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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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Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Beo Player Bang & Olufsen, the makers of very high-end audio equipment, recently released BeoPlayer, a Windows MP3 player and their first software product. The interface is very elegant and minimal, and so far I'm enjoying it. Monday, July 30, 2001
Fine spine design I've always been interested in the marginalia of design in any medium. This article by Creativepro Contributing Editor John D. Berry considers the design virtues of book spines. Not mentioned in the article is the dot-com era practice of using URLs in book titles, and thus on spines, as in the case of Customers.com. Titles like this will look so dated in the next few years. Sunday, July 29, 2001
Eyewitness to the need to SLOW DOWN    A car accident happened right in front of us yesterday evening while we were at the light at 33rd and Calvert. We were on our way to pick up Amy's sister for dinner, and Amy was driving while I was riding in the back seat fiddling with my digital camera. I heard the screech of brakes and crumpling metal followed by some screams as a Dodge Neon (heading north on Calvert) slammed into the side of a KIA Sportage SUV (heading east on 33rd). I snapped the first photo just as the SUV stopped moving. You can see the SUV driver's arm with wristwatch hanging out from under the car. The driver of the Neon is in the second photo standing dazed on the pavement but she looked OK. We pulled over and within a minute, a police car arrived. We stayed to file a report, and watched as the Baltimore Fire Department's Heavy Rescue squad used cutters to free the woman inside the tumbled SUV. In the last photo, she was conscious but we couldn't tell the extent of any injuries. Fortunately, Union Memorial Hospital's emergency room was just a few paces away, and the EMS team carefully moved her there. Even without considering the startling statistics on car accidents, we are reminded of their frequency as there are crashes like this about 5 or 6 times a year just at this corner in our neighborhood. We should all think about how many corners there are like this and SLOW DOWN! Saturday, July 28, 2001
The eBook hack flap If you are interested in digital copyright issues and want to delve into one of the the first enforcements of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) with FBI's recent arrest of a russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarkov, Planet eBook has compiled a detailed list of links to news stories. The programmer was here in the U.S. to give a talk about a software utility he created called Advanced Ebook Processor (AEBPR) that removes the copy protection from Adobe's eBook file format. I can vouch from hands-on testing that it worked perfectly and almost instantaneously on an ebook I own. What was an encrypted file registered through Amazon.com and Adobe to be used only on my laptop, became a plain vanilla PDF file that I could open and print with the free Acrobat Reader. When Adobe saw this software back in June, they were rightly freaked at the reality that their multi-million-dollar development effort, and their author's intellectual property were naked to the world. Elcomsoft, the company who employs the programmer, crossed the line a ways in attempting to sell this tool for a profit. Adobe urged the FBI to nab the programmer, but has since dropped charges probably due to pressure from The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the threat of product boycotts. As an owner of eBooks, I do want to be able to easily move my purchase from machine-to-machine without having to check in with Adobe every time. AEBPR provides an efficient way to do this, and there will always be hackers who need a challenge to produce these tools. However, in purchasing the eBook, I accepted the licensing agreements that prohibit such activity. Many seem to agree the real issue here isn't the hack, but Adobe's implementation of a very weak, hackable protection scheme. Adobe may have damaged the eBook movement by shaking the confidence of their partners and the authors they represent. Add this to the lack of titles, and the usability hassles, and we have a chasm that won't be crossed for some time. After fumbling with a couple eBooks on my heavy laptop and tiny-screened Visor, I am returning to paper. Off the link above, you might start with the article in BusinessWeek which offers a concise summary of the recent events and forces at play. Dreamweaver 4's Missing Manual I've long ranted in classes about Macromedia's skimpy manuals for Dreamweaver. There have been some fine books such as Lynda Weinman's Hands-on Training series, but now O'Reilly has addressed the problem head-on by adding Dreamwevaer coverage to its Missing Manuals series. Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual, offers some of the most focused and frank coverage on using the program. To further entice you into buying, the publisher has posted Chapter 17: Libraries and Templates free on their site, and the author maintains a web site with the electronic files for the tutorials in the book. I'm pretty sure I will be using this book in one of my classes in the fall. Nano font Joe Gillespie, creator of the Web Page Design for Designers site has released another pixel font called Nano. This is a techno-looking font with extended letterforms, and extreme italics. The font sells for $15, and takes its place in Joe's excellent collection. Linked off these pages are some good notes on using these fonts in Flash. In previous log entries, I compiled a list of other sources for pixel fonts and posted an update. Friday, July 27, 2001
A hop across the harbor for lunch  On this beautiful Friday, a couple consultants working in our office persuaded me to take the lunchtime cruise across the harbor to Fells Point on the Seaport Taxi. We strolled over to John Stevens Restaurant for a sandwich, and the photo above is the view from the ride back. This is so decadent! Thursday, July 26, 2001
For Visio geeks: crime scenes  Some of the web sites I have to map using Microsoft Visio for web content consolidation projects could almost be considered crime scenes. Text is sometimes hacked together, navigation is a bloody mess, and there are the bodies of dead files buried at the deepest levels. I was delighted to discover today that Microsoft has long provided a real crime scenes solution and symbol set on their web site. Designed to help police investigators be more productive in creating illustrations for reports, the solution automatically installs in versions of Visio 2000 and previous. I couldn't get it to work in 2002, so email me if you want to play with just the stencils (symbols). One day soon I'll add the hatchet symbol to a site map with sections that need pruning. Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Renegade heating engineer inspires this information plumber    While playing with the still image capture feature of PowerDVD, I grabbed some frames from one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. In the scenes above from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, you see Robert DeNiro playing a renegade heating engineer named Harry Tuttle, who drops in to fix the main character's air conditioner. Tuttle stays one step ahead of a pair of incompetants working for a retro-futuristic bureaucracy called Central Services. I won't give away the story specifics, but this scene inspires the adventurous side of me to buck conformance to become a renegade information plumber who travels fast and loose to fix people's web sites. Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Happy new friends day Like birthdays, we should celebrate the day you know a long-term friendship has begun. I realized today was such a day after I visited the offices of the team at Info Design, a group of information architects and teachers working in Washington, D.C. Thom, Schelli, Barbara, the interns, and Scoops the dog inhabit a very cozy, wacky office near Dupont Circle. The best part of the visit were the cool toys on display in the bookshelves that lined the walls. They will definitely be the subject of a photo expedition soon. Monday, July 23, 2001
Albert Einstein in Love Arts & Letters points to an interview with Dennis Overbye, Deputy Science Editor of The New York Times, on the subject of Albert Einstein's secretive love life. Overbye's book uncovers how love helped to drive the most famous physicist of all to consider the frontiers of time and space. Sunday, July 22, 2001
Almost heaven: Level, West Virginia 39°30.201' N 078°34.459' W We're back tonight from three restful days in a little cabin on the South Branch of the Upper Potomac River. We saw more nature this weekend than recent years put together. All but one of the photos were taken within a few steps from the cabin. All I had to do was watch and wait...  The valley was filled with thick fog for the first three hours after sunrise.  The next morning, a lot less fog, but instead, an amazing number of steam devils danced over the surface of the water. I saw some that must have been 12 feet high. The columns were perfectly cylindrical and made up of upward-sprialing threads of mist.  Beads of dew on blades of grass—a world of detail in an area two inches across.  A picture postcard image of the South Branch Potomac Valley looking east.  This is the view of the valley from the dirt road heading in.  A red-tipped bird feather rests fleetingly on a leaf.  Amy noticed a Great Blue Herron stalking fish on the other side of the river. I stuck my digital camera lens in the eyepiece of the binoculars and after a few tries, got a usable image.  A delicate purple flower on a backdrop of fungus covered tree bark.  I squatted by the river's edge for about 45 minutes to see what would float by, and this pair of mating Damselflies landed right in front of my camera. Yeah baby!  A close-up of the lichen growing on the sedimentary rock surrounding the river.  Another binocular photo: turtles sunbathing on a log in the middle of the river right in front of our deck.  An Evening Bat snoozing (or trying) under the roof over the back door.  Even with all the subtle nature activity around, I didn't forget to look straight up at these cirrus clouds.  You can only stare in awe...  A daisy in twilight.  Neighbors' electric lights compete with the fireflies. Thursday, July 19, 2001
Our tunnel fire affects the net Traffic's been a mess here in downtown Baltimore due to a train derailment and fire in a tunnel running from Camden Yards to the midtown area. CNET reports the fire has severed some of UUNET's fiberoptic lines affecting some customers along the east coast. Looks like I'll be riding into another mess tonight coming back home from a gig in DC. Wednesday, July 18, 2001
The next generation web-enabled DVD Here's a somewhat technical article that surveys what's been done to date to intergrate high-bandwidth DVDs with the real-time content delivery capability of the web. With iDVD, the next generation technology, you might be able to watch a movie next to freshly updated web content or commentary. The missing link is a player that has a web browser and modem, but new technolgies are just around the corner. Tuesday, July 17, 2001
CMS buyers guide All content-rich web sites should be built on a content management system that automates the creation, editing, routing, approval, and publishing of content. But these systems are expensive, and typically difficult to install and customize. Network Computing has a handy interactive buyer's guide covering some of the more popular products. Monday, July 16, 2001
Section 508: access for all As of June 21st, federal government web sites, and those that recieve federal funding or grants, must now comply with new accessibility regulations. It's not clear how the regs will be enforced, and government agencies aren't panicing because they only have to initially convert their top 20 pages, but web production will certainly get more complex in the near future. The HRSA Office of Information Technology has a nice practical handbook on Section 508 compliance, that is part of a larger site on the topic. The FAQ page is also useful. Sunday, July 15, 2001
Norb's ocean Looking around for information on icebergs, I found the stunning underwater photographs of Norbert Wu. Norb, as his friends call him, has done assignments for most of the major nature magazines, and his slogan boldly states "Two-thirds of the Planet is covered by Norb." He sells prints, and I'm really tempted by the graceful beauty of penguins diving under arctic ice. Make some time to take a long dive into this site. Saturday, July 14, 2001
OX4RD The Concise Oxford English Dictionary is taking another leap into digital relevancy in adding SMS message text to their lexicon. GR8! Friday, July 13, 2001
Science fiction in miniature It's summer science fiction blockbuster time, and we look forward to taking in the remake of Planet of the Apes in a couple weeks. To help satisfy any collector urges you might have, Monsters in Motion creates very accurate miniature models of all kinds of science fiction characters, props, and scenery. Check out Icarus, the starship from the original apes movie, and move on to the sections on robots, and dinosaurs. Kids will love these goodies, but they are definitely adult-priced. Thursday, July 12, 2001
Life's Causal Relationships poster Via Metafilter, an ironically funny info graphic titled Gateway to Heaven: A Chart of Causal Relationships from the LA Weekly. One person I showed this to said he could add some boxes, another was amused that practicing yoga leads to LSD and death. News blurbs gallery and a cool site An information architect has compiled a very handy gallery web text "blurbs" to showcase the various ways people write and design teaser copy for news stories. The best example is the format used by The International Herald Tribune, which is also a great javascript-enhanced site. Try out the clippings feature. Tuesday, July 10, 2001
As good as it gets?  In a Bricklin-esque moment of documentary photography, I got up out of the chair at left and snapped a photo of this great all-day client meeting session. It's one of the recent moments I want to remember where everything is going picture perfectly. Everyone is engaged, it's an exciting and important project, and we're in our high-tech conference room. If you've never been in a large company, this is what most of your day looks like if you have regular contact with clients. The Attention Economy What might be the most important dimension of e-business or any business for that matter—attention, is the subject of the new book, The Attention Economy, by two consultants from Accenture. So many times in the last few years I've seen web business schemes that assume people have an infinite amount of time to immerse themselves in a new product or service. Marketers would roll a service out believing that theirs was going to be different and more compelling than the previous. They were most often wrong, and only a tiny percentage of these ventures succeeded. For this and many other reasons, we're seeing the bottom of the collapse of the web business. Take the archetype of the stay-at-home mom for example. In the heyday of the internet boom, you'd have companies producing services that would have mom looking up web recipes in the kitchen on a web appliance, hanging out in chat communities exchanging tips and stories on parenting, logging nutrition info on a Palm device, and checking e-mail to name a few. When would a mom have time to even try one of these things? Sure, I know many people who are completely web savvy—nerdy even. But if you had 30 minutes of personal time in a day, would you use it on some untested, and badly designed new web service? Not to mention the issue of sign-up hassles and cost. Anyway, here's the first chapter of the book. Sunday, July 08, 2001
Fireworks sideshow  For $2, my friend Bill became a giant crazy firefly while we watched the Catonsville fireworks. I'm amazed how clearly the Brightrope came out in the photos. Saturday, July 07, 2001
Looking for distributed cognition  I first read about the concept of distributed cognition in some books by Don Norman and Jeff Raskin. The formal definition comes from a recent branch of thinking in cognitive science that recognizes processes that happen across a wide spectrum of "actors" interactions with "artifacts" as opposed to being contained in a single, closed situation. Put another way, thinking happens when a person tries to understand an object, but it can also happen collectively with many people over time and distance with a single object. An example of this would be the control room in a nuclear reactor facility. The status displays are purposely engineered as large old-fashoned dials because research has shown that teams of operators work better together when they can collectively view a single large board as opposed to individual personal displays. In my daily work as an information architect, I'm particularly interested in ways to bring physicality back into digital work environments. You can walk through parts of our office and not really know what kind of work is being done. It's just a bunch of people staring at computer screens and clicking (OK, no wise cracks). It's not just our place. Many web firms I've visited have little in the way of diagrams on the wall (but plenty of eye candy posters). But, go across the walkway to our neighbor, a building architecture firm, and you see large printouts of concept sketches, massing studies, space plans, floorplans, elevations, and engineering details all over the walls. One reason has got to be that building architecture is a mature discipline that truly uses computers as a practical productivity tool. In digital design, much of what used to be a paper sketch process is now happening in the computer user interface. In the last 6 months, I've started using large foamcore boards (one pictured above) to post site maps, user experience flow charts, and screen schematics. I can buy a sheet of this 4 x 8' stuff for $12. With an X-acto knife, I score the board to fold in half to a managable 4 x 4'. In work sessions, I line these up around the walls. Otherwise passive or standoffish people are forced to engage with the information posted instead of haunching over a paper handout. Members of the group can gesture, comment, and mark on the board very easily. Unlike fixed whiteboards, I can keep a large number of these around, yet pack them up quickly when necessary. Our CEO loves to grab them to show our process to clients, and their size makes for better demo. Here for my own recall (and yours) are some links to investigate:
Friday, July 06, 2001
Return on Interaction InformationWeek cites a McKinsey study on the need to measure the effectiveness of business-to-business online communities. Organizations like National Public Radio, Kaiser Permanente, Cisco, and SAP operate web-based gathering areas where visitors can seek out support for products and services. These communties are proving to be effective tools for customer relationship building, but management oftens wants metrics to quantify the return on investment. The article and study suggest some ways to do this. The study can be downloaded from the PeopleLink website (registration required). Memory bugs ABC News reports on a study conducted by two University of Washington psychologists who used the power of suggestibility to pursuade people into believing they saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. It's a frightening fact that 30 to 40 percent of the people in the groups tested were convinced. Even more frightening is effective advertisers, politicians, sales people, and cult leaders understand the power of suggestion—at least intuitively. Thursday, July 05, 2001
Storm point Tonight, as a bunch of us finished a meeting in our conference room, a summer thunderstorm rolled in from the north.  Right after a scary looking squall line passed over, I came around to harborside and watched not-so-smart boaters take on the storm.  The rain let up after about 20 minutes, and the sun came out ...  ... to present the first rainbow I've seen through a digital camera and at our office. It was actually a double rainbow for about 10 minutes, but my camera couldn't resolve the faint secondary.  And the sunset pulsed a warm goodnight to the sign on our building. Wednesday, July 04, 2001
Fireworks from children Curious about fireworks and their manufacture, I surfed around and landed on Black Cat's history page. They're a large manufacturer of fireworks which are imported into the US. You think the images are quaint or charming, but I was alarmed at how low-tech the operation looks. Then I found this article at the Sydney Morning Herald about how children are exploited by many companies to make fireworks. It's ironic that some children die so that many others can enjoy a holiday. IBM Ease of Use Conference Papers Via NBS, I discover that IBM's in-house usability research group has posted all the papers from their recent conference. There's some good reading and citation material in there—27 papers-worth to be exact. Tuesday, July 03, 2001
Float little firefly  On our front yard tonight, my wife's finger serves as a rest stop and launching pad for this firefly. If this bug could talk, it might say: "Two weeks to live. Mate I must!" Recently, scientists have discovered that nitric oxide is the key to the firefly's light. Monday, July 02, 2001
Memento minutia If you enjoyed the movie Memento a much as I did, you aren't alone. A writer at Salon has watched it several times, read the script, and analyzed it frame by frame on video to uncover the complex, reverse narrative plot structure. I guess someone had to do it. Over at EditorsNet, there's an interview with Dody Dorn, the person who cut the film's footage together using a detailed flowchart and card-sorting techniques. Reading these two pieces makes me appreciate the uniqueness of the film even more. Speaking of minutia, the main character in the film relied on a handmade paper flowchart to help his damaged memory. I would love to have a copy of that as an information artifact, but I've only found a fuzzy still frame. Sane content management The high-technology business sells contained complexity at a premium price. The industry leaders use hard-sell tactics that often edge way past unethical to virtually illegal. Tired of this in the realm of web site content management, UK consultant Alan Pelz-Sharpe writes about the need for sanity and simplicity in developing a system to store, manage, and present content on large web sites. Sunday, July 01, 2001
The Life Force of Eva Cassidy  It's been a while since a piece of music stopped me in my tracks. This came to pass while browsing through Barbarian Books in Wheaton, MD yesterday. Shuffling through the canyons of posters, toys and comic books, I heard an incredible female voice singing a soulful interpretation of Sting's Fields of Gold. The songs that followed traversed a wide range of style from folk to jazz to gospel. On my way out, I asked the shop owner about the music. He told me about a shy singer, Eva Cassidy, who lived in Bowie, Maryland and died tragically at 33 of melanoma. Her music has taken off over the last two years, and just this spring, listeners of BBC Radio 2 voted her one of the top 25 voices of the century. Her albums have been consistently at the top of the charts at Amazon. After reading articles on the Web, I realized the greater force of this story is beyond the sheer power of her singing or the tragic end to her life. Eva was also an accomplished artist who worshiped nature with a constant child-like wonder. We can take a lesson or two away from the story of her quiet, uncomplicated life. Her cousin Laura Bligh maintains an extensive web site with links to media coverage. Eva's popularity exploded after BBC coverage, a story on ABC World News Tonight (link to RealVideo), and Nightline. There's a biography of her life in the works, but here are some good stories from The Washington Post, The Washington Post Magazine, Washingtonian Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Since this entry, I've bought all her albums, and they are all amazing—except for No Boundaries, which is over-produced. Spielberg's machine almost loves I saw A.I. last night along with most of the blogging world. It was a visually fascinating escape vehicle, but the blend of Kubrick-cold and Spielberg-fuzzy was odd, and ultimately cheated the characterization in the film. This is a wannabe art theater film propelled into every shopping mall movieplex by a multimillion-dollar ad budget. But the visuals alone will have me buy this DVD anyway when it comes out. For more reviews and articles, visit Yahoo's page of reviews and fansites. Dataglyphs: weaving messages in patterns  Xerox has a limited online demonstration of its Dataglyph technology. Dataglyphs are a pattern of lines that can have textual data encoded. Much like barcodes, the pattern can withstand a degree of mutilation before losing information. You can retrieve a message from the manipulated image above by saving it to your hard drive, and then reuploading it to the GlyphServer decoder. As decoding devices become cheaper to build, we will increasingly find digital data encoded onto (or into) physical objects.
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