Recently on Beyond Standards
It’s a tired old phrase that a picture tells a thousand words, but its endurance is a proud reflection of its ongoing significance. What’s less accepted though, is how important pictures are when it comes to communicating more technical information, from pure numbers (such as web-stats) to the makeup of complex computing processes.
I’ve long been fascinated by plots and graphs (in a former life I even lectured about them) and particularly in the majority of their authors’ misguided notions that they need to convey every last piece of information in the source data (as opposed to trends, important features and comparative values).
Google Analytics has recently redesigned to introduce (amongst many other things) Sparklines to quickly convey trends in data using small, information rich graphics:
These are great examples of discarding the dangerous notion that for a graphic to be valuable has to convey actual figures.
Anyway, I’m drifting from my original motivation for this post … hands up who thinks it’s possible to qualify the statement ‘Windows is less secure than Linux’ with two graphics that have no directly discernible information on them?
Well, Richard Stiennon recently presented two beautiful images that show system calls on Apache (Linux) and IIS (Windows) in response to a request for a simple HTML page. Time runs down the left, each dark blotch is process and the lines show the hierarchy of system calls. The more calls, the more connections, and the more effort is required to secure an application.
Apache (Linux):
IIS (Windows):
So which one do you think is more secure?
Remember the bad old days? When Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer 5, Mozilla et al caused constant headaches and wrangling over how the same site was going to be delivered to such a vast array of browsers and still look and function consistently? We cried, we wailed, we shook our fists at the devils for making it so bloody complicated. There’s only ONE specification you morons, why don’t you all follow it?
How self-satisfied and smug we all felt when enterprising souls like the Web Standards Project constantly campaigned for consistency, and the devils listened.
While the headaches of cross browser compatibility will never go away (software manufacturers will always have their whims) the playing field is so level at the moment that we’re pumping less and less into browser specific style sheets. In fact, we’re pumping less and less into style sheets full stop: in our recently launched site for the Royal Armouries for instance, we’ve only 390 lines in the core style sheet (including nice formatting, comments and line-spaces) and most satisfyingly, less than 39 lines of browser specific styles (in conditionally commented out style sheets).
Where am I going with all this?
Mobile development, that’s where.
Continue reading ‘The mobile minefield: Handset detection’.
No, not the refugee city in northern France, but Calais, a content tagging web-service. I couldn’t quite get my head around it to begin with, but when it clicked, it’s status as a truly great idea was cemented (in my head, at least).
The idea is that you can send a piece of content (up to 100,000 characters) to Calais (via a SOAP or POST call to their web-service API) and it’ll analyse the text you’ve sent and return a list of metadata that it thinks appropriate to the content. It’s fairly easy to imagine how it can do this, with access to common vocabularies, archives of content/appropriate meta-data, and some neat search algorithms, but it’s such a stunningly simple and useful service I’m amazed no-one else has done this before.
Continue reading ‘Calais’.
Nintendo have revoloutionised the gaming industry with the Wii, bringing fun and physicality to the otherwise finger-and-thumbs world of video games, but one clever technologist and a handful of cheap electronic components have upped the game even further.
Johnny Chung Lee has posted 3 short YouTube videos which bring the futuristic vision of Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report a little closer to 2008’s reality, with a touch of Blue Peter practicality.
Is this the future of human-computer interaction? Maybe not, but it does pose some very interesting questions about how soon we might be able to un-tether the keyboard and mouse and interact with technology
in a more flowing, natural way (and have more fun blasting videogame bad-guys too).
I want this hooked up to my mac. Now!!!
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With the recent release of the fancy new MacBook Pro range with the multi-touch trackpads, I find myself once again desperately willing someone (anyone…) to finally replace the mouse.
I’ve tried and liked trackballs (not finely controllable enough for neat Photoshop work if you’ve consumed anything with caffeine in it), graphics tablets (lovely, but take up too much desk space for a decent resolution as I can’t get on with the A5 sized ones), and even decent optical mice (let’s not talk about any incarnation of Apple mouse, shall we), but none of them have been quite right.
So here it is - my final plea:
Dear Mr Jobs,
Please get your nice apple technical bods to design a multi-touch trackpad that can sit next to my nice new low-profile mac keyboard. It should be a simple USB trackpad that could be used to the left or right of the keyboard, square in shape with a widescreen aspect active surface, with the same height and depth as the keyboard. You’ve already go the technology in the MacBook Pro line, so you just need to make it a bit bigger.
That would really be rather good.
Thanks in advance,
Andy Hawkes (aged 32 1/2)
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