The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in Baltimore, Maryland
New York City

 

"I surf as much as I eat."

 

curiouslee in...


Hiptop Nation

Mirror Project
Google Images
The City Paper
UMBC TechPort

 

email me

 

past monthly...
2000:10.11.12
2001:01.02.03.04.05.06
07.08. 09.10.11.12
2002:01.02.03.04.05.06
07.08.09.10.11.12

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let Spyonit.com notify you when this page changes! (Note: Spyonit is down.)

 

[?]

The first serious contemporary artwork produced on a Palm PDA

Artist Tom Kemp used TealPaint on a Palm Vx to produce 1000 small sketches which he collaged together on a 4 x 17 foot canvas. The piece, titled "Analysis," maps the artist's sequential thought process as the series of small sketches evolved from image to image. Kemp notes:

"The paintings are arranged in a grid but they are placed in the order in which they were made. The ancient Greeks had a way of writing called boustrophedon which means the way an ox ploughs a field: up and down. They would write from left to right and then reverse the letters on the next line, writing from right to left. This is really useful when you have long lines of text; it means you won’t lose your place as a reader. The small paintings are laid out like this with sixty three across and sixteen down. That leaves a gap of eight at the end for a signature!"

The work will be on display at the Rivington Gallery in London, England from October 28th to November 14th 2000.
posted 6:16 PM +

Information on information

Attention information junkies, and information victims: the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley has completed the study, How Much Information? The study attempts to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. I printed out the entire 100 page document...

Here are some stats:

• 2700 pictures are taken every second worldwide
  
• the total output of all information media produces the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth
  
• 500 - 600 billion emails will be sent this year between 450 million email boxes requiring an estimated 900 terabytes of storage
  
• the 33,071 television stations in the world are broadcasting 193 million hours of programming a year
  
• by 2002, Internet data will surpass phone traffic
  
• ninety-three percent of information produced each year is stored in digital form
  
• each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the US
  
• the percentage of file cabinets in relation to other office furniture has steadily decreased from 16% in 1988 to 12.9% in 1998
  
• Americans recieve almost 4 million tons of junk mail a year, and about 44% of it is never opened
  
• the average lifespan of a web page is 44 days

Now my brain hurts. Good night!

posted 5:04 PM +

Flash vs. GIF animation: a tech note in five witty minutes



Click me!
posted 7:24 AM +

Finally, a universal translator?

Remember the Universal Translator from Star Trek? We might be one step closer to that sci-fi tool when Etaco International releases the Universal Translator™ UM-101, a speech-to-speech language translator that instantly translates phrases between six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. You speak into the $150 device's microphone, it interprets your speech, and presents the text phrase to be converted on an LCD screen. Push a button and the gadget will speak the phrase in the desired language. Sounds easy. Let's see how it really works when it's shipped early next year.

Next, I want one that translates between marketing people and software engineers...
posted 11:01 PM +

Could you imagine cities in this weird martian terrain?



This image was taken earlier this year by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. The scene represents a strip of scanned image 1.9 miles wide from the south polar region. I took the source image, adjusted the contrast levels, and colorized it in Photoshop.

The Mars images get me in the mood for the Warner Brothers movie Red Planet, coming out November 10th.
posted 6:59 PM +

Film vs. digital: the debate is over—digital is at least equal

At least it is based on what's in this article comparing picture results from the new Canon EOS D30 digital camera vs. the Canon EOS 1V film camera. In the careful, but not completely scientific test, the digital images simply look better than film.
posted 6:49 PM +

Expiration date on my Diet Coke today


posted 4:47 PM +

Major new study of online consumer opinion released

AOL and Roper / Starch have released the AOL Cyberstudy 2000. This is the third in a series where over 1000 users of online services and the Internet are surveyed to reveal current trends. The press release sums up the findings and you can download the full 56 page report in PDF format.
posted 9:52 AM +

Beautiful desktop wallpapers at Space.com

The Space.com gallery of desktop wallpapers includes jpeg images at several resolutions of Hubble Space Telescope images, space art by Joe Bergeron, and Voyager images of the gas giant planets. Even a quick look might leave you a bit humbler.
posted 9:45 AM +

My friend Bill has an alien thing attached to his body





[Click on the lower image for an 800 x 600 pixel, 88k close up.]

Bill works as a guide at The Maryland Science Center and likes to keep interesting science objects in his pockets to show visitors. Recently, he showed me a iron meteorite that he bought from a co-worker.

It's a 4 billion year old fragment from the Gibeon Meteorite impact in Namibia, Africa. The iron material exhibits a fine "octahedrite" variation of the "Widmanstätten" patterns that are the result of molten metal slowing cooling for millions of years and then violent breakup on atmospheric entry.

Of all the different kinds I've seen on the web, the crystalline iron variety is the most interesting, and others think so too. This meteorite is crafted in a variety of shapes and applications: slices, spheres, stars, rings, guitar picks, watches and knife blades.
posted 10:29 PM +

Mylackey.com goes under

I thought Mylackey.com was a great name, but I also loved the idea of having a web-based service where you could schedule "lackeys" to run errands for you or perform chores while you're at work. The service never made to Baltimore. Mylackey.com burned through two rounds of funding, around $7.7 million dollars, but couldn't secure another, and ceased operations in all its markets today. This is another in a steady stream of closings since the big market correction in April.
posted 6:54 PM +

Other P2P ventures

At ZDnet's Anchordesk, Jesse Berst offers a primer on P2P and mentions a few other ventures that use a Napster-like model.
posted 6:52 PM +

Wired re-hyphenates the word e-mail

In two editions of the book Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, the editors of Wired declared that in their house style, the word e-mail would not be hyphenated. It was one of the manifestations of their "way new" journalism and digital hipness.

Four years later, at a time where even the Commerce Department has stopped calling it the "new" economy, and e-business is just becoming regular business, Wired News is using a hyphen again in the word e-mail.

I actually followed some of Wired's style guidelines and promoted them to students, clients, and co-workers. Oh well, time to find the next "way new" thing.
posted 6:47 PM +

One day soon you might hear, "My web server beat me senseless, took all my money, and threw me out on the street..."*

This Slate story describes how e-commerce is changing the world's oldest profession. A quote:

In the business world, this is called "disintermediation" or, colloquially, "cutting out the middleman." Somewhere between Alex and his girls, the traditional roles of the pimp and madam have disappeared. There is no violent control of the women, and they don't have to fork over most of their profits. The physical security that the traditional pimp used to provide to his girls has been replaced by the physical security provided by high-end hotels, the traceability of e-mail, and by the generally less violence-prone clients to be found toward the top of the economy.

The New/Now Economy knows no boundaries...



* Accept my apologies for the title if this has happened to you and you're not in the escort business.

posted 4:03 PM +

This Groove is so deep ...



Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, and considered the father of collaborative groupware, released Groove Transceiver today. Groove is software you install on your local machine that allows you to collaborate directly with others in a Napster-like peer-to-peer (P2P) mode without a central server. The communication link can handle any kind of data including files, chat, bulletin boards, and multimedia in a secure environment.

Industry thought leaders who have seen it are just short of hailing it as a breakthrough. Groove is a fully conceptualized platform of software tools, protocols, and infrastructure for which they are actively seeking business partners and encouraging as many individuals to use it as possible. One of the articles below mentions that Wal-Mart is already prototyping a picture sharing application in Groove. Their business model is similar to that of Real Networks where a basic version of the tools is available for free, and revenue is generated from software licenses, partnerships and data relaying.

Ray's company, Groove Networks, has been secretively working on the software for three years. Groove is supported by a team of 150, and has secured $60 million in funding to date.

Despite the fact that their site is slammed from the media attention, I have it installed here and I'll post some observations as soon as I can connect with another person who has it installed. The chat module looks and works very much like AOL Instant Messenger (in fact some have called Groove "AOL IM on steroids"), and it'll be interesting to see how AOL (and Microsoft) react to this new technology in the coming months.

Here are some links to background info:

• Dan Bricklin's Photo Gallery of the event
  
• An O'Reilly Network interview
  
• Steve Gillmor of DevX interviews Ray
  
• NYT: New Tools From Lotus Notes Creator
  
• Wall Street Journal Interactive: Ozzie to unveil Napster-style networking
  
• CNET News: Groove pushes sharing ideas on the net
  
• The Industry Standard: The King of Groove
  
• Dan Gillmor: Groove should do wonders for peer-to-peer computing
  
• Tech Web: Groove Gets It On
  
• Dan Bricklin: The properties of P2P as popularized by Napster
  
• A visit with Ray Ozzie [scroll to the bottom of the page]

posted 2:19 PM +

Fantastic Voyage 2001

Given Imaging Ltd., an Israeli-based company, has just announced that clinical trials are under way for a pill-sized wireless camera that can deliver unique images of the human digestive tract. Patients will simply swallow one or more of these cameras, and a belt-mounted, walkman-sized wireless recorder captures the images and transfers them live to a computer workstation. Early animal trials revealed that the system could detect more abnormalities while reducing damage to bowel tissue.

As cool as this gadget is, it dilutes my childhood memory of the movie Fantastic Voyage where a band of scientists, most notably one played by Raquel Welch, are miniaturized and inserted into the bloodstream of a defecting Russian scientist.

Ofcourse it makes more sense to miniaturize the camera instead of the people. And 34 years later, I can't make the image of Racquel Welch crawling around in someone's bowels work.

posted 6:51 PM +

His vision runneth over

"By 2009, computers will disappear. Visual information will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses. In addition to high resolution virtual monitors appearing to hover in space, these intimate displays will provide full-immersion visual virtual reality."

-- Ray Kurzweil

posted 5:23 PM +

Never worry about street traffic again



Assuming no worries about small children and pets on takeoff, you might one day see the Solotrek XFV. It's a prototype for a single pilot vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that is undergoing wind tunnel tests. The Solotrek uses ordinary 87 octane gasoline, flies at a speed of 80 mph, and has a range of 150 miles. The project is supported by NASA, the U.S. Army, and DARPA. How much will it cost? About as much as a high-end sports car. Since the place where I work already has a Prowler, I'm going to submit this to our email suggestion box.
posted 8:37 PM +

Robot iron, iron robot

While shopping for an ironing board I found a surprise...



This view of the control panel on a top-of-the-line Rowenta steam iron.



And it brought to mind the robot in the Warner Brothers movie The Iron Giant.

This weird reality thread ended with The Iron Chef coming on as I started this post...
posted 6:55 PM +

Observed while walking the dog in Charles Village this morning:

In front of the bagel shop, there was a small car full of big, barking dogs.

A big, gentle man came out of the shop carrying a small, delicate bag of bagels and got in the car.

The man grew 4 heads and drove away.
posted 10:56 AM +

The usability list of doom

WebWord just released Trouble in Paradise: Problems Facing the Usability Community. This is not your standard article about how a product or service will fail if you don't address usability. It's an indictment of the discipline that also describes the general public's lack of understanding and interest in it. Some key points from the article:

• Usability professionals often just provide developers with another set of eyes.
  
• Why can't usability be built into the quality assurance (QA) process?
  The central problem with usability is that it is ignored.
  
• Almost any moderately trained person can do usability testing.
  
• The first things to get cut in the development process are documentation, testing, and usability.
  
• Usability is a confusing concept.
  
• Usability seems to be dying as a separate profession and no one is really investing in it as a discipline.
  
• The usability community is small, and not very powerful. [And the article says the profession is very exclusive. -- mike]
  
• There aren't enough generalized rules.
  
• Usability only holds the weakest part of the corporate mindshare.
  
• We make designers angry.
  
• If you had to decide to spend money on server uptime or usability, what would you do?
  
• The better you do usability, the less it is understood, and the less value it seems to produce.
  
• In down times, usability is easy to kill.

I say these are valid points, but why not strip away the ivory tower attitude and make usability usable! Create generalized rules, train some good people, and make it part of your process. I'm inspired to take action.

posted 10:31 AM +

The third wave of computer network attacks: Semantic Attacks

The latest Cryptogram newsletter describes the historic waves of computer network attacks:

• Physical Attacks - attacks against the computers, wires, and electronics. These were the first kinds of attacks the Internet defended itself against. Distributed protocols reduce the dependency on any one computer. Redundancy removes single points of failure. We've seen many cases where physical outages -- power, data, or otherwise -- have caused problems, but largely these are problems we know how to solve.
  
  
• Syntactic Attacks - attacks against the operating logic of computers and networks. This second wave of attacks targets vulnerabilities in software products, problems with cryptographic algorithms and protocols, and denial-of-service vulnerabilities -- pretty much every security alert from the past decade.
  
  
• Semantic Attacks - attacks that target the way we, as humans, assign meaning to content. In our society, people tend to believe what they read. How often have you needed the answer to a question and searched for it on the Web? How often have you taken the time to corroborate the veracity of that information, by examining the credentials of the site, finding alternate opinions, and so on? Even if you did, how often do you think writers make things up, blindly accept "facts" from other writers, or make mistakes in translation? On the political scene we've seen many examples of false information being reported, getting amplified by other reporters, and eventually being believed as true. Someone with malicious intent can do the same thing.

The article has a great list of reference links.
posted 11:39 PM +

Scientists revive 250 million year old bacteria

This story begs for a Jay Leno punch line.

posted 10:19 AM +

Fat is still fat on the web

ZDNET has the results of a survey that uncovered the "fattest" or slowest downloading sites on the web. Withholding judgement, I went to fattest site, JCPenney.com, and hoped that the long download was possibly for a good reason. Nope, the site doesn't offer any more useful information on the first screen than other catalog sites. On my DSL line at home with 384kb downlink and an older Powerbook, it still took somewhere around 30 seconds. Add to that the fact that it takes several seconds more to read and understand the content and navigation structure. Hello! They should look at Amazon again. One possible reason might be the very complex DHTML fly-out menus they use.

It will be interesting to see if JCPenny posts any kind of response to the ZDNET piece. I'm watching Goodexperience.com for comment as well.
posted 9:34 AM +

Couching Audrey

Yesterday 3Com Corporation released Audrey, the first in their line of "ergo" home computing products. The $499 device is essentially a simple web surfing terminal with a 56k modem and ethernet capability. A household with several Palm devices (ours) can synchronize all of them into an Audrey calendar application. I could really get into having a surfing slate while I watch TV, but I can't get past the fact that the thing looks like a 50's clock radio.
posted 11:43 PM +

Fiber bonds

I've enjoyed periodically re-reading a Neal Stephenson article that appeared in Wired a few years ago on the construction of what was at the time the longest fiber-optic link around the globe. Neal goes into quite some detail on all the crazy characters involved and you get a good sense of what a colossal pain in the ass the process is.

The Alcatel Submarine Networks web site has a wealth of information on how these cables are deployed. In addition to technical details on the cables, there's a nice schematic Flash animation illustrating the cable laying process.

After a few minutes of reflection on the global cable maps, I began to see these fragile lines as high tension cables that keep the continents from drifting apart. The physical forces that might threaten the submerged cables pale in comparison to their cultural and politcal importance.
posted 11:36 PM +

A sweet, smile inducing image taken on a tour of a pre-school classroom


posted 11:09 PM +

2 @ 2

Two of my all-time favorite out-of-print books are being re-released this month.

Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety 2 announces its own arrival in large type right on the cover in grand Wurman style: "A decade after the publication of what has become a cult guidebook to understanding, Richard Saul Wurman, in this expanded and updated volume, gives clarity to confusion with new maps for navigating through the web of data which surrounds us."

Clement Mok's Designing Business 2 is a new collection of case studies from the Yoda of Information Architecture. The first edition was crammed full of richly detailed new media experience diagrams and maps that still look fresh and conceptually sound today. The first edition cost a whopping $60 for a rather thin paperback. I'm glad to see they dropped the price.


posted 9:11 PM +

Feel good about Lovemarks

So trusted brands are now Lovemarks. Would an online community like AOL be a Hugmark?

A chart at the bottom of this page shows some examples.

And ofcourse there's the obligatory Fast Company article.
posted 11:42 AM +

New Scott McCloud column on narrative "trails"

The Comic Reader has posted a new installment of Scott McCloud's monthly column, "I can't stop thinking!!" Scott coins the name "trails" for the linear graphic devices he uses to link the story panels on his scrolling comics. As always, he can't stop and goes on to some thinking on the nature of nearly infinite scrolling canvases.

If you want to read the first three columns, here they are:

#3 - 10 suggestions for First-Time WebComics Artists

#2 - The Role of the Web in Fostering Diversity in Comics

#1 - Introduction

posted 10:51 PM +

No, I invented the Internet!!

The current issue of First Monday offers a scholarly look at the urban legend about Al Gore saying he invented the Internet. Minimally, read the section near the beginning on What Gore Said. There's also a great David Letterman Top Ten list.

Wired also has an article on this.
posted 10:15 PM +

Mobile gadgets aplenty in Japan

Techdirt has posted a bunch of photos that were taken at the CREATEC show in Japan a couple weeks ago. The variety and creativity of designs is amazing. We see far fewer variations of products here in the states certainly due to the huge costs of distribution and marketing. A 1991 article in the Harvard Business Review introduced the term expeditionary marketing to describe strategies used by Sony and others to bring many variations of products to market in rapid cycles to gather real-world data on customer satisfaction.
posted 10:32 AM +

Michael Schrage essay: Mirrorware

Noted and quoted:

I have come to the conclusion that, in fact, digital media have become a powerful "mirror medium" for me that gives me the power to see myself in ways that were either unimaginable or impractical barely five years ago. The ability to sort through my email by keyword(s) or frequency of correspondence has given me insights into my priorities that would take a master therapist weeks to have uncovered. Tools for sorting through my cell phone traffic yields comparable value. Examining the past 30, 60 or 90 days of my schedule on my Sharp Wizard tells me all too much about how well -- and how poorly -- I manage time. Unlike my old Filofax, my Wizard can be dynamically interrogated and its confessions are often filled with counter-intuitive surprises. They provoke me.

The rest of the short essay at ACM Ubiquity.
posted 1:11 AM +

Food court vignette




This gang of breads frightened me! I had a fruitshake instead.
posted 12:37 AM +

Have you hugged your
web server lately?
posted 11:44 PM +

Netscape's arrival

I wrote a few versions of this post and decided I didn't have strong feelings about Netscape and my experience with it any more. Looking back over the arc of Netscape's rise, fall, and acquisiton by AOL, I realize that while it expanded my view of the world, it was only a tool.

After Netscape went public, a bunch of people got very wealthy and bold promises of Netscape embedded everywhere and even replacing PC operating systems were never realized. Netscape's hype simply caused Microsoft to completely pull out all the stops to make Internet Explorer the web's browser of choice. Microsoft succeeded.

So here are some links to some historic bits to satisfly my remaining thread of sentimentality:

Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG SRC tag
Origin of a web browser
AOL acquires Netscape

posted 8:38 PM +

6 years ago today

Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 12:05:14 +0100
From: marca@neon.mcom.com (Marc Andreessen)
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Mosaic Netscape is out the door...

Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

   ftp.mcom.com in /netscape
   gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm
   lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape
   ftp.meer.net in /Netscape
   doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape
   archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape
   ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only)
   mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to release@mcom.com.

Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.

A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at info@mcom.com for more information.

Have fun!

Marc and the gang
info@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/

---
Marc Andreessen
Mosaic Communications Corporation
Mountain View, CA
marca@mcom.com

Rememberances, thoughts, and links later today.
posted 2:26 AM +

The NYT reviews Steven King's new book: On Writing
posted 2:42 PM +

Photomicrographs of food and drink

vegetables       ice cream       beer

wine       cocktails       fruit punch

and many other things ...

posted 10:33 AM +

What do I have to do? Draw you a map?

Martin Dodge has posted all of the illustrations from the book Mapping Cyberspace. The images are arranged in a slideshow interface with captions, and with a high speed connection, you can click through them pretty quickly. The majority of the artwork has been available for some time on his excellent site, An Atlas of Cyberspace, but I'm looking forward to the in-depth commentary in the book.
posted 10:25 AM +

Thou shalt not bow down before web gurus

Jorn Barger has compiled a gossipy web dossier on web guru Jakob Nielsen. Advice to aspiring web gurus regarding publicity photos: if you are portly and have a receding hairline, don't let the photographer use a wide angle lens up close.

Be sure to follow the link at the end of the dossier to the tutorial on how to research and write your own web resource or dossier pages.
posted 10:05 AM +

Some ageless axioms

SYSTEMS TEND TO MALFUNCTION CONSPICUOUSLY JUST AFTER THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH.

THE ARMY IS NOW FULLY PREPARED TO FIGHT THE PREVIOUS WAR.

PERFECTION OF PLANNING IS A SYMPTOM OF DECAY.

A TEMPORARY PATCH WILL VERY LIKELY BE PERMANENT.

THE OLD SYSTEM IS THE NEW PROBLEM.

KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT KEEP ANY BETTER THAN FISH.

IF YOU'RE NOT THERE, THE ACCIDENT CAN HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU.

THE SYSTEM IS ALTERED BY THE PROBE USED TO TEST IT.

THE AUTOMATIC PILOT IS NOT MUCH HELP WITH HIJACKERS.

-- from SYSTEMANTICS



posted 1:10 PM +

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0

This Windows utility strips out all the extraneous mark-up that Word leaves in documents exported as HTML. It should come in handy when importing HTML into WYSIWYG web page layout tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive.
posted 10:53 AM +

Aiptek PenCam Trio pen-sized digital camera

It's really a magic marker-sized digital camera that also works as a video camera (32 seconds video, no sound) and a webcam for your PC through the USB port. The 8MB of internal memory stores 80 pictures at 352x288 resolution. Radio Shack has it for only $79! Search for catalog number 950-1183.

Cameras like these should bring the toy camera photography movement into the web era.

** 10.21.2000 Update: I found a Japanese web site for the camera, Stickshot.com. There's a good gallery of photos, and the home page has an example of the multi-shot mini-movies. I think I'll get one now based on the photos. The quality is acceptable for a $79 gadget. I'd love to do a digital photography course for kids using this camera.
posted 10:04 AM +

A Photoshop filter to simulate color deficient vision

Colorfield has just released Insight 1.0, a Photoshop plug-in that simulates colorblindness. There's a downloadable demo and the full product costs $79. Only the Mac version is available with support for Windows coming later this year.

Idea: run this on photos of yourself, family, or pets (or anything other snapshot for that matter) to see what a colorblind spouse or friend sees...


posted 5:32 PM +

Update: curiouslee.com is active!

Lord, now I have to work on META tags and keywords. It's a good idea to start coming through the new domain since we're switching to another hosting provider in a few days. You shouldn't notice any change, but when does anything ever happen perfectly with Web technology?
posted 1:52 PM +

Still smoking? Read this.
posted 11:58 AM +

A history of computer information displays

The November 1999 issue of The IBM Journal of Research and Development published a history of computer display technologies with photos and commentary. Figure 5 in the article is an interesting plot of known technologies by pixel count and image diagonal inches. The high end of the graph data is capped at the limit of the human visual system.

We might actually have affordable displays like Tognazzini's Starfire concept by 2004.
posted 11:52 AM +

Hey, curiousLee.com is coming soon...
posted 10:55 AM +

Really big architecture

Dang! I missed the first episode of PBS' series "Building Big" which is hosted by illustrator David Macaulay. The second episode on domes is tonight. They have a site for the show where they sell the video tapes, and there's a coffee table book. NPR interviewed David a couple weeks ago.

David's book Underground is one of my all-time favorite books.
posted 10:51 AM +

I want to build robots!
posted 5:36 PM +

The day the filters died

Way back in 1992, I was hanging out in the AOL Photoshop discussion area when a mysterious newcomer named Kai Krause released an early version of the Gradient Designer filter that became the famous Kai's PowerTools for Photoshop. Until that time, Photoshop was a utilitarian (but powerful) digital image processing tool. The new filter and the resulting product from Kai exploded our creative boundaries, offering a wild user interface that delivered startling new digital effects.

If there was ever someone who could have been called a "rock star" in digital media it was Kai Krause. His steady rise to fame included the building of a brilliant team of designers and programmers that produced ground-breaking products like Bryce, Live Picture, and Poser. Kai gave riveting, standing-room-only demos at conferences and built a cult following around his products. Much like the fictitious rock-band in the movie Spinal Tap, Kai's company grew out from HSC Software to become MetaTools, then MetaCreations (acquiring Fractal Corporation along the way). Alas, the MetaCreations product line became so large that the company lost focus, and Kai was less vocal. The declining marketshare of the Macintosh didn't help.

Kai left, and soon after, MetaCreations sold off all the cool products to focus on e-commerce applications for a 3D rendering technology called MetaStream. The press wondered if Kai was legally bound to silence, and he has remained mostly out of the digital media limelight to this day. Kai's PowerTools is now owned by the struggling Corel Corporation, and is buried deep in their site.

News on Kai turned up in an article at TheEdge.org:

He is currently building a research lab in a castle on the Rhein river dubbed the Byteburg for applied innovation in all fields, as well as an Incubator for startups with the German government in a second castle near Cologne. He loves "Go and GÒdel, Bach and Billiards, Escher and eclectic food. Tea and Tivo, new gadgets and old books, museums and symphonies.

Sounds like Kai hasn't stopped thinking, and has taken his fortune back to his roots to recharge his spirit. The Byteburg web site is still mostly a placeholder, but there's a little bit of fun reading there. This is definitely a site to watch for the comeback of Kai.

posted 2:46 PM +

Preview of John Maeda's upcoming book

Amazon has posted some fuzzy but intriguing scans of John Maeda's forthcoming book Maeda@Media. John is the Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab and his personal artwork might be described as "algorithmic," with beautiful, delicate imagery resulting from the logic of mathematical formulas and computer processing. He has a bio page at the Media Lab site and a web site for Maedastudio.
posted 11:55 AM +

Sticker seen at the art school where I teach




Great name for a cybercafe...
posted 12:38 PM +

Fat pipes save lives

...was on a character's T-shirt in a Cyberslacker cartoon I saw recently. Brings to mind a caffiene-fueled surfing session I had one night. I landed on an article at Mappa Mundi that described the work that UUNET's staff artists put into their hand-drawn network maps.




(Click on the map to view a 53K, nearly full-screen GIF.)

UUNET maintains a collection of network maps on their site in PDF format. Opening the North American map in Acrobat, I enjoyed some fun Zoom tool clicks diving into the Mid-Atlantic area and Baltimore. The large linked image above works as a nice abstract desktop wallpaper. If you have Adobe Illustrator or FreeHand handy, you can open the PDF file in native vector form and make your own compositions.
posted 8:41 PM +

Information design is out there

It might have been my anticipation over the season premiere of The X-files, or the copy of the 1964 book "The UFO Evidence" I found while cleaning out a bookshelf last weekend, but something sent me to Google for more. There I found the *U* UFO Database, billed as "quite possibly the finest UFO software for PC available at anytime." The application's database is poplulated with over 17,640 sightings and from that data, can create global map renderings with incident locations plotted. The western hemisphere plot looks like what you'd expect--sightings align with populated areas kind of like the night photos of the Earth from space.

The coolest plot is the 50-year graph of UFO sighting frequencies juxtaposed with Mars and Venus orbital proximity. The peaks in sightings tend to correspond with times that Mars is furthest away from the Earth. I guess that's because Martians don't need to worry about fuel costs. The *U* UFO database software is $59.50 plus shipping. Call now, operators are waiting. The lone gunmen are watching.

posted 4:33 PM +

Temporal Typography




Poking around the UrbanPixel corporate pages, I see that Yin Yin Wong is the President and CEO of the venture. That name sounded familiar. Indeed, her work is in Wurman's book "Information Architecture," and she was mentioned in the David Small lecture we attended at The Cooper Union last year. Her conceptual foundation is in Temporal Typography, with the premise that while email usage continues to explode, we are losing the ability to communicate emotion in the process. This news gives me hope that with this artistic soul at the helm, they might find the path to another innovation for the Web that truly brings people closer together.
posted 11:52 PM +

UrbanPixel: Seeing and sharing the crowded web

Bruce Tognazzini's latest monthly column previews a mind-shattering new technology from UrbanPixel that provides a way to visualize groups of people and their interactions on the Web without special 3D technology. You should read this short article if you're interested in the future of shopping and community on the Web.

For those of you who haven't followed Bruce's career, he was Apple Computer's Human Interface Evangelist for 14 years. He recently left WebMD to join three other user experience gurus at the Nielsen Norman Group (or "The User Experience Mafia" as it's known by information architects and designers 'round the net).
posted 8:46 PM +

Haiku: The recent plight of paper

A "3D" haiku about traditional paper publishing (click on the words):

Deforestation
Disintermediation
Disaggregation

posted 7:53 PM +

Navigable product

I noticed this a couple weeks ago while shopping at Home Depot:




Product packaging that looks like web navigation. It's not a trend, but worth filing away for future consideration.
posted 12:26 PM +

Atomilism and Skywriting

A mental dustbunny of mine: what are the smallest and largest man-made drawings?

On the small side, it might be images produced by the Scanning Tunneling Microscope or STM. At IBM's STM Gallery, there's a section called "atomilism" (the use of atoms for pointilistic art) where scientists use the microscope's ultra-precise needle to move atoms around on a highly-polished surface. The image above left is an artful collection of carbon monoxide atoms.

All the way upward, we might consider skywriting. Skywriting is a combination of skilled aerobatics and the release of a chemical compound called Titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4) that generates a dense white vapor when it reacts with moist air.

I'll post an update when I find smaller and larger examples, or make any myself...

[Note: Jack suggests that a larger man-made "graphic" would be a map of the global telephone system, so I changed the word "graphic" to "drawing." In the next couple days, I will actually be posting a collection of links about the global fiber optic network.]
posted 11:33 PM +

Web page flood continues

A recent Cyveillance study advances that there are 7 million web pages appearing every day! And about 6,999,500 of them suck. Visit their home page once in a while and stare at the Web Ticker Real-Time Web Page Count java applet. Some will see this as an ever-expanding opportunity; web marketers should get depressed about the increasing noise.
posted 10:13 PM +

Less Flash, more substance

Symbolman is a Flash animation that tells a story using only international symbols. A site like this is a conceptual oasis out of the sea of spasmodic flying typography. Reminds me of last year's minimalist tour-de-force at Willing-to-Try.
posted 10:25 AM +

Server: name that font!

If you liked the old Linotype FontExplorer CDROM, you can now use it online to search for font designs. An even more amazing service is WhatTheFont [seen at xblog] which lets you upload a scanned font sample for automated identification. Ofcourse you can purchase any fonts displayed.
posted 6:41 PM +

Toob-friendly fonts

Bitstream's TV Font Pack. "Bitstream's typeface professionals selected 13 designs from the Bitstream world-class library to provide a comprehensive collection of fonts for viewing on TV screens." Includes some historical blurbs for some of the fonts.

posted 6:13 PM +

Poetry and big business

A thought-provoking interview, Poems Are Long Journeys In Risk at Knowledge@Wharton examines the poetry of former Morgan Stanley executive John Barr. He talks about how he came to cope with the chaos and uncertainty of business through poetry. A good passage:

Knowledge@Wharton: You once said that you see no conflict between your business and poetic activities because you see both business and poetry as responses of the self to a chaotic world, and that you see yourself as someone who goes around the world transforming that chaos into money and poetry. Could you explore this theme further?

Barr: It’s still a benchmark of how I view the two strange bedfellows that business and poetry sometimes are. Both draw their water out of the same well. Both in their own ways are efforts to seek to bring order to a chaotic and random universe. Business does it in a way that will produce a profit for the shareholders, if it is successful. Poetry creates an order that I would describe as the capture of understanding.

One of the great things we get out of Shakespeare is that once he has articulated something, there’s a comfort level that comes from that. It’s almost like a talisman. It gives one a feeling of control-not in the sense of a control freak, but of control of the unknown and the uncertain. To me, the act of articulation is a basic human response to feelings of uncertainty and even of fear.

That is why in old and ancient literatures, names are so important. If you know a person’s name, you have a kind of power over them. Maybe this goes to the primitive tribal fears of having one’s picture taken, too. A picture becomes a physical possession of a person’s image. There’s a moment in the "Odyssey" where Odysseus and his men have been shipwrecked. The mythical Cyclops asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies, "My name is no man." It is that ancient encounter with the unknown, where the first thing you try to do is know how to call it. You find that in Shakespeare, and you also find that in the great ancient literatures. That is fundamental to what you get out of writing and reading good poetry.

It's jarring to see the concept of poetry even loosely associated with the financial business. Gives one hope.


posted 3:26 PM +

Haiku #1

Haiku written at work last week:

Webbers mix in fall
Like pebble, oil and water
Just need a hammer

posted 2:34 AM +

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