Deep Amongst The Technicals Google Talks About People

[cross post with WaveADept blog]


Google I/O 2010, this year's annual developer event Google hosts, has been full of interesting announcements, (re)releases and developer goodies (we are particularly interested in the Gmail contextual gadgets, expect more news from WaveAdept) and whilst we are certainly happy for our clients that Google Apps is expanding out to become a "platform" onto which the commodities of mail, calendar, documents can be built, we were chuffed to see the following session sandwiched inside the agenda.

How to lose friends and alienate people: The joys of engineering leadership from Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman.

Whilst the session was aimed at "engineering leadership" it can, of course, be applied to any team.
I love that they start of saying that the word "manager" isn't useful anymore (was it ever).

But hey, don't take our word for it, here's the Wave used to annotate the session AND the video will be up on YouTube sometime soon.

The Evolution Of Privacy On Facebook

I'm sure you've all heard the hullabaloo from the digerati* (the people that jump onto the technology as soon as it comes out and leave it it in disdain when "real people" appear ... believe me, it happens) about the changes to Facebook's default privacy settings allowing more and more of the stored data to be accessed by anyone, anything or any app.

So what, some online site changes it's default settings, who cares eh!

Two reasons why "So what":

1. They have 400 million users
2. They don't care about any of them

So now we have (conveniently for Facebook):

• The "flashing 12" problem
• The "surely they won't do anything bad" issue
• The "Meh, I don't care" attitude

"Mike, this is all just computers, just too bloody technical for me - leave me be as I have some friends to talk with and a photo to post!!" I tried to tell everyone but it just wasn't getting through. And then I found this ... The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Go to the site and click on the graphic to see just how Facebook privacy has been slowly eroded from you.
We start with:


... and currently have:




YES! It's nearly ALL public now.
Not just public to everyone on the Internet, I mean "people" but to any applications people care to write. And they can write applications that bring Facebook information (perhaps when you're away for the weekend) together with your phone number (posted on an online email group from your email signature) which means they get your address and ... http://pleaserobme.com/

And that's just the simple stuff *I* can think of.

More from me:

• 5 articles about keeping your identity ("persona") safe
• 5 easy ways to protect your online presence with Dr Miramar Mike
• Blog [Facebook] for your future boss / client / relationship

* I am probably one - you tell me

RWW Mobile Summit Keynote Presentation, May 2010

Richard (McManus) doing what Richard does so well - taking a technical subject and distilling the key trends out of it so we can all see where the future is (probably) going.

RWW Mobile Summit Keynote Presentation, May 2010

View more presentations from Richard MacManus.

Brilliant! Google Chrome Speed Tests Video

That's how to make a point!

These speed tests were filmed at actual web page rendering times. If you're interested in the technical details, read on!

Equipment used:

- Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed
- Monitor - 24" Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process.
- 15Mbps Internet connection.
- Camera: Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at 1920 x 1080, films up to 2700 fps


"Why does allrecipes.com in the potato gun sequence appear at once, and not the text first and images second? And why does it appear to render from bottom of the screen to the top?"

Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrecipes.com appears at once, and not with the text first and images second. Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.

"Why does the top one third of the page appear first on the weather.com page load?"

Sometimes only half the buffer gets filled before the video card sends its buffer over to the LCD panel. This is because Chrome on Windows uses GDI to draw, which does not do v-sync.

"The screen wipes are so smooth - how was that achieved?"

The screen wipes up in a gradated wipe because LCD pixels take around 10ms to flip and gradually change color.

For behind-the-scenes footage of how this video was made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI

Let 'Em Know

I'm lucky enough to be a part of a conversation on the ninja-talk@groups.open.org.nz mailing list where I get to hear amazingly passionate people talk about how they want to actively help NZ Government become an open and sharing set of organisations.

And being mainly self-confessed geeks (with a seemingly inequitable love of live offline quirkiness) the focus of many is to solve the NZ traditional "closed approach to governance" by using a computer. But there are also those that want to be real about it all and actually get physical in their approach - talk to people etc etc ...

Nat Torkington popped up these few "real and active" actions that all Kiwi geeks can do in order for those in power (mostly politicians but by no means limited to that happy band) to get to hear the "open up our data!" request:

• Register where you live, to find your local MP's Office
• Commit to regular meetings (collecting dates and times, reporting back)
• Discussions and briefings, talking points of things to take to those MPs with a regular series of examples of stories in the news
• Illustrate the points we want to make (lock-in, open standards, patent evil, copyright holder abuse, etc.)