All posts by todd

10/GUI Demo Video More Impressive Than the Tech

10/GUI doesn’t seem like much of a deviation from the current trend in OS design, but I found myself watching the demo video long after I was interested because it’s so well-executed. The information is presented clearly and concisely with the perfect balance of text and illustration.

Still wasn’t enough to keep me watching until the end, but it’s a great example. Continue reading 10/GUI Demo Video More Impressive Than the Tech

Jesus Christ (the indie band) – “Is This Really What You Want”

We need to talk. I don’t think we have a future together. It’s not you — it’s me. Is this really what you want?

[wpaudio url=”http://www.fontwhore.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/02_Is_This_Really_What_You_Want_.mp3″ text=”Jesus Christ (the indie band) – Is This Really What You Want” dl=”http://sendshack.com/download/3cqohsi”]

Tao Lin’s new “sound project” from Brooklyn seeks to create something you can “authentically empathize with,” and succeeds almost instantly with the first relationship-talk soundbite over loping electronic beats. I was surprised at how quickly and efficiently it connected with me.

Looking forward to hearing the second song from the 2-song EP due in fall and “available digitally, physically, and emotionally.” No kidding. Continue reading Jesus Christ (the indie band) – “Is This Really What You Want”

High Frequency Trading

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Ever wonder how the big banks consistently make money as the market drops?

  • Big budgets afford enormous computing power to identify and exploit trends in real-time
  • Electronic exchanges can be manipulated to reveal key market details

Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny orders within milliseconds to determine how much the slower traders were willing to pay. The high-frequency computers quickly determined that some investors’ upper limit was $26.40. The price shot to $26.39, and high-frequency programs began offering to sell hundreds of thousands of shares.

Continue reading High Frequency Trading

Kings of Convenience – Mrs. Cold

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“Mrs. Cold,” the first single from the new Kings of Convenience album, has been released to radio.

[wpaudio url=”http://www.fontwhore.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Kings-of-Convenience-Mrs-Cold.mp3″ text=”Kings of Convenience – Mrs. Cold” dl=”http://sendshack.com/download/1wml8tm”]

It’s a solid track, but it doesn’t sound like Erlend and Eirik are advancing, though this is a little bubblier than standard KoC fare.

You can actually get a preview of the album by watching their performance in Seoul last year, where they tested out nine new songs before recording the album. Check them out below. Continue reading Kings of Convenience – Mrs. Cold

How Did I Miss MSTRKRFT & John Legend’s “Heartbreaker”?

Heard “Heartbreaker” for the first time yesterday. Today I noticed it’s on MSTRKRFT’s latest record, Fist of God, which I’d downloaded back in March. How’d I miss such an awesome track?

[wpaudio url=”http://www.fontwhore.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/05-mstrkrft-heartbreaker.mp3″ text=”MSTRKRFT f/ John Legend – Heartbreaker” dl=”http://sendshack.com/download/3kk606j”]

Heartbreaker in iTunes

My star rating system:

  1. Delete it
  2. I want to keep it but don’t want to hear it randomly
  3. I wouldn’t mind hearing it
  4. I like hearing it
  5. It’s one of my favorites

Looks like I gave up after four lackluster tracks. Thanks to Hype Machine for getting me to #5. Continue reading How Did I Miss MSTRKRFT & John Legend’s “Heartbreaker”?

Google’s Billion-Dollar HTML Tag

During her keynote at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, Google’s Marissa Miller (VP of Search and UX) tells us how seemingly insignificant tweaks to the code behind websites can make incredible differences.

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a single design tweak to the Google search results page in 2000 that Mayer calls “The Billion Dollar HTML Tag.” Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to assess the impact of adding a column of text ads in the right-hand column of the results page. Could this design, which at the time required an HTML table, be implemented without the slower page load time often associated with tables?

Mayer consulted the W3C HTML specs and found a tag (the “align=right” table attribute) that would allow the right-hand table to load before the search results, adding a revenue stream that has been critical to Google’s financial success.

Rich Miller’s post on the keynote

Yahoo! got the ball rolling a few years ago when some Continue reading Google’s Billion-Dollar HTML Tag

On Imperfect Perception, or Perceived Imperfections?

There’s something I need to make right.

The attentive person’s honest, real-time report is an imperfect approximation of her subjective experience, but it is the only game in town.

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite — we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.

Those subatomic particles that like to be everywhere at once seem to cancel out one another’s behavior so that the large conglomeration of particles that we call cows, cars, and French Canadians stay exactly where we put them. By the same logic, the careful collection of a large number of experiential reports allows the imperfections of one to cancel out the imperfections of another. No individual’s report may be taken as an unimpeachable and perfectly calibrated index of his experience — not yours, not mine — but we can be confident that if we ask enough people the same question, the average answer will be a roughly accurate index of the average experience.

One of the balls bouncing around my head for the Continue reading On Imperfect Perception, or Perceived Imperfections?