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The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in 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
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Sunday, December 31, 2000
Curious corks Before reveling the evening, I read about champagne cork history, manufacture and safety. Saturday, December 30, 2000
A jewel worth keeping clean and peaceful  Blue Marble 2000 is a new digital composite of the full Earth that simulates as closely as technology allows what the Earth looked like to the astronauts. They offer the copyright-free image in several resolutions for web and print use. The highest resolution images are breathtaking. The rest of the gallery has some great examples, of which my favorite is a perspective view of Hurricane Hugo. These images make great desktop wallpapers, and if you're running a multiple monitor setup like I have at home, these images are high enough in quality that you can make a big backdrop that spans across your dual desktop to simulate the view from the Space Shuttle.  Friday, December 29, 2000
The year 2001—the movie it isn't A bunch of articles are springing up about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, now 33 years old. MSNBC covers the historical significance of the movie, and explains why our real space program hasn't matched the 1968 vision. Turner Classics Network is running the movie right at the turn of the new year, with commentary from Arthur C. Clarke. An HTML copy of the original cinema program book is online. Thursday, December 28, 2000
City boy goes on a sleighride    Amy's dad has a friend that gives sleigh rides on their farm, and we went today. It was the perfect time of day for my first sleigh ride on a white Christmascape. Wednesday, December 27, 2000
Dead machine mecca Every couple years I visit Mendelson's in Dayton, Ohio, a surplus industrial equipment reseller. Anyone who has an interest in the history of technology or electronics should visit a place like this. It's a tinkerer's nirvana. Since my last visit, they've expanded to take in virtually anything non-organic to resell. The company takes up four buildings now totalling 1 million square feet. In addition to the incredible array of electronics gear, they've added a retail store equipment outlet where you can buy any kind of store fixture, mannequins, and an entire Christmas environment from a shopping mall. In the original building, we poked at old firefighting equipment, weird high voltage components, bank vault parts, and a complete diesel truck driving simulator.         And what did we come away with? A bag full of interesting electroluminescent digital display modules ripped from some microwave ovens and other equipment. I think Amy will cannibalize them to make some techy looking jewelry. Tuesday, December 26, 2000
Add a cam to anything   The wackiest present this year was from Amy's brother Bill. It's the camera they pitch on those cheezy X10.com banner ads, but the thing actually works well. It's a tiny battery-powered wireless color TV camera that transmits to a base receiver that feeds the signal into a TV or VCR. Here it is attached to a remote control car and some sample pix off the TV screen. Next, we're going to rig a DogCam. You can review the specs and buy the kit from X10.com for around $80. The possibilities are endless. Monday, December 25, 2000
Today's partial solar eclipse  Amy is holding a pinhole sun viewer I made out of an oatmeal box. The inset in the upper left shows the peak of the eclipse as seen at 12:30pm from Greenville, Ohio, where we're staying this week. The inset of the Sun projected on a piece of white paper in the box was taken with my Nikon CP950 set on macro. There wasn't a noticable dimming of daylight to set a mood, and it was a chewy 12°F, so we didn't hang out for long. For more info on eclipses, visit this NASA web site. Saturday, December 23, 2000
Everyday zen From the book Sweeping Changes: Every other creature on Earth and every plant functions in the present. We humans are the only ones who fret about what hour it is, who try to strap some controlling measure of time onto our wrists, and who hang a reminder of the coming days on our walls. Other life-forms seem to have no difficulty recognizing when it's time to eat, time to run, time to build a nest, or time to go up to the surface to take a breath of air. Animals always seem to know what to do. They seldom seem to be at loose ends. Friday, December 22, 2000
Holiday encounter with the biggest orb of them all  Saturday, Dec. 30th, NASA's Cassini probe will fly by Jupiter in a slingshot maneuver to pick up speed to Saturn. The web site already has some excellent closeup photos very reminiscent of the Voyager images from the 70s. The site will showcase some amazing images and scientific data over the next couple weeks. Check often or set up a spy. Thursday, December 21, 2000
Newsroom of the future  Newsroom editors are looking for new ways to gather news and publish to several media simultaneously. News organizations today duplicate their efforts covering an event with teams specializing in print, TV, or online. IFRA, a German newspaper technology association, has created a video to illustrate the newsroom of the near future. The 9-minute video depicts news editors managing a complex newsflow from a sophisticated control center working with agile teams of reporters or stringers using miniaturized electronic tools. The creator of the video, Kerry Northrup, has posted a paper on the concept, and Editor & Publisher magazine has a review. The IFRA site has a page on NewsGear 2001, their recommended list of portable newsgathering equipment that describes a kit that fits in a suitcase and costs less than $10,000. The video is available on CDROM from an address listed in the articles above. My request was cheerfully answered by an email saying that a free CD was on its way. I'll post more comments after I see the video. Wednesday, December 20, 2000
Life doesn't care about the Internet Despite all the hope we place in technology and the Internet, the pace of our lives stays the same. We shun complexity, and seek out simplicity and efficiency. Sean Carton has some good thoughts about why most people's lives still don't revolve around the Internet. Quote for today I think the intermediating people running the means of production need to be exterminated—a lot of them are basically war criminals. I want to empower designers. I want them walking across the landscape like a colossus. Tuesday, December 19, 2000
The next X George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, writes in his monthly column that businesses should get ready for what will inevitably replace the Web. He says we should remember that the Internet is just the wires connecting computers, and the Web is an application or service on the Internet, and therefore vulnerable to be replaced by another disruptive technology. Colony coins the term X Internet (short for "executable Internet") for whatever ultimately succeeds. He predicts we'll see another wave of startups with exhuberant investors, and the current market leaders like Amazon will be threatened. For some perspective, I adapted a chart from Forrester that illustrates the time it took various media to reach 50 million users.  Notice how as the waves of innovations diffused into the public, they occur in shorter time spans. The original graphic has Web labeled as Internet, but the curves are essentially the same since 1993 except that if you plot the complete existence of the Internet, the line would go back to the late 60's. I've extended the timeline to show the "next things." Colony's idea that the Web will still grow, but will become something else is represented by the top dotted line. This would include technologies that compliment the Web or work with it such as the peer-to-peer Groove and Napster, and more broadly, things like Java and Microsoft's .NET. The second dotted line could be wireless communicators such as the Japanese i-Mode phones which have an incredible user base of over 16 million in under 2 years. History shows us that revolutionary technologies are never what you predict, so I'm excited to see what comes out of nowhere to fill the X Internet, and I hope I'm part of it. Monday, December 18, 2000
The tao of testing Why do web sites cost millions of dollars? In a word, complexity. Large-scale business processes that serve a global marketplace require intricate software and hardware systems that take a long time to build. But development happens in an environment where business rules and technology are constantly changing. One way to cope with this (besides rigorous up-front planning) is testing. Evolt has a short article that describes the different types of software testing. The list is a good primer, but there's not much context, and the author pushes you to a link on Fred Brooks' book The Mythical Man-Month, which is more about software project management as a whole. Sunday, December 17, 2000
Timeline to 2020 Even as they're busy laying claim to the past, British Telecom's Technolgy Journal presents a short timeline of technology predictions from now until the year 2020. I think this one's a bit of a stretch: 2010—95 per cent of people in advanced nations computer literate. Saturday, December 16, 2000
Upsidedown tree  The Christmas tree at the Papermoon Diner in Baltimore hangs from the ceiling leaving the dining area uncompromised. People in small apartments might be inspired for next year. Friday, December 15, 2000
This blog has multiple patent violations British Telecom is suing Prodigy claiming that as the first ISP online, they violated a 1989 patent on the concept of hyperlinking. Prodigy calls the action shameless, and will vigorously defend themselves. Obviously, no one bothered to do some light research on the hypermedia thinking of Vannevar Bush (1945), Ted Nelson (1960), Douglas Engelbart (1962), and Alan Kay (1968). Thursday, December 14, 2000
Codes of Ethics
Better GUI text Author Jeff Johnson has chosen the chapter on Textual Bloopers to release for free from his book GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers. It's a great reference that will certainly entice you to buy the book for your reference shelf. The chapter is all about the little snippets of text that your software displays for graphical user interface labels, alerts, and prompts. These are often the least managed aspects of software and web application development. Trapped here is critical interaction dialog between the user and software system that can deliver a fluid, productive experience, or vein-popping frustration. These bits of text are often badly written, ambiguous, or downright unfriendly. And don't think that this is a problem confined to desktop software application design. Web pages that incorporate JavaScript, Java, Flash, and the like can have really bad, show-stopping grammar creep into otherwise excellent content. With software continuing to grow more complex, not many are hopeful that textual content in software interfaces will get better. Read on about microcontent and nanocontent (bottom of page). Wednesday, December 13, 2000
Print designers getting with the web The AIGA has posted an online version of their new magazine Gain: AIGA Journal of Design for the New Economy. It's good to see them finally attempting to get aligned with the times although the Commerce Department stopped calling it the "new" economy a while back. Electronic networks are simply part of the way all business is being done. Their kickoff theme of experience design is a noble choice. Even though experience design has been around a long time, it's a good topic to present as the first logical example of the new ways print designers will have to think about the Web. Too bad the magazine only comes out twice a year, and the online content is a regurgitation of the print piece with some Flash and a listserv. Gee, for the June 2001 issue they could cover that weird multimedia stuff. Tuesday, December 12, 2000
Time frames  I had written off the Casio Wrist Camera as pretty frivolous until I roamed through the Camborg web site recently. The author bills it as the site for "camera-enhanced humans" and offers a photo gallery with thousands of user-contributed images. Browsing the images, I realized that for the first time we have a tiny digital camera that you can carry with you anywhere with a view screen, and capacity if 100 images. The gallery posters seemed to enjoy the freedom of making lots of images at no incremental cost with a very portable device. There's poetic charm in a watch that can tell time as well as capture visual slices of time. With the ability to store lots of small images, you could use it as a delayed mobile web cam of sorts, taking a picture every time you glance at your watch. Picture quality is less of a problem if you concentrate on things nearby. And when you view lots of these little frames in a grid, they show a graphic map of sorts, full of what I call "time stamps." If there was a way to quickly dump batches of images to my Visor, I could see making some interesting Hockney-esque photo-collages. With a few thousand of these little images, say taken all at work, I could run them through photomosaic software. At $199, the camera's still a bit expensive as a tool for casual artistic exploration, but the price will certainly drop. Monday, December 11, 2000
Sample chapter from the book Web Project Management Books specifically about web site project management are pretty rare, so when Web Project Management was released, I snapped it up. The author operates a companion web site where you can download Chapter 8 on Design and Construction (a 22 page RTF file) for free. Some of the topics covered in the excerpt: effective meetings, project briefs, development environments, reporting on work in progress, and change control. The parent site is an online community for e-business consultants. I registered to browse the white papers and was pleasantly surprised to find a large compilation of papers and resources from elsewhere on the Web. The registration process was smooth, and when you get to the white papers search form, simply enter the word "all". Last I looked there were 93 annotated entries to all kinds of interesting stuff. Steve Krug's new book says "don't," but it does make me think  I linked to the first chapter of Steve Krug's new book Don't Make Me Think earlier in the week, and last night I picked up the book from the local B&N. I'm half way through reading it, and it's the most practical book on usability I've seen. This is a book that preaches common sense approaches to web site usability in a way that can be understood by management, marketers, designers, and programmers alike. It's a refreshingly usable book that arrives at a time when the discipline of usability as a whole is struggling for recognition. Sunday, December 10, 2000
Blog on web community Meg Pickard, a web producer in the UK, and some of her friends, have started a web log about cyberspace culture and community. It's described as a collaborative extension of her thesis work. The entires only go back a couple weeks, but they've been interesting so far. Saturday, December 09, 2000
The mother of all demos  Douglas Engelbart's historic first demo of the computer mouse and other breakthroughs was 32 years ago today. That 90-minute demo showed off the research and development conducted in the mid-60s by the Augmented Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute. It was also one of the most elaborate uses of split-screen, long-distance video collaboration. Engelbart's team co-presented from his lab 30 miles away via microwave transmission to the audience at the San Francisco Convention Center. Engelbart showed working prototypes of word processing, topic outliners with collapsible lists, hyperlinking, a group discussion board, intranet mail messaging, and general concepts of what we refer to today as knowledge management. At the end of the demo, the 1000 in attendance gave him a standing ovation, and it's often said that if high-tech venture capitalists existed then, they'd have showered money on his ideas. Like many visionaries, Engelbart was years ahead of his time, and his singular focus on pure research with no real-world applications forced his funders to cut him off. His disciples went on to the famous Xerox PARC Lab, and inspired a generation that built companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, 3Com, and others. The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker, a chapter in Howard Rheingold's book Tools for Thought, recounts the events of that day and considers their significance. The Stanford computer history web site has RealVideo of the event chopped into 35 pieces, so you have to click on each clip to view the whole event. I've used SMIL to string all the clips together to present the entire 76 minutes of video non-stop, 8 minutes of highlights, and the clips individually (you need RealPlayer). I also added thumbnail images and run times to the clip captions—all in a pop-up scrolling window. When I got the SMIL files done, I watched the whole thing projected on a wall with the volume up, and room darkened. I was gripped by an immersive view that charged me with some of the same excitement of the original audience. Engelbart's ideas were for a few moments new again. I showed the clips around work where most weren't born when we landed on the Moon, and barely remember the Challenger disaster. Some were surprised to learn that the fundamental concepts of personal computing and networks at the core of our work date back over 30 years. Most new technology isn't. When ASPs fail Application Service Providers (ASPs) were all the rage last year. The idea sounded great—in an organization with dedicated Internet access, you could outsource any number of internal information processes to an external hosting provider with a specialized, web-based software application. There was no software to install or maintain. Customer relationship management, and group collaboration services were popular choices. With the recent failures of Red Gorilla and Hot Office, anyone who's outsourced web services to a startup ASP ought to be nervous. Users of these services are SOL because it is difficult to export data stored in the services. At least these two firms have given some warning to their customers. NEC shows nano-sized wine glass Showing what must be the smallest human-sculpted forms, this NEC press release and photo describes a new advance in manufacturing complex 3D structures at the nanometer scale (one nanometer is one-millionth of a meter). Unlike conventional etching processes, this new technique uses a focused ion-beam that travels through a gas permeated with molecules of the base object material. When the beam concentrates on a spot, the material suspended in the gas is fused into place. The beam is re-positioned and pulsed repeatedly in a precise pattern to build up the object. Early Edison recordings on MP3.com You can hear an original 1888 recording of Thomas Edison's voice and examples of the oldest recorded music on MP3.com. The first clip on the page has the Edison voice, but you have to fill out a short form to download the clip. The audio is very faint and noisy but fascinating. Friday, December 08, 2000
Information architecture in a flash For his thesis, Michael Kopscak of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program developed a system to generate web site information architecture diagrams from a database and present them in Flash using Macromedia Generator. The thesis is downloadable as a PDF file (1.7 MB). This resource has been making the rounds on some other IA-related blogs, and I share their desire to have system like this. This inspires me to start getting my site content inventories into a database, and start playing with ASP Flash Turbine. My head-end is bigger than your head-end People still look at me funny when I tell them I have a server in the basement and ethernet in every room of my house. Well in Silicon Valley with all things digital are Texas-style big, wealthy executives have built what they call head-ends in their homes to concentrate network, telecommunications, and AV systems into a huge rack of equipment. And ofcourse the goal is to have the biggest one. Larry Ellison's system is amazing in it's excess, boasting the largest subwoofer available, and a refrigerator-sized video projector. Thursday, December 07, 2000
Parachuting into welcome arms The Chicago Tribune has a story about how dot-com refugees are being snapped up by corporate employers. Why computer technology should be more like an AK-47 rifle Computer companies ship lousy, sloppily designed products that cause untold hours of agony and lost productivity. But you knew that. A Salon article says that the computer industry will one day suffer a shake-up like the one experinced by the U.S. automobile industry when Japan took to heart the Deming theories of quality process, and shipped great cars at a low price to gain market share. Technology companies in India are already moving to repeat history by adopting software development standards that reduce defects to 0.05 per 1,000 lines of code. The article opens by comparing the simplicity of an AK-47 rifle to the complex M-16 which was once famous for jamming. Being human with technology Glenn Fleishman reports on the Pop!Tech 2000 conference recently held in Camden, Maine. Some of the best thinkers around gathered to discuss the implications of technological progress on humanity. The conference's web site will have streaming videos of the presentations. Only 5% of adults around the world are on the net eMarketer has released the eGlobal Report which finds that only 5% or 229.8 million adults worldwide are active Internet users. The report defines active Internet users as spending at least one hour per week online. The percentage will grow to 14% by 2004. The full report is $795, but Internet Wire has a good summary. Wednesday, December 06, 2000
The founder of the web describes his vision for the next ten years At the XML 2000 conference, Tim Berners-Lee presented his vision for a "semantic web" where URLs or more accurately URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers) should not be about the locating an object but helping machines process information. When he says "semantics" he's not talking about human language, but the idea that there needs to be a mechanism that ensures a machine does the right thing when you pass data to it. I think in essence he's saying that we need to move past all the activity surrounding where to find things, and attach more meaning to the resources themselves. The article is somewhat technical but important nonetheless. The game of name The naming of companies is tough these days with the available good word choices gone. And the desired name has be registerable or adaptable to the Internet domain name space. It's not just start-ups but firms that want to reposition themselves in the marketplace. Mercury News has a good piece on the recent renaming of Andersen Consulting, and Knowledge@Wharton examines the policy and legal issues surrounding the seven new top level domains. By the way, the seven new domains are: .aero, .coop, .museum, .name, .pro, .biz and .info. Tuesday, December 05, 2000
In search of WAP usability The Nielsen Norman Group has just released the report WAP Usability, Déjà Vu: 1994 All Over Again. The study was conducted in London recently over the course of a week. 20 participants were given one of two mobile phones with Internet features, and asked to keep a diary of their experience. As you might expect, trying to surf the 'net on a five line LCD screen using a tiny keyboard is no fun for users. 70% said they wouldn't be doing it again in a year. The other good bit about this 90 page report is that you can purchase the PDF file online for only $18. Other firms would charge $500+ for a study like this. Jakob tosses us a goodie. Floppy CDs A company called ThinDisc Media has developed blank CD-Rs and DVD discs that are 1/5th the thickness of standard media. The new discs are flexible enough that they can be wrapped around soda cans and bound into magazines without breaking. The downer is that you need a plastic adapter ring to play the discs. But investors are stoked enough to have handed them $4.1 million in first round funding, and possibly another $20 million soon. Forbes has the details. Be nice, satisfice I felt the ring of truth in Fact of life #2: We don't make optimal choices. We satisfice. Satisfice is a cross between satisfying and sufficing, and is used here to drive home the notion that users of web pages will quickly choose the first reasonable link option that satisfies their goal. They won't methodically process all the visible content and link choices to make a rational decision. This is one of the key points in chapter 2 of the new plain-talking book on web usability, Don't Make Me Think. A footnote: the publisher, web development consultancy Circle.com, just closed down several offices including the one here in Baltimore. Even as the company is feeling a contraction, the launch of this first book in their library on web design is a nice way of giving back to the industry. Monday, December 04, 2000
User interfaces: the next generation Steven Levy writes about Apple employees and alumni designing the next generation computer interfaces: MacOS X, Microsoft .NET, and Eazel. There are interactive screenshot examples of each. Sunday, December 03, 2000
E-stats to arm yourself for the work week
Saturday, December 02, 2000
A galactic embrace in 3 billion years  The San Diego Supercomputing Center has simulated the predicted collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy (links to image-heavy page with somewhat nasty design). Both galaxies were modeled with 100 million particles, and the time span is 90 million years between frames, with the entire sequence spanning a billion years. You can see the animation as an MPEG clip in three different resolutions: The clips will play in either QuickTime or Windows Media Player. I read somewhere else that space is so "empty" that two galaxies with billions of stars each could pass right through each other with no direct collisions. Now I look at the clouds in my coffee with renewed wonder. Friday, December 01, 2000
When you're on the go and have to go From The San Jose Mercury News: Handheld PC can be a public potty pointer.
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