afongen

First Microsoft, now the Republican Party has copied Apple’s switch ad campaign.

At least Microsoft recanted.

And since you asked, Momoko Kikuchi is my favorite Japanese switch ad, hands down. Why? This will make sense only if you know Japanese, and may be interesting only if you’re a linguist. It’s how she identifies herself: “Kikuchi Momoko, gakusei…desu” :) Gotta love that last-second “oh yeah!” before she adds the “desu.”

Wow. If you’re a teacher in the US, Apple will give you a free copy of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

A coworker wrote me today to say that the DARPA Information Awareness Office‘s logo is certainly funny, but did I read the vision statement? Uh, no, not really. Gotta say, it lost me after the first couple lines:

The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats.

Blah, blah, blah. The whole site reads like that. Sigh.

Among the technologies they plan to develop or work with I noticed:

• Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries
• Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users
• Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition

Yeah, okay, whatever. Hm, “Biometric signatures of humans” — a little creepy, but hardly unexpected.

There I stopped. Had I continued reading, I might have spotted these gems:

• Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning
• Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance

Stop laughing. I’m serious, it’s there. Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.

Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning? Useful technologies, to be sure. Man oh man, have I been waiting for those. Bet they’re classified. George Bush certainly doesn’t seem to have access to them.

Story telling? wtf? And what on earth is “truth maintenance”?

Clearly this site deserves more exploration.

If you haven’t read Eric Meyer’s latest CSS book, you should. It’s excellent. Even if you already know everything he covers, which I’d guess a fair number of readers of this blog do, there’s something about how Eric writes that makes it seem fresh and worthwhile.

And guess what? He’s posted material written for the book that didn’t make the final cut. Of particular interest right now: “Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles: Turning Browser Flaws to Our Advantage.”

I have been of two minds on this. On the one hand, easily hiding styles from Netsape 4.x by using @import or the media attribute is really handy and I do it all the time. For some reason, though, Tantek Çelik’s box model hack has always bothered me. I’ve generally preferred to move to designs that would push me toward that hack, which seemed to be going a bit over the edge. I don’t know why, maybe because I figured it’d cause problems somewhere down the road. Seeing these workarounds all together like this, though, laid out clearly and intelligently discussed, makes me feel a bit more comfortable with the idea.

I am such a sucker for packaging.

Interesting article on The Register about how Red Hat is helping make the DMCA look ridiculous. They’ve released a kernel patch that addresses a security problem. To get details about the patch that explain the problem, you must first agree to a license in which you state that you are not under US jurisdiction. Otherwise, see, there’s danger of violating the DMCA.

Red Hat explains:

RHSA-2002-158 is an errata kernel which addresses certain security vulnerabilities. Quite simply, these vulnerabilities were discovered and documented by ppl outside of the US, and due to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act legislation in the US, it is potentially dangerous to disclose any information on security vulnerabilities, which may also be used in order to circumvent digital security – i.e. computer security. For this reason, RH cannot publish this security information, as it is not available from the community in the first instance. The www.thefreeworld.net site allows for accessing this information, but requires you agree to terms which protect the author and documenter of the patches from being accusations that they themselves have breached DMCA.

What a mess. How long do you figure before Congress realizes what a mess they’ve made of things with this lousy legislation?

An X11 public beta of OpenOffice 1.0 for Mac OS X is available for download. Yes!

I have not yet installed this, I’ll have to wait ’til I get home tonight. However, based on some things that I’ve read elsewhere that lead me to believe that people are confused about this, let me say something right now: yes, you need to install XWindows first. This is included with the OpenOffice download, and if the developer build was any indication, it’ll walk you through that. Don’t worry. It’s not hard.

What I don’t know, because I haven’t tried this yet, is whether you’ll need to download the new Jaguar XWindows installer first. That made a huge difference in the developer build.

If an X11 version isn’t your cup of tea, keep your eye on NeoOffice, an OpenOffice port that will run natively on OS X.

Jesse Walker alerts us to DARPA‘s new Information Awareness Office — if the name isn’t enough to stir the conspiracy theorist in you, and if their leader John Poindexter doesn’t ring any bells, you gotta at least check out the logo.

Semiotically speaking, this is the most inept administration in years. Either that, or its art department is trying to tell us something.

Heh.

Back when I worked as a coffee roaster, I was driving around one day with my boss Jeremy and we decided to stop by a recently-opened Dunn Bros Coffee for a cup. Company founder Ed Dunn happened to be there roasting; we chatted with Ed for a half-hour or so before leaving.

“Hmmm,” Jeremy mused as we drove away, “did you notice how he never once mentioned the Illuminati? Don’t you think that odd?”

Upon reflection, maybe I should never have loaned him Foucault’s Pendulum.

Lawrence Lessig blogs his thoughts on how his arguments before the Supreme Court went.

I mentioned this case to Kiara, but NPR had been doing its job and she already knew about it. Great! She was quite interested, as was I, in the story of the bookmobile. I hadn’t heard of it until Aaron Swartz mentioned it.

And on a related note, in the latest issue of New Architect magazine, Lincoln Stein writes about the Hollings Act, and Bret Fausett writes about how technology is undermining the concept of fair use in copyright by enforcing copyright protection far beyond what the law intends. This is something that Lessig discusses in great detail in The Future of Ideas.

Wired News has unleashed a standards-compliant, XHTML+CSS design. If you’re wondering how, Eric Meyer interviews Douglas Bowman, the “brains and primary driving force” behind the design.

Thanks, Wired, and congratulations.

This has been cluttering up my bookmarks for too long, I have to make note of it here or I’ll forget to get back to it: Writing for the Web, Jakob Nielsen on sun.com. A pretty useful guide that covers, among other things, how writing on the web is different from writing for print.

This is something that I’m going to be spending a lot of time talking about at work over the next year or so, as my team begins more actively working with people to figure out how the web does or does not fit into their business processes. As people make the transition toward the web being the sole delivery mechanism for some documents, it’s taking some effort on my part to explain how the publication standards to which they have become accustomed over the past several decades don’t necessarily apply on the web, or at least need some modification.

Sometimes it’s little things like headers: people often want them centered, because that’s usually what works well in print — or at least that’s what they’re used to. On a web page, though, it often makes more sense to have headlines left-aligned: it’s easier for people to identify headlines that way. Not always, no, it depends on other elements of the page layout and design, but left-aligned headlines are a convention to which many are accustomed, so are a Good Thing.

The really hard part is helping people shed their desire for absolute control over presentation. They want everything to be PDF because they want to control exactly how everything looks. Resisting the urge to scream, “GET OVER IT!”, I instead explain that no, PDFs are good for some things, and we can certainly make PDFs available, but we have to have HTML versions because they allow for much greater flexibility, they’re much more broadly accessible, and are the very foundation of the web. The ability to display HTML documents in many different devices and presentation formats is a feature, not a bug. I honestly think that I have an easier time discussing this with professional designers with a print background than I do the amateur desktop publishers.

What I think I need to do, then, is focus attention on non-presentational aspects of creating web content: how the writing is different, how to write more effectively for the web. Hence my interest in Nielsen’s work and this sun.com article in particular.

A couple major hurdles I expect to face:

• Structuring documents. I don’t know why this is so hard, you’d think that people would be comfortable with the idea of an outline and be able to translate that to the web. But no. They’re not. This makes using markup for structure almost impossible.
• Omitting needless words. This is difficult for people in academia and government. I work in both worlds. Great.
• Convincing people that I, a techie, can credibly offer advice on how to write effectively.
• People not being fooled by this transparent distraction from what they care about: superficial presentation.