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This is splorp.

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Monday, June 26, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Big things come in small packages. Eckhart Köppen runs a spunky little open source project shop called 40hz.org and is developing a sweet little XML tokenizer and a small footprint HTTP library for the Newton. In his report from last week's MacHack convention, Andy Ihnatko teases me with the uncovering of a hacked together two button Mac mouse. I need scematics. I need pinouts. Yes, I know I can buy one from a third party, but that's not the point. I need to do this. Oh, the joy of being in the spotlight. Sometimes it's such a bother working in a supposedly swell office environment, particularly when you've been recognized (or picked out of the lineup, depending on your point of view) by some one the local dead-tree media as one Calgary's "Cool Places to Work". And regardless of how massive your cool quotient is, like the teenager with the bad attitude you inevitably get asked to clean up your room by your parents.
"If possible, I'd like to ask each of you to check around your work area for any messes that could be tidied up before noon on Monday. Empty boxes, papers, cartons, hills of toxic waste, tractor parts... anything you can do to tidy up the spaces around you would be fantastic."
Hey, what's wrong with those tractor parts? It's not like I'm changing the transmission fluid out of a Massey-Harris on my desk or anything.

Sunday, June 25, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

I've never liked those pesky warranties either. A brave soul disassembles an iBook purely for the visceral pleasure it brings. And this time, having parts leftover is a good thing. Dang, that's pretty. Steve Ballmer attempts to get more specific about all the .Net fluff in an article over at the Register, but I still can't get my head around what the hell Microsoft is trying to do here. Maybe it's simply the fact that regardless of what user interface they slap on top of it, hosting applications or services with anything close to the functionality of Word or Excel is at best idealistic and at worst... dumber than a bag of hammers. This is partly what Microsoft is trying to do, right? Separating the functionality from the operating system. Separating the display of the content from the creation of the content. Part of the confusion surrounding this whole announcement is the fact that there are so many components to it. Which .Net component does what and how does it interact with the other .Nets of the platform?
But back to Steve holding forth: "Windows.Net is not a service, so it has to come with a service." Rickety logic here, we know, it's a bit like saying Windows 98 is not a cowpat, so it has to come with one, but you kind of know what he means. "You would see certain kinds of services that would be an integrated aspect of that user interface."
Anytime Microsoft starts talking about the user interface or the experience of interaction on a large scale I get nervous. I have a growing uneasiness about this whole thing, and I can see myself having to read a lot more about it before I can even begin to fully understand the ramifications. Is anyone else feeling a bit uncomfortable.Net?

Saturday, June 24, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

My site was offline for several hours again this morning. I muttered under my breath about the server freezing up, and then resigned myself to the fact that I would need to restart the whole shebang manually. (I am adding an auto-restart monitor soon... really.) After checking the server in person, everything was running perfectly fine, but I couldn't ping the box from either an internal or external connection. I double checked the TCP/IP settings, rebooted the box for the heck of it, and still nothing. Then I decided to pay a visit to the server room. Tracing the patch panel for my server's ethernet port back to the switch, I discovered the problem. There dangling beside the switch was the cat 5 cable supposedly connected to my server. Apparently, in the midst of upgrading the network patch panels and server racks this past week and again on Friday evening, our illustrious information services crew missed a couple of things. Aarrgh.

Friday, June 23, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Put away the pain killers. Thanks to this link I found on xblog, I can finally read slashdot without having a seizure.

Thursday, June 22, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

The other day, I set up a Blogger account for a friend of mine whose site I host on my server. He came to me saying, "I must blog. I need to blog." He's a writer by nature and by profession, so I wasn't going to stand in the way of his new-found desire to spew his digital whim all over the web. As of this hour, he has yet to post thing one. So until he lives up to his original statement that got this whole thing started, I'm going to post my own textual sputum to his blog. Maybe that'll get him kick started. Sorry Duane, but it needs to be done.

Tuesday, June 20, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Ars Technica has a Mac OS X Q & A covering the top questions generated by their meticulously detailed articles about Apple's über operating system. My favorite question from the list? "Where can I get the picture of that jet you used as a desktop and window background?" The one question I want answered? Why in the name of Susan Kare do the icons need to be so blasted big? Emotive, my ass.

Monday, June 19, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Oh sure, right after I give creativepro.com a whack up the side of the head with the backhanded complement stick, I find this article on their site. The Man Who Launched 1,000 Fonts is an interesting backgrounder on Colin Brignall, the driving force behind typeface development at Letraset and International Typeface Corporation for the past twenty years or so. His life as a typeface designer goes back even further, with 70's retro hits like Superstar and Premier Shaded. Rock on, Colin. Ever since Clive Bruton boarded up the windows on the FontZone site, I've been rather torn up inside by the fact that Microsoft now has the most comprehensive and well-maintained typography news pages around. I mean, it wouldn't bother me so much if it was some half-assed, token link page surrounded by Word-formatted white papers expounding the technical minutiae of quadratic splines. But cripes, aside from the overuse of italics for emphasis, it's actually a dandy little resource. Aside from creativepro.com's relatively lightweight fonts section, I don't know of any other type-related sites that are updated on a regular basis. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Dad's need new toys too. Following the tradition of Father's Day in our house, I not only get the requisite hand-made goodies from my kids, but I usually get something to play with too. This year I got a Hoberman Sphere. If you've never played with one of these things, track one down. They are an immensely fascinating combination of art, mechanics, and symmetrical geometry. Basically the sphere is a series of interconnected plastic struts that expand from a small 9 inch diameter ball out to a 30 inch sphere reminiscent of a geodesic structure. And now, Chuck Hoberman has come out with a the Expandagon Construction System so budding kinetic architects like me can create our own mechanical art. Now, if I can just figure out a way to meld the Expandagons with the Lego Mindstorms.

Saturday, June 17, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

You've caught me. I'm really only posting something here this morning so I can avoid having to clean out the budgie cage. It's not that onerous a task, just a pain. The birds deserve a tidy home, but honestly if I had the choice... well, you probably understand. At least they don't generate as much crap as a cat or a dog. Why birds in the first place? Allergies. We also have fish and walking sticks. But no dander generating mammals. I'm rambling now and feeling the need to accomplish some level of domesticality. I guess I could vacuum the basement instead.

Thursday, June 15, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Hey, I finally added permalinks. Big whoop.

Wednesday, June 14, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Need a little late night reading material? I offer you a small selection of particularly intriguing documents that I have stumbled across recently.
*Adopting The Aqua Interface - 2.2 MB PDF
*Use & Misuse of Metaphor - 320 KB PDF
*Adobe Illustrator 9.0 New Features - 1.8 MB PDF
*Ameritech Web Page Standards (1996) - 90 KB PDF
*The Beagle Brothers Online Museum
*Unicode & Glyph Names
*Character Design Standards
*A Disagreeably Facetious Type Glossary
*Microsoft Visual TrueType
Are you noticing a couple of themes running through here? It's probably just your imagination. Pay it no mind and enjoy. Plunging Into Aqua is another look at the fruity-fresh face of Mac OS X. Apparently the keyboard jockeys over at MacWeek aren't jiggy enough with Apple to earn themselves a copy of the new system to play with. The article is based solely on "Apple's public demonstrations, the Mac OS X section on its Web site, and technical documents". Not much new to see here, but it does offer an alternative to the marketing-speak found on the Apple site. Why take life so seriously that it makes your brain hurt, when you can simply crank out genuinely useful software? Turly O'Connor has just taken the wraps off a new version of FinderPop, the indispensible utility that puts your contextual menu on a high-fibre diet washed down with a pint of Beamish. This time out, FinderPop sports a completely rewritten user manual that is filled with "...lavish illustrations and plain words of no more than three or four syllables." Even if you don't use the software (it's free, so you don't really have any excuse - except if your stuck without a Mac, you poor sods...) I highly recommend reading the manual anyway. It's insightful, descriptive, self-effacing, and has a lovely dash of cynicism mixed in for no other reason than it seems to fit rather nicely, thank you. I wish that all user manuals were this good a read.

Tuesday, June 13, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

As if we needed another reason to ensure the failure of keystroke recognition... Some bright-eyed keener at the Gartner Group had an extra sip of Sumatran Dark and suddenly realized that you don't actually need a keyboard to listen to an MP3, do you? The frothing crowd dedicated to protecting digitized intellectual property just took another step towards the stupid bus. A couple of companies are pitching keystroke recognition as a means to identify individual users and potentially verifying ownership of digital content and software installed or executed on their machines.
"It's very difficult for any of these companies to articulate this in a way that makes it palatable to consumers. This has to be transparent and seamless to get over the first consumer hurdle."
Given that you can't even run a Microsoft Office application or a Java-enabled browser in the background without the keystroke response being dramatically affected, there is no way any type of input-based, on-the-fly biometric analysis and recognition is going to be "transparent".

Monday, June 12, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

At work today, we couldn't quite figure out if this was good news or not. RealNetworks licensed bits of QuickTime for inclusion in its RealServer system. I guess it makes sense for RealNetworks to support as many different media formats as possible, seeing as they have the number one (in terms of market penetration anyway) streaming server technology. Presumably this could lead to being able to view QuickTime formatted media in RealPlayer. What I would like to see, aside from the abolishment of the RealCrappy RealTechnology altogether, is a way to watch and listen RealVideo and RealAudio content via QuickTime hooks in any application I choose. I hate being forced to use the atrociously designed interfaces that come with RealPlayer and its slovenly ilk. I'd rather hand code PostScript. Really.

Saturday, June 10, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

The gang over at nublog explains why they hate portals. Scripting News points to a new weblog dedicated specifically to the release and propagation of themes for Manila.
"Themes change the way Manila sites are designed, allowing proficient designers to share designs with writers, techies and Manila newbies."
Although I'm glad that non-designers will at last be able to pick from a decent set of pre-built templates, I find the fact that the design of Manila-based sites is all of a sudden "so important". The visual design of an information publishing tool and the output from that tool should be thought about and field tested before it's released. Sure, the underlying architecture of the software is paramount to the success of such a tool, but the fact that they're just now making such a big deal of the user experience is laughable. More fun than a barrel of corporate branding directors. logotypes.ru has a stash of over 3,400 Adobe Illustrator format logos, previewable and of course, downloadable. Collect them all! Via xblog Casual wear: Dressing for success or for stress? According to a survey completed by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, dressing casual is a source of workplace anxiety. Like people need another reason to be stressed. I can't even begin to imagine having this level of restriction placed on my everyday clothing:
"At least on the East Coast, guidelines call for clothes to be "in good taste." No denim, spandex, jeans, team logo shirts, shorts, halter tops, tank tops, leggings, sweat suits, warm-up suits and provocative or revealing clothing of any kind. No also to moccasins and sandals."
What? No moccasins? That's outrageous! I am so glad that my place of employ isn't wound up to the point of lunacy about what people wear to work. I'm sure that there would be a few eyebrows raised if people decided to wear their gym strip all day, and I would personally draw the line at feather boas (sorry Halcyon...), but cripes, we've even had a full-blown pajama day! Today started out sunny and warm, but right now it's overcast and I can hear thunder coming slowly from the southwest. I had planned on doing some yard work, but I'm thinking it might be a better day to clean up the home office. I have a teetering pile of hard drives and old PowerBooks just waiting to take a tumble next to the desk. I'd sure hate to see all that vintage hardware take someone out.

Thursday, June 08, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

We're back kids. After leaving work last night, my server decided to go into "I'm not going to restart after a crash" mode, even with continually prodding by the Rebound! extension I have installed. My FTP server was still running and accessible, so attempting to troubleshoot the sucker, I downloaded my web server and Rebound! log files. I thought that maybe there would be some sort of consistent pre-crash request or entry in the logs that might indicate a source of the crashes. No such luck. Basically, I wasn't able to get the box running again until I came back in this morning. After pulling the beast apart, it looks like the problem was a combination of accumulated crud on the motherboard and a corrupted SiteCam preferences file. After fixing these two bothersome bits, I also reinstalled a fresh copy of WebStar just for the heck of it. Crossing my fingers, everything is stable again.

Wednesday, June 07, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

I just heard something go snap! Sometimes you don't even need the infamous Web Economy Bullshit Generator to come up with this stuff. Occasionally, it just magically appears in your corporate e-mail. This is an honest to goodness paragraph from a message I received today.
"With all of the great change and continuous improvement that has come to define our environment, it is my pleasure to announce a significant change in our technology reporting structure that is designed to greatly enhance our ability to leverage new technologies for strategic advantage while simultaneously sharpening our focus on delivering these innovative technologies into our organization."
Take a breath, will ya pal? I've always theorized that technology buzzwords worked better when used in run-on sentences, but now I have actual proof of concept. If you were trying to hit this site earlier today and kept getting connection errors, my apologies. For some strange reason, the server decided today would be a good day to begin spontaneously restarting every few minutes. Everything appears to be back to normal now. I guess it might be time to look at blowing the dust bunnies out the drive bays.

Tuesday, June 06, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Tog expounds on the virtues of user testing, something which I wholeheartedly believe should be done well in advance of any public software release or site launch. User testing all well and good in theory, but I have spent a hell of a lot of time and energy attempting to convince marketing and development teams that this is actually a useful concept. Why is it so difficult to wedge a tiny little slice of before-the-fact testing into the gantt charts?
"If you don't have user-testing as an integral part of your design process you are going to throw buckets of money down the drain."
Tog mentions five reasons is this article why user testing saves money. Maybe that's the angle I need to play. All this time I've been pitching that it's for the good of the user and the customer experience. But now, it's directly affecting the bottom line... that, I bet they'll buy. Adobe has just released their Scalable Vector Graphics browser plug-in. Nice timing, since the newest version of Adobe Illustrator now exports SVG directly. Not surprisingly, there are some compatibility issues with MSIE 5.0 on the Mac. Verging on tasteless, yet strangely compelling. You've seen the meat, now wear the shirt. Proudly display your true colors by slapping an original "here's hoping they're maggots." tee on your back, and support the next iteration of the stinkymeat project while your at it.
Here's hoping they're maggots.
A bit too edgy for casual day at the office? Here's a tip. It makes a great desktop pattern too.

Monday, June 05, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

After nearly a month, Bill Keaggy is finally back and laying the visual communication link-smack down over at the xblog. I swear my mornings just haven't been quite the same since the hiatus started. Welcome home Bill! For an dead platform, my Newton stacks up reasonably well against fresher-faces like the Pocket PC or the near-ubiquitous Palm OS gadgets. Although I'm feeling a little bit left out considering that Microsoft didn't even mention the Newton in its original feature comparison document. Even a little tip of the hat would have been nice. Via Info-Newt

Sunday, June 04, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Maybe it's just me, but I think that now would be a good time to take a look at dysfunctional families, verb-noun hybrids, and the Apple event object model. Kevin Grant is working on a major upgrade to the venerable NCSA Telnet client for the Mac. Considering that the NCSA application hasn't had a new release in over four years, any change is going to be worth a look. Kevin's version is going to be Mac OS savvy to a fault, including such desirable taste-treats as full Carbonizing, scriptability, recordability, drag-and-drop (...in a Telnet client! Can you dig it?), native Open Transport networking, and a schwack of other juicy features.

Friday, June 02, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Adobe Illustrator 9.0 is shipping. New goodies? Plenty. Of particular interest to web design geeks like me is pixel preview and finally, opacity control. I know the venerable Illustrator has been playing feature-creep catch up with Freehand over the last few revs, but I swear Adobe is clicking now and really starting to kick some Macromedia butt. Thank goodness Flash is an non-proprietary format. Cutting off your nose in spite of your face? I know everybody and their dog is already pointing to A Cancer on the Web called Flash, but Chris is a friend of mine and quite frankly, he nailed a major issue that I have with Flash to the wall in this article. Everyone who touches Flash should read this. One more link ain't going to hurt anyone. Simson Garfinkel asks the question Why can't operating system designers build a better undo feature? Programming hurdles aside, developing an unlimited, intelligent undo would alleviate many torturous user experience problems that we limp along with today. Always being able to step as far back through the creative or document building process as you want would certainly lessen the "learning through disaster" approach that many of us experience when using software. Photoshop (and other recent Adobe applications) have a History Palette that allows you to step back through changes in your document, but this relies on saving incremental document changes to a file. It is an extremely memory and scratch disk intensive process. Your regression back through time is ultimately limited by your hard drive space. One of the better "nearly infinite undo" functions exists in BBEdit. I have never had a case where I couldn't go back to the original state of a document. It's not perfect, since some functions provided by application plug-ins do not adhere to the same undo mechanism. Unbelievably, some applications still don't have any undo functionality at all. And how long have we been using "modern" operating systems? Via Scripting News

Thursday, June 01, 2000 Link / Comments (0)

Oh, my happy inbox... The designer of one of the logos that gets softly skewered on my spiral logo critique page, send me this message today:
Subject: Debian logo
Date: 01/06/2000 01:15 PM
From: Raul Silva, raul@onshore.com
To: Grant Hutchinson, grant@splorp.com
 
Hi,
 
I was the guy who designed the Debian logo. I got a kick out of your page. At least I did not use a swoosh ; )
 
We have been making fun of swooshy logos for a long time. Its nice to see someone make us see that we can be just as unoriginal.
 
Anyhow, the logo you are displaying is actually incorrect. It uses the wrong font. You can get the proper logo at: <http://devel.onshore.com/gnu_art/>
 
Best regards,
 
Raul Silva
I just love it when designers and other creative types don't take themselves or their work too seriously. I certainly don't take myself seriously, but if I ever do, someone please smack me. By the way, the logo has been updated accordingly. Oooh! SoundJam for Mac OS X. Need I say more? A commentary on the use of typography and background images is part of the new stuff over at Web Page Design For Designers. You wouldn't think that the concept of placing text on top of imagery so it's still legible would be that hard to pound into someone's skull. But judging by the number of people building (I won't go as far as to say designing) web sites that are obviously not intended to be comprehended by any living being on this big blue marble - it's still a reasonably large issue. For those that want to do type right, this article is a good starting point. Author Joe Gillespie covers letterform legibility, onscreen contrast, the effects of advancing and recessive colour choices, and other tips. This was a useful refresher. Yes, even for a guy like me who rarely strays from the comfortable safety of black on white.

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