Archive.
Wednesday, February 28, 2001 Link
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I would certainly consider the following to be a reasonably valid excuse for canceling a conference call. But just barely...
Date: 28/02/2001 02:14 PM
From: Internal Communications
Subject: Earthquake update
ATTENTION: WORLDWIDE EMPLOYEES
The Seattle area was shaken at 10:55 a.m. today by an earthquake, measuring approximately 7.0 on the Richter Scale. All staff are safe, and the company buildings intact, aside from minor interior damage.
Employees are being allowed to go home and check in on family members and property this afternoon. We also have staff remaining on premise to ensure that essential core business functions -- customer call centers, technical operations and building/facilities -- remain up and running.
In the event of aftershocks hitting the Seattle area in the next 24 hours and causing possible closure of our buildings, employees should call our Inclement Weather Line to determine if the company is open for business.
And thank goodness they're not sending everybody home. It's extremely important to make sure that you can still take customer orders, access the corporate network, and go to the bathroom during tectonic shifts and other seismic interludes.
Tuesday, February 27, 2001 Link
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Regardless of what anyone thinks, it really is my concern.
Apple Discontinues Development of Newton OS
Today marks the third anniversary of Apple's decision to focus their "efforts in one direction". Well Steve, I'm still using my Newton and I'm still waiting for Apple to "ensure a smooth transition", replacing it with something even marginally close in size, power, and functionality. Waiting.
Monday, February 26, 2001 Link
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Since everyone seems to be keeping tabs, I noticed that Dan's new PowerBook is finally on its way. If the image to the right is any indication, Lord knows how far and wide the various components of my order are scattered. It's been my experience that the phrase "partially shipped" has never instilled much consumer confidence. I'd prefer to have everything arrive at the same place, at the same time. It seems to me that there's a greater chance of something getting hit when there are more targets to shoot at.
And so my adventures in Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line land begin. It's been four years, two months, and six days since our house was first wired with a cable modem. That's right... since December 1996 we've been basking in the perceived high-speed glow of the shared-bandwidth elite. Today, I signed the papers to have a dedicated ADSL connection run to my home. Why? At this point, I can identify three primary reasons:
- To have control over my own subnet of static IP addresses to use and abuse as I see fit, finally ending the fight with the questionably stable dynamic addresses that the DHCP server continually pukes out. Every one of my machines can have it's own identity and access to the network. And related to this...
- To be able to host my own servers under my own roof before the free ride finally ends at my current place of employ. While I certainly appreciate the opportunity I have had to attach my machine to a redundant T3 connection, it's time to let go. Plus, I really don't want to be driving downtown everything time something goes kerflunky.
- To finally bid farewell to the wide-spectrum of @home network-targeted spam clogging up my mailbox. No, I don't need an instant university diploma in the fast breaking career-enhancing field of working at home, and quite frankly, I don't care if I've been selected to cut my casino bills in half with a new, proven medical breakthrough.
It's still a couple of weeks before they convert the copper running into the house from straight voice to voice over data, so anything is bound to happen. Stay tuned. The adventure has just started.
Some things just keep getting cooler. The original eyemodule camera for the Handspring Visor was a spiffy add-on, but the new eyemodule2 expansion pack now sports full VGA resolution (up from 320x240) color image capture, plus the ability to save mini movies. The movies are converted to QuickTime format when saved locally to your hard drive using the eyemodule conduit. Sure, it's no where near megapixel quality, but there's something intriguing about having a combination digital camera and PDA stuffed into your pocket. It's one thing to use your PDA to keep an journal or annotated calendar. But the ability to punctuate your words with images makes the action that much more immediate. The next step? Temporarily swap out the eyemodule for a wireless modem, and then beam the works into your blog. Humdinger.
Sunday, February 25, 2001 Link
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My new G4 is still at least four weeks away from being delivered (although the Pro Speakers and the AppleCare package apparently shipped on Friday), so in the meantime I figured I should give the old box a tuneup. The stock 2GB drive that came with my 8500 has long been teetering on the brink of data saturation. My first task was to slap in the 9GB Seagate drive and an Adaptec ultra-SCSI card that have been collecting dust on top of the pile of hardware detritus beside my desk. I know what you're thinking. Upgrading a 2GB drive to a 9GB drive... how quaint. Anyway, mounting the drive into the empty bay was easy, although the previous owner had used silicon adhesive to mount the drive to the inside of his computer case. Yuck. Cleaning the residual goo off the drive mounting bracket was simply a pain in the hind quarters. Stuffing the SCSI card into the last remaining PCI slot was a different adventure. Getting it to fit properly meant carving away a chunk of the processor daughtercard support. This was so the support wouldn't collide with the ribbon cable connector and bend the card down in its slot. Eventually all the bits fit very nicely, thank you very much. After copying files over to the wide, open expanses of the new hard drive, it was time to take Norton to the old one. I honestly cannot remember the last time I optimized the original drive. Maybe I've never done it... yikes! Over 20% fragmentation is a bad thing, right? Regardless of its previous state and condition, the 8500 is much happier now. The kids can go ahead and start filling it up again this afternoon.
Ah... now that feels better.
Friday, February 23, 2001 Link
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For lightweight geeks like me, who never really got a handle (pardon the pun) on using mainstream, compiled programming languages such as C or Java, this could be interesting. Revolution is a cross-platform development environment that uses a high-level scripting language. Transcript, as it's called, reads an awful lot like HyperTalk, the native tongue of HyperCard. Since I've been living, breathing, and eating HyperCard stacks since it was first released, Revolution appears to be a natural progression. I've just downloaded the beta and am going to give it a crack. Revolution could well be what HyperCard might have evolved into, had it not been placed in some sort of weird product stasis by Apple.
As much as I hate to dedicate much thought or attention to the matter, it's that time of year to start thinking about gathering all our assorted bits of officially stamped and dated paper for the tax man. And while this topic is still freshly imprinted on my cranial lobes, would somebody please remind me to top up my Registered Retirement Saving Plan this weekend? Otherwise the contribution deadline is bound to whoosh by, and another slice of my bacon will end up in the government's frying pan. For the benefit of my American viewers, an RRSP is the Canadian equivalent of a 401(k) plan. I thought you might like to know.
Thursday, February 22, 2001 Link
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The Scourge of Arial
Mark Simonson has put together an entertaining and historically punctuated article on just how this nefariously ugly cousin of a typeface came to be stuck in our collective font menu."Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor."
In cahoots with Monotype? Be sure to read the sidebar article entitled Monotype's Other Arials for details on just how blatantly Microsoft was in trying to avoid paying the higher licensing fees for existing typeface designs. Reading this piece was like travelling back to my first couple of years working as a typeface designer and technical specialist. Back when it was still called Royal at Apple, TrueType shook up a lot of companies, ours included. All of a sudden, we needed to support this new format, convert our libraries, and (gasp) probably even purchase an Intel powered box to support the emerging Windows-based publishing market. We all knew that Windows 3.1 was going to be big, so it made sense to go along for the ride. To be honest, we didn't want it to be big, but we couldn't ignore it either.
Wednesday, February 21, 2001 Link
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Fresh off the truck from the Tokyo Expo, Apple announces revised iMacs in new Blue Dalmation and Flower Power flavours. At last, computer enclosure colours that go with any decor. I'm speechless. Actually, I'm not speechless. One word - MacTac.
That laboured breathing you hear is my credit card. Since Apple has been gracious enough to confirm that the graphite-enrobed, SuperDrive-equipped, 733 MHz G4 boxes are finally ready for public consumption, I gulped down an anxious lump in my throat and ordered one to replace my five year old 8500 series workhorse. I even sprung for the extended AppleCare warrantee. And the kids will be thrilled with getting my current machine as a hand-me-down. Now all I have to do is be a patient little consumer and wait.
Recently, my wife Teri has been pulling some of my discarded geek magazines out of the recycling pile and using them as bird cage liners. Last night I noticed a familiar face peering up through the seed husks and other sundry Budgerigar deposits. It's just getting harder and harder for poor Bill to get any respect whatsoever.
For your added enjoyment, why not download a convenient higher resolution version of this image. Suitable for use as a Mac desktop background or Windows wallpaper. Lovingly optimized in glorious, cross-platform JPEG format. 1280 x 1024 - 185KB
Tuesday, February 20, 2001 Link
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Now that Apple is finally shipping its spiffy, acronym-encrusted, media-crunching SuperDrive, does that mean that the old-school, floppy disk version of the SuperDrive will revert back to being called by its previous name? I'm sorry, but the FDHD just doesn't have the same ring to it as SuperDrive, even when it's been included as part of a more prominent product naming scheme.
Based on previous email conversations with customers across the pond, I've had this notion that most Europeans share an innate ability to get right to the point. No lollygagging, no messing about. To support my case, I received this particularly succinct request to be removed from one of the mailing lists we maintain.
Date: 2/14/01 1:02 AM
From: xxxxxx xxx xxx xxxxxxxx, xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
To: EyeWire Design Nieuwsbrief, designnews@eyewire.com
Subject: Verwijderen
Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen Verwijderen
Hey, you don't need to tell me twice.
Monday, February 19, 2001 Link
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Sorry, I've been out of town. Tune in tomorrow.
Friday, February 16, 2001 Link
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While everybody is still dealing with that distinct queasy feeling and frantic waving of arms that comes with inevitable change, specifically related to the Web Standards Project and their browser upgrade campaign, might I point out that Mozilla 0.8 has been released? I though you might be interested.
And my day just keeps getting more and more interesting...
Welcome to the party. Ed is finally taking the six-color plunge and will be sharing his Tales of a Mac Newbie in a new weblog. It's always interesting see your platform of choice through a fresh set of eyes. This was certainly the case when we bought my Dad his indigo iMac back in October. That situation was a bit different since my Dad had hardly given a computer so much as a sideways glance during his 65 years. However, switching computer platforms is as significant a change as learning what the heck a computer platform is. I'm trusting Ed not to pull any punches.
Ah, there's nothing like coming into work bright and early, ready to tackle the dozen or so things left over from the previous day, only to realize that you need to low level format your boot drive.
Thursday, February 15, 2001 Link
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Beyond the Bar Code
All of a sudden, tracking online behavior using cross-site cookies, chunks of JavaScript, and those little embedded images found in HTML email seems downright quaint compared to penny-per-unit radio tags slapped on everything from soup cans to packages of underpants.
Wednesday, February 14, 2001 Link
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In the midst of all the fun being caused by the latest server-clogging virus running rampant through mail systems around the world, the marketing team behind one of the sites I work on is diving head first into the shallow end of pool. In case you haven't picked up on it already, I don't like HTML email. My mail client doesn't like HTML email. HTML is for web pages. Plain text is for email. Stop trying to make email mimic direct mail. Related to my rant is this comment made today by Mark Hurst over at goodexperience.com:"Whether from using Outlook or HTML e-mail, complexity in e-mail has its downsides. A simpler e-mail strategy would mean limiting oneself to plain-text - not HTML- e-mail, and (if available) using an alternative e-mail program to Outlook. Doing so would reduce virus threats and increase one's privacy. Just a thought..."
Regardless of the privacy issues raised by including JavaScript snippets and embedded images, and aside from the potential for unleashing system-crippling viral attacks, HTML email is just too complicated a medium to do consistently well. There are too many people out there who will never see your message the way it was intended. With plain text, there is generally only one way your message can be presented. As words.
Source Reveals Origin of New Windows XP Moniker
Microsoft has been tooting its horn all over the blessed place about the new, albeit derivative, user experience in Windows XP. Well, here's the real news behind the XP name:
"...the XP that appears after the word Windows is really an emoticon, expressing the user's experience with Windows - it appears much in the same manner as one would put a smiley at the end of a sentence in an email to help clarify the sentence."
Coincidentally, the emoticon has a nice visual tie-in to another Microsoft operating system... WinCE.
Listen closely. You can almost hear the dull, repetitive thumping made by marketing folks at Hallmark as they smack their heads in unison against their office walls. It's beats me why so many people would want to send ecards on Valentine's Day. Go figure. Thanks to Garret for the pointer.
Tuesday, February 13, 2001 Link
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Will the floppy disk find new life?
Matsushita figures it can stuff 32MB worth of data onto a standard high density floppy disk using a technology called zone bit encoding. Cool. The down side to this breakthrough in cheap, nearly ubiquitous storage could be access speed. Transferring a megabyte of files on and off a floppy is tedious enough. How much cursor watching are we going to be subjected to while waiting for twenty times that amount of data to be shuffled around? At any rate, it's time to dig through the closet and pull out all those old AOL disks that begat the current silver beer coaster syndrome. Perhaps Steve should rethink his position on the floppyless Mac after all. Long live legacy storage peripherals.
Monday, February 12, 2001 Link
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I think I understand the positioning and rationale behind Adobe's new midrange image editing product, but what phase of the moon was it when the crew in San Jose congregated in some dimly lit meeting room and slapped the name Photoshop Elements up on the whiteboard? Gak. It sounds like a box full of clip art, doesn't it? I'm positive it must have been the same crack team of product marketing genii that hatched other loopy Adobe monikers like ImageStyler, PageMaker Plus, and the acronymonious FrameMaker+SGML.
The Interface Revolutionary
A lightweight, but interesting interview with Jef Raskin covering some of his opinions on new interface design and how users adapt. Interestingly, and quite coincidentally, he reiterates some of the same feelings I mentioned last week regarding Microsoft's adaptive interfaces."Adaptive interfaces are a disaster. When an interface "adapts," it changes without warning, and you suddenly have a new interface where things work differently or the menus are mixed up. Windows 2000 has some adaptive features, and every user report I've seen says that they are a nuisance."
See? I knew it wasn't just me.
My wife and I spent a lovely, relaxing, and otherwise adjective-ensconced weekend in Lake Louise. We ate incredible food. We played cribbage by the stone fireplace. We had the salt-water pool to ourselves for what seemed forever. We walked several kilometres across a frozen lake. No kids. No phones. No computers. No stress. Of course, I'm back at work this morning. We'll have to see if my state of mind can last longer than a couple hours before the spell from this weekend is shattered.
Thursday, February 08, 2001 Link
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Colour me collaborative. The pixeliciously adroit Daniel has posted a new edition of fusion, and I'll cautiously admit to being responsible for frame number five. Now presenting for your viewing pleasure: Mister Chuckles
Are Users Stupid?
No, but they tend to be lazy. While I'm all for creating web sites that are easier to navigate and simple to understand, I'm opposed to sacrificing functionality and æsthetic sophistication for the sake of lazy users who refuse to read for direction or scan for visual clues to follow. On some level, every user needs to be trained, and be willing to be trained, in order to use independently designed interfaces or web sites. Designing homogeneous web sites that are navigationally indistinguishable for one another is not the solution. This just encourages lazy, assumptive behaviour. If the navigation through the presented information fails, I agree that it's probably not because the user is stupid, it's because of the design. But I argue that good design can be complex and usable at the same time. Unfortunately, it's also true that simple design can be rendered completely unusable if the user is lazy.
Tales from a close call with web page personalization. Epicor sent me a flyer promoting their eFrontOffice software with a custom url that embedded my full name into the subdomain. That's sort of cool, but it wasn't the part of the experience that impressed me. It was the following message that greeted me at the top of the qualification form.
Click on the exclamation mark. I can see how that would make perfect sense to the user. Another example of intuitive interface design theory put into practice.
Netscape 6.01 Release Notes. No big whoop.
Wednesday, February 07, 2001 Link
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Looky, looky! Netscape 6.01 has been posted for Mac, Windows, and Linux. However, once it's installed, the application offers no clue as to what has changed between versions. And there's not a release note in sight except this old one. I'd say that the binaries were actually place holders if the Get Info window didn't betray the browser's dirty, little revisionist secret. Does anyone out there have the skinny on this release?
You know, while they're in there noodling with the code, how hard would it be to update that copyright notice?
Here's something to chew on. During some interface discussions we were having this afternoon, we were evaluating web page elements that a user is supposed to interact with. I came up with the following observation. In terms of the elements and their functions, there is a difference between being transparent to the user and being invisible. It's quite easy to hide controls or triggers out of sight until such a time as they are required. But doing so can severely hamper the user's ability to locate them when they are needed. A classic case is Microsoft's attempt at simplifying application menus by showing recently used commands first. This system appears transparent, because the software makes changes based on your habits or usage. In reality, the system makes things invisible rather than transparent by changing the rules as the game is played. The menus will never be configured the same way twice if you're not performing the exact same task over and over again. I like to think that people can filter out what they don't use or need automatically, providing of course that the context of what is being put through filter doesn't shift around. If it's necessary to hide things to simplify the environment, why not do it in fixed stages. Having two states, like the simple and regular settings in the Mac OS Finder, makes way more sense than having to choose between standard and random states.
Tuesday, February 06, 2001 Link
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Pathintosh
This project lies somewhere between the realization that you really have too much spare time on your hands and the uncontrollable urge that pushes your brainchild to fruition. Pathintosh is a G3 PowerBook installed in a 2001 Nissan Pathfinder, complete with dash-mounted touch screen LCD display, Airport-powered wireless home-to-vehicle networking, and a requisite 60 GB FireWire hard drive to store MP3s. I particularly appreciate the steering wheel mounted switches that execute AppleScript to adjust the various audio controls. Swank. Via MacNN
"...for the love of God, don't click anything."
I remember back when I was twelve or so, I was hanging out along the shore of the lake where my family had a cabin. It was spring, and there were piles of wood and other soggy bits of flotsam lining the waters edge. One particular item grabbed my attention through all the tattered tree limbs and random lengths of weather-beaten lumber. It was a hand-painted wooden sign that clearly read, in large sans serif characters, "not ice". I immediately pondered why anyone would have a sign by a lake that told the observer, in no uncertain terms, that something was not ice. Of course it's not ice, I thought, it's water... After several minutes, the rest of my vacationing synapses fired in unison, and I read the sign as it was intended. Notice.
The point of this story was to give me a reasonable excuse to mention that a similar scenario played out again this week. As I was driving to work, a billboard headline crossed my field of vision. The ad on the billboard wasn't so attractive as to garner much more than half my attention, but nevertheless I glanced at it long enough to read, quite plainly, "ear ned". What a strange thing to put on a billboard, I said to myself, only partially paying attention to the voice inside my head. I drove three more blocks before the little person that lives inside my skull stomped on enough nerve endings to relay the original message of the sign. Earned.
As best as I can tell, I'm cursed with a mild case of sporadic divisive syllable syndrome - a reasonably close kissing cousin to spoonerism. Ear ned, indeed.
Monday, February 05, 2001 Link
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Damn, I hope I can get some traction tomorrow.
I just noticed that Go2Net's finger on the ephemeral pulse of the internet, The Useless Pages, has linked to my available domain name of the week. My humble attempt at providing services to the domain name impaired has apparently been ranked right up there with other unquestionable purveyors of culture. There is nothing so satisfying as to be listed along side other sites that offer tips on such useful topics as Cooking With Monkey and Squishing Cow Organs. I am truly and deeply honored.
Friday, February 02, 2001 Link
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It's time to put some crap on your back.
Excuse me for a minute while I let my ignorance show. I've always been under the impression that when a something has been proofed, signed off by several people, and then distributed as a final version, that you generally do not revisit the content of the item in question and perform multiple, iterative revisions after that point. Apparently I was wrong. Now ask me if I feel exasperated.
Thursday, February 01, 2001 Link
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Problems at Pyra? Let's just hope that it's not as bad as it appears. An indispensible resource like Blogger cannot just fade like a sunset. Hang in there Ev, no matter how high you get dropped from, everything bounces off the floor at least once.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it freakishly ironic that Word includes a Legal Pleading Wizard among all the business document templates? I guess if you're in the habit of cranking these things out on a regular basis... Perhaps it was an feature requested internally at Microsoft.
So close, I can almost taste it. Opera for Macintosh is almost here, and it'll be released with an free, ad-supported version. The status update is nice to see, but I wish they'd just post a expected delivery date. Waiting. Waiting.
Top 10 Reasons The Apple Dock Sucks
Tog tends to make enormously valid points regarding stupid interfaces, but I think his recent stint at the Norman/Nielsen Group has made him a bit grumpier than usual. While I agree that parts of the Dock are counter-intuitive at best, some of the items on this top ten list are grasping. For example, Dock objects have invisible holes in them. This isn't an issue with the Dock. Tog even states that the same problem existed with icons on the original Macintosh. The problem here is improperly designed icon masks, not the fact the Dock displays icons that support transparency. Most of the points on this ranting laundry list makes sense, but go through it yourself. I'm still deciding whether Tog's opinions are those of someone who honestly believes that the Dock seriously debilitates usability, or someone who is just too set in his ways to budge a little bit.
Furthermore.
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