Ever wondered, what these free screensavers are all about?

Here is a good example of a job posted on Elance, which clarifies things a bit. To put it short the person there orders screensaver bundled with some sort of malware. Right now there are two people already willing to implement it…

Project Description
I need 2 softwares bundled together.

First software is a screensaver. (screensaver.exe) I will provide you with 20 pictures of THE PEAKS and I need a simple slideshow screensaver with these pictures. No need for settings or any special functions. I will need an installation wizard to install the software. Software will install itself in (c:/program files/thepeaks/screensaver.exe) Nothing complicated. A very simple, very easy to use screensaver. You can even get open source code on the internet for simple screensaver, I really don’t mind. This screensaver should also be removable in the “add/remove” fonctions of windows.

When this screensaver is installed, it will install an other “silent” EXE software. (c:/program files/thepeaks/silent.exe)
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If you just want to try it yourself here is the page with all tests.

Below are some benchmarking results I got using IE 6.0, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0 on my laptop. For those of you, who like reading here is a longer story.

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It’s tough, isn’t it?

Here is the same place on Google Maps.

That’s right and classy black on white is way behind according to readability study performed by Alyson L. Hill from Department of Psychology of Stephen F. Austin [State University]. You can actually get this conclusion by simply looking at paper’s webpage — it uses exactly the colors combination, which it found to be the most favorable. Nice touch indeed. While the study itself is quite dated (1997) I don’t suppose people has changed a lot since then so most if not all of results must still be valid. Here are some interesting ones:

- Green on yellow is the best color scheme in the most conditions except for italicized Arial, for which it’s the worst
- Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial
- The combination, which gives the fastest response time is (surprise) italicized green Times New Roman on yellow background

- Black on gray is much faster than black on white

Here are response times results from the paper:

Good to see that plain black Arial on white (as used in this blog) is doing well too. Do you agree?

Few more useful Web Page Readability / Usability Research works from the same lab can be found here.

Have you ever wondered what are the limits of voice encoding rate providing that it remains intelligible? Some ultra-narrow-band codecs use as low as 2.15 kbps but can you do better?

I suggest that the best (in terms of lowest bitrate) voice encoding technology would be to translate audio into text with speech recognition first, transfer voice over network as a text and then translate it into speech again using text-to-speech. This approach allows to transfer meaning only and assures that the minimal possible information is transmitted. It’s easy to estimate the bitrate of such imaginary codec.

Let’s assume that the person speaks at a rate of 200 words per minute. It corresponds to approximately 1000 bytes of uncompressed text or 500 bytes if apply some compression. That gives us bitrate of 1.2 kbps, which is less than two times better when compared with narrow-band speex mentioned above.

I don’t think speex sounds particularly good at 2.15 but it’s noteworthy for the fact that it hits very close to the theoretical minimum we just estimated.

This has been captured last spring — pretty fun and an excellent example to prove that teamwork matters. Be sure to have the sound on.

Here is the question — what the hell were we doing?

Think twice if you will want to do it some day

I’m using Wikipedia a lot for the same reason as everyone — it’s a great source of quality and up to date information on almost everything. I’ve been browsing streaming audio topics lately in the course of evaluating our new project and stumbled upon List of Internet stations article in the very top of which there was a Streaming media guides list. Surprisingly it didn’t include the best online radio guide I know — RadioTime, which provides the most comprehensive and accurate information on almost every single radio station available online. RadioTime happens to be our customer for 4+ years so I know the product very well. What surprised me even more is that two items in the list –- Icecast and Public Radio couldn’t be called streaming media guides at all.

My thought was, of course, — thanks wiki, I’ll fix this now. So I clicked “Edit this page” and added RadioTime to the list, linking it to presumably existing RadioTime article. That worked and the link appeared in the list, although it was red, which means no RadioTime article existed in Wiki at the moment. I clicked through it and was promised to create an account to be able to write an article on the topic. I felt I had to finish what I started, so I created an account and started learning how to use Wiki to create a nice looking company profile article. I learned some formatting tricks and style from AOL Radio page, had to read FAQ to know how to upload images and in a couple of hours has been able to put together a short article, which I thought would be a good start.

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