Sir / Madam
Park your bike so it doesn’t take up 1/2 the bike rack

Sir, Done and Done

You Rock

With the weather getting better, I have seen new bikes popping up at the bike rack in the office building where I work. One day, one such bikes was locked up horizontally, blocking the bike rack so that no one could park there. Upon seeing this note on your bike after a long day of work it would be easy to be angry, frustrated, violent, or profane. Someone decided to be nice. Problem solved. Who said bikers were inconsiderate?

We took off, and cheering fair goers cheered. In a blink of an eye we were flying high over Quechee, VT and the famous gorge. Our pilot/captain/basket-master? was a short Richard Dreyfuss like guy. Apparently he drives all over the country with his balloon like a gypsy following balloon festival all summer long. Am I the only one who thinks that’s kind of odd? I guess he’s found a way to make a living doing what he loves, but who grows up thinking of that a viable option for a career and lifestyle? Apparently there is a whole sub culture of hot air balloon fanatics out there walking among us.

We flew over houses and roads. people came out of their homes and cars to look and wave at us. Dogs barked and cows mooed at the weird basket of people tied to a balloon floating in the wind overhead. There is something peculiar about looking down into back yards to see people looking up in wonder and waving. It’s like we just walked through their yards said hi and just walked away. [See all of the photos]

We landed with the aid of the flight crew in some guy’s back yard, as his wife stared in awe from the window as we floated in gently next to her flower patch. Random cars with families stopped and helped us pack up the balloon… and like that we were gone. Like we just played some practical joke on the world. I’m still not sure what the punchline was.

When was the last time we saw a change to the scroll bar outside of the mouse wheel? Pivot’s approach may be a solution the age old problem of the scanning of huge amounts of data, and the scrolling of mobile web content all in one fell swoop (even if they don’t realize it.)

The vertical scrollbar appears just like any other. Upon click-dragging the bar towards the content area of the screen, the content zooms out proportionality. You can then move up and down as you normally would to scroll the zoomed out content. A box moves over the content on the screen to identify which part of the screen you will see when letting go of the mouse button.

This  serves a secondary purpose, as a controlled speed scroll. Try it with your current browser. Click and drag the scroll bar from the top to the bottom of a long page of content (try it with Boing Boing.) The mixed content flashes by without giving anything a chance to catch your eye. With Pivot’s scroll bar, you can see what is ahead and what is behind of the page focus. This gives you a unique ability to scan, even peripherally for something of interest without sacrificing scroll times.

Sure, one could argue that they would never use this. Well…then don’t. The option to use it in the browser would be just another tool like the ‘search page’ functionality; not everyone will want to use it. The beauty is that the function is so subtle that it hides in plain sight. If you want it, it’s there. If not, it wont effect the way you browse the web.

This type of modest functionality is exactly what we need. Perfect for both large content pages and small display interfaces such as mobile devices. The simple interaction necessary to access this zoomed scroll is so intuitive and simple, that I feel embarrassed that I never thought of it. I guess that feeling is a cue to its effective simplicity and its genius.

The two of us have been itching to get some hiking in once the ski resorts started to dwindle in fresh snow several weeks ago. We headed North right from REI for a day hike in the Whites. Mt. Hale was our last minute destination. Why not start the season off with a bang and check another 4,000 footer off the list?

When we got there, the logging road to the trail head was closed for the winter months (and for a few more weeks). This meant that we had to park at the main road and hike in with an extra 2.5 miles to tack on to each end of the hike. No matter. It was brisk but sunny and flat. It was 1pm but we had plenty of daylight to play with. I donned my new pants (which were missing a button) and Jesse grabbed his camera with a new wide angle lens he had yet to play with. [See the pictures in the gallery]

I quickly realized that my new pants weren’t working out. They were cutting off circulation to my legs. Yeah… that tight. Good thing I brought shorts with me just in case. As we ascended, it quickly became apparent that we were not prepared for the amount of snow that we were going to encounter. The snow got deeper and deeper. It was packed down pretty well, but one of us would let out the occasional yelp as our footholds would give way and we would step 1, then 2, then 3, and ultimately 4 feet down through loose snow. We were reluctant to continue once we saw that the foot prints in the snow that we had been following had donned snow shoes. We gave it a shot and second guessed ourselves until we reached the peak. There was little to no payoff waiting for us at the summit. No clearing and no view. Oh well. We headed back down with a few hours of sunlight to spare.

We got back to the car to find that Jesse had left the lights on. The battery was dead. Seeing as how we were in the middle of nowhere and in the off season, getting help was a bit difficult. We called AAA, but who knew when and if they would ever find us. We took to waving down passing cars. It turned into an interesting social experiment. It’s not that I was amazed at the amount of people who didn’t stop. (Those who did, didn’t have jumper cables.) It was the amount of people who didn’t stop and just slowed down to stare. At least pretend you don’t see us. There’s no selfish embarrassment courtesy these days. Needless to say, someone walked into the parking lot from a hike and helped us out. The day was topped off with an amazing meal at my favorite diner: The Tilt’n Diner.

I’m also working on a concept to submit for the Mozilla Labs current design challenge. The challenge is to redesign a transcription tool for streaming Internet video in order to make it intuitive and easy to use.

For now:

Listen to: Groundation to get ready for warm weather.

Eat: Cholula with everything. It’s my new obsession.

The results established that the styling of content with shading or a border has negative effects on a web user’s visual search through a web page. Users process visual cues that are not consistent with a web site’s visual treatment and purposely do not attend to these areas. Web users also use expectations for the location of non-relevant items in order to give priority to goal oriented content during visual search. By defining the avoidance of content in a visual search task in terms of banner-blindness, these findings demonstrated the existence of content-blindness.

Download the complete study (you can skip to the Discussion section for the fun stuff)

Content_Blindness.pdf

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has worked hard to push the standardization of web accessibility. With the creation of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), the W3C has put its best foot forward in educating business and web developers of the importance of web accessibility. Their website acts as a hub for design resources and best practices, as well as a forum for solving complex web accessibility challenges. New challenges arise along with the wide adoption of new technology that focuses on interactive experiences for the typical web user by manipulating content on the client’s end. JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash heavy websites prove to be a challenge to those who require the aid of assisting technology in order experience the content on the page.

No one can dispute the need for wide acceptance and implementation of web accessibility standards. There are about 60 million people in the U.S. alone who cannot utilize a computer in order to use the internet in a normal fashion. This is no shortage of users that can be simply neglected when running a business online. The question is then, why are more companies not investing proper standards compliant development? I speculate that the answer has to do with major flaws in the typical web design life cycle.

The first, simply being oversight in the planning stages. Many successful internet based companies don’t start with standard iterative design process. Depending on the product, the focus is either on some innovative back-end functionality, or flashy front-end development that draws attention. As these products become successful, new version as built on old version until so much time and money has been put into it that a complete overhaul and redesign for overlooked accessibility standardization would be far too expensive. The best way to solve this type of problem is, for large, successful internet companies to take the initiative and lead the way in best practices. Yahoo! has a mandatory accessibility training program that all new developer employees must go through. Google has invested into an automatic captioning for YouTube videos in order to make it much easier for deaf people to enjoy the same procrastination tool that many web users have been able to use for several years now.

The second flaw that I can see contributing to the lack of standardization in web accessibility, does simply not know how to sell the idea. Imagine you work for a web design shop, and you want to pitch allocating some extra budget for ensuring that the product is compliant with web accessibility standards. How would you sell that to a client? I can predict that 9 times out of 10, the client will say: “but our target audience isn’t blind/hard of hearing/elderly/(insert your own excuse).” People generally just aren’t educated enough about the need for accessibility to argue the point. This is where the WAI comes in. An accredited town crier who has presence in the developer’s community as source for professional education is exactly what we accessibility needs in order become a standard.

Further Reading

• Web Accessibility Initiative – WAI Homepage
• CNN/CNET – Web accessibility no longer an afterthought
• Practical Ecommerce – Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There?

Lara Farrar describes in a CNN article how a cell phone has transformed a Ghanaian man’s small taxi business. He is able to get calls to be picked up at any time from any anywhere. He is able to be on-call at all hours, and thus never losing on a business opportunity. Families can stay in touch easier from long distance, and farmers can keep track of market prices a town over in order to keep from losing on potential profit. It’s hard to dispute that the wide acceptance of a cheap, mobile, wireless, device could be a bad thing. It won’t transform a developing country into a modern high-tech society over night, and it is of course no substitute for good education and good health care systems. But it helps.

One of the challenges that faced cell phone adoption in developing countries was the requirement for electricity in order to charge phones. Many of these places have scarce and non-dependable energy resource, and thus driving the cost of owning a cell phone up. Samsung has recently started selling a reasonably priced solar charging phone called the Solar Guru. It has all of desired basic features of a modern cell phone including an FM radio, MP3 ring tones, games, and a torch light (a useful feature I had on an old phone that I am saddened does not appear on a lot of newer phones). This phone costs about $60 and can run for 5-10 minutes of talk time with just one hour of sunlight. It’s incredible how something that comes in no scarcity in many developing farming communities can be used to bring vital communication to places where once people had to travel to neighboring towns just to charge a cell phone.

Samsung is one of the few who attempts to bring cell phones to new markets where there is seldom a competitor. Its simply good business. Out of this there are sure to be competitors who will be able to offer more at a cheaper cost. Many of us in the US complain of cell service providers taking advantage of the consumer. This is the only downside that I can see with the potential boom in cell phones in poor developing countries. I fear that the cut-throat competition that thrives in cell service providers may attempt to get the best of economically week societies. What would be a preventative solution? Many have already adopted a pay as you go type plan in these places. Maybe if the trend continues in this direction, consumers will be safe from the communications giants that wring many modern consumers into contracts that exploit.

Further Reading

• CNN – Africans get upwardly mobile in cell phone boom
• Green Technology Daily - Will solar speed up emerging cell phone revolution
• Developments.org - Mobile phone revolution

So what does this have to do with software and education? Justice Antonin Scalia explained the ramifications of this by equating a patent for business methods with standards in horse training. “Let’s take training horses, don’t you think that some people, horse whisperers or others, had some, you know, some insights into the best way to train horses? And that should have been patentable on your theory.” Why shouldn’t he make this outlandish comparison?

The decision of the appeal will and is being used in similar cases with IBM to combat the rejection of appeals for software. If a business method or more generally, an idea can be patented, what is to stop large corporations who can afford patent lawyers from claiming ownership over standard business practices? Imagine not being able to put in an IT ticket at work when something on your computer goes wrong. What would it be like if Dominos Pizza was the only pizza shop that could offer free delivery?

This could hit software the hardest. Software moves and develops very quickly. Computers and their capabilities have moved very far and fast over the past 20 years. Hardware has changed, and made it possible to do things made of 1960′s science fiction a reality in a very short period of time. Software innovates and grows along with the hardware to do new and powerful things. Software is able to innovate and progress so quickly because much of the development happens through virtual communities. Developers are able to share, inspire, challenge, and ultimately learn from each other. Sure, people may argue that open source is the epitome of socialism. But it would be a crime to argue that open source offers little in terms of innovation and peer-education for the purpose of moving software forward.

It comes down to companies claiming ownership not simply of their own products, but of mathematical algorithms used in their software. Patent ownership comes with over a decade of free monopoly type reign over a piece of technology or technological process before it enters into the public domain. In the world of software, falling a year behind is to become archaic and obsolete let alone 17 years. Patent ownership of a business model would therefore slow development to a halt. It is important to be able to build and improve on existing technology and software.

The ability to own a patent can be used as a defensive measure for companies. Suppose that a hugely successful e-marketing firm somehow solves the age old problem of spam with an algorithm. They could know how to offer complete and total spam protection without the need to aggregate large databases in order to block messages. The company could file a patent for this algorithm, and do nothing with it. Why would they do this? The company would loose all high ground on being able to profit from email spam by releasing the solution to the problem that they themselves create. So why not sit on the solution for a few years and keep their business profitable?

Sure a lot of the things I argue are worst case scenario if things go unchecked. It’s important to understand how far this decision for changes to patent law can reach. It must be dealt with delicately in order to ensure the modernization of technological ownership while keeping good business practice in check.

Further Reading:

• GEN – Oral Argument Sheds Light in Bilski v. Kappos
• Businessweek – Supreme Court to Review ‘Business Method’ Patents
• Washington Post – High court considers whether business methods can be patented
• Ars Technica – Microsoft’s pseudo sudo patent doesn’t really cover sudo

The Open Book Alliance feels that “the mass digitization of books promises to bring tremendous value to consumers, libraries, scholars, and students.” The problem is that at this point, the US government is not very likely to fund a project of this magnitude. Google happens to have the resources to do it effectively without burdening the tax payer.

The trade off is that the corporate giant will own the rights to the product of this endeavor. Naturally their intentions go beyond serving the public. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin stated “I’ve been surprised at the level of controversy there, because digitalizing the world’s books to make them available; there’s been nobody else who’s attempted it at our scale.” It’s obvious that Google’s intentions are to profit off this in some way. And why shouldn’t they? If they can accomplish such a feat they deserve to make money off of advertising, crating new technology by training AI on a massive scale of information, and making it easy to access the information. The problem comes with the ownership of the data. It opens the doors for Google to hold the infinite information in these books hostage for profit in the form of subscription services and the like.

One of the problems that Google’s project raises with publishers is the potential of distribution of orphan works. Orphan works (in this context,) are books and journals who’s publishers either don’t exist or have unknown proprietors. These works do not quite qualify for public domain, but are being included in Google’s Book Search. Google is taking the scan first, ask permission later approach. In other words, they will distribute books that aren’t claimed by a publisher or author unless explicitly told not to by the owner. Ultimately this can (and in many cases will) lead to illegal distribution of published work if the proprietor does not speak up.

It’s fair to hope that Google will be responsible with their mass of knowledge, but that’s just not enough. By ensuring that the project is done with the public’s best interest in mind it’s important to set the rules before the game starts. The Open Book Alliance has set some baseline requirements that they would like too see addressed in the Google settlement. One of which is that “the settlement must result in the creation of a true digital library that grants all researchers and users, commercial and non-commercial, full access that guarantees the ability to innovate on the knowledge it contains.” This more or less encompasses the argument against Google’s Book Search project.

The amount and type of information that would potentially be at Google’s finger tips once this project is complete, would be difficult for Google’s corporate competitors (and impossible for small startup businesses) to replicate. Thus creating a monopoly in the form of digital information. Information that until now has been free to access for the public through the use of libraries. By updating this information for the modern digital age, Google will be creating a whole new domain for innovation.

If Google opens up the data that is collected to the public, they will still have the competitive edge on the technology by being able to get a head start on utilizing the information as the proprietors of the means to create the digital library. For example, they can develop early search technology to work with the digital library during the course of acquisition of the books. Thus, they can still profit off of the fruits of their labors whilst still leaving the window open for competitors to innovate and expand on the public domain of knowledge in a new format.

Further Reading:

• Open Book Alliance - http://www.openbookalliance.org/
• Mercury News – Google’s desire to scan old books has critics casting it as Goliath
• Library Journal – Google Settlement Due in Court November 9; Open Book Alliance Issues “Requirements”