I think most people have at some point in time seen this picture of the Earth at night:

After seeing this again tonight, it reminded me of an earlier image I posted that showed global bandwidth:

I found it interesting (and I suppose expected) that the brighter areas coincided with the heavier bandwidth areas. If you look at the two images overlaid (after some resizing and adjustment) it’s much clearer:

So is this correlation due to man’s thrust to band together to form great city-states multiplied by the accelerated expansion of technology across the globe or maybe just all the late raids in World of Warcraft?

At first I used RSS Bandit to aggregate my RSS Feeds. It worked fairly well, but I had a few issues with it… mainly the fact that items I read on my desktop would still be unread on my laptop. Trying to keep it synchronized in my head as far as which items I had already read was just too much. It may not sound like a big deal, but if you read say 30 items on your computer, to read another 30 new items on another computer you have to potentially process twice as many items (60 items = 30 old + 30 new). Then if you have a third computer on which you read RSS feeds (say at work), forget about it.

Then I started using the news reader I wrote Vein News. With a proprietary folder structure and some XML, multiple computers could share a data store which would then make read items marked as read on all computers sharing the same data store. This also had the fortunate (and somewhat planned) advantage that any of the computers could update the store which kept it more synchronized than a laptop with on-at-times-off-at-times uptime would have. It had another advantage of still having access to all your feeds if your Internet connection ever goes down (something that online news readers are susceptible to).

I kept my RSS aggregator up to date over the years and had it compiling to a desktop version and a Pocket PC version by simply opening either the dsw or vcw workspaces. The main problems I had with this approach was:

1. I was the one that had to keep it up to date, add new features and fix all bugs. This is both good and bad. It was exactly what I needed it to be, but anything I found that needed to be fixed would stay broken until I found time to fix it. And since time is at a premium these days (even though I still find time in the wee hours of the night to blog)…
2. I still had the problem of keeping the home feed store in sync with the work feed store. That could be fixed with keeping the feed store on a flash drive, but then if the flash drive isn’t plugged in and Vein News wasn’t running, it gets out of sync quickly.

Then a few months ago I decided I would give Google Reader a try. A couple friends of mine use it and I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Then around the same time, I started using the Internet access on my phone. Since I can get to any regular Internet page, I could access my Google Reader feeds too… and everything in is sync. No matter where I read my feeds, whether it’s at work, at home, on my phone, or at my parents’ house, my feed items are always marked appropriately. Also, if the Internet does go down for a few hours or even a few days at my house, I can still read feeds through my phone and vice versa. I am always connected. And that holds true while I’m out and about standing in line at the post office or waiting in the dentist’s office.

The always connectedness and complete synchronization of the feeds with Google Reader is basically everything you (well, everything I) would ever need in a reader. And then with the recent addition of offline mode to Google Reader… I mean come on.

There’s a relatively new concept out there called “data decay” (there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it yet!) that deals with the process of how data gradually becomes incorrect and out of date over time and how it should be handled. Here’s one example from Two Sides to Data Decay:

Approximately 10 years ago, I lived in an apartment just outside of Boston. At the time, the ZIP code for the address of the building in which I lived was 02146. A few years after I moved, the U.S. Postal Service decided to split the area covered by that ZIP code into two parts. The southern section kept the 02146 code, while the northern area – where my former apartment building is – was assigned a new ZIP code: 02446

This example is interesting becomes it raises the two problems caused by this event:

1. After he moved, the address that everyone had on file for him would then be incorrect.
2. After he moved and after the zip codes were reassigned, his old address while correctly zoned at the time he lived there is incorrectly zoned any time after the reassignment. So processing of the original zip code performed after the zip code reassignments would either incorrectly include the new zip code when processing the original zip code’s area or would be skewed when comparing new data with the original zip code to old data with the same zip code since the old data for the original zip code included more area.

It’s actually a pretty surprisingly complex situation and I urge you to read the whole article. Bruce Schneier approaches data decay from a different perspective in the this Educause Podcast. He considers the problem of when computers should forget data. Is it relevant and safe for computers to remember things forever:

All process today produce data. It stays around. It festers. How we deal with it. How we recycle it, reuse it, dispose of it. What the regulations are concerning it are central to the Information Age… Twenty, thirty, fifty years from now we’re going to be cleaning up massive data problems just like we’re cleaning up massive pollution problems today… Some people have written about the fact that computers should be programmed to forget things. That remembering stuff forever isn’t necessarily goodness.

I’ve posted about backing up before and take great strides in keeping all my data safe and secure, but I think that Bruce has a point here. I don’t know if I want everything about me stored in some database forever. But at the same time how should data like that gracefully decay without simply vanishing or becoming useless?

I was installing some updates today. Nothing really special: Office 2007 SP1 and three optional updates. I had everything shut down except for Windows Media Player since I was watching a DVD. Well, everything progressed smoothly until it got to the very end. After all four updates were installed, the video driver reset and the screen flashed. Playback of the movie stopped and I received a copy protection error saying something about updating my driver. Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that before. But after I pressed “OK” something else changed:

My main monitor went black and white and remained so through out the whole shutdown process. So I’m thinking to myself that something in the install tripped the copy protection module of Vista. Ok, so a restart should do it…

Uh oh. I’m screwed. If a restart (and even a subsequent complete shutdown) doesn’t work, what am I to do? So I figure I’ll log in anyway just for kicks. It stays black and white. No change. But then about 10 seconds after the login succeeds, the main monitor goes back to displaying color.

I’m not really complaining here. This is probably how it’s supposed to work. And I have color again, so no harm, no foul, right? It just would have been nice to have some indication (probably in a toolbar balloon or popup dialog) of what happened and how to fix it. Otherwise every other user out there that this happens to will probably do the same thing I just did: Sit there and wonder “Ok, what now?”

I’ve had my Cherry Chocolate phone for about a year now. So imagine my surprise when I see the design of the new Zune:

So did Microsoft just say “screw it” and do a copy n paste here? This sure wouldn’t be the first time. Then again, I could probably say the same thing about LG:

Third party cookies are almost never a good thing. Basically, a third party cookie is a cookie that doesn’t come directly from the server you’re interacting with (hence, it’s from a “third party”). Usually, what that means is that it’s a cookie from an advertiser like DoubleClick and is there to record every website that you go to that has an image or something from their server. Definitely not good.

But what is good is that it’s not too hard to protect against. In IE, just go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy (tab). From here you can either set your Internet Zone to “High” or “Block All Cookies” or you can click on the “Advanced” button and set the cookie policy yourself:

In FireFox, it’s a little different story. The FireFox developers didn’t think that a “block third party cookies” option was a complete enough solution since there will always be some way around it, so they buried the option. To access it you need to browse to the URL “about:config”. From there, filter on “cookie” and you’ll see the option:

Set the “network.cookie.cookieBehavior” option to 1 as described in this page. If you want an even more robust solution, you can use the CookieSafe FireFox plugin to protect yourself that much more.

I was at the Picture People in the mall the other day getting some pictures taken. After we trod through the photography session with our Sunday best on, we sat down at the computer to see the shots. This year we also decided to get Christmas cards. With these cards, you always get to put a little message on each card. They allow you to choose all the gory details of the text including the font, style and color… and that’s where things get interesting.

Above our personalized text, there was “Merry Christmas” in a cursive font and an orangeish goldish color. Our photographer suggested that we use the same color for our message and proceeded to pick the color:

However, our photographer either didn’t know the exact RGB values of the color or didn’t have an advanced talent for matching colors, since we sat there trying to match the stupid color for about 10 minutes… “A little more orange”. “No that’s too orange.” “Maybe if we change the brightness.”

What it really needed was a custom dialog that allowed the user to pick from the common colors used in the cards. Or better yet, a color picker tool to simply click on the color of the text to auto-select it for the foreground color. Either way, the generic color picker dialog was simply too advanced and provided too many choices for the application. Sure it’s nice to be able to pick any color, but what’s the help in being able to pick any color if you aren’t able to pick the exact color you need?

Another example is the common file dialog. This allows you to open and save files to and from any folder. However, if you need to limit the available folders to save to or if you know that the files will always be in a specific folder, then using this dialog is overkill. Write your own dialog and simplify that step for the user. I almost always know where the file I want is located, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked over the shoulder of a friend or relative and I see them struggling to browse to the right location and find exactly where they put the file they want. How many users ever save anything to any location other than the desktop, My Documents, or an external drive anyway?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s often right to just use the common control as is. You don’t want to customize every combo box you have, but you need to be able to identify when usability demands using a custom control. We almost abandoned the whole Christmas card thing, because of this stupid dialog. The difficulty in picking the color almost lost them the sale. So is the simplicity of using a common dialog really worth the risk?

We’ve seen Internet traffic maps and Internet address space maps, but there’s another interesting type of map applicable to the Internet. This is the root server map. Root servers are basically the gate keepers of the Internet (or would that be the key masters?) since they are the highest level authorities in the DNS namespace hierarchy. There are 13 root servers specified from A - M:

Although each lettered root server does not neccesarily represent a single physical server. Root servers C, F, and I-M each have physical servers located in different places:

There have been DOS attacks on the root servers to try and bring down the Internet, but none of them have succeeded. The distributed nature and replication of the servers has helped prevent a blackout of the Internet and based on the state of the root servers as of February 2007, this is increasingly less likely to ever happen: