Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

Netscape Has Left the Building

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Netscape Navigator, one of the first ‘popular’ web browsers, is dead.

Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But American Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.

A sad, if unsurprising and inevitable end. One of my earliest web pages bills itself right at the top as being ‘Netscape 2.0 enhanced.’ Times gone by….

Google Transit: A for Effort…

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…but a solid F for practicality and safety. At least where my commute is concerned.

According to Google Transit, the best way for me to get from my apartment to North Seattle Community College involves grabbing a bus from the closest bus stop to the transit center just south of the Northgate Mall. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, after that, I need to walk a block, scale a chain-link fence, climb a hill, play Frogger across three lanes of northbound traffic, one express lane, and three lanes of southbound traffic on I-5, go down a hill, scale another chain link fence, hike through some woods, and swim across the lake on the NSCC grounds. Oh, and according to their estimates, it should take me nine minutes to do all this.

Google Transit Obstacle Course

I think that I’ll stick to the Seattle Metro Trip Planner for now. ;)

(Yes, I’m sure Google does much better in many circumstances. This one just gave me a good laugh.)

Better Buy

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I had to stop by Best Buy today to pick up a new WiFi router for our apartment. Normally, stopping by Best Buy is something I tend to avoid at all costs, and I’ll only go in when I know exactly what I need to get, so I can go in, grab it, and get out as quickly as possible. Today, however, I wasn’t quite sure what router to get (or if it would really be worth getting a new one), so I crossed my fingers and hoped I’d find a sales droid who had at least one and a half, if not two whole brain cells to rub together.

I ended up speaking to two — first, a guy in a green shirt, who was apparently the in-store Clearwire representative, but who happened to be free and knew something about WiFi routers. After describing the situation to him and batting things about, he led me back to the correct shelf, and he snagged a blue shirt on the way. I gave the blue shirt the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of the conversation I’d just had, he recommended a Netgear router to me, and — once again, crossing my fingers — I grabbed it and headed off to work.

(Minor aside: the issue in question was that our D-Link WiFi router seemed to have issues with Hermie, our Vista laptop. The D-Link worked fine over the wired connection with both Macs in the apartment, and connected fine via WiFi to my G5 desktop. Hermie consistently works fine with WiFi in public places — during travels, at the local Panera, and at NSCC — but it had serious issues connecting to the D-Link at home. Some days it would only connect after anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of repeated tries, other days we wouldn’t be able to get it to connect at all. Needless to say, this has been more than a little frustrating.)

After getting home from work, I unpacked the Netgear router, plugged it in, and went through the installation song and dance, using the ‘Installation Wizard’ on the CD from Hermie. Once it said it was up and running, I checked both desktops via the wired connections, and they were fine. Checked the Airport connection on my G5, it was fine. Rebooted Hermie (to cover all my bases), logged in, and started to head to the ‘Network’ icon down in the try to initialize the connection…but wait, what was that? It was already connected! No muss, no fuss, no error messages telling me it couldn’t connect…it was just there, just like magic. Just like it’s supposed to work.

Thinking back on it, I realized that this now makes five times in a row that I’ve had to go into Best Buy for something, and come out with what I needed, and — when I’ve had to deal with any of the staff — actually not been driven to distraction by their idiocy. In this case, I was actually given good information, and they helped me find what I needed.

I must say, while I’m still no fan of the overall Best Buy experience (their stores tend to come across as oppressive to me…too loud, with aisles that are packed too closely together to make the experience pleasant), five consecutive good experiences have to lead me to admit something of a trend. I don’t know if they’re starting to emphasize more or better training that deals in actual knowledge rather than simple salesmanship, but for some time now, the staff has seemed far more competent than I would have expected.

I may not ever get to a point of just stopping by to browse, or remotely look forward to having to dive into Best Buy…but at least at the moment, I don’t feel the need to actively avoid the store or it’s sales droids when I do stop in. And, for Best Buy, that’s saying a lot.

Condescended

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I’m hoping that now that we’re just about a year away from the transition to all-digital TV broadcasting and the government’s TV Converter Program is up and running, we’ll finally start to get some information and reviews on the various TV converter boxes that are (or will be) available.

I just applied for my two coupons towards the boxes, and then started searching on some of the listed eligible converter boxes to see what they’re like. Unfortunately, much of what I found was brief little snippets from über-geek and audiophile sites with comments like this…

…one of the “digital switchover” converter boxes your stubborn granny can buy early next year with her $40 coupon from the government, in lieu of getting a new goddamn TV.

Okay, sure, that’s from Gizmodo. Still — not every geek out there works for Microsoft and has a gazillion expendable dollars…or sees the need to toss out a perfectly good (and, actually, very nice) TV set that works fine, aside from not having the ATSC tuner.

Overspecialization?

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With all the different specialized blogging, pseudo-blogging, or linking websites and services available these days, I’m starting to lose track of how I’m ‘supposed’ to do this one-to-many online communication thing.

It used to be easy. Back in the ‘old days,’ you’d hand-edit a simple HTML file with whatever you wanted to put on it, whenever you wanted to put something on it. Maybe it’d be a link, maybe it’d be a screed. Maybe people would see it, maybe they wouldn’t. Pretty simple.

Then blogging arrived to make everything simpler. Gone were the days of hand-editing HTML and managing pages directly, now you had specialized software that handled the details for you. Databases to store the information, automatically dynamically generated pages, comments, the whole shebang. Still, content-wise, it was still a grab-bag. Some posts would be long, detailed, and in-depth; other posts would be a single small link or quip; sometimes you’d get lists of links that caught someone’s eye.

Now, however, you’ve got a veritable plethora of specialized sites to handle all the different types of information you might want to share. The ones that I either use (in some fashion) or have pinged my radar strongly enough to trigger this little round of rambling, in rough order of depth:

  1. Twitter: 140-character messages originally meant to be IM-style ‘status updates,’ but now often used for ‘nanoblogging’ — short, pithy messages. No more, no less. Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will all tweet brief.

  2. del.icio.us: Social bookmarking that has evolved far more towards the social side than the bookmarking side. While I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually use their del.icio.us account as a substitute for the ‘bookmarks’ menu in their web browser, I see far more who use it as a ‘microblog’ (often displayed as a sidebar to their main weblog) wherein each post is a single link with short commentary.

  3. Tumblr: “The easiest way to share yourself,” according to their splash page. I’ve not bothered setting up a ‘tumblelog’ for myself, but this appears to fill in the ‘miniblogging’ niche, with an emphasis on simple link and media inclusion. Apparently, “this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” Honestly, I’m still a little confused by the niche that this one fills (or attempts to fill).

  4. Weblogs (the usual suspects): Finally, the sites and software packages that used to be simple ‘blogging’ tools are now…what? Is this still ‘blogging’? Or is it now ‘macroblogging’?

I’m starting to feel like I’m losing track of what kind of post is ‘supposed’ to go to which service, and I’m more and more wondering if it’s even worth continuing to keep them all separate. However, there are occasional advantages to the specializations of the services (del.icio.us’s tagging and quick bookmarklets, the dedicated clients that are available for many of the services) that keep me using them instead of just using ‘old-school’ weblog posts for everything.

If I had the time (which student life prevents) and design skills (which simply don’t exist), I’d love to put some effort into seeing if I could assemble an über skin for my site that would streamline everything into one stream-of-consciousness approach (along the lines of what I see on Daring Fireball and kottke.org) but still allow me to use those services that I find useful. It doesn’t seem horrendously complex: plugins (some of which are probably available in some form or another) that would automatically convert each post at one service or another into its own post on my weblog, default posting options for each type of post (perhaps tweets don’t need comments enabled, for instance), and possibly some CSS work that would distinguish the types of posts.

But then, would that still be too complex? There’s always the question of what happens when one service or another is having connection issues (which I keep running into with Twitter — apparently there’s some avian flu going around over there). Perhaps I’d still be better off just coming back around to using my weblog for everything. Consolidate everything in one place — after all, there’s absolutely no real reason why I “have” to ramble on for a certain length for the post to be worthy of going on the blog, rather than being posted as a tumble, del.icio.us link, or tweet.

There’s a few things I’d miss, though, which may keep me from doing this. The in-built social networking of places like Twitter are nice, though not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being able to have my tweets and del.icio.us links show up on my Facebook profile is nice. Sometimes I like the compartmentalization (on the weblog, for instance, ‘big’ posts in the center, tweets and links over in the sidebar), sometimes I feel like it’s unnecessarily over complicating things.

Meh. I’ve gone on to just rambling now. Maybe that 140 character limit isn’t so much of a bad thing, huh?

Ancient Technology

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16mm Film ProjectorMy anthropology teacher had shown the class directly before ours a movie using an actual 16mm film projector, and was rewinding it when we all came in and sat down. I got a kick out of seeing one in use — heck, I was the A/V geek in elementary school who always volunteered to run the projector when I could — but the look of confusion, wonder, and near-horror on the face of one girl in the class was absolutely hilarious.

“What is that thing? How old is it…when was it made, the forties? Thirties?” She watched, absolutely fascinated, as the teacher ran out the last few minutes of film and we listened to the clickety-clack of the gears and rachets and the warbling, jittery audio; as he raised the rear reel and threaded the trailer back in to the hub; and as he patiently waited for the ‘whap-whap-whap’ of the leader slapping against the projector that signaled that the film was done rewinding.

Wireless

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I’ve finally joined the 2000’s — I’m kicked back in bed, typing away on a laptop that’s on a wireless connection.

I mentioned before that last week, Prairie and I picked up a laptop ‘puter. While it came with a pre-installed wireless card, we still had to physically plug it in, as with naught but desktops beforehand, we’d never had any need to go wireless. So, while Prairie was on her trip (where Hermie — named so because, when charging, pink and blue lights glow on the front, prompting Prairie to comment that it’s a hermaphrodite — apparently performed quite well), I picked up an Airport card for my computer.

Theoretically, we should have been able to coax Hermie into picking up a wireless signal from my computer, but no matter what we tried, it didn’t seem to work. As we had a few errands to run, we added a quick run by Target and picked up a little home wireless router from D-Link. Came home, hooked it up…and viola! Wireless is up and running on my desktop and on Hermie.

I am running into one little issue, however — and as I’m just not used to working (er…fighting) with Windows, let alone Vista, I’m hoping there might be some ideas. Right now, in order for Hermie to connect, I have to run the network wide open, with WEP completely disabled. If I turn WEP on, then instead of asking for a password, Vista immediately gives me an error message telling me that Windows did not get a response from the router…however, it pops that message up so quickly that it doesn’t seem to even be waiting for a response. Odd, and a little frustrating. I haven’t tried switching over to WPA yet to see if that works, but that might be my next bet, as all the Google-fu I can muster on the error I’m getting tells me to reinstall the drivers for my wireless adapter. :p Meh.

So far so good, though…

Update: We’re up and running using WPA-Personal. I’m not exactly sure how or why — it took a couple tries and it wasn’t working at first, but for some unknown reason suddenly it got a successful connection. Nifty!

Photo Drop

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Photo Drop

Photo Drop is a slick little Dashboard widget — actually, one of the first that was slick and potentially useful enough for me to download and toss in to my Dashboard, which isn’t exactly the most-used OS X feature on my system. It’s a nice, simple one-trick pony: drag a photo to Photo Drop, set a few quick options for the final look (size, effects, etc.), and you’re done. Plus, it’s free. Not bad!

Flickr: User Interface Overload

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User Interface Overload, originally uploaded by djwudi.

On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.

However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!

  • Line 1 (constant): The global account options.

  • Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.

  • Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.

  • Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.

  • Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.

It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!

Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Hatred Fatigue

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I missed this when it was first posted, but thanks to this (also excellent) post of Mike’s, I’ve just discovered a nicely concise explanation as to why I’m not posting about politics as much as I used to: Hatred Fatigue:

I also seem to be experiencing something that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “hatred fatigue” — namely that, after over five years of abhorring almost every single action, day in and day out, the Bush Administration and neoconservative movement takes, there’s a part of my brain which is simply screaming “I can’t stand it anymore!” — it not being Bush and neocons, but instead the sheer weight of continued pessimism and fear.

Similarly to Mike, while my primary posts have lost much of their political content, my linklog is not exactly devoid of links tagged ‘politics‘. As frustrating as it is to see what I see going on in this country, it’s hard to bother trying to make my voice heard when discourse today never seems to be a rational, respectful discussion of differing points of view — instead, anything that isn’t what we believe is to be damned, vilified, cast out, and exorcised, by any means necessary.

What strikes me as particularly troublesome…is how this incident demonstrates the uncivil demeanor of this country and our relationships with our political opposites. And my definition of civility needs some clarification: I do not mean prudish stuffiness. I mean the treatment of another human being with simple, decent respect, even as you acknowledge with no rancor that your position differs significantly from theirs.

It’s a rather sad commentary on our current culture that as a whole, we’re so intolerant of other viewpoints. There’s nothing wrong with other viewpoints, and neither is there anything wrong with disagreeing with other viewpoints. When we stoop to destroying people in order to destroy their viewpoints, however, there is something seriously, seriously wrong.

Bonus thought experiment that Mike brings up, but that I don’t have time to poke at right now (other than to say that at first blush, I agree with where he’s going):

The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has wired us all up to each other in metamorphosing ways that I still believe our culture hasn’t fully assimilated yet, and perhaps won’t for generations to come.

The Internet allows that intrinsic incivility — that Hatred of the Other — to be both concatenated and ring-led with no lag time or delay. There’s no organizational time needed; all that’s needed is a charismatic figure and its followers.

[…]

The Internet has done such great harm to us as a political culture because, viewing it on the much larger scale of societal development (as opposed to human lives), we’ve suddenly become wired up to each other far more quickly than we ever were before.

[…]

As a species, I don’t think we were sociologically equipped to be hooked up to each other’s beliefs and to handle the combined weight of Internet-scale movements and politically biased memes. I simply don’t believe that as a species we’re going to get an okay handle on this situation, wherein we’ll somehow, someday resort to a situation where we find an easy peace with each other. I think that unless somehow such vitriol and rage falls out of vogue, a possibility I find so small as to be nearly non-existent, we’re going to be culture-warring and meme-warring with each other until the sheer massive neglect of society’s normal business causes something catastrophic to grind us to a halt.

What do we do if the only way to combat this culture of hate is to unplug?