meyerweb.com

One of the things you discover as a speaker and, especially, a conference organizer is this: Keynote generates really frickin’ enormous PDFs. Seriously. Much like Miles O’Keefe, they’re huge. We had one speaker last year whose lovingly crafted and beautifully designed 151-slide deck resulted in a 175MB PDF.

Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe. Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt. Whatever you personally may think of net access at conferences, at this point, not providing net access is roughly akin to not providing functioning bathrooms.

So what’s the answer? ShrinkIt is fine if the slides use lots of vectors and you’re running Snow Leopard. If the slides use lots of bitmapped images, or you’re not on Snow Leopard, ShrinkIt can’t help you.

If the slides are image-heavy, then you can always load the PDF into Preview and then do a “Save As…” where you select the “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter. That will indeed drastically shrink the file size—that 175MB PDF goes down to 13MB—but it can also make the slides look thoroughly awful. That’s because the filter achieves its file size reduction by scaling all the images down by at least 50% and to no more than 512 pixels on a side, plus it uses aggressive JPEG compression. So not only are the images infested with compression artifacts, they also tend to get that lovely up-scaling blur. Bleah.

I Googled around a bit and found “Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview from early 2006. There I discovered that anyone can create their own Quartz filters, which was the key I needed. Thus armed with knowledge, I set about creating a filter that struck, in my estimation, a reasonable balance between image quality and file size reduction. And I think I’ve found it. That 175MB PDF gets taken down to 34MB with what I created.

If you’d like to experience this size reduction for yourself (and how’s that for an inversion of common spam tropes?) it’s pretty simple:

1. Download and unzip Reduce File Size (75%). Note that the “75%” relates to settings in the filter, not the amount of reduction you’ll get by using it.
2. Drop the unzipped .qfilter file into ~/Library/Filters.

Done. The next time you need to reduce the size of a PDF, load it up in Preview, choose “Save As…”, and save it using the Quartz filter you just installed.

If you’re the hands-on type who’d rather set things up yourself, or you’re a paranoid type who doesn’t trust downloading zipped files from sites you don’t control (and I actually don’t blame you if you are), then you can manually create your own filter like so:

1. Go to /Applications/Utilities and launch ColorSync Utility.
2. Select the “Filters” icon in the application’s toolbar.
3. Find the “Reduce File Size” filter and click on the little downward-arrow-in-gray-circle icon to the right.
4. Choose “Duplicate Filter” in the menu.
5. Use the twisty arrow to open the duplicated filter, then open each of “Image Sampling” and “Image Compression”.
6. Under “Image Sampling”, set “Scale” to 75% and “Max” to 1280.
7. Under “Image Compression”, move the arrow so it’s halfway between the rightmost marks. You’ll have to eyeball it (unless you bust out xScope or a similar tool) but you should be able to get it fairly close to the halfway point.
8. Rename the filter to whatever will help you remember its purpose.

As you can see from the values, the “75%” part of the filter’s name comes from the fact that two of the filter’s values are 75%. In the original Reduce File Size filter, both are at 50%. The maximum size of images in my version is also quite a bit bigger than the original’s—1280 versus 512—which means that the file size reductions won’t be the same as the original.

Of course, you now have the knowledge needed to fiddle with the filter to create your own optimal balance of quality and compression, whether you downloaded and installed the zip or set it up manually—either way, ColorSync Utility has what you need. If anyone comes up with an even better combination of values, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. In the meantime, share and enjoy!

The winners of Microsoft’s MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge (for which I was honored to serve as one of the judges) have been announced, and the Grand Prize has been awarded to…

Jimmy D’s Frog Log.

Which is an HTML5/CSS/JS entry.

That doesn’t run in Internet Explorer.

Yep.

Frog Log was my top pick, and obviously did very well with the other judges too, for a good reason: it’s a fun game. It doesn’t play quite the same in Firefox previous to v3.5, as the drag-n-drop doesn’t work. Instead, you click on a frog, then click where you want to place it. I actually found that made the game a touch easier for me, but your interaction may vary. In addition to working in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, it also runs on a number of mobile devices.

Here’s an excerpt from my judging remarks:

Just a great little game, addictive and well thought out with some interesting gameplay. I would LOVE to see this developed further by the author… My only ding was that drag-n-drop failed in Firefox 3.5; clicking worked fine, though.

I’m not sure why I had trouble with drag-n-drop in Firefox 3.5, since I don’t have have the same problem now. Maybe I got confused with browser version numbers or something. Regardless, it works fine, it’s a great game, and remember: it’s less than 10K unzipped.

I also gave high marks to the HTML5 runner-up, Chris Evans’ 100pxls, which was the source of my Dadaist tweet a couple of weeks back and lands right in my personal sweet spot for “doing odd things with popular web services”. Here’s some of what I had to say in my remarks:

…really liked the concept here, especially the nonsensical tweets that were generated by drawing your own icon. The icons could be made easier to see in the main display, but I suppose that’s a minor quibble.

I’d like to thank the MIX 10K crew for getting me involved as a contest judge; I really enjoyed seeing what people created and had a hard time narrowing down my votes to just a handful of winners. More importantly, though, I offer my heartiest congratulations to all the winners, and most especially to Jimmy and Chris for doing such fun, interesting, and downright cool stuff with 10K of web standards goodness!

I’m a bad conference organizer.

Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November, and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job.

Okay. So. Time to correct that.

(deep breath)

Hey everyone, check it out: the complete tour schedule for An Event Apart 2010! Woohoooo!

1. Seattle: April 5-7, 2010 (yes, three days; more on that anon)
2. Boston: May 24-25, 2010
3. Minneapolis: July 26-27, 2010
4. Washington, DC: September 16-17, 2010
5. San Diego: November 1-2, 2010

We’ve got a pretty killer lineup, if I do say so myself. You can get the mostly-complete list from our opening-of-sales announcement last November. It lists the people we had confirmed at the time; there have been a few additions since then. Check out your city of choice to see who’s going to be there! (But always remember that speaker lineups are subject to change: speakers are people too, and life has a way of interfering with schedules. I myself had to withdraw from An Event Apart Boston last year due to a family emergency.)

The price to register for these two-day, one-track Events is the same as it was in 2009, and there are educational and group discounts available for those who are interested.

But wait, I just said “two-day” when the first show of the year is clearly three days. What gives?

Seattle is the site of our first-ever A Day Apart, a full-day workshop that can be attended on its own or as part of a full three days of Event Apart ecstasy. And the inaugural Day Apart will be nothing less than a detailed plunge into HTML 5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm. Jeremy handles the markup; Dan gets stylish. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m going to be in the back of the room for the whole day, soaking up as much as I can.

If you want to attend just the workshop, it’s $399 for the whole day if you buy an early bird ticket (available through March 5th). The price goes up $50 when early bird ends, and another $100 if you show up at the door. But I wouldn’t recommend that last, because I don’t think there will be any tickets available at the door. Again: if you show up unannounced on the day of the workshop and ask to buy a ticket, we will most likely have to turn you away, because I expect that there won’t be any seats available.

On the other hand, maybe you’d like to experience more than just one day of AEA goodness. Maybe you’d like to go whole hog and attend both the two-day Event Apart and the subsequent Day Apart, soaking up all the knowledge and enthusiasm and camaraderie that typifies An Event Apart. And who could blame you? If you do that, then the total early bird price for all three days is $1,190, whereas buying the event and workshop passes separately would total $1,294. That’s right: you actually get slightly more than $100 off the cost of the workshop if you attend all three days, over and above the early bird discount. (Or you can think of it as getting $100+ off the cost of the conference. We’re not fussy.)

As it happens, these three-day passes have proved quite popular. So if you want to get your hands on one of those—or on any Seattle tickets, whether one, two, or three days—I wouldn’t wait too long. Our internal analyses suggest that there will come a time, some time before the doors open on April 5th, that the ability to buy a ticket will cease to be. It may even pine for a fjord or two.

As for the four shows that come after Seattle, well, they’re looking pretty popular too.

I know I say this every year, but I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned for the year. Jeffrey and I constantly and (we hope) consistently strive to create an event that we ourselves want to attend, and that’s absolutely true of the shows and workshop we have planned in 2010. I can’t wait to hear what the speakers and attendees have to share. Hope to see you there!

I am now a Fray Contributor. Official, for real, badge and everything—check the sidebar on the home page. My completely and in many ways unbelievably true story of beginnings around an ending, “A Death of Coincidence”, appears in Issue 3: Sex & Death.

This is a huge deal for me. I still have a little trouble believing it.

For a long time—as in, for more than a decade—I’ve had “participate in Fray” as one of those little deferred dreams we all carry around in the background. I certainly could’ve submitted pieces all along, either for the original site or one of the live events, and might even have been accepted. The thing is, I wasn’t dreaming of simply getting a piece accepted and checking an internal to-do box. I wanted to participate the right way, by my own internal reckoning. That meant not only vying for inclusion, but doing so with a worthy story, one that felt right.

When Fray relaunched as a themed quarterly, I took notice. I often work better when I have something to work against; constraints energize me more than they chafe. The first issue’s theme, “Busted!”, called to mind a few childhood incidents, but nothing really coalesced. There was nothing that said, “I’m a Fray piece; write me.” The second issue’s theme, “Geek”, left me with far too many options. I couldn’t hook onto anything with the right vibe.

Then issue 3’s theme was announced, and I knew exactly what I was going to submit. No rumination of possible narratives, no idle exploring my past for ideas, no doubt at all. I knew, and it was right.

In fact, it was a piece I’d already written, except for the ending. The ending I had used was certainly good enough, and was certainly the right ending for the time and place I wrote and performed it. But there had always been a different, nearly unbelievable ending to that story and I’d always held it back, kept close to myself, never quite sure why. Now I know why. It was the piece that made that story a Fray story.

If you want to read it, you’ll need to pick up Issue 3 of Fray, which you can of course do very easily. You can pick up issues 1 and 3 together for a great price, or become a subscriber and get issue 3 as your first. Any of those would be awesome. Or, I suppose, you can wait until the piece is published for free on the Fray site, though I should tell you that it could be a long while until that happens.

I can’t thank Frayer-in-Chief Derek Powazek enough for including me in Fray. I am quite literally as proud as I was when my first book was published. I’ve passed a personal and professional milestone, and far from just ticking off a checkbox on some internal to-do list, I’m basking in the glow of a dream fully and properly fulfilled.

It wasn’t what I would call unseasonably cold, but then the season was mid-autumn and the afternoon wind along the river did cut the skin a bit. I kept my leather jacket zipped up all the way as I made my way back to the hotel with shopping bag in hand. Brisk, I might have said back home, or even chilly. Not winter yet, but you could feel it coming in the snap and shift of the air.

I crossed the last street before the hotel, keeping an eye on both the short-cycle light and the short-tempered traffic. Not that there was any particular reason for them to be short-tempered—it was a Sunday afternoon and there were hardly any cars on the bridges and roads that grid the downtown area—but I knew from experience that pedestrian intimidation was something of a sport for the locals, and I really didn’t feel like tempting fate, or at least somebody’s ideas about what constituted a bit of fun.

Having threaded through the small bunch of oncoming pedestrians and reached the relative safety of the sidewalk, I came upon a large man with two children in tow, all bundled against the cold in parkas and scarves and hats. He asked if I had a minute, and I immediately knew what was coming. Sure enough, it came out: the request for a dollar, some change, anything I could spare. I glanced at him, at the children, back at him. Something for bus fare, he said. They’d missed dinner at the Mission the night before, he said. Just a little help, anything I could do, he said.

How many times had I heard this before? I gave the usual excuses about not having any cash, I only travel with credit cards, so sorry, had to go.

And went, the wind biting into my cheeks as I strode to the hotel’s front door, the overhead heater blowing a curtain of warmth across the entryway. Into the lobby. Into the elevator. Thirty floors into the air. And in my sight, still, the children looking at me. The boy of maybe eight, looking up at me curiously. The girl of six, peeping at me warily from behind the man’s bulk. Props? Accomplices?

Did it matter?

I stood at the counter of the lobby gift shop, stacks of nutrition bars in my hands. A bottle of water in the side pocket of the jacket I had yet to shed. An apple in the other. My credit card between two fingers, ready for the attendant to take.

Through the doors, into the cold wind under the canopy, the plastic shopping bag weighing down my hand. I reached the sidewalk and there they were on the same corner, looking like they were getting ready to cross the street. I caught the man’s eye, signaled him to wait. As I approached his face shifted, softened, something like relief warring with shame melding into a curiously childlike expression.

“God bless you,” he said to me, and I chose to believe that he meant it. The little boy smiled up at me, a tiny edge embedded in the corners of his mouth. The girl still peeped warily, maybe even more so now. The man and I were shaking hands, looking squarely at each other for a moment. I told him to make sure to get the kids to that Mission dinner. I could think of nothing else to say, because it was the only thing I was thinking. Get the kids fed, keep them as healthy as possible, no matter what else.

As I turned into the recessed, canopied area that sheltered the hotel’s front door, I glanced back at the street corner. The three of them were waiting to cross toward the small park to the north, the gift shop’s white bag ludicrously small in the big man’s hands, and then they were occluded by the building’s corner. I walked back through the wall of warm air, into the dim lobby and out of the bright outdoors, thinking that there was every chance I’d been suckered, and knowing that it didn’t matter.

So Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell has gained national notoriety for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple, referring them instead to another justice to have the marriage performed. His action has, of course, provoked a great deal of condemnation. Pretty much every elected Louisiana official above Mr. Bardwell (and plenty of them to either side) in the administrative hierarchy has called for his removal from his position. That goes all the way up to Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who said:

“This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately – including the revoking of his license.”

As for Mr. Bardwell himself, he has claimed not to be racist, but instead concerned for the biracial children that result from mixed-race marriage. Of all that he’s said, though, I was particularly interested by the following:

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

It interested me because it’s exactly the kind of reasoning that underlies “conscience protection” laws that exempt medical professionals who wish to refuse participation in abortion, or dispensation of contraception.

So now I’m very curious to know whether what pro-life groups have to say about what this man has done and how he’s done it. Or, for that matter, what Governor Jindal himself now thinks of the bill he recently signed into law.

Last week, I got an interesting inquiry from Velda Christensen:

@meyerweb *wondering just how many of your followers follow @zeldman and vice-versa*

I had no idea. Furthermore, I didn’t know of a tool that could tell me. So I built one: Followerlap.

As it turned out, the Twitter API made answering the specific question pretty ridiculously easy, thanks to followers/ids. All it takes is two API requests, one for each username. The same would be true of friends/ids, on top of which I suspect I’ll fairly shortly build a tool quite similar to Followerlap.

Since I announced Followerlap’s existence on (where else?) Twitter, I’ve had a few repeated (and not unexpected) bits of feedback.

• Why not list the common followers? Because followers/ids returns a list of numeric IDs. Resolving those IDs as usernames would require one API hit per ID. If there are 15 followers in common, that’s not such a big deal, but if there are 1,500, well, I’ll run out of my hourly allotment of API requests very quickly. Maybe there’s a better way; if so, I’d love to hear about it, because that would be a great addition.

• Why can’t I find out how many people follow both Stephen Fry and Shaquille O’Neal? Past a certain number of followers, somewhere in the 200,000–250,000 range, the API just dies. You can’t even count on getting a consistent error message back. There are ways around this, but I didn’t want to stress the API that way, so it just fails. Sorry.

• How can I link to a specific comparison? At the moment, you can’t. I hope to make that happen soon, but I decided that a tool this simple should have a similarly simple launch. Ship early, ship often, right? Anyway, it’s on the list of things to add soon. Use the new “Livelink to this result” link underneath a result. (See update below for more.)

So that’s Followerlap. Any other questions? I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments, though for a number of reasons I may be slow to respond.

Update 6 Jul 09: as noted in the edited point above, livelinking of comparison results is now, um, live. So now you can pass around results like the number of people who follow both God and the Devil (thanks to Paul M. Watson for coming up with that one!). I call this “livelinking” because hitting a result URL will get you the very latest results for that particular comparison. “Permalinking” to me implied that it would link to a specific result at a specific time, which the tool doesn’t do and very likely never, ever will.

It’s taken me slightly more than a month to write this post. It’s about people at their best.

Last month, just after speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, my laptop was stolen.

Actually, to be more painfully accurate, my laptop case was stolen—and inside it at the time was the laptop, my mobile phone, and my wallet. Plus the usual assortment of stuff that goes into a laptop case.

Because I still remember to this day advice Tantek gave me just before we boarded a bus to Narita airport, I had my passport on me. I happened to have picked up my camera to take some pictures of the conference hall. My clothes were still in my hotel room. Everything else was gone.

I can’t really describe the feeling. Maybe you’ve felt it. Shaking and stunned and self-blaming and nakedly vulnerable. All that magnified by the complete loss of funds and communication with my family.

And the data. The lost data. I have backups, but they’re never as current as one would want. (Which reminds me: if you aren’t backing up, and you aren’t doing so regularly, learn from my loss and start.) Besides, at that moment, as the full realization of what had happened slid coldly into my gut and started its slow, merciless expansion throughout my entire body, I didn’t think “Oh, I have backups until that date, and all my work mail is on the mail server, and I’ve been uploading the best pictures to online services.” Those things didn’t occur to me. They were completely blocked by the continual, sickening, endlessly looping thought: IT’S ALL GONE.

And that’s when people started pitching in to help me out.

In addition to helping me look for the case in hopes that it had just been moved somewhere non-obvious, Khris Loux of JS-Kit let me call home from his iPhone without a second thought, so I could tell Kat what had happened and get her immediately started on contacting banks and credit card companies. And the honest concern in his eyes helped snap me back from near-paralysis, touched by the regard coming from someone I’d only met an hour before.

Then Gabe Mac, having heard what was going on, came up to me with a fully charged mobile phone I could borrow so that I could remain in contact with my family until I went home. He didn’t ask me how I would get it back to him, because I don’t think it had occurred to him. He just said, “Eric, I have a spare phone. You need it. Take it.”

So I did. And much, much later that same night, it was nearly a lifeline.

Throughout all this, Boris and Patrick, the conference founders, were working to find out if one of the tech crew had accidentally picked it up, or it had been turned in to venue staff. And when it became inescapably clear that the case was well and truly gone, they sent one of their staff to get a SIMM card for the phone Gabe had loaned me and 200 euros in cash so I could get home. Just did it, because they could see that I would need those things even when I couldn’t. They also arranged a ride for me to get to my evening’s social appointment.

That appointment was with Steven Pemberton and his lovely family, who fed me a great dinner in their fabulous top-floor flat and were more than gracious about my disordered mental state. After dinner, Steven took me to the nearby police station and acted as translator as I filled out a report. And then he loaned me use of his home phone to call a couple of credit card companies that I had to speak with personally in order to make sure my business credit cards were cancelled.

It wasn’t the relaxed evening of dinner and shop talk I’d been hoping to have, but I did several things that needed to be done and Steven made it possible. And we did get in a tiny smidgen of (very interesting) shop talk near the end.

At every step of that evening, someone was there to help push me forward, help me lower the unexpected barriers just a little bit, help ease the situation however they could. So many people coming together to help out someone they’d known for years or never before met. Thanks to them all, I was able to get home without further incident. Thanks to them all, I had a major yang to the theft’s yin, a powerful reminder of just how good people can be.

Thank you, all.