This is the page I got as a result of typing in my ZIP code to get the weather report yesterday. It measures 1266 pixels wide and 678 pixels tall. That’s a total of 858,348 pixels with which they could have told me the weather. That, was  – I thought, a simple request. And apparently it isn’t. I don’t run Adblock, but apparently I should. I usually go to wunderground.com or weather.com, both of which are far more tolerable, but I thought I should make mention of this anyway.

There comes a point when a company, in this case – Accuweather, needs to ask themselves: what the fuck are you doing? Do you have that little respect for the people who use your site?

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

Well, you put the effort into sending me the book. Might as well read it. Wow, this Edward fellow sounds like a dreamboat.

Turning the page to page 54… Wait, what?

Page 179.

Page 293.

That just happened.

I believe in the magic illusion business, they call this misdirection. Try as you all might, but I don’t believe there will be a Secret Santa gift for this year that will be able to top this. It has everything. Mystery, suspense, brooding vampires, Star Trek, Adam Sandler, and a battle-scared iPhone. Dennis (coderascal), that was awesome. Higher-resolution images are available by clicking each photo or by going directly to the Flickr set.

Apologies in advance to my Secret Santa recipient. It doesn’t have one tenth of one percent the creativity that this did. And now it’s time to go watch Funny People.

Note: this post was erroneously generated by a new plugin, but this post has comments foreshadowing to the gift described in the next post, so it stays.

Luckily, this week – Apple decided to offer a matte “anti-glare” display option on the 15″ MacBook Pro. I purchased one Friday night from the Apple Store and am posting a few pictures here since it seems to be mildly elusive and CTO MacBook Pros from the website haven’t shipped yet. Thus far, I’m really enjoying it. Take a look below.

It looks very similar to the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. Wider bezel than the 17″.

You can find more pictures over on my Flickr photostream.

Example: Andy Baio was totally just ‘boinged, but it’s totally fine because BB is hip and so-not-corporate.

So – who wants a steampunk waffle-iron?

“Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter’s suggested friend list. They sure were not more popular than @leolaporte two weeks ago.” – Robert Scoble

Well, first. When you pull a ridiculous accusation out of your ass, I do believe that the burden of proof is on you. The issue here is that Robert Scoble has become increasingly more and more irrelevant as the whole free-money Web 2.0 “social networks as conversations” thing began to wane and he can’t handle that. For some inexpicable reason, there are a small few that actually do listen to him and we end up with gems like this.

Twitter has a feature called “Suggested Users” so people can find new interesting people to follow. It’s not really based on any true metric or algorithm as far as I can see and thus, it’s not a popularity contest in the way that Scoble would like things to be. Thus, he feels the need to accuse Michael Arrington of ‘bribing’ a Twitter founder to be on that list. Other people on the list are Veronica Belmont, Felicia Day, Kevin Rose and other assorted popular users. The problem here is that Scoble and others feel that every social network has to be open and trasparent so that “thought leaders” (and I mean that as a pejorative) can quantify their excellence through popularity and notoriety.

Robert Scoble is angry and whining because of the fact that he’s not on it. That’s all. He’s angry that nobody actually cares about what he has to say except desperate start-up owners looking for him to schill their product. Scoble has an always will be an attention grubing blogger who, much like Dave Winer, have completely lost sight of the revolutionary environment they were thought to be fostering in the early days of Web 2.0.

The quote link leads to a thread on FriendFeed which is an interesting read for the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

[image]

You’re welcome, federal government.

First, please note that the laptop in this (intentionally absurd) ad is a MacBook Pro. Second, one of the characters actuall says “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?” Really.

But that characterization may be unfair based on just one project. After all, they did release the Zune – a 30GB brown media player which stopped working for two full days when it was a leap year.

Click on for some choice samples of that Songsmith magic!

I won’t begin to claim that Apple reinvented the music industry or make any sweeping claims, but it must be acknowledged the impact that this company has had on the the creation and consumption of music. With iTunes + iPod, Apple introduced a new and simple way for the younger generation to experience their music. Physical media was obviated through the digital distribution channels that were created through the iTunes Store. As of the last reported quarter, Apple has sold over 170,000,000 digital music players worldwide. Other consumer electronics manufacturers attempted to break into the market for digital music like Rio, Creative and iRiver – yet Apple succeeded because of attention to ease of use and aesthetics. As of January 2009, nearly all tracks on the iTunes Store are free of DRM. OTA song downloads to mobile devices is now possible without a premium price.

Apple, on the both the professional and consumer level, has simplified the creation of music. Through applications like Logic Studio (acquired IP) and the in-house developed Garage Band, creating music from pre-recorded loops and real instruments is approachable to the masses. Through the iLife suite of applications, Apple did not position Garage Band as a niche product – by offering it for free on each and every OS X machine, it took the position that music is not an exclusive art. The latest edition offers interactive lessons from renowed artists to extend this metaphor to helping anyone take on an actual instrument. No other company has done anything of this magnitude (reference the next entry).

Context: Disillusioned David Archuleta fans as the winner of American Idol 7 was announced in May earlier this year. I think it was the screen-printed Archie-shirt that did him in.

SLYT video is behind the cut…

First, Matt Santos was a character on the West Wing played by Jimmy Smits. Santos was a Democratic senator from Texas who ascended to the presidency on the show. Writers on the West Wing noted that Santos’ character was based on upstart Illinois senator and President-elect Barack Obama.

Jimmy Smits has a recurring role as Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama Dexter. He plays a District Attorney who has become quite fond of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills those who kill others. Next, Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, stated in the final weeks of the election that “[Obama] pals around with terrorists”.

Therefore, “Matt Santos pals around with serial killers” is funny.

For the first time in a long while, I’m excited and hopeful for the future of this nation. Join me in fulfilling our civic duty.

I want to take a bit of time to really nail down the problems that Windows has with usability and UI design that seem to never be addressed, or just seem to get worse with each revision. This is not meant to be the usual Windows v. Mac argument that happens so often — rather, it’s a summation of the fundamental interface issues that plague Windows and prevent it from being a truly usable operating system.

One thing that OS X, and iPhone in particular, have demonstrated is a full understanding of the spatial relationships that must exist in computing. While the animations and visual effects present in Mac OS make for a great in-store demo, they serve a greater purpose – they’re visual cues that show where windows emerge from and move away to, as well as establish relationships between the windows themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is Exposé. When using Exposé, you can easily view the desktop, all application windows, or just the windows related to the foremost application. It’s a useful feature that is implemented perfectly. When invoking the ‘view desktop’ key, all windows visually slide to the corners of the screen and the corners dim to reflect the temporary view scenario.

Viewing all windows or a single application’s windows dims the background, bringing focus to the windows you called upon. Each window slides into view so you know where it came from and where each will return once you’ve completed the interaction. Exposé takes a difficult UI design issue and offers an elegant and simple solution that works better than in any other OS I’ve seen to date. Minimizing and maximizing windows to and from the dock illustrate the same concept of spatial relationships and managing lots of individual windows in a graceful manner.

In the same vein, Windows suffers from one key UI design flaw – it is incapable of hiding applications. Windows offers no way to simply “hide” an application and its windows, nor does it offer a simple way to minimize a single window. This is crucial to being able to use more than a handful of applications at once and maintaining an uncluttered workflow. For example, say I’m using three Microsoft Office programs, Firefox, iTunes and Skype. In this scenario, each application has two windows open, so we have twelve windows in total. I want all of these applications open, but not all of them are relevant to the task at hand, so I’d generally have to minimize everything in Windows and rely on Alt+Tab to let me work. The taskbar would be full of individual windows squished together and navigating around is just plain cumbersome. Vista made this slightly easier by adding window previews into the application switcher, but the UI problem remains. Mac OS and other desktop environments have solved this long ago by allowing one to simply hide an application and all related windows, via menu item or keyboard shortcut, such that they aren’t visible until called upon from the dock and won’t show up in Exposé. It’s a simple idea that makes using ten to fifteen applications at a time extremely easy. Without this, Windows remains particularly unwieldy when the information you need is scattered in different programs and you have five or more Explorer windows open.

Which leads us to the culmination of the problem: Windows wasn’t originally designed to multitask effectively. As it stands, Windows retains the antiquated taskbar that lives at the bottom of the screen which becomes nearly unusable once you amass more then six windows open at a time. Some developers have tried to get around this problem by offering the option to minimize to the system tray, but it still reflects a generally poor and ill-conceived interface design. The answer to this is not increasing screen real estate as many suggest – this only encourages continuing a poor design paradigm from Microsoft. Windows has never had a great way to organize and present multiple windows. When Windows 95 came out, the taskbar and Start menu were revolutionary as a way to keep different processes in check and accessible quickly, but the flaw in the ultimate utility of this was exposed when protected memory and powerful computers made multitasking possible and painless. In its current form, the threshold of how many applications one can use at a time quickly is rather low. Some may argue it’s that there isn’t a need to keep programs open, but that is an idea borne of the usability limitations inherent in Windows.

And this speaks to the general problem that Microsoft faces today – they’re unwilling to innovate. Microsoft has such a large install base worldwide that breaking compatibility and instituting a more functional UI would draw ire from business customers and users that are set in their ways. Apple faced this same issue with the transition from OS 9 to OS X but they solved it in the most logical way they could which was allowing users to continue to boot the older OS for legacy applications. The reason that I feel this isn’t such a big problem for Microsoft is their success in the virtualization market. With Windows Server 2008, they included Hyper-V which is their superb virtualization environment where you can create virtual machines and run any x86 or x64 OS you wish. If Microsoft truly wanted to fix Windows and create a 21st century OS, they would redesign Windows and offer virtualization of Windows XP and Vista environments for older applications that haven’t been updated. This is the way enterprise has dealt with the interfacing with older database systems that don’t fit in their current infrastructure and it’s why Citrix is company with yearly revenue measured in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has demonstrated that they try to keep backwards compatibility when they can, but programs still break between revisions of Windows yet and there is little payoff in terms of security and usability. To put it plainly, Microsoft needs to quit ‘half-assing’ change and pull an Apple.

Well, after three weeks, I’m back in Santa Barbara and have returned to UCSB just in time for two back-to-back midterms and a paper due on Thursday. The time in San Francisco was fun, but I’m glad to be home. While there, I registered as a communist, bought a Prius and was forced to marry Clay Aiken – I guess there’s some new law? In all seriousness, I saw more people wearing Barack Obama shirts in five minutes downtown than I have in Santa Barbara in the past twenty months. I’ll add a few photos to Flickr when I have a spare moment and sort out all the things I’m behind on.

Posting should return with some semblance of regularity later on this week.

Through resources on the Drupal developer site and code posted by user “foxtrotcharlie”, I’ve created a module you can place in /modules that works with Drupal 5 and can be modified to work with Drupal 4 and 6.

To start out, you’ll need to gain access to phpmyadmin or your tool of choice to alter your site’s SQL database. Edit the string length of “title” to 255 characters in DB table “node” and “node_revision” or any value you wish, but might as well go for the biggest you can.

Once you do this, add the module I supply at the bottom of this post which is all set to go for Drupal 5 installations and should survive new updates of Drupal.

Download: Drupal Maxlength Module

I’m disappointed with Apple. I’ve been using their machines since I was four years old and have been buying them personally for the past seven. It has been my preferred platform of choice and I’ve never been unhappy with the hardware choices available to me until now. I see a glaring hole in their portable line-up, a small prosumer notebook. This void had been previously filled with the 12″ PowerBook but has never been replaced since its discontinuation in early 2006. One might suggest the MacBook Air as it’s successor, but that’s not paying attention to what the 12″ PowerBook was – a small, lightweight notebook that made almost no compromises in performance and connectivity to achieve it’s minuscule footprint. I do not mean to suggest that there is not a spot in the marketplace for a thin and light MacBook Air, however it’s clear that Apple is leaving money on the table from consumers like myself searching for that elusive perfect computer in a perfect size.

But I have a dream. A dream where there is a speedy and capable notebook running Mac OS X that fulfills these wants and needs. All Apple needs to do is build it. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up spec. sheet of what this computer should be. I give you, the perfect laptop…

MacBook Pro (13″) – Coming Soon from Apple

• 13″ 1440×900 LCD (LED-backlight)
• Discreet Graphics (Dual-Link DVI)
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Montevina)
• 2-4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
• 64-128GB Solid-State Disk
• Gigabit Ethernet Networking
• 802.11N Wireless Networking
• Integrated Sprint/AT&T WWAN
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• iSight Webcamera
• Backlit Keyboard
• 9-Cell Battery*
• SDHC Reader

This would not require a feat of engineering, although I’m certain that Apple could work their usual magic and include some tremendously innovative features in this notebook. These features exist in many notebooks available today (such as the Sony VAIO SZ, ThinkPad X200/300) but prove to be flawed choices as they do not run OS X and lack the polish I expect from a laptop, which is why I’m an Apple buyer in the first place. An optical drive? Who cares about an optical drive? The world’s thinnest notebook? I don’t need it. Simply put, I want a small and powerful laptop that can handle a long day of on-the-go use and be backed by the operating system I can’t live without.

* To keep with the svelte and clean design of Apple notebooks, a smaller battery can be included and the larger 9-cell high-capacity battery would be left as a CTO option.

In some basic testing with the HDTune benchmarking utility, the Samsung drive performed admirably. With an average read speed of 67MB/s and a peak speed of 88MB/s, the drive offers about twice the performance of a standard 5400RPM SATA laptop hard disk. Where the drive really shines is the almost non-existent access times on your data. In this test, the average seek time was 0.3ms where a traditional notebook is comes in at 15-20ms (or about 50-60x slower). Read/write performance also does not suffer from the pitfall that platter-based drives do, which is that information reads at the same speed regardless of where the data is physically on the drive.

The file read/write benchmarks told the same story as the standard read test. When using the 64MB file size, the drive offered consistent performance peaking at about 100MB/s reading data and 90MB/s writing. Comparing this to the tests of the reference Seagate hard-disk drive, it was consistently more than twice as fast as the traditional drive peaked at 40MB/s (HDD benchmark charts are provided at the end of the article). Boot times are not a terribly relevant or accurate way to gauge a computer’s performance, but since gamers/nerds are always clamoring for them, I’ll include them anyways. With the SSD, a the laptop booted to the Windows login screen in 34 seconds and at the desktop with all startup items loaded in a total of 39 seconds. With the HDD, those same tasks were completed in 46 seconds and 58 seconds respectively. Both of these tests were with the same drive image running Windows Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz notebook computer.

As for the SLC vs. MLC debate referenced earlier, it’s all a matter of cost. The best performing SSDs on the market are SLC drives. SLC drives offer better performance, lower power consumption and a longer-lifespan (100,000 write/erase cycles per sector as compared to 10,000 cycles on an MLC drive). MLC (multi-level cell) drives are cheaper to manufacture and are quickly becoming popular because of the lower price point. The lifespan argument loses its utility when one takes into account that 10,000 write/erase cycles is averaged/leveled out through the drive’s own firmware so the same cells aren’t constantly being rewritten (and since SSDs have a near-instant access time, there is no ill-effect on performance). Also, the useful life of a consumer notebook computer is surely less than that of the drive. In either case, a solid-state disk can greatly enhance the performance and battery life of a notebook, but it does come at a hefty cost.

Seagate HDD Benchmarks