Futurists are all alike. You have your 20th Century types like the Italians who celebrated war. You have Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. You have guys like George Gilder hand waving, making big pronouncements. And all of them use terms like paradigm and cusp as a warning to you slackers, trailers, luddite ne’er-do-wells. Make another entry in your list of predictions for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Everyone feels like Apple has to really top what it’s achieved since last year with the Apple iPhone, the iPhone OS and the AppStore. Mark Sigal writing for O’Reilly Radar believes there’s so much untapped juice within the iPhone that an update in the OS will become the next cusp/paradigm shift.
From today’s O’Reilly Radar article by Mark Sigal:
Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.
I’m not so certain. One can argue that even the average desktop 3D accelerator doesn’t really do what Sigal would ‘like’ to see in the iPhone. Data overlays is nice, for a 3D glasses kind of application sure, but it’s not virtual reality. It’s more like a glorified heads-up display which the military has had going back to the Korean War. So enter me into the column of the hairy eyeball, critical and suspicious of claims that an OS Update will change things. In fact OSes don’t change things. The way people think about things, that’s what changes things. The move of the World Wide Web from an information sharing utility to a medium for commerce, that was a cusp/paradigm shift. And so it goes with the iPhone and the Viewmaster Viewer. They’re fun yes. But do they really make us change the way we think?
You wouldn’t think Asus could keep up the blistering pace of development. But here they are once again first to market with a device that uses less power, costs less for the CPU and uses a free OS from none other than Google Inc. What could be better for a bona fide addict of the Google Desktop? Check out the specs on the Snapdragon CPU here.
If I purchase a netbook at all, this is going to be the one I want just for reading blogs and posting to WordPress. This IS my next computer as far as I’m concerned.
” The new laptop — which Qualcomm calls a smartbook — is thinner and lighter than current members of Asustek’s Eee PC netbook lineup because the 1GHz Snapdragon processor that it uses does not require a heat sink or a cooling fan, said Hank Robinson, vice president of business development at Qualcomm.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon includes a 1GHz Arm processor core, a 600MHz digital-signal processor and hardware video codecs. Currently, Asustek’s Eee PC line of netbooks relies on Intel processors, in particular the low-cost, low-power Atom chip, which has an x86 processor core.”
Specifically what is it about CSS that drives me crazy? I am the most evil of ancient dead wood. I am an HTML table man. I got by using tables and got on with my life. I never questioned what I did. I co-worker began beating the drum of usability and web standards about 5 years ago and eliminated tables from his web designs and re-designs. I clung to tables every time somebody pitifully ask me, “Could you make a website for me?”. Usually it was no more than a two cell table to enforce a two column style layout. Picture and text both in their respective cells. Nothing complicated our out of control.
The day of reckoning is now, I am finally “learning” how to use CSS to enforce the old 2 column style web page I always would get asked to make for people. That’s right simplicity in it’s most essential form. But here’s the rub, you absolutely need to know what you are doing. You need a guide to help you navigate the idiosyncracies and vagueries of the CSS Box model and CSS Layout algorithms. What’s that?!
Even at this late stage in the evolution of CSS, HTML, CSS2, XHTML and CSS3 and beyond there’s no tag, no markup, no code that will let you express this simple idea:
Create 2 columns (picture goes on left, text goes on right)
No, in fact what I’m learning from Eric Raymond’s book written under the aegis of Lynda.com is you need to know how the CSS box model including margins, and padding interact to force the web page to render as you intend it to. While creating a DIV element is stragithforward and having DIVs sit comfortably next to one another (like those old 2 cell tables) getting them to render correctly as the web browser grows and shrinks is tricky.
On page 131 of CSS Web Site Design, Eric Raymond states (pull quote indicating use of padding in the #content DIV and the negative margin for the #sidebar DIV). This kind of precision with rendering the DIVs is absolutely necessary to replicate the old HTML table formatting. But the workaround, or magic or trick to it all is reading or learning from someone else the fact that a DIVs width is determine by it’s stated width + the margin. If you set the margin to be a negative (which is allowed) the browser effectively subracts that amount from the stated width. When the two numbers add up to -1, the web browser ‘ignores’ the DIV and lets it do whatever it wants. In this example that Eric Raymond uses the sidebar DIV pops up to the same height as the content DIV. Previously, the sidebar had to sit all the way to the right, until the browser go to small, then it would suddenly pop-down below it’s neighbor. With a negative width, the browser doesn’t see the sidebar div and leaves it alone, it doesn’t popdown, it stays right where it is.
The other half of this equation is to leave generous amounts of padding in the content DIV. The giant field of padding allows the ignored sidebar DIV to occupy some nice open whitespace, without stomping on any text in the content DIV. So extra padding on left hand DIV, negative width on the right hand DIV and you have the functional CSS equivalent of the two cell table of yore. Wow. I understand the necessity of doing this, I know all the benefits of adhering to accessibility requirements, and maintaining web standards. Nobody should be discriminated against because the website wasn’t designed the right way.
My own conclusion however is that while CSS does a lot it suffers the same problems as we had under all previous web design regimes. To accomplish the simple stuff, requires deep, esoteric knowledge of the workarounds. That is what differentiates the Dreamweaver jockeys from the real web designers, they know the tricks and employ them to get the website to look like the Photoshop comps. And it’s all searchable, and readable using screen reading software. But what a winding, twisty road to get there. It’s not rocket science, but it ain’t trivial either.
Up until about a year and a half ago I left my Facebook account unused. I made the account originally in 2005 as a response to the buzz generated in an email listserv surrounding social networking. Some were touting podcasts, some were touting photo sharing, some were touting virtual 3D worlds like Second Life. But still there were more people interested in MySpace and the high school crowd. But all the cool kids in College were going into Facebook. Fashions change, people leave their old accounts until finally they are locked and expired.
Fast forward to October 2007 where I logged in to Facebook for the first time in six months. And to my surprise Facebook had added ‘affinity’ features like ‘other people you may know’. Depending on people’s willingness to self select (by joining groups), Facebook would try to promote creating extensive networks by showing names of people ‘like’ yourself. The big benefit being you may recognize and ‘friend’ those people and run up your total friends count. What’s crazy is this actually worked, I found someone who had attended my college alma mater and immediately recognized his face from his profile thumbnail. I put in a friend request and within a week there we were chatting back and forth via the Facebook discussion/news widget called the Wall.
Before you know it I would start to see people he added as friends and that opened a whole new world. While I may have been out of the loop and not know who was and who wasn’t on Facebook, others seemed to gravitate to one another. Eventually I discovered an old girlfriend of this same fellow I found. And things stayed pretty stable after that, a small network of former college classmates (me, him and her). Towards Spring of 2008 suddenly another wave of Facebook immigrants entered. In this group was a network node point who had been a center of attention all during his undergrad days. He had a unique lastname and firstname and everyone start clambering onto Facebook to reconnect to him. His network was even bigger now that he is a college professor so his total friend count was through the roof early on. By Summer 2008 things were slowing down again but a much larger percentage of college friends were now firmly ensconced in the Facebook universe. I think we were well over 40% of the people I had known back then.
Come Fall of 2008 lightning struck once more when the second network node point entered Facebook. And this really got things rolling. This woman had been the center of a lot of social activities parties and road trips. She had moved in a lot of circles and had documented it the whole way. It was the tendency towards photography that made the difference. Her photographs broke through and motivated some very reticent, stubborn laggards into joining Facebook. Everyone wanted to see the pictures of themselves and all their friends. Lots of people now had kids and hadn’t had any contact with their college acquaintances in 12 years. This was big stuff. No amount of social networking websites prior to Facebook had nearly the mothlight attraction this one person had once she loaded her pictures into Facebook. This is the true miracle of social networking when one person effects a change on such a massive scale, wholly out of proportion to the word of mouth or typical ways Facebook gains new accounts.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 