American Idol in Austin…
Technology
27
Jan 06
More google.cn
The image search for “tiananmen square” on the left is from Google.cn, the image search on the right is from Google.com.
It’s almost so bad, it’s funny.
27
Jan 06
Google trades ideals for utilitarian cynicism
This wouldn’t be so disappointing if it weren’t for their oft-advertised ethos of “don’t be evil”:
Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn’t a step we took lightly. For several years, we’ve debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government’s policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?
I don’t think anyone was shocked when Yahoo! kowtowed to China. They’ve always been business first, cool second, but Google was supposed to be better and different. But all the Google fanboys should remember, when the rubber met the road, and principle clashed with capital, Google got in line with everyone else, shriveling their ethos into a hollow marketing slogan.
26
Jan 06
Minutiae
1. Running on impulse. I broke down today and bought a black, 60gb iPod video. Right now, I have 20gb loaded, which is equivalent to 15 days of music. This is my one big gadget of the year, having resisted a new computer, a digital SLR, and many many other equally unnecessary purchases. Now my last remaining excuse for using the exercise facilities is gone. I still hate Apple and they’re effete hipster smugness. Fact is, the competition just plain sucks for portable digital media. The gadget industry is ceding the entire territory to Apple, when many people (like me) just want a good alternative. It’s not that difficult. The “iPod alternative” needs to have a spacious hard drive, some sort of display so I can tell what’s playing, and a head phone jack. It’s really that simple. Make it super cheap and the iPod has some serious competition. As it is, you can get an iPod or an incredibly lame alternative for the same price. What kind of choice is that? The main draws: I needed something with massive hard-drive space and small size, and nothing really comes close except the iPod. Add to that the video playback, simple interface, and iTunes mojo, and it’s a no brainer. By the way, the clerks at Best Buy are ridiculous. No, I don’t want a service plan for the 3rd time. No, I don’t care about the accessories or anything else you want to upsell me on. No, I don’t want to bond about having an iPod. It’s a consumer device, not an opportunity for group identity reinforcement.
2. While driving down the road during lunch, in front of a high school an inexplicable animated sign advertises: “Now presenting Urinetown.”
3. Tuesday at the apartment after work, while I wait for the elevator with the day’s mail I observe a large-nosed girl in a ponytail pass by in full workout gear complete with white iPod earbuds. I can hear her opening the door to the workout room, but then she’s back again walking angrily past in the reverse direction. “Full?” I ask. She keeps walking and yells, “I guess I’ll just be fat forever!” then slams the double doors. I couldn’t help laughing, but only because she was completely serious and not actually fat.
25
Jan 06
Get your album cover art straight
I’ve been using iTunes a lot more lately. I held out for a long as a champion of Winamp, but iTunes does a lot of nice stuff with podcasts and a few other features. One of the nice things about using iTunes is how it integrates your album art with your mp3 collections. If the album art is present on the hard drive you will see the album cover when you play the song on your iPod or in iTunes. That’s a great touch. Only problem is, since I’ve never bought a song off iTunes most of my mp3’s lack the accompanying album cover art. No problem! There are several cool solutions that have sprung up to help with this:
1. Artie by Patrick Moberg. Artie is a ajaxy website that finds the missing album cover art for your music library. All you do is upload your iTunes playlist XML file and it searches various online sources to find the missing album art, which you then drag into the art window in iTunes to add it to the associated mp3’s.
2. iTunes Companion by Knut August Johansen. This is probably the easiest way to update your cover art since once you set it up it automatically updates the album art as your music plays, by searching Amazon for the album listed in the ID3 tag of your mp3 files. iTunes Companion is a widget for Yahoo’s widget engine (formerly known as Konfabulator), and it works very well.
If you’re using iTunes you could also do all of this manually by searching for the album or single name in Google image search (GIS).
23
Jan 06
PHP Includes!
Have you ever found out about something that would have made your entire life so much easier? I had this experience recently with the concept of building websites using PHP includes.
In a nutshell, PHP includes allow you to build webpages using modular sections or code blocks.
PHP is, of course, a server-side scripting language, which means it can be used to create dynamic content for the web. With PHP you can interact with other applications on the server as well as do things like set cookies, process forms, store input in a database, etc. That’s great stuff, but most people may not need to take advantage of that. The thing most people need to know about is the use of PHP for creating multi-page websites using includes. One of the biggest problems (if you don’t use PHP) is making changes to an entire site. Let’s say for example you have a website with hundreds of individual pages. Without includes, you would have to download and edit each of those files to reflect the new changes. Even if you did some find-replace mojo, you’d still have to edit each of those pages and reupload them to the web server. But, if you use includes you could create a template that each page would use. When you needed to make changes you would simply change the content of the particular include. So, for example, any page on a site could be arranged like this:
header include (separate file like header.inc.php) content footer include (separate file like footer.inc.php)
To change the navigation in the header across the entire site, you would just alter the header.inc.php file instead of having to download and change each separate page.
29
Dec 05
Essential Firefox Extensions: Highlighter and SessionSaver
I’ve just started using two indispensable Firefox extensions:
Highlighter – What it does: select a block of text, right-click and select “highlight”. Very nice when trying to pull out interesting bits. Also has several other useful features like instant highlighting when you select text, tracker icons for jumping back to highlighted sections, and the ability to select different highlight colors.
SessionSaver – This extension saves everything you were viewing when you closed Firefox, so when you come back to the computer you can read where you left off. You can also do cool stuff like sync your session to a previous session over FTP, or even back up a session to a file. Feature list.
07
Dec 05
More Flash stuff
Here’s a little movie I made for our office holiday party where we will be debuting our new company website, which I am still working on. I am aware of the typo at the end of the movie. Here is the basic animation technique I used explained in list form:
- Create blue-white gradient sky background using rectangle with gradient fill. This background is moved down at the end of the animation to darken the “sky” so the white text stands out better.
- Create amorphous snow hill shape that can be rotated and distorted as the snowman goes skiing down the hill.
- Create movie symbol using snowman made in Flash with slightly moving red cap and stick arms.
- Move snowman across scene enlarging so as to create the appearance of moving closer to the “camera”.
- Add snowflakes to Flash library using images from Google image search, which I edited in Photoshop to reduce to two color GIF’s (white and transparent).
- Create several layers of animating snowflakes. Move snowflake’s center of rotation, so when you animate them they will rotate in large circles rather than just spinning about their own center.
- Fade in text. Add blur timeline effect for “From ISDG”.
- Add more snowflakes drifting in and fading out.
- Set movie to pause for two seconds before looping back to beginning of snowflake animation.
23
Nov 05
More Flash goodness
I’ve been working on some Flash elements for the company website, which we’re redoing. I love trying to do stuff in Flash because I’m visual and it’s more like playing than the work I do in HTML and CSS, etc. I also love working in Flash because I always have to learn how to do something new. Here is a simple animated navigation I’m working on right now. I didn’t design the buttons, just the behaviors and how they animate. In other words, I don’t like the button icons.