Segacs's World I Know

Archive for the ‘Science and technology’ Category

Geocities has officially closed. For the most part, this happened with a whimper, not a bang.

You can continue to access this site for now, but stay tuned for updated information within the next few days as I look into a few different hosting options. Wherever I go, I’ll probably continue using the segacs.com URL, so if you haven’t already updated your bookmarks, you might want to at this point. You may find some broken links and images during this transition period, but hopefully these things are all temporary.

I was going to write a lengthy nostalgia post about my first websites back in the mid-90s with animated GIFs and blinking backgrounds and wallpaper… but I’ll spare you.

The Internet Archive Project has preserved a lot of Geocities sites, if you’re looking for something from the distant past.

The GSMA have announced measures to standardize mobile phone chargers by 2012.

In a very un-Conservative move, Stephen Harper made a campaign promise today to regulate businesses more, cracking down on such unfair business practices as price-fixing, deceptive marketing, and incoming text message fees.

While my usual philosophy is to tell government to stay out of business, in this case, I think Harper has the right idea. A free market is one thing; illegal business practices are another. The telecom companies are among the chief violators of fair competition, and they have long hid behind the CRTC to gouge consumers at every turn. This is not a big money issue for most Canadians, but it’s one that gets us up in arms pretty quickly, so it’s actually smart of Harper to latch onto the issue in his campaign.

I just wonder if it will be easier for me to sue Bell for charging me hundreds of dollars of bogus fees, after I cancelled my service with them? Yeah, I doubt it too.

We knew it was coming, but that doesn’t make this announcement any more welcome:

The new layout for Facebook doesn’t actually streamline anything. Instead, it forces a half-dozen clicks to get the information that was previously available in one click.

What the Facebook developers won’t tell you is that this is exactly the point: More clicks means more ads, which means more revenue… at whatever cost to user satisfaction.

Responding to massive public pressure, including an online petition that garnered over 57,000 signatures, Rogers has announced a $30 data plan for the iPhone.

It’s not the unlimited flat plan that people had hoped for, but at 6 gigabytes, it’s pretty close. And so far, it’s only available to people who purchase their iPhone before August 31st. But it’s a whole lot better than the previously-announced plans, which start at $60 and range to $115 per month – gouge-worthy levels.

The problem is, Rogers holds all the cards. Once people rush out to take advantage of this pricing and sign three-year contracts, they’re locked in. And Rogers’ regular rates for data plans are outrageously high.

Meanwhile, Bell and Telus are coming under fire for their decisions to charge for incoming text messages… by the government:

Industry Minister Jim Prentice publicly demanded an explanation from two of the country’s telecommunications giants yesterday about their “ill-thought-out” decision to start charging cellphone customers for incoming text messages.

Here’s a thought: Rather than summoning them in front of a government committee to try to justify their pricing, as these telecom giants are accustomed to doing from their monopoly days, why not open up the market to real competition instead of our current oligopoly-style imitation? That would take care of their cash-grab collusion pricing in a hurry.

Two related stories in today’s Gazette, referring to all three major players in Canada’s mobile phone market:

First, a story about how Bell and Telus are both going to start charging for incoming text messages. Considering most of the spam I receive is actually from Bell, that shows some nerve. Coupled with my recent notice that Bell’s plan prices are going up yet again, for me, this is finally the last straw. I’ve had it with Bell. Enough. Fini. C’est tout.

Unfortunately, the competition isn’t much better. Rogers, which recently signed a highly-touted exclusivity contract with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada, is charging ridiculously high rates for data, basically pricing the iPhone out of reach of the average consumer. And don’t try to get an iPhone from a competitor, either; there aren’t any.

The competition bureau, of course, doesn’t see a problem here:

“Where consumers are concerned about the plans being offered with the iPhones, we don’t consider this to be a competition issue,” said bureau spokesperson Marilyn Nahum. “We don’t consider the iPhone to be a distinct market.

“It’s a cellphone that competes with other cellphones in the market. If consumers don’t like the plans being offered with the iPhone they can go to the competitors.”

This is nothing new. With only three major carriers in the marketplace, Canadians have been gouged on cell phone prices forever. We pay twice what Americans pay for similar voice or data plans, and several times what Europeans or people in the rest of the world pay. Most of us pay a bogus “system access fee” of $6.95 to $8.95 per month, and virtually everyone pays for incoming voice minutes – a practice almost unheard of outside of North America. Our phones are “locked” to our carriers, we are locked into 2- and 3-year contracts with hefty cancellation penalties, and until last year, we couldn’t even keep our phone numbers when switching carriers.

Don’t expect things to get better anytime soon, either. As long as the major telecommunications companies are in bed with the CRTC, and virtual monopolies are allowed to exist, things are only gonna get worse.

Meanwhile, Bell and I are history. Anyone have an old Rogers phone they want to donate / sell to me at a reasonable price?

If Gore, Dion et al. are right and we really are about 10 seconds away from totally fucking up our planet beyond repair… well, maybe we’ll all have someplace to go:

A new world has been discovered nestled in the largest planetary system ever seen outside our solar system, fuelling speculation there are many other habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers doubt the new-found planet – one of five circling a nearby star, which is visible with binoculars – can support life.

But they told a teleconference Tuesday the discovery fuels their conviction that many Earth-like planets are just waiting to be discovered.

Traveling at the speed of light, it would only take about 41 years to get there. In other words, a short, pleasant journey. (Advance tickets on sale on ebay shortly… stay tuned!)

As many of you know, Yahoo Photos, which I’d been using for some time now, is in the process of shutting down. Yahoo’s acquisition of online photo sharing and social networking site Flickr earlier in the year led it to the not-so-unreasonable conclusion that having two competing technologies was maybe not the best idea, and it opted to focus on the service that best reflected where the Web was going.

There have been a few bumps in how Yahoo has managed its transition, but overall, it hasn’t been too bad. Users were given plenty of notice, were offered seamless transition to a number of different sites (including Flickr, of course), and were provided with a lot of information in plain English on the how, what and why. While I could quibble with the details – and many have, on the surface it’s not difficult to understand Yahoo’s strategic decision.

The challenge

At any rate, I’d been a typical Web 1.0 user when it came to online photo sites; for me, this was simply the electronic version of an album. Upload ‘em, categorize ‘em, point links towards ‘em, send my friends and family to view my vacation photos or the cute pictures of my friends’ cats. Not exactly earth-shattering. In fact, I readily admit that I still print (gasp!) most of my photos, too, and store them in real-life, physical albums. Remember those? I’m not quite sure why I still do so, and admittedly I’m doing that a lot less these days, but there’s something sentimental and secure about having an actual album full of photos. Not to mention that the coffee table book is much easier for people to spontaneously flip through when they come over than the online album. But I digress.

All of this to say that I was disappointed in Yahoo’s decision to close Yahoo Photos. I had thousands of photos uploaded and organized, I was linking to them from all over the place, and I rather liked the “new and improved” version of the photo software that Yahoo came out with last year. Not to mention that it was entirely free, while most of the other services including Flickr charged a fee to access the good stuff. The prospect of moving the photos and learning a whole new system wasn’t appealing.

The choices – the good, the bad and the ugly

But dutifully, I did my research. I looked into the services where I could automatically transfer my photos: Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Photobucket. I signed up for free trial accounts at all of them and started playing with the features. One by one, I rejected all these services as not quite meeting my needs for one reason or another:

• Flickr, the most powerful and well-known, did the sharing and social networking stuff really well, but was limited in how many photos you could share with the public and in how you could organize them. Only allowing free users to display of a limited number of photos, categorized into a maximum of two sets? Nuh-uh, not cool. Not when there are so many free options out there. Even paid users, who now get this nifty “collections” feature, can only store a sub-collection OR a set inside a collection. So I can’t have, for example, a collection called “Travel” that stores a set called “Quebec City 2007″ and another collection called “Trip 2006″, the latter being made up of 19 sub-sets for this larger trip. It means I have to build the structure from the bottom up instead of from the top down, which is very counter-intuitive.
• On the flip side of that, sites such as Photobucket and Kodak Gallery did the sharing and organizing part quite well, but didn’t quite get it in terms of interface or usability. In short, none of the sites did what I wanted them to, and I was starting to get frustrated.
• Then I entertained the notion of simply using Facebook as my main photo site. After all, most of my friends are on Facebook already; we’re all uploading, tagging and sharing photos there anyway, and I’d already uploaded most of my recent good ones anyway. Was Facebook simply going to make other photo sites irrelevant and obsolete? In which case, what do I really need an albums site for, anyway? Why do the work twice? But as much as I wanted that to be the answer, it wasn’t quite there yet. Facebook is still too closed to the general public. While Facebook does have public URLs to share albums with non-Facebook users, I can’t, for example, grab a photo from Facebook and post it to my blog, or email it to my friends outside of Facebook. Albums are limited to 60 photos apiece, there’s no collection or sub-album capability, and there’s no public “main photo page” where I can send people to view all the photos from a trip, for instance. I can’t arrange how I want albums displayed, either. It’s a great social networking tool, but not a great albums tool. So I kept searching.
• I looked into Picasa, which Yahoo specifically didn’t list because, of course, it’s owned by rival Google (who, we all know, will soon own the world). Picasa, as users know, is a very powerful platform for organizing and editing photos on your home computer, but was fairly new to the online game and I wasn’t at all impressed by what they offered in terms of web and online albums.
• In the same vein as Picasa, I found Sharpcast, an innovative tool using synchronization technology to allow me to organize my photos offline and immediately update my online web albums from any computer. I was so impressed, in fact, that I signed up and moved all my photos over there manually – a chore not as cumbersome as it sounds thanks to the aforementioned syncing technology. The local client is really fantastic, with drag-and-drop capabilities and quick updates that should make even Microsoft nervous. There’s something to this, definitely.But ultimately, the Sharpcast bubble burst for me as well. The business model seems murky – are they a syncing and backup company, or a photo sharing site? It’s hard to tell. Plus, feature requests for simple, basic things languish for months, with the same form answers from developers. For example, Sharpcast lets you create sub-albums in a hierarchical structure in your offline client, but when they get shared as web albums, the structure is completely flattened. So instead of directing users to my “Trip 2006″ album, I have to send them to 19 different URLs for each sub-album within that trip. Who wants to have to click a different long, cumbersome URL to see the photos from Australia as to see the photos from New Zealand, anyway?

  In addition, it’s hard to feel confident that, as the web advances, Sharpcast will keep up. The developers over there seem to have lost all interest in the photo site, and it’s generating next to no buzz in the community, leading me to believe that it will soon become an evolutionary casualty of digital Darwinism. Heck, a quick search on Facebook for an application that would let me display my Sharpcast web albums led me to the shocking discovery that, not only does such an application not exist, but there’s next to no hits for a Sharpcast search on Facebook at all. One group for employees that has no activity, no profiles, no fans, no mentions, no buzz. And as we all know, on the web, if nobody’s talking about you, that’s as sure a death sentence as there ever was.

  In case anyone’s interested, my photos are all accessible at Sharpcast for the time being. But that’s just a temporary solution.

The lightbulb moment

The whole synchronization issue got me thinking, though: How many different places do I even want to have my photos stored? I already mentioned Facebook, where I had redundantly been uploading photos. I also have been maintaining travel blogs for a few years now on Travelpod, and have uploaded hundreds or even thousands of photos to those blogs from the road, creating albums there. Add to that my Yahoo Photos albums, and of course my original files stored on my hard drive, and managing all of that was becoming very hard work.

See, what I really want, when it comes to photos, isn’t one site to upload them and another site to edit them and a third site to share and tag them and a fourth site to print them. I don’t want to have photo albums residing in my Travelpod journals, the same photos in my Flickr community, the same photos again in my Sharpcast web albums, more photos in an FTP directory for this blog, and the same photos again on my hard drive. That’s too much focusing on the channel and not nearly enough on the content, as far as I’m concerned. After all, these are all the same photos.

And it’s only going to get harder, not easier. Right now I take photos with my camera, download them via card reader or USB, edit and organize them with local software, and post them online to various channels. If camera phones haven’t already turned that model on its head, the iPhone surely will. Now when I go to Brisbane and take a photo of me holding a baby koala, I won’t have to wait to go to an internet cafe to upload that photo to the web and show it to everyone; I will be able to do it instantaneously – and get instant feedback as well. It’s already happening. Synchronization, in other words, is becoming critically important.

Sharpcast and Picasa are onto something here, but they don’t quite take it far enough. Picasa’s model is still heavily focused on online photo organization and editing, but frankly, all I need for that is Windows and my favourite photo editing software (usually Photoshop for most people, or whatever comes with their camera). Sharpcast, for its part, is pinning its business model on the threat of a disk wipeout and the security of having an online backup. But most people have backup systems in place already, and I feel like they’re not really leveraging the full potential of their technology.

Flickr is attacking the problem from the opposite end and not quite getting there either. In addition to the shortcomings of the software itself and the very annoying organizer (which I’ve been experimenting with since moving my Yahoo photos over there by default), Flickr doesn’t sync up well at all with your photos stored on your laptop, desktop, or any other channel. Once they’re on Flickr you can share them, comment on them, tag them and pass them along, but getting them there in the first place is a royal pain.

The opportunity

All this to say that I believe there could be a very big win here, for the first company that truly “gets it”. In all probability, it will be one of the major players. So if you’re Flickr or Picasa or Facebook, and for some reason you’re hanging out here, here’s a bit of a cheat sheet. To really win the space, here’s what I believe is necessary to offer me:

• Yesterday: Online Photo Albums. With all the buzz and hype about sharing, syncing and channels, don’t forget to give me a really solid web album platform that can exist in and of itself. Allow me to upload as many photos as I choose, as often as I like. Let me structure albums in a hierarchical fashion, choosing names, themes and cover photos at will. Let me drag, drop and move them around to arrange them any way I like. Store sub-albums within albums, and give me unique URLs and permissions so I can share them with whomever I like – and hide them from anyone I choose. Let me crop, lighten, retouch and rotate them. Allow me or anyone I allow to order prints. This may seem like old news, but there is not a single photo site on the web today that I know of that does this even remotely well. And if you don’t have the solid foundation, how can you build from there?
• Today: Online Social Photo Networks. Let me share my photos with people in my social networks, on my email list, or in my forums, groups or communities. Let me or anyone else tag them – not only for people but also for subject matter – and let these tags show up across multiple channels. Give me an application so I can load my photos in Facebook. Let people comment on photos, discuss them, share them in their aggregators or news feeds, post them to their blogs or forward them along to their friends. Let me start a photo group, so multiple people can post photos from a community event or occasion and discuss them amongst themselves. Let me upload a video to my photo album and click to share it in Youtube. Give me RSS capabilities for all my photos and allow people to subscribe to my feed. Allow people to digg my photos, bookmark them, add star ratings to them, or even customize the RSS feed they get from them.
• Tomorrow: Total Synchronization. In addition to the above, let me sync my content across online and offline channels. A photo is a photo is a photo. It should exist in one place, from which I can share and post it absolutely anywhere. If I change it, edit it, move it, tag it or delete it in any online or offline channel, it should update automatically everywhere it exists. Allow the creation of reciprocal links to the content, so that the photo of my friend’s cat could, theoretically, show up as #1 on Google’s search rankings. After all, if the web community likes it that much, why not? Move away from a focus on the channel, and move towards a focus on the photo itself.

Sounds simple, right?

What do you think? What photo sites are you using, and what do you recommend? Where do you think online photo sites are going? Let me know.

I’ve resisted as long as possible, and have finally caved to the pressures of Facebook Crackbook.

See you when I emerge… Eventually…

Last week I came home one day and turned on my trusty computer, only to discover that it was making a noise. A very loud noise. A very loud and scary noise, considering I had committed the cardinal sin of failing to back up my essential data.

In a panic, I shut down the computer, and the scary noise stopped. Okay, now what?

With a sinking feeling in my stomach, and feeling somewhat like Carrie Bradshaw, I began phoning friends with more computer knowledge than I.

“It’s probably the fan,” they assured me.

“Probably? What if it’s not?”

“Well, there’s a small chance your hard drive is failing.”

Needless to say, that didn’t make me feel any better. “What should I do?” I asked with trepidation.

“Whatever you do, don’t turn the computer on again. It may already be too late, but if it’s not, you don’t want to make it worse. Keep it off, take it in for service.”

Visions of important documents, irreplaceable digital photos, programs with original install CDs buried in the abyss of old junk, all ran through my head. I didn’t get much sleep that night.

The next day, I had the presence of mind to dig up the invoice for the computer, only to discover – joy of joys – that it was still covered under an extended service warranty. Oh, the relief!

Except that it’s never quite so simple. I phoned up Dell and was pleasantly surprised to see that my call was no longer directed to India. But my pleasant surprise ran out when I realized that they don’t train their local technicians much better than they trained their overseas ones. After sitting for 45 minutes on hold listening to the ever-present “your call is important to us” recording, I got through to a chipper tech support agent and described the problem. He then had me wait for another 10 minutes while he searched for his protocol for dealing with scary noises, and finally came back to me and asked me to turn on the computer to run through some diagnostics.

Swallowing my trepidation – after all, everyone had told me not to turn on the computer – I went down the list of things he asked me to do, which, even with my limited computer knowledge, I recognized had nothing to do with the problem, such as checking the configuration of the graphics card. Yes, I was confused, too. And I was starting to suspect that the chipper Dell technician was just walking me through the motions.

All the diagnostics completed, he told me that since I had failed to isolate the problem, his system indicated that nothing was wrong, so he couldn’t help me.

“What???” I asked, incredulous.

“Sorry, those are our procedures, thank you for calling Dell.”

Hmmph.

I had the bright idea to phone back an hour later in hopes that I would get a different guy on the phone. Maybe even one who knew what he was talking about. Dare to dream, right? Because when I called back, I was greeted with a recording about how Dell’s computer systems were down. Oh, the delicious irony.

To make a long story short, I ended up enlisting some help and finally getting the computer fixed. It was the fan, after all. One of them, anyway. We got them to replace both, just in case. The scary noise is now gone.

And I’ve learned my lesson and acquired a backup drive.