The Assembly demo party in Helsinki is one of the largest geek gatherings in the world, where thousands converge to watch and compete in graphic demo competitions. (View the panorama photo from last year’s event, with over 5,000 attendees.)

This year, the winner of the “Browser Demo” category was Mooncheese, written in pure Javascript and DHTML. Several classic real-time demo effects are represented, such as copper bars, tunnels, voxels, Mandelbrot zooms, and various vector effects. In Javascript!

You can view the Mooncheese demo mirrored locally on my server, or download the source locally.

It works well in Firefox 0.9 and Internet Explorer 6, but not Safari. Read the release notes for more information.

As part of my ongoing interest in Metafilter statistics, I was curious to see which sites Metafilter users link to the most.

From a complete dump of Metafilter’s front-page post database back to July 1999 (thanks, Matt!), I extracted the unique domains linked from each entry and added them all up.

The Top 50 results are below, proving that the NewsFilter moniker isn’t too far off. (Or you can view the entire list.)

Greg Knauss doesn’t have a weblog of his own, so I asked if I could post his rebuttal to Paul Graham’s Great Hackers essay. Greg writes:

“Hello, my name is Paul Graham. I have a bunch of opinions and prejudices, and I’ll now present them as fact: Python is better than Java, Linux is better than Windows, quiet is better than noise, one big problem is better than a thousand tiny ones, hackers are better than normal people. If you disagree with me, then you are obviously not a super hacker, and are instead some sad little monkey, banging on a keyboard.”

Jesus. s/hacker/self-satisfied prima donna/g.

You know what a hacker is? It’s someone who enjoys solving problems. Great hackers do it elegantly. Good hackers do it at all. How they do it is irrelevant, and it certainly has nothing to do with what language they choose or what OS they run or if they’re politically correct or not. To claim otherwise is arrogant, narrow-minded foolishness.

The fact that I’m learning C# and Windows.Forms does not make me any less of a hacker. In fact, it makes me more of one, because I’m able to solve a problem I couldn’t with all the Python and Linux in the world. Oh, but I forgot: hackers only solve the problems that interest them, if they’re presented in the right way and in the right environment. Because hackers are special.

Joshua pointed out that while it may seem that every smart person I know is using open-source tools, it’s a product of observational bias. Open-source programmers hang out with other open-source programmers. I don’t know many Windows applications developers, so I’ve never met a Windows super-genius. But they exist, and to say they don’t is a form of technophobic racism.

At work, we’ve started using iDictate for transcribing audio. After sending them an MP3, they send back a written transcription within an hour or two for about $.01/word. (They split the audio into manageable chunks, distribute it to typists around the world, reassemble the text, and send it back.)

Phil noticed that they offered a 100-word free trial by phone, so decided to have a little fun. He called their toll-free number, started his favorite MP3, and held the phone up to the speakers. They e-mailed him the transcript below. (They couldn’t figure out the words “find emotion” and left it blank.)

Try it out! Call 1-877-DICTATE (1-877-342-8283), press “1” to dictate, then “1” to do the free trial, and start recording. If you have any good results, post them in the comments.

Update: Ryan sent them They Might Be Giants’ “Exquisite Dead Guy.” They mangled the lyrics.

An employee at All Music Guide just e-mailed me with a response to the nearly-universal criticism of their redesign. I pasted the entire text below. (The entire e-mail was just posted to their homepage. It’s gone now.) Feel free to debate in the comments.

Update: In response to the complaints, AMG is slowly fixing some of the more heinous rendering bugs with non-IE browsers. (On-hover link cursors and tabular data are mostly working, and the giant banner is gone.) If you want to use the old site, use the old IP address (for now). (It now goes to Allmovies.com.)

July 15, 2004: The site’s faster (though I’m still getting periodic timeout errors and slowdowns), and many of the worst rendering errors have been fixed (though a couple remain). They’re working out the little kinks and I appreciate the effort, even if it doesn’t address my larger complaints about the site.

Also of interest: In two hours, Tim Murtaugh was able to create a standards-compliant cross-browser version of the AMG homepage, proving that it doesn’t take a large company to make a website that works for everyone.

July 18, 2004: Jeff Veen wrote some interesting thoughts about websites working in conflict with user goals, using the All Music Guide redesign as a striking example of users routing around damage. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

July 20, 2004: Adrian Holovaty wrote All Music Guide Corrector, a wonderful Firefox extension that seamlessly fixes many of the three of the site’s biggest usability issues: the Javascript links, Flash spinner, and partial artist/album reviews.

August 24, 2004: All Music Guide responds again with an update about more recent changes to the site.

GENERAL COMMENTS
We’ve been on the net since 1995 providing a free music reference resource. We would hope that we’ve earned a little patience from our users as we work through the transition to the new site and some of the difficulties we’re experiencing. We’re a small company with small company resources. While we’re flattered by our users’ expectations, we are not Amazon or Yahoo! We’re a small company from Ann Arbor, MI, trying to provide a great resource for music fans.

SLOW RESPONSE TIMES
We are experiencing some response time delays as we work to get all of our servers properly balanced. Additionally, we will be adding server capacity over the next week which will further improve response times. While this site is bigger and more complex than and will be somewhat slower than the old site, the difference once we get everything at peak form won’t be very noticeable.

SUPPORT OF NON-IE FOR WINDOWS BROWSERS
Optimizing a site of allmusic’s complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn’t a simple “brochure-ware” site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don’t have the necessary resources to do so. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward.

We are first concentrating on fixing some compatibility issues with the Mozilla browsers, which are mainly visual, not functional. The main Mozilla problem is a glitch in how tables are displayed. We’re hoping to have this fixed in the near future. We will also be working to fix some compatibility problems with Safari (Mac).

We ask for your patience as we work on these issues.

REGISTRATION
The allmusic site remains totally FREE to our users and only requires registration for access to new Premium Content. If you are uncomfortable registering, we understand and invite you to continue to use the portion of the site (roughly equivalent to the former site) that does not require registration. But we would like to take a moment to explain why we have introduced registration for Premium Content. The AMG websites are FREE sites that are marginally supported by only advertising and product sales. To attract advertisers and retailers, we need to provide them with basic demographic information of our users so they can determine if our site is a fit for their products. We provide this information only in the aggregate (i.e. 60% of our users are male, etc.) and never pass on any individual user information. Please read our privacy policy for more information. Without these advertisers and retailers, the AMG websites would be out of business. Registration is a common practice among free publishing sites such as the AMG sites (i.e. NY Times, LA Times, etc.) that fund their enterprise through advertising and product sales. AMG is in line with common Internet practices and, as a good Internet citizen, zealously protects the privacy of our users.

TAB FORMAT
We realized when we designed the tab system that we would make some folks unhappy, but we felt the trade off was worth it. If we stuck to the one page approach it would limit our ability to add additional information. That design approach (one page) just doesn’t scale as we expand content. And it’s a real problem with artists with extensive discographies. We think that once folks take some more time on the site, they’ll see that there is much more information available now than there was on the old site. The addition of the Songs and Credits tabs are both good examples of information that just wouldn’t be possible in a one page format.