New technology makes us unhappy and stupid?
January 26th, 2009
No time to read this? In a nutshell: Social networking sites and new tech is good not bad. It disturbs us too much though, turn it off when you don't want to be distracted. It is ok to be not available all the time. Otherwise be prepared to effectively sacrifice your concentration. New tech might just be a new form of distraction which we need to selectively ignore when we need too.
Since forever people fight over the fact that new technology is changing our life style and us, meaning our brain, in a negative way. These are interesting claims and have been already made in the past for printing press, radio, televison and so on. Now the newest voices argue that Social Networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter alike harm us and change our brains in a bad way.
Main points against sites like that are that we,
- Multitask too much, which harms concentration
- Spend less face time with our friends
- By lowering our concentration with Mobile phones, twitter and alike we actively lower our IQ
(The first 2:00 minutes give a good overview of the argument)
Interesting enough is that one of the main arguments is that technology is reducing our face time and making us socially impaired. Well, just coincidently I had an assignment recently where I was required to review a Paper from Gaspar and Glaeser from 1998 on Information Technology and the future of cities. This paper is a interesting but complex read where the authors build a mathematical model to support their theory that cities will shrink, but never diminish and human interaction increases in cities rather than to shrink. This is interesting because it is the same argument that Social networking sites decrease our interaction, where the opposite is true. We are now only more selective of how to spend our face time and the overall quality of it has to be higher. Face time is now a much more valuable commodity which we choose more carefully to spend. Our general interaction has according to statistics and studies increased in the recent years, greatly. (I can't emphasize that enough.)
Here are the original slides from my presentation:
Now we have this argument on the one hand side that technology is changing us in a bad way. On the other hand side it can also be very positive. Take for instance this video. I was surprised how true it actually is. (Seriously watch it, it's worth it.) We take tech for granted even though it improves our life and life-style so much. Now you will ask me what has this to do with each other? Well, what are the side effects ?
Just think about it. New technology at least recently (+15 years), puts more and more pressure on people to respond or be responsive in a very short time. Our mobile phones disturb us all the time, we need to respond very quickly on eMails (hours mostly, days, but if its half a week we already tend to dismiss it and its "too late".) and anyway everything is changing so fast. If you are into the IT Industry you know what I am talking about. For a strong counter argument, read for instance this.
Even, I, found myself reading things like David Allen's Getting Things Done because I don't know how to manage everything I have in my schedule. So rather than to argue that Social Networking sites are bad and harmful. I would rather argue that we need to be aware of their influence on us. We need to selectively turn off certain things so that we can concentrate on what is important in the moment. If this means to be unavailable to mobile phone, twitter, irc and so on - it is good. Humans might grow with the technology but for now, we must realize that we can only focus on one thing at a time if we want to do a good job. This means for every distraction we loose 15 minutes of our work time we need again to focus and concentrate. Also be careful with your assumptions, this probably depends and changes from group to group, work type and so on.
References
- Bad Science - Facebook causes cancer
- Social Networking sites change our brains
- Effects of the Office Environment on Health and Productivity 1: Auditory and Visual Distraction (Simple tasks are ok, but complex maybe not?)
- Mindhacks: Myth of the concentration oasis
Tynt copying on the fly - or Graffiti for the Web.
January 24th, 2009
Have you ever heared of Tynt? Well, if you have no own homepage you can ignore this. Also if you have a homepage or a blog and you don't care what people do with your content you can also ignore this. Lastly, if you run advertisement on your page and you don't care about the money, you can also ignore this.
Tynt is a service for people to add or overlay comments and annotate things on your www pages as they see it. Well sounds harmless right, but take this for example.
Source: Eric Lander's blog.
You can add your Grafiti, yes you heared right to any page. They even explain it to you here in the Tynt help pages.
Unfortunately you can't sign up for an account currently (beta) phase so I can't give you more details. In anyway if you are interested, try Eric Lander's blog, here for the Offical Tynt blog.
In those ressources you can also find ip ranges you can block but this probably won't do as it could change quickly. One alternative could be to embedd a noindex tag into your pages, but thats a hack for another day.
If you want to try it out for yourself just use this schema: YOURURLHERE.tynted.net.
What do you think?
A true WTF Microsoft style
February 20th, 2008
It doesn't happen very often that I see stuff which will make me speechless or just *really* give me this strong WTF feeling.
This one though which I stumbled upon did a great job.
What will be next?
The arch enemies GNU/Linux troll, MacOS imp and the ugly UNIX beast in the list? What do you think?
PS: For more happenings like this I recommend this reading literature for further study ;)
Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID 2 test
December 20th, 2007
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID 2 test.
Yes, you read right. I can't belive it either. All those hours and hours of monkey patching and conditional CSSing will this really be a thing of the past ? This is for me as a hobby and freelancing webdeveloper just plainly - incredible.
Finally M$ seems to have managed it back on the standards path proposed by the Webstandards advocacy group (and the rest of the world). This has to sides of a coin. It's good for webdevelopers but bad for our OSS friends on the browser front. From a quote on the webstanards.org page:
- ,,This doesn’t necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, or its hasLayout hilarities. But what it does mean is that there is another browser war, and Microsoft did decide to come.''
Here are some results of other Browsers regarding this test.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel ?
In their blog post Dean Hachamovitch writes something which gives me a good and then a very bad feeling though.
- ,,Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work.''
By all means how can you keep backwards compatibility to something (<= IE7 ) which is plainly just broken ? If Microsoft really takes it serious about dominating the browser market they need to break with the past sorry excuses for a browser. Hey I know I am just critical right? Please don't listen to me, even the guys who are developing this thing said the same. Quote:
- ,,We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support.''
It's great though that there is finally something happening about this ! I really hope they can pull this stunt to stay compatible to the total crap^W^Wnice IE5/6/7 tuned pages as this will save a lot of developers more nerves. Otherwise I rather like to forget all about those ugly hacks which I learned over the time for those releases of IE.
Fellow developers beware seems we ought to take this browser ,serious' again ?
1 comments »
Veoh and the 5 minute limit
November 13th, 2007
I am a big fan of those Web 2.0 mashups like Youtube, Veoh, Divx Stage 6 and so on.
Recently Veoh cut back the playtime of their videos down to 5 minutes if it exeeded 20 minutes in total. Their main goal here was to propagate their ,,Veoh TV Player''. Well after a quick try with my Wine (yes, there is no Linux version available) I gave that idea quickly up and continued to search a bit.
Seems as there are still means to get the video out of their cache. Originally this little hack was introduced here which gave me the incentive to write the following little script. Lets say you want to watch some CCC Videos without playing around with Google webbits. For instance here is a video about Botnet Detection and Mitigation which is quite interesting but again it's limited to 5 minutes due to its longer duration.
First, we need to extract the permalink ID which is the last part of the URL - here it would be
,,v262945dCjc4CJs''. Utilizing this we can extract the original video hash and extension via this nifty trick.
Just call this URL - http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/PERMALINKID/details with the permalink ID embedded into it to get necessary values. There we can find the necessary data to complete this URL - http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/ORIGINALHASHORIGEXTENSION - which actually points to a downloadable video file. Nice !
Lets see how the final script works...
% ./Downloader.rb http://www.veoh.com/videos/v262945dCjc4CJs
--01:13:35-- http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/1df8cd077cde7650567d07e11e8e3ecfba1d3327.mp4
=> `1df8cd077cde7650567d07e11e8e3ecfba1d3327.mp4'
[..]
So much for that problem :)
Here the little Ruby script:
% cat Downloader.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
#
# (c) 2007, Bjoern Rennhak
# Ideas originally taken from http://board.alluc.org/viewtopic.php?pid=400997 .
#
# This code is released under GNU GPL v2.
#
require 'net/http'
require 'rexml/document'
( puts "Usage: #{$PROGRAM_NAME} [Veoh Permalink ID | Full URL]" and exit ) if( ARGV.empty? )
( ARGV[0] =~ %r{^http}i ) ? ( pLinkID = ARGV[0].gsub(/.*\/(.+)$/,'\1') ) : ( pLinkID = ARGV[0] )
detailsURL = "http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/#{pLinkID}/details"
xml = Net::HTTP.get_response( URI.parse(detailsURL) ).body
( REXML::Document.new(xml) ).elements.each('videos/video') do |e|
@origExtension, @originalHash = e.attributes['origExtension'], e.attributes['originalHash']
end
`wget http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/#{@originalHash}#{@origExtension}`
I wrote it with clarity in mind so I am sure you can golf it shorter. :)
For you people out there who are into shell oneliners, here is one...
% awk -v id=v262945dCjc4CJs -- '{ system("lynx -dump http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/"id"/details"); exit }' | egrep "origExtension|originalHash" | xargs | sed 's!.*=\(.*\) .*=\(\..*\)!wget http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/\1\2!g'
Firefox Memory Fragmentation
November 12th, 2007
In my daily work I browse a lot. Often I need the net as a big reference manual for many problems I encounter or even just for the daily news. Well, sometimes (or almost always) I end up with more tabs than I actually can manage to read a day.
Now is that not particularly bad as I always keep my workstation running anyways and as a bonus I can continue where I left off my work the following day. Oh, by the way did I mention that my workstation is a dual Xeon (HT) 3.06 Ghz machine with 2.0 GB RAM ? Well, that is one strong machine for such a puny task ! ,,What's your problem'' you probably ask ?
Funny^W thing is that the very next day my System behaves like a good old 486DX and it is utterly impossible to work on the machine. I figured after poking around a bit in the machine that something is really wrong with Firefox. This Article here explains a lot.
It's is pretty sad though if you see an entire 2.0GB of RAM used up by just a couple of browser instances. Hope they can fix it soon, but for now I am off using Opera as I have no time for something that doesn't work.
Here some data which I took at the time...
% vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
3 0 3559244 57068 113760 64044 0 1 1 10 9 4 8 4 87 0
% cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i "model name"
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
% cat /proc/meminfo| egrep -i "total|cache"
MemTotal: 2076420 kB
Cached: 65052 kB
SwapCached: 179096 kB
HighTotal: 1179092 kB
LowTotal: 897328 kB
SwapTotal: 4194296 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
% top -b | head -20
top - 15:01:30 up 11 days, 20:02, 10 users, load average: 0.97, 1.06, 0.98
Tasks: 233 total, 2 running, 231 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 8.5%us, 3.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 87.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2076420k total, 2020036k used, 56384k free, 114396k buffers
Swap: 4194296k total, 3566232k used, 628064k free, 66248k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 16 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 65 52.4 3147:09 firefox-bin
10117 root 15 0 1842m 348m 3348 S 16 17.2 2555:40 Xorg
1 root 15 0 2072 612 584 S 0 0.0 0:02.04 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:11.84 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
4 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.44 migration/1
5 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.10 migration/2
7 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/2
8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.20 migration/3
9 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/3
10 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.14 events/0
11 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.41 events/1
% top -b | egrep -i "firefox|%CPU"
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 15 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 51 52.4 3147:40 firefox-bin
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 15 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 69 52.4 3147:42 firefox-bin
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 16 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 60 52.4 3147:44 firefox-bin
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 15 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 67 52.4 3147:46 firefox-bin
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15956 br 15 0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R 63 52.4 3147:48 firefox-bin
% pkill firefox-bin
% vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 0 397416 1610484 114976 75584 0 1 1 10 9 6 8 4 87 0
% *wow* i really need to change my browser :///