Category Archives: Technology

How Google and Matt Cutts make the internet useful

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Last week, Jen and I had dinner with our friends Sarah, Matt, and Sarah’s parents. Sarah’s father Roger is a mathematics professor in Morehead, Kentucky and has a keen interest in computers. As we loaded the dishwasher, he asked me a bit about the work I’ve done in development and interactive marketing. He then started to tell me about a friend’s son who was highly regarded in his field. Roger began by stating that this individual was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina but left before completing his PhD.

I cut him off mid-sentence. “Are you talking about Matt Cutts?”, I asked. Roger beamed in affirmation.

I would venture to say that anyone working in search engine marketing has probably heard of Matt Cutts, and if your search marketing team hasn’t, you might want to hire someone else. Matt is a senior engineer at Google and is in charge of web spam: preventing it, not creating it. Matt joined Google very early in the company’s history and has helped it develop and continually refine its search algorithm. So how has this changed your life and what’s an algorithm?

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DirecTV Kills the Tour

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For the record, I do not currently have cable nor satellite TV. I have a 1992 20″ TV with rabbit ear antennas and we receive maybe seven TV stations semi-clearly, one of which is public TV and another is in Spanish. I might subscribe to pay TV if it wasn’t such a headache.

This afternoon, we were at a friend’s house watching the last stage of the Tour de France that she’d recorded that morning on her DirecTV DVR, or set-top recorder. (I still don’t know anything about the stage, so don’t tell me.) About 20 minutes into the program, a heavy rainstorm knocked out her satellite signal, and with it the DVR’s ability to play a pre-recorded show. Satellites need an unobstructed view of the Southern sky. Makes sense, got it. But I don’t understand why the box can’t play a locally recorded show without a satellite uplink. I’m guessing it has something to do with keeping you tethered to a DirecTV monthly subscription and avoiding the sharing of recorded content.

When we finally got the thing back up and running, we tried to resume the Tour stage, only to find out that the DirecTV box had mysteriously decided to record 9 minutes of Extreme Cage Fighting (as opposed to the non-extreme cage fighting shows) over the Tour Stage. The DVR menu still said “Tour Stage 20, 7:30 AM”, but now the notes stated it was recorded at 1:57 PM. A few calls to customer service and tech support confirmed that the program was probably gone permanently. In fact, when we mentioned that we thought the storm had done something to the DVR box, the tech rep replied “Yep, that will happen with storms.”

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Target Unveils New Mixed Media Billboard Ad

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Marketers are working harder than every to capture our attention. A few years ago, a campaign promoting the remake of the King Kong movie put an enormous billboard cutout of King Kong climbing the side of a building in New York. If you sent a text message to a certain number, King Kong’s eyes would blink. Though the technology was rudimentary, this campaign created a lot of guerilla (not “gorilla”) buzz and thousands of passers-by stopped to briefly interact with the billboard.

When I got off Marta at the Candler Park station today, I saw a billboard for a new R&B compilation called “Platinum Tracks,” which is available exclusively at Target Stores. The billboard features an earphone jack, and I actually plugged in my headphones to hear a preview of the album.

While this billboard will no doubt create a lot of buzz, it goes a step further and actually demo’s the product. And the placement is perfect. Marta riders have a lot of time between trains, and iPods and portable CD players are ubiquitous, so there’s no shortage of people with headphones. The Edgewood Target store is only a 10 minute walk from the Candler Park station.

Great example of a billboard that captures our attention, and once it does, it actually has something valuable to share.

Platinum Stacks by Def Jam Records and producer L.A. Reid.

Live Free or Die Hard: best Die Hard since the original

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Everything I’ve learned about terror attacks, I’ve learned from watching the Die Hard franchise.

I know that when terrorists perpetrate elaborately orchestrated attacks on the U.S., they can expect a few things. First, there will be some bureaucrat in charge of the local PD or federal law enforcement agency who will initially respond arrogantly in the face of overwhelming cicumstantial evidence and deny to take any actions which might easily and immediately halt the terror attack. Thank God for that, because if these guys did have any common sense early on, they’d extinguish the terror plot and we’d be left without a Bruce Willis movie. Clearly though, we can’t count on any of the people who are supposed to protect us to be the first line of defense.

The terrorists also know this, and it allows their schemes to unfold in highly dramatic waves of attack. First, send an unmistakable warning, which will be mistaken. Next, knock out the authorities’ infrastructure. At this point, the good guys will scramble to actions which play into the hands of the bad guys. Terrorists also always have an inside man or former employee of whatever agency is investigating them. Finally, as terrorists’ actions become increasingly ruthless and they show complete disregard for human life, we ultimately find out that all terrorists are motivated by money, not ideology or power. The one comfort that keeps us all from heading to doomsday bunkers in Montana is that terrorists never plan on a tough guy falling into the wrong place at the wrong time.

And so we enter the fourth (or is it fifth) movie in the Die Hard series. Formula aside, I think I enjoyed this Die Hard almost as much as the original. It doesn’t have the raw edge, shock value, or desperation that the first one had, but this might have been the most entertaining. The script is faithful to John McClain’s character without spewing too many catchphrases (although you’ll find one or two familiar ones), and it shows a pleasant evolution. All in all I can say that I would go see a lot more sequels if all of them were this good.

*********NO MAJOR SPOILERS, ONLY GENERAL DISCUSSION OF THE BASIC MOVIE PLOT *****************

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Movable Type going Open Source…

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I was late to get on this one. Six Apart’s Movable Type, still the top choice of many companies for enterprise blogging, is going open source.

WordPress is the dominant platform right now and currently powers this blog; its lead has been in large part due to its founder’s commitment to Open Source as well as a strong developer community.

TMC Labs: Movable type vs. WordPress war heats up

TMC Labs: Review of Movable Type 4.0 beta

Do we all need to get iPhones?

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When the iPhones ship in few weeks they will probably be beautifully designed and highly coveted. Apple is famous for cutting clutter and creating simple, elegant devices.

Without intending it, I’ve now owned 4 SmartPhones (all Blackberries) and can’t seem to stay organized without them. Of course, most of the time I’ve saved with the Blackberry has been spent fiddling/procrastinating with the Blackberry. Zero sum.

Here are the questions I’d ask before buying any of these devices.

  • Is the design easy and intuitive?
  • Does it have feature bloat?
  • Is it stable and reliable?
  • Does it have good battery life?
  • Is the network structure and technology going to be supported for at least 2 more years?
  • Why do you need it again? Really?

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Gimp Reviewed: Impressive, but not quite Photoshop

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When I ordered my new Dell laptop, I made a concerted effort to always try an open source option whenever available. After reading a lot of personal commentaries on Gimp vs. Photoshop, I decided to give the Gimp a try.

I’ve been a power user of Photoshop for about the last 10 years. Starting in advertising and moving into interactive media, I’ve had a license since v3. 

Gimp is a great piece of software. For the novice to intermediate user, or for minor editing tasks, it’s the only editor most people will ever need. I do most of the resizing/cropping/sharpening of images on my blog with Gimp.

I have had a few problems. The toolbars and palettes all seem to launch as separate application windows, so they’re never all onscreen at the the same time. As soon as you click to the image window, the toolbar or layers palette disappear.

Gimp Review

I also live and die by shortcut keys, especially in Photoshop. I know so many of them that I can turn myself into a human batch program. Unfortunately, many of them are slightly different in Gimp, or at least the tools behave differently.

All in all, Gimp is solid. It’s incredible robust, and as someone who understands graphic compression and filter algorithms, I can tell you it was no small task to get all of the tools and filters working as well as they do. It’s a great photo editor for novice, and even expert graphic designers would choose to use it for many tasks. It loads so much quicker than photoshop, so when you just want the basics, there’s a lot less wait.

That being said, it often ends up taking me far longer to do the basic tasks. Some of this is getting used to different tool behaviors, but a lot of it is also the palettes and toolbars disappearing on me. Editing text is difficult, and Gimp lacks kerning and tracking adjustment. Many fonts (TrueType and PostScript) do not appear correctly in Gimp. It also doesn’t remember the settings I use. Everytime I export a JPEG, I have to reset the JPEG formats as well as adjust the compression setting. It also doesn’t remember my filter settings.

It appears that the layer options and gridlines allow for some way to slice page images when putting together a website.  I haven’t figured it out, but I think that anyone who already knows how to do it in another tool (Photoshop, ImageReady, or Fireworks) won’t want to learn how to do it in Gimp.

All in all, it’s hard to believe that there is a free tool this powerful and easy. I’m old enough to remember the days when you had to design in one application, like Photoshop, and then compress in another, like DeBabelizer. We were compressing GIFs to a web palette, for 640×480 256 color monitors, for 28.8 modems, all the while worried that Unisys was going to make us pay royalties on each GIF… Ok, now I’m starting to sound like your grandpa.

T-minus 15 hours…

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Had my pre-op with the doctor today. He corroborated my expert read of the CT and my talus is still broken. He did say that there was evidence that the bone and cartilage are still actively trying to heal — they won’t be able to — but that means my body is still trying. Good news for the impending operation.

I’m scheduled at 7:30 tomorrow. My doc did his undergrad and med school at Michigan. I also found out they call the main hospital the “big house”. Interesting.

I’m ecstatic with my choice of a surgeon. He’s definitely a scientist. He’s meticulous with the details, and extremely well-read. So I have the left brain covered. He’s also left-handed, so apparently I have the right brain covered as well. I’ve heard from 2 different medical professionals that he’s obsessive in the details. One of the top guys in Atlanta says that he’s seen the best results from my doc… Here we go.

Javaun’s rant on healthcare

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I wore an ankle boot for 6 weeks, and so I wasn’t about to undergo surgery without seeing if it had done me any good. I had my second CT scan yesterday. It’s really quite an amazing process. You spend 20 minutes in the waiting room, fill out paper for 10 minutes, then go back to the on-deck circle for 10 more minutes. Then they bring you into the room, put you on the table, and then align you and scan you in less than 3 minutes.

While an MRI is the gold standard for soft-tissue imaging, CT is the gold standard for bones. A fracture like mine, that is almost invisible on an X-ray (the first doc didn’t see it on the first four X-rays, the second caught it on the 7th or 8th) is clear as day on a CT. I didn’t have doubts about going in on Friday, but if I did, the CT was clear enough: I’m not getting better.

So obviously this technology is pretty cool, but not everyone gets to have it. The actual scan I had was complete in about 45 seconds. If you walk in off the street, the going rate is about $1500. If you have any insurance that is in network — including the terrible “open access” HRA I have — the in-network discount is about $1200, which brings the cost down to under $300. Even if I pay out of my own pocket (which I will probably have to, but many people don’t) it’s quite affordable. Now, if you’re a poor person without insurance, at $1500 the cost is 5 times higher. This is a diagnostic, often preventative measure. Who decided that people that can’t afford insurance should have to pay more for the same service?

 

I asked all the questions, did my reading, called surgeon friends in Tennessee, Oregon, and even phoned Boulder Sports Med in Colorado. I’ve done my homework and I am confident I have the best person to perform the operation. 

I was really lucky to have access to the doctors I’ve seen. I saw 3 of the best ankle surgeons in Georgia before picking one I liked. I also saw the  podiatrist who sees most of the Atlanta Falcons and is a local legend and hero in the cycling and running communities.

I will no doubt face a lot of out-of-pocket expenses, but since I can a la carte several items, such as the hospital, I can choose an in-network facility and an out-of-network surgeon. Maximum choice mixed with cost-savings. My corporate insurance is the only reason I’ve had this level of choice and affordability. Most Americans aren’t this lucky.

“Snowboarder’s Ankle Fracture” and Search

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It’s so funny how dependent we’ve become on search. Remember BEFORE search made the entire internet actually work? When you had an obscure question, you’d ask your know-it-all maven buddy, who would ask his friend, etc. Three weeks later, you’d be close to answer. Now, you Google it. I grew up using PCs in the mid-80s because my father was an IBMer. I could trade in my current laptop for one of those PC XTs that ran all it’s software from a floppy, but I couldn’t trade in search.

A few days before Christmas, I was able to come up with a few solid leads on why, exactly, my outlet melted and almost ignited our bed mattress.  My wife was also able to find out through some persistent searching (and an email to customer service) that our mattress didn’t contain carginogenic flame-retardants.

Usually, there are a bunch of different terms that will get you the answer you seek. The funniest thing is that after my ankle injury in January, I never came across any info on my condition until the second surgeon gave me the term “snowboarder’s ankle fracture.” Ding ding ding! It’s not a made up ailment! It almost never happens — except that it happens all the time to snowboarders. Especially those that don’t know what they’re doing.

 http://www.google.com/search?q=snowboarder%27s+ankle+fracture