Wyłowione z czytnika

Google Plus keeps your data as much as Facebook does

2011-12-02T02:46:35Z

When you delete an account from Google+, Google promises you to delete all the data associated with your G+ profile.

Well, I deleted mine some time ago, but while trying out the new Youtube homepage the first thing I saw was this:

My circles are still saved, my real name is showing and the same is probably true for the people in my circles.

Yet another reminder: don’t believe the big guys, data deletion doesn’t exists on the Internet, no matter what. There’s no escape, you access the internet, you get sold.

I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore

2011-12-05T16:11:00Z

I'd say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn't understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it's to people's benefit that I understand them but I don't, then they're the ones who are stupid.

There are at least five strains of this epidemic.

Abstractionitis
We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word "doorknob." So a new idea for a doorknob becomes "an innovation in residential access." Expose yourself repeatedly to the extrapolation of this practice to things more complicated than a doorknob and you really just need to carry Excedrin around with you all day.

Acronymitis
This is a disease of epic proportions in the world of charity. I was at a meeting just two days ago at which several well-meaning staff members of a charity were presenting to their board, and the meat of their discussion revolved around the acronyms SCEA and some other one that began with "R" that I can't recall. In the span of three minutes these acronyms must have been used eight times each. They were central to any understanding of the topic at hand, but they were never defined. So I had not the vaguest idea what the presenters were talking about. None. Could have been talking about how to make a beurre-blanc sauce for all I know.

Valley Girl 2.0
My partner and I were at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley five years ago, and a real-live Valley girl was sitting in the booth behind us talking on her cell phone. We couldn't stop listening to her. She had a world-class ability to string together half-sentences devoid of any substance whatsoever. And yet you felt as if something important were being discussed! "And she was like, ummm, and I was just like, you know, umm, no way, really, like, yeah, and when she was like that, I was just like..umm...." She could go on in this way for extended periods of time without mentioning any actual people, actions, or thoughts. There's a business version of this illness. It involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." Oh, OK, that explains it.

Meaningless Expressions
I wrote about the phrase "thinking outside the box" recently and how overused and utterly misunderstood the expression is. There are many more. Another term that has lost its meaning is "Let's exceed the customer's expectations." Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer's expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, "Our goal is to exceed the customer's expectation." The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Abstract Valley Girl 2.0 Acronymitis Using Meaningless Expressions
This is when you combine the four diseases above. So you get phrases like, "You should meet this guy with the SIO. He's sort of this kind of social entrepreneur thinking outside of the box in the sustainability space and working on these ideas around sort of web-based social media, and he's in a round two capital raise in the VP space with the people at SVNP." How many times have you heard what you now recall to be precisely this sentence?

This would all be funny if it weren't true. People just don't make sense anymore. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you internalize this. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, "I don't have any idea what you just said to me."

Why I'm Returning My Kindle Fire

2011-11-27T20:21:00Z

I'm a big Amazon fan, and a Prime account is great when you live in the boonies. I've also become a big Kindle fan -- but I've just discovered that I'm only a fan of the old design: the amazing thin, light, black-and-white book-reader-only kindles.

Supermarket śledzi cię przez twoją komórkę

2011-12-03T09:59:25Z

Supermarkety coraz chętniej wykorzystują technologię umożliwiającą śledzenie ruchu swoich klientów na terenie sklepu poprzez monitoring sygnału wysyłanego przez ich telefony komórkowe. Namierzanie...

**** To tylko fragment wpisu! Kliknij na tytuł aby przeczytać całość. http://niebezpiecznik.pl

Repurposing Anti-Spam Tools For Detecting Mutations In HIV

2011-12-03T19:37:00Z

chicksdaddy writes "Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Consider 'virus,' and 'worm.') Now it turns out that the links may be more than just rhetoric. Microsoft Researchers say that tools they developed to detect spammers' efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus. A report from Microsoft Research in honor of World AIDS Day yesterday described how Microsoft Researchers David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson were called upon to help AIDS researchers analyze data about how the human immune system attacks the HIV virus. To do so, they turned to tools and algorithms developed at Microsoft to detect and block spam e-mail in the company's Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange e-mail products."

Praca na desktopie z małą ilością RAM po raz trzeci - zram.

2011-11-18T06:42:04Z

W poprzednich wpisach było parę przemyśleń i sugestii poprawy komfortu pracy na desktopie wyposażonym w niewielką ilość pamięci RAM, bez finalnego rozwiązania choć z paroma trickami poprawiającymi pracę, więc pora na podejście trzecie do tematu, inspirowane przez kumpla z IRC, który sprzedał mi "newsa" o zram.

Od pewnego czasu (okolice kernela 2.6.37, jeśli dobrze widzę) w kernelu Linuksa obecny jest moduł zram , pozwalający na tworzenie kompresowanych urządzeń blokowych w pamięci RAM. Wykorzystać to można podobnie jak compcache, czyli do tworzenia kompresowanego obszaru pamięci, używanego przez system przed przeniesieniem danych na swap na dysku. Idea jest prosta - swap na dysku jest tragicznie wolny i obciąża I/O, procesor zwykle się trochę nudzi, zresztą nie będzie miał dużo więcej pracy, a ilość wolnej pamięci się zwiększy.

Ogólnie zram jest ideowym spadkobiercą compcache, ale wygląda mi na prostszy i ideowo, i w użyciu. No i jest obecny w kernelu. Idea działania jest prosta: tworzymy swap z wyższym priorytetem, niż swap na dysku, na urządzeniu blokowym umieszczonym w kompresowanym obszarze pamięci. Początkowo dane tradycyjnie są w RAM, w przypadku, gdy system musi korzystać z przestrzeni wymiany, umieszcza je najpierw na swapie w RAM, a dopiero później - tradycyjnie - na swapie na dysku.

Prosty skrypt realizujący powyższe:

#!/bin/bash
modprobe zram
echo $((200*1024*1024)) > /sys/block/zram0/disksize # 200 MB
mkswap /dev/zram0
swapon -p 60 /dev/zram0

Kolejno: załadowanie modułu zram (można korzystać z parametrów), określenie rozmiaru dysku dla urządzenia /dev/zram0 na 200 MB (i jest to rozmiar swap, będący jednocześnie maksymalną wielkością zużytej pamięci, nie rozmiarem przeznaczonej pamięci pamięci!), utworzenie swapu na urządzeniu /dev/zram0, włączenie utworzonego swap z priorytetem 60.

Podobno efekty są świetne - zaczynam testy u siebie, wstępnie nie wygląda źle, na pewno niebawem podzielę się wrażeniami (jako update do tego wpisu) po dłuższym teście. Jeśli chodzi o rozmiar swap dla modułu zram, to zacząłbym od 10-20% całości RAM (u mnie 200 MB przy 1 GB RAM). Z tego co zauważyłem, skompresowane dane zajmują w praktyce ok. 40-50% oryginalnych.

Parę przydatnych poleceń diagnostycznych:

cat /sys/block/zram0/compr_data_size - rozmiar danych po kompresji
cat /sys/block/zram0/orig_data_size - rozmiar nieskompresowanych danych
cat /sys/block/zram0/mem_used_total - całkowita ilość zużytej pamięci
swapon -s - rozmiar i wykorzystanie poszczególnych swap (inna jednostka!)

Linki w temacie, które zdecydowanie warto przejrzeć, jeśli ktoś jest bardziej zainteresowany:

Szczególnie ostatni wpis zawiera fajny, uwzględniający ilość procesorów skrypt startowy. Można rozważyć użycie po przeanalizowaniu. IMHO dla 1-2 procesorów trochę kosmiczne wartości będą, uzależnianie wielkości swap od ilości procesorów też jest średnie, ale poprawienie to nic trudnego. Za to obsługą utworzonego urządzenia blokowego zajmie się w tamtym wariancie więcej, niż jeden procesor. Z drugiej strony kto ma więcej niż dwa rdzenie i mało RAM?

Miałem obawy co do działania hibernacji (z użyciem pm-utils, z uswsusp miałem problem...) w takiej konfiguracji. Niepotrzebnie, bo wygląda, że działa OK - zapewne hibernacja jest na tyle inteligentna, że rozpoznaje, czy ma do czynienia z fizycznym urządzeniem blokowym.

Oczywiście swap to nie jedyne możliwe zastosowanie modułu zram - więcej przykładów w linku do wiki Gentoo.

Quantified Awesome: A place for everything, and everything in its place

2011-11-14T13:00:00Z

A month is a good size for experimenting with life. This month, I’m focusing on having a place for everything and everything in its place.

Brains are bad at recall. Infrequently-used items fade into the fog of memory, like the loyalty cards and IDs I stash in a sometimes too-secret place. Frequently-moved items end up with confused associations: did I leave my belt bag on top of the dresser, or is it on the kitchen table? Under stress, recall is an even more difficult task, and it’s easy to glaze over and miss something when you’re trying to think of where else it might be.

Dean Vaughn’s How to Remember Anything has great tips on making object locations more memorable by visually exaggerating the association between an object and its location. For example, if you put your keys on the table, imagine locking your door with the entire table. The unusual association will probably make it easier to recall one-off locations, but

There’s the classic advice to have one place for everything, and put everything in its place. This works if you have foresight, discipline, and an organized space. Our house looks more like like a Martha Stewart centerfold… the “before” picture.

Because I’m a geek and I’m tired of rummaging through the house for things I’ve misplaced, I added a simple system for tracking things to my home dashboard. I’ll start by tracking the things that frustrate me the most. Infrequently-used things like loyalty cards and passports, frequently-moved items like my lunch bag or my mouth guard…

On my dashboard, I can see what’s out of place and where it should be returned. Here’s a screenshot from November 4:

I can view a summary and do some quick updates:

The detail page makes it easy to see where something is, change an item’s location or view other things that are associated with it. Here, my keys are in my belt bag, which is on the kitchen table.

I’ve just added this idea of a context, which groups together things. This way, I can check whether everything’s in the right place, and I can mark everything moved in one go.

Slowing down and tracking things might help me improve my peace of mind. Even if I don’t always update my system, I think seeing a list of possible locations will help a lot. A table of stuff, current locations, and home locations will also make it easier to ensure that everything has a rightful place. I can identify things that are out of place and where they should be returned, which would be great for daily and weekly sweeps.

I think this would be even better if I built an Android app, as sometimes web access from my Android is slow. (Or maybe it’s my web hosting: I’m using too much memory, so I’m swapping out.)

I hope to collect interesting data over time. Maybe usage stats will tell me what’s worth improving or eliminating. Maybe this is something I’ll discontinue after a month, or maybe it’s something I’ll open up for wider use. Who knows? I’ll give it a try to work out the usage patterns, then maybe I’ll look into tweaking my personal dashboard so that people can try using it to track their own lives too.

Whee!

Like this? Check out my other self-tracking posts.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Quantified Awesome: A place for everything, and everything in its place (Sacha Chua's blog)

Kto jeszcze nie slyszal a approveapp

2011-11-18T09:00:10Z

Nie wydaje mi się prawdopodobne żeby taki fakt zaistniał … ale może jest jakiś śpioszek.

Kto nie miał problemu z masą „poprawek”, niezrozumieniem, niedocenianiem ilości pracy, problemem klienta który nie potrafi obejrzeć projektu w powiększeniu 100%, wyobrazić sobie jak projekt „naprawdę” wygląda? Kto nie ma stosu list ze zmianami, renegocjacjami budżetu, reakcją klienta raz na jakiś czas ale powołującego się na określone deadline, ten nie musi czytać.

No to połowa odwiedzających odpadła, teraz odsiewamy kolejnych: kto korzysta z zarąbistych systemów które pozwalają udostępniać i prezentować naszą pracę i nie szuka rozwiązań lepszych, prostszych i może elegantszych ten nie czyta dalej. Ile odpadło?

Ok to teraz już konkret. Wymyśliłem x czasu temu rozwiązanie do prezentacji projektów graficznych klientom on-line. Projekt jakiś czas leżał w głowie i dojżewał. Następnie około 14 miesięcy temu naszkicowałem pierwsze kilka screenów jak to powinno wyglądać … i przeleżało ponad rok w szufladzie.

Ale problemy prezentacyjne pozostały oraz problemy z odbijaniem projektu (projekt – zmiany – projekt – zmiany … itp) pozostały niezmienne i nie było istotne w jaki sposób to próbowaliśmy rozwiązać. Czasem to klient nie rozumiał, czasem w nawale wysyłało się na serwer ale zapominało posłać info w mailu a to klient twierdził że nie dostał. No co któryś projekt coś zawsze stawało na drodze.

Więc na własne potrzeby postanowiliśmy już ekipą w thoke wdrożyć w życie mój pomysł. Otrzymał on nazwę approveapp (roboczo nazywamy „appapp”), kupilłem domenę, dorobiłem kilkanaście screenów, przemyślałem działanie niektórych opcji po raz enty i do wdrożenia. Aplikacja jest na ukończeniu, wg założeń na oddanie bety do testów potrzeba nam jeden dzień, ale znając złośliwość rzeczy martwych okaże się że pewnie +1 lub dwa dni. Aplikacja działa jak dla mnie znakomicie, podstawowym założeniem jej działania było:
- uproszczenie zarządzania i działania (naprawdę uprościłem wszystko do maksimum)
- skrócenie czasu potrzebnego na przygotowanie prezentacji
- automatyzacja komunikacji (maile dostajemy z systemu, a nasze działanie ogranicza się do wskazania pliku na dysku)
- możliwość kontroli co kiedy komu było pokazane (ta opcja będzie dopiero w pisanej aplikacji do prezentacji i kontroli na ipada … lub dopiszemy moduł – zobaczymy po beta testach)
- pokazanie ilości screenów klientowi w jednym miejscu
- pokazanie ilości zmian klientowi w jednym miejscu (jak powie że ma być zielone a potem różowe to już nie będzie miał opcji bajać że jednak miało być zielone)

Całość ma być darmowa, umyśliliśmy że jeśli spodoba się to wprowadzimy możliwość założenia konta „pro” z kilkoma opcjami przydatniejszymi firmie a konto dla freelancerów z możliwością wgrania kilku projektów i kilkudziesięciu – kilkuset screenów pozostanie za free. Zakładamy że konto pro będzie kosztować kilka zł za miesiąc, a pieniądze z tego mają być przeznaczone na utrzymanie serwisu. Takimi opcjami zaawanosowanymi będzie np. wgranie swojego logo i pod swoją domeną i opcje związane bardziej z kalendarzami, finansami i umowami.

Samo approveapp.com jest pierwszym projektem z kilku, dedykowanych dla osób zajmujących się kreacją, kolejnymi będą … ale chyba nie powinienem mówić. Na pewno pozostałe projekty będą połączone z appapp i między sobą i pozwolą łatwiej i szybciej poprowadzić projekt.

Czy nam się udało, najpierw przekonają się wybrani beta testerzy. A zapisy na beta testy kończymy w piątek 17 listopada (tak, tak – ten), zapisać się można na approveapp.com.

The Jobsian fallacy

2011-10-31T17:34:09Z

I’m sad Steve Jobs is gone. I’m sadder still to see the vultures of shallow thinking circling his name. There is a fallacy around great men, a notion we can learn best from their behavior for how we ourselves can achieve. But that’s only true if we study them with an honest eye. When writers are clouded by mythology and hero worship, they do more harm than good, as sloppy thinking is often the mortar used to put men on pedestals.

Before anyone takes Jobs as an example to emulate, remember the following:

You did not have the good fortune to meet a Wozniak.
You are not as smart as Steve Jobs was.
You do not have the talent to back up a Jobs sized ego.
You are not willing to take the same kinds of risks.
You do not work as hard as he did.

Using Jobs as an example without due recognition of these facts makes you a fool.

We overstate how much can be learned from exceptional people. Their success is a product of circumstance, among other factors, but we dismiss those circumstances when we wishfully consider our own futures. You can’t copy and paste success. We learn of people like Jobs in retrospect, long after they’ve proven their value to the world, and most of what we learn of their lives is tainted by romance and dreams.

Articles with idiotic premises like Steve Jobs solved the Innovator’s Dilemma, or In Defense of Steve Jobs, would likely annoy Jobs to no end. He had a humble attitude about innovation theories and doubted the utility of thinking of work in such abstract terms. He was too busy working to formulate a ‘process’ or a ‘model’, much to the frustration of tech and business writers everywhere. He was asked once ‘How do you systematize innovation?’ and his answer was ‘You don’t’ (See BusinessWeek, 10/11/04). He was in some ways more humble and practical than writers who use his name as a puppet to make half-baked, poorly researched points, that help no one achieve anything.

We are fascinated by our giants and this fascination motivates us to learn. This is good. But we continually forget every story in this world is unique. We can’t cherry pick the convenient elements of one successful life and graft it into our own, expecting the same results. Had da Vinci or Ford been born today, they might have ended up janitors or car salesmen. And a school teacher or gardener from their times, born today, might have transformed the world. We don’t want to see success as fragile or circumstantial, but the slightest touch of chance in the lives of any great man or woman, and we’d never know their names.

The unspoken part of greatness is the courage to venture into the unknown. But if we look too closely at the great people of our past, and use our hindsight of their lives as a map, we end up seeing the world backwards. They had no map in front of them when they lived their lives. The flawed persistence of studying a person from history too closely, means you will keep your eyes buried in the fantasy of repeating someone else’s past, instead of looking to horizons of your own making.

Google BigQuery Service: Big data analytics at Google speed

2011-11-14T19:30:00Z

By Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine Blog and the Google Enterprise Blog.)

Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions. Fortune 500 companies struggle to unlock the potential of data, so it’s no surprise that it’s been even harder for smaller businesses.

We developed Google BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics. At Google I/O last year, we opened a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises and developers. Today we're releasing some big improvements, and putting one of Google's most powerful data analysis systems into the hands of more companies of all sizes.

We’ve added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers to rapidly explore massive data through a web application.
We’ve made big improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically through the API. The new REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the background and manage tables and permissions with more granularity.
Whether you use the BigQuery web application or API, you can now write even more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common.
It’s also now easy to manage, secure, and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and export query results to the desktop or to Google Cloud Storage.

Michael J. Franklin, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, remarked that BigQuery (internally known as Dremel) leverages “thousands of machines to process data at a scale that is simply jaw-dropping given the current state of the art.” We’re looking forward to helping businesses innovate faster by harnessing their own large data sets. BigQuery is available free of charge for now, and we’ll let customers know at least 30 days before the free period ends. We’re bringing on a new batch of pilot customers, so let us know if your business wants to test drive BigQuery Service.

Ju-kay Kwek is a Product Manager for Google BigQuery Service.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Rejected And Legal

2011-11-10T15:32:50Z

Some of the roles I fill at work are: storage architecture, cloud engineering, system administration and backend coding. When approaching my tasks head on, it’s always important to me that standards are adhered to. From PEP coding style to adhering to an RFC for mail server. Unfortunately, I think I’m a dying breed, or something, because more and more, I’m seeing standards ignored.

Case in point: I just filled out a form for a survey to “enter to win a $1000 shopping spree). You know, the crap that you constantly get bombarded with at the checkout stand when the cashier gives you your receipt. I always ignore them, but then thought to myself “I’ll never win if I don’t at least try”, so I gave my first survey a go. At the end of the survey, it asked for my email address. I figure they’ll sell it for marketing purposes, and I have a Google Mail address, so I’m not really that worried about the SPAM (their SPAM filters are amazing). But, I would like to track who they are selling my address to. So, I gave them the following address:

aaron.toponce+survey-provider@gmail.com

To which, I received an error that the email address is not a valid address. AHEM! Yes it is, and it’s this lack of support for standards that I’m talking about. My email address was rejected, yet it’s perfectly legal according to RFC 5322. You see, according to that RFC, I get the following flexibilities with my email address:

ASCII upper and lower case letters (a-z & A-Z).
ASCII digits 0-9
ASCII characters !#$%&’*+-/=?^_`{|}~
ASCII dot (.) so long as the local part of the address does not contain the dot consecutively, and it does not start with a dot.
ASCII characters ” ” (space) and “(),:;<>@[\] are allowed with certain restrictions.

So, I could have the following email addresses, all of which are perfectly legit according to the RFC:

“[Aaron Toponce]“@gmail.com
a&t@gmail.com
aaron.toponce+business@gmail.com
aaron’s-travel-agency@example.travel
{atoponce}@gmail.com

Yet, these will get ejected outright in most web forms I’ve come across. Specifically interesting is the .travel TLD. I’ve had web forms enforce TLDs that are less than 4 characters, which is absolutely absurd for the .travel and .museum TLDs. I’m guessing one of two things is happening with these web forms:

The developer used the regular expression [A-Za-z0-9_\-\.]+@[A-Za-z0-9\-\.]+ for validating addresses.
There is absolute denial for the use of “plus-addressing” as a DEA.

I’m guessing the first is more likely the scenario than the second. Regardless, Of course, when we’re talking about the rules of RFC 5322, we’re no longer talking about regular expression syntax. We’re talking about grammar. If your page is designed in PHP, Python, CGI, or whatever, you should use a real parser for parsing the email address, rather than reinventing the wheel yourself. What’s unfortunate, is this disease of not properly parsing valid email addresses is found in some big companies and sites too, not just the little guys.

Now, Google COULD provide true DEAs, such as Yahoo! Plus does with their subscribers, However, I should be able to create an DEA with an already existing email address, rather than creating completely new ones, because people refuse to conform to the standards. So Google, if you’re reading (I know you are), you may want to consider proper DEAs, seeing as though “plus addressing” isn’t working, and it is important to some.

Stéphane Bortzmeyer has already blogged about this, and he uses the #ral hashtag on Identica and Twitter to vent his frustrations, which stands for “Refus d’Adresses Légales” or “Rejection of Legal Address”. Well, I’ve determined that I will be doing the same, although I’ll bacronym the hashtag to “Rejected And Legal”, along with the url to the site that refuses to adhere to the RFC.

Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” released!

2011-11-26T14:47:44Z

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa”.

Linux Mint 12 “Lisa”

New features at a glance:

For a complete overview and to see screenshots of the new features, visit: “What’s new in Linux Mint 12“.

Important info and release notes:

The Release Notes are an important source of information. Here are some of the topics they cover:

Tips and Tricks
- Information about DuckDuckGo
- Switch to a single top panel
- Switch to a black panel, menu and window list
- Quickly preview files without opening them
- Restart Gnome Shell when needed
- Debug Gnome Shell (for developers or to troubleshoot)
- Run Gnome Shell in Virtualbox (for testers and reviewers)
- Install MATE from the CD edition
- Workaround for a disappearing MATE panel
- Workaround for 100% CPU usage in MATE
MATE
mint4win
Moonlight
Upstream issues

System requirements:

x86 processor (Linux Mint 64-bit requires a 64-bit processor. Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
512 MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
5 GB of disk space
Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
CD/DVD drive or USB port

Upgrade instructions:

To upgrade from a previous version of Linux Mint follow these instructions.
To upgrade from Linux Mint 12 RC, simply apply any level 1 and 2 updates (if any), as well as level 3 “mate” and “caja” updates available in the Update Manager.

Download:

Md5 sums:

DVD 32-bit: ee3d6e2ca498bc7685b7f17cdb5f2eea
DVD 64-bit: 548f0ac303fea840ef138e5669880a74
CD no codecs 32-bit: 40562d26447207cb5111f94b93957a58
CD no codecs 64-bit: 641e0ab8f746b82c36fc3f0bbca70dc7

Torrents:

HTTP Mirrors for the 32-bit DVD ISO:

Australia AARNet
Australia Internode
Australia Western Australian Internet Association
Australia Yes Optus Mirror
Austria Goodie Domain Service
Belarus ByFly
Brazil Universidade Federal do Parana
Canada University of Waterloo Computer Science Club
China University of Science and Technology of China Linux User Group
Czech Republic Silicon Hill
Denmark klid.dk
France Gwendal Le Bihan
Germany Copahost
Germany GWDG
Germany NetCologne GmbH
Greece National Technical University of Athens
Greece University of Crete
Ireland HEAnet
Japan JAIST
Japan Yamagata University
Latvia University of Latvia
Lithuania Atviras kodas Lietuvai
Netherlands Tuxis Internet Engineering
Poland Polish Telecom
Portugal CeSIUM – Universidade do Minho
Romania Apollo Hardware Consulting
Romania ServerHost
Russia Yandex Team
South Africa Internet Solutions
South Africa Web Africa
Sweden DF – Computer Society at Lund University
Sweden Portlane
Switzerland SWITCH
Turkey Linux Kullanicilari Dernegi
USA mirrorcatalogs.com
USA University of Maryland, College Park
USA Yellow Fiber Networks

HTTP Mirrors for the 64-bit DVD ISO:

Australia AARNet
Australia Internode
Australia Western Australian Internet Association
Australia Yes Optus Mirror
Austria Goodie Domain Service
Belarus ByFly
Brazil Universidade Federal do Parana
Canada University of Waterloo Computer Science Club
China University of Science and Technology of China Linux User Group
Czech Republic Silicon Hill
Denmark klid.dk
France Gwendal Le Bihan
Germany Copahost
Germany GWDG
Germany NetCologne GmbH
Greece National Technical University of Athens
Greece University of Crete
Ireland HEAnet
Japan JAIST
Japan Yamagata University
Latvia University of Latvia
Lithuania Atviras kodas Lietuvai
Netherlands Tuxis Internet Engineering
Poland Polish Telecom
Portugal CeSIUM – Universidade do Minho
Romania Apollo Hardware Consulting
Romania ServerHost
Russia Yandex Team
South Africa Internet Solutions
South Africa Web Africa
Sweden DF – Computer Society at Lund University
Sweden Portlane
Switzerland SWITCH
Turkey Linux Kullanicilari Dernegi
USA mirrorcatalogs.com
USA University of Maryland, College Park
USA Yellow Fiber Networks

HTTP Mirrors for the 32-bit CD No codecs ISO:

Australia AARNet
Australia Internode
Australia Western Australian Internet Association
Australia Yes Optus Mirror
Austria Goodie Domain Service
Belarus ByFly
Brazil Universidade Federal do Parana
Canada University of Waterloo Computer Science Club
China University of Science and Technology of China Linux User Group
Czech Republic Silicon Hill
Denmark klid.dk
France Gwendal Le Bihan
Germany Copahost
Germany GWDG
Germany NetCologne GmbH
Greece National Technical University of Athens
Greece University of Crete
Ireland HEAnet
Japan JAIST
Japan Yamagata University
Latvia University of Latvia
Lithuania Atviras kodas Lietuvai
Netherlands Tuxis Internet Engineering
Poland Polish Telecom
Portugal CeSIUM – Universidade do Minho
Romania Apollo Hardware Consulting
Romania ServerHost
Russia Yandex Team
South Africa Internet Solutions
South Africa Web Africa
Sweden DF – Computer Society at Lund University
Sweden Portlane
Switzerland SWITCH
Turkey Linux Kullanicilari Dernegi
USA mirrorcatalogs.com
USA University of Maryland, College Park
USA Yellow Fiber Networks

HTTP Mirrors for the 64-bit CD No codecs ISO:

Australia AARNet
Australia Internode
Australia Western Australian Internet Association
Australia Yes Optus Mirror
Austria Goodie Domain Service
Belarus ByFly
Brazil Universidade Federal do Parana
Canada University of Waterloo Computer Science Club
China University of Science and Technology of China Linux User Group
Czech Republic Silicon Hill
Denmark klid.dk
France Gwendal Le Bihan
Germany Copahost
Germany GWDG
Germany NetCologne GmbH
Greece National Technical University of Athens
Greece University of Crete
Ireland HEAnet
Japan JAIST
Japan Yamagata University
Latvia University of Latvia
Lithuania Atviras kodas Lietuvai
Netherlands Tuxis Internet Engineering
Poland Polish Telecom
Portugal CeSIUM – Universidade do Minho
Romania Apollo Hardware Consulting
Romania ServerHost
Russia Yandex Team
South Africa Internet Solutions
South Africa Web Africa
Sweden DF – Computer Society at Lund University
Sweden Portlane
Switzerland SWITCH
Turkey Linux Kullanicilari Dernegi
USA mirrorcatalogs.com
USA University of Maryland, College Park
USA Yellow Fiber Networks

Enjoy!

We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun with this new release!

Lynx would not be impressed – on semantics and HTML

2011-11-16T22:50:31Z

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about markup, and especially the new HTML5 elements. There was a big hoo-hah when ~~Hixie~~the WHATWG wanted to remove the time element from the HTML spec, Divya stirred lots of emotions with her “Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value” and of course Jeremy posted his views on the subject, too in a counterpoint article “Pursuing semantic value“.

Maybe there wasn’t a counterpoint, maybe there was. Frankly, I was too busy to read the lot. It also doesn’t matter that much, as I get more and more the feeling that we really need to think about the web as it was and how it will be. The lack of understanding of the value of semantic markup to me is just a symptom of a change that is happening.

Tales of yesteryear

A lot of the debate about semantic value and using the correct HTML is kept alive by people who have been around for a long time and seen browsers fail in more ways we care to remember. Valid markup and sensible structure was our only chance to reach maintainability and make sense of the things around us. This was especially important in the long long ago. I remember using Lynx to surf the web.

I also remember to keep Lynx in my arsenal for a bit longer. I used it to “see” what search engines and assistive technologies see. The former was correct at the time (not any longer, Google does index Flash and JavaScript and actually follows ill conceived links using hashbangs).

The latter was even wrong back then. A lot of the debate around using proper HTML5 right now tries to back up with the argument that “assistive technology like screen readers need it”. Nah, not quite the case yet.

Build it quickly, make it work

I’ve mentioned it in a few talks that when people mention the good old days where markup mattered and people cared and such they are talking nonsense. These days never existed and when we started with web development we struggled to make things work. We used tables for layout, NBSP for whitespace, lots of BR elements for vertical whitespace and more evil things. We then used spacer gifs for padding and margin and just started to care when CSS got out and supported. The reason was not that we wanted to write cleaner HTML. The reason was that we wanted to make things work as all we got was a design to build, not a description how to structure the document or what to build. When you start from the look of a web product, semantics are already on the endangered list.

Write less, achieve more

This is the mantra of now. The big success of jQuery is based on it. JavaScript standards were too complex and too verbose to write code quickly and change it quickly. So the jQuery crowd analysed what people did the most – changes to the DOM and adding and removing classes (and later Ajax) and made it damn easy and short to do. No need to write code that doesn’t do much.

The same happens over and over again. less and sass make the prefix hell and repetition for different browsers in CSS easy to maintain and client-side templating languages and browser-internal templating and client-side MVC make HTML the outcome of computation and programming logic and not a starting point.

If you can’t see it, why do it?

A lot of what the fans of HTML and semantics are getting excited about is not visible. Whenever a new HTML element got support and had a visual representation in the browser it was a no-brainer. People used it immediately. In most cases they used it wrongly, but they used it (I’ve seen fieldset and legend used around images as it is pretty and of course indentation with BLOCKQUOTE).

A lot of the semantically rich elements don’t show up at all. Blockquotes’s cite attribute was meant to give a quote meaning by telling us where it is from. ACRONYM and ABBR were supposed to tell people what a TLA meant – heck we don’t even do that in meetings and press releases so why bother adding info that the browsers don’t show the users.

This is also a big issue for Microformats. If browsers made an address draggable to your address book or created voting buttons for VoteLinks, if a browser would automatically detect events and give you a simple interface to add to your calendar they’d be a no-brainer to use. As it is, we have a few success stories to tell, for a lot of work to do.

The big book of ARIA

It gets really frustrating when we are talking about accessibility. Making a web document available for people with various abilities should be easy when we stick to keeping things simple and follow human logic.

It should, but it isn’t. And by keeping things very simple we can reach more people but we could also deprive a large group of great interfaces. Whenever we do crazy things in the browser and the talk comes to making them accessibile the way out is the mythical ARIA.

If you dive into ARIA you will realise very quickly that it is a lot of work, hard to understand concepts and above all a lot of code to write. Instead of having accessibility as an integral part of HTML5, we have to deal with two parallel standards. One to achieve things quickly and move the web from documents to applications and another one to keep it available for everyone out there. This is not a good place to be in. Accessibility happens when you embrace it from the very start. There is no magic bullet layer at the end of the process that makes things work.

So what about HTML and semantics?

You know what? There is no solution for all. The reason is not that technology moved on or people don’t care about users or that our standards are holding us back or anything like that. The reason is that “write once, deploy anywhere” is simply bullshit. The one thing that made the web work so far and become an amazing market to work in is flexibility. We all enjoy that you can reach a seemingly similar experience for our end users in many different ways. So why are we banging on about one side of the development range or another?

How about this:

If you write a document by hand, use all the semantics you can add in. This is your handwriting, your code is your poetry and people learn from looking at what you did.
If you need to write a hard-core application and every byte is a prisoner try to play nice with the semantics but follow your end goal of delivering speed. Make sure to tell people though that your code is the end result of conversions and optimisations and not for humans to look at.
Regardless of what you build – when you can use new technology (maybe in connection with old, like <div class="section"><section></section></div>) use it.
Remember that the web is not your browser and computer – add fallbacks for other browsers when using bleeding edge technology. When the others catch up you won’t have to alter your code!
The main focus of markup and web code that is not optimised for edge case apps is to make it easy for people to maintain it. If people can see in the HTML what is going on – win. If what only works with JS is generated by JS - even better.
More markup is not a crime when it is markup that adds value. Arguments that STRONG is worse than B because it means more code and slower loading pages are irrelevant in times of gzipping on the server
We can only escape the chicken and egg problem of new HTML when we use it. Right now, if you ask for support in browsers for new elements the answer from most vendors is that nobody uses them so why bother. And when you ask people why they don’t use them they tell you because browsers don’t support them. One of us has to start changing that.

Bigger fish to fry

Personally I am concentrating more on the things that really worry me about the web these days, and it might be interesting to list them.

Death of longevity – I always loved the fact that I can find something on the web and go back to it. This is not the case any longer. A lot of my old bookmarks are dead, my tweets go into the data nirvana after a certain number and I cannot access them any longer, and code you write for companies will be totally different shortly after your departure. This is not the web I want. It is a great mix of entertainment and archive and the “real time web” really messes with this.
High fidelity web sites – I remember when Flash made our 500Mhz machines flare up. Nowadays almost every cool new site I try out does that to my dual core macbook. I can see in the very near future pages coming up telling me that my video card is not good enough to enjoy them. This is the reason I never played games on a PC. Let’s use cool new and flashy in a sensible manner instead
Identity – we are spreading ourselves thin on the web right now and leave a lot of outdated and erroneous profiles of ourselves. Who you are on the web is becoming a very strange concept and some of the work I do right now tries to bring that back into an easier to maintain fashion.
The open web – today the US debates if it is a good idea to censor the internet like China, Syria and other countries do. This scares me. I started on the web as it was less regulated and much less commercial than radio or TV. Let’s not give up that freedom
The maker web – the web is ubiquitous, we use it as a part of our day-to-day work and play. Lately I find though that the creative part of the web is dying and people are consuming it rather than using and enriching it. This, again, scares and annoys me. We should not become virtual couch potatoes.

Semantics are like wonderful prose. You use them to deliver an enjoyable product. People are not celebrated for writing books. They are celebrated for what they filled them with. If we keep putting things on the web that have structure and get better on more sophisticated display products we are building for the future. If we point fingers at others doing it wrong we waste our time.

Got comments? Give them on Google+ or Facebook

Lynx photo by Jimmy Tohill #40 in the National Geographic photo contest 2011

Google Chrome and pre-installed web apps

2011-11-15T08:47:35Z

Google recently launched a redesigned version of its Web Store where one can install extensions and web apps. One particular feature caught my attention: it marks the extensions that you already have with a check mark. How does the web page know which extensions you have installed?

Turns out the answer is simple. The Web Store is a pre-installed web app (actually, it is even hardcoded into the browser). Web apps in Chrome can have special privileges if they request them, same as extensions. A look at the Preferences file shows the privileges of the Web Store app: management API and webstorePrivate API. The former allows querying your installed extensions which explains how the website learns about them. But it can do more: enable or disable extensions and even uninstall them without any kind of visible notification.

The webstorePrivate API is (as its name already says) meant for the Web Store only. It isn’t documented online but you can find the documentation if you search in the chrome.dll file. It is apparently the Chrome equivalent of Gecko’s InstallTrigger, with the difference that Firefox makes InstallTrigger available to all websites. But its functionality goes beyond that. First of all there is a method silentlyInstall(), the documentation claims that only some extensions can be installed this way however. The list can be found in extension_webstore_private_api.cc file in the Chrome source code. Apparently, the trusted extensions are currently Google +1 Button and Google+ Notifications. There are 6 more extension IDs on the list which are currently unused (but Google could add these extensions to the Web Store at any time).

If you use Sync in Google Chrome then Web Store already knows you — thanks to method getBrowserLogin(). And if you don’t, the method pair setStoreLogin() / getStoreLogin() makes sure that the store never forgets you even if you remove your cookies.

So much about the Web Store web app. But from my Preferences file I learned that I have more web apps that I never installed. YouTube? Gmail? Where did these come from? Turns out, these web apps had some help getting their top popularity in the Web Store. My Google Chrome installations (at least Chrome 16 and Chrome 17, not Chrome 15 for some reason) have a file default_apps/external_extensions.json where these apps are defined. Removing this file seems to be the only way to get rid of these apps but it will come back on the next Chrome update of course.

Obviously, the point here isn’t really cheating with the popularity ranking of the own web apps (though maybe it is, to some degree). The installed web apps are featured prominently on the new tab page which is likely what this is mostly about. After all, this page is advertising space (the ntp entry in the Preferences file tells me that there was an advertising campaign for Chromebook running on this page until November 8th but I have zero views — somehow I missed it). And another nice side-effect: Gmail automatically gets the notification permission and can display desktop notifications without asking the user for permission. Bad luck for all the other webmail services out there.

Don’t get me wrong: Google Chrome is a great browser and it is easy to get excited about it, argue about benchmarks, brand-new standards and such. But sometimes you get a reminder: this is a Google product and it has to benefit Google. It isn’t merely about making the web better, it is also about promoting Google products and giving them an advantage over competing services. Google may speak out for net neutrality but with their browser the own services get prioritized. Even if it requires violating your privacy.

W odpowiedzi Tes Teqowi

2011-11-22T10:09:48Z

Zdjęcie STĄD

Rzadko się zdarza, aby wpis jednego z moich Ulubieńców doprowadził mnie do wściekłej pasji. Do tego stopnia, że postanowiłem Mu odpowiedzieć własnym wpisem. Nie chcę (bo nie lubię) bawić się w funkcję kopiuj/wklej, więc bardzo proszę przed przeczytaniem mojego tekstu zapoznać się z wpisem Tes Teqa. Przyjemnej lektury TU.

———————————

Właściwie należałoby zacząć ab ovo, od podziału myśli organizacyjnej, która nastąpiła po okresie dominacji „tayloryzmu” i „fayolizmu”. Przypomnijmy 14 podstawowych zasad organizacyjnych wg Henri’ego Fayoli: podział pracy, autorytet, dyscyplina, jedność rozkazodawstwa, jednolitość kierownictwa, podporządkowanie interesu osobistego interesowi ogółu, wynagrodzenie, centralizacja, hierarchia, ład, odpowiednie traktowanie personelu, jego stabilność, inicjatywa i esprit de corps (duch organizacji). I do tego jeszcze „piramida uzdolnień”. Brzmi to jakoś znajomo? Taśmy Forda?

Dopiero późniejsze badania Hugo Münsterberga, Abrahama Maslowa i Eltona Mayo wykazały, że jest to ślepy kierunek oddziaływania korporacji na pracowników, szczególnie radzę się zapoznać z „hierarchią potrzeb” Maslowa TU. Ale dla naszego wykładu najważniejsze są badania Thomasa J. Petersa i Roberta H. Watermana, gdy na początku lat 80. powstała tzw. nowa fala w zarządzaniu (new wave), zrodziła się ona pod wpływem upadku wielu znaczących firm amerykańskich i zachodnioeuropejskich po prawie dwudziestoletniej prospericie. Zwolennicy „nowej fali” postanowili sprawdzić, jaki wpływ na utrzymanie się organizacji w kryzysie miała charyzma i zdolności wybitnych jednostek kierujących i jakie znaczenie mają indywidualności na niższych szczeblach zarządzania. Według nich nie system, nie struktura, nawet nie najnowocześniejsze metody, reguły i instrumenty, lecz wyjątkowe i niepowtarzalne jednostki i zespoły gwarantują sukces firmie.

I jesteśmy u naszych baranów. Sukces firmy zależy dzisiaj, w XXI wieku, od stylu kierowania ludźmi. Jest rzeczą zrozumiałą, że podstawą działania organizacji jest produkowanie wysokiej klasy produktów lub świadczenie usług, bazą jednak, na której opiera się ta podstawa, stanowią ludzie, ich wiedza i kwalifikacje, chęć współdziałania i dokonywania pozytywnych zmian w swoim otoczeniu. Aby zmierzyć się z nowymi problemami, dokonać zmian w strukturze firmy, potrzebny jest wysiłek intelektualny ludzi, ich pomysłowość, energia i inteligencja, potrzebne jest ich autentyczne zaangażowanie intelektualne. Zaangażowanie określa stopień identyfikacji pracownika z organizacją, jego gotowość świadczenia pracy na jej rzecz, akceptacja wartości i celów organizacji. Menedżerom potrzebna więc będzie wiedza o zachowaniu się ludzi w firmie i umiejętność postępowania z nimi. Przyszłość – przy powstaniu wyrafinowanych usług i zaawansowanej technologii produkcji – wymagać będzie nowych sposobów organizowania zespołów ludzkich, sposobów bardziej otwartych, niezależnych, tolerancyjnych, o najwyższych kompetencjach. Do podstawowych zadań menedżerów nie będzie jak dotąd kierowanie każdym ruchem kierownika i podległych jemu pracowników, a jedynie (należałoby raczej napisać „aż”) projektowanie reguł gry tak, aby kierownik i pracownicy mogli dać z siebie wszystko, co mają najlepszego, a rozliczani byliby dopiero po zakończeniu swojej pracy. Nie likwiduje to w żaden sposób kontroli ich poczynań przez menedżerów, ale byłaby ona dyskretną, można nazwać patronacką i inspirującą. Związane jest to z angielskim terminem „empowering” oznaczającym proces uprawniania pracowników, w wyniku którego menedżerowie powierzają im nadzór nad pracami, aby mogli wnieść do firmy własną przedsiębiorczość i inwencję.

Inaczej mówiąc w przedsiębiorstwie wzrasta rola swobodnej przedsiębiorczości pracowników, skutecznie konkurująca z monopolem władzy funkcyjnej i kadrowej.

Jak słusznie pisze prof. Józef Penc w swojej książce „Kreowanie zachowań w organizacji. Konflikty i stresy pracownicze. Zmiany i rozwój organizacji”: „Zdrowa organizacja musi zatem wytworzyć nie tylko nowe rodzaje związków ze swoimi klientami i interesariuszami. Musi uznać nadrzędne znaczenie własnych pracowników i poszukiwać możliwości pełnego włączania ich w procesy transformacji i skupiania wysiłków wokół jasnej i porywającej wizji. Musi ich uczyć nowych zachowań i bardziej owocnych stosunków wzajemnych, aby mogli rozwijać i pełniej wykorzystać całe bogactwo swoich możliwości. Musi więc także dbać o to, żeby stosunki między współpracującymi ludźmi układały się harmonijnie, by panował klimat wzajemnego zrozumienia i współpracy, zaufania i otwartej komunikacji, gdyż tylko wówczas będzie można od nich oczekiwać więcej zaangażowania i własnej inicjatywy, działania i postępowania w sposób kreatywny, a także myślenia o potrzebach organizacji”.

W organizacji „uczącej się” zdobyta wiedza przekuwana jest m.in. na zmiany struktury i ról organizacyjnych. Menedżerowie promują eksperymentowanie, przenoszenie szczebli decyzyjnych na coraz niższy poziom, a to powoduje nieuchronną tolerancyjność wobec niepowodzeń. Tak to wypunktowuje M. Bratnicki w swojej książce „Transformacja przedsiębiorstwa”:

wszyscy pracownicy widzą się w charakterze osób uczących się w imieniu firmy, czują się odpowiedzialni nie tylko za swój własny rozwój osobisty, ale również za efektywność funkcjonowania i rozwoju firmy,
zastępuje się tradycyjną relację „przełożony – podwładny” samozarządzaniem, personel podejmuje działania z własnej inicjatywy, kierowanie i kontrolowanie w zakresie pionowej, hierarchicznej struktury personalnej zostaje w sposób widoczny ograniczony,
panuje duch samorozwoju, pracownicy mają przestrzeń do usprawniania swojej pracy, traktowani są jako osoby dojrzałe i odpowiedzialne za swoje czyny,
przedsiębiorstwo funkcjonuje niczym konsorcjum małych jednoosobowych firm prowadzących działalność gospodarczą, każdy swoją pracę traktuje jak prywatny biznes, cała organizacja przypomina wspólny rynek wkomponowany w strategicznej strukturze nośnej.

Istotą nowego układu w nowoczesnej organizacji jest transakcja wymienna: inicjatywa za możliwości. Jest to niesłychanie atrakcyjne dla ludzi zwanych w literaturze „ludźmi nowych wartości”. Ludzie młodzi, dla których firma jest po prostu „atrakcyjnym miejscem pracy”, wymuszają w organizacjach zmiany całego systemu. Posłuszeństwo i pracowitość dla samej pracowitości zaczynają być zbędne, lojalność wobec firmy przestaje być traktowana jako twór kulturowy, a zastępowana zostaje zaangażowaniem ukierunkowanym na sukces. Młodzi pracownicy przychodzą do firmy, w której mogą się rozwijać, udoskonalać swoje umiejętności zawodowe, odczuwać rozszerzanie swoich horyzontów, spełniać się intelektualnie w pracy, czuć radość z dobrze wypełnionego obowiązku nałożonego przez samego siebie, a zgodnego z celami perspektywicznymi organizacji. Młodym ludziom nie zależy na poczuciu bezpieczeństwa pracy, czują się pewni swoich wartości, znają języki obce, przechodzili wielokrotnie staże w renomowanych firmach, także za granicą, szukają spełnienia zawodowego, nie boją się rzucić pracy bez wcześniejszego znalezienia następnej.

Inaczej mówiąc w organizacji przyszłości wzrośnie rola swobodnej przedsiębiorczości pracowników, która będzie skutecznie konkurować z monopolem władzy funkcyjnej i kadrowej. I w ten sposób powstają „nowi pracownicy”, którzy tak denerwują Tes Teqa. Nie chcę Cię w najmniejszym stopniu obrazić, ale ze swoimi poglądami zatrzymałeś się w XX wieku. A mamy – pragnę Cię poinformować – wiek XXI.

Z pozdrowieniami

Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.

2011-11-21T17:08:37Z

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.

In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.

1. You Cannot Bring Your Content In To Facebook

This warning appeared on Facebook two weeks ago to advise publishers (including this site) that syndicate their content to Facebook Notes via RSS that the capability would be removed starting tomorrow. Facebook's proposed remedy involves either completely recreating one's content within Facebook's own Notes feature, or manually creating status updates which link to each post on the original blog. Remember that second option, linking to each post manually — we'll return to it later.

2. Publishers Whose Content Is Captive Are Privileged

Over at CNET, Molly Wood made a powerful case against the proliferation of Facebook apps that enable ongoing, automated sharing of behavior data after only a single approval from a user. In her words:

Now, it's tempting to blame your friends for installing or using these apps in the first place, and the publications like the Post that are developing them and insisting you view their stories that way. But don't be distracted. Facebook is to blame here. These apps and their auto-sharing (and intercepts) are all part of the Open Graph master plan.

When Facebook unveiled Open Graph at the f8 developer conference this year, it was clear that the goal of the initiative is to quantify just about everything you do on Facebook. All your shares are automatic, and both Facebook and publishers can track them, use them to develop personalization tools, and apply some kind of metric to them.

As Molly's piece eloquently explains, what Facebook is calling "frictionless" sharing is actually placing an extremely high barrier to the sharing of links to sites on the web. Ordinary hyperlinks to the rest of the web are stuck in the lower reaches of a user's news feed, competing for bottom position on a news feed whose prioritization algorithm is completely opaque. Meanwhile, sites that foolishly and shortsightedly trust all of their content to live within Facebook's walls are privileged, at the cost of no longer controlling their presence on the web.

3. Web sites are deemed unsafe, even if Facebook monitors them

As you'll notice below, I use Facebook comments on this site, to make it convenient for many people to comment, and to make sure I fully understand the choices they are making as a platform provider. Sometimes I get a handful of comments, but on occasion I see some very active comment threads. When a commenter left a comment on my post about Readability last week, I got a notification message in the top bar of my Facebook page to let me know. Clicking on that notification yielded this warning message:

What's remarkable about this warning message is not merely that an ordinary, simple web content page is being presented as a danger to a user. No, it's far worse:

Facebook is warning its users about the safety of a page which incorporates Facebook's own commenting features, meaning even web sites that embrace Facebook's technologies can be marginalized
Facebook is displaying this warning despite the fact that Facebook's own systems have indexed the page and found that it incorporates their own Open Graph information.

To illustrate this second point, I'll include what is a fairly nerdy illustration for those interested. If you're sufficiently interested in the technical side of this, what's being shown is Facebook's own URL linter, as viewed through the social plugins area in the developer console for a site. In this view, it verifies not only that the Open Graph meta tags are in place (minus an image placeholder, as the referenced post has no images), but that Facebook has crawled the site and verified enough of the content of the page to know their own comment system is in place on the page. (Click to view the whole page, with only the app ID numbers redacted.)

How to Address This Attack

Now, we've shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of web users visit Facebook through relatively open web browsers. For these users, there is a remedy which could effectively communicate the danger that Facebook represents to their web browsing habits, and it would be available to nearly every user except those using Facebook's own clients on mobile platforms.

This is the network of services designed to warn users about dangers on the web, one of the most prominent of which is Stop Badware. From that site comes this description:

Some badware is not malicious in its intent, but still fails to put the user in control. Consider, for example, a browser toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar.

I believe this description clearly describes Facebook's behavior, and strongly urge Stop Badware partners such as Google (whose Safe Browsing service is also used by Mozilla and Apple), as well as Microsoft's similar SmartScreen filter, to warn web users when visiting Facebook. Given that Facebook is consistently misleading users about the nature of web links that they visit and placing barriers to web sites being able to be visited through ordinary web links on their network, this seems an appropriate and necessary remedy for their behavior.

Part of my motivation for recommending this remedy is to demonstrate that our technology industry is capable of regulating and balancing itself when individual companies act in ways that are not in the best interest of the public. It is my sincere hope that this is the case.

When People Use Different Devices

2011-11-22T08:00:00Z

What happens when you look at use of the same digital content or service on different devices? Quite consistently people's behavior changes significantly. To illustrate here's several examples of the same use case on different devices.

This graph shows the number of articles read each hour by Read It Later users on their computer. The number of reads grows more sharply until noon and then begins to fall off until after work (6PM – 9PM).

The second graph shows the number of articles read by iPhone users each hour. There's four major peaks: 6am (breakfast); 9am (the morning commute and start of workday); 5pm – 6pm (end of the work day and the commute home); 8pm – 10pm (couch time, prime time, bed time).

As you can see there's quite a difference between how people read on computers and on mobile devices. The difference is even more significant when you look at when the same articles are read on the iPad.

iPad readers are much more active in the evening from 7-11pm. Once again, the same use case (reading saved articles) results in different behavior with a different device.

The same distinction between tablets and desktops can be seen in weekday consumption of news content by hour of the day. The use of computers is heaviest during work hours while tablet use once again peaks in the late evening.

Comparing a news site's traffic between smartphones and desktop devices also shows a big difference. In this case, the Financial time's Web site sees a higher percent of mobile devices in the morning and a dominance of desktop devices during the day.

The opposite pattern seems to be true on the social networking site, LinkedIn. LinkedIn's mobile traffic increases towards the end of the day. Likely when people are leaving work disgruntled and searching for a new job!

Even without a common service, different devices lead to different behaviors. Looking at how long a random laptop, tablet, or smartphone is connected to a 3G network shows a distinction between the number and length of online sessions.

As these examples illustrate, the type of device clearly influences when people use distinct types of content and services. It's going to be really interesting to see how these behaviors change as networked consumer devices continue to evolve.

The Role of Environment

A number of folks have suggested that this data indicates different environments are responsible for the use of different devices. For example, the early morning spike of mobile devices on the Financial Times is a result of people reading on their commute in to work and the evening peak of tablet use for news sites is people reading at home. While environment can certainly play a role in device selection and use, there's no location data included in these examples. As a result, these explanations are inferred.

People may be reading the Financial Times on mobile during their morning commute or they could be reading it first thing in the morning because their mobile is on their bedside table when they wake up. Looking at this data, we can't say for sure. The only thing we can tell for certain is that different devices are being used at different times throughout the day. Environment may be the primary reason for that but this data doesn't definitively tell us that.

Tags: devices, mobile, metrics, diagrams, visualizations

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2011-11-18T16:08:47Z

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jQuery Mobile 1.0 Final Released

2011-11-19T09:22:26Z

Following a year of thorough testing and debugging by 125 contributors, the final gold version of jQuery Mobile has been released. If you’re developing mobile applications for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Bada, Windows, WebOS, Symbian or MeeGo, you should certainly investigate what jQuery Mobile offers.

Before we go any further, I should clear up some confusion. Despite the name, jQuery Mobile is not jQuery for mobiles! It’s an interface framework which requires the standard jQuery core (1.6.4 is supported at this time). It could be likened to jQuery UI for mobile devices or, more accurately, projects such as Sencha Touch.

In essence, jQuery mobile helps you build cross-platform mobile web applications using HTML5. Common elements such as pages, toolbars, dialogs, lists, navigation and form fields are styled and transformed into an attractive iPhone-inspired mobile interface.

Impressively, jQuery Mobile provides A-grade support for all modern platforms including: iOS 3.2+, Android 2.1+, Windows Phone 7+, Blackberry 6+, WebOS 1.4+, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile 11, Meego 1.2, Kindle 3 and Kindle Fire. Lesser browsers such as Blackberry 5, Opera Mini, and Symbian will work but features such as Ajax navigation may be disabled. Older browsers will still receive a functional, non-enhanced HTML-only experience.

A-grade support also extends to the desktop editions of IE (7+), Chrome, Firefox and Opera. That should make testing significantly easier for developers.

How to use jQuery Mobile

The jQuery documentation is impressive:

Those with a little HTML experience can implement basic multi-page templates and transitions using markup alone:


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
	<title>My Page</title>
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0/jquery.mobile-1.0.min.css" />
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.4.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0/jquery.mobile-1.0.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="one" data-role="page">
	<div data-role="header">
		<h1>Page One</h1>
	</div>
	<div data-role="content">
		<p>Hello world</p>
		<p><a href="#two" data-role="button"data-transition="slide">Show page 2</a></p>
	</div>
</div>
<div id="two" data-role="page">
	<div data-role="header">
		<h1>Page Two</h1>
	</div>
	<div data-role="content">
		<p>Hello again</p>
		<p><a href="#one" data-role="button">Show page 1</a></p>
	</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Those requiring more sophistication can access the API to configure the defaults, define events and modify themes.

Building Your Own Theme

If you’re not keen on the subtle blue and gray iPhone design, the theme can be tweaked using CSS. If that’s a little too much effort, try the ThemeRoller application. The whole design can be modified by dragging colors on to interface elements and downloading the customized CSS file.

Suitable File Sizes?

jQuery Mobile’s JavaScript code is contained in a 24KB minified and gzipped file. A further 7KB is required for the CSS theme and 32KB for the jQuery 1.6.4 core. That’s a total of 63KB — a reasonable download for the slowest of connections. Don’t forget that you’ll probably require fewer graphics too.

jQuery Mobile looks great. It won’t magically convert your existing project to a mobile app but it’ll make the task far easier, more reliable and it’ll work on multiple devices.

Are you intending to use jQuery Mobile in your next project?

The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience

2011-11-15T16:12:38Z

There are many ways to skin a redesign (I think that’s how the saying goes). On a philosophical level, I agree with those who advocate for realigning, not redesigning, but these are mere words when you’re staring a design problem in the face with no idea where to start. This article came out of my own questions about how to make the realignment philosophy practical and apply it to my day-to-day work — especially when what’s needed is more than a few tweaks to the website here and there.

I propose an approach to redesign through realignment, by using a framework adapted from Edward Tufte’s principles on the visual display of quantitative information.

But first, a little context.

Redesign Through Realignment

Let’s recap the redesign versus realign argument. Here is Cameron Moll in “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign”:

The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven. One approach seeks merely to refresh, the other aims to fully reposition and may or may not include a full refresh.

A realignment can include a full refresh, but the starting point is not the visual layer. The starting point is an understanding of the website’s users and their objectives, of market trends and of brand strategy. These are the hard questions that guide a realignment — not a desire to try out some new fonts or see whether a +1 button would look good on the home page.

But surely a visual refresh can be beneficial, too? What’s the danger in giving users something new to look at? In an essay that builds on Cameron’s article, Francisco Inchauste sums up the problem as follows:

Great designers adjust an existing work with little disruption of the foundational design for a goal or purpose. The end result is a modification to the design that improves the user experience. Good designers, on the other hand, recreate existing work focusing on the aesthetic, with a misunderstood notion that it will always improve it. However, they end up disrupting and/or damaging the user’s experience, making no real impact with the effort.

The main problem with big redesigns, therefore, is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase of John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.

So, if we agree that a realignment is preferable to a redesign (and I’m sure we never will, but let’s assume we do for the sake of this article), a big question remains unanswered: What happens when a realignment requires major changes to the website? What happens when small tweaks aren’t enough, when a website’s UX is so far gone that you’re tempted to scrap everything and start over?

One way to go about it is to use a continual realignment process to redesign the website. Build a vision, and know where you’re going in the long term; but get there incrementally, not with a big-bang release. Remaining rooted in the realignment approach ensures that the focus remains purpose-driven, even if the process results in major visual changes. “That’s fine,” you say, “but how do you do it? Where do you begin with such a project?” Let’s now look at one possible approach to redesigning through realignment.

Edward Tufte And The Data-Ink Ratio

I’ve always been intrigued by Edward Tufte’s principles for visualizing large quantities of data. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite books of all time. Recently, I’ve been wondering whether its principles could be applied to Web design and, specifically, the realignment process. The deeper I got into it, the more I realized that within Tufte’s principles lies a goldmine for people who make websites.

One of Tufte’s central principles in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is what he calls data-ink:

Data-Ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented.

Before we unpack what this means for Web design, it’s important to note that Tufte’s work applies specifically to information graphics and the display of quantitative data, not to the design of graphical user interfaces. However, when carefully interpreted and applied to the field of Web design, the principles are extremely useful.

With that in mind, I propose the concept of data-pixels for the design of user interfaces to mirror Tufte’s data-ink for information graphics. In the context of Web design, we can then think of data-pixels as the simplest and most desirable path that a user can take through a flow (the “non-erasable core of an interface”). It is what would remain in “focus mode” — if nothing else existed on the screen, just the design elements that enable users to get from one screen to the next.

For example, on a payment screen, data-pixels would be the credit-card fields, text labels and “Pay now” button. Nothing else. This is obviously not possible — you need headers, payment summaries, tooltips, trust seals, etc. But the “core data” are the elements of the page that we cannot remove without the user getting stuck with no ability to recover.

From this irreducible point of the design, you can start to add other elements as necessary, and this is what Tufte’s work is all about. Much of what Tufte espouses is finding the right data-ink ratio (or what we’ll call data-pixel ratio) for quantitative data, so that the core data can shine through. He lays out five principles for data-ink. Here is an overview and how these principles can be adapted to redesign through realignment.

Principle 1: Above All Else, Show the Data

Data graphics should draw the viewer’s attention to the sense and substance of the data, not to something else.

– Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

During a realignment, we should be guided by the principle that every page should be focused on the core data and the primary task that users need to take in that particular flow. Anything else is noise and should be added only after very careful consideration.

Craig Mod has written a great article titled “The Shape of Our Future Book.” In it, he describes the “quiet confidence” that a Kindle has when it is woken from its sleep state (compared to the iPad in particular), and then he addresses the data-pixel issue as follows:

I think the same concept of “quiet confidence” can be applied to data. Namely, in designing user experiences, we need to produce data that doesn’t draw attention to itself explicitly as data.

This doesn’t mean that design has to be boring or that aesthetics are not important. It means that we need to be mindful that any layer of design we add to the core data has to serve a specific function and cannot distract from the data itself.

Image credit: Sarah Blake

Principle 2: Erase Non-Data Pixels, Within Reason

While it is true that these boring [pixels] sometimes help set the stage for the data action, it is surprising […] how often the [pixels] themselves can serve as their own stage.

– Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Once the context for the realignment is set by the overarching principle of focusing on core data, it’s time to evaluate the design and start improving the data-pixel ratio.

The first step is to look for ways to erase non-data pixels — the parts of the design that don’t directly apply to the user’s primary task. Look for elements that cannot be connected to guiding a user to the desired outcome, such as:

Colors that don’t support the visual hierarchy through contrast;
Typefaces that draw attention to themselves for no good reason;
Gratuitous imagery (stock photography in particular) that does nothing more than break up the page (consider using white space and proximity grouping to create natural breaks instead);
Alignment, sizes and color contrast that draw unwanted attention (for example, indented paragraphs, large social-media icons, a bright ad that doesn’t fit the website’s visual style).

One website that could certainly benefit from the removal of non-data pixels is doHome. Notice the gratuitous reflection of the navigation menu, the unnecessary stock photography, and the fact that so little content on the page tells you what the website is about:

MailChimp does a good job of limiting the non-data pixels on its sign-up page. Clear language indicates what to do; large fields with top-aligned labels ensure that you complete the form quickly; some information is included about the plan you’re signing up for; and the button to sign up is big and high-contrast.

Squarespace’s sign-up page removes as much non-data pixels as possible to put all the focus on the task at hand. The background disappears as soon as you click the “Sign up” link, and you’re presented with the following zero-distraction form:

Google+ is another example of a design that employs minimal non-data pixels. As Oliver Reichenstein says:

It is extremely difficult to keep a complicated user interface so light, white and free of lines, boxes and ornaments. The content hierarchy is always clear, color definitions and consistent and clear without labeling them.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it illustrates the purpose of the principle: to critically evaluate the visual elements in order to strip out what isn’t necessary.

Principle 3: Erase Redundant Data-Pixels, Within Reason

Gratuitous decoration and reinforcement of the data measures generate much redundant data-[pixels].

– Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

“Redundant data-pixels” refer to elements of the design that are repeated without good reason. Some examples:

Rows of products in a table with an “Add to cart” button next to each one.
(Consider using check boxes, with one “Add to cart” button at the bottom.)
Animation as a way to draw attention to an element.
(Consider using high-contrast color and size instead.)
“Are you sure you want to do this?” dialogs for simple tasks such as adding a product to a cart.
(For potentially catastrophic actions, like deleting an account, this type of dialog is, of course, appropriate.)

Below is an example from the offline word, courtesy of Allan Kent. The chart shows the price of parking per hour. Surely a simple sign that reads “R10 per hour” would suffice?

Note the addition of “within reason” to each of the data-pixel principles. Tufte himself acknowledges that redundant pixels are sometimes necessary:

Redundancy, upon occasion, has its uses: giving a context and order to complexity, facilitating comparisons over various parts of the data, perhaps creating an aesthetic balance.

The exception, then, is when, in Tufte’s words again, “redundancy has a distinctly worthy purpose”. A “Pay now” button at the top and bottom of a check-out page could be an example of this. One of the buttons is redundant, yet it introduces efficiency so that users don’t have to scroll up or down to place their order.

The guiding principle here is to strive for a minimalist aesthetic, adding redundant pixels only when they serve a larger purpose (for example, when they’re essential to the brand’s promise or to user efficiency).

Principle 4: Maximize the Data-Pixel Ratio, Within Reason

Every [pixel] on a graphic requires a reason. And nearly always that reason should be that the [pixel] presents new information.

– Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Once you’ve erased as many non-data pixels and redundant data pixels as possible, the next step is to figure out what (if anything) is missing from the design. The goal of this principle is to add more pixels to the design, if necessary.

There should always be a reason for adding elements to a design, and the reason will usually be that those elements provide information and/or functionality that increases usability. Some examples:

Breadcrumbs that tell users where they are on the website and give them an easy way to get back to where they came from.
An aesthetic layer of color, typography, layout and so on, to ensure consistency between brand perception and the website.
Hover states or tooltips to provide appropriate guidance or contextual help to users.

An example of necessary pixels is relevant inline error messages. Consider the sign-up form on Quora below. Very few non-data pixels are on the page. The form’s layout is simple, with no extraneous decoration. But if you try to enter only your first name, the page instantly reminds you that a full name is required:

One could argue that this isn’t technically part of the “core data” of the design. Quora could have let this slide and either allowed accounts with first names only or sorted it out after users have signed up. But it has decided that data integrity is important from the start, so it has added this real-time check.

A little closer to home, this is what the header of kalahari.com (where I currently work) looked like when I started at the company:

Identifying the non-data pixels in this design is easy: very large radii on the rounded corners, color that grabs too much attention, too many unimportant links, etc. After maximizing the data-pixel ratio to put the focus on the core data (which is search), we ended up with this header:

Principle 5: Revise and Edit

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

– T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932

Tufte quotes T.S. Eliot to describe the relentless effort of editing and revising in graphic design work, and it’s certainly true for Web design.

Once you’ve completed a cycle through these principles, it’s time to go back and start again. Every realignment cycle exposes new opportunities to “above all else, show the data”. UX is a never-ending cycle of improvement, and following a realignment process bakes this constant cycle into the strategy in a very natural way.

Summary

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are many approaches to redesigning a website. The hardest part often is knowing how and where to start. As I’ve shown, Edward Tufte’s timeless principles for the visual display of data can be adjusted and used as a framework to get over that initial hump and serve as a catalyst for a cycle of continual improvement through realignment.

What other models or approaches are there to frame a realignment project? How do you get started?

Front page image source: Elliot Jay Stocks

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