Note to modern web designers: since the displays are becoming wide and short, please do not squander vertical screen space. Here’s a good example of what not to do:
Viewed full size, you see a window that is 705 pixels tall. The OS claims 24 pixels, the web browser claims 90 pixels, and the web application claims 250 pixels. So, by the time you hit the actual content, 50% of the window has been wasted!
Squinting into a tiny pane to read news makes me angry. Google, you can do way way better than this!
Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the Internet’s birth. First word was LO:
And then, he shows us the world’s first router, which they were going to throw out:
My first experience of the Internet was a 1200 baud dialup connection to a USENET host that connected upstream twice a day at 2400 baud. That would have been around 1992 or 1993. (I was a broke highschool kid who couldn’t afford the $30/mo+ for a proper Internet connection.) My first email address was dannyman@netwrk21.chi.il.us, and I lost that address when my network uplink failed to pay his phone bill. Oh well!
When I started college in January, 1995, and had access to labs and labs and labs of computers directly connected via Ethernet, with Mosaic and Netscape installed, it was like I had found my Nerd Nirvana! It only got better when I took a C programming course on the Sun workstations in the basement of the DCL . . .
A friend posted a link about some iPad App that will show you recipes. My reaction was one of being condescendingly underwhelmed, and here’s the gist of what I’d really like to see in a “cookbook app”:
“Will it plan a week’s menus based on seasonal ingredients and give you a shopping list? Because that’s the fucking time-consuming part the computers need to fix.
Any clown can convert a menu book to an App . . . and any clown can find a recipe, drive to the store, spend 45 minutes trying to find some ingredient they don’t know about which is out of season, pay a bunch of money, get home, if they still have the energy maybe cook something sorta edible . . .
. . . but this being the 21st century, an electronic cookbook ought to be able to suggest recipes for you based on the ingredients you have ready access to. (In your pantry, in your growing region, partner with a supermarket…) I have found a website that does a mediocre job of this. This thing is begging to be invented.
Anyway, what I’m saying is–cookbooks in an app–that’s like lets transcribe 15th century technology into silicon. I say hell no, with all this information technology let’s leverage the information to really make it easy for the people to cook healthy, inexpensive meals at home. THAT is the revolution that will make us all better off.”
JIRA is an issue tracking system that is really flexible, but sometimes presents irritatingly arbitrary limitations.
I have been working on a screen which uses multiple tabs. The tabs are there to make it easier for the user to find the fields they want to edit, without scrolling through a single long, complex issue. But every tab has a Comment field rendered on it, which makes things confusing, and makes each tab look like it needs scrolling.
So, just remove the Comment field from the Screen, right? No, it isn’t in there. So, can I remove Comment via the Field Configuration Scheme? No, it is mandatory. Damn your arbitrary limitation, JIRA!
Anyway, I don’t normally speak JavaScript, but I managed to gin up the following snippet to paste into a Field description which appears in the screen I wanted to tweak. It finds the element containing the Comment, and sets its style display attribute to none. As the page loads, the Comment box is rendered, but once the page load completes, the Comment box disappears.
What is a CDN? A Content Delivery Network is a service that caches parts of your web site at different points around the world. This makes your web site load faster in foreign countries, and it reduces load on your server, which is really useful if there’s a traffic spike.
Why is it free? Apparently, they started as a honey pot. A honey pot is a trap where you leave something sweet out for spammers and hackers, who will come and try to taste your honey. The honey pot keeps track of where the bad guys are coming from and what techniques they are using, and this data is then analysed to improve security. They also have a bunch of apps they can sell you, and honestly when you’re looking for a paid service for your company, the first thing that will come to mind is the service you already use for your personal stuff.
I personally have never set up a CDN before, but it has always sounded like a pain in the rear. So, I was pleased to see that Cloudflare made it braindead simple: they did a pretty good job of guessing out the contents of my DNS zone file, which I was later allowed to upload in full, then a quick update of my registrar’s NS records and yes, I was using Cloudflare inside of 5 minutes.
How does it work? It basically replaces your world-facing, web-serving A records with its own IPs, which it then answers HTTP/1.1 style. If you need dedicated IPs for SSL, that costs money. You set some A records to go straight to your server, so you can, for example, use SSH. It hands out the same IPs around the world, then magic network routing that I haven’t learned about takes care of the rest.
You're sharing IPs now, so HTTP/1.1 will work fine, but you'll need to set aside an A record if you need direct access.
Configure your A records: orange clouds will be fronted by CloudFlare, grey clouds will go straight home.
So, is it faster? Results from just-ping.com look very promising. I see an average latency of 62ms for CloudFlare versus an average latency of 144ms for direct access to my server in Chicago.
This shows two things. First, CloudFlare thoroughly reduces my latency anywhere outside Chicago. Second, and really just interesting for the biggest nerds, just-ping’s first Chicago node is closer to CloudFlare’s Chicago node, and just-ping’s second Chicago node is closer to my RackSpace-hosted Chicago node.
Okay, what about actual page-loading time? Well, I just happened to be doing some basic latency testing last month. Here’s what page load looked like in Google Chrome then:
Google Chrome's Developer Tool Network view last month.
Here’s what a page load from California looks like just now:
Page load time from California with CloudFlare enabled.
So, a basic test shows that the initial round trips go from 275ms to 136ms, and the total page load time is reduced by about 1/3. Now, the difference between 750ms and 500ms isn’t a huge deal, but the second you step overseas it makes a big difference. Above you see that the latency from my server in Chicago to Lison is 150ms, and 165ms to Nagano, and 290ms to Mumbai. With the latency goggles cranked to 200ms my page load times went from .75s to nearly 2s. So, my web site feelsfelt sluggish for people in Europe or Japan, and frustratingly slow in India. CloudFlare removes that frustration. Now, Mumbai can browse my site as comfortably as I could from California the day before. (Mumbai should be even faster once Cloudflare adds a node in India.)
Enjoying Dmitri Samarov‘s new novel about driving a taxi in Chicago, I looked up at my cafe table in Mountain View, CA and noted that mine was the only analog screen. Technologist that I am, I’m just not ready for an e-reader yet. I’m too attached to hardbacks and paperbacks.
My mother, however, has a Nook. She used to drive a cab in Chicago.
Many eulogies celebrate Steve in terms of his “products” — those mass-produced little gadgets that we love for letting us check email in front of our friends — and lose sight of his grass-strained spirit. What always moved me about Steve was the calligraphy and the LSD, the passage to India and his firing from Apple, his struggles at NeXT and his return from the wilderness.
The insistence on Steve’s perfection, on the vast difference between him as a producer and us as consumers, seems inhuman and even lonely to me. I wish we could take a moment in eulogizing Steve to grieve for him as one frail human to another, and feel in his passing the miracle of every human life; so many other people, geniuses on a smaller scale, are struggling his struggle. It hurts me that we have so much love to give to Steve and not to them.
Watching "High Plains Drifter" via Amazon.com on the Roku, and on the laptop. On the one hand, the laptop can do high definition. On the other hand, it has to sit on my belly.
What I have always liked about Netflix is that it was a one-stop shop that knew what kind of movies I like to watch, and could make smart suggestions. Netflix had a huge selection and could send me just about any movie I could want. The streaming was a nice addition, but you lose a lot of control that you have on the DVDs like selecting aspect ratios or subtitles. Sometimes the instant gratification is nice but what was important wasn’t a red envelope versus a streaming video, it was that one way or another, Netflix would get me movies I wanted to see.
If the streaming is such a fundamentally new business model start a new business and be done with it. Call it Streamstr. Partner with old-fogey Netflix and their stupid red envelopes so their retarded users can stream a few videos. Better yet, be the Netflix I knew and loved so many years: deliver movies I want to me. If I have to pay more for postage or more for some streaming movie that is really “hot” that is totally cool.
But what you are doing right now is some sort of bizarre unsettling brand seppuku. Why is such a great company working so hard to come up with new and innovative ways to scare away its loyal customers?
Netflix used to be about people watching movies. End of story. Movies. Movies. Movies. Its not about picking the winner between VHS and Beta, its about your customers and their love of movies and about your love of getting the movies to your customers. No nonsense, no bull, no false choices. And now? You’re tossing that advantage aside, and I am just as well served by your competitors.
Making the experience more complex for your customers is just plain dumb. =(
Good luck with your brave new spin-off model. It was a nice ride while it lasted.
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
I work for an Information Technology bellwether, which is both highly profitable and obsessive over maintaining its profit margins. Costs must always be contained. While we have a variety of interesting technology we are working to develop, we are presently completing our latest round of workforce reductions. I wish our leadership could be a little more like Steve Jobs:
“This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.”
You know what John Chambers might say to that?
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it. That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.”
Netflix has two awesome distinctive features going for it:
It knows my taste enough to effectively recommend content.
They do streaming and DVDs!
Right now I watch old TV shows on the streaming service, and maybe 1 DVD/month. For this I pay $10/month. That’s a good deal.
But now they want to cleave their business between DVD operations and streaming, and charge most customers more. Plenty of folks have gotten upset over this. Personally, I am irritated that they’re screwing the pooch on one of their distinctive features. What I had perceived as “hey, in order to satisfy our customers, we do DVDs and now we do streaming” now sounds more like “we want to be a streaming company but shipping DVDs is so expensive so we need to separate these different operations to keep the DVD taint off our streaming business!”
Which makes their distinctive feature list look like this:
It knows my taste enough to effectively recommend content.
They do streaming OR they do DVDs.(Oh wait, that’s nothing special!)
Amazon.com offers me a bunch of “free” streaming through Prime and newer TV shows a la carte. I can get DVDs from the local library, not to mention any number of commercial outlets. I don’t need Netflix for only one or the other.
For my existing plan of 1 DVD at a time plus unlimited streaming, I pay $10/month. The new price for this same plan is to become $16/month. That’s a 60% increase.
I could go unlimited streaming only for $8/month. There goes the $2 extra I had been paying to watch the occasional DVD.
They do have a limited DVD plan for $5/month, but I called and confirmed that I can not combine that plan with unlimited streaming. That’s too bad, because $8 for unlimited streaming plus a few dollars more for limited DVDs is basically what I want.
So, for now, I am downgrading to their $5/month limited DVD plan. If Netflix wants to be a streaming-only provider they need to have way better streaming content. If Netflix wants to stick with their original plan of providing entertainment I like at an affordable price via the most cost-effective delivery option, then I look forward to signing up for an unlimited streaming plus limited DVD plan.
Danny: I think autonomous cars are just a matter of time. Possibly the majority of new cars in 20 years, hopefully a lot sooner. The safety issue will become “why would you want a car controlled by fault-prone humans?”
Response:I expect there will be piles of social and political resistance.
Danny: Well the biggest resistance might be taxi drivers. That’s an effing industry in India. But I could picture the military going for it. “The road is mined and full of ambushes, yet the the supplies must go through. We can pay mad money for insane truck drivers or we can send robots.”
Danny: What interests me will be the impact on public transit. I think if cars can pick you up at your house, car ownership will drop, and people will use inexpensive autonomous car hires as the “last mile” connection to high-density transit services.
Danny: . . . the autonomous cars will happen. I swear that industry is like the Internet circa 1989. I would love to get a foot in the door! If Google nixed that program they are effing dunces–Like HP telling Steve Jobs that the PC is just a little too “out there.” I would buy the effing Apple I Autonomous Car Kit and install it myself.
