Archives for category: Technology

Refueling the Engine

March 10, 08 //
11

It’s been sev­eral months since I’ve writ­ten on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Inter­net time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fin­gers across the key­board and pub­lished some­thing of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a posi­tion with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their net­work of sites. My first thought was; they pay peo­ple to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thank­ful for the friend­ships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my per­sonal life is con­cerned we’re plug­ging along quite nicely. My daugh­ter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve fol­lowed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been main­tain­ing it this is a huge mile­stone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they man­age to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expect­ing another child as well so there are more adven­tures to look for­ward to.

Speak­ing of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stag­nant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describ­ing some sort of post-mortem. Mov­ing on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expres­sion Engine to use as the engine of this site. One rea­son for set­tling on EE is because I’ve used it spar­ingly in the past for projects and the road map of fea­ture addi­tions & inter­face enhance­ments (as show­cased at SXSW ’08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other rea­son is I had din­ner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own artic­u­la­tion and excite­ment I myself became utterly con­vinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incred­i­ble and infor­ma­tive resource on all that is Expres­sion Engine, oh, and he offers train­ing course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I real­ize that and it both­ers me, but, it’s clear to me that the pro­gres­sion of this site is to become some­thing more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.

 

Hacked!

June 6, 07 //
17

For those who aren’t aware Dreamhost expe­ri­enced a secu­rity breach. Accord­ing to Dreamhost, approx­i­mately 3,500 accounts were com­pro­mised, the hack­ers tak­ing note of FTP user accounts, user names and passwords.

With this data the hack­ers, using an auto­mated script of some sort, added SEO links/inframes to every instance of index.html or php.

This is the last straw. I’ve been with Dreamhost since mid-2004 and rec­om­mended them on more than one occa­sion and even went so far as defend­ing them when oth­ers com­plained about slow ser­vice or half-baked cus­tomer sup­port, the lat­ter being some­thing I never experienced.

Not any more. It’s time to look for a new home.

Over the past two hours I’ve had to comb over my files, look­ing for any­thing that could have been stolen and to my knowl­edge some files might have been removed.

Not only that, but the pass­word I used was one of the best pass­words I’ve used in a long time and now, thanks to this, I have to piece together a franken-mash of numbers.

It’s sad because while I rep­re­sent, accord­ing to DH, only .15% of the cus­tomers whose data was changed in some way, I just wish some­thing could’ve been done to pre­vent this.

Yet, who am I to say that web host­ing is safe from this kind of thing, which appar­ently it isn’t. I sup­pose I wanted to believe that they were impen­e­tra­ble, even if that was a pre­ma­ture wish.

The cul­prits added inframes and link­age point­ing to off­shore sites dis­play­ing gar­bled infor­ma­tion; SEO tac­tics indeed.

On the bright side of things, my entries are safe, every one of them accounted for since 2004. This wasn’t an issue really con­sid­er­ing I’ve kept back­ups of my DB since the begin­ning and make it habit to do it frequently.

I’m also plan­ning on mov­ing to a new CMS and will be tak­ing the entries with me to pre­serve for the future, when robots make swiss cheese sand­wiches with George For­man machines.

Does any­one out there have any sug­ges­tions for a new host? 

Joost!

April 24, 07 //
122

Update: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Joost allow­ing unlim­ited invites every­one who added a com­ment and those who leave a com­ment from this point on will receive an invite.

Joost [logo]For weeks on end I’ve been patiently wait­ing for a Joost beta invite. Why am I so excited about some­thing that on the sur­face seems like Tivo™ for the web?

There’s an easy answer for that, so let me spill it. Before I do that how­ever, I’d like to thank Paul for send­ing me the invite.

Joost Oozes With Quality

It doesn’t take a spe­cial decoder ring to fig­ure out what Joost does. The offi­cial site describes its func­tion­al­ity quite perfectly:

The magic of tele­vi­sion, with the power of the inter­net built right in. Joost puts you in con­trol, and TV will never be the same again.

This could be con­strued as a bold claim, as if the creators/developers/masterminds (the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Skype and Kazaa) behind this oper­a­tion could not pos­si­bly con­vince them­selves otherwise.

Yet, when you con­nect the dots, eval­u­at­ing the whole enchi­lada for a ser­vice like this (brand­ing, web site and tech­nol­ogy) you can’t help but be enthralled by the polish.

Spec­trums, Rain­bows and Magic

Have you ever looked through a spec­trum? There’s a infi­nite amount of col­ors that appear if you hold one up to a light source. It’s inter­est­ing that the cre­ators of Joost chose to theme their ser­vice around the con­cept of spec­trums and color vari­ety. Although, I must admit they do look a bit like col­ored Kryp­tonite, not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Ear­lier today I was doing my best to describe the pro­mo­tional video on the What’s Joost? sec­tion to a friend. Halfway into explain­ing how cool it was I real­ized it’s just one of those things you have to see for yourself.

At first glance the demon­stra­tion video seems a bit awk­ward, or at least it did to me. After watch­ing it I real­ized it seems famil­iar and that’s because it’s some­what like a med­ley of Bat­ter­ies Not Included, Cocoon, The Last Starfighter and Tron. Like I said, you need to see it first­hand because my descrip­tion just won’t cut it.

Beta Means Slim Pickings

I would say that my only beef with the ser­vice is that the chan­nel offer­ings are slim at best and the video out­put ranges from near DVD qual­ity to sub par Youtube qual­ity. One moment it looks great, the next it just dis­tracts from the over­all expe­ri­ence but I’m sure in time it’ll improve.

As far as the con­tent is con­cerned other than watch­ing some “vin­tage” Ren & Stimpy car­toons with my daugh­ter and a cou­ple Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel spe­cials on lions and pyra­mids, there’s noth­ing else that peaks my inter­est for the time being.

That will change as Joost con­tin­ues to sign con­tent providers but in the interim there just isn’t a lot to con­sume at the moment. Although, this is still in beta so that’s just par for the course. Joost has promised to con­tinue sign­ing con­tent providers; for instance, they just added a vari­ety of shows from providers like Com­edy Cen­tral, VH1 (the chan­nel you switch on when you’re bored, or, at least I do) and MTV.

Beta Invites

If you haven’t expe­ri­ence Joost yet, well, that’s just not right. I’ll tell you what, leave a com­ment and I’ll use the magic of the inter­nets (and a handy script to ran­domly select a num­ber) to choose three lucky peo­ple to send an invite to.

Ready, set, go! 

The Influence of Art in Design

March 2, 07 //
9

Over the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve eluded to the fact that I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel at this year’s SXSWi called The Influ­ence of Art in Design.

Here’s a descrip­tion of the panel (straight from the horse’s mouth):

Fine arts have long held a sub­tle, yet influ­en­tial grip on both infor­ma­tion and design. From car­toons, illus­tra­tions, dig­i­tal art, pho­tog­ra­phy and more, you’ll hear first­hand from some of the best in their fields, have a chance to explore the past, present, and future of the tech­niques that you see around the web, and how it can improve your own work and get both sides of the brain work­ing bet­ter together.

Turn­ing Thoughts into Reality

To backpedal a bit, before I made the com­mit­ment to go to last year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence — my first visit — I made a promise to myself that come the next con­fer­ence I would be on a panel. Cer­tainly it’s fun to actively par­tic­i­pate as an observer, but to present your thoughts to peo­ple, to engage them, to make them think and all said and done, if they can get some­thing out of what you’re say­ing, well, that’s say­ing something.

I kept that thought in the back of my mind, that I would some­how, using some force of nature have the oppor­tu­nity to be up there amongst a group of my peers and share some­thing, even if at the time I hadn’t any idea of what that might be.

Months later dur­ing a late night IM con­ver­sa­tion with Anton Peck he men­tioned the con­cept of the panel to me and it didn’t take much con­vinc­ing on his part, I was hooked..

The Dream Team

Next week I will be shar­ing meat­space with the fol­low­ing creative-minded people:

Come join us on Sat­ur­day, March 10th (11:30–12:30pm) and be sure to mark it on your SXSW cal­en­dar.

It’s a win-win; you’ll have a blast, learn a thing or two and I can gen­uinely promise your cre­ativ­ity will kick into overdrive. 

High-rise Evacuation Methods

January 25, 07 //
5

There was an A&E doc­u­men­tary on the World Trade Cen­ter the other night, discussing–as well as criticizing–the early plan­ning phases and con­struc­tion of the WTC.

It also focused some­what on the short­com­ings of the WTC, such as stair­wells hug­ging the core of the build­ing pro­vid­ing what they thought was extra sta­bil­ity, that led to so many civil­ian casu­al­ties dur­ing the 2001 attacks.

There was obvi­ous con­cern over the meth­ods used for high-rise build­ing evac­u­a­tion. In most cases stair­ways are used, pro­vided that they are in work­ing con­di­tion. The planes that struck the WTC build­ings destroyed a large por­tion of the stairs which in turn con­tributed to the lack of proper evacuation.

As I watch­ing this, I was think­ing about bet­ter ways for effi­cient and safe evac­u­a­tion dur­ing high-rise build­ing emer­gen­cies. One solu­tion (not nec­es­sary fail­safe) that occurred to me was an enclosed slide that essen­tially loops around the build­ing. The slide itself would be oiled so that when groups of indi­vid­u­als are prepar­ing to evac­u­ate, they descend in such a man­ner where clog­ging of the slide would be prevented.

Again, not a fail­safe method of course, but I believe one that doesn’t rely on the short­com­ings that occur with stair­ways. If you’ve ever used the stairs in a high-rise build­ing you know that this isn’t an effi­cient means of get­ting peo­ple out of the build­ing in a timely fash­ion, espe­cially dur­ing an emer­gency when peo­ple typ­i­cally lose the abil­ity to think sensibly.

Yet, when I was think­ing about this I real­ized that using a slide could also lead to over­sights in the process of evac­u­a­tion. It’s pos­si­ble that like the stairs in the WTC build­ing, a por­tion of the slide could also be destroyed. That said, it’s dif­fi­cult to try and come up with var­i­ous ways to effi­ciently trans­port peo­ple out of a build­ing and at the same time mak­ing sure the means of doing so are safe and expedient.

There are other meth­ods such as zip lines (think James Bond or the mil­i­tary), extend­able slides and chute sys­tems that could work but again, which of these would actu­ally work when the real thing occurs, as opposed to just test­ing them in labs.

I per­son­ally don’t think we’ve found a per­fect sys­tem yet, despite how much tech­nol­ogy has improved in the past 20 years, and I don’t feel like we ever will.

What should be stressed how­ever is that we need to have alter­nate ways of evac­u­at­ing peo­ple from struc­tures to pre­vent mas­sive casu­al­ties when an emer­gency occurs. 

How I came to tolerate MySpace

June 20, 06 //
11

For years I’ve held off open­ing up, or rather cre­at­ing a MySpace account:“kartooner on Myspace(View my pro­file on MySpace)”:http://www.myspace.com/kartooner purely for rea­sons to pre­vent exploit­ing myself or others.

How­ever, I came to the real­iza­tion that when you look past the neg­a­tive aspects and focus instead on the pos­i­tive out­come of recon­nect­ing with peo­ple that you might have lost touch with, well then it doesn’t seem so bad.

In fact, it’s safe to say that despite the count­less amount of good and bad press, which any good jour­nal­ist or sane per­son would tell you is just effort­less adver­tis­ing, there are a lot of inter­est­ing out­comes that occur when you set up your own space on the web.

To me, MySpace is a messy com­bi­na­tion of per­sonal jour­nal and media, mixed together with self expres­sion and some­times self reflec­tion. If one were to attempt to map Myspace it would prob­a­bly be nei­ther here nor there.

Frankly, it’s a phe­nom­e­non that would sound won­der­ful on paper or pitched to in front of a group of investors, but in it of itself it’s like a swap meet of indi­vid­u­als com­ing from var­i­ous social, eth­nic, reli­gious and cul­tural back­grounds on dis­play for the world to see, a messy one at that.

It’s also a poten­tially dan­ger­ous breed­ing ground for stalk­ers, but that light has already been shone many times by the media and it’s not worth revis­it­ing that haz­ard since it steers the pur­pose of this arti­cle in another direction.

Back on topic, it’s worth not­ing that within 3 days of acti­vat­ing an account on MySpace — as well as mak­ing it pretty thanks to Mike Davidson’s Hack­ing a More Taste­ful Myspace — I’ve recon­nected with peo­ple that I lost touch with 4 to 5 years ago and that alone is remark­able con­sid­er­ing I felt it’d be dif­fi­cult to do so otherwise.

The thought of con­tact­ing and recon­nect­ing with peo­ple from my past, the major­ity of them from high school, has always been in the back of my mind, but the con­ver­sa­tion starter, for exam­ple; “How I’d approach the per­son or begin the con­ver­sa­tion” always seemed a bit dif­fi­cult. Also, there never really seems like a good moment to do so and the notion that it might be awk­ward as such can make what would oth­er­wise seem appro­pri­ate and good willed turn into some­thing con­trived or put on.

Sad to say, but Myspace has allowed me to jump right in and test the waters. To show friends from my past that I really do care despite the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For that, I can for­give the site for being a mess from a func­tion­al­ity stand­point and instead remained focused on sift­ing through the vast resource of indi­vid­u­als and egnited friend­ships from yesteryear. 

Teachers, Wii and Spore

May 18, 06 //
8

Here are a few ran­dom thoughts that I’ve had through­out this week, that on their own could poten­tially be expanded, but for the time being will remain in crys­tal­lized form:

Ele­men­tary Schools and Teachers

ChalkboardEver since I accepted a posi­tion work­ing as a cleaner (jan­i­tor, cus­to­dian, slop mop guy) at an ele­men­tary school I’ve gained a new per­spec­tive and greater appre­ci­a­tion in regards to every­thing that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to work­ing at an ele­men­tary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actu­ally ran, see­ing as though my last encounter with a pee­wee edu­ca­tional fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the cur­tain and real­ize that teach­ers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bit­ter­sweet human ele­ment to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you real­ize why schools con­tin­u­osly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teach­ers them­selves, who in turn are modi­vated by their student’s achieve­ments, which fuels their inner pas­sion to edu­cate, look­ing past the spit­balls and dirty looks, know­ing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was think­ing how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a com­puter in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fin­ger­tips, said teacher can instan­ta­neously look up unlim­ited sub­ject mat­ter, print or project, and con­tribute end­less amounts of infor­ma­tion to the edu­ca­tion process.

It’s really fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depend­ing on if you were good or not, Ore­gon Trail with buf­falo shoot­ing action all at a gru­el­ing pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been think­ing about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed con­sole, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), see­ing as though the con­sole and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

How­ever, after think­ing about it some I’ve grown to actu­ally love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Espe­cially after see­ing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no deny­ing the fact that you’re no longer just play­ing, but par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your aver­age TV remote but rec­og­nizes 3D space and move­ment. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appear­ing out of thin air, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing and unde­ni­ably mouth water­ing about Will Wright’s newest sim cre­ation, Spore, that has the media and blo­gos­phere and maybe your neigh­bors in a gam­ing frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way peo­ple look at sim­u­la­tion games, it’s going to turn the gam­ing realm upside down. From the pre­views to demo footage and demon­stra­tions given by Wright him­self, it appears to be a mish mash of evo­lu­tion, cre­ation, old school gam­ing, clay mod­el­ing, strat­egy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Sim­c­ity and Populous. 

SXSW: Days One and Two

March 13, 06 //
5

Admit­tedly, I’m a bit behind as far as my planned “psuedo-real-time” updates for SXSW 2006. The rea­son for this is twofold. One, because I’m still jet­lagged from last Thurs­day and haven’t got­ten a lot of sleep and two, there’s been so much going on that it’s been dif­fi­cult — at least for me — to pin­point what to write about exactly.

That said, it makes sense to tell you that while I’ve been hav­ing a blast here in Austin, TX with newly made friends, I also miss my fam­ily. My daugh­ter is only two years of age and has been ask­ing about my where­abouts since I left. I’m not sure how to han­dle that, but I’ll say that she, along with my wife and new son, have been on my mind alot.

Apart from that, it’s been extremely reward­ing to par­tic­i­pate in these pan­els and for once in my life to pay atten­tion to what’s being said with­out drift­ing off into a trance. A wealth of infor­ma­tion is being shared by industry-leading peo­ple, many of whom I admire.

That in itself is par­tic­u­larly cool espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that up until a few days ago I only asso­ci­ated myself with var­i­ous atten­dees and pre­sen­ters solely by dig­i­tal means (ie IM’ing, email, Skype, etc.) instead of hav­ing face-to-face conversations.

I’m not sure that I’ll go into extreme detail about the pan­els I’ve attended because it would only be a rehash of what’s been dis­cussed on sites already. Rather, I’ll just say that what I’ve got­ten from these pan­els is not only knowl­edge of design, code and busi­ness prac­tices and tech­niques, but also a new­found appre­ci­a­tion for those who are at the fore­front of all this, express­ing their opin­ions and knowl­edge with a great deal of pas­sion and understanding.

As far as the peo­ple I’ve met and had the oppor­tu­nity to chat with, they’ve all shared the same char­ac­ter­is­tics that I noted above, but most notably pas­sion, which dri­ves most of us towards our intended (or unin­tended) goals.

Sure, there’s the notion that a good major­ity of the atten­dees of SXSW are here for net­work­ing pur­poses and that fits within the con­text of the event, but there’s another ele­ment here that’s dif­fi­cult to iso­late. The fact that most peo­ple want to put a face to what­ever online per­sona they’ve become famil­iar with due to blogs, com­mu­ni­ties and forums.

It makes peo­ple more com­fort­able to actu­ally share a con­ver­sa­tion in per­son instead of just rec­og­niz­ing an avatar or nick­name and then shoot­ing an email off, hop­ing for a mean­ing­ful reply.

I’ve got­ten more from the human aspect of this con­fer­ence than what would oth­er­wise be attend­ing a few pan­els and exchang­ing busi­ness cards. This is a life chang­ing event and I know the true effect and end result will grow expo­nen­tially over time.