Gadgetopia

Sketchy Skechers.com: Today’s DailyWTF is a pretty good one discussing the horrors of the Skechers website and how it’s delivered as XML then transformed via XSLT right in the browser.  Standard WTF stuff, really.

But – lo and behold! – the head of the Skechers web team leaves a comment…and it’s a good one.  He sets forth some of their reasoning, and it starts to make sense.  I’m not totally on-board with all of it, but he makes some great points and it’s totally worth reading, especially if – like me – you have an irrational hatred of XSLT.

[…] here’s the great thing about XSLT— it’s cacheable on your browser. Instead of browsing from page to page to page, each time getting 25k+ of html, we can frontload a lot of that by having you download the XSLT. Once you’ve downloaded the file once, you have the layout for the entire site already cached, and the next page you go to is 2k of XML.

[…] My original thought was— your desktop machine, and very quickly your phone, have just as much CPU cycles available as a commodity server. Why not shift as many cycles to the client as we can while still making it a relatively fast experience?

[…] IE7 and IE8 actually have better support for XSLT transformations than Firefox does.

[…] Is it any more insane than hunting through Struts code, or JSF, etc etc? Now, both our front-end CSS/Javascript developers, and back-end Java (now Scala) coders understand Xpath now, so we don’t run into the “I don’t want to touch that Velocity template” problem.

I really commend this guy for jumping in, and I have to respect his desire to try something new.  Did he succeed?  Well, I browsed the Skechers site and it certainly seems fine to me, so I certainly can’t say he failed.

And serious props to him for jumping into that conversation without being a douchebag and turning it into a constructive discussion.  What a great sport.

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?: This is an epic answer at Quota to the question of my software development estimates are so consistently poor.  The author has a running analogy of a hypothetical hike from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which looks simple on a map, but is not so simple once you’re on the ground.

OK, that line is about 400 miles long, We can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we’ll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night. They can’t wait to see us!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan day one. We take a look at the map. Uh oh […]

US Online Ad Spend to Close in on $40 Billion: Interesting.

This year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who’s accountable?: When Skynet goes self-aware, this is going to be a real problem.

The Navy’s new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It’s designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation’s most difficult maneuvers.

What’s even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom: Here’s a great profile of Kimble [insert honorific here].

The man once known as Kim Schmitz (and as Kimble, and as Kim Tim Jim Vestor, and finally as Kim Dotcom), now awaiting extradition from New Zealand to face charges of conspiracy, money laundering and copyright crimes in the US, has enveloped his actual life in a cloud of hype and bluster that echo the worst of the dot-com bubble from which he took his new surname. In 2001, the Telegraph called Schmitz “a PR man’s nightmare and a journalist’s dream.”

I loved Kimble back in the day.  I was starry-eyed over his “Kimble: Secret Agent” video, and his supposedly amazing lifestyle (one NSFW image in there).  Kimble was the embodiment of the “anything is possible” vibe at the peak of the bubble when I was a young developer.

Alas, this has all caught up with him.  Kimble currently awaits extradition in New Zealand.

Page layout algorithm improvement: Google has started analyzing the actual layout of pages, and is now penalizing pages that don’t have a lot of content on top.  This is an official Google announcement:

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

It used to be that search engine crawlers were oblivious to CSS and layout, and just analyzed markup.  Not so much anymore.

Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class: Ever wonder why all your gadgets are made in China?  Low wages, right?  Well, it may have started out that way, but since then the supply chain and infrastructure are simply grown up there, and there’s no way to change that.  And since manufacturing involves the physical movement of goods, they need to be close together.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

[…] “Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

The flexibility and availability of the workforce is another huge factor:

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

[…] The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Why HyperCard Had to Die: This is a well-written polemic that laments the death of HyperCard, around which there’s been a cult of fandom for decades.  In the middle of this post is a lo-o-o-ong set of screencaps that give you a nice introduction to just what HyperCard is (was), so if you’ve never heard of it, you can see what all the fuss is about.

If you already know what HyperCard is, keep scrolling to the bottom where the author explains his view on why HyperCard and Apple are no longer compatible.

The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure.  A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone.  A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. […]

[Steve Jobs] returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.

Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a “bicycle for the mind.” But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)

Given the popularity of HyperCard, I’m surprised there isn’t some web-based emulator that hasn’t caught on and ignited the fervor of the HyperCard faithful.  This guy doesn’t think there’s anything, but if it was so successful as an installed Apple product, why couldn’t it work in the cloud?

(I’ve always thought that the best part of HyperCard was the acronym of the International HyperCard User Group, or iHug.  That group may be defunct too, as I couldn’t find a website for them.)

I found this via Reddit, and the comments are worth reading.  Here’s the top comment as of this writing:

Hypercard was the last vestige of Woz in Apple - of the hacker spirit that said development was just another neat thing anyone could do, like drawing and writing. Jobs excised the program because he had never agreed with that spirit. He wasn’t just dispossessed of it; he was its enemy from the start.

He wanted the original Apple computers to be glorified word processors. He went to his grave still viewing ‘his’ computers as appliances. He’s the reason iOS won’t run your ‘hello world’ app unless an unseen authority has rubber-stamped it for use by all ages. He’s the reason OS X won’t install on any computer lacking an Apple logo. His grand contribution to modern computing is that everything is clean and shiny so long as none of you primitive user-types touch anything.

Good riddance, you tightassed marketeer.

If that’s true, perhaps this explains why Woz loves Android so much.

Corey is Blend’s content strategist.  He was asked to write an article for the inaugural issue of Contents Magazine, so he wrote about methodologies and how they apply to content strategy.

Some people may think that methodologies are rigid and don’t fit the free-flowing nature of creativity, but Corey manages to summarize why I pushed him to get our process documented:

In our field, there’s no single set of rules, and there’s no progress without a little bit of guessing and testing. There’s room for wiggling. But before we can wiggle, we need to know how much space we’ve got to wiggle in.

You need to have a baseline – some framework on which to hang your efforts.  If you can step out of line, you can depart for it if you want, but remember that you can’t deviate from something that doesn’t exist.  You need some type of roadmap with a tension that keeps nudging you back onto a known path or else you wake up one morning and find your project wandering through the forest with no idea how you got there.

[…] your methodology keeps you honest. We’re humans, and humans like to skip things. With each step explicitly outlined, you can better decide which steps to skip. You can refer back to the methodology when you’re questioning your process, too.

In the IT industry in general, there’s too much “management by magic” – you don’t know exactly how things happen, but they always work out, sort of.   If you’re good at this, you can get fooled into thinking this is okay, and that projects that run wild are outliers and just the nature of the beast.

At Blend, we’re going to spend a big chunk of 2012 documenting processes, even ones we don’t think need to be documented.

Fun with Static Publishing: Seth writes about how he’s come full circle back to static publishing of websites.  They’re content-managed (-ish) in the background, but written to files then uploaded to Amazon S3 to be served.

And this brings me to my little obsession with static publishing. I am hosting a few sites on Amazon S3. The cost is ridiculously low and the speed is crazy-fast. Publishing them is fun too. For example, I publish my little personal site (www.sethgottlieb.com) using a site generator called Hyde, which is a Python port of a Ruby-based system called Jekyll. The way these generators work is that you enter your content in HTML, Markdown, or some other syntax and then run a script that renders static HTML pages with your presentation templates. Presentation templates can also do useful things like create listing pages. The Hyde sample site has a blog and there is a script to migrate from WordPress.

There’s lots of goodness here.  For some background on static publishing, consider my blog post of a few months ago: Decoupled Content Management 101.

The trick Seth is doing here is sort of content managing them on the background, but then “freezing” them to disk, and publishing the result.  So, he has a “repository server” in the form of a local CMS, and a delivery server in the form of Amazon S3.

And, often, CMS isn’t even needed.  If you’re comfortable working in code, you can just version manage in some kind of SCM, and use a TMS (template management system – an acronym I totally just made up) to make consistent output.  I wrote about Nesta a few months ago, which is worth checking out (incidentally, I rewrote about 80% of Nesta in ASP.Net MVC in about two hours one afternoon – it’s that simple).

This feels very comfortable to me because this blog is still published with an ancient version of Movable Type, which caches to disk.  I’ve wired it up with a lot of PHP (MT is pretty much just writing PHP include files, at this point), but the principle of storing the data somewhere and using a TMS to get decent output in another repository (the file system, in this case) is the same.  I liked Seth’s idea of pushing to S3, and perhaps there’s a viable model where I publish on an EC2 instance that drops content into an S3 volume for delivery.

(An aside: something I always find funny when talking about this is how we often say things like, “we’re going to write a physical file out.”  Really?   A physical file?  How physical is that file, really?)

I was at a J. Boye Expert Group meeting last week (love this program…) when one of the participants brought up an interesting story, which got me wondering if the ubiquity of LinkedIn will help keep job applicants honest.

They related a situation where a newly-hired executive didn’t have a LinkedIn profile for some reason.  This struck them as odd, because everyone has a LinkedIn profile these days.  Why would a professional in the Internet industry not have one?

It turns out that this person had been really fast-and-loose with the facts concerned their employment history over the years.  He had essentially told every employee what they wanted to hear, and the stories didn’t all match up.  So, they couldn’t risk a LinkedIn profile, because they had to present different stories to different people.

This is an interesting side-effect of single-sourcing information.  LinkedIn has fundamentally become a single-source of our employment situation and history.  When using LinkedIn, it makes it tough to lie about your background, because it’s effectively the same as having a published resume online at all times.  If anyone can look up your resume whenever they want, lying about it is tougher, unless you tell the same lie to everyone, and no one knows the truth.

As a business owner who is in charge of a lot of hiring, it’s got me thinking that I should compare submitted resumes to LinkedIn and make sure they match.  If they don’t, that needs to be explained.  Furthermore, if there’s no LinkedIn profile at all, should that tell me something?

I finally bought a new laptop last week.  I had been working off a Dell Studio XPS 16 for almost three years.

When I purchased the Dell, my biggest concern was performance and size – I essentially wanted a desktop replacement, and I got it.  The “big Dell” (as I’ve come to call it) was wonderfully fast with a dual-core 2.8 GHz processor and had a nice big screen.  But, you paid dearly for this in battery life, size, and heat.

I had the extended battery, which hung down off the back and made it uncomfortable most of the time.  Still, you only got three hours max even with everything on power-saving mode.  And the heat produced was just crazy.  You couldn’t work with it on your lap for an extended period, and if you put a pillow down to insulate yourself, you could hear the fan chugging away trying to cool it down.  Even then, you could feel the heat through the pillow – the machine was really a mini-nuclear reactor.

My role has changed at Blend – I’m doing more sales and consulting (and, consequently, more travel) and less hardcore development.  Because of this, I decided to go as far in the other direction as I could with the new machine – I wanted the smallest size I could get, and the longest battery life.

I briefly considered a MacBook Air, on which I would run Windows.  I really hate Apple as company and culture, but their hardware is first-rate.  However, I just couldn’t bring myself f to do it, for philosophical reasons, as well as the single-button mouse/trackpad (I really do use all three buttons on a Windows mouse), and the fact that I’m pretty sure at least some weirdness would pop up from running Windows on a Mac long-term.

So, after some research, I brought one of the new breed of Ultrabooks – an ASUS UX31.  I got it for $1,450 from NewEgg.

It’s been about a week, and I’m still getting used to it, but it’s a fairly amazing machine.  Some highlights:

• It’s tiny – like, really, really tiny.  It’s a half-pound lighter and a tenth of an inch thinner than a MacBook Air.  I believe it’s even thinner than my first-gen iPad.
• Despite the size, it feels solid.  It’s some kind of metal (titanium?), and really has a feeling of substance to it.
• Battery life is astonishing.  At the lowest possible power level, it runs over eight hours, and will sit on standby for almost 10 days.  (Mind you, at this level it runs Office apps pretty slow, so this isn’t practical for any substantial usage.)   As I write this, I’ve been working on it for 2-3 hours – it claims to have 72% of the battery left, which it calculates at 6 hours, 48 minutes of life remaining.
• It doesn’t seem to produce any heat.  That’s not an exaggeration – as near as I can tell, when I use it on my lap, my body heat is actually heating it up, not vice-versa.  I don’t even think it has a fan.
• It’s instant-on.  When you lift the lid, it will produce a Windows logon screen even before you have the lid all the way open.  I timed it from pressing “Restart” to getting a fresh login screen – so, a full shutdown and full startup cycle.  That took 32 seconds.  Closing the lid is so much more non-committal than my old Dell.
• It has a SmartLogon feature that will log you on by face recognition.  I haven’t tried this yet, and don’t know if I will.  Typing my password is not a big deal, and at the office the laptop sits to my right side, so I don’t know how well it would recognize me.
• It comes with a snazzy Kevlar-looking carrying case, about the same size as a manila envelope.  There are also two adapters (see below) that come in their own matching pouch.  Packaging in general was very cool; very Apple-like.  Unboxing seemed like an event.

There haven’t been any real downsides yet, but there are some oddities that may or may not suck as I keep working with it.  The jury is still out on this stuff:

• There’s no optical drive – no CD, no DVD (hell, where would they put it?).  I might miss this – it was nice to be able to watch a DVD on my old machine.  But, I do this less and less, so I don’t think it will be a huge issue.
• The keyboard took some getting used to.  You have to be more deliberate than usual when typing.  I made lots of mistakes at first, but I seem to be doing fine now.
• There’s no standard VGA port.  Instead, there’s a VGA-to-Mini VGA adapter.
• Likewise, no Ethernet port, just an Ethernet-to-USB adapter.
• No HDMI port either – it’s micro-HDMI instead.  It didn’t come with an adapter, so I’ll need to find one.
• Surprisingly, the screen size hasn’t been an issue.  It’s small at 13.3 inches (they have an 11.6-inch version too), but resolution is 1600 x 900, which is more than enough.  I really haven’t thought twice about the screen size, which I find surprising, since I’ve traditionally been a sucker for a huge monitor.
• It seems to take a long time to charge the battery.  I timed it at about 1 minute, 15 seconds per 1% of battery life.  So, a full charge would take two full hours.  Joe tells me this isn’t bad, but I swear my old Dell could go to a full charge in an hour.  In this sense, the new machine feels a lot like my iPad – a super-efficient battery that stores a lot of power, but which takes a long time to replace.
• The keyboard is so small that several keys are invoked in conjunction with a “fn” key.  This includes keys I use a lot, like Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End.
• The “Delete” key is right next to the power button at the top right of the keyboard.  Hasn’t been a problem yet, but you have to think it might be.

Finally, here’s one thing that I already know will suck.

• The keyboard is not backlight or illuminated.  Working in the dark is a real problem.  If I crank up the screen brightness, this can make up for some of it, but it’s still not great.  I might get a little book light to clamp on it, and carry that in my laptop bag.

Other than the dark keyboard, the machine seems fantastic so far.  The combination of size, battery life, lack of heat, and instant-on really make it feel like more of an iPad than a laptop.  My use of it is about a casual as my iPad, whereas firing up my old Dell involved much more…friction.  When you turned that thing on or shut it down, it required a fair amount of commitment to either course of action.

Let me use it for a month or so and I’ll post a follow-up.  With any luck, I’ll still be in love with it.

U.S. Charges Programmer With Stealing Code: I imagine all programmers are guilty of this to some extent.  Maybe not for his exact reasons, but I defy any long-term programmer not to have at least some code on a drive or backup device somewhere outside their employer’s control.

Federal prosecutors have charged a computer programmer with stealing software code valued at nearly $10 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, according to a criminal complaint filed in United States District Court on Wednesday […]

The authorities said the software, owned by the Treasury Department, cost about $9.5 million to develop.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?: Interesting discussion on a growing tendency to repackage free web content as for-sale public content.

[…] VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.

What got creepy is when the author saw an ad for a book about himself.  He purchased it, and:

Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.

I wonder if they’re using the Wikipedia Book Creator we discussed a couple of years ago.

Flipping the classroom: Here’s an interesting discussion about a new method of teaching – having students view the lectures online, and then do interactive education in the classroom.

They will not get a lecture from Ms Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which. This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.

So, essentially, you’re “flipping” the experience.  The idea is that lectures are very one-way, so it’s inefficient to spend valuable classroom time on this when it can be delivered via other methods.  Classroom time should be spent interactively working through problem sets while you have the teacher and students in the same room.