Michael's Web Blog

This is my Web Blog, which is a weblog about the web. I talk about XHTML, CSS, scripting, web technologies, and a host of other topics. If you use the options panel, you can visit pages about my writing or programming.

Art, Design, and Inspiration

February 5th, 2010

I went to school as a computer programmer (and analyst); and yet, when I started creating websites, I found that design was integral to anything I had to do.

When most people think of ‘design’, they think of art and imagery. They imagine a creative spout of inspiration that makes something ‘edgy’ and new and good-looking.

That’s not design.
Design is the intelligent application of goals around limitations and road-blocks. When you design a page, you’re finding a host of different needs and working with what you have to fulfill those needs.

In this way, design is inherently different than art. Artistic expression is all about reaching into your mind and somehow sharing that with the world. Design, in contrast, is about studying every facet of your work to determine what needs to be done, and how to make it work the best it can. It requires intuition and intelligence and an uncanny knack for seeing every connection.

Next time you’re making something, take a moment to think about how it’ll be used, and who’ll be using it. A good design will take you to whole new heights.

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Moar Netbook

January 8th, 2010

In my last post, I tried to do some sort of real review, which I’m sure sounded a bit boring and normal.
This time, I’m going to put it in real-world terms (much like music players, with their “how many songs can it hold”).

What can you do with this Netbook?

  • Travel around
  • Play old games
  • Emulate SNES games smoothly with a 3x HQ filter
  • Move and shake about
  • Read CDs or DVDs ripped to ISO (etc.) format
  • Play music or video from a flash-drive or SD card
  • Office computing
  • Small-size graphics editing
  • Connect to the internet through Wi-fi (b/g), cable, or mobile
  • Install and use your USB devices
  • Use an external SATA drive.

What can’t you do with this Netbook?

  • Play newer games
  • Do anything for longer than three hours
  • View HD or full-HD movies
  • Color-correction (the quality is crappy)
  • High-powered rendering
  • Use it in the shower

Overall

Really, just don’t expect things to be too fast. Gaming takes lots of speed, so nothing too new will work well. Other applications, like rendering or coding movies, will just take more time. Working from flash drives or SD cards takes some time.
Other than that, it’s incredibly capable and very broad-ranged. Waking from sleep mode only takes about three seconds.

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HP Mini 1116nr

January 6th, 2010

I decided to get a netbook; the $200 refurbished HP you can order from Future Shop.
It’s actually kind of amazing. The specs are as follows:

  • Intel Atom N270 (appears to be dual-core)
  • 8.9″ WSVGA (1024×600) anti-glare display
  • 16GB SSD
  • 1GB DDR2 SDRAM
  • Windows XP Home SP3 for ULCPC
  • Wireless b/g
  • 3-cell battery (approx. 3 hours)
  • Webcam + Microphone
  • SD/MMC Card slot
  • Apparently, a 3G Modem
  • An amazing keyboard

This is actually better than I had hoped it would be. The entire width of the netbook is taken with the keyboard, which means the keys are larger than usual and aren’t squished into any odd configurations. It’s pretty much a full-width keyboard. I can type on it perfectly fine, unlike with other netbooks.

The screen is pretty bright, even on its lowest setting, but the colour quality is abysmal, which I fixed by altering the colour profile in the included Intel options panel. This is the same for other HP laptops, from what I’ve seen; the gamma is almost too high, the colour washed out, and with just a bit too much blue in the mix. I’ve just turned the brightness down and the contrast up, and that almost fixes most of it.

The solid-state drive is some old, small, cheap model from who-knows-when, probably with a J-Micron controller. It’s not very fast, and takes forever to do things when it’s taxed (I believe this is what people meant when they say it ’stutters’). I was planning on getting a new, fast SSD, sometime; one of those able to outperform hard-disks in all aspects. The netbook came with a backup for Windows, so I’ll be able to reinstall everything on the new drive.
It seems that those old 8GB netbooks wouldn’t have been able to store anything on the disk besides Windows XP, which takes at least 6GB and upwards of 10GB if you install too many things. I’m not using it as my main system, and I’m not keeping bunches of movies on there, so the 16GB of storage is just fine, along with an extra 1GB SD (or more if I need it) and 8GB flash drive.

It came with 1GB RAM, but apparently Kingston has a 2GB module out for $40 or so, which I might end up ordering. It’s got a fast little access panel on the bottom for RAM.

Another surprising little tidbit: It comes with a mobile modem. There’s a slot for the SIM card, under the battery, but I can’t see any way to take it back out. Considering I swap my one SIM into two other devices, I’ll just have to use my USB modem.

Windows is running fine on it, and I haven’t had any problems. It came with a load of bloatware, but I’ve turned most of that off.

The charging brick is small! It’s capable of 30 watts, and is built like a regular laptop charger, but is about three quarters the size. I could probably carry it around in my pocket without too much hassle.

The microphone is above the screen, out of reach of the whirring fans in the body. I’ve had to use a laptop where the microphone was right beside the disk, and anything that I recorded would have whirs and clicks throughout.

Downsides: No VGA-out, which means I can’t use my HD monitor. Only two USB ports, though I guess I could use the internal modem and an SD card, which would free up both of them.

Other: It comes with an HP Expansion connector, which I have no clue about. It seems to have a SATA connector for external drives, which is interesting.

Overall: For $200, this is a lot of computer. I couldn’t do everything on the limited screen and drive, but then I’m not trying to make this my main machine. It’s for when I’m on the go, and need to do some work from my flash drive, or surf the internet, or download things while I’m at my parents’ house.
I give it five stars. Out of… five.

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Your First Web Site

January 6th, 2010

Does anyone remember their first web-site?

No, not the first site you built; I mean the first you ever saw. It’s so completely commonplace and so far in our past that no-one ever thinks of it, but it must have been a pretty special event, when you get right down to it.

When I tried to remember, I thought back to the first computer I’d ever played with, and how it had that oddly-annoying “Please wait a moment” message. What’s a moment, anyway? I was only six years old.

I can’t remember the first computer I saw with internet, but I suppose it was one of the brand-new computers our lab was furnished with in our little village school in Vermillion Bay, Ontario.

I suppose, having been introduced to the computers and the internet, the first pages I visited would have been video-game-related.

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Round Houses

December 30th, 2009

I recently had a thought about polygonal houses (a couple minutes ago, really).
Swiss Miss had posted a chair that used the corner of a room for support. It was basically just a shaped board.
I thought, Why would this be limited to a corner? I think just putting it against a wall would leave it open to tipping, but even a small corner should keep it up. And so: why are houses square?

The immediate thought that comes to mind is, “Houses are square because is really hard to work with circles.” And it is. But when you get right down to it, a circle is just an infinitely-sided polygon, which means there’s a corner at literally every spot.

So it’s the corners that are hard to work with.

I’m left with an idea: Give a house an arbitrary number of sides, but let there be a set minimum space between corners, and perhaps a maximum angle. Make every angle the same.

a diagram of a hexagonal house, with each side a different length from the others

By playing around with the base pieces, we see that it’s possible to make all sorts of shapes with the same angles. This is loosely a hexagonal house. I might call this a Scalene Hexagon. The corners aren’t as harsh as in square houses, but there’s still space on the shortest for a couch or something.

The walls inside could follow this same scheme, so that the house is full of hexagons and squares. I’d say we should stay away from triangles.

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Twitter, and the Future

December 29th, 2009

I may have mentioned, once, that Twitter is very public, and so you mustn’t say anything you might regret later.

As it turns out, this is further-reaching than I thought. I did a search for CozyCabbage, which is my Twitter handle, and I was shocked to find an emerging paradigm:
There are hundreds of services that collect every tweet you submit and cram them into any of a number of categories. There’s a site that gathers swear-words (I’ve pretty much got the lowest rating, with something like “shit” in one tweet), and there’s a Whuffie Bank that tracks your social capital. There are a bunch of services that filter out all but the most popular tweets, so that people can get the most out of their Twitter experience. There’s a service that scans every tweet for websites, and then lets anyone see who’s tweeting what about X website.

That last one is great. It seems someone found the IE6 T-shirt I made! (http://digs.by/lD6)

It seems Andrew Miguelez, a small time web designer from Bucks County, PA, tweeted about it at 2:34 PM on Nov 11th of this year. He had a hard time that morning, because he had stayed up late the other night designing until 3 AM. (Always seems like a good idea, at the time.) He was looking at things like the HTML <button> attribute, and found my shirt.

Stalkery? That only took me about a minute to find.
Topsy.com; go there. “A search engine powered by tweets!”

So, what does this all mean? It hasn’t been made into a big thing (and I only found it all by serendipity), so I don’t see it disappearing any time soon. In fact, these kinds of services will keep growing and branching off. Twitter was an ecological explosion, and now all sorts of different life-forms are thriving on this fantastic new terrain.
I think the future will bring tweets into the forefront of modern society. It sounds pretty perplexing, in the context of the past, but I think were were really waiting for an open platform where we could all express ourselves freely and instantly.

It goes beyond this: I’m sure people had said the same thing about computers, and maybe even about some technology before that. When you get right down to it, there’s always something more to add. Twitter requires us to have the right equipment with us, and it takes us a while to open the app and type something in and press send. When we create a constant network of always-on computers commanded by our thoughts, I think we’ll see yet another huge leap.

This whole Twitter thing is reaffirming my faith in humanity. It’s kind of inevitable that we’ll see science-fiction become science-non-fiction: telepathy, cerebral uplinks, pervasive communications…
Some have painted a bleak picture of fascism and war in our less-private future, but I think the reality is that people will find and embrace each-other, and some fantastic things will be built upon the collective intelligence of humanity.

I’ve been meaning to do a year-in-review, but I also want to do a decade-in-review. I’ve been realizing just how far we’ve come in the last ten years, and that’ll help me see where we’re going in the next ten. I think we’ll get further than most people think. The Social Web is just the beginning, but it shows us what kinds of things we can do.

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Project: Social Media Hub

December 29th, 2009

I think the next big app will be a social media hub that collects all your stuff together in one place.
I have to keep on top of Twitter updates, remember to visit my Facebook, watch the email icon in the corner of my desktop, and read my feeds sometime. Then there’s Google Wave, and also about a million Web 2.0 services I just don’t use.

So: What if you could just open an application, and get a stream of Twitter statuses, Facebook updates, email headers, news, feeds, pictures, and anything else you’ve subscribed to, in a bite-sized format. If you want to be notified about emails, set it to pop up a message on your desktop. A little floating bar with several tiny icons could light up when you get something new.

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with mobile devices is that I have to switch between apps or web-pages to check different services.

Here are my own personal criteria:

  • Small: It can’t be some huge window, like TweetDeck. It should be reducible to a single icon.
  • Informative: None of this, “Hey, new stuff!” It should tell me what new stuff I just got.
  • Push: Some services need to poll, but they should push as much as possible.
  • All-purpose: Every service should fit into the form-factor. That includes images, songs, movies, blogs, tweets, status updates, and more.
  • Beautiful: Well, of course.
  • Responsive: Pretty important.
  • Easy: It should walk users through the setup process, and shouldn’t need all that much information.

The winner will be the ones who make a well-designed and usable version of the above. I might try my hand at it!

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About Netbooks

December 29th, 2009
Nicholas Aylsworth
joel.chase620@gmail.com
60.167.166.13
Submitted on 2009/12/29 at 5:27pm
I bought this netbook about two months ago to replace my old Dell Inspiron which had begun having the “white screen” problem . There were several reasons I went with this netbook:

1. 93% keyboard is a absolute must
2. 160 GB (more like a 142 GB) of memory
3. Integrated Bluetooth work great with my Phone, which also happens to be a SamSung
4. Battery life is amazing, 6-10 hours depending on what you’re doing
5. This thing is lighting fast compared to my old Dell laptop

I use it daily to surf the web, check e-mail, watch movies, and talk via the webcam. I installed Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and have yet to experiencing any slow downs. The only program that I use regularly that I have NOT install onto my netbook has been Photoshop. Though I haven’t, I have heard that a massive program like CS4 has been know to work very sluggishly on netbooks. Not a real problem for me because I still have my Dell laptop with the Photoshop loaded onto it.

This is easily the best purchase I have made in a long, LONG time. And for under $400 dollars, it is definitely worth the money.

That comment was spam, but it sounded like something a real person would say. So I figure I’ll reply to the things they said.

1. 93% keyboard is a absolute must
The keyboards on netbooks are fun, but I’ve found that it’s easy to get used to the size. Besides, people work with Blackberrys on a daily basis. The most important thing is the keyboard layout, variations of which you’ll also find on full-size USB keyboards. Some have an Enter key that spans two rows, and the ‘\’ key is placed somewhere else. The ‘Delete’ key might also be in a very strange spot. As a programmer (and one who needs to use the backslash frequently), I couldn’t stand that setup.
When you’re dealing with a non-standard keyboard, you have to re-learn the layout. If you spent a lot of time on that machine and then switch to another you’ll notice that you keep pressing the wrong keys because you’ve gotten so used to doing it that other way.
So, ignore the size, but make sure it’s a keyboard layout you can live with.

2. 160 GB (more like a 142 GB) of memory
A netbook isn’t meant to be your main machine, and I’d urge you to at least get a $500 laptop before the netbook. A netbook is made to be a fast, light, cheap, weak computer with tremendous mobility, which is kind of dulled-down with the bigger screens and the heavier, slower, break-it-if-you-shake-it hard-disk drives.
Most of the drive space on your main machine will be taken up with movies, music, and games (or other installed programs). You really shouldn’t have a lot of movies on a netbook, because it’s just a little thing you grab with you when you go somewhere. If you’re on a trip that’s long enough to need movies, you might as well bring your big laptop with an expansive drive. You can also get a small external drive, and maybe an MP3 player for music.

In other words, get a 16GB SSD (or higher, if you can afford it; they go up to 80GB for a couple hundred dollars) with your netbook. They can be tremendously fast (booting in ten seconds or less), and you don’t have to worry about losing data if you drop the netbook. They don’t hold nearly as much, but you’ll still have gigs and gigs of space. You can also get a 64GB SD card if you need it.
My core files (all the archives of my past, et-cetera) fit into an 8GB flash drive.
(And, considering you can have your main drive, an SD card, a flash drive, and an external hard-drive, there are a lot of memory options.)

3. Integrated Bluetooth work great with my Phone, which also happens to be a SamSung
Okay. I’ve not used Bluetooth at all, myself, and I have no idea if netbooks really do come with built-in bluetooth, but I assume you’d then be able to connect a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to it.

4. Battery life is amazing, 6-10 hours depending on what you’re doing
Battery life is a sticking point. Keep the brightness low (unless you’re in the sunlight), keep always-on peripherals, such as mobile modems, out of the USB ports when you don’t need them, and solid-state drives will take less power than hard-disk drives.
Different netbooks have different battery lives. Because they’re so mobile, you really do need a good battery in your netbook. Look for something with more than three hours, if you want more.

5. This thing is lighting fast compared to my old Dell laptop
These last few points may have been spammy lies to make a long list of great-sounding stuff; I have no access to benchmarks, and the spammer didn’t leave a link to the netbook in question (instead, they left a link to a review for a 15.4″ laptop backpack).

If a laptop is getting very old, the operating system will become bogged down with all sorts of stuff. You’ll find that the drive is constantly being used by one service or another, and it’ll take forever to load programs. Something as simple as opening a menu can trigger a search through the registry, which might take a few seconds to complete if things are accessing the drive.
A new netbook (or laptop, or desktop, or even just a fresh install of Windows on your old computer) will be faster, but only for a couple years. Try not to install too many things, and have someone reinstall windows for you every couple of years. A refresh is always good, and might help you clean up old files, too.

In closing: Netbooks are secondary computers, for when you need to grab something light to use around town, and when you need more power than a smart-phone can give. They’ll be fast and responsive with a good SSD, but you should make sure the keyboard layout suits your needs. A long battery life is good to look for.

And for under $400 dollars, it is definitely worth the money.
You can find them for $200. In fact, you can get one for $50 on a two-year contract with a mobile internet provider. Keep an eye out!

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Christmas!

December 25th, 2009

I know; only children excitedly brag about their Christmas gifts. Maybe I’ll do a proper review, instead?

If you’ve been following Swiss Miss, you’ll have seen a bunch of beard-related stuff. I just received a Beard Head, and it’s about as wonderful as I could have imagined. It’s a perfect fit for my head, and the moustache-customization feature is simple ingenuity. Wearing a coat, I can see that the whole of the engineering is planned out: The back of the Beard Head comes down to my jacket’s collar, but isn’t so long that it gets pushed up by it. There’s room at the front-sides so that I can turn my head easily. The moustache can be taken off and buttoned elsewhere into the natural weave of the wool.

I can’t wait to wear it out and about!

I got a Lexar 8GB class-6 microSDHC. I had half-expected it to be a bit slow, from what I’d heard on forums, but it turns out to be faster than the 2GB card I’ve been using this year. I had gotten a 4GB class-4 card last christmas, but the slowness of it ruined my expectations of these cards’s speed and was useless for my every-day use.
In short: The 8GB microSDHC is great. It also seemed to get slightly faster when I filled it up with stuff. 

          MAX(µs) AVG(µs)
  512 B -   430 /   235 (Sequential)
    4KB -  1830 /  1820
   16KB -  7280 /  7265
  512 B -   500 /   480 (Random)
    4KB -  1895 /  1875
   16KB -  7335 /  7320

I also got a cheap black-and-red Chinese console with two slots which lets me play NES and SNES games. The S-video is low quality (and plays NES games in greyscale), my mom apparently had to glue together a broken part, and one controller has a faulty R button, but it’s otherwise good enough quality. I spent a couple hours last night (this morning?) playing Super Metroid (which I also just got), and it’s as fun as I remember.
I only have about three or four games, but still.

I saved the best for last: Handcrafted CSS, by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte; Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson; and Painting the Web, by Shelley Powers. I’ll save those reviews for after I read the books. I think I’m starting with Handcrafted CSS, because the cover is just so tactile. It’s also pretty short, and reads like a blog entry (complete with links to other peoples’ blogs).

It raises a question, which I might later remember and go into in more detail: Are books like really old blogs? I’m reading this book in 2009, but it’ll be as irrelevant as today’s blog entries after a few years.
(That is to say, not entirely irrelevant; but still kind of “What?”)

I’ve still got to get Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition. Maybe for my birthday? Is John Resig’s book out, yet? (Never mind, I’ll google it myself. It seems that it’s not quite out, yet.)
Oh, I also want Transcending CSS.

I’m going to have to introduce some of the students at the college to these books. I’ve read so many blogs everything in them will likely seem old-hat to me, but the new students will find them invaluable. Or supervaluable.

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What Makes a Fast Computer?

December 17th, 2009

I’m sure you’ve all looked at computers or laptops, at some point, and wondered just what made one faster than the other. What are all those numbers? Why is the salesperson spewing gobbledygook at me?

For the past number of years, CPU (the processor) has been touted as the way to measure the power of a machine. The Intel really pushed this for its Pentium IV, which rated at speed of 3 GHz and beyond.
So, what is the processor? Simply put, it does the math needed to calculate where things go, what a program is supposed to do, and what should come out of a program’s operations. It is the part of the computer that Does the Stuff.
Here’s the kicker: Most of the time, the CPU isn’t actually doing anything. Unless you’re playing a new video game, or rendering fractals, or participating in protein-folding experiments, or otherwise doing things involving large amounts of operations, your CPU isn’t all that important. It just needs some overhead for when things do need to be processed, such as when you move windows around or open a new program. I’ve found that 1.6 GHz is perfectly fine for daily use, and doesn’t usually max out.

What do the other things do, then?

RAM is the computer’s short-term memory, which can be likened to a desk it uses to spread out its papers and work on things. When you open a file, the computer will put that file in RAM so that you can change bits of that file without having to wait for the hard-drive.
Your computer doesn’t actually use much RAM. If you have a lot of programs in the background (such as email, instant messengers, and various option panels), it can load up almost 1 GB of RAM. Windows XP and Windows 7 need about 1GB to function well, and 2GB is about all you’ll really need, if you open a lot of images or programs or internet tabs.

In case you’re wondering, DDR3 is faster than DDR2, and uses less power (a plus for laptops), but isn’t strictly necessary for you.

Hard-Disk Drives (HDDs) hold your data. HDDs today hold anywhere from 160GB to 2000GB (2TB). The biggest users of disk space are movies, some of which are so big they won’t even fit on two DVDs. Music takes less, but even a small library of music can take up 5GB of room. If you have a tremendous music collection, or have a handful of TV shows or movies, you’ll need a large hard-drive. If you don’t keep many videos and only have a small collection of music, you’ll be perfectly fine with 160GB. I’d recommend an external hard-drive for those sharable movies, music, and pictures.

The main bottle-neck on your system, though, is probably your hard-drive. The newer hard-drives can handle 80 MB of data every second, which means it takes over ten seconds to fill up 1GB of RAM with data from the hard-drive. If you’ve got an older computer, it could take ten times that length of time, and you’ll be waiting a few minutes for your computer to come out of Hibernation mode.
Worse yet, because disks have to spin around to find bits of data, trying to find two things at once ruins the speed of the disk. Considering that the computer writes little bits of data every few seconds, you almost never get the full speed of the drive.

So how do I speed this up?

The answer is Solid-State Drives (SSDs). These drives hold a lot less for their price, but they’ll give you a fantastic experience. They are:

  • Up to four times faster
  • A lot quicker at finding data
  • Shake-proof
  • More power-efficient
  • Lighter (for you laptop owners out there)
  • A few other things you won’t find interesting

An SSD will completely take away those little starts and stops you get with HDDs, because it doesn’t have to move an arm across a spinning disk to find data. Because there are no magnets or spinning plates of metal in an SSD, it’s not as heavy and uses less power. It’s got chips, instead, which can get data from different places a lot easier, and is limited by the speed of electrons instead of the speed of a metal arm.

SSDs are only just reaching maturity. The new Intel SSDs are 80GB for $250, but that’s the top quality. Kingston has an easy kit for only a little more than a hundred dollars. It doesn’t have the sheer speed, but it still beats any hard-disk.

Expect the pricing to come down over the next year. Let the old stock quietly file out of the retailer’s shelves, and the other brands pick up the newest technologies, and we’ll see some wide-spread use in the next little while.

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