Flash Usability. That's an oxymoron, right? Seriously though, I'm glad to see that Macromedia is starting to take this issue seriously. The biggest problem with Flash is that it's a presentation-based format, which doesn't work very well for information-based and data-based web sites. And until people start seeing Flash as a nothing but a shell or vehicle for that data, then we'll continue to see the crap that's made Flash such a dirty word in many usability circles. The web is, and always will be, a data-based (i.e. text-based) medium. To ignore this and to base an entire site around the pretty bells and whistles that Flash offers is a gross and negligent mistake being made by many web designers around the world.
Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux
eBay: The Ultimate Video Game Collection
I don't know whether to laugh at or be be disturbed by: GeekBoyServices.com
Long-time readers know that I absolutey detest the phone companies, especially the completely crappy ones like Bell Atlantic (ahem, Verizon) who use anti-competitive practices to squash their competition. Consider this:
Inside Red Hat: An interview with the CEO
Interwoven open sources TclPro.
ZDNet: Riding on the Open Source Wagon. It's getting crowded...
Upside: Those nagging open source details
Forbes: Battle Over the Look and Feel of Linux
Unix still the right choice for enterprise web applications.
Damien Cave over at Salon writes about how chain stores like Old Navy and IKEA are seducing the American buying public into being "identical zombies". This isn't really a new trend. For decades, it's been a very American thing for teenagers to conform to society and wear the "right" clothes, the right brand of shoes, and copy the fashion trends that made them "cool". What chains like Old Navy, IKEA, and the Gap have done is recognized that these patterns exist in American consumerism and have capitalized on them.
leJOS: Java based OS for Lego RCX
George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?
Ha! I was right! Back when I was working for Borders.com, I kept a close eye on the few domains that were being held hostage by cybersquatters, the most important one being waldenbooks.com. At the time the waldenbooks.com domain was shown to be registered by one Greg Ricks of Louisiana. A small bit of online research showed Greg Ricks to be a real person. I approached my boss at the time and suggested that Borders register the gregricks.com domain name, with the idea that two can play that game. In the year and a half since Borders registered the gregricks.com domain, I've kept track of the ownership to see if my theory would hold -- that Mr. Greg Ricks would finally tire of being a squatter and offer up a trade. During one of my periodical domain name checks of the whois database, I noticed that the two domains swapped hands. And also that Mr. Greg Ricks snapped up gregricks.net and gregricks.org. Ha!
So, the above theory may or may not work with individual cybersquatters who are possibly only out to make a quick buck, but what can you do about companies like Mailbank and BuyDomains who register large amounts of domains and then try to either sell them to the highest bidder or try to sell services around them? You may have to take a slightly different tack, like registering a domain name that's a typo of that company. I own a couple domains that I'm using to test this theory. We'll see if I'm right. In the meantime, I get to read lots of mis-directed email for said companies. People make lots of typos! Heh!
Chris Schlaeger: Why we have created the KDE League
For those who enjoyed the Hats of Meat link the other day, you might also enjoy Meat Helmet.
Since most of my immediate family is traveling to Florida for the four-day weekend, I won't be going back to Michigan. Instead, I'll be going over to a co-worker's to feast on some classic Cajun cooking and a Turducken.
USDOJ: Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System
Rant of the Day: Are You Billable?
Oh my. This is truly interesting.
Build your mascot out of LEGO.
Joel on Software: Netscape Goes Bonkers. Wait for Mozilla. [Discuss]
MS-HTML: a Nefarious and Despicable Plot
I like Buy.com, but disagree completely with this article (ahem, press release). Their site does not have "quick-loading pages" nor is their "buying process speedy." Their success is proving to be their downfall, since their technology does not seem to scale well. Logging into an existing account during peak business hours is next to impossible due to overloaded servers. Buy.com is successful for one reason only: low prices and free shipping. To think otherwise is to be fooling yourself.
If you live in the Bay Area, you can now find out how many parolees live in your Zip Code.
OSOpinion: Choosing Open Source: What Does It Mean?
LinuxNews: Barriers to Open Source Use in Medicine Persist
Bill Seitz has posted an article that warns dot-com employees of possible tax problems.
Web Scripting Tools - Compare and Contrast
AOLTV is "seriously flawed."
Register: Microsoft's big picture: Whistler, Blackcomb and .NET
Byte: A BeOS View Of Apple's New OS X
Selling in the Bazaar: How Open Source Manages Code
ZDNet: The joys and perils of open-source life
Jon Udell: Component Software: The Next Generation
Note: I will be attending the CNet Builder conference next month in New Orleans. If you're going to be there, drop me a quick note or hunt me down and introduce yourself. I'm always interested in meeting more of my readers in person.
Hats. Of. Meat. Yes, really.
Wow, Buy.com is getting pounded today. I placed an order this morning that got submitted twice because their servers couldn't handle the load. The massive traffic they're getting today is probably due to their free-shipping promotion that's happening all this week. I've been trying to get into their site all day to make sure I don't get double-billed, but the pages keep hanging. Come to think of it, this is strangely familiar to what happened to BarnesandNoble.com a year or so back. I doubt it's only coincidence that both sites are using an ASP/IIS combination. Scaling people, your ecommerce technology has to scale if you're going to be successful in this industry.
How can people be this incredibly stupid? Wow. I mean, wouldn't it have much cheaper to just rent a U-Haul? I imagine the repair costs on this car are much higher than the cost of a one-way U-Haul.
Cultural Differences in E-Commerce: A Comparison Between the U.S. and Japan
Last night's Saturday Night Live with host Tom Greene had some of the funniest skits I've seen in a long time. And to think I almost had tickets...
PHPBuilder: Open Source Databases: As The Tables Turn.
SCREEM is an integrated web development package for GNOME on Linux.
Macintouch has a bunch of reader reports about Netscape 6. I told Damien the other day to never expect Netscape 6 or Mozilla to run like a native Mac app on Mac OS 9.x. and that people using Mac OS 9.x should pass on Netscape 6 until Mac OS X becomes a standard. I'm disappointed at the level of cluelessness these Macintouch readers are displaying. There's a guy who complains that Netscape 6 runs slowly on his three year-old PowerComputing clone. Well, duh! And then there's the guy who thinks that Netscape 6 is a giant Java applet because there are files using the extensions .js and .jar. Oh my, I can only imagine how these people are going to flounder when they start digging around in Mac OS X. Sigh... My conclusion is that [this version of] Netscape 6 should not be used by novice users.
Derek Sisson asks:
I'm trying to research how music clips are made; that is, when you hear a snippet of a song, how do the powers that be decide what part of the song to excerpt, and how long to make that excerpt. You go to Borders or Amazon, and you can hear parts of tracks -- why those few seconds of that song and not some other segment? I figure that this must have been mastered during the radio days, but now the Web proliferates with sites bearing such clips. Respond to: music@philosophe.com
Netscape: Transitioning from Proprietary DOMs and Markup to W3C Standards: Enhancing Pages That Use LAYER, document.layers[], and document.all to Support Standards
Advogato: Extreme Programming and Open Source Software and Mythical Man Month vs. Open Source Software
MSN gets blacklisted due to spammers abusing their insecure mail servers. Ha. About 50% of the spam I've been receiving lately has been coming through UU.net servers.
Microsoft gets into the collaborative workspace market with a technology called Microsoft SharePoint. If it's like every other piece of Microsoft monkey-see-monkey-copy software, it will likely incorporate all the things that make the competition so innovative but will use a proprietary framework, effectively locking their customers into yet another Microsoft hegemony.
They've got a long way to go yet, but Opera for the Mac has gone alpha. Whoo!
So, there's this domain that I want to register that expired a few days ago, yet the registrar's records show it to still be registered to the registrant, which prevents me from processing my own registration for the domain. I'm told that perhaps there is a grace period that the registrar has in place that allows the current domain owner to renew, despite the expiration date having already been passed. If this is so, how long is this grace period, and when can I expect the registrar to release the domain back into the public domain so that I can register it myself?
Waferbaby: Jon Katz on online communities
WebReference: Weaving the Web of News
Scott Andrew wants developers to stop coding for 4.x browsers and to embrace the possibilities around developing web applications for the 5.x and 6.x browsers. This is exactly what the Mozilla community has been trying to beat through the heads of people for months when they say that Mozilla is more than just a browser.
On that note, here's a list of known bugs in Netscape 6, so that web application developers can code around them. Also, RichInStyle.com has a Mozilla 5 and Netscape 6 bug guide.
At my job, we're developing a set of browser-based tools that uses HTML 3.2 as the foundation for page display. The decision to use the older HTML standard was due primarily to the significant number of expected users we're going to have who are in countries and locales that use older browser technologies, older computers, and slower connections to the Internet. For us to ignore this portion of our audience and develop only for 5.x and 6.x browsers would mean that we're shutting out a large portion of the audience we're trying to attract (open source software developers). Also note that the DOM/scripting capabilities that the 5.x/6.x browsers offer are almost useless for the kinds of tools we're building, since we aren't dealing much with DHTML. Our applications reside in the traditional "page" part of the browser, and rarely (if ever) need to access the DOM or require the use of a technology that makes the 5.x/6.x browsers so exciting.
What's even more interesting, is that while we're firmly entrenched in building "page-based" web applications, we also are moving into building applications that do take advantage of the scripting and DOM capabilities of Mozilla. Before my employer was acquired last summer, we were contracted by Netscape to develop the Theme Builder tool for Netscape 6 using nothing but the existing technologies that shipped with Netscape 6 (a.k.a Mozilla). This is one of the first examples of an entire application being written on top of the Mozilla codebase that was not a web browser or a browser companion tool.
Salon: Open-sourcing the Apple. An excellent article about Apple's new Mac OS X and how it may prove to be the competitor to Microsoft that everyone has been waiting for.
I just realized that I'm not reading Metafilter as much anymore. I remember when Matt came up with the idea, built the site, and then invited everyone to help build it into a cool community site. Lately, it seems like I'm not really reading Metafilter as much as I'm scanning it every couple of days. No longer am I reading the commentary unless it's about something I care about. And I realized that this is because the noise has surpassed the signal. There is now far more noise and crap being posted in the comments than there is thoughtful commentary and observations, which is what attracted me to Metafilter in the first place. And I think, this is exactly what happened to Slashdot as well.
Human Interface Subtleties.
With all the fawning over Groove lately, it's interesting to read this discussion about Groove not being open source.
Silly Stuff: How Much is Inside?
Open source software is NOT free. Duh.
Pope, Protestants protest Open Source bible.
W3C: Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Views and Formatting Specification
LinkGrinder: Media Search
What is Droplifting?
MSDN: The Art of UI Prototyping
Netscape 6 is out. Netscape also has some skins you can install that came from their recent themes contest. I would have entered this contest but was ineligible due to some contract work we're doing for Netscape. Note that the Orbit skin looks an awful lot like an updated version of my Sullivan skin, whch is part of the Aphrodite package. Oh well...
Interesting article about Tcl, a scripting language used in some robust content management systems.
O'ReillyNet Mozilla DevCenter: Localising the Lizard
If it comes down to a revote in Palm Beach county, or for all of Florida itself, there absolutely must be a complete ban on all campaigning by all parties. In fact, I feel that a ban should be put on all media campaigning as well: no TV ads, no print ads, no radio, nothing. This is the fate of our nation we're dealing with. We can't allow manipulative campaigning sway the vote. Perhaps the revote, if it happens, should only allow those who voted the first time to vote again.
I doubt the writers at Saturday Night Live read CamWorld, but it was cool to see "The Presidential Couple" (a parody of The Odd Couple) skit last night where Gore and Bush are both President. Funny.
We still don't have a President-elect here in the United States. This is ridiculous. I've been following the Florida ballot debate pretty closely and am in agreement that some ballots were very poorly designed. The punch-card style ballots that violated Florida state law because it was possible to vote for more than one candidate are a crime. This entire vote should be discarded completely or that county should be forced to do a re-vote. Another solution would be to take the county vote averages and apply them to the disputed counties, and then declare a winner based on those numbers.
Solutions to the ballot design problems are popping up all over usability mailing lists I'm subscribed to. Some people are declaring that the design of all ballots nationwide should be the same. Others are saying that ballots should use fill-in-the-bubble style of design, since that's what's been used for tests in public schools for the last two decades, and the majority of people would be familiar with it.
Perhaps the biggest issue with voting in America is not the design of the ballots or the stupid media calling the outcome of States before all the votes were counted. In my mind, the biggest problem is that not enough people vote. Why is this? Are people too busy? Do they just not care? Or perhaps, they are intimidated by the act of voting: going to the polling location, waiting in line, fearing that they're going to make a mistake and look foolish. Maybe this is why so many people would like to see electronic voting put in place. People could vote from their homes, where they are more comfortable about making such decisions. Take the time to study the candidates, view their stances on issues, and make an informed decision. Too many times, I've watched people come out of the voting booth scratching their heads, wondering if they made the right choice, or even used the machine correctly.
This article made me think of a novel idea. What if Bush and Gore were somehow both allowed to be co-Presidents.
Americans: Don't forget to vote today. Your vote does count. Voter apathy is one of the reasons we're in the mess we're in now.
Another reason not to vote for Bush today. His supporters are now spamming people. To be fair, it's also reported that Democratic campaigners are allegedly distributing packs of cigarettes to homeless people after they leave the voting booths.
So, Microsoft is starting to enforce their software licensing. I wonder what would happen if they really cracked down?
Interesting. Last night, when I was searching for information about the Starrett-Lehigh building, I used Google, but misspelled the name of the building. Yet, Google still found an amazing amount of information. Today, I spelled it correctly, and found much, much more:
Die, spammers, die! [via onepointzero.com]
Stating the Obvious: Hacking the City
Sorry about the lack of updates recently. My employer just moved into new officespace over the weekend, so I've been pretty busy getting things set up. Expect updates to resume to normal in the next day or two. The interesting thing about our new space in the historic landmark Starret-Lehigh building is the companies and people in it:
There's also been talk of putting a new baseball stadium over the train depot, which is two blocks from the building.
We're also told that there is a porno studio somewhere in the building. Interesting! It's a large building, 20 stories, 2 million square feet.
This is great: O'Reilly Ate My Balls
So, I'm watching the local news, which is especially bad. They just did a stupid little bit about an Internet scare letter regarding Nutrasweet that's been making the rounds. At the end of the bit, the reporter said "If you get any junk mail in your inbox, don't delete it. Send it to me" and proceeded to give an email address. Um, Okkkkaaaay...do they really want all my spam?
D-Dubya-I: Not only is he an ignorant moron, he's an ignorant moron who drove while drunk. I'm not surprised. Not one bit.
This is interesting. Product is exposed as sham-ware. Product's seller takes security expert who exposed it as sham-ware to court, threatens his family, moves to a new state, renames the software product, and goes back into business selling the same crappy sham-ware.
Despite my mild dislike for Michael Moore, he does ask the questions that need to be answered by George W. Bush.
Phil Greenspun: What can we learn from Jakob Nielsen?
Salon: To Ralph or Not to Ralph:
"Should Governor Bush be elected President, and the Republicans hold the Congress, conservative Republicans will have virtually captured firm control of all three branches of the Federal Government for the first time since 1930."
Spin, spin, spin. I'm really beginning to hate politics. It disgusts me that it's not about the issues anymore, but it is about appearance and media. Sure, Dubya is a likeable guy, but that doesn't mean he's going to be the best person to run our country for the next four years.
Japanese NTT DoCoMo is buying up huge chunks of AT&T. Interesting.
IBM open sources AFS, an enterprise file system.
elearningpost: Deconstructing Groove
I'll ask it again: Do we really want this ignorant moron as our President for the next four years? Amazing. Please understand that my use of the words "ignorant moron" is in a very literal way. Go ahead, look them up in the dictionary.
LinuxProgramming: Managing Projects the Open Source Way
An Introduction To Open Source Software Development
Excellent Jon Udell article about Groove.
Technology Source: Globalizing the Knowledge Economy
ZDNet's eWeek compares four different scripting languages by building an identical ecommerce site using each one. Compared are Cold Fusion, ASP, Apache's Tomcat (JSP), and PHP.
