Hand Coding

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

• Saturday, March 8: Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device vs Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (both at 2 p.m.)

• Sunday, March 9: Scope Creep and Other Villains vs Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (both at 10 a.m.)

• Monday, March 10: Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update vs WaSP Annual Meeting: Don't Break the Web (both at 5 p.m.)

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.

It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:

Saturday

• 10:00 am — A Decade of Style (with Eric Meyer and Doug Bowman)
• 3:30 pm — Stop Designing Products (with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path)
• 4:05 pm - Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
• 5:00 pm — From Tags to Riches: Life After Code

Sunday

• 10:00 am — Accessibility Wars: A Report From the Trenches (with Sharron Rush of Knowbility)
• 2:00 pm — Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
• 3:30 pm — Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use (with Ian Lloyd of accessify.com)
• 4:05 pm — The Future of JavaScript (with Andrew Dupont)

Monday

• 10:00 am — Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui (with Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone)
• 12:45 pm — The Weblog Awards, Trade Show Day Stage
• 2:00 pm — The Growth and Evolution of Microformats (with Tantek Çelik)
• 4:05 pm — Javascript: The Big Picture (with Peter-Paul Koch / ppk)
• 5:00 pm — WaSP Annual Meeting: Takin’ it to the Street

Tuesday

• 10:00 am — Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields (with Brendan Eich of Mozilla)
• 2:00 pm — Music From the Masses: The Remix Revolution
• 3:30 pm — How to Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Usability Work Together
• 5:00 pm — The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown

SXSW is loads of fun, but, invariably, there’re some tough decisions on which panels to go to — this year is no different. I've managed to figure most of them out, but there’re some for which I’m still a bit torn. So, for these guys, I’m open to suggestions :).

Saturday, March 11th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting (Room 18ABC) …or…
• James Surowiecki Presentation: The Wisdom of Crowds (Ballroom E)

The DOM panel would normally be a shoo-in for me, but I remember hearing from a few people last year that the similarly-titled panel “How to Bluff Your Way Through CSS” wasn’t merely a snarky title, but literally a panel on how to pretend that you’re knowledgeable about CSS. If that’s the case with this DOM iteration, I’m not so sure I’d be as interested.

Monday, March 13th — 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

• Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common Ground, Part 2 (Ballroom E) …or…
• Microformats: Evolving The Web (Room 17AB)

Eric Meyer or Tantek Çelik? That’s a tough one. On one hand, I dig web standards; on the other hand, I always end up missing Çelik’s panels on microformats (due to conflicts like this one) and people tell me that they’re very good.

Monday, March 13th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability (Ballroom E) …or…
• WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel: Getting the Job Done Right (Room 16AB)

And, in this case, Morville’s presentation sounds really interesting, but I don’t really want to miss out on the accessibility bits either :-/.

Anil Dash’s kickball game is somewhat of an institution at this point — he organizes an informal kickball game on the Saturday of SXSW before panels. No one really takes the game very seriously, but it’s great fun.

Having said that, his Kick! website still has the info up for 2005 :-/. Has anyone heard whether the game is still on for this year?

It’s mid-March, and that can only mean one thing — it's time for another fun trip to Austin for SXSW 2005. For those not aware, South by Southwest (more commonly known by its initials, SXSW) is a music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas; I’ll be attending the Interactive conference.

The interactive conference runs this Friday through Tuesday (March 11th-16th) and their schedule of panels is online. Here’re some of the panels which I’ll be attending:

Saturday March 12th

• 2:00 pm — Opening Remarks: Jeffrey Zeldman. With all the useful links on Zeldman.com, his site is almost like a mini aggregator for the web coding world.

• 5:00 pm — How to Make Big Things Happen With Small Teams. I work at a small company and I thought I might be able to get something out of this. And it's presented by Jason Fried of 37signals, so it’s hard to go wrong.

• 6:00pm — WaSP/CSS-D/WD-L/WSM/AIR Meetup for SXSW Interactive. Hosted by James Craig, this could be a good opportunity to meet other standards-minded web coders.

Sunday March 13th

• 10:00 am — Emergent Semantics. It had “semantics” in its title and it’s presented by Eric Meyer. I needed no further convincing ;).

• 11:30 am — How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS. This panel also has some of the big names in CSS, including Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea.

• 2:00 pm — Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s work ever since discovering his article on the Science of Shopping. In this keynote, he'll probably talk about his new book Blink, which I’ve also heard good things about.

• 3:30 pm — How to Use Accessiblity Guidelines, Standards and Testing. I try to stay current on web accessibility and this panel particularly interested me as it appears to focus on real world testing with (free) tools.

• 3:30 pm — The Elements of Meaningful XHTML. Yeah, so I have two Sunday-at-3:30 panels on my list. It's really hard to decide between these two as this one is also right up my alley. And, while I’ve been to panels where Tantek Celik spoke among other panelists, I haven't been to one where he spoke as the sole presenter.

• 5:00 pm — How to Build Your Brand with Blogs. The company I work for (RD2) also has a corporate blog and this seemed a useful panel to get the most out of that.

Monday March 14th

• 11:30 am — How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire. Jeffrey Veen is one of the panelists on this one and, even though I’m not an information architect, his panels which I went to last year were so engaging that I couldn’t resist going to this one as well.

• 3:30 pm — The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure. This looks like it could be one of those debate-panels where experts discuss opposing sides of an issue — sometimes it works out while other times it falls flat. Here’s to hoping this one is lively and interesting.

• 5:00 pm — A Sample of Style from the Homestar Runner Folks. Homestar Runner is an amusing online Flash animation series which can only be made better by puppet versions of their characters (w00t!). Oh, and I’ve discovered that there’s also a Homestar Runner Wiki. Who knew?

Tuesday March 15th

• 11:30 am — Notes From the Underground: The Rise of Remix Culture. I get a kick out of mashups — an art form where someone superimposes one song on top of another to form a brand new song — and I’m looking forward to seeing what they cover in this panel.

• 2:30 pm — Accessibility Shoot-Out. In this panel, URLs are thrown into a hat and then accessibility experts look over the site and give advice. I’m concerned that I may not learn much new out of this one, but you never know.

So, those are the panels which I’ve penciled-in so far. SXSW is a great time every year and I can't wait to get to Austin!

I’ve been catching up on my photo processing and my SXSW 2004 photos are now online. I took 31 photos and posted 6 — I probably would have taken more, but there are only so many gadgets I can carry around at once. I could really only comforably carry either my PowerBook or my camera and on some days I just needed the PowerBook more. (For that reason, I’m halfway-tempted to pick up one of those tiny digicams for next year’s SXSW so that I can carry both a camera and a laptop.)

I ended up taking most of my photos on the last day, Tuesday, as I didn’t really need my PowerBook during any of the panels that day (it seems that the last day’s panels are always a bit on the fluff-side). After the morning’s panels, a bunch of us went to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant and that’s where I got most of my photos.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

Once again, I’m heading off to SXSW. I plan on leaving around lunchtime today (Friday) and driving back Tuesday evening (after the last panel of the day). In case you’re going also, here're some of the panels I plan on attending:

Saturday:

• Accessibility is for Everybody — a general web-accessibility panel[3:30 - 4:30]
• Web Navigation Without A Guide Dog — accessbility techniques with JavaScript, Flash and CSS [5:00 - 6:00]

Sunday:

• Virginia Postrel Presentation — she wrote The Substance of Style about the look-and-feel of people and places [10:00 - 11:00]
• Red Vs. Blue Case Study — Red vs Blue is an amusing set of animated shorts created with the Halo game engine [11:30 - 12:30]
• Wikwiki, What? — a Wiki is a collection of Web pages which can be edited by anyone [3:30 - 4:30]

Monday:

• Hi-Fi Design With CSS — with Doug Bowman [10:00 - 11:00]
• CSS: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — with Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and and Doug Bowman [11:30 - 12:30]
• The Frontiers of User Experience — on information architecture and user interaction [3:30 - 4:30]

Tuesday:

• I haven’t yet decided on the panels for Tuesday.

I’ve occasionally had throughts about buying a laptop and, especially with WiFi proliferation, they’re becoming more and more useful. In particular, I started reconsidering Apple when those switch commercials came out. Mac die-hards, at least the ones I’ve talked to, tend to consider them cheesy, but I found them rather down-to-earth and unpretentious.

More than that, MetaFilter had a post back in June about some switch-logs (for lack of a better term) where regular users would write about their experiences switching from Windows to Mac.

Switch. Apple launches its first major ad campaign since “Think Different”. Rather than preaching to the converted, it's gunning for the other 90% — the unhappy Windows users. Can Apple double its marketshare to 10% as Steve Jobs is hoping? Does this represent a less smug, more aggressive Apple? Are you considering switching, or have you switched already?

Interestingly, I now realize that I’ve met Jish (linked to the word “switched” above) at SXSW, so that gives his account extra credability to me.

However, the PC-to-Mac Log at EdgeCurve.com is even more comprehensive. It chronicles one user’s Mac expereience from opening-the-box and onwards over two months. With that level of detail, I really got a feeling for what switching might be like (of course, in my case, it’d only end up as a somewhat-switch since I’d still have Linux and/or Windows on my desktop machine).

What finally sealed it for me was SXSW. At such a geek-friendly festival, I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that the convention center had WiFi throughout. And, it wasn’t uncommon for attendees to bring along their laptops and browse the web and check their e-mail between or during panels.

What astounded me was the breadth of Mac users. Of attendees that had laptops, I estimated thatg about 9 out of 10 had a Mac. Jish, Leia, Ruaraidh, and even Ben and Mena Trott — all Macs. If I had a Real Web Job, I would have been tempted to borrow someone’s Powerbook, load apple.com/store, and order one right then and there.

PS: I considered titling this entry “Oh, my beloved Powerbook, how I love to lick your creamy center”, but it was too long and also a bit osbscure.