I was playing around with Illustrator’s Live Paint feature and kinda liked this weird starfish-y thing.

• Event page
• Moderator: John Dovovan (JD)

For the Motion

• Simon Jenkins (SJ), journalist (The Guardian) and author.
• Jacob Weisberg (JW), editor of Slate, author of The Bush Tragedy

Against the Motion

• William Kristol (WK), editor of The Weekly Standard
• Karl Rove (KR), former Senior Advisor to Bush 43

Pre-show makeup dusting

Once seated onstage, a make-up artist comes around to give them a final dusting of powder. While Kristol is immobilized by the artist, Rove reaches over and gives Kristol a wet willie. For real.

Intro

Robert Rosenkrantz, IQ^2 CHairman: The liberal critique of GWB is well known, but even the conservatives have a bone to pick. But GWB kept us safe after 9/11. Nixon was reviled in his time, but his trip to China set the stage for today’s world. Jimmy Carter gave us stagflation, the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis.

[audience skoffs]

• JD: the motion is “Bush 43 is the Worst President of the Last 50 Years”

Jacob Weisberg Opening Statements

Please don’t change yr minds, Bush was obviously the worst. Our task is the most difficult, I’m not sure bush defenders are open to persuasion.

I am not a Bush hater. I’m not a partisan democrat the way Rove and Kristol are partisan republicans. I started writing a Bush book, and wanted to find his successes to set the stage. BUt i found no success. I though education might be an area, but he caved to the right. I thought he was right about immigration, but he surrendered to the xenophobes. I thought he’d be good on AIDS in africa, but he fell to the pro-abstinence faction in his party. Those are the “successes”. The top failures of other presidents don’t even make his list.

GWB’s top 5:
1. Invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. I don’t think he falsified the evidence, but I don think he was uninterested in the evidence.
2. Bungling the Occupation of Ir;q: he delegated to Rummy for 3 yrs
3. Undermining constitutional rights, opened the door to torture, suspended habeuos corpus,
4. sabotaging american unity after the 9/11 attacks, and the tarnishing of US abroad
5. catestrophic economic mismanagement; an ideological refusal to sensibly regulate the economy

Nixon and Carter were nowhere NEAR as bad. Neither comes close to bush in terms of sheer incompetence. If they argue that he’s only the second worst, I’d argue “that’s no defense”

Bill Kristol Opening Statement

Bush was not my first choice in 2000, but he’s been pretty good [audience laughter]. We can laugh, but we’re safe, we won iraq, the economy’s grown. The public has soured on Bush, and he’s done a horrible job of explaining his moves. When he became president, Al Queda was ascendant, Saddam was dangerous, Korea and Iran were working on WMDs. Then 9/11 happened. He defended this country. History will look kindly on Bush’s performance. One piece of proof is that Obama won’t change much; he’ll keep snooping, he’ll move Gitmo to Ft. Levenworth. Iraq was necessary; Saddam or his sons would have been a much more dangerous place. The Surge was a courageous decision, no democrats except Lieberman supported it [ed note: lieb’s not a dem] which has been utterly vindicated. We have a pretty good outcome in Iraq, standing with us against Iran. This could be a victory to bookend the Iranian revolution.

Even under Obama, our policies wont change much with regard to Pakistan, Iran, China, etc.

The economy: these were bipartisan mistakes. We did have economic growth over the last 8 yrs. Clinton signed the 1999 deregulatory bill.

Prescription Drug Benefit worked well, Aid for Africa worked well, free trade worked well.

“Obama’s presidency will be, in most respects, a continuation of the Bush presidency.”

Simon Jenkins Opening Statement

A british accent is the only thing that can make you think Bush isn’t the worst. I’m sensitive to foreign comment on domestic matters. I beg yr pardon.

There are two american presidents: the domestic leader, and then the leader of the western alliance who’s seen as the leader of the free world. I was in Lebanon and a woman said “we all went to the polls on Nov 4, but only some of us were let in.”

I’ve been a cheerleader for america all my life, but its been difficult in the last 8 yrs. But every one felt to be pushing the boulder of democracy uphill. There was always progress forward. When Bush came to power, I admired him, his “humble” foreign policy. This seemed refreshing and unbombastic. then came 9/11. Yassar Arafat gave blood for NYers. Almost the whole world was on America’s side. The disaster that followed, going to war, is something that american diplomacy has not recovered. Iraq today is back to where it was in 2004. Afghanistan is going to be a far worse shape. The wrong decisions have been taken. Iran could look like egypt. Russia, a putative friend 8 years ago, is now a menace. Everywhere you look, you see unnecessary choices littering the neo-con road with wrecks.

For years America had a moral superiority that justified its actions. That’s the why those who approved of US intervention abroad were able to justify their approval. Over the last 8 yrs, that backbone has snapped. There’s no way to tell people the last 8 yrs have been for the best. If you go around the world, you’ll find the most extraordinary faith in Obama. A completely naive belief that he’s the messiah. Ludicrous expectations are on this man. The reason that’s happened is that people have been despairing for the last 8 yrs.

Karl Rove Opening Statement

“I’m gonna make an appeal to the open-minded people of the Upper West Side.” I want to talk about some drive-bys.

Education: we saw a drive-by on NCLB. We wanted states to set standards. We’ve seen more improvement in the last 5 yrs than in the prior 28 yrs.

Immigration: we solved a problem.

PETFAR: african lives are being saved.

[Hissing starts]

Free Trade: we won by one vote. CAFTA should’ve been a no-brainer. Politics got in the way for Democrats. Let’s start with a pact with Columbia.

Iraq: “false premise” bothers me. Its easy to flip-flop now, JW. Do we wish the weapons were there? Yes.

[audience boos]

Smart people, like Clinton, thought that there were WMDs there. Saddam was waiting for the west to lose interest.

I love being lectured about poisoning unity after 9/11. The dems get stuck on union membership for the Dept of Homeland Security. Democrats sopping to their union allies was NOT unity.

Economy: major indices down. $6T lost in one year. That’s not today; that’s March 2000. Thank god Bush passed tax-cut stimulus. Even critics say that 1 in 20 workers would have been unemployed w/o tax cuts.

Yassar Arafat wouldn’t have been a real friend.

Its not Bush’s fault that Iranian lunatics want nukes.

I will defend the president in the long sweep of history.

JD

We have yr numbers now: 65% for the motion, 17% against, 18% undecided.

Questions:

• Q: What president in the last 50 yrs has faced the challenges that Bush 43 did?
• WK: every president faces tough challenges, but Bush had severe challenges. He made mistakes, but he put AQ on the run.
• JD: the implication is that no pres could have done well. JW?
• JW: no way. all the prior presidents had to deal with the cold war. WAY harder. Look at JFK and the Cuban Missile CRisis. Brink of doomsday.
• Q: For Rove: If yr right, how come his approval is so low?
• KR: he’s been doing tough things fro a long time. THere have been 3 presidents with lower approval rating: Carter, Nixon, Truman, and __. Rule of law: I won’t testify before congress because I believe in rule of law and the executive should be allowed to get private counsel. The senate and the house are stonewalling my totally fair settlement offers.
• JD: SJ, now that BO is taking over, does he get a boost by contrast, or is his starting point so low that he’s screwed?
• SJ: 9/11 is the starting point of what we’re talking about. Many people feel that the US(and UK) overreacted. The consequence is that we’ve played the terrorists game. We’ve restricted our liberties
• JD: i’ve heard WK say the opposite, that we put the terrorists on the run
• WK: they are on the run. The Jihadist impulse is a problem, but Bush took away their momentum. I don’t buy the premise that we curbed civil liberties. FDR and JFK and LBJ (during Viet Nam) took way more liberty. There’ve been
• JW: the people you mentioned that challenged the bad decisions were drummed out of the administration. Yr amazingly cavalier about this stuff; “gitmo’s no big deal”?
• WK: he’s lost close Sup Ct decisions.
• Back and forth about civilian vs military trials
• KR: we shouldn’t have the same rules fro enemy noncombatants should we mirandize theses people?

[audience: yes]

• jw: under yr system they have NO rights. We can’t find out who’s there. Bush arrested citizens and held people indefinitely without charges
• KR: we picked people up on battlefields, not the Upper West Side
• WK: Bush went out of his way to say “this is not a war against Islam”. He’s le
• SJ: what I think is extraordinary to people abroad is that we can’t see why you needed to do theses thing. You’ll never persuade them you didn’t violate civil liberties.
• WK: what have we done? to muslims?
• You didn’t need to do it
• WK: let’s talk
• is america unpopular in east asia? india? these are success stories. France and Germany went to more conservative- pro-american candidates
• Q: if he’s to receive credit fro protecting us since 9/11, does he deserve blame for allowing it to happen?
• WK: USS Cole was bombed no one was paying enough attention to AQ. The bush Admin’n says they wish they were more in tune. But fundamentally the ability for AQ to train in afghanistan
  -JW: Righard Clarke was running around with his hair on fire. Bush wast reversing policy of the clinton admin, and played it down
• Q: Who is the worst pres in the last 50 yrs and why?
• WK: Viet Nam was a mess (LBJ), Nixon’s corruption, incompetence (Carter)
• Q: this has been the biggest-spending admin’n since LBJ, and that’s w/o DHS and Iraq
• KR: discretionary domestic spending was increased by clinton 15% in one year when we came in. We cut it to 7%, then 4%, then 2%, then flatline. It’s been hard to do. We’re gonna leave Obama a good budget.

[audience laughs]

• WK Prescription Drugs is a good program.
• Q: Rove: Had the intelligence been accurate, would the invasion have taken place?
• KR: in the wake of 9/11, Bush had a concern about Saddam’s human rights abuses, and the UN resolutions, but absent WMDs, no, I don’t think we would have invaded
• Q: If Bush didn’t go to Iraq, what do you think Saddam would have done?
• SJ: I don’t see terrorism as a state-projected force. It’s a criminal act of gangsters. To glorify and give it the status of a state gives recruiters a huge boon. By declaring war, we’ve overstated this threat, and in doing so, we’ve turned huge numbers of countries into menaces. If you declare a small group of people into a n int’l menace, you turn them into a folk hero.
• JW: Rove mentioned in that incredible litany of distortions, that I wanted to remove Saddam—not the way bush did. Saddam was being successfully disarmed and contained. He was a serial miscalculator, but not a madman. What would have happened if we didn’t invade iraq.
• WK: if we know then would we still do it? We may have had to go after Saddam, but we could have done it with allies and we could have planned for an occupation.
• WK: I think KR is right and we would have not gone if we knew there were no WMDs. But I think that he would have been more dangerous.
• Q: Rove: what’s the future of the GOP?
• KR: after a loss, a party goes through introspection. BO got 3% more than Gore. This was not a blowout. The GOP needs to make a real effort to get black votes. THe GOP needs to get the young. Reagan had longer coattails.
• Q: What about Osama Bin Laden?
• KR: He’s hiding in Pakistan, and every effort has been made to get him. A lot of his inner circle are dead. But this is an odd part of the world. It is not a state.
• Q: What did Carter and LBJ do that was courageous? How would you compare Iraq to Viet Nam?
• SJ: Nam seemed to be far more competently executed than Iraq. Iraq was the most incompentant think I’ve ever seen. It’s been a catastrophe. Afghanistan has been better-conducted, but it’s a harder situation and ill end in tears. In Viet Nam, they only just lost. It was not a hopeless case. When you go into a country without a good reason, you’re not likely to do well. The punitive element has been the problem.
• JS: on LBJ: what courageous thing did he do? How about saying goodbye to the south for a generation? On judgment, LBJ doesn’t do as well. Both of them are unable to admit, recognize, or correct error. LBJ didn’t trust JFK’s advisors He couldn’t hear good advice. Bush got good advice from Powell, but he was so blinded by is own motives.
• Q: fro those against tho
• KR: democratic iraq, stabile afghanistan, new institutions for carbon where all the major emitters are at the table.
• WK: the iranian revolution and the saudis exporting of jihadism—jihadism has been on the rise and doing huge damage to us. and to the arab wold. a successful policy would reverse that. Secondly, nuclear weapons. Its amazing that we’ve had so little proliferation. If we can prevent Iran from going nuclear, it’ll be a huge win.
• Q: What do you suggest Obama do to deal with Islamofascinm?
• JW: BO should focus on turning afghanistan, figure out how to get us out of iraq with out it getting worse than it was. Its true that we haven’t had another attack; was it bush’s actions, or luck?
• SJ: good policing on the ground, not war in the middle east, has prevented attacks. The phrase “islamofacism”, which implies __, is the surest way to turn them hostile. These are normal people, just like you, who don’t think they have the right to come here and tell you what to do. Good relations with a country will encourage that country to suppress the hostile elements
• WK: the islamofascists have killed more muslims; what country has been the greatest victim of islamofascistS? iraquis!
• Q: For Rove: if the US known for its Constitution and respect for rule of low, how would you rate the bush presidency. and why would you not testify in a criminal investigation about corruption.
• KR: i refuse to testify to preserve the rule of law. The president needs to have a right to private counsel.

Laptop battery dies. No more notes. Ending:

• Rove and Kristol change more minds than JS and SJ. Surprise. Does that mean GWB is only the second-worst president of the last 50 yrs? Or that the few right-wingers in the audience stuffed the poll and pled “undecided” on the “before” poll. Audience grumbles on their way out.

• presenter: Scott Trudeau of Apartment Therapy Media
• NY Web Standards has a twitter acct! @NYWebstandards

Intro

• the inspiration for this has bee “as a developer, this is how I work with designers”
• starting at pando, worked with a series of freelance designers ST came up with a set of best practices and it evolved. Lots of people said “thanks for teaching me version control”
• that’s the inspiration for this talk.
• Here’s what we found:
  • Rules Devs need to do to make their designers lives easier, and
  • Things designers need to learn

Best Practices

• use a framework or a quality CMS
• if yr using custom stuff, you want contextual config files. If yr running yr project on a production server, you’ll have a different base URL, SQL db, etc. The easier you make it to switch configs, the happier everyone is.
• stole this from RoR: set an environment variable and then the config file can switch that, so you don’t change anything; you check out the project and it just works. Default to the designer’s config, so they don’t hav et oknow about it.

• alternate option: don’t add the config file to the Version Control, and then sym-link to the config. (do this with drupal): make copies of settings.php and create a bunch of symlinks

• manage yr SQL schema versions

• devs should be doing this anyway, but the cleaner it is

• site dumps (if the site is small enough)

• if you want to be really fancy, make a test data set

• if you (dev) do all these things, the collaborators (designers) don’t need to do to much to play along

Designers Need To Learn these Things

• install yr local dev environment (eg MAMP or XAMPP on windows)
• create a db and a user
• import a db

• use version control

• devs need to use an MVC pattern so dev can make templates fro designers to work on

Setting up the local dev enviornment: MAMP

• DL MAMP. Drag it to the “Applications” folder. Use it for anything besides RoR. (Use Locomotive for RoR)
• What about Python? There’s probably something out there (especially w Google App Engine around). Go look for it

• The document root is “/Applications/MAMP/htdocs”; if you put files in this folder, you can access them from “http://localhost:8888”

• one of the first things ST does is make a shortcut to his app on the desktop so he can find it later

• ST wrote a MVC app from scratch for demo purposes

Basic SVN

• create a repository (place to keep files)
• you can check copies out to “working copies”
• when yr done making changes, you can COMMIT to the repository
• every time someone makes a change, you can see what it was and revert back if necessary

• this COMMIT pattern will catch multiple changes to the same doc, and mediate conflicting changes. If yr just using FTP, its easy to overwrite each other’s changes.

• COMMAND: “svn info”: what the situation is; is it in version control? Where’s the repository?

• repositories are basically just a URL somewhere. If you want to start playing with SVN, beanstalkapp.com is a good place to start. SVN needs to run on an SVN server. If you’ve used a wiki, you know about reversions. This is just like a wiki for yr code.

• Q: Are there other Version Control systems? A: yes. Git is the cool new one, but it really shines with large distributed projects with lots of branches. It was written by Linus for the Linux project. For small teams you can work on one branch and SVN does a good job; its more mature, has better tools. There’s also CVS, which was the predecessor to SVN and is a little clunky.

• COMMAND: “svn status”: shows us if there’s anything changed, weird, or funky. As usual on the command line, no news is good news.

• making a change: ST goes into the template, changes a line of text, and then back to the command line. “svn status” returns an “M” (for “modified”) before the filename.

• COMMAND: “svn diff”: shows a “-” before the line that was rm’d, and a “+” next to the line added

• COMMAND: “svn commit”: type svn commit -m “changed a line”

• COMMAND: “svn update”: update’s yr working copy from the repository. If no one’s changed, it just shows you the revision number. If a newer copy exists on the repository, it updates, yr working copy.

On Windows

• using XAMMP and TortiseSVN
• files live in C:\xampp\htdocs
• right-click on a folder and you can get some Tortoise features, eg “checkout”
• once TortoiseSVN is installed, files and folders will get a green checkmark when they’re up to date
• Notepad++ is the file editor of choice. It deals with line endings without complaining and its free.
• If you make a change, the icon will get a red badge
• right-click to commit, you’ll be prompted for yr msg.

Create a conflict

• change and commit on win
• go to mac, don’t update, make a change, commit
• warning: commit failed
• so now you do “svn update” and see the conflict. If you browse to the directory, you can see all the versions, appended with “.r#”.

• to resolve, do “svn resolved [winning-filename]”, then commit

• 1. always update!

• 2. test yr changes!
• 3. commit them!

Qs

• Q: What about absolute URLs? A: avoid absolute URLs. If yr using a framework, there’s always a helper. But if you have to, you can mess with apache and have it redirect the URLs in a Virtual Host Directive. PITA though.

• Q: What about “files” in drupal? A: use “svn ignore” or just never add it, it doesn’t matter.

• Q: why isn’t the DB in version control? A: “Version control is not backup”. But do nightly backups in the db. The schema can be in version control though.

Making a Database

• go to phpMyAdmin
• make a db called “demo”
• import the “init.sql” db into “demo”
• create a user, give him privs (not global)
• neat trick: create the user first, and hit the “create a db w same name and grant all privs”

confiq file:

• should just have an array with hosts, user, pass, db names and let the designer manage that

• you can use SVN on fla’s too if you externalize all the actionscript

tips

• Pragmatic Programmers version control book is good

• lighthouseapp.com is a bug-tracking hosted service that hooks into beanstalk so you can enter the bug ticket number into the message and it’ll address the bug ticket on the commit

• google has free svn hosting, but only for open source

Mac SVN Clients

• SVN X
• Versions
• coda has SVN
• Cornerstone
• finder scripts

After months of behind-the-scenes action, Spot.Us finally launched, with nice write-ups in Wired, the Huffington Post, and TechCrunch. Go check it out—or better yet, suggest a story for journalists to tackle!

✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———✂———

Kottke takes a look at the NYT’s cover, which was my favorite by far of the major paper’s headlines. It was spare, powerful, and dignified.

There’re galleries of other newspaper headlines here and here.

UPDATE: Another great gallery here.

It wasn’t long ago that Karl Rove was talking about America’s incipient “permanent republican majority”. He might have been speaking prematurely. The only region of the country to vote more republican than in 2004 was the Appalachian belt. The rest of the country went heavily Democratic, as the top-notch NYTimes Information Graphics department shows.

Traditional red-and-blue election maps make the USA look much redder than it actually is because population density and geography are decoupled. Cartogram maps distort the size of counties to reflect their population. M.E.J. Newman has a series of maps that tell the story well, but there’s something beautifully kinetic about this map. I think I’ll have it framed.

Patrick Moberg’s gotten a lot of attention for this whimsical and profound drawing that could be seen as a whipsmart take of Chernoff Faces.

Finally, the image that best captured my bleary, awe-filled, humbled state of mind when I woke up for the first time in the country that elected Barack Obama:

Hi All,

Apologies for the mass email.  I’ll try to keep it short.

A wave election is coming, and we have an unprecedented opportunity to
repudiate the horrific policies of the GOP administration.  I know
many of you have already donated time and or money, but if you’ve got
anything left to give, your contributions will be more effective now
than at any other time.

- Because of the wave, there are congressional seats that are in reach
now that will not be in reach again.  Our 1st- and 2nd- tier races are
looking good.  Let’s target the 3rd tier.

- The smaller a race is, the more each dollar or phone call matters.
Let’s target small races.

- Because a Democratic majority is likely, we can focus on *better*
democrats, rather than *more* democrats. Let’s elect strong
progressive voices.

For these reasons, I’ve donated to most of the candidates on this
fundraising page: http://www.actblue.com/page/olbd

Now is the time to press the advantage. Please donate any money and/or
time that you can.

Thanks,
j

ps - If you’d like to read more, I like this article about down-ticket
targeting http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9279 as well as
this argument for going the extra mile
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/9/11055/1670/758/624699.

From O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo.

Clay Shirky: “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

• “How fast is the amount of info growing?” Exponential curve. We love this chart.
• For 15 yrs we’ve been hearing abt “info overload”
• “Info Overload” is the normal case. Why do we treat it as extraordinary?
• Guternberg introduced info overload. It was shortly after the printing press that there was more info available that a person could read in a lifetime.
• Printing (high up-front costs) press also introduced risk: what if books don’t sell?
• There’s no necessary reason to have the same person specialize in 1) publishing books (a trade), and 2) selecting books to publish (literary curation). But there is an economic reason.
• Solution: publishers become the filter
• All mass media (sound recording, television) shared this economic model: high up-front costs to be recouped over time.
• The internet introduced post-gutenberg economics: no more high upfront costs.
• the filter for quality is now way downstream from the site of production
• This is filter failure, not information overload
• Every so often there’s a bunch of spam that gets through, in higher numbers than usual. Clay measured his periodic spam increases over time; it wasn’t an increase in spam volume, it was filter failure.
• Spam is a good example: multiple filters (human & machine), its never over (arms race), the volume always grows
• This is not bad design. Its a (social) system failure
• An ITP colleague broke off her engagement; it came time to change her FB relationship status, but she wanted to proceed with discretion. She realized her Facebook status change would be a billboard. She tried to use the privacy controls, but the “I’m now single” message still went out to everyone. If ITP kids don’t get the interface, who will? FB tried their best. Who’s at fault? The problem is that managing privacy prefs is unnatural for humans.
• “privacy” controls information flow
• Our notion of privacy is not moving from one engineered system to another; it’s moving from evolved systems to engineered systems.
• “personal life” isn’t a phrase we use anymore
• privacy used to be built on (in)convenience. That was a feature, not a bug
• how can we design the filters so privacy works the way we want them to?
• new story: 18 yr old creates study group on FB, gets charged w cheating.
• FB doesn’t have another media metaphor; FB is FB
• small groups defend against free riders, large groups don’t. They’re free-rider tolerant, not free rider resistant
• this isn’t a fight over info, its a fight over flows
• we don’t have obvious tools to fix filter failure; that’s why “info overload” is recurrent alarm
• if you have the same problem for a long time, maybe its not a problem. Maybe its a fact.
• old filters have broken for structural reasons.
• The fix will have to do with rethinking social norms

## 080917 Web2.0 Expo Notes

In this episode:
- John Resig - Processing & Javascript
- Dan Saffer - Tap is the New Click
- DHH - Go REST with Rails
- Joshua Schachter - Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems
- Keynote - Fred Wilson - The History of Tech in NYC
- Keynote: Deb Shultz - The Death of the Grand Gesture
- Keynote - Jason Fried - I Started 37 Signals and You Didn’t
- Maria Thomas - Etsy CEO on Growth
- Gary Vaynercheck - Ad Lib

## John Resig - Processing & JS

### Canvas
- proposed and first implemented in WebKit by apple

- bunch of primitives (line, rect, etc)
- NOT vector
- fill & stroke
- FAST


script
window.onload = function();
var elem = document.createElement("canvas");
elem.width = 500;
elem.height = 500;
document.body.appendChild( elem );
var context = elem.getContext("2d");
context.fillStyle = "rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)";
context.fillRect(0, 0, elem.width, elem);
/script


- Canvas can consume other images, other canvases

- in FF3.1 canvas will be able to consume video
- in an extension: web pages

#### Processing
- data visualization probromming language
- built on Java
- lots of libraries

- strictly typed
- has classes, inheritance
- very flat API (functions are globally accessible)
- two basic methods: setup() (called initially) and draw() (called repeatedly)
- no event handlers

- Initialization: setup() is called
- Draw loop: draw() gets called as fast as possible (unless a framerate is set)
- drawing area is similar to canvas: translate, scale, rotate, pushmatrix, popmatrix

#### Processing.js
- how to run processing on the web?
- natively with applets (but they suck)
- two stages: convert to js, recreate methods

- can we sync a dwg on canvas to music?

## Dan Saffer - Tap is the New Click

- public bathrooms are the interaction design labs for the world (dyson airblade)
- gestural remote control (bang & olafsoR) for messy hands
- most of this stuyy needs to be displayed in video to get it
- T-moblie gestural windows

- M$ Surface (table)
- Sphere surface w multitouch. awesome for panoramas
- David Liddle: “we’re using bodies evolved for hunting, gathering and gratutionsu violnecfor information age tasts like word processing and spreadsheet tweaking”

- we’re in the middle of an interactio design revolution

### History of Gestural interface
- HP 150 - tap on the screen to go to location
- proto-wii
- Simon touchscreen phone 1994 IBM & Bell South
- POS restaurants for 20 yrs
- kiosks: jet blue

- two types of interactive gesture
- touchscreen (TUI)
- single touch
- multitouch

- freeform
- clapper

- the secret sauce: sensors
- pressure
- light
- acoustic
- tilt
- motion
- orientation

- other part of the interface: the human hand
- finger width: 16-20mm
- tip: 8-10mm
- pad: 10-14mm

- issues:
- fingernails (blessing & curse): sometimes they work, sometimes not
- fake fingernails: evil
- finger oil
- fingerprints
- (left) hnadedness
- accessibility issues
- wrist support
- gloves
- inaccurate (compared to cursor)
- attached to a hand (ie, screen coverage)

- Don’t design the target in a way that the hand obscures it when user reaches!

- Touch Target Size
- Fitts Law: distance to target / size of target = time to get to target

- Tricks:
- “iceberg tips”: touch area is bigger than the label
- adaptive targets: algorithmically guess the target based on info. Eg when you type “t-h-” on an iPhone, the “e” target on the QWERTY keyboard will be bigger than “w” or “r”

- Traditional UI element to watch out for:
- cursor: don’t need it. You know where yr finger is
- mouseover and hover
- double-click
- right-click
- selected default btn (can’t just hit “return” fo “Ok / Cancel”)
- undo (can’t un-clap a clapper)

### Documenting Gestures

- Dance Notation is a good place to begin. REALLY unwieldy
- Annotated wireframes are ok
- ARchitectural wireframes: size, height, relative to human form. Where are the sensors located
- “keyframes” - key moments in the activity
- gestural dwgs
- storyboards
- swim lanes: storyboard on top, user action row, machine state row, business logic row, etc

- timing is often a factor
- low fidelity:
- paper prototype,
- man-behind-the-curtain
- environments: paper, second-life

- high-fidelity
- off the shelf: chumby, Nokia 8500, M$ table
- DIY: arduino

- Turning Gestures inot code
- variables: what are you measuring?
- data: get the data from the sensor
- computation: determine diffs in data
- patterns:
- actions

### Communicating Interactive Gestures
- how to make people aware there’s an interaction available?
- Ambient Fear in public: people don’t like to look stupid in a public space, scared of breaking expensive equipment, etc
- Attraction Affordance: M$ Table has a great “riverbed” intro to bring people in
- written instruction (”Touch to Start”)
- small illustrations
- demonstration
- symbolic

### Design
1. available sensors & input
2. task that needs to be performed
3. physiology of the human body

### Ergonomics of human gesture
- avoid reptition
- keep muscles relaxed

### Rule of Thumb
- the more complicated the gesture, the fewer people that can do it
- match the complexity of the gesture to the complexity of the task.
- simple things should be done simply
- the best designs are those that “dissolve into behavior” (Naoto Fukasawa)
- the best designs match the behavior of the system to things people already do

- designinggesturalinterfaces.com
kickerstudio.com

## DHH - Go REST with Rails

Why am I interested in this stuff? REST has been around for a while, but its a very practical thing. Less interested in programming for its own sake than the outcome. Same w REST. After they built Basecamp, they decided it should have an API. At the time, APIs were something you bolted on to the side.

Most web developers haven’t read the HTTP spec. You don’t really need the spec to write a web app. GATHER? POST? Who cares?

That’s both the strength and the weakness of the HTTP protocol.

Most web devs have ignored the past for so long that they’re running into problems that have already been solved; we just need to dig down into the layers. Trying to learn what swart people wrote down 15 yrs ago.

HTTP is an ogre.
REST (”Representational State Transfer”) is like blue cheese: an acquired taste that’s disgusting when you first try. Once you get hooked, its really tasty.

WS-Star: an empire of specs detailing how to relate different services to each other. Associated with SOAP.

REST has infiltrated Rails
REST: a single resource that you can do multiple things to.
- GET: see
- POST: crud
- PUT: update or replace
- DELETE: destroy the resource

the latter two aren’t mapped in HTML, which is why they’re relatively unused
we’re simulating the full HTTP spec in HTML with this little hack (hidden form element using POST to implement PUT or DELETE)

REST enforces constraints. Treat everything as a single resource, use only those 4 verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
Some benefits of REST: XML version is pre-built. This is the “multiple representations” part. Instead of building another controller (eg XML, API, whatever), REST re-interprets it. Why should I write it twice?
- RoR thinks about this in terms of “respond_to”
- everything has a single URL, and with differnte verbs you can do different things to it (read, write, etc)
- REST isn’t all abstracted away because it DOESN’T NEED TO BE!
- SOAP is so complex that when it breaks, yr fuxx0zed

### Convention over Configuration
- REST is **another** set of conventions, like RoR, but at a higher level: controllers, interface
- boost of productivity: not having to make decisions

people/create
show
update
POST destroy

- REST help with *spotting natural borders*

## Joshua Schachter - Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems

### Scale

types of scaling:

1. tech
2. social
3. personal

#### Tech Scaling

- partitioning: get yr users into groups
- don’t use one huge database. it sucks
- caching: don’t go to the database if you can at all help it
- replicas: fastest performance comes from having the data on disk *in the order you need it*. use multiple replicas if you need
- auto-increment will hurt you later: it guarantees that yr dada will be in the wrong order later
- put a proxy in front. when grandpa on a 2400 baud modem hits you, he’s gonna eat up the whole server slot. use a load-balancer or something. by the time you need it, you’ll wish you knew it already

- sloppiness: synchronicity is a bitch. decouple interactive performance from other pieces of the system

#### Social Scaling
- tend to need very different features at different scales
- SMALL: with few people, push everyone together into the same room to encourage meeting
- MEDIUM: features grow to be about mitigating traffic. 1,000,000 users is too big to be a community.

- coping:
- scale is good for 3 things:
1. utility - hiring the product for a job. why do the users come?
2. network effect - value of the system becomes *the other people in the system*.
3. revenue -

do it in this order! If you start extracting value (in the form of cash) too early, it short circuits.

- product should be self-marketing. have the app exhibit as much functionality as necessary before logging in. registration-flow should be as light as possible. when you **must** have them register, remember the user’s state and return them.

- initial marketing vs actual marketing: not necessarily the same. The quick get may not be as powerful as the ultimate use. Eg, pausing TV (tivo) isn’t as big a benefit as network effects.

- layers of the onion: provide ways for people to continually get involved in the system: n00b, user, super-user, priesthood. Give people the means to market themselves using yr product.

- half the traffic came from RSS

- figure out the vectors for infection. For DEL, it was the FF extension. Great match; FF bookmarking sucked. Its ok to use another system as a carrier, but be wary of backing yrself into a corner

- book Josh likes: Animals in Translation by Temple ______

- use sensible defaults; people were checking “private” even when it was opt-in. changed it to “do not share” and finally people stopped checking it

- don’t go too far; do you need to tell the IDs of all the followers? or just the number of followers?

- software doesn’t map well to social norms; that’s why kids are ok with dropping accounts to lose crappy friends

- Spam & Abuse
- link exchange: people will build social systems **around** bothering you
- don’t ban users, legthen or destroy feedback loops. spammers & griefers will come back if you kick them, but they’ll never know if you lock them in a box

- pretty URLs: prime advertising space
- API: add some functionality to [whatever] without building a whole new system. people can fill the gaps that please them

#### Scaling Yourself

- when you build stuff, yr gonna do it wrong
- don’t spend a huge amt of time polishing.
- iterate quickly
- be lazy, reduce
- simpler is typically stronger
- have hygiene around yr ideas. write EVERYTHNIG down. Its a goood resource for instipation (or patents)

- Listen to yr users
- they love it when you respond. they never expect to hear from you
- every week, tally up all the reqs you get and figuer out what to build to engineer those problems

- Motivations: think very clearly about what yr doing
- user testing: yr understaning is biased, you need access to the way people look at things with fresh eyes
- measure and record everything
- always look for ways to shorten yr feedback loop. what did you learn?

### Q&A
- 60x performance increase: reshuffle records so that instead of storing no disk in the order written (primary key), store by URL, UID or UID, URL

- 25% of all passwords are “123456″, username, or domain name

- throttling is important. dictionary attacks are there. failed passwords are a BIG indicator.

## Keynote - Fred Wilson - The History of Tech in NYC

Seed stage deals:

SF NYC
1995: 160 20
2008: 360 116

1991: ZDNet (Ziff davis): put magazines online
1993: still using proprietary svcs, pre-web. Prodigy come out
1994: Pseudo, Razorfish. The name “silicon alley” starts being heard. Fred wants to kill that name. Big media (Time Warner, News Corp) takes its first shot at the web.
1995: 55 Broad St is converted by the city to a high tech incubator. Interactive agencies come along. BYT beta-tests their first web property with the Pope’s visit as their beta. Publications come along (Silicon Alley Reporter), online ad networks emergn (eg doubleclick)
1996: More activity. iVillae, theKnot.com, Flatiron partners
1997: early successes and failures. The roll-up starts: Razorfish bought a bunch of agencies. Doubleclikt isthee first NYC internet IPO.
1998: More success & failure. Kozmo.com. The last year of sanity before the 1st internet wave.
1999: all the offline companies start coming online. All hell breaks loose. Dozens of IPOs, acquisitions. 200 startups were funded. 1000s of parties. Josh Harris & Pseudo.com. “We Live in Public” is a doc about it.
2000: March: the Crash. High burn rates kill companies. Fucked Company. Google comes to NY.
2001: layoffs, landlords, bankrupticease.
2002: rock bottom. Doubleclick’s “Welocme to Silicon Alley” billboard is taken down. Calacanis is in LA, Harris is in the catskills.
2003: renewal. Denton launches Gizmodo. Fred launches AVC. the term “web 2.0″ is coined. Schacter starts Delicios.
2004: Heiferman starts the NY Tech meetup. 10 people then, 7000 now. Union Square ventures rasise $125m
2005: NYTinmes buys about.com: NY’s biggest . Etsy launches. Y! buys delicious.
2006: google comes to NY in a big way. takes over the port authority building. 750 engineers in ny. Web video takes off. Wine Library, Wallstrip.
2007: 75 early stage tech deals by VC. Tumblr, Path101, I’minlikewithyou

NYC is different than Silicon Alley: more creative, more artistic, more connected to media and advertising.

## Keynote: Deb Shultz - The Death of the Grand Gesture

beethoven’s 5th: musicians understand the grand genture
-the presonal: human connections aren’t binary, but social web apps usually are: “friend or not”? “link of don’t link?
- can’t have a continuum without a grand gesture, and vice versa. Otherwise its all white noise.
- “Technology changes, humans don’t.”

## Keynote - Jason Fried - I Started 37 Signals and You Didn’t

- Software is a great place to be. You don’t have to worry about raw materials or physics; just type.
- Cost of change is way lower than other industries. Yr not plumbing.
- Software can be built anywhere.
- BUT
- Doesn’t have the same feedback affordances as other things. Its easy to figure out if a water bottle is well-designed. Its not so easy to tell if software is well designed on not.
- What would yr software be like if it was a physical device? Would it be spikey? Comfy? Etc etc

- software can quickly devolve if you say “yes” to all yr customers.
- be the gatekeeper. be the editor. be the curator. a curator’s job is to say “no”.
- think about yr product as a museum, & yr features as things to hang on the wall
- software trends towards bloat because there’s no visible form
- once you hit bloat, its hard to go back
- “make a collection, not a warehouse”
- attach costs to things. shuts down a LOT of trouble

## Maria Thomas - Etsy CEO on Growth

- grandparents were all small business entrepreneurs
- Greek word “filotimo”: operating with purpose, dignity, and a sense of personal responsibility. No english translation. No kidding.
- only 1/10th of a % of US companies achieve more than $250m/yr revenues
- how people in a company treat each other and their customers is determinative of whether companies break into that 1/10th
- listen to end users
- practice filotimo; keep it human
- get the products out the door.

## Gary Vaynercheck - Ad Lib

- patience & passion.
- “There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate. You can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”
- listen to yr users? absolutely. But giving a shit about yr users? Even better.
- “Look in the mirron, pickt what you want to do. I pormise you can monetize that shit.”
- hustle. this isn’t about parties.
- getting a buttload of users and flipping it s not a business model. get a business model.
- “legacy is better than currency”. I want my grandkids being proud of me.

- the game is changing. i turned down 40 TV deals. there’s no reason for me to share my content. old media is no longer in control, and not everyone gets that.

- build yr own brand equity. believe. work hard, know what yr doing.
- “people are the people that will help you”
- use all the tools. connect to people any ande evryway you can
- we’re gonig through a gold rush of branding. yiou don’t need the machine anymore.
- “what do I want to do”
- “I’m In Like with You” should be a killer