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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Archives for March 2006

Grups

Up With Grups from New York Magazine is a great article discussing the shift in, and perhaps elimination of the generation gap. Those of us in our early to mid thirties have seen this slow shift, and I sure as hell didn’t recognize it, though looking around me today, I should have. Obviously the observances are a bit skewed (super mega cities like NYC vs. the rest of the country), and there is a range of attitudes and practices within this group. For example, I don’t exactly match up with this example:

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

I don’t have anywhere near that many pairs of sneakers (try two pairs). My friend John on the other hand… well let’s just say that he is the perfect NYC Grup poster boy.
Anyway, it’s a long article, so I’ve only made it through the first page, but I look forward to reading it in its entirety tonight.

Link via Jeff Croft.

FlashObject

FlashObject “is a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible.”

The DMCA and You

As noted on Copyfight, the Cato Institute has released Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which takes the law to task for being anti-competitive and derides “Congressional interference in the market for digital rights management technologies.” As noted in the report:

Why won’t iTunes play on Rio MP3 players? Why are viewers forced to sit through previews on some DVDs when they could have fast-forwarded through them on video? Why is it impossible to cut and paste text on Adobe eBook? In a just released study for the Cato Institute, Tim Lee, a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, answers these questions and more.

The new legislation’s most profound effects will be on the evolution of digital media technologies. We have grown accustomed to, and benefit from, a high-tech world that is freewheeling, open-ended, and fiercely competitive. Silicon Valley is a place where upstarts like Apple, Netscape, and Google have gone from two-man operations to billion-dollar trendsetters seemingly overnight. The DMCA threatens to undermine that competitive spirit by giving industry incumbents a powerful legal weapon against new entrants.

This is yet another clear sign that the DMCA affects every single one of us, no matter what our political leanings may be.

Docking boxes

Docking boxes (dbx) “adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements. And … in what might be another world-first for brothercake – dbx is fully accessible to the keyboard as well as the mouse, an action I’ve dubbed “press ‘n’ move”.” This looks interesting, and may well join my tool box for future sites. Though I need to compare its functionality with some of the other JS tool sets that are AJAXified, I’m very excited about the fact that it is keyboard accessible, and hope that it degrades nicely for screen readers.