ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

Listening to my favorite radio station 102.1 in Toronto Canada. Today they're broadcasting from 'The Daily Bread Food Bank' in Toronto as part of a promotion/charity drive. Some stats the DJ just read on the air:

• Percentage of people using the Food Bank with a university degree: 28+ percent.

  It was 28.something. I don't remember the precise number.

• Median amount of money people using the Food Bank have left over per day after paying just housing and utilities (including transportation but not entertainment): $5.67

  Think about the demands for that $5.67 other than food - e.g. medical care, clothing, activities (unless you believe that just being poor is sufficiently rewarding to justify having to struggle through life).

• Median monthly income of people who use the Food Bank: $925.00

• Median hourly pay: $11.60

Looking at that $5.67 number a little more closely: (I assume that's in Canadian dollars)

• That's $2069.55 a year

• If you spent all of it on food you'd have $175.00 a month to spend on food with nothing left over for other groceries - e.g. toilet paper, health and hygiene products.

  And again that would leave nothing for clothing or other necessities. (For example it includes nothing for insurance - health insurance, life insurance, homeowners/renters insurance.)

Read the rest of this post

When friendship means letting would be employers scrutinize your personal life and relationships.

Let me ask you this. If it is widely acknowledged that potential employers are going to insist on checking an applicant's Facebook account, and monitor accounts of employees for illegal or otherwise inappropriate behavior, then Facebook effectively becomes part of a job interview and review process that lasts from now until the rest of your working life potentially. So my questions...

• How is this a good thing?
• Why does anyone use Facebook?

Let's say you had the opportunity to get together with friends socially. You have the choice of going to many different places. Regardless of where you go, it will be you and the same friends. Would you choose to go to a place if the things that you say and do may be monitored by present or future employers, or would you go someplace else? Would you go to a bar that offered cheap drinks and good service but also provided a transcript of what you said and did to your employer?

But you say, is there is a difference between Facebook and other sorts of public participation on the web? Yes.

Read the rest of this post

There is good news and bad news for anyone with Verizon's LTE on Apple's 3rd generation iPad.

The good news: Unsurprisingly great performance

First of all, the performance is just amazing. In my experience, there is nothing to complain about. I've already posted some performance info and first impressions and after using the device for a month, all I can add is that the initial numbers weren't misleading. Where it's supported (which is virtually every place I go in and around Boston, MA (USA)) connectivity is fast, reliable, stable, and... did I mention fast? The 'personal hotspot' feature (free to tablet data subscribers through Verizon) makes the same great connectivity available to a laptop or other device through a connected iPad.

That's the good news. But that's not why I'm writing this post.

The bad news: Surprisingly high data usage (living with a 2GB data plan in a 200GB world)

It's probably obvious that with real world performance of approx 15 Mbps that it would be all too easy to burn through a 2GB per month data plan.

In my first post about the iPad 3 I said

I'm currently paying $30 a month for 2GB of data. That's less than the file size of a single HD movie from iTunes (at 1080p). According to appadvice.com (the first search result) the file size for the movie "30 Days of Night" in 1080p is 3.62 GB. That's nearly twice my monthly data allotment.

Data caps have been the norm for a while now, and I've never come close to exceeding my allowance. But that was before tethering and before LTE. At just 10Mbps, well within the performance levels I'm getting, I could burn through 2GB in one relatively short session. And with the personal hotspot feature I am much more likely to be tempted to use the connection in ways that will consume large amounts of data. I'm going to have to remember to stick with basic browsing, email and similar uses and avoid everything else. Regardless, these data caps are ridiculously low. It's easy enough to say that users should just be careful not to go over. But that's kind of like saying that a serving size for candy contains 15 calories when a single candy bar contains 30 servings. When you think about the idea that you are paying for something by the month that you can use up in literally a few minutes, it seems silly.

So I was well aware of this from the very beginning and I have been using LTE sparingly. I have been careful to stick with 'basic browsing, email and similar uses and avoid everything else'. Well, at least I've been careful to try. As it turns out, that's easier said than done.

I believe there are several factors that tend to cause users to consume more bandwidth than they intend to use.

1. HD media and content automatically fit to the available bandwidth of the channel
2. The quality of high quality content has gone up (and up and up)
3. The amount and variety of content has increased dramatically
4. Increasing prevalence of so called 'cloud services'
5. The proliferation of streaming apps/services
6. Data use associated with background processes
7. Odd/unexpected behavior of individual devices
8. The interplay among all of the above.

1. HD media and content automatically fit to the available bandwidth of the channel

This is an idea at least as old as as streaming media. The goal is to serve the highest quality content to anyone with the bandwidth to support it, and then scale down the size or quality of the media served in response to bandwidth constraints. It makes sense. But the economics of this strategy have changed and the situation is more complicated as a result.

I'll discuss this more in the conclusion at the bottom of this post.

Read the rest of this post

I just paid $2.45 for a large coffee at a Panera along the Greenway.

That beats the previous high-water mark of $2.41, for a Starbucks venti.

This seems to happen a couple of times a year. The lowest price I can remember is $1.89, which was the price for a large coffee at Starbucks maybe 5 years ago. So that's just under 25% in 5 years. At this rate in 5 years we'll be paying $3.06. Make of that what you will. I'm pretty sure 'American-style' drip brewed coffee isn't popular everywhere. But I'd love to know what people are paying elsewhere for this kind of thing (i.e. a large drip coffee at a place like Starbucks.)

Trying to set the tabindex order for an updated version of the edit theme for Ode. This is one of the niceties I didn't bother with when I quickly put together the theme included with the editedit addin now (and something I've wanted to correct for a long time.) This should be simple enough.

To set a tab order other than the default for form elements we just add a tabindex attribute with an integer value. For example to have formfield2 come before formfield1 in the tab order (when form_field1 appears on the page first), we would add tabindex attributes to both:

<input type='text' id='form_field1' name='form_field1' tabindex="2" />

<input type='text' id='form_field2' name='form_field2' tabindex="1" />

But on my Mac running OS X 10.7.x, checkboxes and buttons were being skipped entirely, even though I was explicitly setting a value for the tabindex attribute.

It didn't take long for me to realize that the OS was mucking things up.

Read the rest of this post

Tonight's Mega Millions lottery is now an estimated $640 million.

According to Elias Doinguez, a spokesman for the California Lottery (via 'The Daily') 'this is the all-time record for any lottery'.

For anyone who doesn't know what this is (and hopefully there are a lot of you out there), Mega Millions is a US multi-jurisdictional lottery, with something like 42 States participating, Washington D.C, and the US Virgin Islands as well. Drawings are typically held in Atlanta Georgia at 10:59 PM Eastern Time (UTC -4) Tuesdays and Fridays.

There is perhaps no clearer demonstration of just how deeply irrational people are than a big lottery. That is certainly true of this biggest ever lottery.

Of course it's important to know the probability of winning, right. Virtually everyone talking about this will tell you it's approx 175 million to 1. Almost none of them bother to explain how the probably are computed. Why? The math isn't difficult, and apparently this is something many of us are extraordinarily interested in.

Well Ode's motto is simple means you know how it works, so let me tell you how to do it.

Read the rest of this post

This is something I've wanted to post about for a while. I was finally prompted to do it by this unexpected New York Times article, "A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet" (via Gizmodo's post Is Learning to Code More Popular Than Learning a Foreign Language?). I want to say more about this NYTimes article but I'll save it for another post.

The most recent issue of Wired magazine also includes an article about online education "The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever".

The Wired piece focuses on large scale efforts to extend education beyond the college or university campus. It focuses on a single effort, Udacity, which has set itself to the task of bringing a broad slate of courses and educational materials to anyone with a desire to learn and an internet connection. Again, I'll save my comments about the article for later.

In this post I just want to share a list of some of the internet based educational initiatives I know about:

• iTunes U
• MIT Opencourseware
• MITx
• Udacity
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)
• Coursera
• Kahn Academy
• Codecademy
• Mozilla's Hackasaurus
• P2PU
• Learnable
• O'Reilly's School of Technology

I'm sure I've missed more than I've included, but this isn't bad for a start. I may add to this list in the future.

Read the rest of this post

Woodcut Maps is a clever service that just launched takes a Google Map and transforms it into a 'handcrafted wood-inlay'. The service itself is very well done allowing you to use the standard Google Maps UI to specify an area, panning and zooming using standard Maps controls, fit to the size of the finished product. As a result of the fantastic implementation, something that could have been extremely tedious is actually fun to play with.

I love maps. And I love the idea of turning something that is at first as fleeting as a single view in Google Maps into something permanent, and doing it in such a beautiful way.

Read the rest of this post

Apparently some employers are asking employees and potential hires to hand over the Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.

The first time I saw this story,Prospective Employees Are Now Being Asked for Facebook Login Details I was just dumbfounded. Now that it has been a while, it still isn't sinking in. It goes against any standard of appropriateness, and just plain common sense, I've ever known after being involved with computer technologies for decades.

On behalf of employees who might feel that they can't speak up for themselves, let me say fuck you to any employer doing this. And if anyone is considering hiring me, or contacting me for any other reason, and you do this, have ever done this, or would consider doing something like this, then do both of us a favor and don't bother. I would never consider for a moment working for any company that would even consider asking me for a password to a personal account.

Read the rest of this post

In both cases we've taken something that was once a resource and figured out how to package it and sell it as a product.