Who are these people?

I live in a high-rise in downtown Chicago, just yards from an upscale hotel used more often for business than for pleasure.

My drapes are frequently open because, well, I live in a high-rise across the street from a hotel. The only people who are going to see me running around naked are strangers, people I’ll never meet. So why should I care?

Apparently, they have the same attitude. At least, many of them do. I’m frequently amazed by the number of exhibitionists who stay in this hotel. (I’ll leave what they do to your imagination.)

My insatiable curiosity makes me wonder about these people. Who are they? What do they do? Why are they staying in this hotel? Why do they want to be watched in their private moments?

I have answers – guesses – but I’m still curious. What makes a person an exhibitionist? What makes them do what they do? And why do they want to be watched?

My psychologist friend Stephanie probably has the answers – her focus is on human sexuality. I think I’ll shoot her an email, see what she has to say.

Impressive (and not so much)

Stumbled on this article on a blog linked to from another blog I read occasionally. It talks about how YouTube was inaccessible in remote parts of the world where they’re still using dial-up (or other low-bandwidth connections). The problem was that the page weight (the combined size of the page and all elements of it, including linked JavaScript and CSS files and images) took too long to load on low-bandwidth connections, and users simply avoided it. Then they rewrote the code, cutting it from 1.2 megabytes to 98 kilobytes. Instead of taking 20 minutes to get to the first frame, it now took only two minutes – and “large numbers of people who were previously unable to use YouTube before were suddenly able to.”

I’ve been frustrated a lot lately by the software that I work with. I’m referring to the browser interface to the back-office software I do independent web development for. It’s obvious the company’s developers don’t care about performance, and I end up spending countless hours trying to overcome this attitude, looking for ways to eek out faster page loads. Some other developers just add a “page loading” message, but that’s the lazy method.

There are some performance problems I can’t overcome, so I end up using AJAX to make it seem faster. I’ll load the fast elements right away, then use either XMLHttpRequest or a hidden iframe to load the slower elements, showing “loading” placeholders where the data will eventually go. It’s not a perfect solution – it doesn’t actually reduce load time – but I get far fewer complaints from clients because it appears to reduce load time. And, as they say, perception is everything.

Firefox and the OS X Keychain (about bookmarks, too)

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I’ve been cleaning out my decade’s worth of bookmarks and came across a link to a Google Code project for integrating Firefox with the Mac OS X Keychain – allowing Firefox to share passwords with all the other browsers on the Mac. The refusal of Mozilla developers to fully integrate with the Mac has been my single greatest complaint about Firefox (and perfectly demonstrates their arrogance, but that’s a complaint for another time).

When I bookmarked the page, the project was still just a dream – the only file was a PDF explaining what the developers wanted to do. I never revisited the site until now, four years later.

And what did I find? A fully functioning Firefox extension integrating Firefox with Keychain. Apparently, it’s been available for two years, and I missed it because it got lost among my other bookmarks. Now there’s an official version on Mozilla’s website, and the Google Code site doesn’t appear to be used anymore.

That’s the problem with bookmarks. I missed out on this because I had too many bookmarks I rarely use anymore – search engines and Instapaper have all but eliminated my reliance on bookmarks. There are only a handful of sites – mostly news and blogs – that I visit regularly and a few dozen more that I visit infrequently. And now, after a couple of hours of deleting dead links and those that I don’t care about anymore, I’m down to a few dozen instead of hundreds.

Of course, that’s just my main Firefox profile. I still need to go through my development profile – the one where I do all my work. (I keep work and play separate; work requires a completely different set of Firefox extensions that allow me to do web development.) I’m not even going to bother with the bookmarks in Safari and that wretched Chrome – which I’m forced to launch only on occasion when a client complains that something isn’t working. Yuck.

Why bother?

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I get both amused and annoyed when I see captions like this. It doesn’t tell us anything that we can’t see ourselves. It’s as if someone added a caption because some arbitrary rule in some manual (probably the AP Stylebook that’s the bible of journalism) said that every picture should have a caption. This inflexibility goes a long way to explaining why traditional news media are dying, similar to the way a language dies when it fails to keep up with its users.

woman-on-bed

Never too old

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I’ve just discovered Carambola, a.k.a. star fruit. I saw these little things in the grocery store for the first time the other day and picked up a couple. Google told me the entire fruit is edible, so I sliced it and fell in love. Kind of like a combination of tart apple and pear, but unique. Of course, it was after I ate it that I read further and discovered I should have let it ripen – mine was dark green instead of yellow. I’ll let the other one ripen before eating it and see what the difference is.

carambola_health