The Mu

My old cell phone was awesome.  It got a signal almost everywhere and it had a couple of features that I took for granted until I got my new cell phone. One feature on my old phone actually annoyed me at first but I quickly saw the wisdom of it: the alarm, once set, would ring even if the phone was turned off.  So you could turn off your phone to sleep, which means you wouldn’t get any calls, but you’d still be awoken at the correct time.

My new phone is unusable in this area: you must leave the phone on else the alarm never sounds (meaning you get calls in the middle of the night whether you want them or not).  Worse: the phone does not allow you to set an alarm unless it is “in service area”.  In other words, it must connect to the phone network before you can even set the alarm.  Maybe it doesn’t know what time it is until it gets the current time from the network.

My old phone would keep the time always and just update whenever it could get the correct time from the network.  To top it all off, my new phone gets significantly worse reception so the likelihood of being connected to the network at any point is much lower than it was on my old one.

I wonder if product designers actually use their products before releasing them to the public.

I took more than a month off from this blog to study (more on that in the new year).  But while I was away, I was bombarded with a higher than usual amount of spam comments and spam responses to my main site’s “information request” function.

WordPress and Drupal are popular enough platforms that spammers have widely shared bots that automatically crawl into your site and issue bogus requests that end up in my e-mail box.  What the incoherent and nonsense spam really is trying to accomplish is beyond me.  Some is apparently for male enhancement products, but much of it is just a jumble of letters in no particular language and a series of links.  I assume the links are the thing the spammers are trying to get people to follow, but… who would?  No one I know.

To fight this scourge, I have installed a CAPTCHA routine on my main site.  This is a pretty rudimentary version but it seems effective.  My spam has dropped to zero since I installed in a few days ago.  For those who haven’t heard of CAPTCHA, it is a system that displays graphical letters and numbers in random sequences that theoretically only a human can read and type back in as a response.  If you match the sequence, you are granted access to whatever function is being protected (in this case the request for information is actually sent to my inbox).

As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically.  The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers.  Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye.  So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code.  In the example above… is that an ‘8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’?  It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.

For now, I am simply happy that my inbox is no longer drowning in useless messages.

You’ve likely never heard of Brent Oxley.  Maybe you will.  He has grown his webhosting business from nothing to 200,000 customers in just over six years.  His story is an illustration of the persistence and confidence that sets true entrepreneurs apart.

I’ve been hosting this site with HostGator for several years now.  It looks like I was one of just a few thousand customers when I first signed up.  Poor experiences with other hosting companies had me looking around and latching onto HostGator by pure happenstance.  I feel pretty lucky that I have had so little downtime and very fast customer service throughout the business relationship.

This post is really not about me recommending a hosting company (many Canadians hate the idea of having their servers located in the United States), but more a tribute to the “never say die” attitude of great entrepreneurs.

Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stone but the critic) published an excellent essay about a month ago.  It outlines the prevailing mentality in the newspaper industry over the past twenty years.  He breaks down the reasons that newspapers are failing:

1. Consumers don’t pay for news. They have never paid for news.
2. Newspapers are the product of monopolistic thinking.
3. Timidity doesn’t work on the web.
4. The staffs of the papers, from management on down to the reporters, deserve a big share of the blame.
5. Newspaper websites suck.

As you can tell from the wording of these “reasons”, there is some emotion behind Wyman’s argument.  He has experienced first-hand the kinds of attitudes that amount to newspapers shooting themselves in the foot, then the other foot, and now taking aim at their own heads.  As someone who has only been peripherally involved in the business (many years ago), I found Wyman’s two-part analysis both depressing and insightful.

His prescription for fixing the problem is right on the money, even though I think the difficulties are too entrenched to easily embrace Wyman’s plan.  He recommends hyperlocal, debate-generating coverage that involves the community and puts ease of access as a priority.  No matter what, though, surely the days of huge profits for newspapers are over.  Aggregators (what newspapers used to be for a community) are so well-established on the Web that any news organization would find it difficult to make inroads.  If they were successful, they would still face the much lower ad rates in the Web world.  And even if they made those work for them, there would always be unpaid competitors (local bloggers) to contend with.

As bleak a picture as this paints, I still believe journalism as a profession has an important future.  If nothing else, patrons may rise up: mega-rich individuals with a genuine interest in uncovering truth and creating community debate.

In what has become something of a tradition, I have talked with friends and family about what’s coming up on television in the new Fall season.  The media landscape is under radical change but the television networks still hold big preview presentations for their deep-pocketed advertisers. These tend to happen in May or June.  At that time, for viewers, we still don’t know which of our favorite shows have been canceled.

By the middle of August, everything is pretty solid and we know what’s coming.  In the past, the best shows would return or premiere sometime in September or October.  Anything else was a “mid-season replacement” which was a euphemism for “second-rate”.  Now, throughout the year, you can hear stories and rumors about really good shows.  I feel that this time of year remains the time when the networks are willing to confirm or deny many of these rumors because they are making promises to their advertisers.

So here’s a rundown of some promising escapist fare that I intend to watch when it airs:

• Dollhouse (25 September 2009 on Fox) – survived for a second season by the skin of its teeth but this is the brainchild of Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame.
• Flash Forward (24 September 2009 on ABC) – Canada’s own sci-fi novelist extraordinaire, Robert J. Sawyer, is the creative force behind this new one.  I trust ABC to completely screw it up, but I still have my fingers crossed.
• Fringe (17 September 2009 on Fox) – returns for a second season after a really cool first one.
• True Blood (still airing its second season, but returns sometime in 2010 on HBO) – this adult fare has been renewed for a third season and provides an alternative to the well-laundered supernatural tales like last year’s Moonlight and this season’s The Vampire Diaries.

I’ll be watching lots of other shows, but very few deserve special mention.  Glee (Fox) was much anticipated and really isn’t all that good.  NBC, after taking the risky foray into sci-fi with Jericho and Heroes (which is actually returning for a fourth season if anyone still cares) is sticking to Biggest Loser reality, wall-to-wall Law and Order, and not one but two medical dramas to try to fill the space left by ER (Trauma and Mercy).  CBS is donning a similar bland franchise suit with CSI-o-rama and NCIS (now with two flavors of its own).  I am at least grateful to CBS for having more scripted dramas than reality shows (Survivor is back and remains one of the better reality shows if you simply must watch that kind of crap). CBS also resurrected Medium after NBC canceled it, but honestly that show is running out of legs anyway.

There’s a great site called gotoandlearn.com which is run by an Adobe employee named Lee Brimelow.  He has filled up his page with a whole bunch of great video tutorials that demonstrate the power of the Adobe suite of tools.

One of the most intriguing tutorials I have gone through so far is the one explaining the simulation of the parallax effect using Photoshop and Flash.  You need the CS4 edition of the tools to easily leverage the 3-D effect that Lee demonstrates.

Note: You can right-click on the image above to Rewind and Play the Flash movie over again.

I have mentioned before about the dangers of soliciting user feedback to guide your product development.  If you’re using a product you’re going to have very good ideas about how to improve it based on the way you’re interacting with it today.  But truly revolutionary steps forward don’t really come from simple questions like “What would you like to see in the next release of our product?”

However, there are good ways to get your community to provide feedback.

What you’re reading right now is powered by WordPress.  This open source personal publishing software has improved significantly over the last few years, and it was already a good choice in early 2007 when I started this blog.  Now, WordPress 2.9 is in the pipeline.  The developers are soliciting feedback from users in a more granular way.  They already know what they want to add in that release, but they turned to the community to rank the priority of each feature.  To me, this is a great hybrid approach between wide open feedback gathering and closed-door “developer knows best” approaches.  The results of the WordPress inquiries are not really all that surprising, although I definitely believe putting everything into the core is a mistake over time.  Feature bloat is the leading cause of software death these days.