the tower

freedom from expression

Thu Aug 13
marco: I get emails from friends about once a month asking what this means, quickly followed by a sinking feeling that I need to tell you this: that you almost definitely don’t have a backup of anything, and you’re going to ask me about data recovery, and I’m going to need to tell you that it doesn’t usually work, and you’ve probably lost the photos from your great European vacation or your baby’s first steps or the last four years of your life. I have almost the same experience as Marco, and I edited his words slightly to reflect mine: I often find it my job to tell people that their not having a backup is most of why I can’t recover their files for them. I pretty much never get out of these situations with very high stature. (The edit was to change “tell you this, and you almost definitely don’t have…” to “tell you this: that you almost definitely don’t have…”.)

marco:

I get emails from friends about once a month asking what this means, quickly followed by a sinking feeling that I need to tell you this: that you almost definitely don’t have a backup of anything, and you’re going to ask me about data recovery, and I’m going to need to tell you that it doesn’t usually work, and you’ve probably lost the photos from your great European vacation or your baby’s first steps or the last four years of your life.

I have almost the same experience as Marco, and I edited his words slightly to reflect mine: I often find it my job to tell people that their not having a backup is most of why I can’t recover their files for them. I pretty much never get out of these situations with very high stature.

(The edit was to change “tell you this, and you almost definitely don’t have…” to “tell you this: that you almost definitely don’t have…”.)

Fri May 8

My First Omegle Chat

  • Stranger: Game?
  • Me: Risk.
  • Me: Movie?
  • Stranger: Blade.
  • [System] The other party has disconnected
Mon Feb 16
Light Stage Six at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies

Light Stage Six at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies

Thu Jan 8
The MLK Day of Service being organized by the Obama transition team has a comical number of activities going on in the DC area.

The MLK Day of Service being organized by the Obama transition team has a comical number of activities going on in the DC area.

Thu Dec 18
The Microsoft approach to security: lots and lots of warnings. This is the warning you get when you open a new, blank access file. There is absolutely no data in this file at all, let alone macros. Read that text carefully - “may not be safe if it was intended to harm your computer.” How insightful. I’d even go so far as to say the file is not safe if it was intended to harm your computer. This warning serves no purpose and provides no security at all. What’s worse, Access only has two options for warnings, it seems: either throw a dialog up every time you open any file, or never warn you. These are equally useless options. What you need is a warning that only shows up when certain, often unsafe, conditions are present, e.g. the file contains macros. I realize the computer can’t analyze whether a file has “harmful intent,” but it can recognize when it’s exposing functionality that makes itself vulnerable, e.g. running arbitrary scripts.

The Microsoft approach to security: lots and lots of warnings. This is the warning you get when you open a new, blank access file. There is absolutely no data in this file at all, let alone macros. Read that text carefully - “may not be safe if it was intended to harm your computer.” How insightful. I’d even go so far as to say the file is not safe if it was intended to harm your computer.

This warning serves no purpose and provides no security at all. What’s worse, Access only has two options for warnings, it seems: either throw a dialog up every time you open any file, or never warn you. These are equally useless options. What you need is a warning that only shows up when certain, often unsafe, conditions are present, e.g. the file contains macros. I realize the computer can’t analyze whether a file has “harmful intent,” but it can recognize when it’s exposing functionality that makes itself vulnerable, e.g. running arbitrary scripts.

Mon Dec 15

Overheard at the office

  • Person 1: "What's the new version of Word?"
  • Person 2: "Word? .... XP? Vista?"
  • Person 1: "Vista!"
  • (The quote isn't meant to make fun of these two, I just enjoyed how their conversation went fluidly since they shared the same misunderstanding about Word v. Vista. Or maybe Person 2 was just really smart and knew Person 1 wasn't asking about Office.)
Fri Dec 12
When you turn on Universal Access on a Mac, you can use the space bar to press dialog box buttons. Unfortunately, most dialog boxes have different initial targets for space and return, so unless you have the visual indicators memorized (they’re harder to keep straight than you would think), you find yourself in a lot of ambiguous situations. (The solid highlight is for return, the stroke is for space.)

When you turn on Universal Access on a Mac, you can use the space bar to press dialog box buttons. Unfortunately, most dialog boxes have different initial targets for space and return, so unless you have the visual indicators memorized (they’re harder to keep straight than you would think), you find yourself in a lot of ambiguous situations.

(The solid highlight is for return, the stroke is for space.)

Tue Dec 9

Information Workers

Everywhere I turn I see information workers constrained by their inability to use & understand technology. Ease of use problem? Used to be.

The tasks these people are trying to get done are increasingly complex, and I feel they need to invest the time in learning some of the building blocks of technology. Want to edit video? You’re going to need to know something about moving around large files, even if you’re using iMovie. Want to design a piece for print? You need to understand DPI, and image compression formats. Want to build a website? I don’t recommend hand-coding HTML, but I do recommend understanding basic tags.

All the time around my office I hear the same problems come up again and again - people confused about which version of a document is current, because they emailed the document as an attachment each time they changed it. People who need to update a few words in an article hosted by a CMS, but can’t figure out why the formatting gets all screwy when they paste from an editor designed for print to an editor designed for the web. People who spend hours pushing around objects in Word because they’re trying to format something nicely, and aren’t aware of Publisher (or the reasons it exists).

I think because knowledge of information technology generally decreases as you climb the corporate ladder, this lack of skills is tolerated, and even accommodated for. There was a time when computers were just infuriatingly difficult to coerce into doing simple tasks, but those days are over. The things information workers are trying to do now are genuinely complex, and there’s no ease-of-use potion that will turn a complex task into an easy procedure. Businesses would be wise to push their employees to better understand the tool they sit in front of eight hours a day.

Thu Oct 16

marco:

“For those hurt by the financial crisis, a coin is no longer required.”

— iFixit on removing the battery cover on the new MacBooks

Assuming you were swapping in a new battery, a coin was never required: the flat, round corner of the replacement battery fits right into the lock’s groove. (At least this is the case on my PowerBook G4.)
Tue Oct 7

Cape Farewell - Infuriating image policy

There’s an amazing project called Cape Farewell, where a bunch of artists, writers, scientists, etc gather on a boat once a year and sail to the Arctic to get inspired. Their web site is a little confusing, but basically it’s an annual expedition, and they produce tons of great material each time they go.

Except it can’t be shown.

They only put out playing-card sized images of their trip. The largest image I could find on their Flickr account was this 500-pixel wide shot called Jakobshaven Icebergs.

I think the meteoric success of The Big Picture is a clear lesson that large-format photography is a huge attractor of eyeballs. It should not only be available, it should be easy to view — scrollable, not stuck in a flash interface or behind a gallery where you have to click each image individually. Cape Farewell has gone totally the wrong way on this — if you want a high res image, you have to a) be an actual journalist and b) get an account with them. I guess they don’t want coverage from blogs.