Patrick Jarrett

Arr and Dee

When it comes to web development, or technology as a whole, I want to be Julian Delphiki. You may expect me to tell you that Delphiki was a famous scientist or some brilliant engineer who created an enhanced beach ball, but in fact he was just a child when he had his greatest success.

Julian Delphiki is better known as Bean, the diminuitive greek kid who helped Ender Wiggin save the earth from the buggers in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. His specialty was being the problem solver. He thought of the stupid ridiculous over-the-top ideas and made them work.

I want to be the mad scientist of web design. Ask me for the impossible, give me the time and the resources, and I’ll find the way or I’ll blaze my own trail.

There’s a magical idea here, the seductive power of the infinite. Web design is an infinite canvas with infinite canvases available. But even in the infinite boundless workspace the possible can be hard to find. I love web design for that feeling, the same feeling a sculptor has as he digs his fingers through clay. The way that Edison felt when his light bulb lit and held its burn for longer than the flash so many others gave off as they went off.

Or when the Pirate Blackbeard first spotted his prey and then successfully overran them and began to pillage and plunder. The feeling of satisfaction and pleasure basking in victory. He created a victory where in many cases there should have been none. Now imagine if Bean had been a pirate, Somalia would have been deeply interested in that.

Invention is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Milo and Natal from E3

If we decided what had won E3 for the most press and buzz, undoubtedly it is Xbox 360’s Natal (nah-tall). This project is bringing the next level of interaction and immersion in games. The ability for us to move past the Wii’s active level using a controller into an active gaming experience on our own.

Now the first thing is to share that a bit of this technology is bought or licensed by Microsoft, it isn’t their own. Johnny Lee, who is best known for the hack he did with the Wii, where he modified a pair of glasses to interact with the Wii and create an impressive experience where the screen reflected his location and orientation, allowing him to literally look behind objects and such. Also I saw a demo for some of the function where a person can control systems without any controller, such as we saw the flicking through movies etc.

Of the demos though, Natal’s Milo is the most amazing, stunning and unbelievable. The functionality shown in this demo is so smooth and realistic I find it very hard to believe.

Further, I realized halfway through the video that Milo had not fallen into the Uncanny Valley for me. Obviously he’s still clearly animated and not going for the 100% realistic look, instead going with a more artistic nearly anime art style while still staying somewhat close to realistic.

But considering even the animation as ho-hum, consider the AI we’re shown. The ability for the system to process natural language, detect inflections, and the creation of realistic audio. Just wow. This could be truly epic and if the game / system continues to develop in this way, I will definitely be acquiring an Xbox 360 for it.

Two Possible Link Shortening Answers

Link shorteners have come under fire this week. Schachter criticized them saying they make the web more fragile as a single point of failure for hundreds of thousands if not millions of links on the Internet. Jason Kottke posted agreeing with him. And they’re right. There’s no disputing that. However I have two proposals for ideas which could strengthen the web while still utilizing shorteners.

First, what if link shorteners developed a similar framework to what Identi.ca is doing as a distributed Twitter clone? Meaning that there is a unified database between any number of link shortening sites.

There would be some coordination required such that sites would have to work hard to remain up to date in their databases to avoid collisions. But this would allow people to take ‘abc123′ and go to one of the multiple domains to utilize the link shortening. It would of course still be hampered by the fact that people would have to take the tokens to a new url to get redirected.

The second proposal I have is for a third party to backup the shortened links.

Imagine if Google indexed all the link shorteners (or rather, utilized the data they’re already tracking) and provided an easy way for people to access this information? Maybe as a single page people can go to that provides the expanded url and redirects them or as a plugin in Firefox. Now this doesn’t have to be Google or even a search engine, Twitter could do it, or perhaps someone else. And through this system the Internet infrastructure is strengthened.

Updated 8:31am: Changed ‘their’ to ‘they’re’.

Expectations

Expectations are a dangerous thing.

On the one hand, when they are correct they can greatly speed up your process giving you somewhere to begin and allowing you to forgo many questions and tests in terms of figuring out the situation. Or, when your expectations are wrong, it can cost you valuable time.

Sunday I woke up, ready to edit and produce ManaNation for the next day, but I discovered something. My computer had frozen and would not boot, asking me for a bootable disk to be inserted, and I could hear one of the harddrives producing the ‘click of death.’ A small clicking sound that indicates the reading arm is broken or stuck and thus the hard drive is nearing death.

My machine (Mace II, named for Mace Windu, yes I’m a geek) has three hard drives. C: is the main drive where all the action happens. Operating System, program files, my documents, mp3 collection, etc. D: is my storage drive for movies, big apps, some backups. O: is for ManaNation stuff exclusively. I also use an external hard drive to run backups and for transporting ManaNation video files.

I shut the machine off and, assuming it was my C:, main hard drive, since the machine would not boot. So I ordered a new hard drive rushed from NewEgg. In the meantime I produced a low quality video with my Flip camera and had it run on Monday instead of the schedule episode.

Yesterday the new hard drive arrived. After work I got home and set up the new hard drive, booted with a Windows XP CD and installed the OS. It took about an hour, K and I took our evening walk during the time, and then after it booted up I went to install Mozilla Firefox only to see something peculiar.

It was trying to install Firefox to the G: drive. For those not used to Windows machines, Windows is almost universally on C: drive. This comes from the days when you would have an A: and B: drive for floppy disks, so C: fell to the hard drive. It’s not required but it’s the standard. When I investigated further I discovered that the drive I had just installed was indeed the G: drive and that the C: drive was my old main hard drive. The one which had died was my middle hard drive, D: drive.

This was good news on many counts: first it meant a quick fix. I just had to fix the jumpering on the hard drives and it would boot into the main drive again, restoring order to the universe. Second it meant a huge reduction in needed time to rebuild my machine and re-install the applications. And thirdly it meant that there was minimal critical data loss. I’m fairly good about backups, but I had gotten lax on backing up files that weren’t ManaNation or web projects.

The main thing that bugs me, is that if I had checked which drive was dead, I would have found out that I could remove it (temporarily) and booted the machine normally, thus saving myself the delay on ManaNation. Alas, lesson learned and I can only make a promise to myself to check which hard drive died before rushing to replace the whole operating system and drive.

But, all is well in the world. Mace II is back on his feet, with a bit more storage space, and I learned to always check my expectation when there would be over

Signal vs Noise

One thing which is going to become even more central to our online existence is the prevalence of signal vs noise. We’re being bombarded with more and more information about friends, family, idols and news. I pride myself on keeping a fairly short (150) list of feeds in my Google Reader, of which I speed through the majority of them, skimming with liberal use of the keyboard shortcuts.

In my Twitter though, I’m wrestling with the issue as there are a number of people who I follow, but are not people I’m truly that interested in. In my personal Twitter app, TweetCore, I had come to a solution where it used a simple algorithm to hide tweets from someone past the first X, and thus remove the noise to allow me to enjoy my feed without too much noise. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than any other twitter app allows right now.

It’s also the single reason I haven’t killed of the TweetCore project. It has had almost no time devoted to it in the recent months, but I need it to manage this level of information and noise in my life. More »

My Thoughts about Safari 4 beta

As soon as I saw that Safari had a new beta out, being the new Mac convert that I am, I went and grabbed it. Overall, it’s a huge step up! It feels smoother, faster, cleaner, and is no longer a hindrance for me to use as my main browser.

SquirrelFish (now Nitro) the new JavaScript engine is blazingly fast! It makes Gmails’ multi-inbox functionality quick enough to be usable and not annoyingly slow as it was in FF3 and other browsers.

The built in Firebug clone is quite powerful and on the first use was intuitive and smooth.

I much prefer the tabs at the top of the screen as I have a nasty habit of accidentally clicking them as I make liberal use of the bookmark bar. This separates the two bars and avoids such incidents.

Overall, I love it and it quickly replaced Camino as my browser of choice on my work machine (the browser I use for non-work stuff though it could soon overtake Firefox for work stuff.)

However, I do have a few gripes:

1) I dislike the placement of the ‘new tab’ button. I use the button frequently and the upper right corner is not ideal.
2) No easy way to change the default search. While I use Google frequently, I’m also a big fan of Ask.com’s search and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to integrate them so far.
3)  In fact you can’t remove the default search bar without removing your location bar, they’re linked. Not a fan of this option either.

Pirate Bay Search Engine?

The Pirate Bay is perhaps the most well known bastion of power for the seedy underground of internet piracy. It continues to survive and grow in the face of a continuing surge of legal pressure from around the world. There are stories of their plans, if they do happen to get shut down in their native Sweden then they will be up within a matter of hours on a backup location in another country with equally lax laws.

The problem is that their search is still limited. It’s only files on their tracker, but consider what it could mean if they took on Google.

Now obviously they can’t really compete with Google on par with the speed and true depth, but The Pirate Bay can do a few things: ignore censorship laws and not worry about anything on that, reach the darker corners of the Internet, and for those searching for questionable material they can provide a resource that they trust.

Obviously I’m not condoning or encouraging this behavior, but it is an interesting fact that there has yet to rise a real pirate search engine. It’s an untouched corner of the digital underground.

So why? Why hasn’t any site really pursued this? More »

The Social Network of my kids

Of course, after I post about this blog being more journal and less soapbox, I have an idea that warrants a serious look and a blog post. The idea morphed in the few hours I pondered it yesterday, starting out as a concept for a kid’s social network governed by the social network of the parents and turning into a more philosophical concept of what my (one day) kids will think of the social networks I am so deeply intertwined with. More »

Why Facebook Status can’t kill Twitter

Facebook has come out and openly said that their goal is to mirror our relationships in real life not to necessarily connect people who didn’t know each other previously. Earlier today I read Nick O’Neill said that Facebook could kill Twitter by simply enabling status pulls from the API.

While that would definitely create more competition there is a very core and central point where Facebook’s system cannot be Twitter without a very core change.

Facebook, as said above, is a 1-to-1 relationship system. Every relationship is mutual between people. Where as the power on Twitter is that it is 1-to-N. Tim Ferriss, the author of the Four Hour Work Week has over 10,000 followers and is in turn following ZERO people. If that was on facebook, he’d have to follow each of those people. Kevin Rose has over 80,000 followers and follows only a very small percentage of those. Not possible on Facebook.

Now Facebook would definitely conquer a segment of the market that revolve around just friend statuses but so much of Twitter is following people who we can’t normally keep in touch with that this market would have to remain with Twitter.

Could Facebook adjust and make their system compatible to the way Twitter uses? Sure. But not easily. And definitely not as easily as Nick made it sound.

A Facebook Browser?

No I haven’t heard any rumors about it. This is just common sense.

Microsoft has a browser because it’s the door out of their platform and if they didn’t have it, their users were going out the window using the very popular alternative: Netscape. Windows installed the door and made it standard, sure enough people started using it. More »

Making Predictive Typing Better

It used to be that I hammered out text messages each letter at a time, manually typing rather than mess with that “T9 crap” and then I discovered how it worked. That’s right, I did it the hard way for a long time until I took the time to learn how to text faster. More »

LOL Jobs

K and I have a non-aggression pact when it comes to the PC Mac wars. I have my PCs and she has her Macs. We respect each others’ machines and life moves on.

MindComet has tipped the tide of this war, broken our standstill. How? Well, we’re a Mac office so I’ve adjusted and am happy to say I’ve had little trouble with the machines. There are some frustratingly simple things I’ve had to unlearn. Not to mention it drives me batty when I’m switching between my Mac and the PC I’ve remoted into to test for IE6 bugs. Why does it drive me batty? The difference between Option + R and Ctrl + R. The Option key is where Alt normally is for PC users. But that’s a small thing. More »

Why Gmail is Mature

I just got back from Los Angeles last night. The weekend went very well with lots of networking and interviews getting done, I also did a lot of networking and it was funny, as soon as I asked someone their email address and they began saying “firstname.lastname” I knew it was at gmail.com.

On the flight I was pondering just why it is that everyone has the mature email address at gmail. I mean, 99% of the time that’s the way it is. Then I realized why: It came about when Generation Y was entering the work force.

Hotmail and Yahoo may be as old as the Internet, but that means we all have emails like “masterblaster1968@hotmail.com” (my apologies to whoever has that email address.) They were the geek names, the identities we used online when the idea was anonymity. The Internet has grown and matured and now it is used to build your real name for school and employers.

Yahoo, a few years ago allowed their users to change their name, which is when I got a mature yahoo email address as well, but I never use it. Why? I was already established in Gmail.

Gmail simply hit the nail on the head when many of us didn’t realize the board was loose. The right interface, great storage, and the better features were all factors in a major coup for a market many considered to be a solved system.

Now sadly the Gmail interface is falling behind. We rely on tools like Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail firefox plugin, and other such apps to increase it’s usefulness. Rumor is that Google is working on an upgrade but we haven’t seen it yet. Now we’re hearing things of a company called zenbe.com (I’m working on a review of it actually) and Xobni for Outlook.

So, is Gmail the king? No, it will be dethroned. But it was a major stepping stone for the realm of email, moving us past limited space into lifetimes of email, from folders and into tagging, and more!

Personal SEO

Two weeks ago I was searching my own name on Google to see what sort of presence I had for my name. I know there is a hockey player who has a fair bit of attention and there used to be an Olympic sprinter, so how did I fair?

I did alright, it turned out that at that time my Twitter account was higher ranked than this blog! I was shocked.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. And it means understanding, at the most basic levels, how Google (and other engines to a lesser extent) search and rank your website. Yes Google is largely based off of other links to your page, but also is a whole host of factors you as a blogger can affect. While we (SEO people) don’t know the exact formula for Google’s secret sauce, people with infinite patience and a algorithmic approach are able to determine the importance of various factors.

For example we know that having the search term in your domain is a major boost. So “PatrickJarrett.com” would immediately be better than “TrickJarrett.com.” Things like the use of the <H1> tags, the appearance of the search phrase inside the body of the page, whether it is bolded, or in links or in image alt text. The list goes on. I’ve seen lists of over 250 things which affect how your page is ranked.

All I did to bump TrickJarrett from the 2nd page of results for “Patrick Jarrett” is add an H1, add it to the title tag, modify some wordings to use the full name and sure enough this morning I’m front page and #4 on the results. With a bit more work I can be the #1 result for my name.

4:15am – Coding time

I awoke with a start, the room was dark and all was quiet. I heard the TV on in the other room but presumed K had just fallen asleep with it on. I listened and could hear Mattie in her cage, and it struck me that I didn’t take her out before bed. She would be nearing 8 hours without a trip outside. Usually not an issue, but she had eaten since going out. I feared the worst, thinking she had had an accident in the cage.

My sinuses have been clogged and even without that my sense of smell is iffy, so I couldn’t smell anything but I got up and pulled on jeans and a shirt. I retrieved Mattie’s leash and took her out for a quick walk. She did her business and when I got back inside I checked the cage to find it clean – thank goodness.

After putting Mattie back into the cage I crawled back into bed and proceeded to toss and turn for half an hour. Finally I gave up trying to fall asleep and got up. While in bed my brain had been crunching over a few coding issues with a project for ManaNation. I trawled my RSS feeds for anything of interest and I scanned my forums, most hadn’t had any post since I went to bed just 7 hours ago.

I settled in to work on the code and sure enough, the early hour, the quiet email and twitter, and the quiet house allowed me to really dig into the work and lay down some quality progress on the project.

It was extremely refreshing since, when I went to bed last night, I was fuming with frustration over another project. I take coding very personally and if I can’t solve a problem, or if something I do continues to be an issue, I get extremely upset. So to get up and in the early hours knock out two hours of solid progress on a project is a great boost to my morale.