When I first heard about the United 93 movie I had just about the same reaction as Matthew Haughey. Hollywood only wants to make some quick cash off of other people's tragedy. The movie is going to be painful to watch, it won't be accurate anyway, and it will be full of sappy, exaggerated nonsense meant to pull at our emotions and our wallets.

I probably said about as much to my television. I only watch a couple hours of TV a week, and a significant portion of that is yelling at advertisements or the local news crew.

But then a few things changed:

• I heard that the desire to make this movie was more driven by the director than executives.
• Reviews coming in seemed very positive.
• I realized that I couldn't ignore this movie just because of my overwhelming fear of flying.
• I remembered that after September 11th, I wanted to make a film about it too. (My story was not a 'docu-drama', but a short animated film with a fantasy spin on real events in New York City.)

Anyway, I saw the movie Friday night. As surprising as it may seem, it is very good. I don't think I'll say anymore than that.

Years ago, in college, a few Virginia Glee Club colleagues and I sat around in the Glee Club House, drinking beer and watching a recent Aerosmith concert on cable. As the string section behind the band appeared on screen, our director, John Liepold, told us that one of his friends had been tapped as the touring cellist for the band, and said, “Imagine that career. No matter what else happens to her, she’ll be able to say ‘I was in the Aerosmith orchestra.’”

Well, tonight, that sentence can be spoken by everyone in the Boston Pops. What a weird night, with the decay of Steven Tyler’s vocal chords on full display. And Keith Lockhart hitting the gong at the end of an abbreviated “Dream On”?

But no matter how weird, it’s still not as weird as last year. Big and Rich with the Boston Pops? Dream on, I guess.

Update: Waitaminnit. “Walk This Way” with the Boston Pops? Now it’s weirder than anything I’ve ever seen in this town.

Violent crime on rise in big U.S. cities: AP - FBI statistics Monday confirmed what big cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland and Las Vegas have seen on the streets: Violent crime in the U.S. is on the rise, posting its biggest one-year increase since 1991. [...] effrey Sedgwick, director of the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the FBI numbers reflect a real increase, or the ordinary year-to-year variations that statisticians call "static noise." (Via Yahoo! News - Top Stories.)

Statisticians don't call anything "static noise," at least not in informed company. A statistician might have used the term, which people are familiar with from bad phone systems and car radios, talking with a journalist who knows nothing about statistics. But a serious journalist would not imply that a folk term is a technical term with a specific meaning in statistics.

Bad statistical terminology is just one problem with this article. It falls for the usual neat single cause explanations for a complex problem. It highlights big relative changes in fairly low counts, which may be artifacts of small sample sizes. It does not seek serious scientific analyses of the numbers.

'Essentially we partnered with GNi because as BitTorrent becomes a key player in the online video distribution space, it is imperative that we have reliable IP support,' said Lily Lin, director of communications for BitTorrent. 'With a secure,
scalable and fast network solution in place, BitTorrent can focus on delivering the best user experience.'

When the Bittorrent distribution deal was announced a little over a month ago, I was sceptical about the benefits for wither company involved. But details in this PC Magazine story shed a whole different light on what may be going on here.

'It's a higher performance content delivery system,' Wise said. 'A lot of times when someone is downloading, it's smaller or the real time is not important because it's about the end result. Because this is a real-time streaming issue, it requires higher IP support. BitTorrent were more interested in finding a high-performance solution for bandwidth and that's what we do.'

Wednesday 26th November 2003 at 7.30pm Bowdon Rooms, The Firs, Bowdon, Manchester.

Nicholas Ward

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, led by its Artistic Director Nicholas Ward, will perform Alan Bush's English Suite for String Orchestra in Manchester on 26th November, in a programme of music for strings spanning 200 years. Formed in 1967, the NCO has a formidable reputation throughout the North West of England. Playing without a conductor, the ensemble members are all distinguished musicians who play as principals with other orchestras and regularly appear as soloists.

In 1994 the NCO recorded Bush's English Suite - one of his more important works - on a CD for Redcliffe Recordings, Music by Alan Bush. You can listen to the Passacaglia movement on the Listen section of the website.

INETA has recently launched a new program to let the community help with their great program. If you are a business or just interested in helping out a good cause then send them an email!

(from the INETA NORAM website:)

On June 1st INETA North America launched an extensive new Sponsorship Program aimed at raising funds to expand and improve services for our members. Over the past six months the INETA NorAm Sponsorship Team, led by Sponsorship Director Pat Tormey, has designed a great program with many options for sponsorship at a variety of levels. In the four years since our founding, INETA has grown tremendously and to deliver programs and services to our members requires substantial funding and volunteer time. During the past year the INETA NorAm Board of Directors has targeted key areas for expansion and growth to better serve our members. As part of that strategic analysis it became evident we needed to establish a substantial and diverse sponsor base.

The new Sponsorship Program consists of four main levels of sponsorship (Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze) and a wide range of services from which a custom sponsorship program is designed for each sponsor. The services available to sponsors focus on INETA's key strength of providing the opportunity to reach a targeted audience of software developers focused on Microsoft technologies. 

If you are interested in learning more about INETA sponsorship programs, please email marketing@ineta.org.

Another massively late film fight, yes, but a good one.

November kicked off with the controversial Borat (yes, I can't be arsed looking up the full and correct name). Enough has been said about this film: Sasha Baron Cohen travels around America as one of his alter-egos baiting people into saying some pretty awful things. It's an amusing and tragic look at both the attitudes in some parts of our society and the way we choose to deal with them. I would say this is worth seeing regardless of whether or not you find the man's work particularly amusing, as his subject's are suitably horrifying.

Christopher Nolan keeps up his near unsullied record with The Prestige. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play magicians locked in a vicious feud, pressing forth the boundaries of magic, showmanship and dedication to their cause with the most poisonous venom. With the director's usual sleight of hand present, excellent performances all round (including a cameo by David Bowie), and some fairly interesting set pieces, this is a masterful work, beautifully presented. A definite must-see.

After years of Bond heading towards mindless Hollywood action, full of cheap special effects and ludicrous adversaries, it is a pleasure to watch such a solid piece of cinema in the form of Casino Royale. With Brosnan ousted, Daniel Craig plays Bond like never before: as the determined government killer, torn by morality, that Ian Fleming always intended in his earliest works. Gone are the outlandish gadgets (for the most part), in are some fast cars and some of the best action sequences the series has yet to produce. Though the free-running inspired building site hunt is in stark contrast with the plodding pace throughout much of the casino material, the latter is bolstered by a few interesting twists. It's not much of a compliment to say this is the best Bond movie since GoldenEye (which shared the same director) since the rest of the films were garbage, but perhaps it is worth saying it is likely to be in my top 5 bond films.

Finally, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny has much of what you expect from a Jack Black comedy: a silly premise, executed warmly but lacking the really big laughs of his peers (such as Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller). The early scenes present few laughs, mostly rehashing material the band has previously used, but starts getting funnier towards the end. This is not much more than an extended music video for the band, so if you like them, go get the album and you'll have a large chunk of the strongest material here.

In other months, Casino Royale would have won, but The Prestige is just such a great film that it was never going to get beaten, hard as Bond is.

Students not interested in school-sanctioned music downloads: In 2003, colleges began signing exclusive deals with online music services to great fanfare. Nearly three years later, the schools are realizing what we've known all along.(Via Ars Technica.)

Here's the money quote in the original WSJ article:

There is also little consensus among administrators about how successful the services have been in eliminating piracy. Although some say complaints from the recording industry have dropped sharply, no one can tell if that's because fewer students are engaging in illegal file-sharing or if the industry simply doesn't want to go after schools that are spending money to combat the problem. "The RIAA's push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we'll protect you from our lawsuits," says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project's director.

The RIAA denies the charge. "We do sue students and send takedown notices to universities that have legal services all the time," says Mr. Sherman. Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of intellectual property, he adds, because they are "probably the No. 1 creator of intellectual property." And he disputes the idea that the subscription services have fallen out of favor. The number of campuses that subscribe will increase "pretty significantly" in the fall, he says.

WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

• While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall...
• Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
• "People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up...

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

U.S. Analysts Had Flagged Atomic Data on Web Site
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: November 4, 2006

Two weeks before the government shut down a Web site holding an archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war, scientists at an American weapons laboratory complained that papers on the site contained sensitive nuclear information, federal officials said yesterday. Two documents were quickly removed.

The Bush administration set up the Web site last March at the urging of Congressional Republicans, who said giving public access to materials from the 48,000 boxes of documents found in Iraq could increase the understanding of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

But among the documents posted were roughly a dozen that nuclear weapons experts said constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb. They were accounts of Mr. Hussein’s nuclear program, which United Nations inspectors dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf war...

Intelligence officials said the documents do not indicate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when President Bush ordered U.S. troops to take over the country and depose Saddam Hussein.

Counselor to President uses NY Times story to push 'Iraq had nuke program' meme
Ron Brynaert
Published: Friday November 3, 2006

In an interview on MSNBC earlier this morning, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President, dismissed concerns about a U.S. government Website shut down because it may have revealed sensitive bomb building data. However, he insisted that the unauthenticated Iraqi documents online did show that 'Saddam Hussein had the capability and was working towards a nuclear weapon program,' which would bolster Bush's preemptive war arguments, RAW STORY has found...

...MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Bartlett why the documents were put on the Internet without anyone 'properly vetting them' and why did President Bush 'overrule John Negroponte, his own intelligence director, who clearly did not want this to take place but finally had to give in.'...

So as the preparations for Seattle get underway, and we pack in the visits with friends, a few common questions are emerging. What better way to address the most common ones than a trusty old FAQ.

Are you excited?

Yes, no, maybe, depends. Definitely excited about the new job and opportunities is has; looking forward to the trip and discovering a new city; glad I’ll be able to better get to know a bunch of people I’ve known online for years. However, I’m really going to miss Toronto and the people here.

When do you move?

Around the end of the year.

Yeah, but when

Around end of the year. (We’ll know better when we get closer.)

Are you going miss Toronto?

Yes (see my answer to whether I’m excited), but most definitely not its winters (and on occasion, its summers).

Are you getting a green card?

Not yet, we’re planning on going down on a special visa.

What are you going to be doing’exactly?

I’ll be the Director of Site User Interface for MSNBC.com and its related properties to working with an amazing team and continue to enhancing its Web design (and user experience).

Lee will likely be taking up art again, but beyond we’ll see what happens.

Where are you going to live?

Dunno, but we hope to know before Christmas. Looking to be in Seattle proper (maybe in Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, or somewhere downtown) ideally, with a yard, a washer/dryer, and close to transit. We’re heading down in mid-December to look for a place.

Are you going to get a car?

That’s not the plan (see above).

Is your dog coming?

Yes…<sarcasm type='mild'>unless you want him</sarcasm>. (He’s a great little basset hound, BTW, name after a great little band.)

Can we get together before you go?

As much as I would love to meet with friends individually, family has now taken priority. But, you’re most definitely invited to come to our send-off party on December 1st, in Toronto (more info at Pownce, Facebook, and here on the site).

How will we get in touch with you when you’re gone?

Same as before: the Toronto phone number stays the same, as does the email and the Web site. Only thing changing is the mailing address (but only a few of you ever used that) and the buzzer code.

Are you ever coming back?

To visit? Most definitely.

To live? We’ll be back before we retire…and likely the exact moment the Canadian dollar sinks to record lows again.

Anything I missed? Let me know.

• Table of Contents
• All Images in the Book

Simply put, flash memory will enable a revolution in improving computer performance in daily utilization scenarios. Your computer will boot up faster. It will launch applications significantly faster. (Hey, it will shutdown faster as well.)

The problem

To see why we will have this dramatic performance improvement, let's remember how harddisks work: whenever you have a mixture of random I/O requests, the actuator moves across different tracks to read/write the corresponding data. Switching tracks is a slow operation. For an average SATA drive, this is around 9 milliseconds. This might not seem much, but a few milliseconds per seek means that you can have at most a few hundred random I/Os per second. And this feels like light-years compared with the performance of other components in the system like RAM access speeds or even CPU frequency. So, just to give you an example, a random I/O with 4 KB requests and average of 4 ms seek time per request would mean around 1000/4 * 4 KB = 1 MB per second disk transfer rate. Pretty small, don't you think? Especially when you compare it with sequential I/O, where you can get a much faster transfer rate (say, 60-70 MB/s on a regular harddisk, depending the rotational speed, data density, etc).  

One trick to alleviate this performance issue is to minimize seek time by reordering writes and/or serving reads from cached memory. Memory caches can greatly help in this regard, but here is a little problem: applications, the OS, and other components do not expect writes to be reordered. When you a write reordering is detected at the application level, then a data corruption can appear, especially when you reboot the machine in the middle of performingg a set of reordered writes.

For example the applicaiton is performing Write(block1) followed by Write(block2) in one thread, and Read(block1) followed by Read(block2) on a different thread. In the sequence above, the application expects block1 to be written always before writing block2. Having this guarantee simplifies for example applicaiton recovery semantics, assuming that the computer can crash between writing block1 and block2. But if we perform write reordering, and only write to the disk block2, then our application recovery logic cannot be done in any way. And so we get to corruption.

Still, storage controllers perform today all sorts of tricks like maintaining a write-through cache in volatile RAM, coupled with limited reordering. More advanced controllers, or SAN equipment use persistent caches (battery-backed volatile RAM) to perform write reordering, complementing advanced storage features like RAID configurations, etc.

The solution - why flash is good

By now it should be clear how flash can be used in this picture: you can use inexpensive flash as a persistent write-through cache for reads/writes. Also, the fact that this flash is persistent enables reordering I/O requests at an unprecedented level, therefore greatly reducing our nasty seek time bottleneck:

The new 2Gb OneNAND chip doubles the capacity of a OneNAND memory device (from 1Gb) and increases the chip's ‘write' speed from 9.3MByte to 17MByte per second.

”We're seeing a rapidly widening market for our OneNAND memory because of its outstanding performance and capacity that has become even more noteworthy with the application of 60 nm technology,” said Don Barnetson, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. [...]

Because of its exceptionally high performance, OneNAND can serve as a catalyst in the development of new product markets. A much-discussed example of this application-creating role is in how OneNAND memory is now being specified as the buffer memory inside a hybrid hard disk.

Samsung successfully demonstrated a commercial Hybrid-HDD prototype for the first time at the MS Developer Conference (WinHEC: Windows Hardware Engineering conference) in Seattle last month.

[source: http://www.physorg.com/news70899414.html]

Flash-based I/O optimizations - already present in Vista 

One more thing worth mentioning: Vista already benefits from Flash-based optimization. The feature is called EMD (External Memory Device), and can boost the performance of your computer by simply adding a USB thumbdrive and designate it as an EMD device. Under the cover, it works in a similar way with the technique described above.

• Creating a dramatically larger knowledge workforce
• Creating a culturally and geographically diverse knowledge workforce
• Creating new, emerging consumer markets
• Extending the capitalist paradigm into heretofore 'underdeveloped' cultures
• Creating new cross-culture complexity (and opportunities) for expansion-minded companies and products
• Creating myriad new companies, originating in new cultures and with different mindsets, vision and strategies

GOP furious about timing of Rumsfeld resignation
By Patrick O'Connor

Donald Rumsfeld's abrupt resignation from the Pentagon the day after Republicans lost both chambers of Congress has infuriated some GOP officials on and off Capitol Hill.

Members and staff still reeling from Tuesday's rout are furious about the administration's decision to dump the controversial defense secretary one day after their historic loss, they said in a series of interviews about the election results.

President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation on Wednesday and named Bob Gates, a former CIA chief and president of Texas A&M University, as his replacement...

Gates Hearing in Senate May Have Echoes of 1991

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: November 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — The accusations lodged against Robert M. Gates the last time he came before the Senate for confirmation, in 1991, sound eerily contemporary in the wake of the debate over skewed prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Mr. Gates, in the words of one Central Intelligence Agency subordinate, Jennifer L. Glaudemans, “politicized intelligence analysis,” insisting on slanted reports that became the basis for “momentous foreign policy decisions.”

The Senate will have to decide whether such claims, which did not prevent the C.I.A. veteran from becoming the agency’s director 15 years ago, have new relevance now that President Bush has named him to succeed Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

Senators may revisit assertions that Mr. Gates falsely denied knowledge of the Reagan administration’s secret scheme to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels, an issue that derailed his first nomination to lead the C.I.A. in 1987...

U.S. seeks better ties by aiding militaries
Updated 11/10/2006 8:09 AM ET

By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Concern about leftist victories in Latin America has prompted President Bush to quietly grant a waiver that allows the United States to resume training militaries from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries.

The administration hopes the training will forge links with countries in the region and blunt a leftward trend. Daniel Ortega, a nemesis of the United States in the region during the 1980s, was elected president in Nicaragua this week. Bolivians chose another leftist, Evo Morales, last year.

A military training ban was originally designed to pressure countries into exempting U.S. soldiers from war crimes trials.

The 2002 U.S. law bars countries from receiving military aid and training if they refuse to promise immunity from prosecution to U.S. servicemembers who might get hauled before the International Criminal Court. The law allows presidential waivers.

The White House lifted the ban on 21 countries, about half in Latin America or the Caribbean, through a presidential memorandum Oct. 2 to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice...

The cruise started in Amsterdam, Holland and sailed to Copenhagen, Denmark for the first stop. The main attraction there was Tivoli Gardens, a very nice amusement park with numerous gardens and restaurants. The next stop would be Stockholm, and the Century headed for the high seas and cruised at roughly 23 miles per hour -- pretty fast for an 815 foot, 70,606 ton ship with 2,500 people on it. The approach to Stockholm was scenic as we passed many small islands to get to the port. In Stockholm, the "old town" is the place to be, where cobblestone pedestrian streets are lined with shops and cafes. Just before departure I hiked up to the city's highpoint and found a micro geocache hidden behind a stone in a rock wall.

After cruising into Helsinki we enjoyed walking in the city center and having lunch at a nice cafe. The next morning we arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia for a two-day stay, beginning with a very early departure for Moscow (see "Flight To The Kremlin").

St. Petersburg is sometimes called the Venice of the North or the Paris of the East and it was the primary destination of the trip. There were many excursions available. Many people toured a palace that was the summer residence of Catherine the Great, a czarina who ruled Russia for about 50 years. There was also a subway ride to a large market, followed by an afternoon tea at a museum restaurant. I did not take advantage of that but I did take a subway ride in Moscow that I neglected to mention in the prior story. The subway stations -- 500 feet below ground -- were immaculate . One of them had 72 beautiful statues along the station walls. A bit different than New York!

The most popular destination in St. Petersburg is The Hermitage, the best landmark in the city and one of the early IBM "e-businesses". There is no substitute for being there in person but the next best thing is to take a virtual tour. The physical tour encompasses a complex of 5 buildings that includes a palace, a very large art museum and galleries of jeweled artifacts that showed the opulence during the reigns of czars and czarinas. Another tour included the grounds of the Imperial Palace built by Peter the Great who ruled in the early 1700s. The palace is noted for the 156 elaborate fountains on the 2,000 acres of gardens.

The next to the last stop of the cruise was at Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, formerly part of the USSR. Tallinn It is located on Estonia's north coast to the Baltic Sea, fifty miles south of Helsinki. In addition to being a really nice medieval city of a half-million people, Tallinn has spawned an information technology industry in recent years including Skype. After leaving the cobblestoned city center where a brass band had played a nice concert, I took a detour on the way back to the ship and found two geocaches, one near the port and one in the woods.

The final stop was a familiar one -- Oslo, where I go every ninety days or so for meetings at Opera Software, where I am a director. This time was not a business trip, however, and although we only had six hours in port, we were able to visit Vigeland Park and see the 212 sculptures that depict many human life stages in bronze and granite. The rain subsided and we were able to have a cup of coffee with a Norwegian friend before heading back to the ship and sailing back to Amsterdam and then on to New York.

Other patrickWeb travel-related stories
read more:

Fortent combines technology innovation and expertise in regulatory risk to help financial institutions improve productivity and protect hundreds of million accounts from money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. Endorsed by the American Bankers Association as the industry gold standard, Fortent's advanced systems deliver the most efficient and effective anti-money laundering, know your customer, and fraud detection available on the market today. Technology clients include The Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi-UFJ, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Justice Federal Credit Union (U.S. Department of Justice), Lloyds TSB, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, and UBS.

Through its information and training businesses, Fortent serves as an authoritative source of regulatory information, news, and guidance. Alert Global Media publishes moneylaundering.com and Money Laundering Alert, and, in Spanish, lavadodinero.com. It also produces the world's largest money laundering conference and exhibition. Other services include the industry's leading professional certification program, career planning tools, web seminars, and conferences in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Fortent's global team operates from key offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, London, and Tokyo.

DediPower, one of the UK's fastest growing managed hosting providers, delivers a range of managed hosting solutions including: dedicated servers, application and exchange hosting, high availability multi-server clusters and co-location. DediPower is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and a RedHat Ready Hosting partner. A winner of numerous awards, hosted sites include Sony, Sam Learning, Institute of Physics, Coca-Cola, Capita, First Great Western and Carphone Warehouse. Established in 1998 and self funded, DediPower runs its own purpose built data centres totalling over 22,000 sq ft situated in Reading, UK.

For further information, visit: www.fortent.com.

To learn more, please visit: www.dedipower.com.


read more:

Late, late, late on a Tuesday night almost two weeks ago, we re-launched FeedBurner.com with much-needed updates to the design, content and overall direction.

Traci already commented on the strategic importance of the new site, while Rachelle provided a more personal account.

But as the designer and half-developer (Rachelle did the other half — actually, probably more than half — with great skill and speed), I’m going to share a couple of “behind the scenes” details that I find super neat. Hopefully you’ll feel the same way.

Powered By FeedBurner

Going in to this project, two requirements became clear:

1. Traci (our marketing director) needed the ability to make content updates without routing all changes through the design team.

2. Many types of content needed to be reused in slightly different settings and formats around the site.

To address these requirements, we came up with the idea of modular content — basically, little nuggets of content that can be randomized, subscribed, inserted and updated anywhere.

For a couple of content types — blog posts, publisher buzz, press releases — we used feeds and our very own BuzzBoost service to repurpose content wherever we needed it on the site (mmm, dog food). For others, we generated custom blocks of static HTML or Javascript and included those in the JSPs that contain forms, session information (“You are signed in as…”) and other application components.

Of course, we had to generate all of this content somewhere…

Powered By MovableType

We’re using MovableType to store and publish the press releases, in the news, events, corporate backgrounder, stats, Publisher Buzz, and of course our blog, Burning Questions. Our MovableType installation is rigged up with a variety of templates that publish static files in HTML, Javascript and Atom formats — all of which are then pulled into the pages like I mentioned above.

One of the complaints people have about MovableType — that it creates static files by default — is actually a huge advantage here. We’re able to publish flat, lightweight static files to a single server, then pull in these files in a variety of ways across our distributed server environment.

Elegant, dual-float layout

When I was first learning CSS, doing multi-column layouts was always the hardest part. Even two-column layouts seemed tricky, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches and never being totally satisfied with the end result.

Then I got floats. Like, really got them. It was Doug Bowman’s slides from this presentation that secured my understanding and I haven’t fretted about CSS layouts since.

On the new FeedBurner.com, everything but the home page uses a classic dual-float, two-column layout. I set a width on both columns in the CSS, then assigned float:left on the left column and float:right on the right. Finished with a clear:both footer, it’s a solid layout that works regardless of which column is longest.

A new approach to navigation

While many sites feature massive navigation (practically a site map), we took a page from Flickr’s design books this time around and divided our navigation into two sections. A high-priority “primary” navigation and a lower-priority “secondary” navigation are based on prominence, not hierarchy, which helps focus the page and not overwhelm people with choices.

We also made heavy use of in-text hyperlinking across sections, to encourage exploration without forcing folks to grok and traverse our site architecture via the navigation.

Coming soon

Perhaps the best things to come out of this redesign process haven’t arrived yet. As a result of our extensive brainstorming and planning, we have tons of ideas and a general roadmap for web site improvements over the coming months.

And now, with the addition of Rachelle Bowden to our team, we have the manpower womanpower to get it done.

Questions? Comments?

Use the comment form. As always, I love to hear from you!

Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.

During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.

One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.

What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.

Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, "connect the unconnected," or fund university education and research.


Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
read more:

The final afternoon of the Business Leadership Forum focused on the big picture -- of both global political factors and technology. A panel included Karl-Heinz Grasser, Federal Minister of Finance for the Republic of Austria. He spoke about how governments can not only avoid being an obstacle to innovation and growth but also encourage competition thereby creating more jobs. The panel was bullish about how the information revolution -- ushered in by the microprocessor in the early 1970's and the Internet of the 1990's -- has led to an explosion of new products and new business models, However, there was a consensus that retaliation from poor economies and over-regulation by some countries could stymie the growth. 

Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and commissioner in the European Union for ten years, was quite optimistic about the EU -- a market of 480 million people -- and said that the EU itself is an innovation. He said that Europe is much more like the U.S. than it was. It is now a single market, has a single currency, and has been expanding market reach around the world. The shortcoming is that Europe, unlike America, does not yet have a constitution. This results in an economic disadvantage because the European community can not make a decision for the total. The European economy is not innovating quickly enough and in fact some countries are protecting the past at the expense of the future. Mario says it is time for "naming and shaming" the laggards through peer reviews. Then he got more specific -- "Germany, France, and Italy are behind on liberalization of service markets and have resisted initiatives to increase competition". These three countries will have a negative impact on the Euro which in turn will hurt the rest of Europe. Mr. Monti's presentation was sobering but hopeful. He said the EU has a lot of good features, that it can protect intellectual property but also move against monopolies such as Microsoft. The key to get innovation going in Europe is for the EU to innovate itself by completing it's constitution.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger kicked off the final segment of the forum, which focused on the future. IBM supports Linux because it is a great operating system for computers. Irving introduced Linus Torvalds the developer of Linux which he published as a student in 1991. Don Tapscott, a widely acclaimed author, who invented the term "paradigm shift", then moderated the final panel which included Linus, Nick Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM, and Ann Mettler, executive director and co-founder of The Lisbon Council. It was a wide-ranging discussion. Linus is an incredibly humble guy. He said he has no vision, just looks 5 cm ahead before each step, and loves to solve technical problems. Linux is successful, he says, because both the development and the decision making are distributed -- a "built-in meritocracy". Don asked why volunteers worked on Linux for no economic return. Linus said, "if you were all engineers, you would not be asking that question". Open source software is viable in most all software areas, with the only exception being niche markets which are too small to get adequate collaboration. "Open source will take over most all infrastructure".

Ann said there is a huge gap between businesses which are moving ahead rapidly and societies which feel left behind. The key problem is that the economy is 70% services but the regulations and governance are still based on an industrial model. She believes that government should learn how to innovate from businesses. "Politicians are clueless about the discussion of the past day and a half". She says that businesses need to share their leanings with society. The labor market in Europe is flat because companies do not want to hire and that is because the laws are so onerous. "You can hire but you can't fire". Labor reform is needed desperately.

Nick says' It' s all about change". IBM is doing a balancing act by supporting both open things and proprietary things. The company is generating a lot of patents but also giving away a lot of patents to move the ball forward in key markets such as healthcare and education. "The world can move ahead faster if the OS is Linux -- it is good enough and a "blow for freedom". A California venture capitalist asked about business ethics and Nick was very aggressive in his response saying it was not optional for companies to be totally and completely ethical in every respect. (Having been at IBM for 38 years, I can say I never ever had a  concern about ethics at the company). Nick summarized that anyone can innovate if they are willing to change. "If nothing changes, nothing changes". Sam wrapped up the conference by saying corporations need to be transparent. Their ultimate responsibility is to create value for the constituencies: stockholders, customers, employees. He walks the talk.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories