justdrew

Okay, there are some products that just rock. WordPress is one of them.

I am continually impressed with the improvements over the past (how many?) half-dozen years since I started working with it.

Just did an upgrade that in any other system would be painful to the point of drawing blood… yet everything went so smoothly I was convinced nothing happened.

Nothing, other than even more improvements to the UI (easily the biggest weak point of all other opensource projects) and a noticeable improvement in performance.

In this crazy, fucked-up world it’s so refreshing to have something work for a change. Thank you WordPress team!

–Drew…justdrew

Every day we collectively come closer to understanding the fundamentals of the universe we live in. Fear and ignorance, once in the driver’s seat, are now relegated to surly and unwanted hitch-hikers in the back seat.

Eventually, we’ll cast them out of the car altogether (at which point the ion-powered antigravity engines will kick in, the wheels fold under and we take to the air… to extend the metaphor and throw in some Spielberg-esque imagery)

This Newsweek article gives an update on the hunt for the Higgs boson. In extremely geeky scientific circles, this is the -to steal a phrase- Holy Grail of early 21st century physics.

It’s a fundamental particle that has been predicted in theory and has not yet been disproved, but also has never been observed in laboratory conditions. This is mostly because of the incredibly high energy scenarios the mathematical models require.

The opening of the Hadron Collider at Cern offered promise that the necessary experiments could be carried out soon. Of course, there was that little breakdown just after it opened and they are still trying to get the systems back online.

So, that delay to the Europeans and the latest speculation that the particles may actually show up at lower power conditions couple to give American-based Fermilab an edge in the race to be the first to produce evidence of the much sought-after particle. Not only are they operational, but their accellerator operates within the range some models predict will produce the “magic” particle.

Confirmation of its existence will replace theory with observed fact that could advance nearly every area of science. To paraphrase Newton- yet another giant on whose shoulders the next generation can stand.

So why should anyone care about this? Basically, even most physicists will concede, there is no apparent immediate benefit to proving the existence of the Higgs boson. Likely, what will happen is further advances in technology will be made because of our increased depth of understanding of fundamental particles and how the universe truly works.

I believe that once we begin widely using sub-atomic particles for computing, medicine, and constructive generation of energy (as opposed to nuclear weapons which use it destructively), we will see advances in technology that will easily make the 20th century look like we spent the time living in caves and hunting mastodon.

If nothing else, the Newsweek article closes with an awesome quotable quote:

…the physicists in Geneva might want to have some dark matter or a few extra dimensions to show for their efforts.

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For a nice concise summary of the Higgs boson, the latest Wikipedia entry is excellent.

I’ve been saying this for some time now: those who have services to offer companies (and individuals) that actually make or save them money (which amounts to the same thing) still have value to create and will make wealth for themselves and others- regardless of where the DOW average is.

For those of us in IT who focus on streamlining processes and making operations faster and cheaper, the market is only growing. My guess is we’ll emerge from this downturn with a slew of companies who operate faster, cheaper and deliver better customer service. In the end, we will all be better off… though it may take a while before we collectively wake up and look around to realize, “hey, things aren’t so bad again”.

Here’s what Forrester has to say about it.

And remember- if you only went by news coverage, we still haven’t recovered from the last recession. Recovery doesn’t make headlines- only crashes do.

Now, I suspect this online movie rental company failed more because of the success of Netflix and Blockbuster than its horrible interface- however, they certainly were doing themselves no favors when they rolled out this gem:

Clearly, that last checkbox label is one of the most confusing things I’ve seen on the web (which is why I saved it). Just came across it today so I thought I’d share.

When thinking of the million or so better ways to represent this option to users, a few clear winners stand out.

Why not this, for example:

Use new Drag-and-drop Queue Format?

…which has the advantage of needing no code changes to the front or back end.

But really, this is probably better served as a radio button set as in:

Queue Format

Standard

Drag-and-drop *NEW*

Really, this stuff shouldn’t be so difficult. But time and again I come across interface elements that seem to have been put there as a joke.

Of course, with this example, we can’t rule that out entirely. Who knows how many disgruntled developers they had on staff.

If you’ve ever watched the show, you know the producers usually put the three hosts through a variety of vehicular-themed challenges (such as one when on tour in the deep south, USA where they each bought a car for under $1,000 and had to drive from Miami to New Orleans- leading to an unforgettable scene where they had to abort a tongue-in-cheek attempt to get eachother arrested or killed by painting offensive slogans on the others’ car… aborted as soon as they realized American southerners don’t do tongue-in-cheek and actually would physically attack someone for driving a car with offensive graffiti on it… whadda country).

This challenge, though is a much nobler one. (Though in fairness to the previous reference, when they arrived in N.O. instead of selling the cars as part of the challenge, they gave them away to hurricane Katrina survivors).

The latest project is to build a highly fuel-efficient vehicle for under $7,000– less than the price of a high-quality hybrid car battery.

Read the article on the Top Gear (USA) site.

With devices shrinking to nearly invisible, displays need to stay the same or get bigger.

How to solve this apparent dilemma? Embed tiny projector units into handheld devices so the display can scale up quite large.

Of course, this idea has been floating around for some time now, as well as ideas to use projection technology as input (as in the laser projected full-sized keyboard that has somehow failed to capture the market’s attention).

However, the news is now, the technology (battery power, image processing, ability to push enough candle-power to be effective) is getting to where it’s good enough and cheap enough to fit our incessant demands for tiny handheld units.

Now, we just need to come up with a clever way to energize particles in the air so this display can hover in front of us without the need for a flat surface on which to project…

Here’s how close we’re getting to this being the defacto standard. Read the eWeek article.

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I love the blend of technology and medicine/biology. Here’s a great technology that appears to hold tremendous promise: ways to expose attributes of our bodies to the outside world, in this case, blood-sugar levels. Basically, it’s a formulated ink that changes color based on the owner’s blood sugar levels, obviating the need to do regular finger-pricks to measure.

Such a device (tattoo) could alert first-aid givers of an unconscious diabetic’s condition as well as an accurate level (once the tech is perfected) of glucose in the patient’s bloodstream. The technology has a way to go before it is accurate, reliable, and cheap enough to become the norm. But the march of technology is swift, determined and never seems to stop. I suspect these techniques will be commonplace within a decade.

Here’s a decent, if lengthy treatment of the subject and the technology.

Although, a similar concept taken much further was posted years ago in this concept video. Nano particles that turn a patch of skin into a display device. Combine that with internal sensors that can report such events as heart rhythm, white blood cell count, and even an orgasm count. Not sure why that would be something you really need to know, let alone show others, but hey- some people might like to advertise their active libido.

Like, I’m totally not into numerology, but omigawd it’s just so neat when things like this happen… y’know?

Gizmodo Post on the subject

I really could care less, but it does tickle me the way some folks attach significance to very old superstitions. I’m sure this week we’ll see and hear a bit from some nut-jobs who take this stuff seriously (stuff == whatever they believe the numbers and the dates signify).

Trust me, as a person whose birthday has more than once fallen on a Friday the 13th, there’s very little that can go wrong on such a day that can’t happen any other day- and hey, you might get a new skateboard like the bad-ass one I got back in ’76!

This one’s almost too good to be true. I think they should just leave it up there and convert it to a local tourist attraction (having lived in Wales some four years, believe me- they can use some help attracting people to the place)

This story tells the tale of a British sign mishap where the Welsh translation was handled very sloppily indeed. Turns out the supposed translation was really just the would-be translator’s Out-of-Office automated responder. Full story here

A while back, a friend of mine recounted to me a nuggent of wisdom from an old client who said, “you know what ‘legacy system’ means to me? It means that it works.”

Funny. True. …and when you’re in the business of making new and better systems, you run into this sentiment a lot.

It didn’t occur to me sooner how to elegantly respond to this chestnut, but I think I have it now.

By way of analogy, the early adopters of the automobile and the telephone system could easily have fallen back on this way of thinking.

A horse will most likely get you where you need to go and will have fewer breakdowns and no flat tires along the way- you don’t even need to use a road.

Likewise, an early long distance telephone call could take hours to connect and required a team of operators to synchronize and make it happen… but hey- when you send a letter through the post, it doesn’t suddenly cut out half-way through or get merged with cross-talk from another sender.

On the downside, you have to put fuel in a horse whether you’re using it or not, it has few serviceable parts so when something goes wrong you need a whole new one. Sending a letter takes time and resources to create and can take weeks to get any kind of response.

When we look at these changes, we know that (most of) the kinks in the new systems got worked out and we now have it way better than those who rely solely on the legacy systems.

Lucky for those of us born after the 19th century, we didn’t have to experience the extreme growing pains these early adopters did, but the pattern repeats itself with every new innovation.

The change is spurred by an unserved need that is first met by a solution that isn’t quite good enough. However, this new solution attacks a problem that motivated early adopters will endure a period of low reliability to solve.

Embracing change is hard. Harder for some than others. The wonderful thing about the diversity of the marketplace is there seems to be a healthy balance of early adopters who bring the more conservative risk-averse forward by working through the rough periods of change ahead of them.

When you find yourself facing the murky waters of early technology or process change, it might be better to be looking ahead to the time when the new solution works as reliably (but better in most ways) than the legacy system it is replacing.

This is healthier in the long run than lamenting over the fact that even though it was slow and ugly, the legacy system “worked”.