart about my book, Urtaru.  These will repeat 9 times each.  Given my social network map which I talked about in another blog post (which now has yahoomeme attached to it) I should be able to hit the 4 corners of the earth twice a week.

So as to have a good sense of my clicks, I have bit.ly to see what people are clicking on, and google analytics on my book website.  If the clicker ends up in my blog on wordpress, that has some level of analytics too, and can send people to my google/bit.ly-ized links.

We’ll see how it goes.

Google and Net Neutrality

While the phone and cable companies are getting apoplectic on the net neutrality issue I thought that the last line in this article in the WSJ today was really funny…so I dugg it…

WSJ.com – FCC Crafts Plan-B for Web Traffic

“For its part, Google said net-neutrality rules would “keep the Internet awesome for everybody” although it noted that there is “no principled legal basis or demonstrated need” to extend those rules over Internet applications and content providers like itself.”

I think that that use of awesome is awesome…:-) It sounds so different than the responses from the various carriers, you can tell they are from different industries and technological generations…

Follow up: Pulse Smartpen and Livescribe Software (specifically handwriting recognition)

So as I wrote in my last blog post I was hoping that the files generated by Livescribe were searchable via text (aka OCR my handwriting).   @philbog told me that Evernote does OCR of pdfs and images and then @macktucket said from across the room that the livescribe had an app you could buy.

Anyway, I loaded the evernote for mac client, and saw it sync my documents from the web and there were my pdfs and no ocr no search.  I googled livescribe evernote and searchable and got advice that I needed to upgrade to premium to get that feature on evernote.  A possibility, but I haven’t got enough content up yet that I’d want to search that that would have been worth it.  While I was pouring through the search hits, I saw a reference that said that livescribe desktop searched the uploaded docs…hmmmm….so I went back over to the desktop and saw the search box (in a new light) and typed in something. Suddenly instead of 25 thumbnail pages of notes in the panel, I see 2 thumbnails with a tiny yellow glow emanating from the middle of each of the thumbnails. I expanded one of them and Voi la it had found the word highlighted it in the written text (Cursive, not printing…cursive…yes I know how to write cursive…yes, old school).

I was so excited by the fact that it could read my writing I called my wife and sons over and cackled endlessly.  I then had them pick out words from the text just to see if it could find them.  9 out of 10 were found.  the 10% failure seemed to be due to the the fact that some of my capital T’s are being mistaken for lower case and the search is evidently cursively case sensitive (HA!) and those T’s were written badly.

Anyway, this makes the thing REALLY useful to me for both school and work.

Not so useful for sharing because the pdfs that are generated don’t seem to be searchable, but that may be another thing that I’m just not doing correctly.   if I got search working correctly in pdfs, I’d load the searchable pdfs onto my kindle and see if it could find text in them (if the kindle allowed you to search pdfs of course).  Anyway experiments and features for another day.

Thanks to @philbog and @mactucket for their inspiration.

Oh my droid just made its wonderful DRRRROIDDD sound…I’d better go check to see if it is something important…

Pulse Smartpen and Livescribe Software

So I got one of these for Christmas, Thanks Honey!

Of course the technology is neat, and on that alone I’d at least play with it.  For me it’s not just the technology itself, its how to use it with other stuff.

So for the not-so-technical, the pulse pen is a pen with a bunch of electronics in it.  It is used in conjunction with the livescribe notebooks, journals and pads.

The pen functions by writing just like you would in a normal notebook except that these pages in the special notebook have tiny little dots on them, almost too small to see with the naked eye, that help the pen copy everything you are writing.  When you dock the pen with your computer, the livescribe software reads everything that the pen stored and renders a page that has your penmanship there to share.  It’s as if the pen took a picture of what you were writing.

But that’s not all.  Since the pen knows where you are on the page based on those dots and the tiny little camera in the end of it near the pen-tip, you can do other things.  The pen as an audio recorder built in which means you can record your voice or whatever is happening at the time you are writing.   You activate the recorder by hitting controls at the bottom of every page that say record, pause and stop.  What you can do is hit record, start writing and it records whatever is being said or the ambient noise while you are writing until you hit stop.  If you tap on the paper near the beginning of the place you wrote at after you hit record, it replays what was recorded at the time you were writing.

There are also the necessary cool little apps like the movies in the led display on the pen and a way of telling the pen that you are a piano, draw a piano keyboard, then change instruments and record music and a rhythm accompaniment.

The pages that are uploaded into the livescribe software can be replayed and you can hear the audio associated with your writing.  The whole thing is pretty cool although it seems like a lot of work for just a cool hodgepodge of features.

The better part was how I discovered the sharing aspect of it.  First of all the pen knows which pages have been written on and in which notebook.  So you can have many notebooks stored on your computer.   You can (at least on the mac) pick a group of pages to print to printer or print to pdf.  This means that you can give somebody notes if they’ve missed a meeting or a class…but if you print to pdf, you can even do more things…

For example I was able to print to pdf, and then take the saved document and load it in my kindle.  That’s kinda cool.  But then I was taking a class at work which had a blog for us to share the info and I posted my notes after each half day to posterous.com and it renders the pdfs through the scribd reader which means that just like embedding a movie or a picture, you end up with a scrollable or page turnable electronic doc embedded on the posterous post.  OF course you can email the pdf to someone else too.  Here’s an example on my posterous

One thing I haven’t figured out is if there was a way to annotate the stored pages so that you can turn the pages (which are essentially pictures) into searchable documents.   That would be cool…maybe its there and I just didn’t get to it yet.  It seems like something that the geeks who invented this would have on the product backlog

The other thing you lose when you convert to PDF is any audio recordings that were associated with that page.  Oh well not a deal killer.  but if the audio was still available and the bookmarks were transferable through the pdf, it’d be cool to read the docs on my kindle and then have it render the sound…that’d be awesome (ok ok, when the ipad/islate/newton2.0 comes out I won’t need to worry about this right?)

Oh I forgot to tell you.  On the inside of the cover page you’ll see all kinds of things you can tap that are commands to the pen to present something.  battery life, memory available in the pen…and also a calculator.  Now this is actually kind of cool.  you have the picture of a calculator, and you tap the buttons with the pen and the result is presented in the led display of the pen.  not bad.

Here’s the killer-app for 2010: Anti-Social Media

So a former colleague of mine and an entrepreneur mused on his facebook page:

How many friends are too many friends? and how many enemies are too many enemies?
Or are a thousand friends few and an enemy too many?

Being a smart-ass, I had to reply to this:

Hey, you’re an entrepreneur, you should start a site called InYourFaceBook…instead of friending people, you enemize people. you sign up enemies instead of friends…play games, send them hugs (deadly embraces), molotov cocktails et cetera

to which he replied:

That’s it you are officially my mentor from now on 8-) what should I start with?

And since we were brainstorming at this point, I continued to let it flow:

Since this idea is the basis for ubiquitous anti-social media, you should start with a premise of a nixonian enemies list. Just list all the people you hate, call google through an api which returns last known email address and photo of that person. Then send out dis-invites to start

I thought about what I had said: “ubiquitous anti-social media” and cracked myself up.  Then I thought about my idea and tried to get it down to its core.   When I had peeled away the crust, the mantle and the outer core…what I was left with was spam which like a disease had already been invented and through its generations of evolution reached its zenith in the form of Twitter.  Twitter is essentially a way for everyone to spam relentlessly without it coming into your email box.

Since I couldn’t come up with an ROI for an anti-social media app that really satisfied a pain point that wasn’t already solved by Twitter or it’s copies, I kinda dropped it.  But being as how all my social media sites are all tied together through a single update, I will now hit “publish” on this wordpress blog and it will be tweeted all through twitterdom.

BTW just to make this worth your while, I’ve included the spam scene from Monty Python (note of course how the repetition of spam in this moves like a retweet through twitter):

I hope you all have a healthy, prosperous and Happy New Year in 2010!

Google Chrome Beta for the Mac

So I spent some time tonight using Google Chrome Beta for the Mac.  I use Chrome (as well as every other browser except opera) on a daily basis on my windows machine at work.  On my personal mac, I had Safari and FF3 on the mac side, and IE8 and Chrome on the XP partition.

For those who read my comments on Chromium…this is different than that.  Chromium is a whole operating system with a UI that is a browser.   This is just a browser running on Snow Leopard (AKA MacOSX 10.6.2).

I use Safari most of the time on my mac, but use IE when I need to do stuff on the xp partition for school.  I also notice that when I use the outlook web version for work, it just works nicer on IE8 than on safari.

So, as I said, tonight I loaded Chrome on OSX.  I have to say its pretty fast.  I’d even venture to say that blew safari’s doors off on javascript intensive sites.  Just to see what would happen, I went to mobileme and the iwork.com beta site.  Mobileme rendered flawlessly, while iwork.com came up and complained that chrome wasn’t supported.  nevertheless it allowed me to continue and worked ok…although it got hung up a couple of times.

I’m going to use it for a few days and see what happens.  I like safari (although there aren’t the multitude of plug-ins like on firefox) and it tends to work fine and fast. definitely faster that FF.  But this chrome beta screams in comparison to Safari on some sites…

I tried FB, twitter, mobileme, iwork.com, linkedin, my yahoo, yahoo mail, yahoo finance, digg, authonomy, cnet.com, googlewave, igoogle, wsjonline, and wordpress.  All seemed to work just fine.

Anyway, if you have a mac, and you see the invitation when on a google site (gmail or whatever) download it and see what happens.

Drrrroidddd

So I upgraded my old t-mobile htc g1 to a verizon motorola drrrroiddddd this past weekend.  It’s an awesome upgrade.  the G1 was dying under the weight of the software upgrades on 1.6 and the newer apps.  And t-mobile’s phone coverage was adequate but spotty.  Verizon’s phone coverage is much better.

Anyway the first thing i noticed was that battery life was way way way better than the year old G1.  This is expected from a year old phone battery, but the change was dramatic.  In fact i have yet to turn off 3g service, so they’ve figured out how to keep it up without me charging the battery once a day (that was the case with the G1 even in the early days).

All the other wireless settings (bluetooth, GPS and wifi) were setup the same, but seem for some reason to be more sensitive.  I can’t tell if that is true, but the setup for my wifi never misses…as soon as i enter the house, switch to wifi from 3g.  The G1 would do it intermittently.

Google maps with voice. awesome.  Used it already.

facebook app, (seems to have more features than on the G1), came up within a few clicks.

BAD Very BAD….yahoo email service is gone.   I’ve been all over the net and tried all the remedies, but it will not connect to yahoo.  I can go through the browser of course, but that means I can’t see email notifications.  I can pay yahoo $20 a year for pop service.  but why?   I also noticed that the yahoo browser program no longer is downloadable on the droid market.  C’mon guys, get along…

gmail works great and every time I get a message DRRROIDDDD…it is kinda funny.

I use Moxier mail to get my work email.  I can’t figure out Verizon.  They are SO NICKEL and DIME.  If I use their email program, I get charged for activesync like $30 a month or something.  But if I use my own program free…watch, they’ll cut me off now that I’ve talked about it.  I pay for unlimited internet so don’t touch it.  Don’t mess with me, I have followers of my blog, facebook, twitter and on YouTube you know.   And I play the guitar, so I’ll write a verizon nickel and dime ballad and sing it for the masses!

The phone has a 5mp camera.  I can’t imagine what the photos and videos are going to be like, but i can see doing more stuff.

One massive advantage for those of us luddites who like bluetooth, but still have wired full headgear with a boom mic, there’s an actual jack.  And not the usb appendage on the G1 that prevented you from charging and using a wired headset at the same time.

Oh did I say that QuickBase works great on the mini-chrome browser?  reports look pretty good and most forms come up in looking good.  On the G1 version of the browser (with the slightly smaller screen size) QuickBase forms seemed to go over the right edge of the screen a little bit if they were complicated.

On the suggestion of a friend, I loaded google sky maps.   it is awesome.  Now all I need is a clear sky app

With the deal/plan I got, I have visual voicemail.  Waiting for someone to leave me a voicemail

OK so the one thing that this cannot do is play my relatively vast iTunes library.    Oh well.   I’ll probably load imeem again or something to get the doobie brothers channel or something so that I can get some of my music.  I can put some on a card, or buy songs from amazon, but I just can’t see it.  not worth it.

One extremely awkward thing.  You can’t get to the dialer directly from the main screen like you could from the G1 button panel.  This proves to be rather annoying.  You have to (unless you have the bluetooth earpiece on) hit the home button and then select phone.   This is rather annoying.  C’mon google/motorola, some of us still call people from a phone…

All in all I’m pretty excited.  I need to get a mount to use it as my gps now and hand the nuvi to my wife for her car.  in the meantime its pretty cool.

As you know I love my mac, I’m intrigued by my AppleTV and thing the iPod Touch is an awesome thing and watch my iPhone friends browse effortlessly. I don’t get locked into anyone technology offering (heck I still use yahoo email)…..but this is a pretty damn nice smartphone.  Now if they could only get a kindle program for it  I mean, they have one for iPhone/Touch, they have a PC version and they have a Mac version now…

Physical stuff?  Screen is large and has great resolution.  keyboard is kinda strange.  It has a funny feel to it.  I didn’t care for the G1 keyboard (especially the fact that the button bar forced you to reach your right thumb over it to get to the right side of the keyboard.  But this keyboad is thinner and smaller in some ways.  It forces you to click less hard.  I’m still getting used to it, although after 3 days, it has trained me.

I’ll leave you with this final thought

Drrroidddd…

A Poll: Which Version of Bach Brandenburg Concerto #2 do you like?

This sounds weird but I tweeted which version of Bach I was listening to and I got all kinds of opinions on my facebook page

Please feel free to comment on why you prefer the one you prefer…I’m very interested…

My Favorite Dilberts…

Chromium Update – It seems to be working now…

So sometime over the weekend, the fancy button on the top left came to life and the apps were available (and it took my gmail auth).   I also suspect that there was a behind the back update to the service because I’ve done nothing with the partition since Friday, and this morning it was running without a hitch and wasn’t crashing every 3 minutes on me.   Congratulations to whomever did that.

As I said in my last post, I was waiting for a stability update, and I guess I got one.  Thanks.

Still not sure why I need it, but as long as its being a good citizen on my mac, I’m content.

Chromium OS…you CAN wait…

So I loaded up Chromium OS on my mac as a vmware partition alongside my XP partition. I will say that XP is more stable than Chromium — Kudos to Microsoft

For those of you who do not know, Chromium OS is the new operating system ostensibly for netbooks and tablets from Google.  It is really the Google Chrome browser living on top of the Ubuntu linux OS.  I found a vmware kit on gdgt and loaded it up.  I saw that people who had vmware 3.0 seemed to be having less trouble with it so I upgraded vmware in the process (I was going to do that for my later upgrade of xp->7 someday so what the hell, I’m all set now).

Ok I got around the weirdness in the various forum instructions that said I should use bridged network instead of NAT…I used NAT.  It did take a reboot (of just the partition) to get it to see the network.  You need the network the first time to log in because it authenticates with the mother ship the first time.  I haven’t experimented with seeing if it allows you to log in if the network is down.

I will say it comes up pretty fast.  and that’s important since it crashes every 3 minutes.  Oh and don’t hit the non-colored google wheel in the top left corner.  It asks you for your google login (which is different from your gmail login evidently since it won’t take that credential on me).

Since it is a browser-as-OS, you can get to your google docs and all kinds of other websites.

The only place that exposes the underlying linux is when you go into the preferences and you start mucking around in there with the filesystem. Then you see the familiar /xxx directories that most unix implementations have.

Overall I found it to be sluggish in performance and it curiously spent a lot of time getting itself back to norm.  which meant that sometimes it’d lose itself while I tried to click on things.  I wasn’t sure if the guys who built the vmware compatible kit forgot to turn off debug mode or something.

Ok experiment done, I did it.   My mac now has 3 different operating systems on it: Snow Leopard, XP and Chromium…and it still works.

No compelling reason to keep playing, hopefully the upgrade will be soon and clear up the bugs and slugs…

Oh and 10-12 years ago I remember the last time someone was trying to do this…the company was called Netscape…

#RIAUnleashed – notes from “UX for the development minded”

The slides will probably do this more justice, but these are my notes:

The presenter was Andy Powell from Universal Mind

We are surrounded by great experiences – nice cars, satellite radio online service (pulsar), gourmet food delivered inexpensively…the iphone (which changed the way we view what a phone can do)…the movie Pulp fiction (ok this was a stretch)

Defining Experience Design

people’s guesses

• looks nice
• works the right way
• how it works in its context

But what is really is is users/technology

The user wants to be inspired and makes the user come back.  If you can get them into the immersive place, where they have to be there, then you have got a good design

Styling is not design…skin and style at the end is NOT design.   Design is more immersive and is part of the process.

There are 4 steps to making a good design

1. Discovery (figure out what the need is)
2. Design (wireframes, user testing, prototyping, gives the user a good idea of the look and feel)
3. Development (making the design bring up tangible results for the underlying application)
4. Deployment

The presenter called this the 4D process

the process is a marriage of Ideas (users ideas) and Technology (the thing that is the right one for the problem)

Why are we doing this?   Because the technology facilitates a great design…look at the Dyson vacuum cleaner

The art & science of experience design

The path you eye follows is a circular clockwise movement.  There’s a reason that the apple on an apple is in the top left corner and the default icon sort starts on the right side of the screen.  Your eye will start on the top left in western society (it will be different for other cultures of course)

misused technology hinders experience

I’m sure we can think of examples

understand our audience/users

in order to do this we need to establish trust, so that they will give us feedback honestly and openly.  Trust goes both ways…the app can’t blow up (like twitter when crashes) on the user

Triggering emotion

we want to trigger a positive emotion.  Then he showed this ikea ad which showed this pathetic lamp in the rain…and then someone steps on the screen and says “what are you crazy, its just a lamp”

Emotion is the added value of design.  ”reason lead to conclusions, emotion leads to action”

environment also affects perception

think about different people’s reactions to snow (people who live in different parts of the country

What’s the story / goal?

good stories connect the user.    The elements of the story are lead character, ambition, conflict, resolution

How is the story being told?

must be from the user’s perspective — This is where Personas arise

Title (picture) overview characteristics goals frustration influenceers questions knowledge

Personas create Empathy

as developers we should be asking from the users perspective, he hits the button — what does he expect to happen?

Features are Dead -

focus on the solution and features will follow

Create User Stories

chart interactions, data access, system persona, actors, even inanimate things can be viewed this way.  These stories are crucial…developers write the stories.  This is the point where we take the wireframes from the designers and define what can be built.

Good UX arises from a collaboration between designer and developer

Notice the experiences around you…and bad experiences will start annoying the $#|+ out of you.  The ENTIRE experience is the key, the whole immersive experience.  That includes people interaction as well as RIA.

#RIAUnleashed – notes from “keeping front end dependencies under control session”

The real slides are going to be posted at some point by the coordinators, but just for my own sake here is what I typed as fast as possible

5 simple rules for better client performance  (these are yahoo’s recommendations)

1. organize and plan
2. location matters
3. load a component smart and once
4. maximized caching opportunities
5. optimize, minify and compress

Javascript

over time you keep adding libraries because something is missing

website application continuum

spry jquery prototype YUI EXT.hs Dogo GWT

<————————————————->

keep all your scripts in one central place

Classic pairings of libraries:

• cf + ext
• cf + spry (adobe)
• jquery + jqueryUI  (nice theme roller DOM manipulation)
• YUI + YUI (very comprehensive…followed their own advice)
• Prototype + script.aculo.us

Externalize (java)scripts at the bottom.

because scripts load their own stuff, you can’t render anything while the scripts are loading.  Only caveat, some scripts only run in the head.  Anyway will improve performance

Try to get your scripts load only once

manage loading from the client-side.  http://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay

Yui has a loading component

Ajile?  yes with a j

Server-side script bundling – coldfusion example given.   scriptalyzer

Minify and Compress

YUI compressor strips out whitespace and comments to minimize

optionally obfuscate your code

http://develop.yahoo.com/yui/compressor

There are other examples of

GZip over 1 or 2k

serve compressed files from the server to browsers that support it

don’t compress files already compressed

Browser Cache

use external scripts

set expire headers for caching (Google-hosted)

set expire headers on common scripts

configure entity tags (e-tags) on clusters (http://www.askapache.com/htaccess

She gave some example of the tags to use for these various options

JSLINT

will help you write more efficient code

CSS/Style Sheets

externalize the CSS files at the top

embedded styles are a bad practice

use core style sheet when developing

if you use YUI you can link to their common style sheets

the import directive will not be invoked until CSS is completely loaded.  (you’ll see the page loaded without the style then zap the style gets applied)

Use a link tag to avoid the problem

Minify for CSS

cascading nature of css is not effective as javascript

cssinclude Custom Tag

manage them on the server side (recommendation)

Please

o Comment Your CSS

o declare your most global rules first then the page structure

o try to minimize the declaration and stack/cascade the styles and then the classes

o put your rules as high up in the stack as possible (to avoid redundancy)

Reset CSS

comprehensive eric meyer (http://meyer.web.com/tools/css/reset/reset.css)

Yui

Toward Modular CSS

• build a grid system
• blueprintCSS

Working with Multiple CSS files

Good-organize by purpose

• framework
• core/skin
• hacks
• application sections

Problematic-organize by rule type (but useful for user-skinnable apps)

• colors/images
• typography
• positioning

Images: Organization and planning

• keep them in a central place
• separate structure and skin
• keep logos in one place
• use a naming convention for commonly repeated files

Images: Minimize file size

• PNG files are your friend
• jpegs for photos and continuous tones
• GIFS for simple illustrations
• use the comparison views of your image editor
• Fireworks to do the compress slightly better than photoshop

Images: Loading Smart

• minimize your image needs
• use css sprites for nav tabs
• do you really need an image—Use CSS3 for nonfunctional enhancements (like rounded corners)
• trim images to minimal dimension
• small tile backgrounds (if you do it 10000 times it reduces performance)

Essential tools

• firebug
• yslow
• firefox web developer toolbar
• safari web developer toos
• ie web developer tool extensions

Windows 7 is pretty stable a week into it…here’s how I got there…

I did my upgrade last week from that abysmal Vista 64 to Windows 7 64. First I’d like to recount how long it took. For that, I will show you my tweets from last Friday night/Saturday morning.  Let me say that I started the upgrade at about 10:30 PM on Friday night:

1. @alexbarnett was stuck in a damn loop that kept saying uninstall logitech, itunes and norton. after the 3rd tim it gave up and started
   • 11:23 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to alexbarnett
2. @alexbarnett now I’m just waiting for it to do its thing
   • 11:24 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to alexbarnett
3. This windows 7 Ultimate 64 upgrade is taking FOREVER…this is ridiculous
   • 11:56 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck
4. 1AM and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit is STILL installing…brutal
   • 12:59 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
5. This is why I use my mac for important things.
   • 1:02 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
6. @jeffmc this may be the last PC I use. Vista 64 was a disaster. Let see if w7 cleans it up…oh btw, still installing…
   • 1:52 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck in reply to jeffmc
7. OK Windows 7 is up…now I have to go through and get iTunes to install…just uninstalled the logitech driver that was uninstallable for 2y
   • 2:41 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
8. un-uninstallible that is
   • 2:42 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
9. yay! first time I’ve been able to install itunes on the pc since the 8.00 release.thank you windows 7. now can iPod touch can be upgraded?
   • 3:06 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
10. That’s been stuck with rev 1.0 software because I couldn’t install itunes after 8.00
    • 3:07 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
11. O & 1 more windows 7 test. The driver & software 4 my HP allinone printer wld not install on ths PC w/ Vista (crashed). lets see
    • 3:15 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
12. Printer driver up, printer software up…phew
    • 3:34 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
13. The ipod touch upgrade did not go well
    • 4:22 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
14. Done, everything is working now (I think). Touch, printer, itunes, windows, outlook…Yes I did sleep in between
    • 10:25 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck

 

So I started at 10:30 PM or so, got stuck in loop that took about 10 minutes as it barfed at me that I couldn’t do the install until I uninstalled logitech, itunes and something else that escapes me now.  After the 3rd attempt to boot off the DVD, it relented (like a GPS that finally gives up when you go on a different path) and started installing.

At about 11:30 I started getting impatient.  My upgrade of Tiger to Leopard on my powerbook only took about a hour.  What was this?

At 1:00 (Tweet 4 above) it was still marking and verifying files.  Mind you my machine is a relatively healthy quad 64bit with 4 gig of ram with a 3g clock so it isn’t underpowered.

At about 2:30 Windows 7 was up.  So that was approximately 4 hours to do the upgrade.  Then the fun part started.

The first thing I needed to know was if I could uninstall software.  Yes, uninstall on my vista 64 bit machine did not work.  I couldn’t take anything off.  It’d tell me that I didn’t have privs.  I’d even run control panel in admin mode and it’d still barf on me.  Drove me nuts.  First to go was logitech for the camera that never worked on this machine (even with the 64 bit driver).  Whap.   then I uninstalled something else can’t remember what now.  Then the real test came.   iTunes.

For over a year I could not upgrade itunes on vista 64 even with the apple vista 64 version of itunes. it would bomb during install and tell me that the windows installer wasn’t installed correctly.  Really?  so since my wife’s ipod touch and my apple TV were primarily used to connect to this machine, I couldn’t take advantage of new functionality (or even download new versions of the ipod touch firmware) because I couldn’t get to itunes 8.02  OR itunes 9.0

So I took a chance there.  I brought up itunes and then asked it to look for an upgrade.  Several minutes later, itunes was up.  YAY!  So at 3:00 I could have stopped and left work till another time…but there was real crime…no not the touch upgrade (which in my sleep deprived mode I was still willing to skip till the morning).  No, we bought a printer last year, an HP 5550c all in one.  But we could not install the drivers or the HP software.  It’d bomb 3/4ths of the way through the install and tell us to try again.  This seemed to be a manifestation of the itunes install issue.  In frustration we figured out how to use the windows photo viewer to do scans and installed the printer driver by hand to get printing working.  But I needed to know.  So I went to the HP site and got the Windows 7 software for this class of printer and Voi La! it installed.  yay…(tweet 12)

Now at this point I could have given up, but I figured since I was up, and I wouldn’t get this much concentrated time ever again, I started to do the iPod touch upgrade.  I paid apple 5 buck for the 3.0 software and hooked up the ipod, it backed itself up and then it started to upgrade.  About 4:00am the upgrade crashed.  Now the ipod touch was stuck looking for something to connect to and would not come up.  The software was wiped out.   I went to the apple site, hit the power and menu buttons simultaneously, cursed in colorful language, ascribed the situation to the scatological nature of all the connected  technologies and their famous steve’s and bill’s…and then I remembered that my macbook was at the other end of the desk.

“Aha!” I said to myself.  ”I can to reinstall the old software from my mac, and then reattach it to windows and have it wipe it out…maybe that’d work”

So as I was doing this, about 4:10 am or so, my wife comes downstairs and says “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”   I said, “Look, with my schedule, this is the only way I’d get all this done.  When am i going to have 7 hours of concentrated time to do this?” So she grumbled and went back upstairs.  So I did hook the touch to my mac, put the the 2.2 software back on.  Then I attached it to the windows machine.  The windows machine would make the USB device connected sound, then nada.  I was almost beside myself at this point.  I grabbed the can with the remains of my second diet coke of the evening/morning and said “Damn windows pos…I’ll reboot it.”   So I did a restart of windows (which of course wouldn’t go down on its own, so I finally succumbed holding the power button down for 10 seconds).  I then hooked up the ipod touch, doink sound, itunes came up, recognized that this was a wiped out version of the ipod touch and asked me if I wanted to reinstall my wife’s profile.  YES DAMMIT

So it did, then it reminded me that there was new software needing to be installed for the touch…did I want to do that?  YES DAMMIT

and then it installed. When it reinstalled it shut down all the sync settings for everything…so now I had to figure out what the touch’s sync settings were which took about 10 minutes and several syncs of calendars and music and podcasts et cetera till I got it right and didn’t overflow the 8G of memory.

And at 5:00am I was done.  I was going to tweet that I was done.  In fact the last tweet at 10 am (tweet 14), was actually what I had typed in on tweetdeck on my mac and forgot to hit return.

So the whole thing (remember an upgrade isn’t just installing the OS it is making sure that your machine and all peripherals are functional) too 7hours.

There’s my story…

Apple Time Capsule

So as I tweeted tonight, I received my 1TB Apple Time Capsule today and installed it to replace my aging Linksys router and to capture my dream of having a network disk mounted that all my machines could use (and maybe do some backups).  The real reason is that I need to back up all my important data on my Windows vista 64 bit machine that is just not cutting it.  Vista sucks and I have a W7 disk waiting, but I do NOT trust that microsoft with not destroy something (no matter what Walt Mossberg and Steve Ballmer say).  So I have a 24 hour backup going on to get 226G of important information copied to the time capsule and then I will feel safe to do the upgrade.  Why am I doing this?  Well Vista 64 sucks and my wife has an iPod touch that I cannot upgrade to the latest OS because windows vista is so screwed that I can’t upgrade iTunes (trust me I’ve done everyting including a bare metal install of iTunes…I’ve followed every web suggestion to play with the registry and msconfig, I’m done going down that path)

So rather than do the CNet thing and show how I opened the box, I’m going to cut to the chase.

1. 1. The software loaded flawlessly on my mac
   2. I set up the Time Capsule as both a disk and as a router
   3. I set up both a regular network as well as a guest network, both wpa2 et cetera et cetera
   4. My macbook pro connected to it.
   5. I went to connect my old powerbook (running osx) and it would NOT connect.
   6. I noticed that I had lost my connection on my macbook, and tried to reconnect to no avail (including the airport software that I just used to configure the device.  its scan button did NOTHING.
   7. I could not get the airport utility to see the time capsule anymore.
   8. My wired connection through it was working (my pc is wired to the router)
   9. In frustration I hit the reset button on the time capsule and saw that I was again able to see the time capsule on my macbook
   10. I reset all the stuff I did from steps 2-5 again and again all my machines got dropped.
   11. at this point I was so frustrated that even the reset again and did it again
   12. In desperation I connected my macbook pro to the “guest” network.  voi la a connection.
   13. I then asked to connect to the primary network…voi la again a connection
   14. did the same thing on my powerbook
   15. did the same thing on my G1
   16. did the same thing on my wife’s macbook
   17. What do I mean the same?  I connected to the guest network first then the private network
   18. Being the engineer, I reset the time capsule again, and re-setup the whole thing again and go the same results.
   19. Then I reset the time capsule and set up everything EXCEPT the guest network.
   20. Now everything connected to the private network first time…all 6 wireless devices.  No connection timeouts, nothing went wrong.

Being an Apple promoter, more technical than the average consumer, and persistent because of both an engineering background and Armenian DNA, I kept with it.  My conclusion?

Apple, you blew it with this device.    The fact that it not only dropped all the ancillary devices but the macbookpro with the airport software installed…

Well anyway, its up, i’m backing up my PC onto it AND I’m about to install windows 7-64 on my PC (probably tomorrow night at this point).  I’ve forwent the guest network for now since it just seems to complicate things.

It’s working and doing most of what I expected (including the dual band network for my apple TV to connect to) So I guess I’ll keep it.

Famous and Self-Abuse…

I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft on my Kindle.  I thought it appropriate since I’m trying to be a writer, why not get advice from arguably the most successful fiction writer of the last 30 years.   Now mind you I didn’t say the best, I just said most successful.  Truly, he is the Mark Twain of our generation, more on the fear side anyway.  Anyway, I’m about one-third of the way through the book and I just spent that 3rd learning about how poor he was, how much people in Maine smoke and drink, and how he became famous during a time he engaged in serious substance abuse.

I’ll admit, on those late nights 3 years ago when I wrote my book I sometimes had a glass of wine or a scotch on the rocks but to read his story, he doesn’t even remember writing Cujo.  Damn!

The reason I thought of this was that he finally started to get to the craft of writing about this third of the way through the book.  I was wondering if he was going to tell me at all.   Then my mind wandered to Michael Jackson and Oprah and Jim Morrison and CSN and Ringo and Barbara Bach and I started thinking:  Are there any famous people who don’t have a sordid or pitiful past?  Is it a pre-requisite to notoriety to engage in self destructive behavior, or live a lie for many years?

I wonder.  I’m also simultaneously reading a biography on Andrew Carnegie.  It’s fascinating also.  He was close to the richest and close to the most famous person at the close of the 19th Century.  But his story doesn’t sound the same.   I don’t know.

Hemingway is another notorious drinker.   What is it?

So as I sit here reading about these guys, looking for inspiration to write, sometimes play my guitar, do this and that and maybe school…I wonder, are they all so exceptional that they (unlike lots of other people who fail miserably) rose above their self-abuse, their sordid past…or was that past necessary for them to have nothing to lose so they could excel (aka not care about failure).

Just sitting here philosophizing…

Google Wave…WHY?

OK so I got my precious invitation to Google Wave and I went in, and started experimenting.  There’s some cool stuff in there.  It seems like a mashup of Friendfeed, Utterli and IM, with a sort of email feel to it.

My best description of what it feels like to use it is, if you ever watched that show “The Woodwright’s Shop” on PBS with Roy Underhill, with no power tools and all those chisels and planes and saws and the big workbench…all tools sitting there in one shop looking for a job to do.    Roy would appear with his little toolbox and build a barrel using the oddest plane to shape the boards into a curve…or a hand cut dovetails.   But without him, those tools are just sitting there looking for a purpose.

I just don’t get it.  I can use it.  I could see whipping up some widget for fun for it.   But I don’t know the answer to the following question:

WHY?

Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize? Give me a break!

First off, I can say this because

• I voted for him
• I have a right to free expression
• I have to laugh

So lets get this straight.  Nominations were due on Jan 30, 10 days after the inauguration…so singlehandedly without most of his transition done, in 10 days Barack Obama changed the world peace situation.   What did he do wave his wand?

The Nobel Peace prize has been won by significant people AFTER they did something significant to change world peace…like Begin and Sadat, like Mandela, Martin Luther King, et cetera et cetera…Heck Mahatma Gandhi DIDN’T GET ONE!…it makes no sense to award one to a newly elected leader just for showing up and warming the chair!

What’s next?

• Obama wins an Oscar for his inaugural address?
• Obama gets the Baldridge award for running and efficient Campaign?
• Obama wins the congressional Medal of Honor because a some congressman noticed we had 1 extra in the drawer for 2009?
• Obama wins the Charlie’s Angels award for best imitiation of John Forsythe saying “Bosley”
• Obama awards himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom, because, well, he can?
• Obama wins the Silvio Berlousconi award for best swooning attitude?
• Obama wins on the Price is Right (except he had to play from the Oval Office)?
• Pope to issue an encyclical that called “Barack Obama est valde , es vos?”
• Barack Obama is awarded Stigmata by God for his service to humanity.

I like the guy.  I don’t agree with everything he’s doing, but he’s ok.  But that doesn’t mean I give him a medal for just showing up!