OhRyan.ca

Google labs just launched a political quote comparison engine called “in quotes.”
Apparently Steven Harper is running for Prime Minister of Canadia.

Update: Looks like the fixed it.

The year is 1996, grunge is on it’s last dying breaths, gas is cheap and the internet is rapidly making it’s way out of nerdy basements into the mainstream. The dot-com bubble is underway and web sites are ugly!

I’ve often wondered if the terrible web design back then was completely due to the technological limitations, or if it was entirely due to the fact that nobody had designed for the web before. Or if it was some sort of combination of the two factors. 

To answer this question, I came up with the idea of a 1996 compatibility challenge. The idea for this was partially inspired by this post on the pingdom.com blog: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=423. Seeing those old sites brought back so many memories of <font> tags and colspans. 

Here’s the challenge.
Take an existing web page and make it 1996 compatible. It doesn’t have to match the functionality and it doesn’t have to look identical. 
In order for a site to be 1996 compatible, it needs to be designed for the following targets.  

• OS: Windows 95. As far as I remember, there were some serious font display and color issues with the Mac OS, but their market share was so small that a site could easily get away without designing for macs. Windows 3.1 was still quite popular, but we’re ignorning it. 
• Browser: Netscape Navigator 2.0. Netscape had an enormous market share in the 90s. Version 2.0 was release in March 1996. Internet Explorer 3.0 compatibility is a bonus. 
• HTML: Version 1.0
• Javascript: 1.0, was released with NN2/IE3. Since we’re designing for NN, use it’s DOM for any fancy DHTML tricks. 
• Screen: 640×480, 256 colors. Bigger and better displays existed, but were prohibitively expensive. 
• Filesize: 42kb. With slow dialup modems of the day, filesize was the major limiting factor in site load time. I suspect this will be the hardest constraint to work within. The number is based on ancient study I found, stating that the average filesize of a website in August 1997 was 44kb. I arbitrarily dropped a couple of kilobytes. http://www.pantos.org/atw/35654.html

My good friend notian will also be taking part in this challenge. We’ll be testing our sites in an Win95 virtual machine. If you’re interested in joining the quest for the best website of 1996, leave a comment or tweet or whatnot.

Go figure. 

• Battery life is better. I haven’t had to charge my phone over night.
• Keyboard and animations seem faster. 
• My car adapter actually charges my phone again. 
• I’m getting 1 more bar of 3G at home.

Hak5 is an internet TV show about “everything from network security, open source and forensics, to DIY modding and the homebrew scene.” In some ways it’s the spiritual successor to The Broken. I was a big fan of thes how when they first started releasing episodes 4 3 years ago.  But for one reason or another, I stopped following the show sometime near the end of the first season.

Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I heard that Hak5 had been signed to Revision 3 earlier this summer. I watched the first and second episodes as soon as I found them available on tivo. To my dismay, the show has gone down hill. The episodes were not at all up to par with the production quality of most other shows on the revision 3 network. 

First of all, the show did not seem to be edited or rehearsed. The hosts were literally reading off scripts in front of them and they still managed to make mistakes! A couple of times the shot quickly switched between the 3 sets for no apparent reason. In some cases the hosts had trouble demoing the software they were talking about. I don’t get why they did not take the time to edit out any of these error and/or reshoot scenes. I’d assume that Revision 3 would be giving them a budget or direct accept to their editing infrastructure, so that amateur mistakes like this don’t make it to air. 

Second, the new hosts are really unpolished and awkward. There’s a weird (lack of) chemistry between the 3 of them. Also, the topics they talk about are fairly complex and the hosts aren’t able to strike a good balance between explaining the complexities in a way that’s understandable by a wider range of people. For example, in episode one, mubix tried explain a piece of “forensics” software called Maltego. I spent the entire 10 minute segment wondering when he was going to actually explain the software, benefits of using and how there was anything “forensic” about the software. Even though he gave a couple of use-cases, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He just said the word “transforms” a lot. 

The other software that they talked about in the two episodes I watched was all fairly irrelevant. Covering openDNS in a show that also covers fairly advanced network management tools and hacking concept seems a little backwards. And why would you have a guy try to explain decompiling windows programs and hexediting when he admits that he’s not even a programmer.

The overal format of the show has just become very confusing.

Other than that, the show still has a couple of good things going for it.
The microshaft ads are still hilarious.
The old host Darrent is still good.
It seems like they are focus on some more pratical “hacking” technics, DIY and other stupid nerd tricks.
Even though I’m not involved in it, it does seem like the show has a good community, that’s always a good thing.

Links to the episodes: 
Episode 1
Episode 2

With the looming Canadian federal election, I thought I’d take a look at the federal party websites. I’ll be rating them on 5 characteristics, on a 5 point scale:

• Design: How much I like the look and feel.
• User Interface: How well does the site layout work
• Candidate Info: How good is the info on the candidate in my riding. 
• Web 2.0: How well are they pimping themselves on the social networks, are they including a lot of media, etc. 
• Ease of contributing: Online donations have been a major part of the current US Presidential election. I took a quick look at their contribution processes to see if there were any obvious problems. I didn’t actually donate.

NDP – 92%

• Design: 5. My favorite site. Nice and tidy, good use of orange. Cute icons.
• UI: 4.5. The index page is really well organized. The drop down menus are a little redundant, since most of them only contain 1 elements. The use of flash on the for the candidate finder is unfortunate that page should really be accessible to everyone.
• Candidate Info: 4.5. The bio is a little sparse.
• Web2.0: 4. Twitter, facebook. Their site looks the most web 2.0.
• Donation: 5. The most straightforward process of them all.

Conservatives – 90%

• Design: 4. Decent overall. Some weird layout and graphic choices. 
• UI: 4.5. Dropdown menus are familiar, nice series of quicklinks on the right nav. 
• Candidate Info: 4.5. Has everything I could want except for his mailing address.
• Web2.0: 5. They’re on the ball, flickr account, friend feed, twitter, myspace, facebook. And all their ads are online. 
• Contributions: 4.5. Giant donation buttons everywhere. They’re already required to collect a lot of info already, they could have at least made it a one step process. 

Green – 76%

• Design: 4. Pretty good. Albeit a little uninspired and sloppy. Probably designed by a volunteer.
• UI: 4.5. Bonus marks for using a drilldown information structure and NOT using dropdown menus.
• Candidate Info: 4. Long Bio. No mailing address.
• Web2.0: 2.5. They have blogs and a youtube channel.
• Contributions: 4. Nice and easy.

Liberal – 52%

• Design: 3.5. Simple. Just a little too simple. Too much white. 
• UI: 3. Use of flash on the index for something that could’ve been easily done in javascript was a bad choice. Other than that, it’s pretty run of the mill. 
• Candidate Info: 0! No picture! No personal contact info! No permalink. Unacceptable. 
• Web2.0: 3.5. Facebook, youtube, some video and pictures. Seems like an afterthought. 
• Contributions: 3. The page is quite cluttered and a little confusing. The page contains elements outside of the secured site, causing a certificate error that will probably scare of some potential contributors. 

Bloc Québécois – 47.5%

• Design: 2.5. Looks like puke, but it could be worse.
• UI: 3. Mediocre. 
• Candidate Info: N/A. They only run candidates in Quebec.
• Web2.0: 1. They have a “blogue” I guess that’s worth something.
• Contributions: 3. The online form is only available in french (isn’t that against some law?!). It appears to be pretty straightforward.

Libertarian – 23%

• Design: 0. My 7 month old son could design a better site. 
• UI: 3. It’s oldschool, but effective.
• Candidate Info: N/A. None in my riding.
• Web2.0: 0.5. They have a forum *shrug*.
• Contributions: N/A. I think they’re still too small to be accepting donations on a large scale. 

 
There you have it, if you want to vote based on my opinion of the party’s website, you’ll have to vote NDP.
I took a look at the rest of the minor parties for any standouts. The Canadian Action Party has a surprisingly good website. The West Block Party‘s site is easily the worst, it has an under construction diggerman.