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Condensed knowledge for 2008-03-12

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Reviews

Thomas TimberWolf

Thomas TimberWolf

Back in 2001, you could see some wonderful and innovative cartoons on the Internet. I’m talking about Thomas TimberWolf, an (unfortunately) short series made sometime in 2000-2001 by Chuck Jones and company. This series is possibly the last animation work of Chuck Jones, who died in 2002. This was about the same time that you could see some truly crappy cartoons on TV — not that things have improved much nowadays. But let’s get back to the good stuff…

One of the wonderful things about Thomas TimberWolf is that the series was done in Flash. While some of the smooth movement and art of hand-drawn cartoons was lost, what we gained was a small file size (about 2.8 MB for 5-6 minutes of fun) and vector art. Vector art?! Oh yeah. It means you can scale any of these cartoons up to whatever size you want, and the lines will still be smooth and crisp. No pixelation, no blurriness, only clear lines and colors. Wonderful!

Let’s also not forget that the cartoons themselves are great. I mean, c’mon, we’ve got an intellectual timber wolf with a tragi-comic flaw: every time he says the word “Timber!”, trees fall on him. He spends his days trying to avoid falling trees and not entirely succeeding. How can you not be entertained by that? 😀 What’s even better is that Chuck Jones’ signature style was retained during the computer animation process. We’ve got the same minimalistic gags, the familiar, endearing character art, and that wonderful, non-specific warm and fuzzy feeling that you get when you watch quality stuff. I can’t describe it, but any cartoon aficionado will probably know what I’m talking about.

Thomas TimberWolf was released on the Internet in 2001, and it seems that a short while after the series ended, the Flash files became easily accessible on various sites, without copyright restrictions. I’m not sure entirely sure about that, so don’t quote me on it, but that seems to be the case. At any rate, I believe I downloaded the episodes from this same site several years ago. They’re still up and available there, so that’s a good thing.

Although only 13 episodes got released to the public, there are about 6 more episodes available, and that’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Stephen Fossati, who created, directed, wrote and co-produced the series, said it sometime in 2005. Stephen Fossati is Chuck Jones’ only living protege and worked closely with him for about 10 years. Their collaboration culminated with the Thomas TimberWolf series. I would love to see the other episodes, and I wonder where they are. If anybody has information about them, please let me know.

If for some reason the site where the episodes are posted goes down, I have them and can post them here. I’m not sure about the legality of it. If someone can give me the all clear on it, I’ll gladly put them up.

So, while they’re still available, go download all of the episodes, and keep them safely on your hard drives. They should be preserved for posterity.

More information

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Thoughts

A look at culture and technology through sound effects

I was listening to the radio one morning, and realized the sound effects they were using to advertise a website were the clicks of a keyboard likely made in the 80’s — you know, long key travel, spring-loaded action, hard clicks. But it worked.

More importantly, it is the only sound that can approximate a keyboard well, and transmit that action to an audience. Think about where keyboards are going today though. Apple is putting out keyboards that barely make any sounds — for example, see the new slim iMac keyboard, or the MacBook or MacBook Pro keyboards. Other hardware manufacturers are following suit, each advertising softer keys, more muffled sounds, etc. How do you record that? It can’t translate well over radio as a sound effect.

Remember how they used to advertise accessing the internet just a few short years ago? Through the sounds of modems. Tell me, could anyone afford to advertise internet access like that any more? No, they’d get laughed out of business, because most everyone is using high-speed access now. But is there a sound that can represent an Internet connection now? How do you represent it or record it?

What about the sound effects for phone calls? They were the simple, old-fashioned ring, right? Everyone knew what it was, and there was no confusion. Not any more. Although people still recognize the old phone ring, children growing up nowadays have so many choices when it comes to ringtones, that soon enough, the old phone ring will no longer be a recognizable sound effect for phone calls.

In some of the older movies or radio commercials, beeps, flashing lights and loud sounds were used as sound effects for computers. The starts and stops of tape reels were well known as well. What about the sounds of the punch cards, rolling through the machines and getting processed? Those are all things of the past. The only sounds computer hardware makes nowadays is the drone-like noise of the hard drives and cooling fans. It may be the representation of an efficient computing machine, but it’s pretty boring as a sound effect. Desktops or laptops (the newer ones anyway) make no sounds at all. We prize them based on how little sound they make, and rightly so, but we’ve lost the sound effects.

Remember the sound of switching TV channels? There was the manual, hard click of the round knob on the TV set (not many of you know about those anymore). If you were using a remote on older televisions, there was a sound pop, followed by a short period of static and the sound of the new channel that accompanied each channel switch. On newer televisions, that’s no longer the case. There’s no pop, click or jarring sound transition during channel switches. It’s all handled smoothly, and on some, the sound is gradually brought up to listening volume so as not to disturb you. But how do you represent a channel switch in a radio ad? You can’t, not anymore, not unless you use a decades-old sound effect.

The point of all these examples is to illustrate how technology is outpacing culture. I wanted to look at this through sound effects, but there are many ways in which it can be done. Just think of social networking sites, their invasion of privacy, and the new expectations of online behavior if you want to look at another aspect of this same issue.

One thing’s for sure — our culture has some catching up to do. While I love technology and embrace it (for the most part), we have to recognize that we’re in uncharted territory nowadays, in many, many areas of technology, particularly at its intersection with people and general culture. The rules aren’t even getting written, because no one is sure just how to grasp the situation. We each understand but a little portion of what’s going on — and that’s both scary and exciting, depending on your point of view.

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Reviews

Windows Family Safety

Windows Family SafetyWindows Family Safety (WFS) is a new offering from Microsoft that aims to offer protection from questionable or indecent websites to families or individuals. I tried it out for a couple of weeks, and found it to work fairly well, except for a few hiccups here and there.

It is a software-based internet filtering mechanism. The difference between a software-based internet filter and a hardware-based one is that the software needs to be installed on every computer where filtering is desired. A hardware-based internet filter is usually self-contained in a box or appliance that gets placed between the user’s internet connection and the internet. The benefit of such an appliance is readily seen. There’s nothing to install on client computers. Unfortunately, hardware-based solutions have been fairly expensive, historically speaking.

Software-based internet filtering has also cost money, until now. As a matter of fact, Microsoft used to offer one such software-based solution with its premium MSN service. Windows Family Safety may be that same offering, repackaged as a free service.

Having used other software-based internet filters, I can tell you Windows Family Safety is a lot easier to use, and much less annoying than paid products. Those other services, who don’t even deserve to be called by their names, were just plain awful. I had to authenticate every time I tried to access a website, and logins didn’t even take at times. What’s worse, if a single website called out to other websites to display information, as is so common these days, I had to authenticate for every single request. They were a nightmare, and I quickly uninstalled them.

Windows Family Safety requires a simple install, and the selection of a master account which can set the level of access for that computer. It uses Microsoft Passport sign-ons, which means I was able to use my Hotmail account to log in. After that, it was a matter of logging in every time I turned on my computer or came back from standby. This was one area where I encountered a hiccup though. The software had an option to allow me to save my username and password, so I wouldn’t have to enter them so often, but that option didn’t seem to work. I was stuck logging in much more than I cared to do, but still, this was nothing compared to the torture I went through with other software-based filters — as already mentioned in the paragraph above.

Just how does WFS work? It turns out that it uses a proxy to filter the traffic. It means that every time you make a call to a website, that call first goes through the WFS servers, where it gets matched to their content database and the website deemed to be appropriate for the level of safety that you’ve chosen. Here’s where I encountered two hiccups.

The first was that at peak times, the speed of my internet connection was slowed down to a crawl until it could pass through the fairly busy proxy servers and be filtered. That was really annoying, but I assume that’s going to get better as MS dedicates more proxy servers to the service. Perhaps it might be better to download content filters directly to each computer and filter the traffic locally, so the chance of a bottleneck is reduced or eliminated.

The second was the seemingly arbitrary designation of some sites as inappropriate. I chose to filter out adult, gambling and violent websites. Somehow, both of my blogs (ComeAcross and Dignoscentia) didn’t meet that standard, which was very surprising to me. Neither of those sites can even remotely be classified under those questionable categories. Fortunately, there’s a fairly simple process for requesting that a site be reconsidered for proper classification, and it’s built into the Windows Family Safety website. I followed the procedure, and within days, my sites were properly classified. But the fact that I had to go through all of that makes me wonder how they’re classified in the first place.

Overall, I found that WFS still hasn’t gotten proper branding. What I mean by that is that it’s not clearly identified as a product by Microsoft. The Windows Live OneCare Family Safety website is part of the Live Family of sites, true, but it’s not even identified on most of the other sites in that family (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) I also found that configuring one’s WFS account can be pretty unintuitive, as the navigation on the WFS site is cumbersome and lacking focus (much like the Windows Live OneCare site, come to think of it.) I even got code errors when I tried to surf through it recently, which is not what I expected from a public MS site.

On a general note, Microsoft really needs to do some work in associating each MS product with the Windows Live account that uses it, and making it easy for each user to access the online/offline settings for each product. Google does a great job with this, and MS could stand to learn from them here.

Windows Family Safety is a good solution, and it works well considering that it’s free. If you’re looking to set up some easy internet filtering at your home, it could turn out to work great for you. Give it a try and see!

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Google bought Jaiku

Around noon today, I saw Scoble’s Twitter about Google’s purchase of Jaiku, and left two comments on his blog post. Basically, I said that Jaiku’s purchase made sense, but that Google probably considered Twitter and found Jaiku to be less expensive. I use both Twitter and Jaiku myself. I tried using Jaiku as my primary microblogging service, but came back to Twitter.

The thing about Jaiku is that it has more built-in features than Twitter, no questions about that. Its built-in feed integration service doesn’t even exist at Twitter, where we have to use the third-party Twitterfeed to get similar functionality. I wrote an in-depth comparison of Twitter and Jaiku back in July, and I invite you to have a look at it (see Part 1 and Part 2 of “The value of microblogging services”).

The kicker could be even more interesting though, and I don’t know if someone else has already touched on this. We all know about Facebook’s ridiculous $15 billion valuation, right? Well, Google’s purchase of Jaiku has just burst that absolutely ridiculous bubble. Jaiku offers functionality very similar to Facebook’s, but without all the annoying hype.

I bet you the price Google paid for Jaiku was very reasonable, much like the price they paid for FeedBurner. I for one am glad Google pays sane prices for their acquisitions, unlike Microsoft. The only time I think they splurged was with YouTube, but they paid for the users there. (They obviously didn’t pay for the content, since most of it was and still is pirated from TV and movies…)

I hope Facebook’s valuation drops down to some normal amount now, something like $500-750 million. By the way, I’m not on Facebook and I don’t intend to join it any time soon. I’m also not on MySpace.

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