I was browsing digg not too long ago, and came upon an article about Bittorrent. When attempting to read further, I was greeted with bright white text proclaiming “Blocked Website!” on a dark blue background. Now, I live in an apartment for students at Portland State University, and am, therefore, no stranger to this screen. It typically appears when attempting to access certain known spyware sites, and – yes – torrent sites. However, this wasn’t a torrent site I was visiting – I was specifically visiting the digg comment section about the particular story. The story was blocked anyway.

Interested, I decided to try something. I googled “bittorrent,” and was (un)surprised to see this:

Heh, apparently googling for Bittorrent information is prohibited.

Google for torrent? Blocked. Google for torrential downpour ? Blocked as well. Geez…overzealous much?

Do I agree with PSU blocking P2P traffic? Not really, but due to our limited bandwidth, I can see why they do it (even though this must have unintended consequences: doesn’t World of Warcraft contain a bittorrent client for its update process, for example?) Regardless, blocking the traffic itself is one thing…but doing keyword blocks on the URL string? Wow. What else is going to set off the great Cymphonix Network shaper? Pornography? Current events?

Thanks for saving me from myself, PSU.

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(Before I get into this: yes, I did use Photoshop to prepare this demonstration. I really like Photoshop CS3, but you still have to call a spade a spade.)

When I downloaded the beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 a couple of days ago, what I noticed first wasn’t the improved speed, the new palette locations, or some feature upgrades. Nope; the first thing I noticed was the icon: a sharp, simple, blue-gradient-filled box with a couple of letters on it, which might as well mean Postscript or PlayStation:

Gone was the feather. Gone, apparently, was a sense of style. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one curious about this. However, unlike these folks, I just silently assumed this was a placeholder icon, and stopped thinking about it. I mean, c’mon: I’m not a designer, but if I created a portion of one of our webapps’ interfaces with these types of icons as menu choices, my boss would tell me to get back to the drawing board.

Well, turns out it isn’t.

Wow. Apparently, others also thought these were placeholder icons and have started questioning Adobe. Reaction has generally been quite unkind. I haven’t seen this much vitriol over an icon since BBEdit brought Comic Sans back.

I won’t rehash any of the arguments made against these icons – they’re all good ones. But one think I don’t quite understand is all the shouting about how these icons look at small sizes.

Yeah, that’s not good – but I think they’re equally as bad at large sizes. As a Mac user, with a 1600×1080 desktop, it wouldn’t be out of the question for me to bump up the size of my desktiop icons, and just throw a few of my most frequently used apps out there, for easy access. Well, with these new icons, let’s just take a look at how that might look:

See what I’m getting at? Quick – pick the two sorest thumbs.

Look. I get the periodic table. But, when viewing what’s been produced (along with the fact that Adobe hasn’t even made this shift to all of their applications – check out Acrobat and some other icons I can’t decipher – that explanation starts to sound more like a college student who stayed out all night partying, hit the word processor with minutes to spare, and whipped off something slapdash, and then just as quickly created a half-assed reason for it.

Time to hit the books, Adobe.

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I have nothing but praise for the beta, Universal version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that I’ve been using for several days. I like the modifications to the palettes (they no longer get lost like they used to) and there appear to be a lot of little niceties added to the program. As a web developer, I’ll probably never use the most powerful of Photoshop’s features, but I have been very, very satisfied with the number one reason for this upgrade: performance.

I originally bought an iMac G5. This was a great machine, until it died. After several months of wrangling with the local Apple store, I was given an otherwise equivalent 2Ghz iMac Core Duo. As a geek and web developer, I was pleased with this – now I got to install things like Parallels, and Windows XP (in order to swing my sword in that time-sink known as Oblivion.) As someone who can appreciate such things, I was also blown away by the performance of Rosetta, Apple’s compatibility layer that allows older applications not written for Intel’s processors to run seamlessly. This doesn’t meant the speed was equivalent; I was impressed that they could make these apps run at all. Indeed, Rosetta-run applications lag significantly behind their universal counterparts (and have a voracious appetite for RAM).

Photoshop was one of the worst offenders; even increasing my RAM to 1.5 gigabytes still only made it tolerable. Palettes routinely took several seconds to gain focus; zooming was far from instant; and sometimes, while swapping, the text tool was almost unusable. That’s why I (along with many, many others) was excited to see this beta version of CS3 become available. Would it make Photoshop snappy again?

In a word? Yes. But pictures (or in this case, screencasts) are worth a thousand words. I setup a highly, highly unscientific test: first, I would grab 50 pictures from a website I maintain . These pictures are all JPEGs, ranging in size from 4K to around 100K. Then I’d launch the Rosetta version of Photoshop CS1. I’d quit the program, then relaunch it by dragging these fifty pictures onto the Photoshop icon, and see how long it took. Then I’d do the same with the universal CS3 beta. (Why did I quit each program and then relaunch them? I didn’t want to have to worry about my RAM swapfile making this test take longer than it had to, for either program.)

Here are the movies.

Screencast 1: Photoshop CS1, Rosetta

Screencast 2: Photoshop CS3 beta, Universal

The verdict?
The beta manages this task in 18 seconds, while the CS1 takes 47. That’s a pretty healthy improvements. Kudos, Adobe.

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Not to be outdone by my Portland Portal, electricstate.com (aka, this site) has been redesigned to look like more of a traditional blog. The emphasis is on readability.

• Bio/links are easily available

• Site searching and browsing can be easily accomplished

• Font size and leading should make reading my entries easier.

• You can get in touch with me through my LinkedIn profile and Meebo sidebar. Yeah, I’m hip to the web 2.0, kidz.

Oh, and some posts – ones I deem worthy – will be following by a plethora of icons. Using these icons, you can submit these aforementioned posts to sites like digg and reddit. Let’s get viral!