A Whole Lotta Nothing

For the past six months

For the past six months or so, whenever a client has noticed a CSS bug in a site in Netscape 4 browsers, I often mention before I start coding workarounds that the browser "is almost five years old" because I vaguely remember playing with the betas in early 1997. I was curious to when it was officially released, so I went ahead and ponied up some dough at Google to find out

It turns out that the official release date is rapidly approaching, as Netscape 4.0 will turn 5 years old on June 11, 2002.

I'm just throwing an idea out here, but it's probably something worth publicizing on your sites. Just this week I've spent a couple hours coding some redundant CSS to a site that passes the w3c validator, but Netscape 4 browsers refuse to inherit parent styles at various points for no reason.

Now, maybe it hasn't sunken in yet, but It's been FIVE YEARS since the browser was released and it's still a pain the ass to work with today. I know there have been user upgrade drives at glassdog and the webstandards project, but maybe it's time to do this again? I know the Mozilla party is the next day, I should probably talk to the organizers about perhaps burning an effigy of the 4.0 browser to celebrate the 1.0 release of Mozilla.

I'm becoming increasingly aware that

I'm becoming increasingly aware that the advertising market for the internet is hitting rock bottom. The daily links from MetaFilter often point to news sites, and in the past few weeks the tide has definitely shifted from a minority of newspaper sites having obnoxious pop-up or pop-under ads to a majority. I'm actually surprised now when I can find a news site that doesn't feature annoying advertising. Banner blindness means giant flash ads or forced advertising breaks in the middle of stories, as the only advertising that anyone notices seems to be the annoying types of ads. The ads themselves have also shifted in content. Gone are the harmless computer company pitches or even the goofy sexist x10 camera ads, as the rock-bottom of the internet advertising world (aside from porn ads of course) is making frequent appearances in my browser: online casino ads. They're not only legally questionable, they're gaudy, ugly, and remind me of the mob.

In business, if you need money and don't have it, and you can't secure a loan from the bank, you call the mob for an emergency loan you'll soon regret. Apparently the internet advertising business works the same. When all else fails, advertise for online casinos.

Amusing mp3 of the day:

Amusing mp3 of the day: Tivo sounds as music [from zert.net/mike]

Some distressing news for fellow

Some distressing news for fellow bay area readers: at a recent protest, Frank Chu got hassled by the police. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the harmless freak that touts a sign in downtown San Francisco 7 days a week.

Watching Do the Right Thing,

Watching Do the Right Thing, it's hard to believe it was just over a decade ago when I first saw it. The MLK quote at the end still seems rather apt today.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destrous community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Best car trunk emblem ever.

Best car trunk emblem ever.

After a few hours of

After a few hours of tweaking (and losing email, if I don't get back to something you sent in the last 24hrs, feel free to resend), I have finally got SpamAssassin up and running to filter my email. From the past couple day's worth of messages, it has caught every spam, and the one false positive it found out of about 200 messages was for something I didn't want to receive anyway.

I first heard about spamassassin from Bill Rini's review, and my experiences with it mirror his. It tags spam with a special header and rewrites the subject, making it easy to filter tagged mail into a spam folder, and the remainder of all your email comes through clean. It is incredibly liberating to be able to read new email free of junk, though it sucks that the spam situation is such that people have to write applications like this.

Over the course of the

Over the course of the past two days, I've helped Lawrence Lessig create a new site for the Eldred vs. Ashcroft Supreme Court case. This case is a major milestone in what will hopefully be a shift away from limitless control of copyright by publishers and back to copyright's intended purpose: to protect artists and creators for reasonable periods of time. The once rich public domain is almost a memory as copyright on new creations is commonly held for periods in excess of 140 years total. Check out the site for the case, and if you believe that copyright has gone too far, please spread the word about this case.

How to lose customers: when

How to lose customers: when faced with customers that have cash-in-hand, force unnecessary delays on them.

A couple months ago, we rented a house and moved in. The previous resident was the owner (my brother-in-law) and had cable and DSL service. The day before move-in, I called PacBell to convert over the phone and DSL service into our names. After a 20 minute call, I was informed a new phone number would be working at the place within 2 hours. DSL, however, would take a minimum of two weeks to be activated. Now, I may be biased because it is my profession, but why can't other vital services at the phone company be turned on and off with the flick of a switch like a phone line? I didn't want to go with PacBell for DSL service, but since they wired up the old place and I still had the equipment hooked to the wall, I figured it'd be faster than asking an outside provider to provision a new DSL line. Not so, and I ended up waiting about 15 days before DSL service was fully functioning.

Thursday I came home to find an ominous message hanging from the front door. AT&T cable had been checking the neighborhood, and noticed we were getting free cable, which they promptly shut off. The next morning I called to inquire how much it'd be to turn it back on, since it was working 12 hours previous. Instead of a flick of a switch, AT&T said it would be a minimum of two weeks to send someone out to physically do something on the side of the house to get the analog cable lines going again. When a possible install date was discussed, I noticed it was after the first games of the world cup, which would be a major problem in our home. They said there was nothing I could do, so I decided to look elsewhere.

When I lived in LA a few years ago, the neighborhood offered cable tv from three different companies. You could pick the best lineup or the best price, and go with them. Not so in the bay area, as AT&T has a lock on the market, charging $38 monthly for analog cable with 60 channels or so, and $48 monthly for digital cable for a hundred or so channels. I recall spending under $30 a month for cable just a few years ago in LA, but I guess that's why monopolies are good for business. My only other option was a satellite system, and since we live in a house, it's not that big of a deal to bolt a small dish onto the roof. After talking to Andre, I decided to look for a Tivo/DSS system like he had, and eventually I found an online retailer offering the entire setup with a new directv subscription for under a hundred bucks. Circuit City used to sell them, but TiVo setup an exclusive deal with BestBuy, who didn't offer the satellite system any longer. Directv is pretty much the only satellite player, as they bought their rival a few years back.

This experience has taught me not only that I'm impatient when it comes to necessary services like internet access and tv, but that monopolies are everywhere, and I've merely traded one cable monopoly for a satellite one. The days of true consumer choice seem to be behind us as merger mania continues.

If I could have any

If I could have any car on earth right now, this would be my first choice.

50 mpg on the highway, a zippy turbo for quickness, and it can even run on soybean oil and old grease. Now that we're living outside of a mass transit-friendly city, I'm mindful of the gas my car guzzles and more importantly, the area of the world it comes from and effects of such consumption. I've been thinking that I'd like to replace my current car with one that gets 50 mpg, but figured with putting that criteria first and foremost, spaciousness and driving pep would suffer. The Golf TDI looks like an amazing piece of engineering that solves all three problems for me (I was actually eyeing the Toyota and Honda hybrids, and the Golf before, but didn't know they made this high-mileage version until today).

It also reminds me how disappointed I was when congress didn't approve the increase in fuel efficiency standards a couple months back. Engineers and designers are used to working within constraints, and good ones excel at finding clever solutions to complex problems. In the absence of constraints, it could be argued that the lack of pressure to innovate means that advancement doesn't happen. Imagine if in five years time, the average mpg of a car in the US was raised to a high number like 35mpg. I know I just came back from the most stimulating conference I've ever attended and I've still got a post-panel buzz going, but I have no doubts that you'd see some incredible innovation in a short period of time if new limits were imposed on designers. "In the future all our problems will be solved with technology" may just be short-sighted optimism, but for things like this, it really applies.

So the big news isn't

So the big news isn't all that big right now, but I hope it becomes something major someday.

The Creative Commons site is now online, mostly in a preview, informational form for now.

I mention it because it's what I've been working on for the past couple months, as a member of a distributed team. I'll have more to say later today, for now it's time for a few hours sleep and a big day tomorrow/today.

I'm spending all week at

I'm spending all week at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, and it's been great so far. When comparing it to my previous experiences at the Web99/2000/2001 conferences, and the SXSW conferences, this one is quite a bit different. While the South by Southwest conference frequently looks at the past and dips its toe in the future, web conferences like the Web99/00/01 series were firmly planted in the here and now ("Here's what we do about web browsers today, and how we build web servers and services for today's needs.").

The Emerging Tech conference is a breath of fresh air because for the most part the speakers are all looking fairly far off into the future. I probably heard the word "terabyte" spoken more times today than I have in my entire life. Storage and processing power is getting very cheap these days, and in the far off future, archiving every email you've ever received, every web page you've ever looked at, and every application you've ever used will be trivial. So will instantly searching any word in any of that content, given the power of desktop computers. Applications and operating systems that create connections between data and learn from your behavior will also be the norm.

Even though the current funding climate is still pretty bad, there is a good sense of optimism among those gathered. There are still many interesting computer science problems worth attacking and things will get better tomorrow, as we grow closer to solving them. You can sense and feel the optimism that the future will be better, and brighter. The bulk of presentations I saw today were about solving problems years down the road, for situations that haven't quite happened yet. The crowd is an interesting mix between visionaries you read about, and open source hackers that can see beyond the end of their noses. Overall, a great gathering of the minds and a fun conference to be at.

Oh, I'll be announcing some big news on Thursday.

Today was the first time

Today was the first time I ever experienced an earthquake while using an IM client.

That was weird.

"People seem to misinterpret complexity

"People seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication"
-- Niklaus Wirth

A great quote that is rather apt begins a couple articles (1,2) in the New York Times on the new BMW 7 series model that features the iDrive interface. While aiming to simplify the cockpit controls, it sounds like the least intuitive thing imaginable. This gigantic knob, a small stick, and a couple buttons control things like shifting, climate controls, cruise control, the radio, and releasing the parking brake. Some options, buried in multiple submenus require the driver to read from a screen, selecting the proper options all while driving a large, heavy car at speed. If this is the future of the "ultimate driving experience," I can't see anyone wanting to be a part of it.

I suppose it's time I

I suppose it's time I should come clean and mention I'm almost wrapped up working on another book. Jason noticed the dichotomy between the secrecy around book publishing and the usually open and honest writers of weblogs, and I've had the same conflicted experience with this and a few other things.

Books are old media, as are newspapers and magazines. Printing something on dead trees requires long lead times for writing and editing, then printing and physical delivery to eventual sales centers. Dead tree printing is also mired in old thinking, that of contracts and paychecks and witholding stories until specific launch dates. It goes against every fiber of the average weblogger's personality, but when you are are invited to participate in old media, like being invited to a traditional dinner, you usually do what your host asks.

Last year, I was interviewed for a few newspaper articles, a couple of which didn't get printed for months after I spoke with reporters. At the time close friends and the reporter said I should hold off saying anything about it until it went to print. The same thing held true for the magazine interviews I did last year. I actually got to travel and have wonderful adventures while participating in one interview, but I couldn't say a peep until it was on the newsstands. Books seem to be the same way. You've got contracts that allow you or the publisher to back out at any time. I have friends that poured a year of effort into a book that was killed right before it went to print, when it was already listed at Amazon. When I've asked about it, old media people have told me it's not a good idea to announce something before it hits print, and that's an unfortunate and hopefully dying idea.

For this blog book, we wondered if announcing early was beneficial given the problems that could arise. We planned to announce it early on, as early as January of this year, but held off until we had a website ready for it. We're still in the process of getting that up, but it should be up very soon. So yeah, I'll be hawking a new book soon, and I'm actually involved with a third book, which should also be out soon.

Need an expert ColdFusion application

Need an expert ColdFusion application developer and designer in Southern Californa? Do yourself a favor and hire this man: Michael Buffington. He writes great books, has lots of great projects, writes great code, and kicks all kinds of ass

This is the best critique

This is the best critique of the Israel/Palestine conflict I've seen

Meg wrote a great piece

Meg wrote a great piece on Macromedia's recent foray into blogging.

It looks like Macromedia is seemingly picking and choosing what parts of the Cluetrain Manifesto to follow. "Talk in a language customers understand" would be a good way to support blogs for the company, but to not put them on their own corporate server seems like they don't trust their employees to be human in a corporate setting. The bit about not writing about what you ate for breakfast is similar. I don't want to read a fake personal blog filled with press releases. When I found out that John Dowdell was running a blog a month ago or so (saw it on his sig), I thought it was a great idea. I've met John and he's a really eccentric and interesting guy, so I was looking forward to hearing what he really thinks about stuff that isn't Macromedia related, but his blog is pretty heavy on MX-release stuff and not much more, and I was concerned that he didn't disclose his connection prominently on the site.

Meg's points all ring true because Macromedia is in effect saying:
"You guys can take advantage of that blog trend thing so we look good, but don't say anything except the company line, and do it outside of work."

which isn't exactly what blogging is all about (on the bright side, it seems like a few choices were made by accident and they are learning).

As much as OS X

As much as OS X and macs are generally easy to use, there are a few major features that are well-hidden. I'm usually a fan of hidden information spaces when they are supplimental or simply serve as shortcuts, but booting into another OS is a fairly big deal that shouldn't be obscured.

I boot into OS 9 once in a blue moon, so seldom that I forget the secret keystroke to access my OS 9 partition. It seems silly that I have to look it up every time, why can't I choose "restart into the alternate partition" from the main apple drop down?

The Klez virus is easily

The Klez virus is easily the worst email-based virus to date. It does everything the typical Outlook Express-exploiting virus does, it looks like a almost normal email, you run the cloaked attachment then it emails everyone in your address book with more viruses, but it does one extra thing: it randomly changes the From field to anyone in the address book.

This small change means big things. Email is the killer app but suffers from a big problem that is internet-wide in scale. Email is inherently insecure, and I think we've coasted pretty far without addressing that. I can send an email as if I was anyone, and unless you know how to read email headers, you might not know it was faked. The other thing the internet is particularly bad at is reputation management. While sci-fi authors envisioned avatar-infested worlds with all sorts of metadata available on everyone, by and large there isn't a central point to measure anyone's reputation on, so we have to go with things like past history. I've avoided using Outlook or any of its variants for years, and I'm happy to say I've never gotten infected with an email virus to date. It's no small task to successfully avoid contracting any viruses for years while getting upwards of 100 messages a day the whole time.

Imagine my surprise when I started getting bounced messages saying my messages couldn't be sent and realizing I never sent them. Then imagine seeing that the messages all came from an account I haven't sent any email from in 3 years. When several messages starting showing up from email servers saying I sent viruses to a law firm and then actual people asking me if they should open the attachment they received, I knew something was really wrong.

For someone that has never fell for a virus message or been infected, this is the equivalent of trying to buy a car and hearing that the credit check showed you were attempting to pass bad checks in Long Beach under your name, or that your name was on a credit card used to buy jewels in Kuala Lumpur (both things have actually happened to my wife and I). The only problem with this virus is there is no way to verify that someone sent a message, or for someone to look up my track record of being virus free and knowing this message was a fake.

I'm happy to say

I'm happy to say my first book project is finally going to print as we speak, and is available for pre-order at Amazon. I wrote a chapter on all the design decisions I made at MetaFilter, why the interface looks like it does, how it relates to community participation and growth, among other things. I think it came out really well and was a blast to write.

Some photos from the backyard.

Some photos from the backyard. Mena saw these shots in my camera and wondered when the precise moment takes place, the one that makes you start doing things like taking photos of flowers and saying "ahhhh" when you view them. My guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-28 years old, but I have no idea why.

Meg's article at O'Reilly

Meg's article at O'Reilly should be read and re-read by every UI designer and contract consultant working on the web. I've experienced the same sorts of client/interface request problems in 1997 that I do in 2002, and aside from constantly defending my decisions, Meg presents ways to prevent them from ever happening in the first place.

Verisign has still not fixed

Verisign has still not fixed the hoopla.com/smug.com problems it caused.

The current toll is three

The current toll is three days, and I'm starting to think quitting for a lifetime could certainly be possible. For no reason other than I've been meaning to do it for years, and I was out of Pepsi at the right time, since May 1st, I haven't drank a soda. I've been drinking a coke every morning, and at every meal for years. Over the past few months I caught myself downing 4-5 cokes or pepsis (I had no preference, anything brown and sugary would do) a day, especially whenever deadlines approached. I'd often sit wide-eyed awake at 3am, trying to get to sleep after 12 hour days and I knew the day was coming when I had to stop.

The monkey's off my back and it's not so bad really, I've been drinking water or flavored sparkling water in place (both zero calories versus 150 calories/can of soda) and getting to sleep at normal hours again. I haven't had any caffine withdrawls and my productivity hasn't slid downward, both of which surprised me. After at least ten years of having several cokes a day, it's been surprisingly easy to kick the habit (and Calistoga water kicks ass).

Another great, simple scientific paper

Another great, simple scientific paper from the Wichita State University's Software Usability Research Lab, this time on the subject of sitemaps on websites. Guess what? Although you see them on most every corporate website, and most large clients ask me to create one, they only marginally help people find anything online.

Today's the day that internet

Today's the day that internet radio went silent. If you've ever enjoyed an interesting radio stream online, you should check out this site and contact your representitive (via fax online here). May 21st, the final decision will be made, and if the proposed fees are approved, internet radio is essentially dead. Given the climate and the other equally ridiculous laws being proposed to stifle innovation, my hopes aren't very high.