Random Neural Misfirings

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net stuff

Gamification

23-12-2011
net stuff, translation

Brent Simmons writes about gamification, saying

you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”

I’ve been thinking about gamification a little for a while now, and I think it’s actually more sinister than that. Look at a website like Stack Overflow. They’ve got it set up with this treadmill of meaningless rewards to keep you engaged in the site, asking and answering question. In addition to increased ad impressions (which is cynical enough, the sole point of a game like Farmville, which has no rewards that I recognize as such), your labor makes the site more valuable: a good “answer site” like Ask Metafilter (which is a cool community, not an exploitative business play) gets very high Google rankings—Stack Exchange clearly want to cash in on that action getting strong Google rankings for their own site, leading to more pageviews, and the circle of life continues. For your efforts you get a gold star. A virtual gold star. But they’ve figured out that points and achievements activate some hindbrain reward center that they cynically play off of.

In my own vocation of translation, there’s been an increasing trend toward uncompensated crowdsourcing (another hot-button word) as an alternative to professional work, and I fully expect to see gamification tactics applied to that as well before long.

Twitter’s dickbar

21-03-2011
net stuff

Starting about two weeks ago, Twitter seems to have embarked on a program of doing it wrong.

  1. They have told independent developers not to bother writing primary clients for interacting with the service.
  2. They have (finally) announced that they are shutting down DabbleDB, a wonderful service that got caught up when Twitter bought out the company behind it for unrelated technology (Trendly).
  3. And of course, the dickbar.

A lot of people have written about the dickbar, a misfeature of the official Twitter iPhone app. The first version had a misbegotten interface that covered over your timeline until you played around with the phone. The second version was an improvement in UI terms, but still a misfeature in that it emphasizes information that I don’t care about (nor anyone else who has complained about it): showing global trending keywords among Twitter users.

Obviously the big reason behind the addition of this misfeature is money: it puts “promoted trends” front and center. But even apart from the monetization angle, it feels like evidence that Twitter is guiding people away from using the service the way, well, we do use it.

Twitter was conceived as a lightweight way to pass around status updates among acquaintances, and that is its greatest value to me and (I think) most people. The emphasis on trends seems to be designed to turn people into spectators rather than participants—trends answers the unasked question “what are people I don’t know talking about.” It doesn’t invite me into the conversation and it doesn’t relate to me or my circle of friends. I can see how it’s useful to, say, marketers though.

This fits with another aspect of Twitter’s service that debuted a while ago, where it suggested people for you to follow—celebrities. I see that now, it suggests people who are actually friends of friends (and promoted feeds), so apparently they’ve fine-tuned that, but it’s evidence of the same shift away from participation toward spectation.

Twitter’s got a right to run their service however they see fit. And if they keep going down the path they seem to be following, I have a right to go somewhere else.

Department of redundancy department

26-03-2010
net stuff

form asking me what it's telling me.

I encountered this when setting up web access to my account with a utility. To get to this page, I had to enter my account number from one of my bills. Note the information provided at the top, and the information requested at the bottom.

Search tip

18-12-2009
net stuff, technology

A couple of nights ago, Gwen used the phrase “Googling for something on America’s Test Kitchen” instead of “searching for…”, which just reinforces that Google has become a synonym for search.

Google search results are often polluted by irrelevant links to commercial websites like bizrate and dealtime, though. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to avoid that? There is: use Give me back my Google.

It would be even nicer if you could search via GmbmG right from the search field in your browser. And in fact you can, but you’ll need to set it up first

Safari

Safari does not let you customize your search field out of the box, but there are some hacks like Glims that add this capability. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to add GmbmG to Glims as a custom search engine and teach it the specific search syntax that GmbmG uses. It is:
http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/forward.php?search= search key

Firefox or Internet Explorer 7+

These browsers support something called the “open search description document,” which makes adding a new search engine dead-simple. I have no idea how this works in IE, but in Firefox, just install this plugin (which I created, not the creator of GmbmG—the plugin is currently listed as experimental, but it’s perfectly innocuous, I promise) and it will add that site to the list of search engines your browser uses.

Standards, schmandards

29-06-2009
net stuff

When it comes to e-mail, I’m a plain-text kind of guy. But I know that some businesses prefer to use HTML-formatted e-mail, and thanks to Gwen’s new job, I’ve been learning way more than I ever wanted to about this. Long story short, it’s a nightmare. Avoid.

If you can’t avoid it (as Gwen cannot), you have to learn to deal with it. It’s a complicated problem because there are more renderers for HTML e-mail in frequent use than there are web browsers: in addition to client-side e-mail apps like Outlook or Mail.app, there are also web-based clients like Yahoo (which has two separate renderers, depending on whether you’re using old-and-busted Yahoo mail or new-hotness Yahoo mail), Hotmail, and Gmail.

Each of these has its own peculiarities, most of which can be managed without too much pain, except for one: Outlook 2007. Outlook ’07 actually has a more primitive renderer than Outlook 2003, using the renderer from MS Word instead of the renderer from Internet Exlorer. Word’s renderer uses a non-compliant mishmash of HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.2, with very limited support for CSS. There has been a movement among people who have to deal with this to get Microsoft to straighten up and fly right. Last week, Microsoft promised that they would not, provoking considerable gnashing of teeth.

I’m surprised at Microsoft’s response. They seemed to generally be moving in the direction of better standards support, if perhaps grudgingly so. While there is a legitimate argument to using Word’s HTML renderer in Outlook, this strikes me as a situation where they could have their cake and eat it too—in fact, there’s a recent precedent in Microsoft’s approach to HTML rendering with the compatibility mode in IE8.

It would be nice if the Word HTML renderer and generator were brought into the new millennium to emit and interpret standards-compliant code. It would also be nice if I had a unicorn that farted rainbows.

Short of that, it would be a relatively straightforward expedient for documents designed in Outlook around Word’s HTML renderer to include a header element like <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="Outlook=EmulateWord" /> or equivalent in order to invoke that renderer, otherwise relying on whatever the current IE renderer is. This would, admittedly, add some overhead to the app, but MS doesn’t seem to have any aversion to adding overhead to their code.

Austin Broadband Information Center

13-04-2009
Austin, current events, net stuff

I recently wrote about the impending volume caps that Time Warner Cable will be imposing on its Austin customers, a move which has earned an angry reaction from many Austinites. I’ve seen an online petition in opposition to these caps. I’m not a customer of TWC, and frankly, I’d be just as happy for them to continue pissing off their customers, convincing more and more customers to leave, until TWC doesn’t have any customers left to worry about pissing off.

It is telling that TWC approvingly cites Canada as an example of bandwidth caps in action. Cory Doctorow, a Canadian citizen, has stated that he cannot live in Canada because Internet access there is so dismal. It is equally telling that TWC does not cite South Korea or Japan—where bandwidth that Americans can only dream of is common—as an example of the kind of Internet service they aspire to provide.

Anyhow, the tirelessly public-spirited Chip Rosenthal is actually doing something to help: he’s put together a website to serve as a clearinghouse on information on the subject: the Austin Broadband Information Center. Check it out.

URLs that would be really annoying to give out over the phone

09-04-2009
net stuff

Inspired by the McSweeney’s List of e-mail addresses it would be really annoying to give out over the phone, I have registered the domain name www.wdoubleudoubleyou.com. I should set up “adamatwww@wdoubleudoubleyou.com as an e-mail address for maximum ridiculousness.

They hate us

03-04-2009
current events, net stuff

I’m starting to believe that American telecommunications companies actively hate their customers.

AT&T Mobility has just announced a change to their terms of service for 3G that basically makes any broadbandy use of it a violation of their TOS. Time Warner Cable has just announced monthly volume caps (these are sometimes called bandwidth caps, but that phrase strikes me as ambiguous), the highest of which will be 40 GB for $55 per month; overages will be priced at $1/GB.

Contrast this with Japan, where for about $35/mo, you can get a service with 47 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream. At maximum saturation, you’d burn through a 40 GB cap in 19 minutes. TWC’s lowest cap of 5 GB would take less than 3 minutes to burn through. Now, admittedly, nobody in the USA is getting that kind of bandwidth in the first place (I’m getting my carrier’s top level of service, which is about a quarter that speed up and down). And it should go without saying that NTT is not imposing any kind of caps on their service.

But wait, it gets better. Right now, Japan’s leading wireless carrier is field-testing the next generation in mobile broadband, a protocol called LTE (in the US, we call it 4G; over there, they call it 3.9G). This is running at 120 Mbps in their tests, and they plan on doubling that by the time it’s deployed commercially. At that rate, you could burn through a 40 GB cap in less than three minutes. Over the air.

American consumers are getting shafted by their telecommunications providers. Paying a nickel for a text message that costs exactly nothing to deliver is only the start. And let’s set aside spying on their customers for the NSA. With these increasingly restrictive terms of service and tariffs, I get the impression that carriers not only want to limit our expectations, they want to lower them.

I can’t explain the difference in pricing and service between American and Japanese companies, I can only speculate. And my speculations sound like a conspiracy theory.

Over the last ten or so years, we’ve seen Enron used as an inspiration for running the entire economy. A friend who used to be a muckety-muck at a cellphone maker said that telecommunications companies ultimately want to move towards a tithing-based pricing model—where you pay them a certain fraction of your income.

I have to imagine that in the boardrooms of AT&T and TWC, they rub their hands with glee at how they’re finding new ways to screw over their customers, just as Enron traders chortled over “aunt Tillie” sitting in the dark because they had engineered a power outage. That may sound over the top, but there’s definitely something about these companies that makes them want to provide the shittiest service they think they can get away with, not the best that is technologically possible.

And the thing about communications is that there’s really no way to “save up” those bits or bytes. Every second that fiber is dark is a second you can’t get back. Volume caps create an artificial scarcity where none exists.

Backing up your Delicious library on a Mac

08-02-2009
net stuff

The recent implosion of Ma.gnolia and a growing skepticism of entrusting your data to the cloud got me thinking about the data I’ve got that’s “out there.” One particular point of vulnerability is Delicious, where I keep my bookmarks.

Fortunately, Delicious makes it pretty easy to download all your bookmarks if you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, you have to know what you’re doing, at least a little.

With that in mind, here’s a simple Applescript that any Mac user can run to create a backup. Delicious requests that you do this sparingly, so I’d recommend doing it only, say, once a week.

To make this work, open Script Editor on your Mac (it came with it, and should be lurking about somewhere unless you deleted it) and paste the following into it, changing the username and password. There may be a linebreak on the last line—edit it so that it is all on one line. Save it using “Application” as the file format with whatever name you like—this will result in a mini app that you can double-click to run.

Running it will create a file called deliciousbackup.xml in your Documents folder. That file will not be in the most readable format, but it will have all your data. Each time you run it, it will overwrite the previous version of the file. It would be possible to do multiple snapshots, but I haven’t gotten that fancy.

set thefile to "deliciousbackup.xml"
-- change myusername to your username, keep the quote marks
set theusername to "myusername"
-- change mypassword to your password, keep the quote marks
set thepassword to "mypassword"

-- this is where the magic happens
do shell script "curl https://" & theusername & ":" & thepassword & "@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -o \"$HOME/Documents/" & thefile & "\""

Custom key commands for Gmail

11-12-2008
net stuff

If you use Gmail and have a keyboard with a numeric keypad, try turning on the Labs feature, and then turn on the “Custom keyboard shortcuts” gadget.

This will create a new tab under settings for your keyboard shortcuts. Following is a proposed set of shortcuts allowing for faster browsing and sorting, with what I consider a logical organization. Note that I’m not showing shortcuts for every command, only the ones I propose changing.

Action Key(s)
Back to threadlist 4
Newer conversation 8
Older conversation 2
Select conversation 5
Star conversation +
Report as spam *
Move to trash -
Open conversation 6
Previous message 9
Next message 3

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