Valhalla Island

My web programming professor…

• …speaks in a droning monotone
• …is in his 40s
• …is short
• …wears his shirt tucked in and his pants up high
• …is passionate about programming
• …believes in the sharing of free information worldwide
• …uses free software
• …supports free software
• …teaches MVC programming
• …plays Second Life
• …bores my friends to death
• …knows the intricate differences between xHTML and HTML
• …speaks highly of Ruby on Rails
• …also speaks highly of Python
• …knows the power of Javascript
• …gets mad if structure and presentation are combined
• and makes jokes at his own expense

I like my web programming professor.

Design school is a completely different experience to the school of IT and the campus I spent most of the year at last year. The people are passionate, they’re are excited, they ask questions, they’re not bored, the documentation is well designed and the lecturers have traveled the world. The girls are much nicer to look at too.

I’m waiting at the train station after just finishing my first day. I’m not spending a great amount of time here this semester but the course I’m taking feels like a great one. This campus is beautiful, I’m here in the afternoon and I really have to take some photos.

The promise that I’ll spend more time here next semester is making me reconsider student exchange. The meetings for Europe and North America are next Monday. While a semester at this design school would be wonderful, studying overseas has the potential to be much better.

It’s strange that every assessment item corresponds with a sometimes national, sometimes international competition with quite huge cash prizes. We have three assignments with six briefs to choose from, all competitions with prize money of $3000 and up, including presentations at major design conferences. It adds another level of motivation.

During discussion about these competitions the issue of intellectual property came up. I am in extreme disagreement with the university’s policy but that’s a post for another day.

Even after just one day it’s obvious that most of the people there don’t get the web. They are designers. They admire flash websites with lavish animation and could care less for a semantic, well-formed definition list. This makes me glad I stuck with Multimedia, I love the web and would be missing it if I wasn’t studying it.

I won’t say posting will slow down here and there now that university is back on because it might not. There’ll be times like this, on the train heading home that were made for post writing.

I’ll keep this short as it’s already been said in over 110 posts on the Habari discussion board. It’s still something that interests me greatly.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be switching the content type on this blog to application/xhtml+xml. This site will completely stop rendering in IE 6 and below. There comes a time when you have to leave old technology behind for the benefits of new technology. I’m not in a position to lead the way, I just want to do things right.

Accessibilty expert Mark Pilgrim weighed in with his argument. He said this, I find it’s true for a lot of things, in and outside computing:

If you want to produce application/xhtml+xml, you are free to do so. If you get it right, no one will notice. If you get it wrong, no one will forgive you.

I have to admit, this brilliant scam wasn’t my idea. I’ve just seen it done and am passing on what I’ve learnt. Here are the steps that will lead you to the pot of free Mac software at the end of the rainbow.

1. Rush together an ugly Macintosh blog - like this one.
2. Pretend you’re an authority on the subject and command respect.
3. Contact indie software developers, convice them they’re so desperate for publicity that they need to give you a free copy of something they’ve made for you to review.

4. By now, you’ve got the free software but you’ve promised a review. To avoid pissing off the developer and making any real effort - take some screenshots and write a (badly written) review praising features no matter how useless they are. Use made up examples to support these features, for example:

   A designers’ worst nightmare is when he edits something and finds out two minutes later that he destroyed his whole layout or messed up his entire layout or created some undesirable color scheme and can’t remember how to fix it.

   See! That’s what an undo button is for, but not in this review! Don’t proofread or edit the review, it’s wasted time, remember you’ve already got the free software.
5. Use the money you’ve saved to shout your family dinner to congratulate yourself on a scam well done.

This method may also be used to gain press passes to events like Macworld. Enjoy!

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It’s been a really long time since I’ve written a haiku so today I bring you two, on the marvelous technology that is feeds.

Feeds on all websites Visitors? No! Subscribers No design, just text

My Feedburner stats Make me a slave to my blog NetNewsWire die

Last time I decided to try Flock out, giving it a real go as my full time browser for a week. If it wasn’t perfect, I was giving Opera a go. They both did so well that I’m now back to Camino, what happened?

Flock was OK but had a lot of small things that annoyed me. The first was when trying to import all my information from Firefox, Flock does not import from Firefox. A browser built on top of Firefox does not import from Firefox. So I had to export my bookmarks, import them into Safari and then import from Safari to Flock.

Actually, managing the bookmarks was a nightmare. There’s no folders, just collections, inside collections you can’t have folders. It goes against every other bookmarks system I’ve used. I like to have a folder of bookmarks on my bookmarks toolbar, I couldn’t with Flock.

Another small annoyance that wasn’t so small considering it’s right there all the time is the slightly off vertical center of text on the bookmarks toolbar and in tabs. It seems to be a pixel too high in the toolbar and a pixel or two too low on the tabs. Things like this annoy and frustrate me. Things like this should be right, they’re easy to get right. I can forgive and ignore a huge, highly complicated feature for being slightly off but not the vertical alignment of text.

Flock was far from perfect so 7 days later I was trying out Opera. Opera lasted an hour or two. I enjoy Opera’s interface, the default icons, it’s OS X like while still being unique.

It only lasted an hour because it has no bookmarks toolbar and no options. A bookmarks toolbar is important to me. I never used to use one but since I’ve started I’ve come to depend on it, I can’t use a browser without one. Also, there’s no options, I couldn’t make links from other applications open in a background tab. I couldn’t make tabs in general load in the background. I couldn’t customise the toolbar. There’s a lot I couldn’t do and I was forced to change familar browsing habits to accomodate Opera’s lack of features.

So I’m back to Camino. Quite a humble little browser. It’s fast, has a nice interface but is lacking a lot of the more enjoyable features from Firefox. Things like the nice find-as-you-type content search, being able to change tab ordering, built-in text field spell checker, extensions, there’s a lot Camino is missing out on.

Pimp my Camino has lots nice additions but it’s still not nearly enough.

The most frustrating thing about consistently changing browsers is the lack of ability to import everything that’s not just bookmarks, cookies, field values, saved passwords, tempory files. The only browser I’ve used that supports this is Firefox for Windows, it wins yet again.

Maybe it’s time to try Bon Echo again. I did try it once but my computer was so confused by which was the default browser and whether they were both actually FireFox that I almost lost all my bookmarks. That scared me off Bon Echo but maybe I should give it another chance.

The latest Daring Fireball article, Command, Option, Control, pulls the arms and legs off the argument for DRM in a few paragraphs.

In fact, he [Steve Jobs] explicitly pointed out the opposite, that DRM in general has had no effect on music piracy whatsoever, because 90 percent of music ships on DRM-free CDs.

For me, this is the single reason DRM is a ridiculous waste of time that hurts users with no advantage to the music companies. A massive majority of music purchased is DRM-free anyway, why should it be different for music sold online? Imagine if buying a T-Shirt online meant you could only wear it under certain circumstances.

It’s also for this reason that DRM has never affected me, I buy music on physical CD which I can then rip to my computer and copy to a music device of my choice.

The reason the music companies are unpopular is that their actions and stated policies make people unhappy. The reason Apple is popular is that its actions and stated policies (including Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”) make people happy.

and

Likewise, Microsoft’s deep institutional devotion to DRM is not about making their customers happy; it’s about making the entertainment industry happy even though it makes customers unhappy.

This rings so true. The RIAA (and Microsoft) are so hell bent on trying to wipe piracy off the face of the planet that they’re hurting their genuine, full-paying customers without thinking twice about what they’re doing to them.

Two billion songs have been sold on the iTunes Music Store since it’s launch, two billion songs that anyone can download for free via a P2P network, yet they were legally purchased. Gruber continues

If iTunes were to switch to DRM-free music, would it stop anyone who is already buying music from iTunes? No. And, more importantly, are there people who have refused to buy songs from iTunes because the songs are encoded with DRM? Yes!

Yet the big 4 won’t settle for anything less than a world where everyone pays for every piece of music anyone will ever listen to. They’re spending all energy trying to force pirates to pay for their music, which they will never do, instead of treating honest, paying customers with the highest regard. Make people think “paying for music might actually be worth it” instead of “why should I pay for music that’s crippled with DRM when I can download DRM-free music for free?”

Yesterday we finally got around to getting some shirts printed up. Home brew style.

Screen printing is fun, it’s a bit of hard work and it’s a bit primative but it gets the job done. All our shirts turned out really well. We did up a bunch that I designed with plans to sell them online as well as our touch football jerseys.

The Husselhoffs, the best team in G division! Have a look at the photoset on Flickr.

9 Rules have called their latest redesign and added functionality “Ali”. Being the hater I am, it doesn’t impress me, it’s taken 9 Rules off my daily reading list.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not as if I liked it before this added functionality and now I  abruptly dislike it. A long time ago it became one of those sites I’d just skip over, a strong sign it’s about to be taken off my list. These latest changes and additions have pushed me over the edge.

Before I forget, is there a requirement that if you host with Media Temple you have to display their ugly (mt) logo at the very top of your page? Or is it just like a badge of coolness? “I host with Media Temple, I’m so totally cool!”

9 Rules isn’t a high quality blogging network anymore, it’s lost it’s quality and it’s lost it’s blogging network in a huge mess of other stuff. Notes, Communities and now my.9rules. It seems as if the “The Rulers” have thought “9 rules as a blogging network was pretty successful, let’s release a bunch of new stuff under the same, already successful name”.

It hasn’t worked. For me, all it’s done is create clutter. The sole feature I used at 9 rules was the list of latest posts from around the network, this used to be the only feature and I’d always find a couple of good posts in that list each visit. Back then, there were far fewer blogs in the network and the percentage of blogs in the network I actually liked was high. Now, there’s so many blogs that the percentage I like is low enough to render that list useless.

On top of that, the list’s position has been relegated down the page. Below the ads, below a huge list of topics, below the search, below a huge my.9rules link and below a list of categories. It’s even on the right of screen, you could almost say the public notes feature has greater priority.

It bothered me the first time they moved the huge list of communities to the top of the page. I would go to 9 Rules to read some top quality content, I never wanted to read about something in particular. This is the case whenever I feel like reading, I don’t care what the book is about, I just want to read something good. 9 Rules used to provide this beautifully.

I can’t see anyone thinking “I really want to read what 9 rules members are saying about Apple”, for example. And the search? Are they trying to be somewhat of a moderated Technorati? If I want to search for something, I’ll use Google.

As for the design, it’s the previous design, with more distraction. Want a quick way to make the simplest site a little more cluttered? Add rounded corners to everything. Then they’ve added a holy ray of sunshine to the top of every block. With the rainbow of colour, I can barely hold my focus.

A severe case of overdesign.

I also find it strange that for a few months now the  only ads on the site have been to do with 9 Rules, for a company run by the runners of 9 Rules or for Text Link ads. What happened to their advertisers? Do they agree with me?

It might look like I’m just being a big negative nancy and I’ve got something huge against 9 Rules. I don’t. I’m annoyed that something I really enjoyed using has turned itself into something I don’t like. What used to be an exclusive, high quality blog network is now a free-for-all, crowded, low quality online community, moderated blog search engine, public forum, a mediocre social network and a popularity contest.

I’ll take the few blogs I found during the early days and be on my way.

A week ago, after signing up for the millionth online service, I had an idea to make fun of the whole account creating experience. Last weekend I built Useless Account and sent it live.

Before I even blogged about it I thought it’d be funny to submit it to TechCrunch and Paul Stamatiou as they review a lot of new web startups, not really expecting it to be considered at all. Unbelievably TechCrunch’s Michael Arlington featured Useless Account! He gave me a huge wrap and I couldn’t be more appreciative:

It’s clear, for example, that more work has gone into this joke than many of the startups we see every day.

After the first 50 signups the site started to slowly grind to a halt as the server tried to process so much of my horrible code. A huge thanks to Andrew Krespanis who offered to host the site’s images, moved quickly and got the site moving quickly again. Andrew is a book editor and also helped me with a lot of copy. He was a massive help all round.

Props also go to Randy Walker and blognewb in my IRC channel for writing two of the questions.

At the time of writing there are currently 202 useless accounts. An overwhelming amount. I’ve also been flooded with an a huge amount of email, both with thanks for a laugh and requests for design work through Brisbane Creative, even a phone call from a fellow Brisbane startup operator! A few new members in my IRC channel, #bcreative on irc.freenode.net, have popped up.

There’s a couple of other blog posts I’ve come accross too, this one on TinFinger is great!

The whole thing has completely exceeded my expectations. It’s going to take me forever to reply to all these emails, I’ve never recieved so many at once. But if you’re waiting for a reply, I will get back to you.

It’s not only supplied attention but in the few hours since it was featured I’ve met a whole bunch of people from the Brisbane and Australian web development community, it’s been great! I’m going to try to organise a BarCamp Brisbane.

I can’t wait to check out some of the answers to “What would you do for $1,000,000 that you wouldn’t for $10,000?”

Update: It got over 1000 Diggs and on the front page of del.icio.us! Wowza!

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There is no ideal browser for OS X. Firefox for Windows is where it’s at. If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know I’ve been through a few changes since switching. From Safari to Camino, from Camino to Firefox. Lately Firefox has been crashing over 5 times a day and it’s annoying, I want to switch.

One good thing about browsers for the Macintosh is choice. Here’s what I have to choose from:

• Camino
• DeskBrowse
• Firefox
• Flock
• IE 5
• Netscape
• OmniWeb
• Opera
• Safari
• Shiira

I thought I should try OmniWeb next, it’s a non-free browser in a free broswer world, it must be good. It’s very different to other browsers and you can tell it’s developed by a team of paid developers, there are a lot of features and a lot of options.

Too many things put me off OmniWeb right from the start. It feels kind of rushed together with not much attention paid to detail. The shelf of tab thumbnails is OK, but it feels poorly implemented. The bookmarks bar really bothers me, it kind of blends down into the page making it look like a menu bar on the top of each page.

I started writing this post in OmniWeb before remembering why I walked away from WebKit in the first place, the TinyMCE editor WordPress uses doesn’t work in WebKit and I really like the editor. Even if OmniWeb was wonderful apart from the editor problem I still wouldn’t stay, the last thing I want to do is use more than one web browser.

So I’m back in Firefox with another new browser to choose. Joey suggested that I try DeskBrowse. I like the idea of the controls on the bottom but having it stick to the side of your screen and not be able to pull it off? That’s stupid.

There’s two left that I take seriously and I haven’t throughly tried yet. That’s Flock and Opera. I really like both the interfaces, Opera’s especially. I don’t like the idea of not using Gecko though. I’ll be able to use the web dev toolbar with Flock but I’ll definitely miss Firefox’s content search, I’m not sure if that’s in Flock.

It’s Flock for this next week and if it’s not perfect, I’ll try Opera full time the following week. If Opera’s not perfect… I’ll stop using the internet.

Wait, no it wasn’t, it was horrible and I’m stopping. It may have been that I only had one Twitter friend, it might be that I’m just a boring person, whatever it was, it was crap and I was constantly forgetting to make updates.

Although I did end up making 18 updates over a few days, I only ever remembered to make updates at times when I had nothing to update about. Maybe it takes a week or two of solid twittering before it’s drilled into your brain that when something happens, you make a Twitter update. I’m glad I’m getting out before I’m addicted but as I say, I don’t feel like I’m getting addicted, I feel repulsed.

Twitter reeks of MySpace. It’s like public IM sometimes, which reminds me of MySpace comments, that often don’t need to be public but are. If I had a penny for every time I’ve read “Hey, how are you?” in a MySpace comment I’d have like 20 pennies but still, that’s a lot. Twitter isn’t that bad, but it’s getting there. I don’t want messages for someone else appearing in my twitter feed.

That said, I will be subscribing via RSS (not following via Twitter) a few people’s Twitter feeds, just because they post some interesting links. Blogging’s been slow lately and I want back in!