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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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Wednesday, January 31, 2001
The compucoach I just caught up with a story from last week's Baltimore Sun about the ultra-sophisticated digital video archive that the Ravens use to study footage of game plays. Coach Brian Billick, nicknamed the "compucoach", has his staff systematically digitize and catalog game footage so that the coaches can annotate the time-stamped video. Some plays carry 30 pieces of extra information. Up to 90 hours of video are kept online for instant random access from Macintosh computers set up throughout the Ravens' Owings Mills, Maryland training complex. This in-depth analysis uncovers weaknesses and trends in the opposing team's game. I think there's no end in sight to how much technology will be leveraged in the high-stakes realm of professional sports. I imagine players not only transmitting audio and video, but emanating streams of radio telemetry about their bodies as 3D cameras track every nuance of field maneuvers. Games might feel more like Space Shuttle missions with game support teams yelling: "Player Lewis status: shoe temperature, NOMINAL; helmet, SECURE; jockstrap: DRY!" Reporters: "I don't need no stinkin' Internet." CNN: "Deal with it." CNN is reorganizing its interactive division out of existence in the next year forcing reporters to become multiskilled individuals who can report for television, write for the Web site and lay down radio tracks. The online reporters used to be kept as far away from the "real" newsroom as possible. Now CNN realizes that it's about good reporting regardless of the medium. Orifice tour Storyteller Mike Daisey's non-disclosure/employment agreement with Amazon recently expired, so he's doing a one man show in Seattle called "21 Dog Years" on his experience as "dot-com wage slave." In preparation for the show, he used his old employee ID to sneak into Amazon, and made Rear Entry, a funny video of the tour. The short clip is in Quicktime format. Here's a follow-up interview at Netslaves. Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Cost of sale with some common courtesy please Today I went on the company dime with some co-workers to present at an Internet pure-play in Houston, only to enter a meeting where 75% of the attendees didn't show. The two that arrived late, had other meetings to attend and moved on after 15 minutes—an obvious sign they had already selected a vendor. One annnounced herself as the product manager deeply concerned with the usability of her products. Given that usability is practiced for the benefit of humans, with a goal towards a product or service that has humanistic qualities, this manager had a low regard for her human guests. One quality any person concerned with the process of usability should have is the feeling of empathy. Common courtesy on the other hand, should be learned as soon as possible after you leave the crib. The befuddled, or might I say "idiot" project manager who courted us could have easily cancelled the meeting last night, but instead left a message to delay it another hour. Our Creative Director is livid. I at least can rant into this web log... Monday, January 29, 2001
Great art waits for no information designer The Curse of Information Design is a new rant at A List apart. Let the arguments continue! Exclaimation architecture Here are some pix I shot early this morning as downtown went wild over the game victory. Besides the usual screaming and arm flailing people, there were some monumental messages.    I hope we don't have to wait another 30 years for this kind of nearly universal joy. Superbowl commercials gallery As usual, Ad Critic is starting to post some of the commercials shown during the Superbowl. You can now judge with a clearer post-game mind if they were worth $2.5 million a minute. Sunday, January 28, 2001
Virtualized bowl This Superbowl offered the first live demonstration of what CBS-TV calls Eye Vision where 33 cameras track and digitize the action to create 3D rotatable motion videos as seen in the movie The Matrix and many TV commercials. The technology is based on research from Carnegie Mellon University on virtualized reality. CBS Sportsline has a page of the post-game video highlights (requires the RealVideo plug-in). Saturday, January 27, 2001
The humanity  The largest human gathering on Earth has been imaged from space by the privately-owned Ikonos satellite. The Mala Kumbh Mela festival only happens in Northern India once every 12 years. Upwards of 30 million people converge at a river pennensula to wash their sins away. What's amazing to realize is there might be 4 million people in the purple blob pictured above. Here's what the scene looked like from the ground. Spaceflight Now also has a story. USB flex light This is a useful little USB-powered flexible reading lamp for laptop computers. After pluging it in, you can adjust it around to the front of your laptop. It's great for throwing a little bit more light on your keyboard or paper notes. I've had the Mac ADB port version for a couple years. Friday, January 26, 2001
The future flat Some photos and a Cringely piece are promoting the idea of electronics printed on flat, flexible circuit boards that can be used to make anything from a displosable to a cheap laptop. One company, Dieceland, has a cell phone design patent using the process, and was profiled last year in the New York Times. I can easily see promoters wanting to give out single-use cell phones at sports events. You could be made to endure a 15 second commercial eveytime you make a call, and the thing would shut off in a couple hours. If ram gets cheap enough, I'd like to see disposable cameras made this way. You could shoot maybe 60 pictures and beam them into a kiosk. As with most miniaturized gadgets, battery technology still lags behind. The cell phone illustrated in the paptent drawing above has a big hump in the back for a 9 volt battery. Maybe the paper-thin battery technology from Powerpaper might one day hold enough energy. The Don of usability The New York Times interviews usability expert Donald Norman for his views on ballots and product design. I enjoy anything about Don since he's less full of himself than his co-worker. Thursday, January 25, 2001
Shrek dreck? The site and trailer are up for Shrek, another Dreamworks animation coming this summer. I thought the preview looked pretty good, but Animation Blast has a rant from Sept 11 on mixing realism in animation. There were even plans to release a 3D version. The summer of artificial intelligence  A fan site just released the preview of Steven Spielberg's summer movie, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Spielberg took over the project from the late Stanley Kubrick who had amassed 20 years worth of notes and concepts. The film is based on a short story by Brian Aldiss (which you can read at Wired) about an android boy who has to face obsolescence. This looks like it could be another cute E.T movie, but Spielberg has grown up a bit since then. ZDNet UK is running a timely article on the subject of AI. Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Happy Chinese New Year!  The celebrations begin today on the new lunar month, and go on for a week. For more about the snake sign, visit this Chinese Zodiac page that lists birth years and describes personality traits. It occured to me that the two women I interact with the most, my wife, and our operations director at work, were both born under this zodiac sign. What does that mean? Me? I am the Ox. Tuesday, January 23, 2001
The web design crisis A List Apart is running a special double issue with 40 personal stories of dot com survivors. Most are web designers. If you're in the business, or near it, you should find someone like yourself in there. The White House hacks When the Clinton administration left, they made a funny voicemail, took some keycaps, and cleaned out their web server root. The 100th anniversary of radio over the rainbow CNN has a story about the 100th anniversary of Marconi's first successful radio transmission over a horizon to a reciever 186 miles away, proving that signals could eventually cross oceans to span the globe. Later this year on December 12th will mark the centennial of the first trans-Atlantic broadcast. Monday, January 22, 2001
"Like, OH MY GAWD, I made a web site!" The San Francisco Bee reports on the amazing popularity of a 15-year-old LA teenager's self-published site. Called The Goosehead Teen Entertainment Network, it attracts 300,000 hits a day for girl web publisher Ashley Powers. At this nexus of narcissism, young visitors access discussion boards, chat rooms, advice columns, hardware reviews and MP3 files. Ashley writes about how the site got started, and shows off her partnership with Richard Dreyfuss. She's already entertained offers from NBC, MGM Entertainment, Showtime and Disney. Even though I majorly gagged at her "Dawson's Creek" good looks, her site is a totally-on reference for what teens want out of a web community. The cyber-grey lady is five today The New York Times has been on the web five years, and an article there recalls the site's development. There's even a Flash-based timeline that shows how the design has changed over the years. Sunday, January 21, 2001
Web stats at WebSnapshot Now that StatMarket has been charging for its web browser usage stats, designers have been going over to WebSnapshot. They also publish a monthly analysts report in PDF form. Saturday, January 20, 2001
Molecular dot matrix printing  Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM) have been around for almost 20 years, and in the last two decades, we've seen the advancement of the "tunneling" effect which employs an ultra-fine tungsten needle that glides over atoms and molecules. Data from the needle's path is plotted to create images. This technology is so important, the inventors won a Nobel prize in 1986. Now the STM has evolved into the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) that can nudge, pick-up and animate individual atoms, giving scientists the ability to construct simple atom-sized machines. Insprired by a famous 1959 speech by physicist Richard Feynman in which he noted that there was no reason that the individual atom can be a building block, a team from Northwestern University imaged the quote shown from the speech in an array of atoms. This effectively gives us the smallest possible printing device. The technique is called Dip-Pen Nanolithography and NWU has a press release about the 1999 image. Bitmapped fonts for composing web graphics Well, at the request of students, I've finally created a list of bitmapped screen-resolution fonts suitable for use at small sizes in web images. Joe Gillespie has just revised his popular Mini7, and the expanded, cross-platform font set is for sale at Kagi. As of this writing, the old free version can still be found at Fontsite. Another popular font is Jason Kottke's Silkscreen, and you also hear about Peter Bruhn's Sevenet which is posted by Fountain Foundry. Other fonts:
I suggest you snag 'em all while you can. Paper prototyping A common technique in software application and web design is the use of paper prototypes to facilitate thinking about how the user will interact with a proposed user interface design. Paper prototypes can be simple "low-fidelity" sketches, or more formal drawings generated in illustration software. These paper images are a prelude to the construction and presentation of rough working prototypes on the computer. Here is a kit of user interface widget templates that can be printed on Avery labels for quickly assembling user interface layouts. The Society for Technical Communication offers a tutorial on creating paper prototypes in Visio 2000, and The Usability Professionals Association even goes as far as describing the use of 3D paper prototypes to test interactions with kiosks, vending, and ATM machines. Friday, January 19, 2001
Digital photojournalism turns a corner Photojournalist Dirck Halstead, who covers the White House beat for Time Magazine, writes about the coming of age of digital cameras in his latest editorial for The Digital Journalist. The new Canon D-30 will be used almost exclusively to cover the first 100 days of the Bush administration, and a new generation of digital cameras will create grain-free images virtually indistinguishable from film. Photojournalists are excited about this technology not because of the great resolution, but now they can edit, crop, and transmit images from a laptop in the field while keeping more control over their creative vision. 70 years of the Amateur Scientist on CDROM The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American has been the inspiration to high school science fair projects for decades. With not much more than stuff you can find at the hardware store and Radio Shack, you could build working science demonstrations of lasers, cosmic ray detectors, seismographs, bubble chambers, and more. Now Tinker's Guild has released the complete 20th century collection of this treasure on CDROM for $89.95. It's cross-platform compatible including Linux. Even if you'll never actually build any of the projects, there are plenty of articles that will simply satisfy your scientific curiosity. Thursday, January 18, 2001
Are you a closet project manager? When a web development effort has to involve the efforts of very specialized discplines such as visual design, software development, and marketing, project managers assume a critically important role. The Project Management Institute (PMI) is recognized as the primary association for the project management profession. While the oprganization's efforts inform all kinds of complex project management across many disciplines, PMI's resources are especially valuable for software development. A major PMI project is the publishing of The Project Management Book of Knowledge, which is a comprehensive overview of generally accepted project management practices. The 1996 edition is free to download, and sample sections of the latest 2000 edition have recently been posted. The information is rather dry and sometimes dense, but the book should be valuable if you are developing or enhancing processes for medium to large technical projects. Both are available in paper book form. Filter fresh content The New York Times surveys the current goings-on in self-organizing web sites where users rate other's content postings to drive a software system that brings the best writings to the top. A higher authority on the Internet? From Wired online today: "God created the Internet—he is the one who gave us the ability as human beings to do that. We have a responsibility to use what God's created to reach people." Someone should tell these guys. Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Another famous SF novel on the way to movie theaters Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C. Clarke's classic novel about a crew of astronauts that explores a mysterious space station that passes through our solar system, is being developed by Director David Fincher for release in 2003. Fincher is best known for Se7en and Fight Club. The film is endorsed by Clarke, and will star Morgan Freeman. A web slide show gives the details and shows a few early concept sketches. This project looks promising! Macromedia merges with Allaire The company most known for multimedia products Flash, Shockwave and Director will merge with the one that makes the database-driven web publishing tools Cold Fusion and Spectra. Tuesday, January 16, 2001
The digital want As AOL surpasses 27 million members, inner city residents are concerned about the cost of getting online but realize it's valuable. Nigel Holmes' littlest Internet book  In a time when publishers crank out books that speak to dummies with content displayed visually with no long and boring passages, Nigel Holmes, former Graphics Director at Time, comes up with literally a little solution. Reproduced in its entirety in Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety 2, the business-card-sized booklet can be ordered via email from the author and may be posted to his web site in the future. Single copies are $1.50, and he will discount for bulk orders. Sunday, January 14, 2001
Gladwell on workplaces Malcom Gladwell, a regular contributor to New Yorker magazine and author of The Tipping Point, thinks about the nature of workplaces and their social interactions in a recent essay. He anchors his thinking on the 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities about the planning and structuring of large cities, and extends those ideas into how workplaces should be more like cities and towns. The middle of the essay features the work of Karen Stephenson, a business-school professor and anthropologist who now specializes in creating "X-rays" the map the social interaction networks in large companies. The X-rays remind me of the similar work being done by Valdis Krebs. Saturday, January 13, 2001
A rainy day project for alien kids   In the summer of 1999, a team of scientists beamed a message to the stars as part of a project called Cosmic Call. It was the second radio broadcast message attempted in 25 years. The 23 pages of data in the new message start with known physical constants, principles of geometry, and astronomy to progressively communicate information and diagrams about our planet. Leafing through a gallery of the pages, I found that they had transmitted a pattern to build an icosahedron model of the Earth. For grins, I printed it out and assembled it. It was a pain because no tabs were provided, and they had to end the pattern with an awkward subdividing of a couple of the triangle faces because of the format of the data transmission—a problem for this human and prospective alien recipients. The last page ends with an invitation for the intelligent entities to reply, and I hope they don't return with a usability complaint. For a better idea of what this globe model really looks like, take a look at this collection of planetary icosahedron globes. Friday, January 12, 2001
More on IT from Internet Wire:
Thursday, January 11, 2001
Dating your Palm isn't healthy The CEO of Eruptor Entertainment suggests that their new game PortaPam, which has players managing Pamela Anderson's career, "is like a virtual girlfriend..." Allrightythen... I was reminded that Eruptor also produces PortaPimp and PortaHo. InterFace font The London design firm Dalton Maag, Ltd. has released a new font called InterFace that's designed for the Web, but also works well in print. The regular weight can be downloaded from their site for free. Palm life plot After tweaking the preferences on my Visor datebook program, I was able to get full year calendar views, and I realized that I could scroll all the way back to the first day I bought a Palm in 1996. I've been religiously backing up my desktop databases, and syncing to the same files for all these years. Pasting together screenshots creates a simple tapestry of the interactions I've had with the various models I've owned.  This is takes me towards the fundamentally profound possibility of having a device the size of your wallet that can remember your whole life. Now I just wish I had made regular and more detailed entries. [ A week after this log entry, I upgraded to a Visor Platinum. ] Wednesday, January 10, 2001
Tantalizing hints of a Jetsons future? A book proposal that describes the events surrounding the development of a radical new invention was leaked to a writer at Inside.com. Based on sketchy details and the big name players involved, a publisher quickly closed a $250,000 deal. The proposal hints at a device or technology developed by famed inventor Dean Kamen, who is most famous for the iBot, a computer-controlled wheelchair that can climb stairs. Many are guessing that the consumer product, to be announced next year and code named "IT" or "Ginger", will be some kind of personal transporter. Adding to the anticipation is the fact that the project is venture funded by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (AOL, Sun, Netscape), and both Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are on the advisory board. Here are some of the wild quotes from the article about the proposal:
I went to the USPTO web site, browsed through some of Kamen's patents and saw this interesting illustration:  And for 20 years, I've often thought of an illustration from my copy of the now out-of-print book Sentinel II by conceptual artist Syd Mead showing a personal transporter called the "Unipod." You strap the carapace-shaped pod on, close the plastic bubble windshield, and the Unipod wheel drops down. Activate the twin gyroscopes, step into the foot rests, and away you go. This is what "IT" should be...  I think my interest in this rumor is a manifestation of an unfulfilled desire for a future that's more fanciful, and not subject to the engineering, political, and economic realities of change. We almost never see innovations that radically and rapidly change the way we live our every day lives. Even the Internet has been around for 30 years, and the World Wide Web is just a new service on it. Same goes for fax machines, cell phones, computers—they've been around for decades, and new product versions are really about miniaturization and reducing cost to further expand customer bases. So I'm hoping for once that the hype above from some very respected industry visionaries pans out into something truly breathtaking. [Another hint the next morning: on the Today show, Scott Kirsner, who wrote a profile on Kamen for Wired last year, said another other hint he got was that Kamen was meeting with automotive engineers to plan ways to market the device.] Wireless technology and the erosion of place Erik Davis writes in Feed about his first accidental encounter with wireless technology in a rental car. He theorizes that as wireless technology penetrates our society, it will erode our sense of reality. Tuesday, January 09, 2001
Buffed Apple There was a little puddle of saliva on my desk today after I watched Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld where he introduced a new titanium body G4 Powerbook, DVD-R "SuperDrives", and demonstrated some new digital music software. He also gave an update on OSX, saying it's really (really) about to ship and will be standard on machines starting this summer. You can watch the speech via streaming QuickTime. The new DVD-R drive works just like a CD-R except it produces DVD discs that are playable on any standard home DVD player. And more incredibly, the high-end unit, called the SuperDrive, reads and writes CDs, CD-RWs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs! Naturally, there's new software that allows home users to master DVDs from their digital video cameras. This is an oh-so-sweet development that will soon be announced by Compaq as well. My PayPal The current TidBits offers a good introduction to the PayPal system, where you can transfer funds directly to another person by email. s i m p l i c i t y I'm reading Bill Jensen's book Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster and it's like suddenly feeling a cool breeze after working in a hot stuffy room for a day. The book is the result of a seven year survey of over 2500 corporate managers and workers. He concludes that the biggest obstacle to corporate objectives is complexity, and the main cause is that change isn't integrated into the way people work. He also calls for more clarity and usability in the ways that people communicate. Jensen's web site has some good highlights from the book, and you can download the original 150 page study, which is also a good read (and free). From my vantage point inside a growing web development company, I strongly agree that complexity and the associated need for clarity are the fundamental issues we struggle with every day. Monday, January 08, 2001
What's up DOCTYPE? Ever wonder what this line of code means at the beginning of most HTML page source code? <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> A really good article from Apple's Developer Central site explains what the DOCTYPE element means. The parameters you assign to this line affects how Cascading Style Sheets work with tables. Elsewhere on the site, they link out to a nice HTML tag browser compatibility chart. Pay for bad service faster at McDonalds, and savor those flavored fries TechWeb reports that McDonalds is installing equipment at nine Chicago locations to let customers pay instantly with Mobil Speedpass Transponders. I think the weak part of this scenario is that people are still manually gathering and bagging the food. What they should also do is install a simple four button switchbox that allows user to rate the speed of service. And a laterally related article from The Atlantic Monthly: Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good. The article opens with the story of McDonald's french fries, but is really a look at the artificial flavorings industry. It's an amazing account of how artificial flavorings are used in every processed food. It's a post-war technology that developed alongside of computers, but has a direct grip on our bodies. Here's a tidbit: the chemical flavoring in a Burger King Strawberry Milkshake consists of amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent. Wouldn't it just be simpler to squeeze a strawberry or two? The article is an excerpt from the book Fast Food Nation, which I am definitely picking up. Bitter java In Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant Simson Garfinkel convincingly recaps why the hype on Java has failed to produce a viable platform for delivering web applications. He says Java's two big lies are 1) it's fast, and 2) it's portable. Most web surfers will confirm that for anything more than simple applications, Java runs *really* slow. And as for portability, if you use a Mac, you've experienced the regular crashes when Java applets load. With the momentum gone, it's fun to look back at soapbox pieces like George Gilder's The Coming Software Shift which predicted that Marc Andreessen would become the next Bill Gates with the help of Java. Sunday, January 07, 2001
Kubrick's usability joke in 2001 I found my copy of Jerome Agel's 1970 edition of The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (out-of-print), and in the photo section there's a transcript of the instructions for zero gravity toilet on the Orion Space Clipper. Dr. Floyd is pictured nervously reading the 10 steps, but the toilet isn't shown. A quote from Arthur C. Clarke says it's the only intentional joke in the film. I think some usability gurus would have a field day if this was a new film. Saturday, January 06, 2001
Design language: 100 design terms  The new design magazine ONE has a glossary of 100 design terms from the book Design Language by Tim Creight. I think if web designers regularly used all of these words in organized discourse, their designs would have a more solid conceptual foundation. The screencap here is the animated example illustrating entropy. Tech in bulk on dead tree Walking past our network admin's desk on my way to the project manager's area, this monolith caught my eye:  The Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit book and CDROM comes out to a whopping 1767 pages! It must be the thickest book in our building and is even thicker than Oracle and Cisco references I've seen at the bookstore. Friday, January 05, 2001
Mommy, I want an eye tracker!  Eye gaze trackers have been in use for years by media producers to track what people focus their attention on when watching TV or reading print ads. They are also used by people who are totally paralyzed to control computer mouse cursors. Here's a research group at Georgia Tech that uses a low-cost IBM eye tracker to acquire, track, and discriminate between several pairs of eyes. The last 20 seconds of their demo video (10 meg MPEG file) linked at the end of the page is hilarious. Looking elsewhere in the web, I found a company, LC Technologies, not far from here in Fairfax, VA that sells a portable eye tracking system for $16, 900. I want one! IBM's Blue Eyes web site notes that the cost of these units will drastically drop in the next 5 years and they are researching how computers can use eye trackers and other technologies to know how the user is feeling. I can envision the trackers built into game consoles one day. For usability studies, an eye tracker can measure not only eye gaze spots, but also pupil dialation and blink rate so that user fatigue and other factors can be inferred. There's research on how people read newspapers, and the New York Times reports on how DLJ Direct tests their web interfaces with this equipment. Wednesday, January 03, 2001
Generations of information
From a paper on augmenting reality with virtual information overlays. Tuesday, January 02, 2001
Scott McCloud can't stop thinking about micropayments In the fifth installment of his column, Scott wonders why online content providers aren't using micropayment technology. Monday, January 01, 2001
A signal  An extreme closeup photo of an E.L. display bought from Mendelson's last week that looks like it could be the landing pad for a lunar base ... Hal, what do you think? Hal?
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