WebMutant on the philosophy of web design.
People evangelizing Macromedia Flash as an end-all solution for web site design need to be shot. I came to this conclusion after reading the feedback to Dack Ragus' Flash is Evil paper.
Wow. I didn't know there were more Adrian Mole books beyond the original two. I grew up on these books, as did millions of other British and American schoolchilren. [via LinkMachineGo]
Brain Teaser: Four Men in Hats
Ebay Treasures. Whoo-hoo!
Remember the Enormicom.com parody from last week? Apparently, Looksmart thinks it's a real company! [Scroll down to the e's.]
www.greatguy.com should be renamed www.desperateguy.com. I don't normally like picking on people like this, but there are much easier ways to met girls. Jeez.
Wassup Eliàn. [Someone was going to create this sooner or later.]
You know you're a geek when the first thing you think after visiting this site, is "I want one!" In a geek's mind, it's technology first, safety second. [I still want one, though.]
Tim O'Reilly on Book Publishing:
"Most publishers think that their business is to create products that people want, and that accordingly transfer dollars from consumers' pockets to their own. At O'Reilly, we believe that the core of our business is to transfer knowledge from people who have it to people who need it. Yes, we are in business to make money, but this is a kind of housekeeping, not the purpose of the business."
Servlets.com: The Problems with JSP
A Linux-based PDA. This is pretty cool. It has an NTSC input jack (for television) and a digital camera as optional add-ons.
David Wertheimer: Why I Hate My Palm Pilot
Please re-read: How the Web Was Almost Won
Bruce Tognazzini talks about the history of user interface conventions and what Apple should be doing with Mac OS X. There are a lot of new UI concepts that could easily be integrated into Mac OS X, Eazel, or any other OS UI of the future. [More: Eazel screenshots]
Awww, were the wittle MSFT stock holders a wittle upset? I seem to recall this exact same behavior a few years back when journalists proclaimed that Apple was dead.
Girl's Guide to Geek Guys. This is pretty accurate despite the fact that it was written in 1994, and is chock full of 1994 geek stereotypes. [via RiotHero]
Drue Miller: How to Love Geek Girls. [If you read both of these, do they cancel each other out?]
Tripping has been covering the political news coming out of Zimbabwe lately.
The UCFX WooHoo5 34500 AGP Graphics Acceleration Video Card. Whoohoo! [found at Hack-The-Planet]
Stupid Research Tricks.
Only in a country as commercially-inundated as America would come a story such as this one: Easter Bunny arrested in Mall Brawl. You just can't make this stuff up.
O'Reilly: ESR on Microsoft -- Microsoft: Designed For Insecurity I no longer care if Microsoft gets broken up by the government. With sloppy programming practices, nightmare spaghetti code, and inherently insecure products, more and more businesses are going to dump Microsoft and choose software and services that are founded around the tried and true open source model. This is what many people mean when they say we should "let the market decide" what happens to Microsoft. No matter what happens with the US DOJ case, Microsoft will be a dead company at some point in the future. The only thing that could save them is to change their entire business and production/sales model. Apple gets this completely. Mac OS X is written on top BSD, an open source operating system.
SprintPCS Watch: So, I still don't have my new cell phone. The CSR I spoke with on Friday night said it was "lost" in the system between their distribution center and UPS. At this rate, the overnight delivery they promised is going to take a full week. How's that for customer service? And, to top it all off, I saw the same exact phone in a store this weekend for $50 less than I paid online. Time spent on hold with SprintPCS since last Monday: About 4 hours. SprintPCS, are you listening?
Edd Dumbill: Why Does Metadata Count?
Whoops! That's what happens when you use an unstable OS for mission critical services. Good thing it's in the airport, and not in the planes.
Wow.
Microsoft: "Disks are duplicated on a variety of industrial strength, quality focused systems. Most of these systems are UNIX-based. The UNIX-based duplication systems used in manufacturing are impervious to MS-DOS-based, Windows- based, and Macintosh-based viruses."
Judd Apatow's "Freaks and Geeks" diary. This is great. Why aren't the network executives listening? The people love F&G. Put it back on the air!
Knowledge Management Portal. Lots of great links and resources here.
I am completely transfixed by this girl's journal entries. Man, I wish I could write that honestly and openly. Wow.
Scooby Dooby Doooooooooo! Zoinks! [via Memepool]
Scene: Sitting in my living room, on two very comfortable couches, TV is turned on for background noise. Players: Damien and myself, each equipped with a Powerbook and a wireless ethernet connection to the house LAN. Damien is looking up prices for cheap folding tables for our various servers to sit on, in anticipation of getting our DSL installed.
Damien: [calling from his couch] Hey Cam, I found some tables at OfficeMax.com. Cam: How much? Damien: From $35 to $50, depending on the size. Come and look [points to his Powerbook]. Cam: No way, just email me the link.
There's nothing like seeing mobs of police in riot gear to remind you how screwed up our country is. The boy is back with his father, where he belongs. We now return you to our previously scheduled programming.
Colleges go wireless. Cool!
Every once in a while, you come across a web site that just blows you away. That is what happened tonight when I read the introductory page of this new site called Kit Dove, which seeks to chronicle the stories, the pain, and the grief we all share when a loved one dies. I lost my father at a very young age, and it changed my life in ways that I am still struggling to deal with 15 years later. Sharing your grief, your stories, and your pain with others online can only do good. And Kit Dove, wherever you are, you are being thought of, even by completely total strangers such as myself. Read. Share. Cry.
Fast Company, May 2000; bottom left-hand corner, page 82.
They're filming an episode of "Now and Again" outside my office today. Ugh.
Abusing the Internet by sending our millions of pieces of spam and unsolicited email ought to be a federal law.
Run! Run for your lives. Or just cancel cable and get a satellite dish. Or better yet, stop watching TV altogether. [Note: CamWorld is no longer 100% Elian Gonzales free. The media just sucked me in. Aaargh!]
Some reporters shouldn't be allowed to write technology pieces. This article about Netscape 6 PR1 is so full of FUD that you'd think he was a Microsoft crony. Hey, here's an idea, let's dumb it down so that even our idiot readers can follow the story. Jeez, it's worse than that awful USA Today crap people read on the subway. If you don't believe me, read the first and last lines of the article referenced. And then re-read the article's title. Ack, how freaking trite.
AllExperts still hasn't fixed their programming mistake. I guess they don't care about the privacy of their end users.
Anyone who has been around on the web for a while has probably heard of AllExperts.com, a site which attempts to aggregate expert knowledge about all kinds of stuff. While the idea is a good one, the site itself suffers from some serious security problems. For instance, you can view anyone's account info (including usernames and passwords) by simply going to this URL [http://www.allexperts.com/login.asp?chosen=0000] and changing the number at the end to any arbitrary number. It would be very easy to write a script that hits this site, grabbing email addresses, account names, passwords, and then sporadically trying those combinations at e-commerce sites and free email sites. I know for a fact that AllExperts.com knows about this problem, but has yet done nothing about it.
The problem here is simply poor security planning by the site developer, but it is clearly amplified by the poor architecture of Microsoft's ASP technology [yes, I'm biased]. They market ASP as a secure e-commerce solution, yet make it very easy for developers to make mistakes like the one above. From my perspective it's clear that the blame lies with both parties, the developer and the technology.
BTW, I claim no responsibility for these exploits and/or hacks. I am by no means an ASP expert nor an expert on security. I am simply passing along this information to my audience in the hopes that site developers will pay attention to issues such as these when developing secure web sites that store personal data.
Another security hole has been found in Netscape that allows access to files on your hard drive. This bug "grants a webmaster the ability to read properties of any HTML files on a user's hard drive." The demo is written using Windows file paths, so it's unknown [as of yet] if this exploit affects Mac or Linux users.
Dave's been pointing to my CMS chart again, so I'm getting all kinds of new submissions for CMS packages I've never heard of. [I'll be updating this chart later tonight.] He also wants me to do a similar chart for Weblog software. OK, I'll get to it soon. Like, this weekend.
Salon.com: The Free Software Project
A parody [rebuttal] ad to Microsoft's WinCE ad campaign.
Pretty girls who like calculus! Geez, where were these girls when I was in high school?
Byte: Web UI On The Cusp Of Change
CHI-WEB: web browser - web page - web application
Another huge security hole in Microsoft's IIS web server software (which uses ASP) has been found. To see if your IIS server using ASP-backed pages is vulnerable, visit this site and try to see your ASP source code. This security hole allows anyone with a web browser to view the ASP source code of any web site using IIS and ASP together. This includes ASP-backed e-commerce pages as well as ASP-pages that store private data.
A couple of readers have written in saying that this vulnerability was first reported back in January. Still, it's interesting to look behind the scenes of some major sites who haven't patched their server software. Gap.com and JCPenney.com are two I'm aware of.
Onclave, a startup that promises to "connect people to people to information" has a very informative collaborative weblog on their site. I'll be back. [Great job, Elan.]
CamWorld is 100% Elián Gonzales free. Go read Chuck Taggart's comments. I'm of the same opinion.
I've been re-reading Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (and follow-up essays), and have zeroed in on the concept of the hacker community being a gift culture. It's interesting to see the open source movement being driven by what Raymond calls "egoboo" [ego boosting] and reputation-building project management. And I can't help but think about how this concept might change the way our society functions. Considering that our lives are increasingly dominated by electronic devices and software, the worlds and cultures of science fiction authors like Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson aren't really that many years away. As our society adapts to technological change, we're starting to see whole new attempts to create "virtual countries" that purposely shun our existing societal structure by embracing the Internet and using it as its own foundation. Over the past few years, I've seen a couple different "online countries" pop up. One such site [country] is Waveland.
Allura Ellington has an intriguing site with some good writing. The most interesting thing for me during my visit was the botton navigation UI. She has set it up to randomly generate a different set of navigation links every time you use her reload button or every time you visit. It's a bit unconventional but it works surprisingly well. Sometimes you just have to break the rules.
Derek Sisson: Social Entrepreneurs and the Quality Web Experience
Nothing frustrates me more than a web site that fails to work when you really want it to. Last night I finally called SprintPCS to get my cell phone number changed to New York Metro (instead of Detroit Metro), After about two hours of continually being on hold and then disconnected, I got through to a customer service representative. Because I'm also getting a new phone and giving my brother my old one, I needed to upgrade my service plan and order a new phone. You'd think that I would be be able to do all of these things either through a single web site or using a single customer service agent. Nope. While I was waiting for the CSR's computers to retrieve my account data from any one of them remote databases, I continually received "Server Too Busy" errors from their overloaded [and crappy] ASP-backed e-commerce web site. Ugh.
The bottom line is that in order to get the 6 month trial of web services through my cell phone, I have to order online. This is fine except for these problems:
Understand that I'm not upset at Sprint or their cell phone service. What I'm pissed about is spending almost three hours on the phone and then being told that I needed to order through their web site, and then not even being able to do that becuase their web site failed to work properly.
Freshmeat: The Client as the Server
Here's the story of a high school biology teacher who claims to have started the Rocket Car urban legend. Fascinating. [via my old friend Matt.]
Those wacky kids at 37Signals have done an excellent parody of sound-alike dot-com companies. The sad thing about Enormicom.com is that I could drop the last slide off this site, shop it around New York City, and have VCs lining up at the door in droves. I remember this great article at Salon about company naming. It somehow puts it all in perspective.
Argo/UML is an open source project attempting to provide an object oriented tool for software designers that provides cognitive support. It sounds pretty cool.
Monday. Is it really Monday?
For those readers who are coming here for my Mozilla links, I'm now posting them to a separate weblog called Understanding Mozilla.
Privacy Forum: Web Security, Privacy, and the Big Lie
Another reason not to visit porn sites.
When my brother Damien was a teacher he complained constantly about the lack of online and computer knowledge found in the majority of the schools he taught at and visited. He's since told me that in addition to the low pay, this was one of the primary reasons he left the teaching profession. Computer-savvy teachers are leaving the teaching profession in droves after discovering they can make lots more money using the same skills in other industries. We used to talk a lot about what our country's teachers needed when it came to educating them about computers and the Internet. I had the idea of creating a company that served this need, where Damien would travel the country giving lectures and training courses to any school who needed them. It's not unlikely that such a business would be able to get a large grant from the government. It's refreshing to see papers like the Washington Post address this problem and shed some light on it.
Models, Processes, and Techniques for Information Design. Especially read the papers and articles in the Techniques section. [Excellent resource]
Writer and journalist Mark Fraunefelder is now keeping a weblog at Boingboing.net. [Cool, I've always liked his Wired articles.]
I wish Deepleap would solve their Mac certificate problem. I'm ready to take my spare G3 and make it a Linux box just so I can install Netscape and use their web app. [Psssst: I was going to install Linux on my spare Mac anyway...]
Someone has been submitting barbelith.com through my submission form every couple of weeks for the past few months. And every time I visited, the site just didn't grab me. I don't know if the design has changed or his writing style has changed since I last visited, but it's turning into a pretty good site full of witty commentary and great links. And the design is decent, too.
Cockfighting.
So, I've been thinking a lot about brands lately. I recall a discussion on a mailing list some months back about the origin of brands. Some basic net research turns up this wonderful rules of livestock branding in Canada. And the identification and marking of reptiles. Think about this the next time you see someone walking down the street in a Tommy Hilfiger jacket or a Nike t-shirt. Are we voluntarily branding ourselves?
One of our designers has Ryan McGinness' book called "flatnessisgod" lying around the office and I'm hooked. This guy is a certified design genius wacko. If you don't believe me, read this interview Microsoft's engineers left a backdoor in the Front Page server software that allows unauthorized access to supposedly "secure" servers. Whoops! Here's how you can see the password yourself (from B. K. DeLong): Use Google.com or Altavista and locate the file "dvwssr.dll" Save a copy to your desktop or folder OTHER than MS system Open in notepad or any other text editor Wrap the text Scroll down past the first 12-line block of binary Look for "Netscape engineers are weenies!" spelled backwards
Microsoft's engineers left a backdoor in the Front Page server software that allows unauthorized access to supposedly "secure" servers. Whoops! Here's how you can see the password yourself (from B. K. DeLong):
It's official. Linux is the fastest-growing OS.
Deepleap: Your robotic pal who's fun to be with! [?] I've been alpha testing this web app for a couple weeks but have been too busy to play with it much. Maybe now that it's in beta I'll try to start using it more. And the staff icons are really cool. They really do look like that.
Safe sex. Get it? Safe sex. [Found at kottke.org]
My brother hates the Wassup commercial, but I think it's hilarious when they lip-sync it other stuff.
I know I shouldn't really link to this, but it's just so damn funny. [Found at MetaFilter]
For some people, a birthday is an excuse to go out with friends and get drunk. For me, it just means another day of work. For some reason I just don't get excited about my birthday, and come to think of it, it was that way when I was a kid, too.
Happy Birthday, Rebecca. And Damien.
Do U.N. ambassadors have too much time on their hands?
Glenn Davis, one of the WaSP's spokespersons has published a reasonable article explaining why web standards are so important and why Microsoft is not playing by these rules.
Tim O'Reilly's keynote speech from last week's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. He outlines why open source software is so important and why it will the future of all software development.
Journal of Mundane Behavior.
American Prospect: Should Public Policy Support Open-Source Software?
Forbes ASAP: 5 Habits of Highly Effective Revolution
Computer Programming For Everybody. [This is an excellent essay]
SWIG is a software development tool "most commonly used to create high-level interpreted programming environments, systems integration, and as a tool for building user interfaces." I wonder if it's anything like XUL.
Mark A. Hershberger writes:
The user interfaces that SWIG mentions are programming user interfaces, not GUIs. SWIG allows you to specify the programmatic interface once and then use a compiled C or C++ library with multiple scripting languages. It takes care of the different things that you need to do to interface with Python, Perl, Tcl, etc.
A letter from a dog named Brutus to a loving friend. My old friend Matt has a great sense of humor. Hi Matt!
Mark over at Good Experience has done up a diagram poking fun at some of the sound-alike Internet services firms.
Andy Ihnatko laments on the recent Bill-Gates-turned-Mister-Rogers sweater TV commercial.
Request: My digital camera is acting up and I am unable to retrieve the pictures off the smart card. Does anyone want to loan me their Olympus D-320-L (or similar model) for 10 minutes so that I can get the pictures off the card before I send it back into Olympus for repair [again]. Email me.
WaSP: Microsoft gets tarred and feathered. Go WaSP, go.
MozillaZine: Mozilla is a not a browser. Well said, though I think Taylor's right about the problem of getting the general public to perceive Mozilla as more than a web browser.
I responded to this article on Userland's discussion boards.
Scott McCloud has a new book called Reinventing Comics coming out in August. It's the sequel to the amazingly successful book, Understanding Comics.
Design By Numbers is both a book and a programming language that attempts to teach computational design for graphic artists and designers. It's like learning how to program in a visual way.
O'Reilly Developer Network reviews Netscape 6 PR1.
The ineedawife.com guy found a woman. I've actually met this guy. He came in for a job interview a year or two back when I was working at Borders.com. And I thought my web experiences were seen as weird.
LogoHell. Swoosh!
Internet Explorer and Standards. This is basically Microsoft telling developers that it can do whatever it wants. They seem to be saying "screw the standards."
Despite the excellent information on user interface design that Joel Spolsky is publishing on the web, this line really pisses me off.
"If they go to the Font toolbar and replace the word "Times New Roman" with the words "Insert Picture", you've probably found a Linux Weenie who doesn't know about fonts and thinks that that box is a command line interface. Ignore him and move on."
You know, I was just joking around the other day when I told someone it wouldn't be long before we started receiving cell phone spam.
Great, now I can furnish my new apartment.
There's been a lot of talk about the decision the Mozilla team made to abandon native widgets (scroll bars, buttons, progress meters, dialog boxes, etc.) in Mozilla and Netscape 6. Many people are saying that this will work against Netscape. Despite my Mozilla involvement and the excitement I have for it, I think that they're correct. The solution is for Mozilla (and Netscape) to either put native OS widgets back in or ship XBL sets with Mozilla that closely [or exactly] emulate the look, feel, and behaviors of the native OS widgets. This is not that difficult to do, but the development time might be tricky. I'm more worried about closely emulating the behaviors than anything else. Regardless, Mozilla is an amazing piece of software that is extremely extensible. I'm writing some articles on Mozilla that will be published shortly that explain just exactly what Mozilla can do and why it's so powerful. Not surprisingly, most of the complaints come from the Mac users, and I don't blame them one bit, as I'm also a big Mac UI fan. Porting Mozilla to the Mac natively would have been very difficult and expensive, and is one of the reasons the Mozilla team decided to use their own set of native widgets that look and behave the same across all platforms.
From my perspective, it shouldn't matter whether Netscape 6 is a success in the consumer browser market or not. It's more about Mozilla as an application platform, and the benefits it gives developers in their fight against Microsoft-technology-based web application development. Mozilla is completely standards-compliant and works exactly the same on more OS platforms right out of the box than any other web-enabled software in the world. Microsoft can put that in their IE 5.5 pipe and smoke it.
InformationWeek on Netscape 6.
Apple: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines and MacOS 8 Human Interface Guidleines. [Valuable resource!]
BetaNews: Interview With the Mozilla Team
"Writing the project "in itself" is a cool idea, but not conducive to rapid development. If fast development time was the goal we should have scrapped the XUL idea and used a stable toolkit to build native browsers. That was what we did with Communicator, and the result was that Unix and Mac development falls behind because we can't justify spending 2/3rds of the front-end programming budget on platforms that make up < 1/5 of our customer base."
RichInStyle.com is a great resource for CSS information.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to publish online. This rant about Mozilla is pretty clueless. When are people going to realize that Preview Release 1 does not mean beta! Mozilla and Netscape 6 a long way from beta folks.
Lots of great UI and design links at this new weblog called antenna. [Bookmark it.]
The Mozilla Developer Meeting from last week has a great write-up in Slashdot this morning with quotes from yours truly.
Evolt: A brief history of Mozilla.
Suck.com on skins.
So, after 4 years of reading DaveNet and Scripting News, I finally met Dave Winer last week. Unfortunately, my conversation with him at Netscape was cut short by the Slashdot reporter who wrote the article referenced above. I did hitch a ride with Dave to La Fiesta and have a great picture of him driving his SUV. If I can get my digital camera to export its pictures [argh!], I'll post it.
Amazon.com circa 2001. Heh! [via Dack.com]
I tried very hard to make it to Ev and Jake's Superspring 2000 Party last weekend but too many things happened too fast for me to make it there in time. For what it's worth, my birthday is in 3 days. The big two-seven. No party has been planned.
I wish my writing was as good as Lance Arthur's, and some day it might be. One of the things I learned at SXSW back in March was something Lance told another conference attendee when he was asked how he became such a great writer. He answered [paraphrasing] that he used to never write but in his quest to become a writer he decided to write something every day, no matter how bad or stupid it may be. After a while, his writing became clearer and writing every day became easier. In some ways, this is exactly what some weblogs are like that have gained a large audience. It was sort of an epiphany to me to realize that good writers become good writers simply by practicing. And now that I think about it, that's how all people become good at whatever they're good at. Sports athletes, musicians, writers; it all boils down to practice. The same can be said for software programming. The more you do it, the better you get. Graphic design, too.
"Bad Microsoft, bad!"
Great Netscape 6 banner ad, found by Steven Champeon. [via Edd Dumbill]
Matt Haughey always manages to put a new perspective on things. [Found at Scripting News]
My old friend Andy Winter sent me this funny picture.
From the you-can-buy-anything-on-the-Internet department comes the Penis Pillow.
Shift's Digital Education Guide featuring the top 10 schools for new media.
We released my first Mozilla skin today, called Sullivan. It looks pretty slick. It works best with the M14 release of Mozilla. The nightly builds of M15 are breaking all sorts of things. Hopefully, all will be straigtened out soon.
Our new Alphanumerica site is now live as well, complete with its own weblog.
Mother Jones: Is the Internet a Ponzi Scheme?
How to Wash Dishes.
I was too tired to go see Richard Stallman (pictured here) speak last night, but I'm told he's a very curious speaker. This picture was found at Danny O'Brien's "Some Past and Future Cliches Regarding Linux."
Resources for the study of comics.
An interview with Scott McCloud from 1994.
Whoo-hoo! I'm not the only Cameron Barrett in the world anymore. I have to credit my parents for giving me such a unique name. Although I'm certain I'm still the only Cameron Barrett in the world who is a twin.
Welcome to April, my favorite month. It's a beautiful day in New York City.
O'Reilly: Babel Fish. [Funny.]
My co-worker introduced me to Stereolab. This is damn good pop music.
I know I've been working too hard when I start seeing things outside my office window. For instance, I just thought I saw someone walk by the window. I work on the 10th floor of a NYC office building -- I think it's time to go home.
