Internet matters – Page 25 – a sibilant intake of breath

Subpixel rendering

I am often struck by how websites look so much better on the average Mac than on the average Windows machine. I think one major reason for that has to do with how fonts are rendered:

Mac OS X’s Quartz is distinguished by the use of floating-point positioning; it does not force glyphs into exact pixel locations, instead using various antialiasing techniques, including subpixel rendering, to position characters and lines more accurately. The result is that the on-screen display looks extremely similar to printed output, but can occasionally be difficult to read at smaller point sizes.

By contrast, subpixel rendering seems to be off by default on Windows machines. Turning in on in Windows XP is straightforward enough, however:

Click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.
On the Appearance tab, click Effects.
Click to select the Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box, and then click ClearType in the list.

I still don’t think it looks quite as good as the Apple system, but it does seem to improve serif fonts especially. Without it, they tend to look rather awkward and spidery.

Online data and death

Perhaps the most unusual WordPress plugin I’ve ever heard of is Next of Kin. According to the plugin’s creator:

It monitors your own visits to your wordpress system, and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (of your choice) without a visit. If you fail to visit your blog even after that, the system will send a mail you wrote to whoever you choose.

Presumably, the idea is to include the access credentials for your site(s) in the final email.

This raises the more general question of what should happen to web content after a person dies. Facebook pages can be turned into memorials. Blogs can be left up, intentionally taken down, or left to eventually vanish from non-payment or some other hosting change. What is most appropriate generally? What would readers want for themselves?

Email might be the trickiest of all. Most of it is trivial, but some is an important life record. Should any of it ever be passed along to survivors, as a person’s personal correspondence might once have been?

Photo storage costs

At Ottawa’s 2010 Capital Pride festivities, I found myself thinking back to my Oxford days when I would generally only take a couple of hundred photos a month on my 3.2 megapixel digital camera.

By contrast, I took around 400 shots during the course of the parade and the party that followed. Initially, that struck me as a bit excessive and made me nervous. Then it occurred to me that a 4 terabyte external hard drive sells for about $400 these days, meaning that the cost of storing one gigabyte worth of photos is around 20¢ – ten for the external drive, and ten for the internal one it is backing up. The biggest constraint I face is the cost of replacing the 750GB hard drive in my iMac, given that the things really have to be stripped apart for that to be accomplished.

The cost per shot of digital is pretty amazing, compared with film. Of course, there is a new danger that accompanies that. With big memory cards and high speed internet connections, you risk putting more photos online than your friends or readers would ever wish to see.

“Don’t be evil”

The above, famously, is Google’s motto. When I first saw it, it seemed like an embodiment of the ways in which Google differs from other large corporations. They are involved in charitable works, in areas including infectious disease and renewable energy. Furthermore, they give away most of their products, getting the financing from those famous automatic ads.

On further reflection, however, “Don’t be evil” isn’t some lofty, laudible goal we should applaud Google for having. Rather, it is the absolute minimum required of them, given just how much of our personal information they have acquired. Think about GMail: many of us have tens of thousands of messages, many of them highly personal, entrusted unencrypted to Google’s servers. If they were evil – or even a few of their employees were – they could embarass or blackmail an enormous number of people. What Google has is, in many cases, far more intimate than what sites like Facebook do. Facebook may have some private messages to your friends, but Google is likely to have financial information, medical test results, photos you would never put on Facebook, etc.

Now, Google has incorporated a very useful phone calling system into GMail. Install a plugin, and you can make free calls to anywhere in Canada and the United States. In my limited experience, it seems to work better than SkypeOut, while being free to boot. Of course, it is another example where we really need to trust Google to behave ethically. For Google Voice, they already developed algorithms to convert spoken words into transcribed text. Users of their phone service need to trust that their conversations are not being archived or – if they are – that the transcripts will not be used in any nefarious ways.

In short, Google must avoid being evil not out of benevolence, but because their whole business model requires people to view them that way. So far, their products have been remarkably empowering for a huge number of people (any other sort of email seems deeply inferior, after using GMail). If they are going to maintian the trust of users, however, they are going to need to avoid privacy disasters, or at least keep them on a pretty minor scale, like when Google Buzz abruptly let all your friends know who else you are in contact with.

AdBlock and Google AdSense

AdBlock Plus is an excellent Firefox plugin that automatically prevents the display of advertising on websites. This includes banner ads, as well as the sort of targeted text ads that Google has made a fortune through. When using AdBlock, the web is a much more functional, uncluttered place with fewer distractions. I highly recommend it.

At the same time, this site does have Google ads embedded in it.

If people want to use AdBlock and, by extension, not see the ads, I encourage them to do so. Indeed, I think there is a certain editorial advantage that arises from using both AdBlock and Google ads, myself. Since the ads are blocked whenever I view my site, I do not know what is being advertised here. As a result, I am not consciously or subconsciously influenced by the advertising. If newspaper and magazine editors could live in a similar state of disregard, when it comes to who is paying the bills, perhaps there might be a bit more journalistic integrity in the world.

Starcraft II Mac installer crash fix

The following is a description of the problems I had installing Starcraft II on my 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, as well as the solution I found. I am running Mac OS 10.6.4.

The bug

Three times, I tried installing Starcraft II from the DVD I bought. Each time, the installer hung at 30% completion, on file 06748/37853. Each time it hung, the only thing I could do was manually turn off my computer. The same result occurred regardless of whether I used an administrator account or an ordinary user.

My fix

Insert the Starcraft II disc
Open the Disk Utility Program bundled with Mac OS X
Select the Starcraft II disc from the list on the left side of the window
Click ‘New Image’
Set ‘Image Format’ to ‘DVD/CD master’ and ‘Encryption’ to ‘none’.
Save the disc image to your desktop
Eject the Starcraft II DVD
Right click on the disc image and select ‘Open with’ and ‘Disk Utility’
From the list on the left hand side of the window, select the .cdr file you created earlier
Right click, and click ‘Open Disc Image’
Run the installer, out of the disc image
Once the game is installed, delete the disc image

Make sure nothing is running in the background while you are running the installer. I found that even such minor actions as muting and unmuting the sound were enough to crash the install program.

This may not solve your problem, but it worked for me! Another option is to download the game files from Battle.net, once you have created an account. Of course, downloading several gigabytes of data is likely to take a long time.

[Update: 24 August 2010] I finally got Starcraft II installed and working. I had to download the game from Blizzard and run the installer about six times, before it managed to get all the way through without crashing. Then, I had to download the 1.0.3 patch from a third party website (because the built-in updater always crashes). Even with the third party update file, it took about five tries before the game updated properly and could be played.

[Update: 14 October 2010] Starcraft II is an extremely frustrating game! It is mandatory for me to upgrade to version 1.1.2 in order to play, but the upgrade program fails every time I run it. It suggests erasing and re-installing Starcraft II, but it was such an ordeal to get it installed in the first place that I am reluctant.

I can’t find a direct download of the update file anywhere.

I don’t know why Blizzard installers are so picky, but I think it may have something to do with anti-cheating technology. They try to prevent users from altering the game’s files, but the protective systems that do that may cause install and upgrade errors.

[Update: 15 November 2010] I finally got the 1.1.3 patch installed, but it took a lot of work. I had to backup all my personal data to external drives, format the hard drive in my iMac, re-install OS X, re-install Starcraft II, and then install each patch.

The fact that it works now suggested that some sort of software problem was causing all the difficulties earlier. Mac users who are having the same problems should consider doing a ‘clean install’ of the kind described above. I tried simply over-writing the operating system files (an ‘archive and install’) but it did not work.

If you need them, the Starcraft II patches can be downloaded directly from Blizzard instead of by using the automatic updater.

Software behind Facebook

Given its massive scale, it isn’t surprising that Facebook has cooked up some custom software. What I just learned – which is encouraging – is that Facebook is sharing some of its technologies. One particularly interesting example is HipHop. This software takes the PHP code used by many modern websites (including those running on WordPress and MediaWiki) and compiles it into highly optimized C++ which servers process more quickly. While I don’t know much about it, it seems like something that WordPress might be able to usefully incorporate or reproduce in a future version.

Facebook also contributed to highly distributed database Cassandra, which Twitter also uses, as well as a number of other pieces of open source software.

It is nice to see Facebook providing potentially useful code to the wider web community.

Google and net neutrality

At Google headquarters recently about 100 people showed up to protest Google’s apparently eroding support for ‘net neutrality.’ Net neutrality is the idea that the internet should not restrict the modes of communication that can be used across it, nor the sorts of devices that can be connected to it.

Lots of companies oppose net neutrality because it means they should not discriminate between traffic from different sources. Data traversing the internet – broken up into pieces called packets – includes everything from pirated DVDs being passed around using peer-to-peer filesharing systems to corporate phone calls being routed though voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephone systems to songs being downloaded for money from the iTunes store. Lots of companies would like to slow down or block file sharing, restrict services like VoIP, and allow people to pay more for faster paid downloads.

One big reason why this is worrisome is that it could prevent the emergence of new technologies. VoIP seems like a good example. Routing telephone calls through the internet challenges the monopoly of fixed-line telephone companies. Low cost VoIP calls have been a source of competition for them, and have probably produced improved services at lower prices for consumers. A future version of the web where companies can slow down or block traffic of undesirable types could be a version where new such technologies get strangled at birth.

That said, abandoning net neutrality could have some advantages, by improving network performance for those who use relatively low-bandwidth services like email and text websites. It could also facilitate the emergence of interesting new technologies, which are not viable on the internet as it exists now. For instance, the sometimes slow and clunky load times were one of the reasons why Google Wave proved to be a failure.

Given their enormous influence on the content and structure of the internet, the position of Google on net neutrality is of considerable public importance. The full details of their deal with Verizon – which is rumoured to allow special treatment of certain sorts of traffic – have not yet been publicly announced. When they are, there will surely be a lot of scrutiny and interest from the geekier components of the general public, as well as those with a particular interest on how technology policies affect societal change.

In Canada, Bell is probably the most vocal opponent of net neutrality, while Michael Geist may be the most prominent defender. I wrote a bit about net neutrality earlier, as well as about the related technology of deep packet inspection.

Single player and multiplayer

I have always preferred the single player modes in games like Half Life and Warcraft III to the multiplayer modes. The latter strike me as excessively hectic, with everybody racing to destroy their enemies, generating a lot of chaos in the process. Single player games allow you to take your time and execute things perfectly, in a much more controlled way.

It has occurred to me that the two options might appeal to rather different sorts of people. Multiplayer fans may be the sort who are thrilled by immediate engagement and happy to come out on top, even when the process for doing so is risky and disorderly. If they lose 90% of their army but end up victorious, they are happy. Single player may appeal to the sort of obsessive individual who wants to find a way to beat the enemy without losing a single unit, or suffering a major setback. It is well suited to the risk averse.

In life, it does seem that the kind of skills required in multiplayer are generally of more use than those required in single player. While there are areas of life where developing a plan methodically and them implementing it is possible and a good strategy, there seem to be many more where a capacity for improvisation and a willingness to not reflect on losses and failures are more valuable. Is there any way, I wonder, to make a natural single player fan into a more engaged multiplayer user?

How important is Facebook?

Facebook now has over 500 million users – a larger population than that of all but two nation states – as well as an upcoming movie. Perspectives on the site differ sharply, from those who see it as a successor to MySpace, and similarly doomed to eventual irrelevance, to those who see it as a key part of the future of the internet.

I think two things fundamentally distinguish Facebook from the rest of the web, and are important in combination. Firstly, there is the degree to which it is almost universally used. The great majority of my friends and co-workers have Facebook profiles. That creates powerful network effects. As with the telephone and other communication technologies, Facebook has become more useful and captivating as a larger and larger share of the population signs up. Secondly, there is the way in which the site imposes simplicity and standards. The internet is often a jumbled, confusing, technical place. By restricting the scope of what people can do, Facebook ensures that it will remain comprehensible, even to people without a great deal of technical knowledge.

Maybe the biggest thing Facebook has done is increased the level of social transparency in society. It has made the high school and college reunion largely irrelevant, since it is now easy to check what any particular former classmate is up to. Indeed, you probably don’t need to do any active research: their latest travel, relationship changes, photos, employment decisions, and more are likely to be displayed to you automatically if you sign in often enough. Suddenly, ambiguous romantic situations are perceptible to anyone who cares to investigate, and a much wider swathe of personal information has become readily accessible to future employers, co-workers, romantic partners, and friends.

Before the internet really emerged, I think a lot of people imagined that it would end up being much like Facebook – a centralized location for interpersonal interaction, in which physical location is not important. Clearly, the wider internet has developed to play many other roles, such as serving as a mechanism to gain access to specialized and niche products and information. That said, it does seem like Facebook is now a core part of what the internet does, taken all in all, and that the economic and social consequences of that could be significant.