January 2011 – Page 3

Month: January 2011 (page 3 of 3)

Google’s decision to drop H.264 support in Chrome

Google’s decision to drop native support for the H.264 video codec in Chrome has generated a number of arguments on the Web. Google’s defenders argue that H.264 is not royalty-free and is thus inappropriate for use with HTML5, since the W3C refuses to mandate the use of royalty-encumbered technologies in its specifications. Google’s critics argue that this doing so is a cynical move aimed at bolstering its own codec, WebM, and undermining vendors like Apple and Microsoft who support H.264 and who don’t support WebM or Theora. It seems inarguable that this decision by Google insures that Flash players will continue to be the primary means of showing video on the Web.

The best overview of this issue that I’ve seen is Peter Bright’s piece at Ars Technica: Google’s dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness.

Gauging the battle between carriers and handset makers

January 12, 2011 / Rafe / 7 Comments

One of the most encouraging things about the original iPhone was that it was an Apple product, not an AT&T product. Apple maintained control over just about every aspect of the user experience, and customers relied on AT&T only for connectivity. This was great news for end users, because mobile carriers tend to do an awful job in terms of user experience. One of the reasons the iPhone was so starkly different from everything else on the market at the time was that it was so obviously free of the horrible sorts of interfaces that carriers always foist upon their customers.

I was among the many optimistic people who believed that the iPhone was the harbinger of things to come, and that soon there would be a plethora of handsets from a variety of manufacturers that, like the iPhone, reflected the design choices of the handset maker rather than the carrier. Aside from the discontinued Nexus One (which no carriers subsidized) and more recently the Nexus S (offered by T-Mobile), that hasn’t happened.

Now I’m seeing a similar prediction from Owen Thomas at VentureBeat, arguing that the Verizon picking up the iPhone in its pristine state is a sign that carriers will lose control of the handsets.

I’m not as optimistic about this as I once was. Android has not been helpful in this regard. Because of the way Android is licensed, carriers are free to manipulate it in any way that they choose before installing it on handsets, and manipulate it they do. Apple alone insists that carriers who offer its handsets do so without customizing the phone to suit their needs.

For a number of good reasons (one of which is that they won’t allow carriers to customize the iPhone software or put their logos on the hardware), iOS is unlikely to become the dominant OS in the handset market. Android is an excellent product, and Android handsets are going to be offered across the full handset price range soon enough. RIM and Microsoft aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The question then becomes, is anyone other than Apple going to stand up to the carriers and demand that they control the user experience instead of the carrier. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely.

Fred Phelps is a troll

January 11, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

I wish the media would take Rogers Cadenhead’s advice when it comes to dealing with Reverend Fred Phelps and simply ignore him. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s the pastor whose tiny congregation pickets military funerals and other events with placards bearing hateful messages. His church has announced it’s going to picket the funerals of victims of the shooting in Tucson, and he recently made the news by showing up at the Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral.

People who hang out on the Internet should have no problems recognizing Phelps for what he is — a troll. The message on just about every forum I’ve participated in on the Internet when dealing with these types is, “Don’t feed the troll.” When they fail to provoke the response they’re looking for, they search for greener pastures.

I met a woman who had just left a counter-protest against Phelps on the day of Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral and she was talking about how many people showed up to shield the funeral from Phelps and his crew. I couldn’t help but think that even though she was well intentioned, she and the others who joined her were in the end part of the problem. Don’t feed the troll.

2011 Skill of the Year

January 8, 2011 / Rafe / 9 Comments

I’ve set upon the idea of picking up a new skill this year. Over the past couple of years I’ve let my Ruby on Rails skills atrophy as I haven’t been working on any Rails applications professionally, and the Rails world changes too quickly to keep up with if you aren’t immersed in it every day. Instead I’ve been using a lot of Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, and SQL, with a dash of client-side JavaScript when needed. In 2011, it’s time to pick up something new or take a new look at something old. Here are the options I considered.

Ruby on Rails is something I already know, or at least knew, and I’m sure I could pick it back up quickly. However, I still don’t have a good Ruby on Rails project on the horizon, and so it would be just as much a pain to keep as it has been. I wouldn’t mind having a new Rails project to work on, but until one comes along, I’m going to leave it alone. I would consider working on my Ruby skills, but it’s hard to use Ruby for general purpose scripts at work because our servers all run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which uses some old version of Ruby and is apparently impossible to upgrade. Ruby on Rails, I love you, but it’s a pass for 2011.

I am intrigued by big data projects. I’d love to dig into Hadoop or other tools that can be used to manipulate large data sets, but at the same time, I already work with some fairly big data sets at work and find that I can mine the data out of them that I need with SQL. In other words, while this area intrigues me, I don’t have any interesting problems to solve right now. Without that, it becomes tough to get motivated to really dig in and learn this stuff.

Another option is to learn a new (to me) programming language, like Clojure or Scala. Doing so would be great in terms of mental stimulation, but probably less great in terms of practical application. We’re not going to start using either of them at work this year, so I’d probably spend months learning one of them and then forget nearly everything I’d learned before I ever got to turn back to them for practical reasons.

Android or iOS are other options. Mobile development is huge right now, and I have a lot of ideas for apps I’d like to build. I could probably pick up Android development fairly easily since I already know Java. The only reason not to do it is that I am not a great user interface designer, and the best mobile apps are triumphs of interface design. I certainly have time to become a solid mobile developer, but without someone else’s design to implement, I think I’d just be unsatisfied with the results of my work. I may still try to pick up some mobile development skills, but they’re not going to be my primary focus this year.

The choice I settled on is JavaScript and Node.js. I already know JavaScript, but I wouldn’t consider myself a strong JavaScript programmer. I can generally solve the problems I’m asked to solve in JavaScript, but I find myself using a lot of libraries that there’s no way I could write on my own, and it’s easy to get lost in complex scripts. Not only is Node.js interesting in its own right, but learning about it gives a good chance to learn pure JavaScript as opposed to JavaScript simply as a way to manipulate Web pages. I’ve said before that HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL are the most transferrable skills for Web developers. JavaScript is the weakest of those skills for me, and I need to get better at it. That’s the plan for 2011.

The ways people use search engines

January 7, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Marco Arment lists the ways people use search engines and talks about how spam has taken over each of them. I think his categories of search types are pretty accurate and agree completely that spammers are systematically taking over each of them. I find that going to Amazon or other trusted retailers and looking for reviews is much more useful than looking for product information on Google these days. I also find that I use site: searches more than I ever have before. Trusting Google to return results for the whole Web just isn’t very effective any more.

The Line Diet, revisited

January 5, 2011 / Rafe / 7 Comments

A year ago I wrote a long post about the Line Diet that turned out to be one of the most popular of the year. Not only did a lot of people respond to it, but several people gave it a try, and found that it worked for them. I actually heard from four different people who all lost over 30 pounds in 2010 after they read the post, so that’s kind of cool. I’ve been Line Dieting for about 16 months, and I’ve lost 55 pounds or so.

Oddly enough, I still don’t want to be in the diet advice business, other than to say what has worked for me personally. Here’s what I wrote last year about that, and I’m sticking with it:

People should be on the diet that enables them to manage their food consumption and achieve their goals. If it works for you, do it. If it doesn’t, do something else. Some people eat one or two meals a day and feel fine, other people need to eat five meals a day to keep from going around hungry all the time. The world is full of people who want to tell you that one way works better than others, but everybody is different. The only thing that matters is whether the way you’re eating is helping you get to where you want to be. On that same note, if you’re not really committed to managing how much you eat, no diet is going to work for you. Just skip it until you’re ready to commit, you’ll be happier.

I also still haven’t bothered with calorie counting in any form, which I consider a badge of honor. That said, it works very well for others. Matthew Yglesias lost 70 pounds in 10 months by carefully counting calories.

Beyond eating light when the scale says to, I’ve made a few other big changes to my eating habits that have helped a bunch:

Eating lunch out really sparingly. Lunches out were a killer for me.
Almost never having seconds at dinner. My wife is a great cook, and it’s very easy for me to eat a lot at dinner. I just don’t eat seconds any more.
Telling my wife to serve me what she’d serve herself. In other words, putting less food on my plate in general.
Almost never eating until I’m really full. I don’t miss the overstuffed feeling that I had all too often after eating before I started on the Line Diet.

I still haven’t cut anything out of my diet categorically, although I do eat a lot less of some things that I really love. I also started working out, but that’s a separate post.

I’m still using the Bang Bang Diet iPhone application. The only thing I wish it offered is a way to display a weighted average rather than the absolute weights for each day.

Climate Change 101

January 4, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Here’s a must read, or at least must forward, article on climate change from the New York Times: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning. Basically it’s a long review of what we know about climate change, how long we’ve known it, and what we can do about it at this point. It also covers the way that climate change deniers work to undermine things that are generally accepted basic scientific facts. The thing that really stood out to me is that the basic mechanism of climate change and the expected results have been well known since the 1960s. Deniers like to say that in the 70’s alarmists worried about global cooling, but the truth is that climate scientists have understood climate change perfectly well.

Are browsers killing content syndication?

January 3, 2011 / Rafe / 9 Comments

RSS and content syndication have never seen the kind of uptake that I would have predicted once upon a time, but syndication is essential to the people who do use it. So it alarms me when I read that syndication may be on the way out. I hadn’t realized that Google Chrome doesn’t support RSS in any official way, and that Firefox 4 is de-emphasizing RSS as well. Here’s the crux of the argument:

If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or “Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with corporate owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in (and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held