jon-david schlough

BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca

Badass physics, not sure how useful the little thingers are without filenames on hover...

Link: BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca.

Oh yeah, here's the hip-hop version...

Net Neutrality : Save The Internet, OddTodd, & AskANinja

If you enjoy surfing the internet and using it to do useful, free or low-cost stuff then you should be aware of the goings on in Washington D.C. One thing I'm focused on lately is developing strategies to help legislators and lobbyists understand exactly what it is they are voting on as policy is defined around technology. This is a good example.

Basically, you want to surf a site and your ISP is, oh I dunno, Time Warner. Republicans want to make it legal for Time Warner, or any other ISP, to prioritize content based on....whatever the feel like. How would they prioritize content? It's all about the $$$$$ baby! The content that you'll be able to view with the full wonderful huge high-bandwidth fiber connection we'll all have soon will be content willing to pay Time Warner a bunch of cash. Crap.

More insight and some seriously funny stuff after the jump...

Test your password strength

Interesting...people sometimes wonder, how did I get owned? They use words from the english dictiionary, for one.

Go test your password strength.

Keep in mind that the result you get is the complete search time, i.e., during this time your password will be found with a 100% probability

Dual-Boot Vista and OSX? Not Bloody Likely.

Dammit. This is really disappointing. There is a raft of intelligent comments in the slashdot thread, but f-it. I don't care to read /.ers eating their young.

All I want to is to Tri-Boot a Mac-Book with OSX, Vista, and Gentoo - is that too much to ask? Emulation sucks. I emulated XP on a Powerbook last year, using it made me want to stab myself in the eye many, many times.

*SIGH* Why can't companies do the right thing and just give a shit about users, instead of their childish - I won't support you if you don't support me bullshit? Whatevers. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons and speculation about the thinking behind this, but I don't care about them. I care about building my MacBook out to kick ass like Mobil Gas.

Interoperability and Open Standards - the killer app, get with it bitches!

Link: Slashdot | No EFI Support for Vista.

Target.com sued by blind student

I bet the team I used to work on is as busy as bees adding ALT everywhere. In all fairness, Matt and I used to rant about ADA compliance to people all the time - few listen when it costs money to implement, as soon as someone sues and it hits the media, corporations amazingly spring in to action.

One sad thing is that the shiny new main navigation has no alt text to speak of, I wonder how navigable the site really is for people with disabilities?

 

Link: Target.com sued by blind student.

Multidimensional Desktop

Wow. Wow. Wow.

And you thought fast-user-switching was cool....

Link: Novell: Videos.

Minneapolis citywide Wi-Fi

Clearly, very shortly, internet service will be viewed as just another utility. Indeed for most, it already is: Heat, Water, Garbage, Power, Internet...

Funny thing about this article, is that the Star Tribune frames the whole initiative as Minneapolis trying to be "cool". R.T. Rybak just wants to appeal to the hipsters, right? Even the subtitle is:

"The city sees wireless Web as a way to keep its cred with hipsters"

Seriously? How about, The city sees wireless web as a way to offer low-cost citywide internet access to its citizens? How about, The city sees WiFi as a catalyst for communication and creation of information amongst its taxpayers? How about, The city of Minneapolis sees WiFi as a way to offer services of all kinds to its residents in an efficient manner?

Interestingly enough, the only decent quote was not from a hipster, or a progressive businesswoman, or an executive director of the Citizens League, it was from a senior at Chaska High School, Katherine Rose Heal:

"I don't think we're that much ahead of anybody," she said. "It's like garbage pickup. A long time ago, that was a cutting-edge thing. In a couple of years, this won't be cutting edge."

Listen to the young people! This young woman did a better analysis of this in 4 simple sentences than the hapless John Reinan could do with an entire piece.

BigUpYaSelf Katherine Rose Heal!

Link: Minneapolis is cool with citywide Wi-Fi.

MNteractive : Garrick Van Buren

If you're into usability, design, interactive...er something...anyway. Go read MNteractive, a group I've wanted to get involved with for a long time and just have not got it done. Need to attend a meeting...

Anyway, had lunch with Garrick yesterday and all is well! He's eating at the mighty trough of Sun Microsystems right now, and doing good work. I'm hoping to get him back to code42 to give us some objective UI feedback.

He's also selling his house - it's dope, check it out if you're in the market. Also, it's very near me - which is either a good or bad thing, depending on who you are...

Link: MNteractive - Garrick Van Buren.

E.R. for Hard Drives - New York Times

Have you backed up your Hard Drive lately?

Link: E.R. for Hard Drives - New York Times.

If all computer users backed up their hard drives, the data recovery industry would barely exist. But the routine, like flossing teeth, is practiced regularly by few.

And as hard drive capacity explodes, the consequences of catastrophic failure mushroom. Hard drives now store not just documents but photos, music and movies as well, electronically embedded on a platter spinning at 10,000 revolutions a minute (300 times the speed of an LP record); access is by a read/write head floating a hair's breadth above, and flying back and forth at 60 miles an hour.

If the head falls onto the platter or picks up a jot of dust, the data can be rendered unreadable.

Inverse Kinematik | chilloutzone.de - some German dude's nice flash work

This is the smoothest implementation of mousey interactive flash I've seen in some time. Check it out, toss the bikini-clad girl around amongst the bubbles...squeeze her through crevices, hang her on bubbles, get her wedged in contortionist exercises - it's all up 2 u.

Link: Inverse Kinematik | chilloutzone.de.