Ben Bodien | Blog

Modular Wine Glasses

ben@benbodien.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:16:50 +0000

A reinvention of the wine glass set by Sherwood Forlee. Metal stems for enhanced strength and interchangable glasses for easier storage.

More photos over at Yanko Design.

Good Night Firefox (Good Morning Chrome?)

ben@benbodien.com — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:34:16 +0000

Some exciting times may be just around the corner in web browser land, as news of Google’s rumoured foray into the browser market is “leaked” in the form a rather spectacular Scott McCloud drawn comic strip.

Here are some highlights:

WebKit based: debatably the best performing rendering engine out there at the moment
Tab process isolation: one process per browser tab, so one tab crashing will only lose you that tab, like having everything in Prism or Fluid (also delivering security and performance benefits)
V8 javascript VM: a ground-up rethink of a modern javascript Virtual Machine — faster better stronger
The might of the Google server farm being put to work on software testing, including tests of rendering bugs

The obvious question that remains unanswered by this lovely graphic medium for product introduction is; “can I get my Firefox extensions into it?”. The extensions I use on a daily basis are probably all that are keeping me from switching to Safari or Opera, and I put up with a lot of crashes for those extensions. Here’s hoping there will at least be a means for extension developers to port their code to Chrome, and that Firebug crosses the gap quickly.

I’m predicting that the Google effect will kick-start a strong take up rate, but it will be very interesting to see how things stand in terms of market share a couple of months after Chrome launches.

Olympic Medal Table Bias

ben@benbodien.com — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:56:38 +0000

Now that the spectacular events in Beijing have drawn to a close, I’ve been looking at the final medal tables and how different news sites are representing them.

There’s something suspicious about the sorting order. The official table ranks by gold medal count (but includes a rank by total medals), putting China in first place. This method is also used by the relatively neutral Reuters and the BBC.

Curious then, how the some US news sources are choosing to sort by the total medal count, which puts the USA out in front. How convenient:

A Bizarre Attack on Fire Eagle

ben@benbodien.com — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:24:04 +0000

The BBC ran an article today voicing the concerns of a couple of privacy groups over Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.

I’d love to know whether the director at the Centre for Digital Democracy actually used the service before declaring that sites like Fire Eagle are “building and collecting more data, not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.” I’ll have to assume that he hasn’t, or he’d know just how daft he sounds implying that Fire Eagle is collecting data (it only stores the most recent location of each user), and that this data is being held for the purposes of extracting patterns in user behaviour (rather hard to do with a single location record per user).

I had reservations about using Fire Eagle at first, but after getting it set up and experiencing the extent to which its creators have gone to ensure that the information you provide is safe, I’ve been nothing but impressed and perfectly comfortable with it. There are a number of controls in place to keep your data safe. Here they are:

You can provide your location with as much or as little precision as you like, as accurate as exact latitude and longitude or as vague as your country.
You choose which third party applications you want to use, and you can stop sharing your location with them at any time.
You decide how much precision each third party application that you authorise receives regarding your location.
Fire Eagle reminds you on a regular basis which applications you are sharing location data with, and unless you explicitly confirm that you’re still happy with that, it will block all application updates for you.
You can put a temporary block on application integration so that you can go off-radar for as long as you want.
You can purge your location data from Fire Eagle at any time.

That all sounds pretty democratic to me, though it somehow fails to satisfy the CfDD’s definition of the word.

Quite honestly, if half the web applications that store personal data paid even a tenth of the level of attention to the issue of privacy as Yahoo have done with Fire Eagle, the Internet would be a better place. The Brickhouse team are doing an incredible job, and I have to believe that there are more appropriate targets for this kind of misguided assault.

This Redesign, Thing

ben@benbodien.com — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:55:19 +0000

Following in the footsteps of many others, I’m now aggregating activity from a number of websites I use into one chronologically ordered stream as you see here. Such systems are colloquially referred to as lifestreams.

Rather than use a hosted lifestream service such as friendfeed or socialthing, I decided I wanted more control over design and functionality so I’ve written an application in Ruby on Rails to talk to sites such as:

Flickr (photos)
Amazon (products I add to my wishlist)
Dopplr (travel plans)
Tumblr (blog, shared links, audio and video)
Others (keep an eye out for rare exciting items!)

If you’re only interested in blog posts, there’s a blog only RSS feed, but I’ve taken care to ensure that there’ll be very little noise on here - only items I truly deem worthy of exposure to my faithful followers will make it onto this stream.

I might blog another time about certain design decisions involved in building this, and I also plan on releasing snippets of Ruby code that may be helpful to others.

Finally, I thank the remarkable work of Yongfook whose own lifestream was a big inspiration when working on this. His PHP based implementation will soon be available for self-hosted use and further idea-borrowing (ho ho), as Sweetcron.

My RSS Feed

ben@benbodien.com — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:11:10 +0000

I’ll be moving my RSS feed for this site about a bit over the next week or two, so please bear with me if you get a volley of “new” old items re-appearing.

Hopefully FeedBurner will work its magic and you won’t notice a thing.

Cool Drainage

ben@benbodien.com — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:13:36 +0000

Two interesting sinks. Both via Yanko Design.

DHL Non-Express Tracking

ben@benbodien.com — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:05:40 +0000

Expecting a delivery sent via DHL, and armed with a consignment number, I attempted to track the package.

Hilarity ensued as the code was not recognised by the fast track box on the front page, an actual pop up appearing to display an error: “Please enter a Number (only one) in the FastTrack Box.” Since my tracking number contained spaces, I stripped these out by hand, and resubmitted. This time I was redirected to the main tracking page, with a “No Result Found” error hidden away in the middle of the page.

I then turned to the On-line Tracking section of this page, which provided a drop down box to select which service the package had been sent with. All I knew was “DHL”, so I tried a couple (DHL Air Waybill, DHL Europlus), but to no avail.

Back up the page was a section titled More Tracking, with UK Domestic as the first link. I presumed that the store I’d bought from was also UK based, so I tried this. I then hit a blank page, with nothing but a retro Netscape favicon to distinguish the fact that I’d hit any kind of page at all. Was the page just broken? I dug into the source with Firebug, and noticed that it was assembled (badly) with javascript writing a frameset onto the page, with no body tag.

So that page looks blank in Firefox, but works perfectly in IE6 which doesn’t mind a webpage not having a body block. Once you’ve worked that all of this out, you can track your package with ease.

Or you could insist on UPS or FedEx the next time, which I would do, given the choice. They can both make websites that work, and have consignment numbering systems that allow them to determine the service used from the number itself.

Splash Pages can be Good Things

ben@benbodien.com — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:01:05 +0000

At HP, if you’re not in the USA and you don’t think to inform them as such when you hit the homepage using the dropdown at the top (not a primary nav element by any means), you’re in for a big dose of inconvenient.

Typical usage path for HP website (at least, mine, a few minutes ago):

Hit www.hp.com
Select “Small & Medium Business”, “Servers”
Happily follow the information path to find a suitable server (either by choosing a product family, or trying the product chooser)
Arrive at a server you’re quite interested in
Notice that the price is quoted in USD, which for someone who lives and works in the UK, is a problem
Try and work out how to get to the UK equivalent page, and notice that the dropdown country selector that’s typical of such companies is just flat, unbudging text.

So you have to back out all the way to the homepage, switch to your country, and then navigate back down to the product you wanted.

Some companies will force you to specify your country or region through a splash page (ABit, Asus) which would have prevented this problem. A direct competitor to HP forgoes a splash, but instead makes the default country so much more obvious with a flag icon that stands out on the page.

Presumably, differences in regional catalogues make it too complicated to allow visitors to hop between regions from any page on the site, but this would clearly be the ideal. In the meantime, things like country selectors and age verification forms justify splash pages, because if you don’t ask for that information up front and your assumption turns out to be wrong, that will be a problem.