Posts from — February 2009

I wish I could watch state of the union and similar speeches with the applause time skipped. It would be neat to make a system that automated applause-time-removal.

Ending marijuana prohibition is becoming a bigger issue in California lately. NYT:

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a freshman from San Francisco, made a proposal intended to increase revenue, and, no doubt, appetite: legalizing and taxing marijuana, a major — if technically illegal — crop in the state.

While I don’t think that the budget reason alone should be sufficient, it sure is a lot of money to leave on the table. I really don’t understand the other side of the debate, so I watched this video clip of Glenn Beck, hoping that he’d have an opposing opinion, but I just got more confused:

(the video is 6 minutes, but borderline watchable)

I’m really not sure what Beck’s opinion on the issue is. My favorite part of the conversation is:

“Do you smoke marijuana?”
“Occasionally.”
(condescendingly)”It’s against the law you know..”
“So is speeding, and lots of people do that.”
“… Wow”

The heath care issue is irrelevant. By Beck’s logic, we would need to ban cigarettes, alcohol, junk food, firearms, and cars if we wanted to have health care. The health care bills caused by those things dwarf those caused by marijuana (ok, that sentence is completely conjecture, but I’m confident of it).

Beck’s anecdotal evidence about the cost of marijuana enforcement is clearly ridiculous and are thankfully immediately responded to with actual facts.

It seems like the burden of proof is in the wrong place here. I think that the burden of proof should be on people trying to make/keep something illegal, not those trying to prevent the government from banning something. For a self-proclaimed libertarian, this is doubly true. The default case for the government should not be to make something illegal.

The one aspect I’m concerned about is drug tourism, though. Places like Amsterdam have a reputation tied to drugs, and that reputation brings tourists, but often not the best mix of tourists. I don’t really want San Francisco to become that.

Swat Valley, Pakistan, a beautiful area of land that was once a tourist destination, was taken by the Taliban in December. Since then, they’ve instituted Sharia law and have banned the education of women (destroying schools and killing people in the process). With that as the backdrop, this New York Times video profiles a schoolgirl and her father, who runs a school for girls. It’s worth watching, and is rather terrifying. (Warning: contains a decapitated corpse at one point.) I fear for what will happen to that family.

(video via andrew sullivan)

Continuing my series of biased reviews of Windows-only products…

Google Chrome is a free, open-source web browser from Google that currently only runs on Windows.

One of Chrome’s core aims was to be the fastest browser. There have been a lot of benchmarks to show cases in which this is and isn’t the case, but I’m just looking at anecdotal usage for now. Using gmail in Chrome feels faster than using it in Firefox 3 and significantly faster than IE7. I didn’t compare it to Firefox 3.1, which will have some significant speed improvements.

Another significant feature is process isolation: if one page crashes the browser, you only lose that tab, and if one page is using a lot of CPU or memory, you can figure out which one it is. I didn’t have any crashes or memory/CPU problems in the time I’ve used Chrome, so I haven’t actually used these features, but I’m glad to know that they’re there. There are plenty of times on linux and mac that I’d like to know which page is using the CPU, but I don’t know of a way besides guessing which tabs to close.

Chrome currently doesn’t support extensions, but I found that most of the firefox extensions I use are already built-in. Resizable textareas is built-in, with each textarea (e.g. a comment box on a blog) having a little handle for resizing. I use greasemonkey scripts from time to time, and greasemonkey isn’t built in yet, but you can enable it in some builds, with some caveats. Finally, I use firebug all the time when developing web pages. Chrome’s javascript console reproduces almost all the functionality of firebug that I use. I still prefer firebug, but the javascript console does work quite well. Plus, it doesn’t seem to have some of the performance implications that firebug does.

Chrome’s address bar, the Omni Bar, is a combination search box and address bar. Most other browsers separate these, but Chrome tries to intelligently figure out what you’re trying to do. I haven’t found this to be as good as Firefox’s awesome bar. For example, I’m currently writing this from http://www.magicspatula.com/blog/wp-admin/post-new.php. To navigate to this page, I just type “post-new” into the address bar in firefox. It has an index of the URL parts, so the correct page comes up in the list right away. Chrome doesn’t quite get the right order for me:

Despite starring the page and following that path many times, it’s still not the top result. I use shortcuts like this all the time, so this slows me down a bit. To be fair, though, most of my other uses of the keyboard do work just fine.. this is a bit of an outlier.

I’ve been a big Firefox fan for a long time. I used it when it was called Firebird and when it was called Phoenix before that. If I were using Windows regularly, I’m not sure which browser I would use. Probably both. I’m also not sure if I’m more excited about Firefox 3.1 or Chrome coming to mac and linux. Luckily it doesn’t matter, because all those things will be happening anyway. Better to have too many good choices than too few.

Chrome accounted for about 5% of this blog’s traffic in the last month.

If you’re on a mac and want to keep tabs on Chrome’s status, see this status page.

I left out a bunch of features in this post, so you may want to view some short videos about them or just try Chrome yourself.

My brother just arrived in Chile and will be there until July. He just started a blog, which may interest some of you. He writes blog entries a bit like emails, but that’s OK

This mashup is great:

Brubeck’s saxophone part works really well and adds a light layer atop one of my favorite Radiohead songs.

via waxy

When I got a new computer, I ended up using Windows for the first couple of weeks I had it. I’m now back to using linux 90% of the time, but I used my time in Windows to try out some windows-only software. Today, I’m writing about Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. I hope to write a bit about Google Chrome later. As always, these are my own biased opinions, so BYO-grains-of-salt.

OK, here we go.

Virtual Earth 3D is a free browser plugin available at maps.live.com (just click 3D on that page). It works in IE and Firefox on Windows. The plugin itself has an API that can be used to do some interesting things, but I’m just focusing on the 3D integration with Live Search Maps. Google has a similar browser plugin, but it’s not integrated with Google Maps, so it’s not quite the same. Google Earth itself seems to be the most similar product, so I’ll compare those.

I like Virtual Earth’s integration with the live search web app. Moving between the plugin and the web page generally feels seamless, as most of the UI is the same between 2D and 3D modes. Perhaps I just had trouble transitioning from Google Maps, but parts of the UI seemed rather difficult to figure out. For example, to get directions from near home to near work, I just type “94115 to 94043″ into the google maps search box. Not only did this not work in on Live, but none of the search box options allowed me to get directions (I had to hunt for a link in the sidebar). Also, I just discovered that the edges of the 3D view are invisible hotspots where you can do different types of panning, which makes 3D navigation a bit better, but it still didn’t feel comfortable.

The quality of the 3D models and textures is quite good. It seemed like there were more 3D models in San Francisco in Virtual Earth than Google Earth, with similar quality. Here’s a screenshot I took of Manhattan:

Had this been any other building, I wouldn’t nitpick, but, uh why does Google’s NYC office have a gaping hole in it?

Other than that, the buildings look really beautiful, though.

Another feature I liked was the cloud rendering. It’s exceptionally hard to demonstrate it in a screen shot, but here’s a view of San Francisco from the East:

They used code from Microsoft Flight Simulator for this. For some reason, I couldn’t figure out why I could sometimes see clouds and sometimes not. I had to reload the page in order to get the above screenshot- if anyone knows a secret, I’m curious to know.

One thing that bothered me was the way that images and text were handled. First, text is rendered on the map images themselves, so it’s essentially bolted to the ground. This means that when you rotate the map, the text often appears sideways and upside-down. Also, if you view something from far away, the text is inscrutable. Second, satellite imagery at different zoom levels often comes from different data sources. This means, as you zoom in, lakes change color, some buildings can appear and disappear, etc. Also, if you view the map from an angle, some of the view may be from one data source while the rest is from another:

(also: almost none of the text on this map is legible)

That screenshot isn’t a loading phase, that’s the steady state.

At first, I couldn’t figure out why someone would think that this is a good idea, but I eventually realized that it was to avoid making the map look patchy. Here’s the problem: Let’s say you have high-quality imagery for San Francisco and high-quality imagery taken on a different day from Oakland. When people are zoomed in to either city, you’ll want to show them the best imagery you have. As they zoom out, though, both Oakland and San Francisco will be in view, so if you continue to use separate data sources, the two cities will look different (lighting conditions, etc), and it could be quite jarring. If you switched to a slightly lower-res, and let’s say older, view of the whole bay when the user zooms out to see the region, you’ll avoid showing the cities in different conditions, but it makes zooming feel weird as shown above. Google Earth takes the opposite approach, which makes the map look patchy when zoomed out. Here’s a clear example of this:

Missouri isn’t actually a different color, there’s just a different data source for that area. All those rectangles are the same effect. It’s a bit ugly out here, but zooming in is much smoother.

Here’s the same region in Virtual Earth:

While the VE method does make Missouri look better, I prefer the Google Earth method here. On 2D map sites, like Google Maps, the zoom levels are discrete, so switching data sources between zoom levels isn’t as jarring (Google Maps and Live Maps do this, by the way), but in 3D, the zoom is continuous, and the effect is seriously distracting and removes a bit of the suspension of disbelief when flying around.

I don’t think it’ll catch on like “series of tubes”, but if we give him time, I’m sure Joe Biden will come up with more terminology:

fbCal is a no-hassle app that lets you see a feed of your facebook friends’ birthdays in Google Calendar or other calendaring applications. This is tremendously useful to me, because I only log in to facebook about once a week, so I otherwise tend to miss birthdays. It seems like this should be a feature of facebook itself, but I won’t get into that…

Courtesy of Alan Keyes:

(via)

As Keyes himself says: “This is insantiy”