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5
Jan 10

The 00s in review, part 1, possibly of 1

Well, since everyone is doing lists…

Best moment

The US electing Obama.

Worst moment

Katrina. Yes, it was worse than 9/11. Sorry, it just was. 9/11 may have had a more profound impact on world events and American politics, but ultimately Katrina was a far more horrifying event. (note: I realize this is a profoundly American view. The worst moment for humanity was by far the Indonesia tsunami.)

Douche of the decade

Wow, it was a spectacular decade for douchebaggery. On the list of obvious choices you have Bush or anyone in his administration, Osama bin Laden, Brownie, credit card companies, all the neocon leadership, James Dobson, H1N1, Musa Hilal, RIAA, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Pope Ratz, Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who voted or lobbied for deregulation of the financial industry. Ultimately, unfortunately, it has to go to us, all of us. For letting these idiots get elected, for not doing enough to fight to curb carbon emissions, for not holding anyone in our government or media accountable. Sorry, but you and me and everyone else is the Douche of the Decade. You may now buy yourself a hat or a shirt or whatever as a prize.

Idiot of the decade

Pseudo-tie: Intelligent Design proponents and climate change deniers. Its pseudo since these two crowds often happen to be the same idiots. Both of these movements are like the new religions of the 21st century. ID isnt even pseudoscience, its really just mythology: a bunch of made up horseshit used to control people. And climate change deniers. Wow. I really dont care how financially beneficial it is for you to spout your nonsense. You know why? Cause all that money you might be able to leave to your progeny wont be worth fuckall if the planet becomes inhabitable. Or even if it just starts to suck hard enough to throw us all back to the stone age and your accrued currency will be laughed at for not being potable water.

Sucker of the decade

I could repeat the above, but that’s lazy, so instead: Anyone who bought real estate in 2005/6. Bonus points if you got an ARM.

Best movie of the decade

In retrospect, there were actually a surprising number of great movies, from Fellowship of the Ring to Fahrenheit 9/11 to Food Inc to District 9 to An Inconvenient Truth. I’ll give the nod to Al Gore, if for no other reason than Truth was the most important topic.

Worst movie of the decade

Attack of the Clones. If you had told me in the 1990s that there would be three more Star Wars movies and that I would fall asleep during one of them I would have been sure you were high. Alas… Plenty has been written about all the failings of this movie, from the comical courtship to the astonishingly tensionless action sequences, to say nothing of the actual title. What gets the film the award is that it confirmed that, indeed, the prequels were going to suck. The Phantom Menace left some doubt, after all the lightsaber duel at the end kicked ass, but AotC took a big fat wooden stick and stabbed it deep into the heart of our Star Wars Childhoods, and then twisted it a few times.

Runner up: Cloverfield. The only movie where I’ve actually seen people go to the theater manager and ask for their money back.

Best tech of the decade

RSS and Blogs. That’s right, stupid and simple. Nothing did more to empower so many as keeping web sites simple, giving non-technical users better software, and bringing about a standardized distribution format (Atom is still better, but that’s irrelevant to the point here…). I get asked whats the difference between a blog and web site? a lot. For a long time, I used to just say nothing really. But then I started answering a different question: what makes a blog a blog? A blog is a web site whose format is a list of content. That sounds like a non-answer, but when you look at all the various attempts to revolutionize web navigation (remember when mouseovers were like the greatest javascript trick ever? Or, anything in Flash, see the next entry), the revolution was make a list, and do it in a way that computers and humans can digest the list with equal accuracy.

Best tech of the decade 2

Cloud computing. Despite it befuddling CNN reporters, on-the-fly provisioning and scaling are one of the most fundamentally positive changes to computing. From the short-turnarounds to the benefits of everyone getting their data into a datacenters. And don’t listen to those CNN reporters. Your data is MUCH better off in a datacenter than on DVDs stored in your file cabinet. Yes, there have been a few outages, and there will certainly be more. Guess what, your stuff is still better off in the cloud. Seriously, just ask yourself, who is more likely to lose all your precious photos, Flickr or you? Does your home office have redundant power and backups and electronics-safe fire suppression? I didn’t think so.

Worst tech of the decade

Flash. Yes, I realize that it was around in the 90s, but Youtube, banner ads and ActionScript 3 took Flash to a whole new level of distribution and ambition in the 00s. Never has a technology put more power to crash more computers into the hands of so many.

Im not even sure where to start with all the ways that Flash is awful, but Ill try: Its proprietary, it incurs tremendous overhead for development and maintenance (and bandwidth…), its chock full of opportunities for memory leaks and namespace collisions, its only pseudo-searcheable (and even that is a recent development)… sigh, this is just making me angry. Heres a google link if you need more reasons.

Final thought: If you want to see just how much Flash wrecks your browsing experience, install Flashblock.

Worst tech of the decade 2

Identity. Or the lack thereof rather. How many logins and passwords do you have? How many times do you have to update your physical address if you move? This might be the singular failure of this century, so far, by the tech industry. OpenID isnt going to get it done. OAuth is promising, but it still doesn’t really feel like a solution to this problem. There is a lot of work to be done on identity in the Teens.

Best TV

Battlestar Galactica.

Worst TV

Battlestar Galactica.

Best album

American Idiot.

Most obnoxious musical phenomenon

I couldn’t really do Worst album since Im sure its something I would refuse to listen to. In lieu of that, I have to go with Maroon 5 and all their similar genre of pop. This Loves whiny, choppy, horrid self was inescapable in public spaces for much of the middle part of the decade and personified a large amount of the useless, annoying music that drives people away from pop after they get out of puberty.

And you thought I was going to say Britney.

Neatest phenomenon

Voter turnout. Its amazing how well a bad president motivates people.

Most annoying phenomenon

The destruction of written English. I’m as guilty as the next person of having typed lol a gazillion times in the last ten (okay, 15 for me…) years. But really look at this. Wow, just wow.

That’s it for now.

web — Comments
15
Oct 09

Google Wave Reminds Me of Microsoft

I got a Google Wave invite (thanks nick) and I am remarkably unimpressed. Essentially it’s a threaded discussion system with the ability to insert different kinds of media and it works in realtime. For one thing, this is not actually new. Calling it “wave” and making it easier to include non-textual media does not make what you are doing new or radical. Sure, Wave is trying to get us to a better kind of email collaboration and email is certainly a technology that is overdue for either some much better client-side functionality or to be retired completely (but that’s a post for another day), but pushing email towards threaded discussion boards and adding Hype, meh. Secondly, Wave seems to do all of these things badly.

Let’s start with other media types. You can put images, videos, and “gadgets” (essentially mini apps) – all sorts of stuff in a “blip” (one particular message in a “wave”). Okay… I see that this might be mind-blowing to someone who has only ever used email and commented on one or two web sites. But there are a lot of different sites and infrastructures that allow this functionality now. There are blog plugins, help guides, all sorts of things… Facebook Apps are probably the most used example of this sort of thing. Okay, so not being “new” doesn’t make “bad.” Fair enough. It’s bad cause it’s confusing to use and abysmally buggy and slow. Sometimes you click on things and nothing happens. Since there’s no UI feedback I don’t know if something is broken or just slow. The rendering is pretty sluggish even when things do work. Also, since they’ve tried to pack so much functionality and slickness into a web-based app, more than once I found myself in focus hell. I was clicking around trying to move my cursor and I ended up opening three new blips (ugh, that just made me sound like a professor in college I saw trying to use a mouse for the first time).

Realtime updates. Waves update in page (as opposed to say, a thread on a blog post where you have to refresh). This seems like wasted effort to me. I know the software industry has been pining to provide the realtime digital equivalent of a whiteboard for years and tons of time and money have been spent on such systems (Gotomeeting has a whole mess of these kinds of features that I’ve never actually seen anyone use in a meeting). I’ve never understood the intensity with which people clamor for this functionality. At any rate, the aforementioned sluggish-ness of wave renders this an ironic feature and has probably made the code and API a gazillion times more complex. I sound like a broken record, but the the HTTP protocol was not designed to do this sort of realtime, stateful stuff. Also, the level of realtime-ness is overkill. Watching someone else fix their typos is about as productive as watching a Roomba and is, actually, far less interesting.

And then there is the threading, which might be the piece that bugs me the most. Wave essentially does the same sort of indenting seen in many threaded systems, with one really notable exception: It’s nightmarish to find new posts. Your Inbox tells you that there are new Wavelets, but there’s no way to jump to them. You just have to scroll around until you see the green bars or outlines. Really? REALLY? Tell me I’m missing something Google. There are so many sites that figured out this problem ages ago that it’s king of stunning that it works so badly in Wave. Also, you can’t mark a single Blip as Read (or if you can I haven’t figured out how, it’s not on the drop-down menu). So, all you can do is mark the current state of your Wave as read, even though it’s synchronizing in realtime. So if there’s a new Blip or Wavelet and I hit Read, does that mark that one as read too or is it smart enough to figure that out? Again, it’s such a bad user experience that I just don’t care.

All of this gave me deja vu of sitting through product demos where a tech evangelist would be explaining some “great new functionality” and I would just be sitting there going “that’s just X re-written to work with Office” and then, of course, it would crash. I’m really struck by how much Wave reminds me of something Microsoft would do: take existing concepts, rename them (the descriptions of Waves, Wavelets and Blips even describe them as “conversations,” “threads” and “messages” in the documentation, so why not just call them that?) and re-write them from scratch to work within its own ecosphere. Granted you will be able to host Wave robots externally to Wave and you can embed Waves on sites external to Google, but the embed API does not appear to be a data API. It looks like you’re literally dropping the Wave into a webpage, which is disappointing. Essentially you’re using Wave whole hog or not at all. Wave Aid.

Finally, if the Terms of Service are anything like the Google Apps ToS then Wave is dead in the water for the corporate world.

web — Comments
2
Sep 09

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog

Backblaze built their own crazy 67TB 4U servers made up of 45 1.5TB drives configured in 3 RAID6 pods of 15 drives each. All I can say is WOW, when are they getting into selling these things? I’m thinking of this setup combined with my hope that Oracle GPLs ZFS and I’m having a home network storagasm.

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog.

web — Comments
7
Jul 09

The giant twitter bird is going away

twitterwhore bird

Okay I thought I could tolerate that twitterwhore bird in this WP theme (which is otherwise great), but it’s just too big, bright, shiny and all pretending-to-be-modest with its eyes closed as if it isn’t holding that big sign. I’ll come up with something else.

Really, it’s on my Things to-do list, so I’ll either get to it eventually or pick a different theme.

web — Comments
7
Jul 09

Okay, I’m fiddling with Scala next

I’m sold on trying out Scala, after seeing James Strachan state:

I’m very impressed with it! I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I’d probably have never created Groovy.

Strachan created the very cool Groovy and is one of the few big Java guys (along with Jerome Louvel) who has some good perspective on the language and has been doing cool stuff.

I even have a couple of small projects I’m fiddling with where I can try it out. For client work I will still be using Python and straight up Java for the time being.

web — Comments
1
Jul 09

A 90 minute review of a random selection of luxury brand web sites

I was asked my opinion about luxury sites I do or do not think are well done, so I sat down for an hour and a half, Googled a bit, and then surfed and wrote down notes. As it turns out I only need talking points, so I decided to share my notes here, complete with snark.

Luxury sites have long been notorious for ignoring usability or often even utility. I hadn’t actually looked at any of these sites in quite some time, so this was actually a good check in. If this random sampling (basically gleaned from mentions in the first few articles that come up from googling “top luxury brands”, combined with a few that were specifically mentioned to me) is an indicator, then, as a market sector, “luxury” has actually improved, although many of the brands clearly still have a ways to go…

Chopard.com

Pros
Chopard.tv is a great video player. Good photography, clear navigation.

Cons
All Flash, long wait to load before you can see or do anything. No RSS for press releases, which are password protected. Too much porn music.

Notes
Press Room goes to second site – http://www.chopard-press.com/, Contact, Careers, Customer Service, all on main site.

Bulgari.com

Pros
Clean, can get to all destinations from initial page. Excellent photography, it’s tough to make such gaudy stuff look okay.

Cons
Navigation changes sometimes from subsite to subsite. Everything wants to open a new window. Stupid disabling of some keyboard functions.

Notes
Many sections, such as IR and careers go to separate sites hosted on subdomains, e.g. Investor Relations points to ir.bulgari.com.

Patek.com

Pros
It’s pretty and everything is one place.

Cons
Sloooooow. All Flash, doesn’t even update window location so no bookmarking or copy and paste of URLs. Section naming is really confusing, navigation looks easy but it’s actually difficult to find things and other links go to unexpected places.

Tagheuer.com

Pros
Flash is used where it’s necessary instead of everywhere. RSS feed for press and news. Personalization. Large photo rollovers actually work pretty well.

Cons
Nothing particularly compelling on homepage, but decent use of “cover story” concept. They somehow managed to find and use a bad photo of Leonardo DiCaprio. Perhaps too much use of mini-sites.

Notes
Tag Heuer makes a cell phone, who knew. (ed: Will build web site for Monaco 24 Concept watch).

Ferrari.com

Pros
Lots of options on homepage. RSS. Good mix of HTML and Flash. Community features.

Cons
Poor execution of red gradients. Way too many features hidden behind registration. Drop shadow happy.

louisvuitton.com

Pros
Simple to use. Mute button applies sitewide. Nice, subtle, interaction features in certain areas (choosing between Men and Women under Collections).

Cons
Terrible URL plan. Some surprisingly bad use of type color on photos.

prada.com

Pros
It’s pretty.

Cons
What is going on in this site? W.T.F. Am I even at the right site? I guess I clicked too much, the navigation bar broke. Is that photo on the homepage a giant alien hairdryer? And to think this company made a shoe I liked. Oh hey, speaking of, WHERE THE HELL ARE THE SHOES???

Revo.com

Pros
Brilliant use of background photography with foreground navigation and page elements. Resize the window and the site still looks quite good and remains functional. Great photography.

Cons
I think I broke the store locator. The use of Flash to do some of the tricks kills some mouse functionality. There must be a separate corporate site? There are no careers or press sections??? Did I just miss them? This is probably not the easiest site to maintain.

Notes
Revo has a long history of well-received site designs, going back to the mid-90s.

Cartier.com

Pros
Still looking for some…

Cons
It’s not as horrifically confusing as prada.com, but I couldn’t find anything of interest or utility besides the store locator. It pops open in a new window for no reason whatsoever. The red gradients are supposed to look elegant but just look garish and like a poor ripoff of blue Macintosh wallpaper.

Notes
The Middle Eastern sites are in English and French but not Arabic (or Hebrew for that matter).

Tiffany.com

Pros
As an ecommerce site that is trying to just be simple and elegant, it’s actually pretty good. This site has really come along way over the years.

Cons
May not be a fair comparison since it is essentially now an ecommerce site rather than a “luxury brand” site. But maybe that’s a positive?

Notes
The girl on the homepage looks like somebody dressed up a real doll (NSFW!!!!) as a hippie.

Chanel.com

Pros
Lots of video.

Cons
Confusing. More fucking porn music, WTF is up with that? Opens new windows for no reason. I have to wait for an entire Flash piece to load to choose between Fashion or Eyewear under Store Locator.

Notes
The Paris-Moscou line looks like it was possessed by Queen Padme’s hairdresser.

Gucci.com

Pros
Technically impressive use of Javascript and CSS. Excellent guided search. This site has also come a long way over the years.

Cons
Fear of the vertical scroll seems a bit obsessive. Gold tones don’t look so hot onscreen.

Conclusions

Tag Heuer, Revo and Tiffany have the best sites of the bunch. Prada was obviously the worst. One thing I will say for all of them that stunned me is that I didn’t have to sit through a splash page on a single one. Some of them seem to get that on the web URL choice is more important in the long run. Fashion and high-end jewelry are still obsessed with porn music, what can you do?