Arc and Angle

An article posted on the ReadWriteStart channel called From Co-Working to Cubicles: Where are you Working? got me to daydreaming about my ideal work environment.

I’d repost some pictures of awesome offices like the Twitter office, but the images are copyright protected, so a link will have to suffice.

Here goes:

• I want to be able to take my office with me. I don’t think humans are best suited to repeatedly sit in the same spot of the same room every single day. How often do people start looking for a new job just because it’s time? To me, that means, “I can’t take looking at that Ansel Adams photo one more time. This place is starting to kill my soul.” I mean, if you REALLY think about it, it’s sort of strange that we live in the same place every day. Don’t misunderstand me; I love the concept of home. It’s comfortable, safe, etc…but isn’t it just a little bizarre to think about the fact that most people have a certain small area of the world that they reserve as their own? Is that natural? I’m digressing. The point is, I’d love to wake up and say, “Wow, I have a lot of work to do, but I am so sick of being in the house” and I’d be able to go to a coffeehouse or on a nice day, a park or an outside patio.
• Portability is ideal, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want a home office. I do want a place that is reserved for me to work in that I can rely on to be quiet, comfortable, and where I can store my equipment, projects, and supplies safely. My ideal home office will be organized, but not too organized. I will have a specific place for all of my papers and things, and it will be clean, but not sterile. I will have inspiring things hung up on my wall (not kitten posters with motivational quotes. More like artsy travel posters of the imaginary planets from Serenity. There’s a small chance I might already have those.) I will have a lot of plants. I will have a comfy couch, a spacious desk and a beautiful desktop computer. There will be a coffee pot really near by and I will have a favorite mug. My office will be stocked with great pens.

OK, so that’s really about it. Now, if I do not work from home and instead work in an office with real life co-workers, here is my ideal scenario:

• It will be near my house so that commuting will not be a major part of every day of my work week and the parking will be easy.
• The building will make genuine efforts to be eco-friendly.
• There will be lots of huge windows overlooking a pleasant landscape (a skyline, forest, ocean…that sort of thing). My desk will be positioned right next to a window.
• Lots of plants
• Good lighting, none of that fluorescent stuff.
• An open floor-plan and  high-ceilings.
• It will have some color to it.
• There will be a coffeepot really near by.
• Oh, there will also be a workout room, a pool, a rooftop patio, and a really good Mexican restaurant with great happy hours. Hush now; this is my dream.

So that’s my dream folks. If I blog it, it will happen.

There come a few times in a budding web designer’s life when they discover something very useful and incredibly helpful and they wonder, “Why on earth did nobody tell me about this before!?” And, being the collaborative souls that they are, they think, “I will share the news with all of the others so that they too will reap the benefits of this new knowledge!”

It is then that the cold truth rises to the surface. The fact is, this news is completely geeky and the topic is completely, assuredly boring to just about everyone except our inspired little geek.

Well, lucky for me I have a blog for this sort of thing. It may not interest my loved ones and does not merit an “I made a new post!” announcement on my various social networking sites, but I know that I have an audience out there. Somewhere out in the vast hinterland of the Internet, a lone shivering geek must also be asking, “Is there another way to make my web site faster!?!?!?”

And like me, they shun the easy non-standards solutions of image maps. Like me, they have read and re-read countless articles on how to optimize photos for the web. And like me, they felt there just must be something else out there. Something warm and fuzzy, like a tiny piece of code.

Today on my journeys, I learned a few new things on topics whose keywords involve GZip, htaccess, Live HTTP Headers, and YSlow. Don’t go away! Now’s where it gets exciting!

Just about every web developer uses Firefox add-ons, especially the Web Developer Toolbar. There are two others that are particularly useful when trying to increase the loading speed of a site and for some silly reason, I never used them until today: Yslow analyzes a site’s performance based on Yahoo’s rules for web performance and Live HTTP Headers displays the live communications between your browser and a site’s server.

I used YSlow to analyze one of my sites. I got an “A” in everything except GZip compression. Huh? I did some reading and discovered that I might need to configure my server to output GZip compression. To check this, I scanned the dialog between my browser and the server using Live HTTP Headers. I saw that my browser sent this request: “Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate.”

This is the browser telling the server, “FYI, I accept compressed files if you have any.”

The server ignored that request, meaning that it was not set-up to Gzip my content. Bah!

I have a shared-hosting plan and never realized that I have access to certain server set-up options. Web hosts who put dozens of clients’ sites on one server would be insane to allow everyone access to the server’s config file. I thought I’d just have to send them a message if I needed something on the server changed. It turns out that individual accounts may have access to certain set-up options by using an .htaccess file (hypertext access).

First, locate the file. I signed into CPanel, went to the file manager, clicked on a little check box to allow me to view hidden files, and then went into my home directory. There it was, “.htaccess”. I clicked on it to edit it and added code from BetterExplained to configure the server to allow compression output.

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>

I saved the file.

I then reloaded my site and behold! The load time was four times faster! My work here is done.

For great reading, check out these articles:

• BetterExplained: “How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression”
• Yahoo! Developer Network: “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site”

“An overview of PubSubHubbub, a simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub protocol & open source reference implementation. Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick demonstrate what PubSubHubbub is and how it works. For more information, visit pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com” –The Google Code Channel on Youtube.

(Random completely irrelevant side note: I know that Brad Fitzpatrick works at Google. Is it safe to assume that some of these shots are inside the Googleplex? And what ever happened to computer nerds looking nerdy?)

Up until now, I’ve steered clear of making any judgments concerning Mark Zuckerman, the so-called boy-genius creator of Facebook. The entire time he was in charge of Facebook, his mantra was always, “User privacy is sacred!”

It is the foundation of Facebook. It is what set it apart from Friendster. It is why I was happy to defend Facebook against a few of my Friendster-loyalist friends. They could disagree about aesthetics and cool features (remember those diagrams showing you how many friends-away a person is connected to you by?). But I always fell back on the fact that I loved how much control I had over my privacy settings. I could block strangers from getting almost anything. I could show my mom my pictures but not my wall. It was the clear winner.

In public statements, he is now singing a different tune touting ridiculous arguments supporting the idea that basically, it is the natural evolution of our tech-centric times that we are simply going to have to adjust to less privacy and more openness.

One of my favorite social media sites, ReadWriteWeb wrote a great article that argues that in this case, users aren’t choosing to be less private. They are being told that they want less privacy. ReadWriteWeb’s: “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over”

I predict Facebook is about to alienate a lot of people and it’s only a matter of time before an open-source social networking tool changes the playing field. In short, they’re digging their own grave. Mark: Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Do yourself a favor and separate yourself from this debacle before you become the Microsoft of Social Networking.

Maker Profile - Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Artist Reuben Margolan shows us where he finds his inspiration and how he experiments with his ideas to create wave scultpures.

I love so much about this: how making things has been a part of his life since he was a child, how he takes one thing about the world that he finds beautiful or fascinating and then uses his art to experiment and explore that, the way he notices and loves things in every day life that are easily missed.