boinged (verb, past-tense): the act of Cory Doctorow copying and pasting four paragraphs of an author’s work, writing a one sentence preface for it, calling it original content and wrapping ads around it on Boing Boing.
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.
I can’t believe that Congress and the new administration actually passed an extension for the US Digital TV transition deadline, but alas – here we are. But look, I’ve solved the entire problem in two minutes. After the deadline, display this test card on the analog channels for one week. When old people find out their TV no longer works, they’ll call a somebody young and useful to the world and find they need a converter box or a new television in order to keep watching Wheel of Fortune and Matlock.
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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).
This is officially, my favorite thing ever.
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…
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.
Four days ago, Microsoft unveiled the pre-beta of Windows 7 at PDC and offered up quite a few user interface changes meant to streamline the aging operating system. What they came up with was a taskbar that mimics the styling of the KDE on Linux and further extends the broken window preview concept introduced in Vista. Needless transparency is at every corner, another UI metaphor taken the the extreme since the introduction of Vista; and of course, more ideas from OS X have made their way into Windows, although implemented less intuitively.
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.
Photo Credit: randomtruth on Flickr – used under CC license
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.
Drupal limits the character length of a node title to 128-characters for a old and antiquated limitations of early versions of MySQL. There is a way to get around this by modifying part of the MySQL tables used for nodes and increasing the value a title can contain to the limit of 255-characters. This is extremely useful if you’re also using the “Events” module and you’re posting lectures and talks with lengthy names. You will also need to hook-into the Drupal installation through a module to alter how long the Drupal core-software will allows a title to be.
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
