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Nerds of various shapes and sizes have a variety of choices when it comes to making gut-level choices about whom to vote for in the 2008 presidential election. For example, if your vote lies with the candidate whose website is both standards-compliant and performant, you’d have already checked out Yahoo’s coverage and cast your vote for Mike Gravel.
Until now, typography nerds have been left out in the cold. That’s why I was excited to see a few of my favorite blogs pander this increasingly crucial demographic. In this spirit, I share these links with you:
- Scott Dadich, Wired’s creative director, nearly climaxes over Obama’s logo on the Economist podcast
- The designers of Obama’s typeface (it’s called Gotham) review Hillary and McCain’s logos:
- A bonus feature on the DVD for Helvetica (yes, there is a documentary) documents the origins of Gotham:
This stuff excites me way more than I should freely admit.
Filed under: Politics | 1 Comment
Lunar Eclipse
I braved the cold last week and took a few photos of the lunar eclipse. I think some of ‘em turned out pretty good!
Filed under: Photography | Leave a Comment
One of the more interesting films I watched last year was the King of Kong, a documentary about the quest to break (or retain) the Donkey Kong high score world record. As Zach Leatherman points out, there seemed to be some glaring (if trivial) inaccuracies in the film, such as the exclusion of a third contender for the high score title. Nothing to get too worked up over though; you have to edit the film to make it more enjoyable. That’s show business.
It looks like we’ve been had. Jason Scott, a filmmaker working on his own arcade documentary, has some not-so-kind words to say:
[This is] a documentary that rips entire groups of good-hearted people as shadowy, conniving scumbags with razor-thin morality hurts the scene being portrayed and hurts the people themselves. All this effort, just to turn reality into a faked up drama worthy of a dime store pulp.
Some of the core themes of the documentary apparently are conjured up by omitting inconvenient facts that would singlehandedly disprove the theme. For example:
Billy denies Steve the satisfaction of playing one-on-one on Donkey Kong. They’d played Donkey Kong one-on-one a year before the documentary was filmed at a previous championship.
Read the whole thing. For more, take a look at Twin Galaxies’ verbose comments on the film, or Billy Mitchell’s interview with The A/V Club.
Filed under: Movies | 5 Comments
You’ve probably heard about (or signed up with) Mint, the startup which promises to liberate us all from the Quickens of the world and revolutionize personal finance. It’s gotten quite a few high-profile positive reviews.
Mint has an incredibly hard sell. Before handing over all of your financial information to a startup run by five folks, they have to convince you to really, truly, deeply trust them. You’re handing over the user name, password, and any personal security questions for your banks and credit cards. Mint has to overcome barriers not seen since Paypal’s startup. The site prominently displays page after page detailing their focus on security.
I was eventually convinced and signed up. Mint’s account entry page is well designed and ajax-y; set up a new account, and it fires off a few XHRs, keeping you notified of login/signup activity. Because I’m a curious fellow, I inspected the contents of one:
<ajax-response><response type="" id=""> <timestamp>0</timestamp>
<json>[{
"id":xxxx,
"name":"My Personal Bank",
"uri":"https://www.mypersonalbank.com",
"fiId":12345,
"status":123,
"terminal":false,
"balance":9999.99,
"refreshed":"01/21/2008 14:06:15",
"isFirst":false,
"html":"<div class='cardfi ' id='pollElem-12341234'>
<table cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0'><tbody><tr><td class='top-left'>
.... html continues ...
</table>
</div>"}]
</json>
</response>
</ajax-response>
I’ve cleaned up the response and stripped out any of my personal data; for security, you know?
In any case, notice the data structure Mint’s using to encapsulate its information. The entire content is wrapped in XML, with an <ajax-response> element as its envelope. There’s a <timestamp> elemented appended too, but the bulk of the data is encoded in the <json> element.
In <json>, basic bank information is encoded in key-value pairs, such as the bank’s name, URI, etc. Then there’s the “html” key. Raw HTML lives here, containing mostly data stored in a <table> block. This is the real meat and potatoes of the XHR; it shows the actual status of the connection.
So backtracking a bit, notice how that data is sent across the server. The actual markup used to update the page is sent, wrapped in a JSON envelope, which is itself wrapped in an XML envelope. Mint must be taking security seriously, as they require you to decode three completely different markup wrappers in the scope of a single ajax call.
In all seriousness, this isn’t groundbreaking stuff. Code like this goes up in enterprise applications all the time, and worse kludges won’t make it to the Daily WTF any time soon.
So why worry about it?
As Web apps become more complicated and handle ever increasing amounts of sensitive data, companies can no longer merely claim they are designed with a focus on security. Fair or not, the code we write says just as much (maybe more!) about how much thought has gone into an application’s design. If your company is already fighting against a torrent of criticism that perceives your product as rapidly designed and possibly insecure, something as simple as redundant nested data structures can have a profound effect on what people think about you and your software.
Mint probably won’t lose users explicitly because of the data format of their XHRs. However, it provides one more piece of ammunition critics can use to paint it as untrustworthy, and may make prospective users just a little more wary of handing over their personal data. In a hyper-competitive environment like startup software development, why risk it?
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: mint, security
Occasionally, Qdoba sends me an email detailing local promotions and sales. It’s all very standard bacn stuff.
Yesterday I received an email from Qdoba with the subject “New Year’s Resolution”:
The email doesn’t go into any detail on what kind of 2008 resolution I might maintain by consuming their burritos, but I assume they’re reaching out to the people who are resolving this year, to finally become a giant goddamn fatty.
Here’s the nutritional information for the most delicious entree on the menu, the Queso Steak Burrito:
I omitted the sour cream and extra cheese, because I want to eat healthy, you know?
A single burrito contains 1160 friggin’ calories; that’s over half the FDA’s recommended value for the entire day. And half the DRV of fat. And 110% of your saturated fat intake.
And you’d better not touch that saltshaker; the burrito contains 103% your daily recommended value of sodium.
For comparison purposes, the Burger King “Quad Stacker”, which piles four beef patties beneath eight strips of bacon, has 100 fewer calories than the Queso Steak Burrito.
There is a simple solution: eat half the burrito now, and save the rest for later. You’re getting 1.25 pounds of food when you order the burrito. This thing has its own gravitational pull; one does not need to consume the entire portion in one sitting.
Filed under: Food | 4 Comments
Hillary’s Crowd Gaffe
If you watched Hillary’s New Hampshire victory speech you probably noticed the demographic makeup of the crowd behind her. Apparently 95% of all of her support in the state was from 18-24 year olds, which makes me wonder how the exit polls got the demos so wrong.
Packing the crowd with young’ns was a big change from Iowa, when she spoke in front of Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, and other bigwigs. But the crowd probably should have timed their applause to sync with the prestaged applause lines written into Hillary’s speech:
At 3:08 – “We are facing a moment of so many big challenges…” *applause*
At 3:54 – “Young people who can’t afford to go to college to pursue their dreams…” *wild applause*
To me, it sounds like the crowd is applauding the fact that college is unavailable to so many, or that the world is getting increasingly screwed up. It’s probably not a good idea to paint yourself as the candidate who succeeds (joyously!) when the system goes down the tubes.
Especially when the conventional wisdom is both that you are a super-ambitious candidate and that an economic recession will help your party.
Filed under: Politics | 2 Comments
Recently I signed up for a friendly bet as to who would win each primary in the first month of the season. An online version of the pool (with Iowa results!) is available here:
http://bettingpool.matthew-steele.com:8080/bettingpool/
Check it out.
Update: I just realized the table looks completely broken in Internet Explorer. You should have been using another browser anyway, because seriously it’s 2008.
Filed under: Politics | Leave a Comment
Tyler Cowen on Ron Paul
To me, the most frightening idea behind the Ron Paul candidacy is the number of conspiracy theorists and lunatics he’s attracted. I’ve blogged about this before.
Paul’s defenders (including Andrew Sullivan) that every candidate attracts some form of crazy, and that they shouldn’t be held responsible for the passions of those on the fringes. Since he’s running a grassroots Internet campaign, let the nutjobs congregate as they may, as they are irrelevant to the candidate at hand.
I’ve always found that argument suspect; as conspiracy theorists tend to congregate around someone for a reason. Tyler Cowen points out the conspiratorial nature of Paul’s policies here:
…I am discomforted by his overall anti-intellectual demeanor. He strikes me as the kind of person who has a natural attraction to conspiracy theories… I don’t doubt Paul’s sincerity, but I would like to know his theory of why most economists — even market-oriented ones — don’t agree with him on monetary policy. I suspect he thinks he knows some secret that others do not.
The (libertarian) GMU economics professor closes with this: “A good rule of thumb is not to get too excited about any candidate whose actual election would make the Dow lose thousands of points.”
Filed under: Politics | 7 Comments
I assume you’ve seen Idiocracy. If not, I’ll wait for you to catch up with the rest of society. Ready? OK.
So you also remember Brawndo. It’s got what plants crave, i.e. electrolytes… the drink which nearly causes humanity to be extinct? Well they’ve made it into an energy drink:
Seriously, check out the video.
Notwithstanding the obvious irony related to marketing a drink designed for consumption by futuristic morons, the concept is brilliant. You don’t even have to expend energy thinking of food ideas; just outsource that work to screenwriters, and rake in the dough.
So without further adieu, here are some foolproof ideas for profitable drinks:
- Buzz Beer – show your support for both stimulants and depressants while financing Bob Barker’s successor.
- Schmitts Gay – endorsed by Larry Craig: “Nine and a half foot taps out of ten!”
- Olde Fortran Malt Liquor – for the procedural programmer in your life.
And a classic:
- Soylent Cola – It varies from person to person.
At least I know when I run my day job into the ground I’ve got a bevy of backup plans.
Filed under: Humor | 2 Comments
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