Gadgetopia

The new rules for reviewing media: Kottke notes an important trend – media is available in so many formats now, that people are arguing about format just as much as they’re arguing about the actual content.

Reviews for the theatrically released versions of The Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray are mostly negative […] the reviews are dominated by people complaining about New Line’s decision to release the theatrical versions before the extended versions that the

[…] Similarly, the early reviews for Michael Lewis’ The Big Short are dominated by one-star reviews from Kindle owners who are angry because the book is not available for the device.

[…]  Packaging is important. We judge books by their covers and even by how much they weigh (heavy books make poor subway/bus reading). Format matters. There’s an old adage in photography: the best camera is the one you have with you. Now that our media is available in so many formats, we can say that the best book is the one on your Kindle or the best movie is the one on your iPhone.

Kottke feels this is completely legitimate:

In the end, people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts. That citizen reviewers have keyed into this more quickly than traditional media reviewers is not a surprise.

I’m beginning to wonder why I ever bought a laptop over the Internet.  I’m actually on my second laptop from Dell.  I don’t think I’ll do this again.

The laptop performs great, and has been really stable (calm down, Mac fanboys).  But what I’ve learned is that you have a fairly close ergonomic relationship to a laptop.  A desktop is a big, bulky thing that sits under your desk.  You have very little interaction with it.  But a laptop, you feel.  It sits on your lap, you carry it in a bag over your shoulder, you move it around the office and around the house.  You get much more physically intimate with a laptop than a desktop.

So, for this relationship to work, the laptop has to fit you well ergonomically.  This one…doesn’t.  A couple things –

For some reason, Dell saw fit to make the leading edge of this machine…sharp.  You know the edge of the laptop, below the keyboard, right where your palms rest when you type?  It’s sharp.  Not sharp enough to cut anything, but sharp enough that it digs into my palms when I type for a long time and generally drives me nuts.  (One reason why this may be a problem – I have big hands, and I think my palms hang back further from the keys than a normal person.)

And the extended-life battery – it hangs down in the back.  So it’s like a keyboard stand that tilts the whole machine up, towards me.  This is not a big deal when it’s on my desk, but on my lap, the battery digs into my thighs rights above my knees.

These are two things I just couldn’t have foreseen or predicted when ordering a laptop over the Net.  The extended battery thing, maybe.  But the pictures would have all shown the standard battery, which doesn’t have that problem.  As for the sharp edge – how could I have possibly predicted that?

Next time I buy a laptop, I’m going into an actual store.  I’m going to pick a machine, sit down with it, and type for a while.  I’m going to move it around, open it, close it, and put in a bag over my shoulder.  I’ll do this for a couple machines, until I find one that I’m reasonable sure is physically compatible with me.

Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text: The Onion speaks the truth.

Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

Internet Explorer 9 embracing HTML 5, GPU acceleration: Interesting.

[IE9] puts a lot of focus on support for the HTML 5 standards. IE9 is also expected to beef up performance, offloading tasks within the web browser to the graphics processing unit (GPU), or using separate CPU cores for certain elements of web pages if available.

[…] The new Chakra Javascript engine compiles in the background on a separate CPU core if it is available on the machine.

Puppy!: This is a larger article about why Joel Spolsky is going to stop blogging, but I really appreciated this bit at the end.

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

Generally speaking, I feel exactly the same way, and I don’t think anyone has summed Twitter up more concisely or eloquently.  This of course raises the question of why I still have a Twitter account…

Like, Python: I can’t decide whether this is stupid, or awesome:

Like, Python uses Python’s own tokenizer to essentially add keywords to Python’s lexical understanding. Python is a subset of Like, Python, so any script you’ve already written in Python is valid Like, Python and will run in the interpreter. But you can also write like you’d speak.

So, you get something like this:

This was sent to me by Seth Gottlieb.  Figures.

The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought: John Battelle updates his Database of Intentions to include concepts like The Social Graph and The Status Update from the social networking explosion since he last wrote about it.

Taken together (and honestly, there’s really no other way to think about it, to my mind), these signals form a Database of Intentions that is magnitudes of order larger, more complex, and more powerful than my original concept back in 2003. And while the current players in each category are clear, what’s also clear is that the battle is on to control each of these critical signals.

Before reading this, you really need to read the first Database of Intentions post from back in 2003.  Or his book.

I absolutely believe in the Database of Intentions.  Both in a larger, Internet sense, and in an organizational, intranet sense.  It seems simple – what people are searching for and clicking through to is what people want.  That concept, however, often gets ignored in when doing more practical things like content planning or traffic analysis.

gigapan: Gotta say that I’m kinda smitten with Gigapan.

The GigaPan process allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.

People take and upload panoramic photos with insane pixelcounts, and you can explore them via a Google Maps-like interface.  What’s neat is that people can take “snapshots” to hi-light things in the image, which you can skip through.  It’s like “Where’s Waldo” for realsies.

Some awesome ones:

• A pig sculpture decorating contest in the UK
• Hanauma Bay in Hawaii. Some of those people are so far away.  Look for the turtle.
• Kocani, Macedonia
• The Golden Gate Bridge. I’ve been in this exact spot.  You can zoom all the way into the city in the background, with reasonable clarity.

This proves that all those “enhance” scenes in CSI could totally happen in real life.

EPiServer Trumps Competition, Decides to Go Public: This is neat to see.  Not many pure CMS companies are public.

EPiServer is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Being one of the few in its Web CMS market segment to be public, this move gives the company a certain advantage.

For buyers, it is going to be easier to evaluate a public company, since all the financials will be out in the open. One might say that no one cares about that, but the reality shows a different picture. No one wants to indulge in guesswork when investing in a Web CMS product and vendor. As we know, this deal is just like marriage.

As soon as I can figure out how to buy something on the Stockholm exchange, I’ll invest.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love: I really have to agree with this post.  Too many people feel like the Internet is designed to be free, and there’s no expense associated with content development.

This is an impassioned plea for Ars Technica not to block their ads.  It’s worth reading.

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

I wrote about this exact same thing a couple years ago: AdBlock Plus and the Future of Advertising:

Like it or not, advertising is the currency of media. Unless you want to pay for everything you watch, read, or hear, advertising is going to have to be somewhere.

Risking a really bad analogy, it’s like a terrorist movement, — if you successfully block its traditional methods, it will just come out in more subversive ways. It’s up to us which method we let stick — but one of them will have to stick, trust me.

Still true.

Build Your Business, US Partner Seminar series: I’m headed out on the road with EPiServer in March for their partner road show.  It’s a series of half-day sessions to show Web development shops how EPiServer can help their business.

They’re free, and will be in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston and New York in late February and early March.  Here’s the schedule.

I’ll be at the Seattle and Chicago stops.  Joe Kepley from Blend will be in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  I’ll probably be present via video for Boston and New York.

Come on out.  I’d love to meet anyone and everything.  I’m friendly that way.

Tuesday’s MousePath : My friend Corey tracks his mouse movements for an entire day using MousePath.

[…] a lot of fast, straight lines up to the right corner (where I have my OSX 10.4 “All Windows” shortcut) and a lot of black dots (where my mouse rested - the larger the dot, the longer the rest) in the middle of the page, where I often drop the cursor as I’m typing in everyone’s favorite program: Word.

Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network : Google is doing something interesting in the fiber space.

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Facebook rewrites PHP runtime : Looks like the HyperPHP rumor that hit the Net a couple weeks ago was legit, and is getting released.

[…] Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch. This coming Tuesday, they will make a big announcement around this project, and will make it available as open source software. […]

So, why has Facebook rewritten the PHP runtime? Because PHP is obviously too slow for their tastes.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: ​Modern browsers for modern applications : Google is dropping IE6 support.  Also dropping support for pre-3.0 Firefox.

We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.