Posts from — March 2009

PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk’s will reads like a parody. My favorite part:

d. That one of my eyes be removed, mounted, and delivered to the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a reminder that PETA will continue to be watching the agency until it stops poisoning and torturing animals in useless and cruel experiments; that the other is to be used as PETA sees fit;

I can imagine being her successor and having to hold a meeting to figure out what to do with the other eye…

(This post consists of biased personal opinions, as always)

Chrome Experiments has some pretty cool stuff. The idea of the site was to create some javascript demos to show off Chrome’s speed. Some of them also run in firefox (and maybe safari), though I wasn’t able to find any that ran in IE, mostly because IE doesn’t support <canvas>.

I’m running beta 3 of firefox 3.1 on all my computers now. Its javascript execution is definitely faster than 3.0. It didn’t perform too well on a some of the chrome experiments, though. Unlike IE, it could typically run them, it just wouldn’t be as smooth as Chrome (for example, 3D rendering). My favorite experiments are all among the top-rated, so try some of those out if you have a chance. Some of them are really clever.

I installed IE8 on my windows partition tonight. I haven’t used it enough to do a full review or anything. I don’t expect IE to return to the Mac any time soon, so I don’t really have incentive to try it. I stumbled upon this video on Microsoft’s site regarding browser speed. The video consists of a lot of flashes and text flying around to techno music, so I’ll save you some time and summarize:

Everyone talking about browser speed seems to think that micro-benchmarks are important, but those benchmarks are just made up and regular people have never heard of them anyway. The real way to test is in the load times of popular websites.

They then show load times from IE8, Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0 on popular sites. As you might expect, IE8 did pretty well. They conclude that “IE8 is fast just like other browsers”

The type of speed Microsoft is talking about here is important, but it’s not what most of the browser speed discussion has been about. Their analysis is on the top 25 most visited sites, e.g. google.com. To time the rendering of google.com has a high ratio of time spent rendering HTML to time spent running javascript. The same is true for most of the top 25: these aren’t javascript applications, they’re web pages. Rendering these quickly definitely has value, and I’m glad that the IE team has worked on rendering speed, but the claims of this video are a bit simplistic. Although IE does well on these simple pages, it can’t keep up on the javascript-heavy applications used on the web (e.g. Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Google Docs, etc). When the ratio of HTML rendering time to javascript execution time goes down, javascript benchmarks become more important.

I ran Firefox 3.1b3, Chrome 1.0 and IE 8 through the Sunspider javascript benchmark test. From the description:

This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

I’m not asserting that this is a perfect test (it doesn’t test DOM manipulation, for example), but it’s not a bad way to get a rough idea about how a javascript engine is performing. Here are my results on an Intel 2.33GHz quad-core with 8GB RAM:
Chrome: 1193ms
Firefox: 2033ms
Internet Explorer: 5753ms
(click the links for a more detailed breakdown)

This speed difference doesn’t make mainstream web apps unusable today, but I worry that it inhibits the web apps of the future. Chrome Experiments is a good showcase for the types of things that are doable in javascript with a fast interpreter. If you showed me these a year or two ago, I’d think that they were implemented in Flash. Speeding up javascript and enhancing multimedia APIs (canvas, video, SVG) will expand the range of things possible in web applications, and I’m really looking forward to this faster generation of browsers becoming mainstream.

UCB’s video is pretty funny (language warning):

Jay Leno:

“Here’s something to think about: How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?”

Ooh, I know!

From Season 1 of The Wire (language warning):

(via onegoodmove)

This seems to summarize about half the major themes of the show. Once most shows are in reruns, I’ll start rewatching this. If you haven’t given it a try, you should.

Google Voice, the successor, to Grand Central. I’ve been using it for a while and have been very pleased with it. The most important feature for me is voicemail transcription:

Since I get the transcribed voicemail in my email, I generally don’t have to listen the the voicemail itself- the transcription is good enough for me to figure out how important the call is. I haven’t actually listened to a voicemail in months.

Additionally, I find it useful to be able to SMS from the web interface. I’ve had times where I’ve been at a computer (surprise!) when receiving a text message. Instead of typing out the reply on my phone, I just open up Google Voice and type it with a real keyboard. For non-trivial conversations, it can make a big difference.

Lifehacker has a good screenshot tour, if you’d like to learn more.

this photo series is quite chilling. It reminds me of the pictures after Hurricane Katrina.
(via kottke)

Designer Douglas Bowman recently left Google, and wrote his rationale on his blog, causing quite a stir:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

One of the things I like most about Google is how data-driven most of the decisionmaking is. Data is the referee that decides debates, and it’s a great equalizer: data doesn’t care who the idea comes from, so an intern’s idea can trump a director’s idea. You might argue that people can “make statistics say anything”, but among people who are pretty well-versed in statistics, I haven’t really found that to be the case.

Design complicates this, though, mostly because it’s just harder to measure. There are some things we can measure, though, for example, a design that reduces latency will likely increase usage. Eye tracking studies can yield some information about how complicated a page is and how distracting parts of the design are to the user. Someone suggested that data can be used to make incremental improvements in design, but it can’t often be used to validate a completely new design. This is where risk comes in.

Any significant design change entails risk, and there’s almost always a user backlash. People acclimate to changes, though. For example, I found Google SearchWiki distracting at first, so I wrote a script to hide the UI elements. I still don’t love the design, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.

A good example of design risks is Facebook. They iterate on major portions of their design, regularly incurring a user backlash (there’s one going on now, apparently). Think back to the news feed, though- when they introduced that, everyone was up in arms, but it turned out to be one of their best features. Making decisions on risks like this is rather difficult because it’s hard to measure. What would the metric for a new design- number of users who liked it minus number of users who didn’t? The facebook news feed would have failed that test for months until users acclimated and understood it.

I’ve had surprisingly many chances to design things at work, and I’ve really enjoyed discussion designs with others. Most of the things I learned about design came from The Non-Designer’s Design Book, which I recommend to anyone interested in the topic.

President Bush’s speech as the Iraq War began:

The Bush Doctrine rationale couldn’t be more clear: this was a war to preempt a threat. I’m not sure that I’m against all preemptive war, but this one we got wrong. We used bad intelligence, didn’t understand Iraq at all, and were sold a war by people who believed that the ends justify the means.

From Richard Florida’s analysis of a recent poll:

happy states are also apparently those greater concentrations bohemians (.43), immigrants (.36 ), and gays (.32), as well as states with higher levels of high-tech industry (.22) or those with more innovative potential.

(via)
Wow, what part of the US does that sound like?