Archive.
Thursday, November 30, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
One hundred and seven Photoshop layers later... we have navbar.
You know the holidays are close at hand when even the spam starts to get the warm fuzzies. This particularly joyous message was cheerfully waiting for me in my mailbox this afternoon.To: undisclosed.recipients@...
Subject: We Teach, You Learn...You Earn...We all Profit!!!
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 01:19:37 -0500
Bulk E-Mail
Take advantage of the holiday season !!!
Let us help you generate more income in a week
then your business has all year.
Free Business Consultation.
Free Campaign managment.
Free Advertising Tips, Tricks and Techniques.
Call now.
Unsolicited email really is the gift that keeps on giving, isn't it?
Wednesday, November 29, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Inventing The Lisa Interface
I can't believe I haven't stumbled across this article before. It was originally written as a paper by a group of engineers working on the Lisa UI, and was supposed to be included in the ever essential book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Chock full of tidbits surrounding the development process, external design influences, and the opinion-powered decisions which ultimately resulted in the precursor to the Macintosh user experience. There's a whole page of pretty prototypes too. Be sure to check out the multipane file browser from the December 1980 prototype screen that looks disturbingly similar to both the NextStep file viewer and the column view Finder in Mac OS X. Little Stevie wonderful never misses a trick does he?
Tuesday, November 28, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Today, I am a periodical. Following the advice of Joe Clark (As Ed says: "...no, not that Joe Clark"), I registered my blog with the National Library of Canada and now it sports it's very own International Standard Serial Number or ISSN designation. Big whoop you say? Read over Joe's ISSN For Weblogs to get a whiff of the why and whatfor. In the meantime, this weblog will wear its newly gleaned ISSN 1496-3221 with a playful mix of pride and childish wild abandon.
The phone rings this afternoon. I can tell from the call display that it's an outside line ringing through from the employee directory. A rule of thumb in this situation generally dictates that the caller is one of two types of people. It's either a relative of mine who has forgotten my extension number, or a salesman. Today, it was what was behind door number two.
Half a dozen months ago, I received a call from a courtesy-impaired, east-coast accented jerk representing a dot com investment firm or a smarmy financial planning outfit or some other sort of organization that apparently didn't impress me to the point of remembering what it was. Maybe he was just representing his own self-inflated ego. Who knows. At the time I was able to brush him off, but I was coerced into agreeing to have him contact me again in a few months - theoretically when I had more time to discuss the topic at hand. Usually, when I say "call me back in several months" most reasonable people will forget about the entire conversation and never follow up on it. Not this time.
Getting back to this afternoon's incident, I am trying to finish a couple of page designs up before heading home and this joker starts in on his spiel about having "his situation back together", "imminent massive returns" for existing clients, and so on. My bullshit deflectors go up and I make a valiant, yet underpowered attempt at stopping the flow of crap from this human manure spreader. Sensing my resistance, he goes on asking why I don't want to make money with his company? What was my percent return on my own obviously mismanaged investments last year? What's wrong with me anyhow? When I do manage to cut in long enough to utter something to the effect of "Hey you jerk, you talk too fast...", he immediately rebuts with a carefully poised comeback that has been honed to perfection through the course of hundreds of similar calls. "Oh, you're a slow mover. See ya." Click.
Why is it that jackasses seem to thrive on this planet? Why?
Monday, November 27, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
All I want to know is this. Who the hell decided to schedule the redesign of one of our sites the same week we were soft-launching the other? I mean, what persuasion of hallucinatory brainiac actually does that sort of thing? Hmmm, come to think of it, I may have been involved in that decision. Oops. Sorry about that.
Sunday, November 26, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
All of a sudden, my life feels warm tonight.
Saturday, November 25, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Full-metal geek-speak. Here's a pointer to some updated documentation and technical verbiage on a theme that is dear to my heart. Fonts. It's sort of a love/hate thing really. I just expect them to work. Often they don't. If there's anything I can do to smooth out the rough spots along the road to system-level, typographic nirvana, then so be it.
Font Management API For Carbon & Mac OS 9 - 43 KB PDF
This is fairly hard core stuff. I don't operate anywhere near this level of programmatic comprehension, but I certainly appreciate those folks that do. Consider this a favor from me to you. I'm just sharing the love.
Java Server Pages on the Mac. Will wonders never cease?
Friday, November 24, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
It was bound to happen sooner to later. The first alternative themes for changing the Aqua appearance of Mac OS X are available from macAkio. Yes, they're uglier than the backside of an intimidated rhesus monkey. And yes, they appear to have been squeezed out of the old pixel-sphincter by some high school junior with lots of spare time and an abundance of third-party Photoshop filters. That's what you get for being first to market. The quality always comes when the competition wakes up.
As part of his pre-move purge, Mike gave me a wonderfully dog-eared hardcover book called Programming Business Computers. It was first published in 1959, and its pages are littered with poetic references to things like Nonrandom Access Main Memories, Upper & Lower Accumulators, Six-Channel Punched Paper Tape Storage, and something strange and foreign-sounding called Cathode-Ray Tube Output. In the chapter on Flow Charting, I found the following example illustrating the classic concepts of the flow chart in action. Remember when life was as simple as the technology itself?
Thursday, November 23, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
A four day weekend? What's all that about? I'm sorry, but this Canadian boy thinks that the special day of Thanksgiving belongs in October, not November. And by the way, shouldn't you finish picking a lane in the presidential race before deciding whether or not you have anything to be thankful for? No, I'm not being bitter because I have to work tomorrow. I'm just thinking out loud. And besides, I have to choose a leader for our country on Monday, and that's tough to do when you're lying on the couch bloated with turkey and all of the associated trimmings.
It almost like having one on your coffee table. Earlier this year, the British Library digitized two versions of the Gutenberg Bible, one printed on paper from the library of King George III and another version that was printed on vellum. The detailed illumination that can be seen in some of the larger images is absolutely gorgeous. The only thing that might make this even better, would be to have John Warnock's hobby company, Octavo create an annotated Acrobat document out of it. Then it would come complete with goodies like searchable, and translated, live text like this edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Via calebos.org
Wednesday, November 22, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
How To Run Java In HyperCard
Why? Because you can do it, dammit. That's why.
Tuesday, November 21, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Oprah Gives A-OK To E-Books
First of all, this shouldn't even be a valid news item. Second of all, nothing disturbs me on a more regular schedule than the apparently unstoppable, culture-permeating fact that Oprah Winfrey has indeed become the Alan Greenspan of the book publishing industry. This very minute, I'm hovering somewhere between being frightened for the safety and well being of my family and overt nausea.
Netscape Goes Bonkers
And you thought it was just a new version of a browser. No, it's much, much more than that. In fact, it's a meticulously prepared set of instructions on how not to release your software to the clamouring public. Thanks to Joel for putting into words what we've all been thinking, specifically this lovely bit of observational wit:"I can't prove it, but I have to imagine that Netscape didn't have a schedule for 6.0, choosing instead to meander for years and years and suddenly "find the religion" about shipping on time when it's way too late to cut trivial features, like themes, and instead finish the important features, like standards compliance."
That dull thumping sound you're hearing right now is the broadside of a Mozilla-sized two by four repeatedly smacking Netscape upside the head.
Huzzah! I do believe that the nasty little null character insertion bug has finally been eradicated from Blogger. Jack said they'd look into the problem, and apparently they did. Since those pesky, unparsable nulls won't be vivisecting my page code anymore, I think I can finally dive in and start using the SSI on my server to do some jiggier things with the blog.
Monday, November 20, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Let's start the week off with what is probably a familiar story. Basically, I thought yesterday was Monday. The alarm goes off later on Sunday mornings, but since my brain follows its own chronological path, for a moment or two I was totally convinced that I was late for something. I'm not sure what, but something. When I woke up this morning, it felt mostly like a Monday, but there was evidently still a strange synchronization issue between my internal clock and the one on the nightstand. On the positive side, I had no meetings this morning so I knew that I wasn't late for anything. Driving in to work, the traffic was heavy and the forward movement sluggish. However, the entire trip was complete in an instant. A few minutes ago, I thought it was already already the middle of the afternoon, when in fact it was only around 12:30. To convolute matters even further, Blogger isn't working very well right now either, and this 1:00 pm post probably won't find its way to my site until tomorrow morning. Time seems to be warping around me this week, and I'm not sure why.
Friday, November 17, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
I've always suspected that Jakob Nielsen was a bit of a twit. A vociferous, well-intentioned twit, but a twit nonetheless. I've had a distinctly unflattering view of his snooty, pseudo-guru attitude, but I've let my predeterminations slide because every once in a while he manifests a truly wonderful piece of obvious common sense. However, after reading the following quote from this article over at Wired News, my hackles are up once again."In the future, first of all, websites will be designed by my guidelines ... for the simple reason that if they don't, they are dead."
Oh my. How can someone possibly continue to stand upright when they're so full of themselves? And why would anyone with even a particulate amount of hands-on web design experience take you seriously after hearing this quote? Sorry Jakob, but there is no other way to put this. You are simply an idiot.
Thursday, November 16, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Praise the lord and pass the browser. Opera for Mac goes alpha.
Maybe the release of Netscape 6 was a bit premature. Arguably, it could stand to be a little more polished around the edges. However, when compared within the proper context of say, a plastic soup ladle, well by gosh golly we have a clear winner.
Canada World Champs in Internet Use
As Canadians, I suppose we all express a slight concern about the dilution of what is loosely defined as our unique culture. However, all the worry about our systematic national homogenization from the constant exposure to American-based media is completely unfounded. How can we possibly find time to be influenced by skewed television programming and biased magazine articles that creep up past the 49th parallel when we're all online? I feel so proud.
Well, that was exciting. Nothing gets you out of an early afternoon energy slump like the fire alarm ringing. Not some false alarm thing either, but a real "I smell stuff burning that ain't a slice of toast in the kitchen" alarm. Something in the server room of the company located directly above my office migrated to a combustible form and set off the bells. After grabbing two small items of value (my Newton and my sketch book), off I trundled down eight stories worth of stairs. With the wind chill hovering around -13°C and my jacket sitting on the front seat of my car in the parkade, Mike and I decided to go find a bowl of hot soup.
Wednesday, November 15, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
My name is Grant, and I use HyperCard. Thank goodness I'm not the only one. While some blasphemous individuals think it should quietly rest in peace, others like myself tend to go on and on about how useful HyperCard can be. To this day I use it to build quick and dirty file-manipulation utilities and other snarky little tools that basically scoot bits of data around. And it is still one of the most useful and viable rapid prototyping tools for interface design I have ever had the pleasure of noodling with. If the feisty folks over at the International HyperCard User Group have anything to do with it, we might just see another iteration of the software yet.
Tuesday, November 14, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Thanks to ev for pointing out that you can use the NewsBlogger site to post to your blog while Blogger is hemorrhaging. Of course, this particular alternative only helps you when the system isn't spitting up ASP errors and your posts actually get published. Go Pyra! You can lick this bugger, I can feel it in my bones.
Trying to avoid a repeat of the air-borne virus and infectious disease circus that swept through our house last year, I'm getting a flu shot this afternoon. Weekly trips to the family physician for allergy injections were standard fare during most of my pre-pubescent life, so the thought of sharpened metal instrument being stabbed into my flesh doesn't even make me blink. On the other hand, reading the official Fluviral Acknowledgement, Consent and Waiver form gave me the willies.
Monday, November 13, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
At one point or another, all followers of the democratic electoral process have probably stopped, scratched their chins, and speculated that politics is really just a big game of chance. Shall we add a bit of proof to the pudding? Witness the shocking similarities between the infamous Palm Beach County ballot and a standard issue Milton Bradley Triple Yahtzee® score card.
Is this a simple coincidence or a nefarious, anti-establishment plot hatched by the trusted brand name behind some of the world's most popular family-oriented board games? You be the judge.
Sunday, November 12, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
When it comes right down to it, we probably all could use a few new punctuation marks. I mean, we can't possibly be expected to use an interrobang for everything. Everyone who agrees, please raise your octothorpe.
Duane shakes his shivering fist in the air and shares a Canadian perspective regarding the never-ending story formerly known as the American electoral process. But just you wait. We've got our own problems slowly surfacing through the political muck.
This series of WebStar plug-ins allows you to include custom AppleScript, Frontier, C, and MacPerl commands directly in your web pages, include and execute AppleScript directly in your HTML, and handle AppleScript actions within web forms. I'm trying hard to think of what else I could possibly want beyond customizable, scriptable SSI functionality that is programmable in the language of my choice. Nummy.
When Buzzwords Become Meaningless Droning
Buzzwords don't become meaningless, as they are inherently meaningless from the start. Teched-up, recontextualized sputum has taken the place of clarity in business communication and conversation. The buzz comes from the fact that your ears are hearing new combinations of sounds, rather than from the content itself. Without the buzz, the rest of the words fall flat. And if that's the case, perhaps most of these things are better left unsaid.
Friday, November 10, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Remember my festering usability rant from earlier in the week? Well, I finally received a response to my painfully articulated email to the site in question.Thank you for your e-mail.
We appreciate your comments regarding the functionality and appearance of our web site. Our program managers will keep your feedback in mind as we update our site and add new features. Thank you for shopping at WirelessToo.com. Please visit us again soon.
Not bloody likely. By the way, for those of you in the back row keeping score, WirelessToo.com wasn't even the site I visited and attempted to use. It was the Signals.com site. Insert muffled cussing...
Thursday, November 09, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Überschriften! It's time lay waste to those sissy sans serif typefaces you've been using with some kick-ass fraktur. From Alte Schwabacher to Zentenar, it's one stop shopping for all your blackletter typesetting needs. Bang your heads!
Wednesday, November 08, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Unable to resist adding his own spin to our earlier topic regarding the personal centrifuge, Ian passed along a pointer to this curiously inventive labour saving device. Once again, America proves itself as the preeminent birthplace of innovation.
This wasn't supposed to be a weekly feature, but sometimes serendipity is the mother of online content. Fresh from my in box, please enjoy the following spam report response in the most gloriously fractured English you could possibly imagine.Dear Sirs,
We are the user service charge of an Allesnet secretariat. We received the mail from you. We thank for the opinion and information offer from you sincerely. Certainly, we are managing the Web (www.dnac.co.jp) as one virtual server user. But, it understood that we are not our user' member of this ID (cindysue), as checked it by the header data from you. We pretend our someone domain and ID and able to conclude be using. Even we are never able to permit this spamer. So we are under investigation about this spamer.
Anyone who finds the aforementioned snippet nothing more than an insensitive affront to non-English netizens, has obviously never experienced the simple joy of reading the hastily translated text found on imported food packaging.
Gadget shopping for that special somebody? How about a personal centrifuge to combat the effects of gravitation deprivation in space? Now, be honest and ask yourself who couldn't possibly benefit from the ability to generate artificial gravity right in your very own garage. Of course, I suspect that getting your garage up into space in order to properly utilize this device would be a bit of a battle.
Tuesday, November 07, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
I have the beginnings of an e-commerce usability rant festering in the back of my head. I blasted a barbed, yet reasonably constructive email at this site today. Since they didn't post any email addresses on their site, I ended up having to dredge one out of a feedback form page via a quick visit to the view source menu. I hated having to call this company to place my order because their site didn't work the way it should have. I also hated describing, in achingly granular detail, why their site didn't work the way it should have. If and when I hear back from them, I'll happily elucidate further.
Monday, November 06, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
A planned two hour meeting today stretched itself out an additional 30 minutes. Normally this would have been an unbearably painful experience. However, during the extended confab, lunch was served, laughter was shared, logic prevailed, and do I believe everyone came away reasonably happy. The operative word of the day migrated from decisive to lurching compromise and then finally inched towards hard won committal. Extra points were awarded for the no-nonsense statement found on the meeting room white board, "Silence is Alignment". In other words, if you didn't agree with something, you'd better damn well speak up. Orwellian overtones aside, it reminded me paraphrasically of a line from that classic Jimmy Webb ditty made famous by the rhinestone cowboy himself... I'm in Alignment For The County. Whether I was aligned or not, it kept me humming the rest of the afternoon.
Sunday, November 05, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Software dichotomy. Something that made me extremely happy this past week was stumbling across David Kha's Mac OS sound set made up entirely from samples from Warner Brothers cartoons, specifically the work of the amazing Carl Stalling. Something that made me uncharacteristically angry this weekend was reading the following blurb regarding portions of Microsoft's Enterprise 2000 product line up:Exchange 2000 requires the Active Directory, "so from a billable consulting viewpoint, it's a great opportunity to migrate customers over to Exchange 2000 and to implement the Active Directory, because this will be your killer application to help deploy Active Directory," says Erik Moll, product manager at Microsoft Canada.
I always had a hunch that Microsoft was mainly in business to support consultants and not customers. What a bunch of assholes. By the way, the above passage was found in the October 23rd issue of Channel Business Magazine.
Friday, November 03, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
By the way, the operative word this past week was process. Hopefully, next week the operative word will be decisive, as in "pick a lane already..."
I don't care what anybody says, the new disc from The Presidents of the United States of America simply spins my propeller. It's more of the same stuff that makes me spew the metaphorical milk out my nose. Although, in my book, nothing matches their sparkling rendition of the infamous MC5 ditty Kick Out The Jams.
Thursday, November 02, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
Photographer Drake Sorey was kind enough to pass along his take on the dot com flameout of ExactPhoto mentioned earlier this week."I read your blog entry about Exactly! and thought I'd mention something. The company had been around for about two years offering free billing/organization software for photographers, as well as a way to phone-order film, etc. at a discount. Although I have registered and tried the software, I have never really used it (my own invoices are more than adequate and much nicer looking) primarily because the interface (at least for the Mac) was not that good, and I could never quite figure out how to get an invoice started! (gave it a couple minutes - lazy?) Nevertheless, it was, I thought, something very worthwhile, and a good thing for photographers; a standardization of rates, terms and such is a good thing. Their stock business would have been a wonderful thing also, had it been successful, since the contracts of Corbis and Getty, two major companies currently making big and bad changes to the photographers end of the stock photo business, are screwing the photographer. An Exactly! contract would have been a much more photographer friendly, progressive, and fair contract. So while it seemed to be a rather instantaneous burn-out, I think it was more the case of an ill-timed, ill-advised press release that should never have gone out in the first place. Supposedly, they will still release the next (final) version of Exactly! For Photographers 2.0 - then, poof, they will be gone."
After receiving Drake's message, I formulated a couple of thoughts on the subject. While the timing of the press release does appear to be a bit misplaced, it could have been an honest attempt at giving the business a kick in the pants. The point here is that once again an assumption has been made that good press means gold. Wrong. I've seen too many companies sit back and rely on a little bit of press coverage and serendipitous word of mouth to be their primary supplies of customer traffic.
I'm wondering how much was done by the folks at ExactPhoto to get their product (which obviously had some strong benefits) in the face of potential customers. It's not like there isn't a need for the services they were offering. Alternatives in any industry are a good thing have and encourage. On another point, putting all good intentions aside, I'd be a little concerned about a dissolving company promising to release another version of its software product. Without the promise or ability to support the software after release, what's the point?
Consider this a disclaimer: For the record, I work for EyeWire which is a visual content brand owned by Getty Images. I posted Drake's feedback because it was honest and I felt it should be shared. I'm not going to take sides in the argument regarding the treatment of photographers by large scale aggregators such as Getty and Corbis. Likewise, I'm going to start playing favorites at this point in my life either. Thanks for understanding.
Pants. Long pants to be precise. Yes, I am wearing long pants today. Many people I work with have never seen me in long pants. As long as I don't have to shovel snow off the driveway before heading in to work, shorts are part of my daily wardrobe. To clarify why today is a pants day, let me state these three things first... No, I do not have a job interview. No, I am not giving in to the crisp fall temperatures. And no, I am not trying to impress anyone. We're simply having visitors from head office today, and I don't want to put anyone off by prematurely exposing my knees. Ok?
Wednesday, November 01, 2000 Link
/ Comments (0)
A redesign is imminent. And just for the record, this is not a redesign for the sake of a redesign. This is a redesign for me. Things to watch for? Graphic header treatments utilizing my own typefaces. Ooh! Style sheets. Gasp! Hover properties. Aah! Less generic meta tags. Outrageous! Larger point size type. Scandalous! Perhaps if I'm feeling really playful, I'll even throw in an updated icon-sized representation of me. I mean, I haven't worn a beard in over a year. If nothing else, that fact alone tells me that it's time for a serious rejig.
Need a pick me up? Sometimes there is nothing better than just kicking back and relaxing with an entertaining spam report auto-response message. Read on.Good day!
Thank you for mailing us.
If you are the informer of this spam mail, we'd like to apologize first for all the trouble you have encountered, and thank you for your efforts in keeping a clean internet environment. We will deal with this matter as soon as possible in the following procedure:- Search out the spam sender according to the letterhead you have offered.
- If the sender is a xxxxx dialup user, we will cease his user's rights immediately.
- If the sender is a user of xxxxx's downstream ISP, we will transfer your information to the authority concerned and help them in handling this matter.
- If the sender is a xxxxx leased-line user, we will give warnings first. If he gets a second warning, we will close his outgoing mail server port.
If you are the sender of this spam mail, please behave; xxxxx will transfer your spam mail to your ISP, and certain penalty will surely fall upon you.
Thank you and best regards.
Sincerely yours
Customers Service Department
Take that, you spammer you. There's nothing worse than having your rights ceased and certain penalties falling upon you. If service provider policies like this don't scare those unsolicited email nogoodniks straight, nothing will.
Furthermore.
Blog archives
Back
Meta.
Subscribe to posts (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (Atom)
ISSN 1496-3221
Copyright © 1996-2012 Grant Hutchinson