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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, February 28, 2001
Where the @#$#^*!& did those fonts come from? Many software packages and some web browsers automatically install fonts in your system and it's virtually impossible to attribute them all correctly when you're trying to do spring cleaning in your fonts folder. Microsoft tries to help by coming clean with this pretty good list of fonts typically installed by their software. Also listed are the standard fonts used by Mac OS, Unix, and Adobe Type Manager. Kathi hates sports ...but her web site really wants you to visit the ESPN web site. This call to action happens after you read her bad poetry, goofy tips on life, and check out her PG-rated photos. The New York Times reports about this fake web site designed by one of ESPN's ad agencies to generate more clicks from male 18 - 24 year-olds. It's working, and as pointed out by my bosses, all the TV commercials don't hurt either. Shows you how much sports TV I watch. Cartoonist and comics futurist Scott McCloud talks to Apple Scott talks briefly about the state of online comics, his recent projects, the use of Flash, and not surprisingly what Mac equipment he uses. Tuesday, February 27, 2001
Make license plates for fun and profit  Webtype.org recently linked to the Acme License Maker. With it you can make an image of a custom plate for any of the 50 states, and in versions from previous years too! The gallery of recent plate designs is worth a look. New type zine A new issue of the experimental typography magazine Fuse has been released after a long hiatus. CreativePro has the story, and you can order a copy for $59 from FontShop. If you can't get their attention, wave harder The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets are reporting on the Internet Advertising Bureau's new voluntary standards promoting larger ad banner and pop-up windows(actual-sized samples here) as a way to help sagging ad revenues. Given that content or products (and sometimes community) are the primary reason people go to web sites, this quote from the WSJ piece kills me: "Banners got so standardized that consumers weren’t clicking on them at all," says Norm Lehoullier, managing director of Grey Interactive, part of ad company Grey Global Group. Larger sizes should "allow us to create a stronger emotional bond with the customer." I don't blame the ad industry for doing what they know best, but web site owners need to somehow understand that compelling content and products that really work will make advertisers' jobs easier. It's a bitch to change the world. Monday, February 26, 2001
Kinkoid arrival A Kinko's Copy Center opened today at 7am here in Charles Village, right across from the JHU campus. I was probably customer number 10 and ordered their very first coil-bound document. To celebrate my patronage on their first day, I got a plastic baggie with Kinkos candies, Post-IT notes, and a lime green highlighter. My fetish for copies can now be satisifed 24 hours a day a stone's throw from my house. SequoiaView Trees  SequoiaView uses a beautiful visualization technique called cushion treemaps to represent the entire contents of your hard drive as subdivided blocks of your computer screen. The visible surface area of the blocks represent individual files as a percentage of the total drive capacity. You can zoom in on subfolders, and show the map with a block representing your free disk space. The utility can color code and filter specific file types. SequoiaView was developed by the computer science department of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and the download is only about 500kb. It installs easily in Windows, and a 43 gigabyte drive full of files took only a minute to scan and render. There is no Mac version, but SequoiaView worked fine through VirtualPC to scan a large shared folder on my OS9 hard drive. Managing a massive store of mixed media source files in digital game production This is a techy piece outlining the requirements and a solutions for managing over 40,000 game and production assets in the production of the game Age of Empires II: Age of Kings. Conference on screen-based typography The Philadelphia Type Director's Club is presenting its conference It's Alive: Typography for the Screen on Saturday, April 21 at Drexel University. The speakers list tentatively includes: Bruce Sterling, Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, and others. The registration fee is $225. I'm almost certainly going to the storytelling seminar at the Smithsonian that day. www.everythingstaken.com Geeknews notes that Domainstats.com counts over 35 million domain names registered worldwide with over 21 million in the .COM space alone. For a comparison, there are about 1 million words in the english language according to Dictionary.com. Sunday, February 25, 2001
Funny 404 From CamWorld, Roxen's funny 404 page. If you thought "Error 404 -- Page Not Found" screens are supposed to be grey and boring, take a look at the 404 Research Lab, where error pages are elevated to art and science. Saturday, February 24, 2001
Shedding light on slumber and dreams The Guardian offers this long, thoughtful consideration on the mysteries of sleep. The link is from the habit-forming Arts & Letters Daily. The breathtaking cost of downtime: up to $3 million an hour! Following up on the recent post on backing up your system, here's a long article from Network Computing on the costs of downtime on web servers. The opening quote sums up the surprising numbers: Downtime costs vary from industry to industry, based on dependency upon technology and typical labor costs. Companies that are the most dependent upon automated systems, such as energy and telecommunications enterprises, accrue an average of nearly $3 million in losses for every hour of downtime, based on lost revenue and employee idling, according to an October 2000 Meta Group study. IT-dependent manufacturing companies and financial institutions suffer per-hour revenue losses of $1.5 million to $1.6 million. Health care, media and hospitality/travel companies, less dependent upon IT infrastructure, lose between $330,000 and $636,000 of revenue per hour. The article also provides a table of downtime costs by vertical industry. Friday, February 23, 2001
Workspheres The Museum of Modern Art is presenting a new show and Flash-based web site in collaboration with the MIT Media Laboratory's Aesthetics and Computation Group on the balance between work and life in six built concepts of work tools and environments. In the Flash exhibit online, the conceptual environments are wrapped in a historical survey of designed objects and products found in the home, office and on the road. The show runs until April 22nd. Head case part 2 The new iMac designs are not exciting analysts and Apple's Director of Product Marketing for desktop products speaks. Thursday, February 22, 2001
Covering your assets Windows 2000 Magazine offers a short article on the the importance of backing up your computer data. Do it today, any way you can! If your web page could talk... From Web Word: comes an audio comparison of inaccessible and accessible web pages. Play the MP3 sound files with your eyes closed and experience a web page as a blind person would. Reality blogging There's a discussion going on a Pyra (makers of Blogger) about creating a web log about online dating. Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Head cases  Apple introduced a new iMac today in two swanky patterns, Flower Power and Blue Dalmation. Groovy! [Comment: these designs are *not* growing on me...] Rise of the information literate NUA Surveys' New Thinking column describes the emerging requirement for workers that are information literate with "the capacity to adapt, learn, and master the changes [in the workplace] quickly and efficiently. Some desirable qualities of the information literate:
I think information literacy is a central issue in the workplace today, and in education as well. There's a good deal of thinking and writing that presents easy prescriptions for simplifying and extracting meaning from the flood of raw information that engulfs us, but we need to work harder at elevating an individual's baseline skills for embracing information. A person who ebodies all of the qualities outlined in the article would be a passionate soul indeed. But people who truly love the act of acquiring, using, and spreading knowledge are in the minority. Most people are numb. Brainmate profile: Esther Dyson Ubiquity interviews Esther Dyson, publisher of the influential newsletter Release 1.0 and the book Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Tuesday, February 20, 2001
Content management systems immature An article by David Walker summarizes a report from Forrester Research that says today's content management systems are "immature." And that's a heavy statement considering the fact that companies can easily spend anywhere from $100,000 to $1,500,000 on a content management system for a web site. Tools for information architects Where there really aren't any per se—just a bunch of small task-specific utilities and off-the-shelf general productivity tools. The lack of tools seems to be the hope foremost on the minds of IAs everywhere after a job description. I know I spend a large portion of my time hacking away with an ad hoc collection of tools and templates, and dream of an integrated set of tools that would help in creating deliverables such as site maps, content inventories, storyboards, low-fi prototypes, and user interaction flows. In the last couple weeks, Information Architects Louis Rosenfeld and Christina Wodtke have both taken a stab at surveying some IA tools. I think that as web sites continue to get more complex, the processes required to track and analyze details are becoming complex as well. A good packaged set of tools will have to be developed as open source because there probably isn’t a viable market to create tools for such a specialized and undefined field. Monday, February 19, 2001
It's all about the connections In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections and nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected. Does this look familiar?  No, it's not the rifle shooting target of an idiot. This is an enlargement of the 1" square barcode called the Maxicode that's been on UPS shipping labels since the mid '90s. I've always thought they looked interesting, so I finally looked up the background on them. In the late 80s UPS realized they had to use technology to squeeze more efficiency out of their package sortation operations. The question they faced was how much information should be stored on the package itself versus the computer database. The specification eventually defined that the package carry enough tracking information so that it could reach it's destination without the help of the database. They knew that the most cost effective technique would be a printed barcode of some sort, but no technology available could meet the unique requirements. So they developed the new scheme. The resulting Maxicode can store up to 100 characters of text, and works with both cameras and laser scanners at a variety of orientations on packages moving at up to 500 feet per minute. The data encoded in the barcode is redundant, so information can still be retrieved with up to 25% of the label missing. The barcode initially stored just the zip code, but can also hold the point of origin, destination address, and shipping rate. The barcode is called a "2D" code because the plane of the label can be scanned from any direction unlike the linear "1D" barcodes you're used to seeing as UPC codes on packaging and books. The Maxicode site has a case history of the UPS development. Sunday, February 18, 2001
"Take this information and run with it..." ...reads an ad to direct marketers from Network Solutions selling information from your domain name record including your mailing address, site security details and other information. This story broke Friday in the Wall Street Journal, and since then, The Electronic Privacy Information Center has drafted a letter of protest to congress. This web site's domain has been registered with them since 1994, and even though it probably too late, I'm going to their opt-out page and removing myself from the three areas where they are releasing my contact information. I suggest you do the same if you're registered through them. No sympathy for a company that makes $10 million a year for ineptly maintaining a simple database. U.S. Internet population at 56 percent A new Internet tracking report released today by The PEW Internet & American Life Project finds that more than half of the U.S. adult population used the Internet in the last year with 16 million new users coming online in the last six months. The results show that the digital divide still continues:
Of those online, 52 percent have made a purchase which is a six percent increase and translates to 14 million new online shoppers in the last six months of 2000. The 9 page PDF is a quick download. Saturday, February 17, 2001
Cubicle framed  Photo taken today of an office cubicle across from Border's Music in Towson, MD. Someone is going to spend almost one third of their life here. Scary thought. Friday, February 16, 2001
Raskin on interfaces Computerworld has a short interview with Jeff Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh, and author of the book, The Humane Interface. He says there's been little innovation in the realm of human-computer interfaces since the mouse, icons and windowed views were introduced 30 years ago. He doesn't offer any revolutionary solutions himself, but hopes another company with the same fanatical vision, engineering brilliance, and marketing savvy that Apple had comes along with a new to way integrate all the modes we use computers today. Snakey light  We got our USB FlexLights this week. I decided to include a photo here since the one at the MCE site isn't too clear. The light works great especially if you're using your computer on a long car ride or in bed late at night. You just plug the $19.95 light into your USB port and adjust the end to shine on your keyboard. It works with any computer that has a USB port and be sure to use your AC or car adapter! Thursday, February 15, 2001
WAY outreach I'm coordinating an outreach program at work to bring interested staff in contact with teachers and students of Francis Scott Key Middle School in South Baltimore. We've already had some class sessions teaching the teachers technology, and when we complete our move into our new offices by the harbor later next month, our activities will go into high gear. I was invited to see 20 of the 8th graders speak live to some of the Shuttle astronauts early this morning at The Maryland Science Center. In addition to the kids and their parents, two of the astronaut families were there to cheer on the fact that all three of the mission specialists were originally from Baltimore.  After a buffet breakfast, we gathered in the planetarium to hear former astronaut Fred Gregory talk about his experiences. He's a veteran pilot of three Shuttle flights. He retired from the astronaut corps to become a NASA safety administrator. After Fred, Flavio Mendez, the Director of the SpaceLink Facility at the Science Center, gave an excellent briefing on the mission events to date. He showed the launch video and some selected images from NASA's high-resolution photo gallery.  The kids rehearsed weeks before the event, and again just before the satellite uplink. Because the mission was delayed a number of weeks, the kid's names and questions were actually written right into the mission plan. The uplink ran for about 20 minutes with a couple short blackouts as the Shuttle passed between communication satellites. Tom Jones (in the red shirt) showed off his stash of freeze-dried Maryland Crab Soup, and Robert Curbeam (wearing a white Ravens T-shirt) hung the Maryland state flag. It was mentioned by someone from the Science Center that there was a small "this side up" sticker on the flag so the astronauts would get it placed correctly. I think the best question was asked by a kid who challenged the astronauts to prove they were really in space. Curbeam's response was an effortless mid-air tumble.  At one point, both the commanders of the Space Station and Space Shuttle joined in. Station Commander Bill Shepherd (left) was just floating by, and Shuttle Commander Ken Cockrell (third from left) was taking a break from struggling with a piece of equipment that wouldn't fit through a hatch. Oops! Video highlights of this flight day are in NASA's video gallery and there's a 44 second sequence of the Q&A session about 2 minutes in. This was such a great way to start the work day, and I thank Bill Swartwout of FSK again for inviting me. The life of Larry Larry Ellison, the Chairman of Oracle Corporation, cashed in $845 million in stock last month, and is now rumored to be schmoozing Bill Clinton for his Board of Directors. The boys could have a wild party. Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Do the eros hop  The NEAR space probe recently made the first successful landing on an asteroid named Eros after a successful science mission. Now the JHU mission control team has announced that they are going to launch it again today at 2pm. This is all pretty amazing since the spacecraft is covered with sensors, solar panels and antennas and was was never designed to land. I adapted a photo from Eros to show what I think they should have done while maneuvering the satellite around. [Update: NASA has decided not to relaunch the probe, but has extended the science mission another 10 days since the probe is still transmitting from the surface.] Tuesday, February 13, 2001
Über information architect  Dan sent me this scan of Clement Mok's business card from 1995. Clement called himself an IA a year before the book with the same name popularized the subject. Windows Xtra Pretty Microsoft has released some screenshots of their next generation operating system, now renamed Windows XP. I think it's a welcome change from the oppressive grey bevels and dark blue stripes, yet it's not candied-out like Apple's OSX. Ofcourse there's still time to mess it up, and since the UI is completely customizable, end-users will no doubt be able to install some wild skins. [02.14.01: Wired has a story today that quotes a Microsoft VP as saying Windows XP is "the system my mom needs." The mantra during development was "simplify, simplify, simplify."] Monday, February 12, 2001
Information architecture builds an identity The recent meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology focused on the practical aspects of Information Architecture (IA). Practitioners from around the world and a variety of affinities gathered to share insights about how they are doing their jobs and the challenges they face. Here are several short, recent writings that collectively provide a snapshot of the state of the art.
Icons so familiar Here is the original 1997 presentation board showing the user interface icons for Dreamweaver 1.0 by Jim Leftwich of Orbit Interaction. Macromedia claims there are over one million web developers staring at these day in and day out. Sunday, February 11, 2001
LATCH on to Wurman I finally discovered the companion web site to Richard Saul Wurman's new book Information Anxiety 2. In addition to the usual hype, chapter 2 is reproduced in three parts with illustrations and sidebars. In addition to a chatty start on how he got started in the business of understanding, Wurman restates the five known ways to organize information: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Heirarchy. Sidebars reproduce Nathan Shedroff's model of the continuum of understanding, and Nigel Holmes' nifty little 28 page micro-booklet that explains the Internet. If you have some time to kill, you can see 27 minutes of QuickTime video featuring the well-lit Wurman meandering on the following topics (run times in min:sec):
Interestingly, Wurman reveals that his real desire is to roll Information Anxiety 2 in with its out-of-print companion Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Learning to Give, Take, and Use Instructions and some new text to form one omnibus on information design and understanding. A sleek, slim beauty When she arrived at the front door, Andrew unwrapped her and explored her features. She was fast, but not terribly so. Saturday, February 10, 2001
Whew! Destiny lab is safely bolted on  NASA breathes a huge sigh of relief not only because this was a delicate operation with a one-of-a-kind billion-plus dollar piece of hardware, but also they'll be able to take over control of the station from the Russians whose space program is suffering from severe economic problems. Marcus Landroos of Finland has compiled an excellent history of the space station and related NASA programs. He shows the current state of assembly with the (depressing) manifest of how many more shuttle flights it will take to complete the station by 2006. And the posted schedule has already slipped by a month. The sections after show the next assembly phase, and the completed station. A final page describes the escalating costs and summarizes what went wrong. It's also interesting to see the reproductions of NASA's desired timelines for space exploration which had us back on the moon by next year and to Mars by 2017. We'll be lucky to get a small probe back to Mars by 2003 as most of NASA's declining budget continues to be sapped by the shuttle and space station. The digital lightroom Most of the visible developments in digital cameras have lately centered around incremental improvements in resolution. Inkjet printers are a cost-competitive commodity now as they easily render high quality prints that rival traditional chemical lab results. The soft-epiphany I had last fall was seeing a full kiosk of inkjet papers and inks next to the darkroom chemicals at Service Photo Supply. The sample printouts on display were incredible. In the last year or so, low-cost high-resolution color output, multi-megapixel cameras, and Photoshop software have converged to create a new kind of darkroom—what some call the digital "lightroom." You don't have to be an elite photojournalist to enjoy these tools. Photographer Joe Farace describes what you need for a personal digital darkroom in an article in ComputerUser Magazine. R35 web designer's tools It's been a while since I've checked in on the R35 catalog site. It looks like they've diversified into online learning and filmmaking, but their web tools section still offers the Web Color mousepads in square and round cut, an HTML code cheat sheet and web colors poster. Friday, February 09, 2001
Neuromaster The Slamdance Film Festival website offers this quote from Mark Neale, director of a new documentary NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES about cyberpunk author William Gibson: "I drove 12,376 miles around America and Canada in the course of production. William Gibson smoked over 900 cigarettes on our travels." Read the review at Salon. New report on global online retailing Ernst & Young has just released Global Online Retailing, a special report that surveyed 4,400 online buyers in 12 countries. Conducted over a two-month period late last year, the study's significant findings include:
You can download the 1.6MB PDF file without registering. Enjoy this one free and clear. Thursday, February 08, 2001
Baltimoreans in space The Space Shuttle Atlantis took off last night at 6:13pm Eastern carrying the Destiny science lab module for the International Space Station. All three mission specialists were born in Baltimore. The Shuttle will dock with the Space Station at noon tomorrow and on Saturday, Thomas Jones, and Robert Curbeam, Jr. will don spacesuits to lift the module from the cargo bay. Marsha Ivins, a verteran of 4 flights, will be responsible for operating the Shuttle's robot arm to install the module. The team has to work with only 1" clearance while removing the module from the cargo bay. To keep their energy up, they have a supply of freeze-dried Maryland Crab Soup on board. Here are some interesting links:
Wednesday, February 07, 2001
Consulting skills A short article at The Usability Professionals Association web site describes ways to be more in tune with your clients and the consulting process overall. The advice applies to many other kinds of consulting. RFP tips If you're around any kind of project-based work, you eventually have to create or recieve a request for proposal. ITworld offers 10 touchstones for those who need to outsource technology projects. [I couldn't load this page in Netscape 4, so you might want to try IE.] Free to go Wired reports that ZDNet UK's free email service shut down suddenly without notice, leaving users with no access to archived emails. This is another vivid illustration of why you can't rely on free web services. Tuesday, February 06, 2001
Those damn users Jakob's latest column: Are Users Stupid? The rest. Monday, February 05, 2001
The geography of connectivity  We scream bloody murder when our web site or net access goes down for a few minutes. The gif animation above, compiled by a group at Stanford University, shows the monthly averages of network performance by country for the year 2000. The higher the spikes, the lower the connection quality. We really have it good in the U.S. compared to neighboring countries. The full map is even more telling. Pricey party It would probably cost you a cool quarter million to have all these people at your party, but the conversations would be amazing. Sunday, February 04, 2001
Blobjects of desire Cruising through Wordspy's archives, I came across the term blobject which describes the current craze in product design that produces bubbly, curvy, nerfy forms.  Bruce Sterling observes the phenomenon in an article that appeared in Artbytes early last year. Saturday, February 03, 2001
The Republic of North Dumpling  The story of North Dumpling Island kept coming up as I went through some of the backstories at The Boston Globe, NPR, and Wired about inventor Dean Kamen. Kamen is famous of late for the alleged world-changing technology he is developing nicknamed Ginger, the iBot motorized wheelchair that can climb stairs, and a series of innovative medical devices. The story begins soon after Kamen amassed his fortune and learned how to pilot a helicopter. On a referral from his flight instructor's wife, Kamen landed on a lighthouse island named North Dumpling 3 miles southeast of New London, Connecticut, and in 1980, bought the island for $2.5 million dollars. The fun began when state authorities denied his request to install a wind turbine tower. Kamen unofficially seceded from the United States and drafted a non-aggression pact to his friend, then-President George Bush. Kamen dubbed the island The Replublic of North Dumpling and crowned himself Lord Dumpling. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's were appointed "joint chiefs of ice cream." He even created his own currency, flag and national anthem. As you can see from the photo above, he got his wind turbine. He only visits the island a couple times a year, but if the government ever changes its mind, he can defend himself with his one-ship navy, an amphibious vehicle dubbed "Old Aluminumsides." You can see the ship and more of the island in this picture gallery. Reading about Kamen inspires me to keep feeding my obsessions, and have more fun with life at the same time. Computers catch and match your mug ESPN reports on the ACLU's objection to the surreptitious photographing and databasing of people's faces as they entered the Superbowl to automatically search for terrorists. The technology was deployed for free by Viisage Corporation. New Scientist ponders this Orwellian technology. Interesting Smithsonian programs If you're in the the D.C. area, you might be interested in a couple of the upcoming seminars for Resident Associates (and open to non-members): Product Design for the 21st Century I'm going to both. Classmates epiphany I finally got around to signing in to the 1979 class page for my high school at Classmates.com. It looked like about a third of the class had registered, and surprisingly, many of the beautiful people I heard about all the time weren't there. Looking at the class that graduated ahead of me, I was shocked to see that someone had grandchildren already. GRANDCHILDREN! Unbelievable. Friday, February 02, 2001
"The inventor will no longer understand his own machine."  — an illustration by Charles Schneeman from the January 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Thursday, February 01, 2001
A company of one makes this possible The free Blogger service I use to publish this web log has been limping along for the last few weeks, and was temporarily revived by a grass roots fund-raising drive to which I contributed some money. Now only the CEO remains, and he's posted the story of how it started with one, and ended with one. Now that I'm hooked on blogging, I would have paid more than my $40 donation to have a smoothly running service with a few more features like categorized archives and picture handling. I hope the service really does continue on.
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