Archive for the 'Web' Category
Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout
One of the things that has kept me super busy over the last month has just launched: Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout. A small flash game for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ “Meet the Mascots” page. I’ve liked the Meomi designed characters ever since they were revealed last winter, so it was a joy and privilege to be able to work with them.
The game was produced by zinc Roe Design, who recently launched their own weblog. All Flash coding by me. PS. try to break 3000 points.
Star Trek Euphemisms
It’s puerile and ridiculous and excessive and I couldn’t sit through all ten minutes of it, but I love this Star Trek: The Next Generation montage on YouTube:
Basically, it condenses all 8275 minutes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, from all seven seasons and all the movies, into a ten minute long clip of out-of-context sexual euphemisms. All of which is presented in a linear, story-like fashion. It is quite… preposterous. I can not imagine how much work it took to compile this but I can guess at how devoid that time was of the activity it mentions.
Playing mp3s In Browser
or, “The V in FLV Means ‘Video’”
The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.
Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.
Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.
Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.
NoScript vs Popular Weblogs
Javascript has been on my mind. I had a fairly large sized javascript project a month ago and I currently have something smaller going and I’ve been using NoScript plugin for Firefox for a couple of months now. Funny enough, I installed a javascript blocking extension mere weeks before getting a javascript-exclusive contract job. It always seems to work that way.
It’s NoScript, though, that has made me more aware of javascript usage. Seeing it in action is enlightening because it’s a very good visualization of just how much cross-domain javascript is being executed on any given website. Using javascript to give your site some specific functionality is perfectly fine. I’ll often temporarily allow that (sometimes I have to because there are no javascript disabled alternatives) but I will never allow all those cross-domain scripts to run. Most of those are for pointless little widgets that do nothing but clutter a site and user tracking and cross-site embed of third party content (often ads.) I do not need these things. They are prone to be abused. I block them.
Seeing the blocked content lists in NoScript inspired me to make a simple visualization of (mostly cross-domain) javascript usage amongst popular weblogs (as is seen in the image above). Seeing TechCrunch in there still makes me laugh.
Anyway, keeping in line with that I removed my del.icio.us network status embed code, removed the legacy javascript I was linking to and removed Objecty. Objecty was a script that I used to embed flash content dynamically but it worked half the time, often produced weird errors in my access logs and added a considerable bloat (well over 100kb). It’s gone now. Things should run smoother as a result of it.
But I’m not getting rid of Google Analytics. I need my vanity, even if I block it myself.
IP Imperialism
It’s not a new development, but it is one that seems to resurface every few months. The US is, of course, trying to export US-style copyright reform to Canada. This is happening all around the world. Many new treaties and trade pacts between the United States and foreign countries include copyright stipulations. The US is exceedingly aggressive in this regard and, often times, very one sided. They complain when other nations don’t respect copyrights as strictly as they do, citing international treaties and agreements, but they turn a blind eye to their own anti-competitive practices. Sometimes even rewriting WTO treaties for their own gain at the expense of other nations: In May, the United States said it was rewriting its trade rules to remove gambling from the jurisdiction of the W.T.O.
. It’s easy to understand why the United States does this: culture is the only major exportable resource it has left.
This is why, in this age of globalization and bitTorrent and cheap DVD copies, those of us outside of the United States get this bullshit:
There’s a lot to be said about how region locking is anti-competitive and how a lot of these major IP holders are in favour of globalization if it gets them into new markets but against it if it benefits the consumer. Essays have been written. Books are likely to be published. But the biggest problem with it, from a personal perspective, is that it requires local IP holders to be as “on the ball” as its major American owners. Online region locking wouldn’t be such a problem if there were local alternatives and competition. There isn’t. Canadian media companies aren’t exactly at the forefront of such progress, which is a shame because this is a very internet and tech savvy country. Hell, we’re just now getting on the iPhone bandwagon — a year late to the party.
But there’s hope…
Quite a bit of it. Hopefully, Canadian media companies will soon get their heads out of their asses and realize that, yes, Canadians use the internet too.
FITC and Flash
FITC Toronto was in full swing over the last weekend and it struck me with a severe case of deja vu. Annual conferences like this, if you attend them frequently enough, are strange beasts. Forgotten names are brought up, faces that are seen once a year show up and all the lunch time (in)decisions and presentations feel awfully familiar. There are always interesting bits and pieces and insights to take away from some of the talks, though it’s often a bunch of stuff that can be seen on the presenters’ website anyway.
But it’s a great place to network and find work and, with my upcoming ronin lifestyle, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
One of the main presentations at FITC, every year, is the Adobe keynote. It is often the same predictable thing. They show some weird, little side tools (this year it was kuler), some new Adobe Labs stuff, they boast about the adoption rate for the latest version of Flash player (video traffic this year) and they show new features from the perpetual next version of the Flash authoring application. This year they focused mostly on improved animation tweening controls, a modified timeline and some native rigging and 3D tools. Nice features, but they should have been in the previous version of Flash. Or, more accurately, they should have been there before they alienated their animator (read: non-programmer) demographic.
A preview of some of the motion tween features in Flash 10. See the rest of my FITC 08 pictures here.But it’s all part of the Madden philosophy: getting people to pay for a constant stream of incremental updates and fucking over those that don’t by restricting the compatibility between the new versions. Fuck you Adobe. Everyone would be perfectly happy if you released upgrades half as often with twice as many features, but you couldn’t milk that now, could you?
Even those files that are saved as “Flash 8″ documents don’t work for me because I have the audacity to have “Flash 8 Basic“. Unable to open document with this version of Flash because it contains screens
? Seriously? Screens? Who uses “screens”? No one. The file has no screens. You’re just trying to fuck me. Damnit. I’m sick of it. You win. I give up. Take my money. I am upgrading today.
But this better be the last time.
A Source of Random Medieval Information
Amongst the many ridiculous events in the Church’s history, the Cadaver Synod has to rank in the top five. Basically, they dug up a dead pope, cut off his fingers, put him on trial, found him guilty, reburied him, dug him up again and then threw him into the river. Here’s another article about it.
Anyway, that’s all inconsequential. What’s interesting is that the wikipedia page’s discussion is categorized as “Low-importance Middle Ages articles“. Following through to that will reveal a vast depository of obscure and random medieval history. If you ever feel the need to write historical fiction set in the dark ages, this is the place to be.
PS. Don’t forget about my Tumblr, I’ve been posting there frequently.
Run Button
Eight years ago when I was looking for a domain and dedicated web host for my fledgling weblog, I came across WestHost.com. It offered a lot for a very fair, and student friendly, price. I registered the-inbetween.com through them for the full $70/2 year price tag that domains had back then. The package had unlimited bandwidth (remember those days?), a capacity of 15 MB and full PHP3 support. It was good for the time. In those years that account has been automatically upgraded and I now have 2000 MB worth of space and PHP5 and all sorts of other nice things that I don’t ever use.
Halfway through that run dreamhost started promoting themselves with their weblog friendly hosting packages. Webloggers, and others, started to switch. They raved. The packages were tempting and I was considering the switch myself, but I figured that domain transfer would be annoying and that, well, nothing was wrong with my current hosting provider so I chose to stick it out.
Nowadays I hear nothing but complaints about Dreamhost. Their status page reads like a comedy of errors (Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.
) People are canceling their accounts and looking for new options. Meanwhile, my account with Westhost just works. I am glad I never switched.
So when I was looking for some extra hosting for some possible projects, I went with WestHost again. I’m not one to normally plug companies like this but eight years of happy service has to account for something. If you ever need reliable and simple web hosting, give WestHost.com a look and put ‘the-inbetween.com’ as a referral.
Anyway, as I was signing up for that new hosting account I needed a domain. With the help of some friends on IRC, we came up with a list of potential (and available) domains. Since I can’t register them all I offer them as free domain name consultation service to you. They’re all available as of last week.
- bossattacks.com and bossattack.com
- blockpuzzle.net (unfortunately it’s a .net so it ruled it out for me)
- badicality.com
- f0il.net and m00d.net (more .net domains, but these are 133t)
- resetthis.com (not a fan of the double ‘t’)
- loadbutton.com
- levelledup.com (very good for subdomain fun, ie. mike.levelledup.com)
- isnonplussed.com and isacynic.com and enjoysthings.com (for more subdomain fun.)
In the end, I settled for Runbutton.com. It’s brief and snappy (three syllables); it’s not inherently game-y; it is totally game-y; it’s an obscure reference to weird game-y things (the most useless button ever: the dedicated run button. I’m looking at you Mortal Kombat.); it was available.
What kind of projects are going to go there? I’m not sure right now but the first might be in response to this TIGSource competion and it might look like this:
Szomorú Vasárnap
The ubiquity of YouTube is a wonderful thing. For every one four million view video on the site there’s another forty thousand videos with a hundred views each. This, as Alex Juhasz [1]calls it, “niche-tube” exists below the radar of YouTube’s popularity and is often a treasure trove of weird and specific videos that only appeal to small subset of people. Some of it is prime research material.
Take “Gloomy Sunday” for example. The so called “Hungarian Suicide Song”, which has many urban legends around it, was mostly popularized in English by Billie Holiday. Originally written by Rezso Seress (lyrics), it was promptly rewritten to be less depressing by poet László Jávor (lyrics). It was that version that was later translated into English by Sam L. Lewis (lyrics) and Desmond Carter (lyrics). Carter’s version, performed by Paul Robeson (who has his own interesting history), was the more accurate translation but it proved to be the less successful one. After a bunch of performers, Lewis’ version was eventually recorded by Billie Holiday with a new third stanza that tries to take even more weight off the original meaning of the song by implying that it was a dream. It was this version of the song that persisted, eventually being covered by the likes of Elvis Costello, Bjork, Sarah McLaughlin, Sinéad O’Connor and others. It is this version, three iterations from the original, that is mostly known as “Gloomy Sunday.”
Now this is all well and interesting written out, but a quick YouTube search will reveal all this history in all its aural glory. YouTube is a great cultural library for this media and while copyright issues will always plague it, at this point I doubt they will ever stop it. How can you go back with all this culture a click away? Here’s an audio/video history of the previous paragraph:
Tumblr
With my growing ambition to extend myself to every corner of the internet, I have created a tumble log. I’ve been aware of Tumblr since it launched but never really considered it useful at the time. I already had a weblog. I already used del.icio.us. What did Tumblr do that I already didn’t have done?
Then I had a revelation. Tumblr fills that little tiny niche that exists between a so-called “proper” weblog and a linklog like del.icio.us. It’s great for ephemeral snippets and pieces of the internet. Of course, if I had an invite I’d probably be using ffffound for that too. But yes, n0wak.tumblr.com.
Also, it made for a fine birthday gift, to me from me.
Time to bring out 28 cock candlesInterface Trap
One of my biggest user interface peeves is the use of loading interstitials that don’t leave the user a means of escape. This is prevalent in a lot of Flash and AJAX sites that tend to load a lot of external data. You click on a button or link, everything deactivates while the word “loading”, or some equivalent, is shown on the screen and once the application loads what it needs it reactivates the buttons and does its thing. The problem with this design is that if there’s an error in the data it’s loading or a network hiccup it gets stuck on the loading screen. And if there’s no way to cancel the request, the user is stuck and is forced to reload the whole thing. I hate when this happens on a website.
When this happens in a game — a game that takes a long time to load and start-up — I become incensed. For all the thought that Criterion put into the user interface of Burnout Paradise, it is the lack of a single cancel button on the leaderboard screen that has left the most lasting impression on me.
As you can guess, I was stuck on this screen. There was no way out and I was forced to quit to the dashboard and reset the whole game. Thankfully, I didn’t lose any data, but that doesn’t excuse the mistake. When relying on data coming over the internet always leave a contingency in case it fails because, online, it will eventually fail for someone.
I’m liking the game though.
