ExpanDrive

Do you even know what one is? If you’re reading this, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you do. But according to a highly-informal Google poll conducted this April, fewer than 8% of Times Square bystanders knew what a web browser was.

As painful as this is to watch, it goes quite a way toward explaining why each morning, I wake up to an inbox full of multi-millionaire Nigerians and pills offering an “xtra 2 !n¢hes of grith” [sic].

Don’t get me wrong, the answers in this video aren’t universally off—two guys interviewed pretty much nail it, and even the big dude who claims to be “not a computer guy” knew the “blue e explorer” was his browser. As a whole, I’d say they’re more tech savvy than Orin Hatch, but somewhere behind Ted Stevens.

If this poll is reflective of the general population, it brings up all sorts of interesting points. Number one is that the internet must be pretty freakin’ safe—either that, or not enough skilled individuals have been shunted into the identity theft industry. I’d also say the fact that people like this use the Internet and still have assets is a pretty big win for public-key cryptography.

Another point this brings up licensing. Would someone so ignorant of the rules of the road work be allowed to drive? Or so ignorant of firearm safety be allowed to own a gun? Granted, the immediate consequences of poor driving/gun use are more dire, but the economic impact of botnets, spam, phishing schemes and other fraud largely dependent on ignorant users shouldn’t be underestimated.

Finally, this video levels a pretty serious indictment against Americans—or at least Americans who wonder aimlessly around Times Square on a weekday. We’re too used to looking at things as if they were magic boxes. If the box breaks, take it to a magician, give him some money, he does some magic, and it works again. Certainly, ads with identity thieves climbing around inside your computer do nothing to dispel that myth.

I say the problem is cultural because this is long how Americans have dealt with that other indispensible possession, the automobile. Sure, most people know how to drive a car, but if I asked 50 people on the street what a catalytic converter was, I’m not sure I’d have a much higher success rate than Google did.

But considering the growing impact general computer awareness (note that I did not say “computer skills”) has on universally important things like getting a job—as a story from today’s Morning Edition higlights—I just don’t think this level of ignorance is sustainable. The inability to change an oil filter will have no impact at most offices, but the inability to recognize a virus-laced email almost invariably will.

General skills like the difference between a browser and a search engine, or between a file attachment and a virus, are the sort of basic knowledge that people should be taught early on in schools. If this video survey is any indication, treating the PC like a glorified typewriter for the past 20 years hasn’t done a whole lot in the way of education.

Mozilla Labs is hosting another Extend Firefox competition aimed at creating awesome extensions for Firefox 3.5. I’ve been using Firefox 3.5 for a couple months now and it’s a huge improvement. Given how many browser choices are out there, what really separates Firefox from the pack for me is extensions like Firebug.

We’re super excited to sponsor this competition alongside all-stars like MacroMates, Sofa, Manning Publications and InformIT. 14 licenses of ExpanDrive are up for grabs along with a handful of MacBook Pro’s as well as some great books and software. If you have any ideas for a Firefox extension brewing, now is the time. Last year brought about some pretty awesome entries.

As soon as I saw Menlo I knew it was going to be my new favorite programming font. Just a couple weeks ago I gave Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono a try, and it didn’t work for me, so I wondered what the difference was. You’ve probably seen the high resolution comparison already. But I don’t code in size 64 font; I program I code in size 11 font. Here’s an animation of some real code switching between Menlo and Vera Sans Mono.

Menlo is the one with the slash through the zero, while Vera Sans Mono has a dot in the zero. You can see that a lot of characters (“M”, “N”, “l”, “#”, and all the punctuation) look way too light and blurry in Vera Sans Mono, but look great in Menlo. The just look at how blurry that octothorp is in Vera Sans.

Update:

When Gruber asks, who can say no?

Here’s a comparison of Vera Sans Mon and Coda’s variant. Coda has the higher, longer underscores and the slightly lighter weight. I don’t really like how Coda is so thin that anti-aliasing kind of greys out the text. If you blow it up (or look at it with Digital Color Meter), then you’ll see that very few of the pixels are close to black.

And here is an image with all three. Vera Sans, Menlo, and Coda in that order. Menlo has the zero with the slash, so you can keep track of which is which. (I intentionally omitted a key from the image, because I wanted to focus on how the text changed without distraction.

You can download the gifs and open them in Preview if you want to page back and forth manually. It will give you each image as a separate page, and you can switch back and forth using the arrow keys. (This is also a great way to do an impromptu slideshow. Open a directory full of images, hit ⌘-A to select them all, and hit ⌘-O to open them in Preview.)

For those outside Boston, The ExpanDrive offices are located in Porter Square, which roughly straddles the border between the Cities of Somerville and Cambridge. While Cambridge has a long-standing reputation as a left-leaning, over-educated nerdocracy, Somerville is a far more complex place.

I used to live on Adams St, in Somerville’s Winter Hill neighborhood. Like the bulk of the city outside Porter and Davis, the neighborhood is difficult to access from the T (at least for now), but Somerville’s 4.1 square-mile footprint means residents are never more than a 15-minute bike ride from anywhere else. Even with less-than-reliable bus service, only in the rarest of circumstances did I have trouble getting around.

The largest problem I had living in the city was parking. It’s so bad, in fact, that I made a song about it. Turned out to be pretty popular, even getting some radio airplay, so I feel like it should come as no surprise that the city announced new parking regulations starting this summer. The rates essentially adjusted the costs of parking to reduce the demand.

What I did find surprising, however, was the idiocy of the response from local business owners—or at least those surveyed in a recent Somerville Journal article.

“Parking is a problem in the square anyways. It’s an almost like chasing people away in the square by doing this.”

Yes, actually, that is the idea. Except that they’re trying to drive away cars. People don’t take up parking spots—cars do.

“…the first time they get that $30 ticket, that’s probably the last time they’ll drive to Somerville.”

Again, that’s the point. The $30 ticket makes the short walk from the $8 Alewife Garage or $6.50 Commuter Rail look like a bargain. If parking is overcrowded, you want alternate access to be more attractive.

“It’s already frustrating, my staff is trying to work but they constantly have to be feeding their meters.”

Regardless of the cost, meters still need to be fed. If your business’s performance is suffering because staff need to feed meters, you should be in favor of disincentives to driving.

“… It’s just about making money, not about functional traffic and parking options.”

Take a look out your Magoun Square studio between 4 and 6pm, where traffic is backed up four and five cycles at the Medford Street/Broadway intersection. Outside a mad frenzy for Cabbage Patch kids, you’ll never see a more obvious mismatch of supply and demand.

I have a lot of respect for small business owners (except Jeff), but these statements display a pretty embarrassing lack of economic sense. Granted, most of the blame probably lies with The Somerville Journal for not interviewing any of the adamantly pro-cycling businesses (JP Licks, Redbones, Diesel Cafe, to name a few) peppering Davis Square, but still, forcing car drivers to bear more responsibility for the costs they inflict isn’t something you’re going to see less of over the coming years.

Bostonist has it right—precisely no one inside the greater Boston area has a reason to drive to Davis Square. Yes, the business owners are correct that this is a revenue generating move; Mayor Curtatone makes no bones about that. But if its one that helps clear up Somerville’s congestion, pollution, and noise problems in the process, I can’t see why anyone in their right mind would complain.

Robin Harris made a great post last week over on Storage Mojo outlining 5 zombie storage concepts that should die. His last item on the list really hit home:

Cloud. Yep, the word du jour is, because of its popularity, rapidly being drained of meaning. Public? Private? Compute? Storage? Cheap? Secure? Software? Infrastructure? What??? Sure, talk about cloud, but for goodness sake don’t put the word cloud in a product name. You’ll regret it within 2 years if you do. If you simply must then follow EMC’s oblique approach with Atmos.

I appreciate the need for a simple buzz word with a real-world analog to help people understand and get excited about new technology, but meaning is being drained from “cloud” at a break-neck pace. This blog is a great place monitor the insanity.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre (六四屠殺). Consider reading the Wikipedia page, and also the page on Tank Man. The New York Times published a great retrospective with the photographers who took pictures of Tank Man, as well as a previously unpublished photo from the street.

BBC has a story about reporters being blocked from entering the square today. It includes some humorous video of un-uniformed agents blocking the cameras with umbrellas. Also, a website claims that an unusual number or Chinese social networking websites are “down for maintenance” today.

Where can I apply for this job?

ExpanDrive v2.0.2 is out with a few major bug fixes. We strongly recommend the upgrade.

David Appleyard at Mac Appstorm posted a glowing ExpanDrive 2 review on Monday and has followed it up with an awesome giveaway – AppStorm is handing out free 10 licenses of ExpanDrive! Feeling lucky?

(RT @cottonduck)