Heading to Ireland for a week. I’m leaving the laptop at home (although if I had one of these I wouldn’t be,) so any updates from the road will be sporadic. I will drop in here and on twitter if I do end up a net cafe or something so don’t be surprised by a little bit of activity. Don’t break the Internet while I’m gone.
Another custom skate deck show. More info as I get it.
Here’s a flyer from the last one, to give you a little taste:
More about the Technical Shop
Whenever I’m paid $200,000 to demonstrate my martial arts abilities and give a short speech to a gathering of young people, I always speak about the same thing: the epidemic of violence we see in our society today. Why do so many kids think using their fists is the answer to all of life’s problems? Where do they get these ideas? That’s why I’m using my status as the world’s most famous martial arts movie star to teach children an important lesson.
Never, ever take a fist to another person unless you’re profiting handsomely from it.
I was a child once, and I know what it’s like to want to settle your differences with a fight. There were many times I dreamed about giving a swift roundhouse kick to the bullies who tormented me. And I could have, too. I was trained. Ready. But when I entered the Peking Opera School to learn kung fu, my master Yu Jim Yuen told me that the true warrior must never strike first. He must sit and wait—at least until he has secured a three-picture deal with Warner Bros. and has fully developed his persona as a highly marketable, family-friendly Bruce Lee.
It’s funny, of course, but what I love about it is how well it references Jackie’s career.
Check out the full article:
Sweet!
(Photo shamelessly stolen, in a fit of patriotic glee, from the Olympic site. Sorry NBC!)
Cancellara, not surprisingly, won the gold. The Swiss rider actually caught Germany’s Stephan Schumacher, who started thirty seconds ahead, on the road, which must have provided no small measure of revenge after Schumacher twice beat Cancellara in time trials at the Tour.
Gustav Larsson, time trial champion of Sweden, won the silver.
Giro d’Italia winner, and Leipheimer’s professional teammate on the Astana team, Alberto Contador finished 4th.
On the women’s side, American Kristin Armstrong won the gold, beating out Great Britain’s Emma Pooley, and Switzerland’s Karin Thurig.
A great day for American cycling.
or
As of this writing, there are approximately 1.46 Billion internet users. The following are the best approximations of usage/traffic for several sites and technologies in order to provide some perspective when thinking about and discussing some of the sites and services that are currently making noise in the tech press. I hear and read a lot about the following sites and technologies and sometimes the claims make me scratch my head in confusion (”twitter has gone mainstream“), so I figured I’d do a little research to put some numbers together so I could more accurately separate out the hype.
These are pulled from different sources and have different methodologies, so there’s not much scientific rigor to the following. That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting an interesting list to peruse anyway 
According to Comscore, GOOG has 643,809,000 users as of May 2008, which is something like 50-75% of the internet population.
Facebook attracted 123.9 million unique visitors in May 2008. That’s a more-than-respectable 8% of the internet population.
Interestingly, while there are a healthy number of users, according to a three year old study a lot of them (83%!) of them didn’t know it. I’m sure that number has changed in the past three years, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon.
Twitdir reports 1,244,969 registered users.
That’s a whopping 0.085% of the folks online. Is Twitter an occasionally fun service that I and my geeky acquaintances enjoy? Yes. Mainstream? It doesn’t even sniff mainstream’s vapor trail. If email is Mt. Everest, Twitter is the mound of mashed potatoes on your plate at Thanksgiving.
Yuval Atzmon reports his research shows 75,000 FriendFeed Users
That’s a percentage so small Google wouldn’t even return a regular number when I fed the numbers into its calculator. Instead returning 75 000 divided by 1 463 632 361 = 5.12423762 × 10-5
I can’t find any good estimates, but large sporting events like the current Beijing Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are estimated to bring in 4+ BILLION viewers, so the total number is somewhere north of that.
*FriendFeed’s inclusion is based on by the post “Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service?” over at Mashable. That post crystallized the question asked above. It had been gnawing at the edges of my brain for a while, with everyone talking about twitter being “mainstream” and the like, but the idea that FriendFeed could grow to be more than a niche service seemed kind of crazy to me. Following that, I started to cast about for some perspective on the matter. This post is the result.
Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.
So, while we’re cheering on Firefox’s growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I’d lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.
As a fun exercise, while you’re reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here’s hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the “help” line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
For those that don’t know, XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API used by JavaScript to transfer XML (and other text formats like JSON and plain text) data between a browser and the web server.
This one is obviously pretty big. While “Ajax” the phrase coined by Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, didn’t spring directly from Redmond, a large part of it, and therefore much of the recent innovation in the way web interfaces are programmed, does spring from the creation of the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object. Originally an ActiveX object, XHR is so far entrenched into the way web works right now it’s not even funny.
Personally, without Ajax making JavaScript the hot language it is today, I wouldn’t be half as marketable as I currently am.
Introduced in Internet Explorer 5.0
This JavaScript property is a read/write interface to the HTML markup and content within a given element.
All day, every day I use the innerHTML property. Faster than the DOM methods for object creation and insertion setting innerHTML is normally my first choice whenever I do DOM manipulations.
Introduced in Internet Explorer 4.01
Like a frame, an iframe (”inline frame”) is an HTML element that allows you to embed a HTML document inside another HTML document. The iframe is the earliest innovation this list, appearing all the way back in 1996.
Humorously (or tragically depending on where your allegiance lies- Mountain View or Redmond,) a good portion of the GOOG empire is built on the iframe as the search giant uses an iframe to deliver its advertising on non-Google properties (you can see one in action on this very page.)
Introduced in Internet Explorer 3
A favicon (favorites icon) is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. The favicon not be the innovation that affects me the most on a day to day basis, but judging by the chatter generated by Google’s new favicon, I think a lot of people notice that little browser accessory.
Introduced in Internet Explorer 4
Maybe not the biggest impact, being able to set the overflow property in one dimension is an immensely handy thing to be able to do and I’m happy to have it in my list of tricks.
*This is 100% focused on only technology. Anti-competitive practices and killing Netscape are definitely NOT positive.
**it should be added that while I’m pleased to develop for IE7 in comparision to IE6, it still falls short of what I’d like to see in terms of standards support. Hopefully IE8 will knock it out of the park, but until that time, I’d much rather everyone just go with Firefox, Safari or Opera
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (Unrated Extended Edition)
Not Ran, but definitely worth a look.
This is the candidate for the new millennium.
Why Jackie?
…since that’s the only Chan he would know from popular culture, having grown up watching Charlie Chan films in the 30s.
Danny just sent me the link. It’s basically “Digg for Stoners”
I’m more than halfway* tempted to come up with some 420.com linkbait, just to see what kind of traffic the stoner contingent would bring and how they might behave once on the site.
The stereotype would be low bounce rates and long visits? Sounds like my kind of traffic?
*to be fully accurate I’m 75% of the way there
eMusic, the cheaper (by a factor of four or five) and DRM-free alternative to iTunes that I use recently redesigned parts of their site. The biggest change came on the album pages, which now truly focus on the album. A prominent rating, track listing and album cover now dominate the screen. The former design had much less focus on the album itself and instead featured other site features, none of which I actually used.
Here’s a sample (and a heck of a record, by the way)
So far, so good.
One thing they didn’t redesign is the login page. Here it is:
Take a look, if you will, at the default configuration. Being a member (and lazy) my email and password are saved. Which is just the way I like it. What I don’t like is the fact that the “Do you have an eMusic password?” question is there in the first place, and then it defaults to “No, I need to create a profile.”
There are two things about that design which drive me batty. Depending on how attentive I am I’m annoyed by one of these two things:
I’ve done this long enough and have actually seen this argument raised, so I can imagine the logic that went into this approach. Some “hands on” exec or inexperienced user experience designer said, in a meeting, “What if a new user lands on this page? We’ve got to have a mechanism to allow them to register.” A worthy idea indeed and one that is standard all over the Net. The problem is, they designed the page around that idea and not around the actual purpose of the page- logging in. In effect it’s the first page of a registration flow that just happens to have login functionality as well. Which is backwards since you register only once and then sign into the system many times. Optimizing this page for a single use, “what if?” scenario has consistently frustrated me.
Hopefully there’s a new login page in the queue for this redesign and soon I’ll have one less frustration on the web.
A man can dream, right?
*Amazon actually uses a similar pattern, but they default to “Yes, I have a password” which solves the issue I have with eMusic.
