Archives

The Slow Lane

Road RunnerAbout nineteen months ago, I set up my first wireless router at home, and I remember at the time that there were only one or two other publicly broadcasted SSIDs in the general vicinity of my apartment. Today, there are at least eight or so wireless networks within range of my laptop, suggesting that broadband, in my building or in my immediately neighboring buildings anyway, has reached a significant level of pervasiveness.

One unwelcome consequence of this is that my home broadband access has gotten noticeably slower over the past six months, almost to the point of frustration. It takes two or three seconds of blank responsiveness from my browser before a page will suddenly load, a clear sign of saturated bandwidth. I was hoping that, by upgrading to an 802.11g router as I did earlier this week, I would see some performance gain — not a realistic presumption, I know, because most of the speed increase in wireless-g hardware benefits intra-network activity. Still, I hoped, but as is to be expected, no favorable results.

I never paid much attention to warnings that the performance of cable broadband pipes, by virtue of the fact that they are community shared, inevitably degrade with increased patronage. Naturally, I assign more credence to that claim now, but I think it’s also attributable to a predictable tendency to outgrow bandwidth, regardless of how much speed you have. Given 5 Mbps downstream (I’ve been at that speed for roughly five years now), before too long I’ll need 8 Mbps. And if you give me eight, I’m sure I’ll find a way to max it out before the current (and last!) Bush presidency comes to a merciful end. You can never have too much bandwidth, so to speak. It’s a natural human behavior — or, at least, a natural consumer behavior.

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The Art of Wiki Design

JotSpotThis morning I spent some time fooling around with JotSpot, a hosted wiki-engine that allows anybody to create a new wiki and share it with authorized collaborators instantly. It’s a pretty cool piece of work with a lot of smart user information architecture behind it. The JotSpot team has put some laudable effort into making this tool a solid user experience — no installation or server configuration is necessary, and I got a pilot wiki up and running in under ten minutes. But there’s not much new to be found in terms of design, unfortunately; in spite of its competence, the application doesn’t look or feel particularly slick. In fact, JotSpot got me thinking that the rendering of wikis, by and large, has been quite lacking to date.

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Replacing iPod Earbuds

iPod EarbudsOkay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”

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Bright Ideas

AdobeIt takes a lot of energy to write new weblog posts regularly, and last week I just didn’t have it, between working some long days and flying out of state on a business trip that began with a Thursday morning flight at 5:00a and returned that same day around 8:00p. Whew. Anyway, it’s over, and I spent the weekend recuperating, which left me fresh and alert for today’s Adobe Ideas Conference here in New York. It was an interesting affair that brought together lots of different kinds of Adobe users — illustrators, designers, artists and business people — for seminars, mingling and, as it turns out, the celebration of the announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 2.

I saw some interesting speakers, but the best was the “holy shit” moment I had when I realized that the legendary illustrator and designer Paul Davis was sitting at the table next to me at lunch. I’ve actually met him in person once before — he’s the father of a friend of a friend — but that did nothing to diminish the awesomeness of the moment. The free swag wasn’t bad either — Adobe gave out shoulder bags to all attendees which, rare for a conference giveaway, is actually useful: it’s made by Brooklyn’s YAKPAK and fits my laptop and doesn’t look completely cheesey.

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A Commentary on Comments

For those of you who do a lot of weblog surfing, and who frequently participate in discussions at those sites by posting comments, I think there’s a need for a centralized system to manage that content. I’m talking about a method of aggregating those contributions in a single location, ideally on one’s own Web site but perhaps also on a page hosted by a remote application, combined with some pinging intelligence and a facility for management by their original author — you.

Think about it like this; taken altogether, you can look at everything you’ve written on other people’s weblogs as a body of content that you’ve generated for free — it’s only fair that you should be able to maintain a centralized archive of it, and to be able to display the fruits of your labors. Of course, the archive would include abstracts or excerpts from the original weblog post, as well as a URL directly back to it. That way, everybody wins.

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Keeping Secrets

LockThere are a lot of codes that I need to remember in order to get through a day of work. I’m talking about passwords, combinations, personal identification numbers, credentials of all kinds. Most of these, I keep in Web Confidential, a Mac OS X program expressly designed to encrypt and store this kind of data; it’s pretty much the best utility of its kind in my experience, but I’m no big fan of it. That’s why I notice acutely when I have to open it more often, and over the past six months, I’ve been looking up the 280 or so passwords I’ve stored in it almost constantly.

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A Matter of Perceptionists

The PerceptionistsThere’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

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Enhance Your Performance!

Enhance MeThe advice that some readers had for me in response to my complaining about Mac OS X’s tendency to develop troubles over time was: run a clean system and avoid third-party enhancements. It’s good advice and I’ve heard it lots of times over the years. At an old job, when the new Mac sysadmin first saw how many extensions and control panels I had running on Mac OS 9, he said, “Everywhere I go, there’s one guy that has like three rows of extension icons on the load screen. I guess you’re that guy here.” Guilty. I’m addicted to system utilities and enhancements, I must admit, but that doesn’t mean that I must resign myself entirely to the ill effects of them, does it?

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Just Like Starting Over

Mac OS X PantherMac OS X is great and all, but I’m feeling a little down on its susceptibility to the effects of accretion. My experiences with both Jaguar and Panther have been that life starts out all hunky dory when you have a new installation, but over time things gradually start to break down — utilities stop working, mysterious crashes occur, speed takes a hit. This is to be expected with complex operating systems, but it makes me pine a little bit for the old days of Mac OS 9, when you could clean out a system simply by moving files in and out of select folders and then reboot — now you need to run the Terminal and invoke all sorts of arcane UNIX-style commands and shit.

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The New New Methodology

New!Jason Fried made some waves at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference with a talk he gave entitled “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams.” It’s a little uncomfortable for me to talk about a competitor in a weblog post, even (or especially) one I respect as much as Fried, a principal at the justly lauded 37signals — but he raised some excellent and also controversial points that bear further discussion. Equal parts advertisement for his company’s hit Basecamp product and a proposal for a new way to look at Web development, his presentation might be grossly summed up thusly: set aside almost all of the time-consuming, preparatory measures of user-centered design and start designing the final customer experience — the interface — as soon as possible. You might call it something like “iterative design.” Fried published some initial thoughts on this approach in this weblog post, and if/when I can find a copy of his slide deck, I’ll link to it here.

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