Jesse Smith

"Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how..."

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:22:55 -0400

“Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster, it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around. Only then is it ready for hash.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Turkey Recipes

"The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a..."

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:06:47 -0400

“The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.”

- Stephen Fry

"Lucky · Us, I mean; lucky to be alive just now, watching these big games play out. Billions of..."

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:52:38 -0400

“Lucky · Us, I mean; lucky to be alive just now, watching these big games play out. Billions of dollars are at stake but that’s a sideshow. We’re working out ways for the people of the future to talk with each other. There are lots of possible outcomes; the ones that seem likely to me look mostly pretty decent.”

- Tim Bray on Google+

These two images were side by side in my feeds this morning, and...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:23:33 -0400

These two images were side by side in my feeds this morning, and I couldn’t help from mashing them together. But the question remains — who is ASTOUNDING ANTOINE?

"Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new..."

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:42:12 -0400

“Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”

- HDT

"Apple can, of course, do both things - build great products and cut contract throats. But with this..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:55:16 -0500

“Apple can, of course, do both things - build great products and cut contract throats. But with this 30% thing, the 30% I’m really interested in is, will Apple eventually see 30% of its revenue come from various cuts, percentages, deals, and obligations? If so, that means a different focus for the company - a focus on things and people farther removed from me and you. And that makes me a bit bummed out.”

- Neven Mrgan

"But one argument that Apple should care about: this policy will prevent many potentially great apps,..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:23:39 -0500

“But one argument that Apple should care about: this policy will prevent many potentially great apps, from many large and small publishers, from being created on iOS at all.
[…]
The discussion shouldn’t be whether Apple can enforce this policy, but whether they should.”

- Marco Arment

"The overall requirements for enhancing and innovating social management are to stimulate vitality in..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:17:32 -0500

“The overall requirements for enhancing and innovating social management are to stimulate vitality in the society and increase harmonious elements to the greatest extent, while reducing inharmonious factors to the minimum.”

- Hu Jintao, poet apparent.

Contrast

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:41:30 -0500

Contrast:

Ahmadinejad to Egypt:

“You will be victorious…. the Iranian nation is your friend and it is your right to freely choose your path. The Iranian nation backs this right of yours,” he said.

vs.

This week, the Iranian judiciary rejected a request by Iranian opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi to hold a rally Monday in support of the protests in Egypt and Tunisia, saying only pro-government forces could march.

[…]

Reports have also surfaced about fresh waves of arrests of opposition activists. On Thursday, Karroubi’s website said he had been placed under house arrest.

And just this morning:

Security forces fired teargas to scatter thousands of opposition supporters marching toward a Tehran square, a witness said. There were also clashes between police and demonstrators, resulting in dozens of arrests, in Isfahan in central Iran, the country’s third largest city, another witness told Reuters.

"Where the hipster says “no, no, no” to everything, pre-emptively, Gillis twists the screw a perverse..."

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:30:40 -0500

“Where the hipster says “no, no, no” to everything, pre-emptively, Gillis twists the screw a perverse turn further. “I want to like everything until I’m convinced why not,” he tells me. He and his friends will “ride each other for not being into things. ‘You didn’t buy the new Katy Perry record? What? I’ve got two.’ ””

- The NYT profiles Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk

"The way to reduce clutter is not to thin down and sprawl out the content; instead fix the design...."

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:08:24 -0400

“The way to reduce clutter is not to thin down and sprawl out the content; instead fix the design. Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design.”

- Tufte on Windows Phone 7 Series

Testing Flash embedding for Into the Woods

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:46:28 -0400

Testing Flash embedding for Into the Woods

"But [Obama’s] “new beginning” has aroused nervousness in some, especially those who disagree..."

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:46:00 -0400

“But [Obama’s] “new beginning” has aroused nervousness in some, especially those who disagree with his counterterrorism policies, or those more comfortable with a vision of America as a white and largely Christian nation, and not the pluralistic melting pot Mr. Obama represents.”

- “Those more comfortable”? Quite the euphemism, NYT.

This is a major miscalculation by the Goposaurs. Their open religious intolerance is everyday more akin to radical Islam.

"your spreadsheets might not calculate correctly."

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:51:33 -0400

“your spreadsheets might not calculate correctly.”

- Microsoft does Mac vs. PC

Into the Woods now uses the HTML5 video element. For the...

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:45:00 -0400

Into the Woods now uses the HTML5 video element. For the moment, support is limited to iOS and Safari 5 on Snow Leopard (the only Mac/Safari configuration that includes a fullscreen button). Conveniently, Jeroen Wijering released a JW Player skin that closely resembles the QuickTime X player, so the switch should be fairly transparent.

The bad news is that it took me well over a month to work out all of the kinks — and as much as I loathe to admit it, I don’t think the video element is ready for prime time.

Hiding the player while the video buffers is one of the trickier problems. This behavior is important because there’s at least a few seconds lag on the iPad before any loading indicator appears, making the site feel unresponsive. While the iPad supports hiding the video element, the iPhone doesn’t. And while the iPhone supports lowering the opacity to zero, the iPad doesn’t. So in the end, I moved the player outside the bounds of a box with its overflow hidden. To my dismay, this technique unloads the Flash object in Firefox for Windows, so I relented and opted to only hide the player on iOS, at the expense of a totally consistent loading experience across platforms & devices. Both the video element and the Flash player support transparent backgrounds on the desktop (not on iOS, though!) — so, close enough.

Turns out the iPad’s video implementation is the least flexible. Bizarrely, if you add a video element to the DOM using jQuery’s $.replace() or $.append() methods, it always appears on top of other elements, regardless of z-index or overflow properties (which broke my hiding method). For whatever reason, only when I used the $.html() method would layering remain intact.

On all iOS devices, although content can be overlaid on top of video elements, interaction always defers to the video element below. So if you try tapping a link, the link will be ignored, and the tap will be received only by the player. This behavior forced me to add iOS-specific code to unload a video when the “Copy/Embed” interface is opened. (An aside to the “Copy/Embed” interface: iOS doesn’t support copying text from “readonly” input fields, nor does it support JavaScript text selection.)

Another significant hurdle was implementing HTTP byte-range support for iOS. This feature allows the player to request a specific chunk of a video instead of the entire thing. While HTML5 video will play in Safari 5 without byte-range support, iOS requires it. Also strange, browsers make multiple requests to a video source file, presumably to gather metadata before downloading the entire file — but the 2nd request from Safari is from a different user agent (QuickTime/7.6.6 (qtver=7.6.6;cpu=IA32;os=Mac 10.6.4)), which can’t read the same $_COOKIEs, meaning you can’t use them to pass authentication tokens. And while I used to be able to do basic video analytics by tracking file downloads, byte-range downloads make so many disparate requests that progress is impossible to track. So I had to write a new analytics method for the front-end and the embedded player that works by sending data with hidden GIFs.

In the end, I’m very happy with the result, and I think watching episodes on iOS devices is more engaging simply because there aren’t other windows or tabs to distract. But I don’t wish this experience on any other developer. Browser implementations are just too quirky for the video element to be treated as a standard (right now). And I haven’t even mentioned the competition between video codecs (H.264, Ogg Theora, and now WebM). For practical reasons, it doesn’t make sense for Into the Woods to encode videos in multiple formats when H.264 is supported by the JW Player and iOS. So Firefox is out. Chrome is out, too, because Google refuses to add a fullscreen button (per the W3C’s specification).

I bet we’ll support a Flash player for at least another 2 years. In the meantime, I’m watching for new browsers that meet our minimum video requirements — Android may already.

It’s 5:51 PST, and this widely-debunked article is still...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:01:54 -0400

It’s 5:51 PST, and this widely-debunked article is still the top story in the NYT tech section, complete with a furious swarm of commentators (“I already changed my default search engine”). It’s been almost 24 hours since publication, with PR statements issued by both Google & Verizon, and still no clarification or correction has been posted.

"[W]e no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G."

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:49:00 -0400

“[W]e no longer have plans to charge a supplement to make calls over 3G.”

- Thank you, Skype.

Absolute Insanity

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:07:00 -0400

It’s gotten worse than politics, I swear.

Listen to Nick Bilton:

“You are now entering the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.” These were the words I heard from several journalists when I first started writing about Apple for Bits last year.

On Friday last week, the distortion field was in full effect when Mr. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, held a press conference at the company’s Cupertino headquarters to address problems with the iPhone 4’s antenna.

As Mr. Jobs paced back and forth on stage, he tried to paint a picture of a world of smartphones that are all rife with antenna problems. He showed videos of signal drops on BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung phones.

Not one of the many NYT articles published about “antennagate” has addressed the substance of Jobs’ argument, which is that signal attenuation is common to all phones, to varying degrees. Nor has Consumer Reports, for that matter. And Mr. Bilton wants to talk about reality distortion?

The initial reaction from the Times immediately after the Friday press conference was surprise that Jobs hadn’t been more apologetic (“Many expected a mea culpa”). This was one whole day after publishing a gossipy article about a potential software fix that turned out to be completely wrong.

I mean, do these guys have no shame? If anyone should be apologetic, it’s the press. It’s their job to remain cool in face of wildly-flug rumor & anecdote, to parse that gap between substance and appearance (yes, distortion). They’ve done nothing but fan the flames for their own benefit — just as they are now by feigning offense at having been finally called out for sloppy journalism.

Hulu’s made a real effort to justify its new $9.99/month premium service, with 720p HD...

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:05:00 -0400

Hulu’s made a real effort to justify its new $9.99/month premium service, with 720p HD streaming and a full back catalog of shows. But I think they’ve made a mistake by limiting free users to Hulu.com, while “Plus” users can access content on a bevy of new clients (TV-integrated, iOS, PS3, Xbox, etc.). I’ll admit that the new players are the most enticing feature to me; I rarely get into a TV show if it’s been on the air for a few seasons already, and I also rarely start watching a show far enough into the season that Hulu’s viewing window isn’t long enough. (It should be noted, too, that the “extra access” isn’t exactly new: I re-watched all 3 seasons of Arrested Development on Hulu probably over a year go.)

The mistake they’ve made is to perpetuate the status quo, furiously clung to by middlemen at every rung: the insistence that our pocket computers or living room computers are, in fact, not computers, but “mobile phones” or “game consoles”. I mean, surely they are still mobile phones and game consoles, but in just the last 5 years, both platforms have become so generalized that their names are mere vestiges of their once constricted use. The most damning example of this insistence is that new Android phones with Flash support, that are fully capable of using the Hulu website, are artificially blocked, I assume because they aren’t “computer-y” enough.

The question becomes, where is the line? Does it have to run Mac OS X or Windows? Does the screen have to be over and under certain size thresholds? What happens when someone finally puts Windows 7 on a small tablet? (Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what happens when Android is powerful & versatile enough to serve as a desktop OS?) As the general public sees more and more that applications and computers are separate (especially in the context of HTML5 applications), that reasonably we only need one powerful processor beneath our TV (and not a range of proprietary consoles), they’ll wonder why they can’t use the computer they already have for a given application, whether a game or Hulu.

Like so many other industries, contorting the present to resemble a comfortable past, they risk being swallowed by the future. Clay Shirky’s maxim is profoundly accurate: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

I can only laugh at this particular contortion, trying to explain the convenience of their new TV apps:

Let’s start in your living room. You’re sitting down for dinner, and you’d like to pull Hulu up on your TV. Today you’d have to plug a computer into the TV and try to connect the audio from your computer to your sound system. It’s certainly doable, but it’s not as easy as it could be.

Actually, it’s just as easy as any other computer with an HDMI port (Xbox/PS3), since audio and video are carried over a single cable. If there’s any reason that using a laptop to watch Hulu is inconvenient, it’s not technical: it’s because they’re trying their hardest to make it difficult. And that gets right to the heart of the matter: that their business model is actually predicated on inconveniencing and deceiving users, rather than earning their trust.

If they had offered an HD and ad-free Hulu for $10/month, without restrictions on my computer’s screen size, I’d be in — even without any new content. As it is, I think Netflix is offering way more value for my $10.

mrgan: I just had to get this out of my system, and I blame all...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:30:41 -0400

mrgan:

I just had to get this out of my system, and I blame all of you for not making it first. Back in my day, we used to drain every droplet of fun out of memes before we discarded them like greasy burrito wrappers.