New iMac

Poooff and the new iMac is here. Watch the blogosphere light up...

Personally, I'm not entirely seduced by the 'pizza box on a stand' shape of the new iMac, just like I wasn't entirely convinced by the 'screen on a stick on a blob' design of the previous iMac, but you can't deny that Apple turns out some of the slickest product designs ever. Just look at the connection ports on the back of the case. I'm not sure that's the best place from a usability point of view (does the base swivel?), but damn... those ports look good :)

2004-08-31 @ 13:40 » 1 comment » Tech

Put-put-put

Is it just me or is the internet sluggish today? Servers in the Netherlands seem to respond as quickly as normal, but fetching stuff from across the Atlantic or the Far East (often routed via the US) is rather slow compared to usual. Oh well...

2004-08-24 @ 16:13 » no comments » General

Form feeds function feeds form

Dave says:

[R]eactions to the two successive redesigns of this site over the past few months have been insightful. I believe they go a long way to illustrating that content requires presentation, and function requires packaging. [...] A good design lends credibility. A bad design hurts it.

I thoroughly agree. I really should do something about this site, heh.

2004-08-19 @ 11:45 » 2 comments » Webdesign

RSS software update feeds

Software is frequently updated. That's nice, because new versions usually fix bugs and security problems and sometimes offer new functionality. Increasingly programs want to auto-update themselves. To do so they need access to the internet to check if there is a new version available and if so, alert me or automatically download the updates.

I always turn off this behavior if possible. It's not that I don't want to stay up-to-date, but most of all I don't want software to connect to the internet on its own account. That's why my ZoneAlarm firewall blocks outbound connections of unauthorized programs. For the same reasons of security and privacy my computer sits behind a NAT router and my browser only accepts cookies from whitelisted domains.

I don't use very many programs on a regular basis, there are about 40 entries in the Programs folder of my Windows Start menu, but there are also a number of appliances (like my router, mp3 player and scanner) and other hardware like the videocard of my computer that occasionally get firmware or driver updates. All in all it adds up to a big list of software updates to keep track of, which is probably the exact reason why more and more programs want to auto-update themselves.

What would be a really good solution is if for every piece of software, whether program, driver or firmware, there was a RSS feed informing users of updates. Every update published to the RSS feed could come with a little advisory whether or not the update fixes any critical issues or with the release notes. As a user I could keep all the software update feeds in the "Software Updates" folder of my preferred feed reader and easily, in one central place, keep track of all available updates and their importance.

I'm not someone who writes specifications, but building on a future universal (hah!) availability of software-update feeds, it should be possibly to click the "install" link for a particular update and have the installer or downloader launch, while simultaneously have the installation instructions pop up. I'm sure there are many issues to be resolved for this system to work, but it would be a pretty cool system.

2004-08-18 @ 13:45 » no comments » Tech

Oh crap!

I've spend a whole lot of time on this really gruesome bug. I foolishly tried to install an ISDN card after updating and patching Windows 2000 up the wazoo. Some drivers just will not install after installing ServicePack 3, 4 or one of Microsoft's critical updates. In this case the ISDN driver quit the installation with the complaint that "a file" could not be found. What file? But no... "a" file could not be found during installation.

Eventually I had managed to mess up a freshly installed Windows 2000 so badly that no networking was possible anymore at all (yes it's possible! ipconfig /renew said that that the adapter I was trying to renew had no sockets anymore... whatever that means). I don't know if the bugfix actually works, I just installed Windows anew, again, and installed the ISDN driver before installing any updates. Worked fine, no problem. Which leads me to conclude that the very original installation of that computer predated SP3 and that hotfix that Microsoft mentions. Which explains why I had no recollection of there being any problem with installing that ISDN card in the first place. I think it's only cost me, oh what... 12 hours in total.

2004-08-13 @ 12:26 » no comments » Software

Number One!

Okay... I complained yesterday that Google was sucking up loads of bandwidth from my server, but at least it's returning the favor...

This site is the number one Google search result for the term "fragment". Out of some 3.7 million hits.

W0000t! Ichiban!

2004-08-11 @ 10:21 » 2 comments » Blogosphere

Google's big bad appetite

I'm not particularly interested in the stats generated by my website. I have a generous hosting plan and I don't generate that much traffic. Today I looked at the website's stats for the first time in a couple of months. May 2004 saw a huge spike in traffic, almost 900 megabytes, whereas previously the website was generating somewhere between 400 and 500 megabytes of traffic. Since May traffic has fallen a little, but is still at roughly 750 megabytes.

When I looked closer at my stats I saw that the huge spike in traffic was largely generated by Google's webcrawling Googlebots. Until March 2004 my website got about 100-200 hits a month from two or three different Googlebots generating some 2 megabytes of traffic. Not even enough to end in the top 10 of the "Sites by Kilobytes" section of the stats.

Come April 2004 Googlebot traffic is soaring and in May the top 5 is completely taken over by Googlebots, generating 35% of the total number of hits on the website and sucking up 40% of the total consumed bandwith. That's 365 megabytes out of a grand total of 898 megabytes.

I like Google's accurate and up-to-date search results as much as the next guy/gal, but this is getting ridiculous.

I sometimes post more than once a day, but most of the time it's once every couple of days. Indexing my website no more than 4 times a day should be plenty for any search engine. Does anybody know how to tell Google to ease up a little on my poor little website?

2004-08-10 @ 15:33 » no comments » Blogosphere

A better WiFi connection

I forgot where I first found this tip, but it's been instrumental in getting my dad online this weekend.

The Situation:
The phone line and hence the ADSL connection are located on the ground floor at the front of the house. My dad's computer is sitting on his desk on the second floor at the back of the house. Running cables would be a big job requiring plenty of drilling, so I set up a 802.11g (54 Mbps) wireless router next to the ADSL modem and plugged a corresponding 802.11g wireless network card into his computer.

As it turned out, the connection was rather flaky with the default settings of the router. Although the computer said that the signal strength of the router was about 65-70 percent, the actual strength of the established wireless link was hovering around 30-40 percent. The network card was constantly trying to get the transmission rate as high as possible, preferrably at 54 Mbps, but in the process it kept dropping and re-establishing the connection with the router. Obviously, this interfered with a normal use of the internet connection.

The Solution:
The trick is to go into the administration panel of your router and select a much slower transmission rate in order to stabilize the wireless connection between the router and the network card. I 'detuned' the transmission speed all the way from its "Auto" (meaning maximize) setting to 1 Mbps. The result was (and still is) a rock stable wireless connection.

The Explanation:
Maybe you're wondering now... why get a speedy 54 Mbps wireless router and set it to transmit even slower than a previous generation 11 Mbps 802.11b router?

One consideration is security. The 802.11g routers support the more secure WPA protocol, whereas 802.11b routers don't.

The other consideration is that if you have a setup like this, there is absolutely no need for a connection at the highest possible wireless transmission rate.

Most likely your ADSL (or cable) connection will be slower than 2 Mbps. My dad's ADSL is rated at 416/160 Kbps. Note the difference here between the M=Mega and the K=Kilo. The ADSL connection effectively limits the topspeed to 0.4 Mbps, or less than 1 percent of the maximum throughput of 54 Mbps wireless connection. Dialing down the transmission rate of the wireless router does not make any difference in how fast you surf the web, but it makes all the difference in how stable your wireless connection is.

If you have a faster 1 to 2 Mbps ADSL connection, try setting the transmission speed to 2 or 5.5 Mbps. Most likely that will secure a more stable connection while still being plenty fast enough to support your internet related traffic.

There is one caveat, namely if you have more than 1 wireless computer and you want to have them talk to each other fast(er). If that's the case, you will have to up the transmission rate of the router to establish a faster connection between the different local machines. The trick here is to find the optimal trade-off between a fast and a stable connection. Just experiment with the transmission rate settings :-)

2004-08-10 @ 12:43 » no comments » Tech

Visiting webloggers

I had a rather weird dream last night. I was visiting some of the best known bloggers on this planet, although, as it often goes in dreams, I didn't actually know their names even though I very clearly know who the were, nor was it totally clear if I was actually there with them or if I was a somewhat disembodied spectator looking in. They had fabulous lives, those bloggers, meeting all kinds of interesting people in very glamorous surroundings and being important in all the right places. I drifted around in this scene with varying lead actors/bloggers for a while until I woke up. I wondered why the hell these bloggers were even blogging themselves. It looked like there would be enough paparazzi interested in documenting their lives for them.

2004-08-05 @ 09:02 » no comments » Blogosphere

Microsoft interested in buying Nintendo?

Well, that was the four line news item in the newspaper this morning. Turns out that the source of the news is the German financial magazine Wirtschaftswoche (note the amazingly userfriendly URL). They quoted Gates as saying that were Nintendo's former president and largest shareholder Hiroshi Yamauchi happen to call, he would immediate get Gates himself on the phone. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quotes Microsoft spinmeisters as saying it was a quip, lost in translation. Make of it what you will.

2004-08-05 @ 08:52 » no comments » Games

Sponsored links

anandtech-sponsoredlink.pngToday I noticed something interesting in an article on Anandtech. Some of the words in the text, as you can see from the first picture here, are sponsored links. If you hover over them, you get to see a little advertisement and clicking on them takes you to the website of the advertiser. The most interesting thing here is that these links are added in dynamically, even after the page has loaded. If you look closely when loading on the pages of the article, you will see that the words "Radeon 9700 Pro" are at first unstyled and then, retroactively, are styled as a link. This is confirmed if you look at the source of the page. That link is no normal hyperlink, it is plain text.

At first I thought, wow, this is a brilliant way of advertising. It is very unobtrusive, just a link in the text, a little pop-up to warn the reader it's an advertisement. Of course, these links are pretty much like the "Smart Tags" that Microsoft at one point tried to introduce, but that it quietly abandoned after a big public backlash. The basic idea was simply to have their Internet Explorer browser actively insert paid-for links on certain keywords in a webpage, any webpage, that the reader was looking at. That plan was quite a bit more intrusive than one site implementing this advertising strategy, but still... I wonder if Microsoft patented that idea.

anandtech-normallink.png However, I soon also saw two major problems with this advertising strategy. The first is that, as you can see from the second picture, that Anandtech chooses to style the sponsored links exactly the same as their normal links. Apart from hovering over the link, there is no way the reader can easily distinguish sponsored links from normal, bona fide links. This is probably good for click-through rates, but I guess people will quickly become annoyed by it. This would be a whole lot more palatable if the sponsored links were styled different from normal links.

The second problem I find harder to describe, but inserting links this way messes with one's (my) perception and understanding of the text. Reading a (hyper)text and seeing many links, you (I at least) start to map out that text for a better understanding. Is this a text that references many outside sources or is it heavily linked to other relevant texts on the same server (by the same author)? In the first case, I'm reading a commentary of sorts that I may (or may not) understand without reading the external sources. In the second case, there is a good chance I'm looking at only a piece of a larger whole. Regardless of which scenario I find myself in, the links in the text, even if I don't hover over them or click them, are part of the way I make sense of the text.

The type of sponsored links seen on Anandtech change that. Most importantly, the links in the text don't function in service of the text anymore, they don't link to any information that the author of the article thinks is relevant for the understanding of his text. The sponsored links might be internal or external, they have no semantic function with regard to the text anymore. This is made worse because these links are dynamic, which means that they will disappear over time or maybe subsituted for a competitor's link. Whether intended or not, the lack of semantic function seems implied/acknowledged by the way these links are retroactively inserted on the browser side, so they will probably not show up in, for instance, Google's ratings.

All in all I'm not that enthousiastic about these sponsored links anymore. They are actually more intrusive than any banner ad you could place in or around the text, but they are more insidiously so. Not simply because the reader could click on them and be taken to an advertisement page s/he did not expect, but because these links undermine our collective understanding of what a (hyper)text is by eroding the intentionality and authorship implied by the text. That's not good, but unfortunately it is a point that will not at all be obvious to most readers.

2004-08-04 @ 10:52 » no comments » Webdesign

Who owns your ideas?

A spooky article on Slashdot about a programmer who lost a long running court case about who owned the ideas in his head: the programmer himself or his employer. The employer won.

2004-08-04 @ 09:45 » no comments » General

New category in the File Sharing Database

Slashdot points to the File Sharing Database, which offers people a place to register which CDs, DVDs, software or other stuff they bought after having first sampled part or whole of it by downloading it through a file sharing utility. They say that:

The ultimate goal is to show what (if any) significant revenue the RIAA, MPAA, and SPA have to credit to the file sharing community, and hopefully convince some of the organizations supporting them that their money would be better spent taking advantage of this market rather than trying to exterminate it.

It's nice to know what stuff people did buy because they liked it, but I suggest another category in the database (can't be too hard): stuff people didn't buy because they sampled it and they thought it sucked. Then you could also list how much money people saved by not buying a CD that they'd really only listened too twice (Moby, 18, ~10 euro) or movies that looked interesting but that you only saw 25 minutes of on an airplane, so you got them on video and they sucked (Moulin Rouge, ~10 euro).

2004-08-01 @ 10:17 » no comments » General

A small miracle

I had dreaded the day I would have to open my mailbox at work. Including our holiday it would have been close to six week since I had last checked it. I figured it would be filled to the brim with spam. So when I finally forced myself to open Outlook at work last Wednesday I was pretty surprised to only see 407 unread messages. I checked how many messages had been filtered into the spam-folder. Just 34. And scrolling through the subjects of the unread messages revealed that only three actual spams had made it into my inbox. A small miracle. The university sysadmins must have tightened the spam filters when I wasn't there. Great!

Of course, I could have done without the 60 or so automated messages from the sysadmins telling me that both my Outlook mailbox and my homedir are over their quota. Sending those messages daily won't help cure the problem, especially not when the user of that account is on holiday. They should rather talk to the department staff who insist on sending us their newsletters as huge Word attachments bloated from included images and loads of styling. I recon that would reduce intranet traffic and storage needs significantly. Oh well... I just need to process some 300 messages now, so that's pretty doable.

2004-07-31 @ 13:19 » no comments » Work

Picture

I was going to post a picture I took in Japan here, but suddenly MovableType borks creating a thumbnail big time. So if you want to have a look at a pretty picture of wet leaves in Kanazawa, you can temporarily follow this link. If you happen to have a clue what kind of tree this is, feel free to leave a comment :)

All in all it seems about the right time to ditch MovableType, or at least this installation of MovableType, because through no action on my part the search function started acting funny and now I can't upload images anymore. Hrmp!

2004-07-27 @ 22:33 » no comments » Sitestuff

Changes and language switching

I haven't been all that happy with this site for quite a while... for several reasons. One is that for an extended period of time I've felt like I'd run out of steam and consequently I felt like I didn't have all that much to write about. Another is that I've been feeling that the technology driving the site is often in the way of writing. It's not just the content management system (CMS) that's been giving me the jitters, nor just the layout which I think needs a thorough overhaul, but mostly a lack of integration.

There are several sections on this site, the main blog that you are reading now, my Dutch blog, the Cyberculture Resources, and the not yet very integrated Fotolog and Quicklinks. Because of the way MovableType operates, these different sections are each their own weblog installation and are thus separated from eachother not just in presentation on this website but also in management/administration in the CMS. This most importantly means that they are separate from each other conceptually. While I don't feel that it is a big problem for the Cyberculture Resources or the Quicklinks to be somewhat separate from the rest of the weblog, it is a big show stopper for the "content rich" posts in the English, Dutch, and Photo sections.

You could say that I am bilingual (or trilingual if you'd count photography as a third language) and virtually every weblog application is monolingual. There is no true support for more than one language in any of the weblog applications that I've looked at. What we need is not just internationalization and localization of applications, as important as they are, but we need true support for multi-linguality. We need a "language switch."

I think Stephanie wrote up the problem quite well and even provided a great solution for Wordpress users. As she also notes, you can't adequately solve this problem by using the category system provided by most weblog applications. When I want to write a review, I want to file it under Reviews and I don't want to file under either English/Review or Nederlands/Recensie. Say you are bilingual, just like me, and you want to see all my reviews, whether they are in English or Dutch, you should be able to pull them up by hitting the "review/recensie" category. If you read only English or only Dutch, you'd hit the language switch and immediately filter out only the English or the Dutch reviews. Pretty much the same should go for the whole weblog.

Actually, taking a little detour here, this points to another problem. Users are free to choose how they name their categories and these categories generally play an important role in the navigation of the website. However, categories can not be "localized" depending on where you are in the website. A "review" is a "recensie" in Dutch but I can only choose one of those two words to indicate a single category. However, regardless of which language I choose to write in, I want my review to go in the "review/recensie" category. Ideally the language switch would be smart enough to allow localization of categories, showing you the category name in the proper language, depending on which language you chose through the language switch.

When I write, I don't want to be thinking about how or where my post fits into the weblog and I don't want to realize after the first paragraph that I need to copy/paste my text into a different weblog installation. I want to write my post as an integral part of my bi/multi-lingual weblog, set the language switch, and publish it. The software should be smart enough to deal with my post in the right way. Ideally each post would be published to the "front page," while allowing separate indexes for each language, including a separate index for the photographs, in case you just want to browse through the photographs. Not quite incidentally, most weblog applications could do with a serious upgrade of their photo/file handling and integration (but that's a topic for another post: photo uploading, thumbnailing, post integration, and dynamic image handling for liquid designs).

So, where does that leave me for the moment? I've installed Wordpress to test it out and I'd already decided to give MovableType 3 a spin around the block and I will install that later. Just this morning Six Apart released new details about the upcoming MT version 3.1 (general non-developers release). The most intriguing news is that MT will start to offer dynamic PHP generated content on a per template basis, meaning that the previously fundamentally "static" MT will now allow you to set up a dynamic weblog and generate static files for only a couple of high traffic indexes, such as for instance RSS/Atom feeds and the main index.

Interestingly enough, this exact same morning Matt delivers news of the updated Staticize plugin that will allow the fundamentally dynamic Wordpress to deliver certain high-traffic indexes, such as RSS/Atom feeds, as static files, resulting in less work for the webserver. Guess this is an indication of things to come: an optimal distribution between dynamic and static content, meaning both flexibility for the user and low server overhead. Meanwhile I will try to pick up posting here a bit and not be such a slouch.

2004-07-27 @ 13:15 » 4 comments » Sitestuff

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