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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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Saturday, March 31, 2001
Coronal mass ejection to light up your weekend nights CBS News reports on one of several "coronal mass ejections" that, in recent days, have sent bursts of charged particles towards the Earth, with the possibility of disrupting telecommunications. Here's an animation of a weekend burst from the Sun's corona as seen by SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite, operated jointly by NASA and the ESA:  The SOHO site maintains a page of realtime instrument images. When the particle bursts arrive here, the radiation belts that protect the Earth force the particles to the North and South poles producing spectacular auroral displays such as this one recently photographed by John Russell in Nome, Alaska:  SpaceWeather.com has a beautiful gallery of user-contributed aurora images. Go and be dazzled. Java-enhanced toaster prints weather forecast Robin Southgate, an industrial design student at Brunel University in West London, has developed a Java-enhanced toaster that prints the weather forecast. The toaster's embedded Java software dials out via modem, and downloads the day's forecast information. The user inserts the toast normally, but 30 seconds before the toast is due to pop up, a heat-resistant mask of the approproate symbol (cloud, sun or raindrop) is dropped in between the heating elements and the bread to produce the image. No picture is available yet since the student show doesn't open until June 11th. The project site is still under construction, but as soon as it goes live, I'm sure this story will make the rounds again. (story via Metafilter). Friday, March 30, 2001
The Blogger system was down for about 16 hours Wednesday, and has taken a while since then to stabilize, so I'm a little behind on posts. This is further incentive for me to finish my new Greymatter-based web log. The acceptance of digital art might lead to its end Stefanie Syman of FEED reviews Bitstreams, the new show of digital art at The Whitney Museum in New York. She observes that while digital art has reached acceptance in the art world, the making of art with digital tools really doesn't say anything about the art itself. You don't see a museum category called "oil paint art." Museum shows are always about the singular, strong vision of the artist, a conceptual movement by a group of artists, or art that arises from effects on the human or cultural condition. Syman suggests that digital art will disperse and disappear as established categories of art defend thier boundaries and embrace digital tools themselves. Violins treasured by players and collectors Arts & Letters Daily brings to my attention an article in The Arts Journal about collectors driving prices of old master string instruments sky-high, pushing them out of reach of even the best musicians. Typical prices for Stratavari violins run in the millions of dollars, with one in mint condition topping off at $20 million. Top soloists consider playing one of these instruments essential to their careers, and have sought consortia of investors to help finance purchases. But collectors continue to acquire these instruments to lock up in permananent collections, and even the best contemporary instrument makers are booked with years of orders. It's a collector's market, and the unique sound of these instruments is slowly being silenced. This was a timely bit of reading since we just watched the DVD of The Red Violin again last weekend. Wednesday, March 28, 2001
The CubicEye web browser CubicEye is a psuedo 3D web browser that got a wave of press a couple months ago. It isn't out of private beta yet, but they recently posted some Flash demos of the interface. CubicEye basically provides navigation tools for five or more simultaneous views of web pages in a flat-walled room metaphor. It will be interesting to see how this can become more than just a page presentation gimmick. Do people care about seeing more pages at once? There seems to be a small resurgence of 3D web tools, now that Adobe has released the beta of Atmosphere, a virtual environments authoring tool. People are so thoroughly conditioned to what Edward Tufte calls the "flatland" of pages, it will be a long time before your average Joe/Jane understands 3D. But geeks will love anything new. Oscar class visual effects Creative Planet has a series of stories on the visual effects of the films nominated for best picture. The coverage on Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is illustrated with stills and video clips. There's also a new piece on the spacey opening titles of Sunday night's ceremony created by RezN8, and I found that the RezN8 web site has released a Quicktime clip. Tuesday, March 27, 2001
Art from mice Via Metafilter:125 artists have come together to creatively interpret the Microsoft mouse for the Tails of the City exhibition. Design as a discipline, or disciplining design? In Design is not a therapy session, Kent Dahlgren asserts his opinion that far too many so-called graphic designers have not benefited from a classical design instruction, and believes usability can save the profession. I think designers need to do more critical and systems thinking. A wireless phenomenon from across the pacific RCFOC delivers news that NTT DoCoMo, makers of the popular i-mode Internet-enabled wireless phones used all over Japan, will soon surpass AOL as the biggest ISP in the world. DoCoMo is also the third largest company in the world behind Microsoft and GE! i-mode phones are coming to the US next year. Monday, March 26, 2001
Meeting the crew of STS-98  It's not every day you meet five astronauts at once. Sure, working at NASA as a tour guide, I met one or two a year, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime treat. Today's event was a follow-up to the last month's live uplink to the space station at The Maryland Science Center. The same 20 students from Francis Scott Key Middle School who spoke to the crew that day came back to meet them in person. Several hundred more students and parents from FSK, and other schools were invited to the presentation in the IMAX Theater. Every kind of politician showed up to speak, including the Governor, Mayor, two Senators, and the local House Representative. Senator Barbara Mikulski recieved a Maryland flag that flew on the mission, and gave the crew cans of Old Bay Spice. The crew narrated a new video compilation of flight highlights, and answered questions from the audience. Later in the afternoon, the crew spent some quiet time with the 20 students in the planetarium. In the informal chat, mission specialist Bob Curbeam described the feeling of the launch into space as like being rear-ended by a tractor trailer truck—for 8 1/2 minutes. Marsha Ivins, who installed the Destiny module using the Canadian robot arm, described using shampoo in space. Since there isn't a shower on board the station or shuttle, a special shampoo used by hospital emergency rooms is issued to the crew. They massage it in, and wipe it off with a damp towel. One trick she used to control her long hair, which wouldn't stay out of her face in the zero-gravity environment, was to put a loop of sticky tape on a nearby bulkhead to catch flyaway hairs. The event wound down, and the astronauts split up to mingle with the crowd in the Science Center exhibit areas. Heading out the door, I saw Commander Ken Cockrell signing autographs at the end of a line of 100 students and parents. I bet he really wished he was back in space. Sunday, March 25, 2001
Mark on the beast  We took our dog Cody to the MDASPCA March for the Animals event on the JHU campus today, and signed in to have an electronic ID chip implanted between her shoulder blades.  Here's a closeup of the glass-encapsulated chip implant. It's approximately actual size as pictured here. The unpowered device consists of an antenna coil, capacitor, and silicon memory chip which stores a unique ID number. If a dog is lost and found, a handheld electronic scanner is used to read the ID number from the chip to look up in a national registry. Checking in Google, I found these implants are believed by some to be the devil's work or part of a military UFO conspiracy. I'll report back here if Cody starts acting weird. Anyway, here are a couple more photos ...   Saturday, March 24, 2001
The MacPlus lives on  It's been years since I looked at the status of Mac emulators, and BoingBoing recently linked to the completed Virtual Mac Emulator Project, prompting me to take another look. The site provides the necessary ROM file; and disk images of the first Mac operating systems 1 through 6, MacPaint, and MacDraw. You have the choice of running the Virtual MacPlus emulator on MacOS, Windows 95-2000, or Linux. After downloading and installing all the bits and pieces, I saw the tiny grey desktop and was doodling again in MacPaint. Just for grins, I installed the Windows version of the MacPlus emulator into Virtual PC so I could see MacPaint running on Virtual MacPlus/System 1.1 running inside VirtualPC/Windows 98 running inside Powerbook G3/MacOS 9. It all worked (pictured above), albeit very slowly. Seeing the old interfaces brought back memories of the summer of 1984 when my brother bought his MacPlus. I remember bringing it into 2D design studio only to hear people ask what the hell I was going to do with it. We've come incredibly far. As a design teacher, I've always wanted to develop a kit with minimal tools as part of an assignment that deals with the foundations of digital design. We're in an age where digital design assignments are so encumbered with process that students are sometimes at risk of not completing projects. With this emulator, I would build a kit with an early Mac operating system, MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite, Photoshop 1.0, Illustrator 88, and Swivel3D in just a few megabytes storage. Students in an intro-level class would be required to use this simple kit on some exercises that focus more on conceptual development by reducing technical complexity and minimizing process. They would also experience some history along the way. How refreshing would that be? Watch the skies—systematically Noting on Amazon that Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is finally coming on DVD in May, I went looking for the Hynek UFO Classification System that inspired the title. I found the Hynek list that describes the five types of close encounters, plus an expanded rating system. Here's the "Anomaly Rating" group:
You just never know when you might need these. I'll update this post with a downloadable Palm memo file. Friday, March 23, 2001
Suburbanizing New York City The March issue of Metropolis magazine has an essay by Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker's architecture critic, on the "malling" of Manhattan. Goldberger observes that city streets are losing their uniqueness and diversity, and becoming less public as commercial chains like Barnes & Noble move in. Conversely, he sees suburbs becoming more like big cities. NPR Morning edition's Margot Adler interviewed Goldberger last week, and in the 6 1/2 minute RealAudio clip, they take you on a walk through a New York City street. This phenomenon is hitting close to home here in Charles Village as Ruby Tuesdays, Blimpie, and Kinkos have recently opened up to attract JHU students' dollars. Your Flash code library runneth over Laura sent me a link to the PDF order form for Joshua Davis' Praystation experimental Flash source code CDROM. Joshua's decision to release this huge collection of code is an incredibly generous gesture that will inspire the Flash community. The $30 CD was produced in collaboration with IdN magazine, and contains approximately 3637 open source Flash files, and a booklet with background information. According to a link on Praystation (link labeled "cd-rom" in the lower right corner of the calendar), the CD is due out in April. Via Kottke and currentform comes a link to ioLib, another open source release of an extensive library Flash code. The site provides working examples, and all of the code is immediately downloadable. Now I wish I could take a three month sabbatical from work and teaching to play more in Flash. MIR: 1986 - 2001  The Russian space station Mir was pushed into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean today, ending the mission of the most ambitious space station project to date. NASA's web site has some graphs that show the station's altitude adjustments over the past few years, and for the final descent this year. The graph pictured above clearly demonstrates the skill of the Russian flight controllers in gently guiding the station to final entry. The Visual Satellite Observer's Home Page maintains a great page of Mir information, and features the Reuters photo of the entry burn-up. And for one last look at the full station, APOD has a beautiful NASA photo of the MIR station flying over New Zealand. There are lots of links to explore on both pages. Thursday, March 22, 2001
Mike TeeVee  I was on Maryland Public Television's Newsnight Maryland with web studio owner Amy Vansant talking about how to start a simple web page. Host Jeff Salkin showed a tape of the producer's brother-in-law building his first web site, introduced us, and took a couple caller questions. It was a fun night, and another nine minutes of fame. A thank you goes to Chris Beauchamp, a project manager at work, who asked me to fill in for him. Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Faust: the reboot Last Saturday night, my wife and I went to our first opera show. The Baltimore Opera was presenting Gounod's romantic opera, "Faust." The show was promoted as a technology extravaganza with front- and rear-projected computer imagery, video, stills and pyrotechnics. The show started with overture music from the live orchestra, and images projected on a giant scrim at the front of the stage. The words "Final Cut Pro" flashed by followed by video color bars. I thought, "cool, they use Mac software, but those color bars are kind of avant-garde." The curtain rose and as Faust began his speech, more imagery and then another color bar pattern appeared at the rear of the stage. Right after Mephistopheles (the devil) started lurking around, the curtain suddenly came crashing down. The general director came into a spotlight and announced he was restarting the show due to technical difficulties. Mumbles and giggles were heard, and then the show began again, continuing without a hitch. If Alan Cooper were there, he would have said, "what do you get when you combine an opera and a computer? A computer." Tongue's eye view Researchers at The University of Wisconsin have developed a device that can translate simple images into electrical stimuli on the surface of the tongue. Called the "tongue display unit," the postage stamp-sized grid of 144 electrodes create a fizzing sensation that can be interpreted by blind people as graphic forms or directional cues to navigate computer interfaces. Will we have to design tongue-friendly content soon? TongueML anyone? SXSW 2001 report Some of the oh-so-hip web digerati gathered in Austin Texas a couple weeks ago for the annual SXSW conference. Captain Cursor has a good summary on his blog, and Zeldman has more links to reviews and photo galleries. Tuesday, March 20, 2001
The user is firmly outside the box On The Washington Post's site, Thinking Outside the Box: The End-User View of Techno-Nirvana: Blink, Blink, Blink discusses the overwhelming pace of new technologies and how we're well into a state of saturation: The future, say inventors at the bleeding edge, is ever-newer products that have not been tested, help desks that won't answer the phone, and manuals not written in recognizable English. While techies will always have a steady stream of new toys, we're going to keep seeing waves of new products bouncing off people who have less and less time in their lives. Monday, March 19, 2001
Mau's incomplete manifesto After picking up a copy of graphic designer Bruce Mau's lavish new book Life Style, I went looking for his studio's web site. I found it, but didn't realize the simple business card-style graphic was clickable (or maybe it wasn't at the time). Inside, there's information about the new book, and a presentation of his well-known Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. Eight by six WebReview's The Myth of 800x600 declares that the practice of designing fixed web page sizes for an average screen size is fundamentally flawed, and I have to agree. Web designers, many coming from print backgrounds, need the comfort of a defined size to build into, but for a long time, the people writing the underlying software that drives the web have been working to separate content from presentation. Most of the web is still a mess of old style HTML pages and new pages loaded with buggy implemetations of emerging standards. And now there's talk of a new kind of adaptive information architecture that will work to shape pure content into user experiences regardless of the delivery mode. The new handhelds that approach ideal form and function Last Monday, Handspring released the new Visor Edge, and Palm followed this week with the m505 and m500. The Visor Edge breaks new ground in the product line with a metal-clad case almost as thin as the classic Palm V. The Visor also retains expansion capability with the help of an adapter. The m505 adds a color screen and the new MultiMediaCard (MMC) expansion slot. I think the m505 is closely approaching the perfect combination of form factor and feature set for a PDA, and it's a far cry from the Newton MessagePad 110 I used carry around. In a device as small as the m505, color is still a nice-to-have if battery life isn't compromised, but the expansion slots open a vast array of possibilities. PurePalm ran some photos from a recent Palm developer's conference showing some interesting prototypes of near-future MMC expansion slot add-ons. Sunday, March 18, 2001
Spring is near  Here are Crocus in bloom by our front steps today. This should be a wonderful spring in many ways. Saturday, March 17, 2001
I need Greymatter... ...and have for a while. Greymatter is a free web log script that runs locally on your web server if CGI script installation is supported. Developed last fall as a theraputic execrise by web designer Noah Grey, it is catching on with web loggers as the free hosted service Blogger (what I'm using now) has gone out of business. Blogger is on life support and is maintained by its creator, but who knows how long that will last. Today, I finally got some time to concentrate and installed Greymatter successfully on this server. I'm rusty at UNIX file permissions and PERL script variable paths, so it took a couple hours of messing around in my server directories. With Greymatter installed on my own host machine, I won't be vulnerable to the extremely frustrating server problems that have plagued Blogger. Greymatter offers more control and more useful features than Blogger, and since the script is written in PERL, it is easily maintained by any competent programmer. This week, I'll be working on a custom template, and possibly moving some old entries into the Greymatter database. Very useful features I'm looking forward to are the automatic image upload and integrated discussion board. A piece of Kurtzweil's brain Ray Kurtzweil has opened The Kurtzweil Accelerating Intelligence Network to provide an ongoing forum for discussion on artificial intelligence. Ray is the renowned inventor of the Kurtzweil Reading machine, the Kurtzweil synthesizer, advanced speech recognition technology, and author of the book The Age of Spiritual Machines. The site is graphics intensive with a Flash-based interface, a resources section built on The Brain navigation system, and a virtual hostess named Ramona which requires the LifeFX player. Once you get past playing with the site gimmicks, you'll find an extensive collection of articles, and deep, trippy discussion boards. This is another destination for my rainy afternoon surf list. Design like web kiddies K10K presents a funny tutorial on how to design cool web sites just like those made by the web kiddies people worship. Zeldman is right in saying, "you'll laugh, you'll cry." Friday, March 16, 2001
Replicas of ancient information tools  I've been wanting to collect three replicas of round objects that represent ancient information design to put into a shadow box frame in my study. The best I've found so far on the web are pictured above. The first, the Aztec Solar Calendar, was an instrument of time carved in a 12 foot diameter stone and used as early as 1500 B.C. The second, an Astrolabe, was an instrument for determining time and location used in ancient Greece in 225 B.C. And the third, a Feng Shui Compass which is still used to divine spiritual forces in your home or office, and dates back 3000 years. The examples I found range in size from 6 3/4" to 9 3/8". I'll look at this thumbnail image for a while to decide if it'll be worth the $350 to assemble the display. Earthquake art A beautiful set of photos have been making the rounds on web logs showing patterns produced in sand by a pendulum during the recent earthquake in Seattle. Inside a touch-screen PDA The New York Times How It Works column describes how computer touch-screens work, and shows a nice series of infographic illustrations of the inner workings of the Handspring Visor. In the wake of Argus A member of the information architecture discussion list has posted an archive of the messages back to July of last year. Here's the thread on the sad news of the closing of Argus & Associates. Thursday, March 15, 2001
Porter's latest thinking on competition Michael Porter, who authored the seminal business book on the forces of business competition, has a new article on his latest post-market collapse thinking in the current issue of The Harvard Business Review. The article can be purchased as a PDF for $5.50 (minimum purchase $10) or you can buy the magazine on the newsstands right now. The squeeze on Internet consultants LA-based consultant Khoi Vinh offers an unscientific Flash animation that visualizes the factors involved in the fall of the Internet consulting industry. Semi-disposable cell phones Nando reports on the upcoming Telespree cell phone which has a voice activated interface, and stored value/talk time in ad banner-decorated disposable batteries. The Telespree site has photos and a demo. Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Electronic paper Electronic paper looks and handles much like ordinary paper, but embeded inside are tiny pockets of material or beads that when charged by a grid of wires, change color to render images on the surface. Imagine a two-page newspaper that can display an infinite number of pages of content via a wireless connection, yet is easily folded or rolled up. MIT Technology Review has a good update on the state of this technology, which is already being used in point-of-purchase displays. People not on this Earth Looking out the window on plane flights, I've often wondered how many other people are in the air at any given time of day. Others have asked the same question, and New Scientist attempts an answer. There's also a good explaination of how pilots do skywriting. Tuesday, March 13, 2001
Truly sad news...
Elephants' foot stomping talk CNN has a story that confirms again the mystery and wonder of nature. A new study that finds elephants can communicate by stomping on the ground and picking up return vibrations through their toenails! Scientists believe that they can sense the movements and emotions of other elephant herds 20 miles (and possibly up to 100 miles) away. Here is the abstract of the study, and the Environmental News Network has a related story. Tux for all Wired has an article on The Story Behind Tux the Penguin, the logo of the Linux operating system. Describing pictures to the blind Maps and images can be presented to the blind by reproducing them as embossed surfaces. A conference paper titled How to make tactile pictures understandable to the blind reader suggests guidelines for further describing these special images: Because the picture is multi-dimensional and can contain many details, describing it is not always very easy. Describing a picture means translating from one medium to another, from image to text. All translations involve a problem of interpretation, in the sense of having to judge what is the best word for an object or phenomenon. This is a matter of defining objects and concepts. And so, inevitably, the description of a picture is always arbitrary and subjective to some extent. At the same time we must not forget that often the fascinating thing about pictures is that they are open to several interpretations, without any of those interpretations necessarily being wrong. Here's an example of a map of New York City's Washington Square Park rendered with tactile graphics symbols, and the map legend shows the symbol meanings. 20th century typography Originally created as a school assignment in 1999 by designer Brian Morris, this informative survey of 20th century typography goes slightly beyond just showing font styles, designers and history. You can type on your keyboard in the typefaces section to see magnified letter form samples. Monday, March 12, 2001
The original computer desktop  This is a historically significant sketch from a Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) internal memo authored in 1976 for the development of the Alto Computer. It's probably the first illustration of the desktop metaphor we use today. Alan Kay had just defined the metaphor of the computer desktop as a way for people to understand file systems based on work in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart on window views. The innovation of overlapping windows appeared soon after and eventually made its way to Apple Computer and Microsoft. The image is from Thierry Bardini's Bootstrapping : Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Sunday, March 11, 2001
Baltimore reads a little less There was a story in today's Baltimore Sun about Bibelot, the largest local independent bookstore chain in the Baltimore area, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday. They're going to close the four remaining stores, and lay off 100 employees in the next three months. I made many impluse buys at the Bibelot under our old offices in Canton while waiting for coffee. Now I make do with either the B&N or Borders that are virtually across the street from each other in Towson. With Crown Books gone too, and the closing of Louie's book section, I'll be buying just a bit more online. Saturday, March 10, 2001
A punch in the nosepilot  On Metafilter, I discover that Philadelphia-based freelance illustrator and animator, Alex Sacui was knocked over by a surprise $16,000 bill from his web host for excess bandwidth due to the popularity of his 4.5 megabyte Flash animation, Nosepilot. In a short text log, he contemplates filing for bankruptcy but rejects the idea of leaving the country. So far, there's no news about how he's going to resolve the situation, but his domain has moved to a new provider and several sites have mirrored the animation. The lesson here is to be mindful of the fine print on your ISP agreement. Web sites are incendiary in nature and it's relatively easy to be subjected to a sudden burst in traffic, such as when Slashdot links to a site resulting in The Slashdot Effect. In this case, the ISP should have issued fair warning or temporarily shut down the site. A friend of Al's has even done some math in his defense. The 8 minute, 30 second animation has been floating around the Internet in bits and pieces since last summer, and Alex pulled them together at this site last fall. If you haven't seen it, set aside 10 minutes to be pleasantly and completely charmed. And do have a look at the luscious concept storyboard and the FAQ page. Storytelling simplified
Friday, March 09, 2001
A museum of lights to spark your inventive spirit  Yesterday afternoon, we went for a visit to the Mt. Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting here in Baltimore. The museum was created in 1963 by a dentist named Dr. Hugh Hicks (pictured above speaking), who has a passion for light bulbs. In the basement of his dental office, there are 6,000 lightbulbs on display out of the full collection of 60,000. The eight large display cases trace the entire history of the development of the electric light from the gaslight era to the present. Dr. Hicks is an acknowledged authority on the subject, and trades bulbs with other collectors and museums around the world. He also has a close working relationship with the curator of the lighting exhibit at The Smithsonian. This was probably my fifth visit since I began taking some of my design students there on field trips. I see something new and wonderful every time. Here are a few of the photos I snapped:  Some very early Edison lamps—some of the first to have a screw base incorporated into the design.  These are novelty lapel pins commissioned by Mr. Edison for staff and friends.  A funny sign. Usability circa 1890...  This bulb (about 2 1/2" tall) is a highly collectable, mold-formed bulb in the form of the cartoon character Betty Boop.  An extreme closeup of a neon bulb with a flower-shaped core.  One of the jam-packed display cases. This one has the largest lightbulb made, bulbs from the Statue of Liberty, and x-ray tubes.  A lightbulb postcard from the large collection of ephemera. If you're at all interested in technology or history, this should go on your list of summer field trips. Dr. Hicks will take appointments Monday through Saturday 9am - 5pm for groups large and small. If you bring a small group, Dr. Hicks will have more time to tell his wonderful stories. Contact info: Dr. Hugh Francis Hicks The Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting 717 Washington Place Baltimore, MD. 21201 (410)-752-8586 Thursday, March 08, 2001
Testing a pile o' cell phones Nooper, a mobile communications startup in Tokyo, has a fun photo gallery of what it looks like to test a big pile of Internet-enabled i-mode cell phones. The big get bigger i-mode, the most popular cell phone in the world, now has 20 million users mostly in Japan. Today AOL announced reaching 28 million users. And now the two companies are blending their services to create an anticipated 1 million new users. Search engines feature reference chart InFoPeople offers a 2 page reference chart on selected search engines, directories and meta-search engines. You can view the chart as an HTML table or download the chart in PDF format. More bitmapped web fonts Brad J, a web designer at work, told me about another nice collection of bitmapped web fonts at MINIML. Nuke someone today PBS still has a nuclear bomb blast calculator running on the web site of a 1999 documentary. The interactive script uses MapBlast (good choice) to plot blast radii and fallout footprints on full color maps. I was surprised that a 1 megaton hit doesn't quite cover all of Baltimore. Wednesday, March 07, 2001
Mac opera web browser preview I've been using the newly released technology preview of the Opera web browser on my Mac at home, and I'm really impressed with it. Once you get past the nasty looking graphical interface, you'll see very nice features like an integrated Google search field and a screen magnification control. It was a quick 2 megabyte download, and pages I surfed held up really well and generally loaded faster than other browsers. The Opera web site also has a good summary of the special features of the browser that are useful to web designers. The Linux preview was released at the same time, and the Windows version has been out for some time. The state of privacy The Atlantic Monthly has a very long piece about how the debates on online privacy will fade and managing privacy will become big business. Tuesday, March 06, 2001
At IT again Inside.com is hyping a special issue of their magazine that will hit newsstands later this week with new revelations on Dean Kamen's much anticipated personal transportation device. Yahoo has a story with some details on the article's findings. The article apparently produces more evidence to confirm that the device is a gyro-stabilized two-wheel personal transporter and also reveals that it may be powered by hydrogen. Over at MSNBC, there are details from the appearance of Inside.com's reporter on the Today Show, and a video of a concept illustration of the scooter. And most recently, Brill's Content scores an interview with Dean Kamen, which is preceeded by a good overview of the media hype. Another web color mousepad And in checking up on Lynda's web site, I find she's selling what is probably the largest web color mousepad. Again, a paper chart is not the most accurate way to judge screen-based color, but you get Lynda's mug on the pad. Color Voodoo books Finally a series of books about color on the web that are supplied only in electronic form! There are a few paper book references for web color, notably Lynda Weinman's fine but out-of-print Coloring Web Graphics, but they can never come close to transmissive RGB color on a computer monitor. The Color Voodoo series covers basic color theory, color schemes, color logic, web color, color in interior design, and color for e-commerce. The books are well illustrated and are excellent for teaching or training. You can buy them online and download them as PDF files. The prices range from $14.95 to $29.99. There are discounts of up to 25% for buying a set of books. Monday, March 05, 2001
Steve's Digicams first look at the Sony MVC-CD300 digital camera The new review covers the Sony Mavica MVC-CD300 which is the latest in a series of cameras the use recordable CDs for image storage. The new models now use mini CD-RWs so that each 156 megabyte disk can be reused many times. The benefits are huge. The blank discs cost around $3 each, and can be immediately read in a laptop or PC CDROM drive. I think this would significantly streamline my workflow given that I'm using an expensive compact flash card now with a variety of adapters, and backing up my images to CD anyway. The camera is due in June for just under $1000. George Lucas and the new Sony digital motion picture cameras TheForce.net has an excerpt from someone's Cinequest DXD conference notes on the Sony CineAlta 24P digital motion picture cameras being used by George Lucas to film the next installment of Star Wars. The cameras used by Lucas have been modified to bypass recording to tape with data stored directly on computer hard drives. As soon as Lucas started evaluating the cameras in April 2000, a wave of manufacturers and filmmakers jumped on the bandwagon. The end of the full article at AICN has the author convinced that the digital output is as good as film. Tips for spiffier shopping carts The Ecommerce Guide offers a list of tips for online shopping cart design. Sunday, March 04, 2001
A cold, rainy Sunday with snow on the way    I stopped by work to pick up my laptop just in case we really do get snow tomorrow, and picked up a couple DVDs from Sound Garden. Critique sites The year end 2000 issue of Critique magazine has the results of THE WEB CRIT web site awards from a noted group of judges. The magazine site doesn't offer clickable links for the list, and you can't expect the selected designs to remain unchanged for long, so here's a live list of the winners: Critic's Award Williams-Sonoma Critic's Award Turbonium Critic's Award Triple Winner Altrec's Crown of Africa Education Category National Museum of American History E-commerce Category OXO International Corporate Category Lufthansa Systems Network Self-Promotion Chris Guselle Saturday, March 03, 2001
Mapping web sites: the book My back-ordered copy of Paul Kahn's Mapping Web Sites came from Amazon yesterday. The book, based on a course taught by the author, is chock full of web site maps created in the distinctive "tombstone" style of Paul's company, Dynamic Diagrams. But after the eye candy, there's not much more text than the captions, and some descriptions of their methodology. Near the end of the book, the authors remembered for me Jacques Bertin's seven retinal variables: size, value (gray scale), texture (variations of fineness & coarseness), color, orientation (of fill pattern), shape (of mark). The site doesn't promote the book at all, but the demos area has several of the maps from the book for download in PDF format. Friday, March 02, 2001
Data art Datastreams is an upcoming exhibition that will be presented In conjunction with the Bitstreams digital art show (nice Flash site) at The Whitney Museum in New York starting March 22. Here's the blurb on Datastreams: Data Dynamics focuses on Internet art that creates visual models for representing a continuously changing flow of data. These models allow users to navigate visual and textual information and experience the flux of data. They constitute a form of "dynamic mapping," where the map constantly adapts to changes in the data stream in front of the viewer's eyes at any given moment. These visual models go beyond traditional notions of geography and the map, which remain static once set down. Well these look like a good reason for another weekend day trip to New York City. Thursday, March 01, 2001
FF Webfonts Collection FontShop has released a CDROM collection of 13 web-optimized fonts of popular designs that have been painstakingly tuned to work on low resultion monitors at a variety of sizes. The licensing of the package has been relaxed to permit the fonts to be embedded into web pages and PDF documents. Price: $199. Web color wheels and pop-ups For those who make web graphics and have to finesse color palettes, here are a couple reference tools. Visibone offers a collection of web color reference products including laminated cards, mouspads, wall posters, and software files. On a recent visit, I discovered that they've added a download called Visibone Popups. Popups are a small collection of HTML and javascript that you can add to any web page to display popup windows with either an HTML tag reference or 216 web color chart. And in the category of No Surprise, The Color Wheel Company, makers of traditional plastic color wheels you find at art stores, now offers The Web Wheel. The wheel lists RGB and HEX color values for the 218 web safe colors, and by rotating the wheel's secondary scale, you can juxtapose the color swatches to preview color harmonies. Digital dementia MSNBC examines the technology concerns of Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. The article opens with the hypothesis that people's frustrations with technology, a phenomenon described as digital dementia, could become as acute as road rage. Dertouzos' is searching for ways to relieve our frustrations with the complexity of technology with is $50 million, 5-year long Project Oxygen. His goal is to integrate the disparate computer interactions we have today in desktop computers, laptops, palmtops, and mobile devices to build in intelligence that delivers personalized information anywhere.
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