MumbleMumbleCoffee

The anatomy of a windproof lighter, or when your Zippo doesn't light

2008-10-26T21:07:00.011-05:00

Note: For those of you who are wondering, I'm trying to write linkbait. The existing body of Zippo HOWTO is teh suck. Note further that this article applies to all Zippo-type windproof lighters.

In a year and a half of owning a Zippo lighter, I've experienced challenges at getting the damn thing to behave… sometimes the Zippo won’t light, no matter how many times I strike it.

Symptoms and problems

The striker rolls with difficulty, or not at all

This problem is caused by a used up flint which needs to be replaced.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you replace the flint by removing the screw in the bottom of the lighter, shaking out the remnants of the old flint, putting in a new one, and replacing the screw.

If the flint stops working unexpectedly, you can usually get a few more uses out of it by rolling the striker to the inboard side of the lighter by a quarter turn, then using it normally.

The lighter throws sparks, but doesn’t light

When this problem occurs, it might be caused by:

Fuel depletion;
Fuel starvation; or
Wick burnout.

Refuelling the lighter

Lift the pad at the bottom of the lighter and deposit fuel on the batting underneath. Two or three passes from the spigot across the batting is usually enough.

If the lighter hasn't been used for a while, you’ll probably want to leave the lighter upright and open for a minute or two, to give the fuel vapor enough time to work its way up through the batting and wick. It’s also quite likely that a disused lighter placed back into service will need to be refuelled several times at close intervals, early on.

If due to habit, impatience, or inexperience you’re inclined to overfuel the lighter, hold the lighter perfectly upside down by its edge between the tips of two fingers with no obstructions between the chimney and the surface underneath — preferably a sink — and hold the lighter motionless until it no longer drips fuel through the chimney. Failure to exercise care as described will result in fuel spreading onto your clothes or hands, which is something to avoid.

Finally, take care to remember that fuel starvation cannot be fixed by adding more fuel to the lighter.

Resolving fuel starvation

Fuel starvation occurs when there is fuel in the lighter, but fuel vapor doesn’t find its way to the chimney. A Zippo user will see this kind of behavior under two circumstances:

The batting inside the lighter is too loose; or
The wick needs repair or replacement.

The first of these causes is easy to repair: remove the screw and pad, and using a suitably long, skinny, blunt object repeatedly apply pressure to the batting on both sides of the conduit that holds the screw until the batting ceases to give. By the time you’re done, you should have roughly ¼ inch (6–7 millimeter) clearance between the limit of the batting and the bottom of the lighter.

Wick repair and replacement

If your lighter doesn’t work and the portion of the wick in the chimney appears to be charred, you’ll need to cut off the used portion of the wick and pull up a fresh length.

Dealing with the wick of a Zippo lighter is a delicate process. To adjust or replace one, you need initially to:

Remove the screw and pad.
Carefully remove the batting.

The official word from Zippo is that the user should take care to arrange the removed pieces of batting in such a way that it will be possible to put them back into the lighter by the same order in which they were originally arranged, though experience teaches me that doing so is a feat of memory that’s beyond the abilities of most folks.

Once the batting is out of the lighter:

Use a pair of tweezers or wire cutters to pull out the charred length of wick.
Cut that length off with the tools at hand.
Tug the wick back down from the bottom of the lighter so that it ends slightly below the top of the chimney.
Replace the batting, making an effort to wind the wick through its separate pieces.
Tamp down the batting as described above.
Replace the pad and screw.

The wick itself is 2½ inches (63.5 millimeters) long off the shelf and the chimney is only about one-fifth of that height, so even the heaviest of smokers should be able to go at least a year before they need to consider wick replacement.

Tools

A good pocket-size multitool with wire cutters is probably the best thing to use when servicing a windproof lighter, though if you don’t have one of those you can get by with the following:

pair of tweezers
cheap paring knife
flathead (or multi-bit) screwdriver

The tweezers are the best tool for both removing the batting and threading the wick through the chimney of the lighter, and the knife — or better yet, a pair of wire cutters — is to cut the end of the wick.

The parts of the lighter

Exterior case
Latch
Chimney
Striker
Flint
Screw & spring
Screw conduit
Wick
Batting
Pad

The latch rests behind the chimney and keeps the lid closed.

The chimney is what makes the lighter windproof, and is integral to the structure of the lighter itself.

The striker is the reeded wheel that causes the flint to throw sparks.

The screw and spring push the flint all the way up to the striker, when properly installed.

The screw conduit holds the screw and spring, and is threaded at the bottom for the screw. It’s notable for the fact that two pieces of batting fit between it and the outside of the lighter.

The wick is made from copper alloy wires interwoven with cloth thread — thus the need for wire cutters — and is meant to be saturated with fuel vapor.

The batting is made from a heavier grade of fiber than normal cotton balls; it serves as a fuel storage medium that attenuates evaporation.

The pad is made of cloth fiber that takes up fuel poorly in comparison to the batting, holds the batting in place, and consequently prevents fresh fuel from leaking through to the bottom of the exterior case.

Copyrights and treaties and jails and oh, my

2008-05-24T18:02:00.005-05:00

I just bumped into a warning about efforts toward a new copyright convention. After considering the source and its concomitant shrillness, there’s one conclusion that can be drawn from the whole prospect:

Corporate rights holders want to protect their business models at any cost.

That's not a new conclusion, I know.

Meanwhile, I sit here as someone who’s been writing here and there about this and that, practically all of it online, for nearly thirteen years. Maybe I flatter myself, but I reckon I have some insight on the issue: there’s nothing to stop anyone from making tons of money off of ideas that are mine, and I’m okay with that.

The realities of a level playing field

What gets to me is that these big rights holders are still living in the world of fifteen-plus years ago, when works of artistic merit with high production values could be considered scarce.

They’re not anymore.

Understandably, these same rights holders want to lock down the past century’s worth of good stuff and stripmine it for every last red cent of revenue, while the market that would like access to those works is pushing back.

The best and easiest resolution to this conflict is to go ahead and let the market decide the best course of action, period, end of sentence — in effect, to hasten the inevitable.

Living in the attention economy

There are only 24 hours in a day, and of those a normal First World resident might have six or eight of them to spend at their own discretion. They need to decide how those hours are to be spent: with people in a gathering place? At home? Chatting online? On the phone? Passively enjoying a lease on intellectual property?

My focus here is on the last of those options: one way or another, the market is going to decide the price point greater than the expenditure of time at which people will be willing to exercise it.

For the notional consumer, the bottom line is one of opportunity cost: what is the best use of one’s time, and is that best use deserving of the expenditure of money?

Without respect to monetary cost, the best use of free time varies from one person to the next, but I suspect it can be said to center on one of the following activities:

Passive entertainment to the end of relaxation
Making things
Socializing with family or friends
Resting

The upshot for creative rights holders is that they need to focus on the market of people who engage in passive behaviors to relax, and draw sufficient attention to what they have to offer in the fragmented marketing environment of the present day. Finally, they need to prove that the access they’re selling to their offerings is sufficiently more valuable than access to others’ offerings that can be had at lower monetary cost.

The big disconnect: production cost vs. market value

The current solution to this disconnect can be summarized in two words: reality television.

Cheaply produced content that’s attractive to a comparatively large audience is a cash cow.

As much to the point, expensively-produced content needs to guarantee large audiences.

The necessities of intrinsic value, effective marketing, and ease of access

Any work with pretensions to being an ongoing revenue source must be well-written and well-performed; bring your A Game, or stay home.

Furthermore, such a work must be marketed effectively, both with paid placement and through word of mouth. Paid placement is a larger component of this system than the freetards¹ will ever admit, because it plays right into efforts to encourage ease of access.

Ease of access: should I stay or should I go?

Simply put: what's the path of least resistance to obtaining works? The less the time and effort required to gain access to a work, the more willing a prospective leaseholder will be to pay for it, all other factors being equal. This is why iTunes is such a smashing success: they have a huge catalog at tolerable price points, sitting at the far end of a regular gusher of bandwidth; it’s a million impulse purchases waiting to be made. The only better alternative is entire albums with hundreds of known BitTorrent seeds — an alternative that doesn’t exist far beyond the origin of a Zipf distribution.

If, however, your album’s not on iTunes nor in a nearby retail joint, then BitTorrent’s the only network on which you stand a chance of finding it at a reasonable opportunity cost… unless you have the patience to order it from an online retailer and wait for its arrival.

The inevitability of this dynamic decreases not a jot in other media or points of purchase, either.

Summary: one way or another, prospective leaseholders of intellectual property will get what they want, when they want it. The goal for the owners of that property should be to make it available as quickly as possible, with few or no impediments to use. The ones who do will retain the privilege of charging fees; the others will be shit outta luck. The better the work and easier the access, the higher the cost that the market will bear. The more popular the work, the more profit will be made.

Back to the problem: why restrictive legislation is wrong

We are left with rights holders who cling to the fiction that their property is scarce, artificially or otherwise; their collective delusion results in the demand that governments sponsor and enforce the fiction, notwithstanding the demands of common sense.

The medium term consequence of such sponsorship will be to leave the great creative works of the 20th and early 21st centuries in a permanent limbo, a Dead Sea in our oceans of cultural heritage, which will start to form the day upstarts figure out how to best use the tools at their disposal.

How to set things right

Make stuff that’s truly greater than the sum of its parts.
To do this, you must have good writing, good performances, and production values exactly at the lowest point needed to maintain the performers’ hold on their audience.²
Get the word out to as many people as possible, as often as possible.
People can’t see things that don’t cross their path, and won’t stop to obtain them unless the effort of doing so is worthwhile.
Once you’ve got their attention, make it pathetically easy to obtain your stuff.
If you can't show a member of your audience where something is and set up a system that will allow them to start downloading it within sixty seconds of hitting a landing, that person will find something else that does offer those benefits.
Make that stuff usable on the user’s terms.
In other words…
- Copy protection is bunk.
- Rights- and scope-managed formats are bunk.
- Excessive advertising, watermarking, and nagging are bunk.
- Crap-bundling is bunk.
- Crap quality indices are bunk.

On those days when I have the money, I would gladly spend money on music, films, television, or literature if I felt tremendous confidence that it was good, and could have my hands on it in toto inside of five minutes. Wouldn’t you?

Footnotes

¹ While urbandictionary.com hews to the identification of this term with Open Source Software diehards, I refer to the broader class of people who cling to the prospect of inalienable and total freedom of information just as tightly as conglomos cling to the erstwhile artificial scarcity of their intellectual property.

² I propose to you that had not Titanic’s story not been so @#$&ing insipid, its production budget could’ve been slashed in half with little impact on its sales.

Metered residential bandwidth: wave of the future

2008-04-10T08:31:00.006-05:00

Over at Gizmodo, they’ve got something to say about what they think might be a new trend in Internet service pricing.

Meanwhile, I’ve been paying for metered-over-cap bandwidth for quite a while — almost two years for which I can speak from personal experience. My ISP has had metering infrastructure in place far longer than that.

When I asked one of their engineers what the deal was, he pointed out a highly relevant fact: bandwidth usage tends to follow a Pareto curve. In layman’s terms, that means that everyday users wind up subsidizing the leeches — that’s no good.

However, I see something else at work, too: I get the itchy feeling that the ISP’s planning to meter their customers’ bandwidth usage offer video on a different service tier.

Could it be that cable companies are anxious to discourage their customers from partaking of the smorgasbord of video options available from the public Internet? How could it be?!

</snark>

The best kind of insanity: thoughts on KU's national championship

2008-04-08T11:48:00.004-05:00

I was watching, like nearly everyone else in town.

The last time I was near this electricity was in 1990. Even though there was no way to watch the game being played at the time, I couldn’t’ve asked for a better place to be than aboard an airplane when Portland got a road victory in that year’s NBA Finals; all aboard were all fans that night.

…Of course, history remembers what happened in that series, and in the series two years later.

I’ve watched MU and KU flame out under pressure too many times. Butler?! Bucknell?! UNI?! Tyus Edney?! Meh.

…But last night was different.

I confessed my Mizzou origins to one of my hosts, but later pointed out — with the national title in the hands of a Big 12 team, a rising tide lifts all boats, including Missouri’s. You bet I was cheering for KU.

I can happily remember what it was like to witness the thrill that came from these last two wins. It’s the antidote for a lot, from September 11th on down.

On the subject of hoarding

2008-03-07T22:17:00.009-06:00

I just scanned through POSSESSED, a short film comprised of interviews (et cetera) with four hoarders conducted on film.

It was difficult just to watch even a few minutes of it, not because it made me heartsick, but because I couldn’t drive the thought, “been there, done that” out of my consciousness. I came home to comparable sights for the final five years of my mother’s life.

The feeling of emotional fatigue was exacerbated by the fact that my best friend in town is developing the same form of mental illness. In this latter case, a brief reminder that he ought to clean out his car is met with defensiveness at best, words of one syllable at worst. And when I asked him why he lets things get to that point, he said, “it just makes me more comfortable to keep that stuff around.”

The ultimate hell is that there is no truly effective treatment for OCD (the underlying illness) — only coping strategies. Argh.

For those who might wonder: what about me?

We-ell… I'm not quite appositely obsessive-compulsive (i.e., to the point of throwing things out gratuitously, as is one commenter on the Metafilter thread where I found the film) but if I can't eat it, drink it, or smoke it, chances are that I will agonize over whether or not I should buy it.

Though I'm ashamed to admit it, I will throw recyclables away rather than let them pile up, if I can’t get my sorry, non-vehicular ass to the recycling station. Even when it comes to blessedly compact data, I only claim a spindle of eighty DVD’s and half a terabyte of disk space, itself only (roughly) half-full. The thought that I will eventually need a bigger apartment for the sake of my stuff is, to put it bluntly, appalling.

Make of all that what you will.

Two worldviews for the price of one?

2008-03-07T19:15:00.002-06:00

It seems that the likelihood of habitable extraterrestrial planets just took a big leap.

But before you Sci-Fi Nerds Throw a Party…

To get there on any terms, we would need a spacecraft physically capable of surviving intact through the entire acceleration regimen of the trip and withstanding the rigors of the journey¹, while still being able at the end of the trip to operate its sensor suite and send a minimum of a few megabytes of data at a level of power sufficient to supply clear reception at the end of a 4.3 light year trip. Finally, the first such ship must be able to make the outgoing trip in less than fifty years, which is the longest travel time we could obtain without running the risk that a subsequent spacecraft capable of overtaking it could be designed and built. To attempt any such journey before those basic conditions would be met would be a colossal waste of resources.

To sum up the numbers

The conditions laid out above result in the following specifications:

One to two tons of payload
Sensor suite, data storage, and EM transmitter components capable of operating intermittently during fifty years of exposure to wide variations in temperature and exposure to high-energy particles
Both of the above joined to a propulsion system capable of maintaining an average speed of 93 million kph during those same fifty years, and decelerating to a capture velocity at the end of the journey

Such a system is possible in theory, though probably not practicable unless the infrastructure to build it can be developed in orbit. Meanwhile, three additional conditions must be met:

The engineering of such a system must be made possible through advancements in propulsion and materials tech;
The target planet(s) must be known to fulfill basic conditions of habitability such as atmosphere, surface gravity, surface temperature regime, and ambient radiation levels in advance (otherwise, we’re better off confining exploration to our own solar system); and
Perhaps hand in hand with the research done to meet the second condition, the spacecraft design must be flown and refined several times before the full mission is attempted.

Such a program would offer a second piece of good news to follow on discovery of habitability: the technologies developed to fulfill the first mission could in turn be adapted to the needs of colonizing any habitable planet found.

Something tells me that as a species we’ll be lucky to accomplish all of these tasks within our lifetimes, and almost as lucky if we don't manage to louse our own planet beyond a state of easy habitability in the meantime.

When you’re a Web nrrd, this passes for news

2008-03-07T16:21:00.006-06:00

Angry thoughts about IE7 and IE8

2008-03-06T13:05:00.007-06:00

So much has been written about how IE7 b0rked the user experience for a lot of users... and everytime I see that comment, I get pissy.

Why?

Reasons I get mad about IE7’s twitchiness

If so many folks hadn't used IE6 as their dev platform and ignored everything else, these problems never would have developed.
If the rest had used proper filter rules, their sites would’ve been easier to fix.
If people would take the time to stay current with their skills and learn new ones, the breakage would’ve made more sense at the time (and thus caused less uproar).
Did Microsoft's senior management honestly believe that the rest of the world would stand by idly while it let the Internet Explorer property go to seed? Pshaw! (Insert saltier words of one syllable here. Yes, I'm still all manner of pissed off about that.)

By my way of thinking the furore over IE7's “breakage” is from people who treat their jobs like sinecures.

…And the horse they rode in on!

My own experience

Perhaps I’m being a hardass; goodness knows that I’ve got a reputation for it. My bottom line, however, is that when IE7 came out, I probably spent 10-15 minutes per site getting things into shape. IE7 supports standards far better than its predecessor, and I was developing to standards, so I had few problems. Most of those were caused by vestigial hasLayout issues, though more recently I see that the fuzzy selector problem hasn't yet gone the way of the dodo.

If I could do it, why was it so hard for so many other people?

The answers I get to that question speak more than adequately to my anger.

Gun rights, abortion, and frustration with Congress?

2008-03-05T13:06:00.003-06:00

Science fiction novelist and freelance writer extraordinaire John Scalzi links to a WaPo article about the political culture in the county where he lives.

The reporter summarizes interviewees’ points of contention as resting on gun rights, abortion, and frustration with Congress (thus the title for my own post). As can be expected, the article does a fantastic job of confirming my own biases, namely those that lead me to the conclusion that many of these people are at best ill-informed as a consequence of slurping from the Fox News trough… and at worst, outright hypocrites.

Blow by blow

Gun rights
I’m going on this one anecdotally, since a call to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action rang off the hook.
I’ve yet to hear of any concerted effort in the mainstream of the Left to promote a British-style ban on guns; the effort seems to focus on assault rife and concealed carry rights. Those, folks, are issues about personal power, and I bet that’s what’s got the mudflap demographic so riled up — the fundamental “pry it from my cold dead hands” issue and the ease with which ownership restrictions can be considered the top of a slippery slope. Meanwhile, the manner in which the Bush clique wants to leverage existing registration requirements into find-’em-anywhere-anytime domestic surveillance systems is an even greater threat to folks’ civil liberties.
Abortion
This is the issue that really steams me, and not without cause¹. Stories of prosperity-gospel churchogers² and lifelong Catholics taking their knocked-up daughters in for abortions are legion in my experience; I can count two that involve close relatives². Meanwhile, the whole issue has always reeked to me of hypocrisy³: the same people who are egged on by Rush Limbaugh into pasting the Nanny State follow up by insisting that the government ought to legislate morality. The fuck?! So much for intellectual honesty.
Frustration with Congress
The gamesmanship of parliamentary procedure has led both the D’s and the R’s to tiptoe around each other. Between that and the fact that too many of those bozos are beholden to moneyed interests and the demands of looking good for the media, you have a big domed building filled with 535 milquetoast characters. Meanwhile, those of us who want real change wait for someone to put the Internet to its best use.

Footnotes

¹ After I was born and until my parents’ divorce, abortion became Mom’s back-up method of birth control. The why-and-wherefore of this fact gets long in the telling, so I’ll save that litany for a time when I can do it without coming across like a total horse’s ass.

² The omission of “Christian” from the designation I give these people is deliberate, if something of an overgeneralization — many of these people do come across to me as sincere Christians, but plenty more do not.

³ Judging by sources, I seem to recall the Savior as saying “…and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Another memorial to EGG

2008-03-05T12:15:00.006-06:00

One E. Gary Gygax, the principal contributor to the early form of the Dungeons & Dragons games, passed on yesterday.

Like a lot of tech-oriented types I had tons of exposure¹ to his game as a teenager — by the time I was thirteen I had a complete set of First Edition rulebooks² — so I cannot understate the game’s influence (and by extension, the influence of Gygax) on the formation of my worldview.

Lessons learned from D&D: a list

There are lots of different ways to believe, and most of them are silly. Better to deal with it sooner than later.
Seriously. Get your hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods and thumb through it, keeping in mind that it was sourced to a faretheewell.
If you want people to do something, you need to give them the tools and the incentives requisite to the task.
“Running a game” is just an obscure synonym for “herding cats.”
Work smarter, not harder.
…Because it doesn’t make sense to spend more time designing a locale than you’ll spend playing in it.
The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes is valuable beyond price.
On Saturday afternoons that talent for ideation makes the difference between an okay game and a great one. In life it makes the difference between using mirrors and avoiding them.
It took a long time for us to get to where we are, and in the meantime we thought up plenty of imaginative ways to betray, abuse and kill one another.
Digging into the game expanded my interest in history, by way of finding out why. What I learned was humbling.
Computers. So. Very. Rawk.
When I was into playing, I went through unbelievable amounts of paper and mechanical pencil lead, to say nothing of the calories I burned toting around rulebooks. If I woke up tomorrow and decided to become a gamer again, it'd all be going on the laptop in a New York Minute.

…And those are just the ones that come immediately to mind.

Footnotes

¹The last time I played was in May 1998, for better or worse.

²Before I moved to Lawrence I retrieved them from their closet and gave them to a colleague with lots of active gamer friends. He in turn gave them to his little brother, who at last report gets steady use from them. Total win.

After an entire month, a few observations about the day's experiences

2008-02-22T16:49:00.003-06:00

I assure you that the past month's absence is more a reflection of my state of nerves and laziness than it is a reflection of the quality of my life. Go me!

Today I learned…

My only remaining excuse for taking lousy care of my teeth is that I’m just damned lazy.
Kansas winters make me homesick. (Go figure.)
Fish sticks were not put on sale at Dillons arbitrarily; it’s Lent and there's the whole meatless-Fridays thing going on (not that I bother to observe, though I am fond of fish sticks… hmm… piscatine food-like substance).
Cheap LCD displays hate being unused for extended periods of time.
There's some dude in town who’s the spitting image of Matt Damon. How strange.
Doubling up combined width/max-width/min-width attributes in a parent-child node relationship causes Gecko to prove that π = 3 for extremely small values of π. Or something.
When you are heads-down at a coffeehouse, there are few things more terrifying than discovering that the restroom is Out of Order.
My MP3 player is sweet in many ways, but its battery life is only a fraction of the length of the playlist it can hold. Argh.
Firmware updates are a Good Thing — I no longer need to reboot my POS router every time I power up my MacBook.
The aforementioned router (a Linksys WRT54G) apparently will issue a lease on 192.168.1.100, which caused ZoneAlarm on the desktop to throw no end of conniptions.
Bloglines is, like my router, a POS. But I’m too accustomed to having it handy to find a better service.

… and that's it for thus far today.

Meta tag mishmash

2008-01-22T23:02:00.000-06:00

This will make no sense unless you’ve read the following:

If you know what all of these places are, care what they have to say, and haven’t read them, do so now. I’ll still be here when you come back.

This approach amounts to, “require Web operators to opt-in if they intend to stick to the latest and greatest.” Five years out, this is going to result in a lot of rendering engine bloat and the bugs that go along with that, but Microsoft has plenty incentive to avoid that without badgering from standards advocate. They probably also have some insitutional memory with respect to solving that problem (though the question of whether or not they put it to use is another matter entirely).

Who wins, who loses

This situation begs a game analysis.

Good for Microsoft: customers don’t yell so much, and are more likely to accept version upgrades of IE (along with their security benefits)
Bad for Microsoft: improperly used, the recommended change in practice ultimately leaves Microsoft open to the same charges of deliberate somnolence they faced as a result of letting IE6 rot outright for something like four years: why improve your browser if no-one’s using its features? Given Microsoft’s track record, the possibility of this outcome needs to be taken seriously.
Good for professionals: there will be a mechanism by which developers can avoid passing on sudden and gratuitously fortuitous labor charges because oops! IE was updated and changes were made to the rendering engine
Bad for professionals: it becomes necessary to keep track of which sites are tethered to which versions of Internet Explorer, which is very close to the outcome WaSP was founded to avoid
Good for users: version upgrades will no longer result in the entire Web experience going wonky all of a sudden one morning
Bad for users: sitebuilders and their sponsors now have a perfect crutch for keeping their sites in the Stone Age

Is the good worth the bad?

In the long run, I believe so… especially if guys like me step up to the plate and keep on educating people.

Autobiography: stapling and car parts

2008-01-21T20:07:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading an article about poor handshakes, which brought me back to a couple of handshaking lessons I was taught when I was kid.

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree

The thing is, Dad’s always had a handshake on the weak side. Anymore, it comes from professional and social habit, but at the bottom line the closest he gets to being the garrulous good ol’ boy is his atypically generous support for a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment (itself complicated).

The point is that when I was a kid, I didn’t know how to shake hands worth a damn.

Remodeling

The first clue toward a different way of shaking hands came from Poppa Joe, who tapped me for some DIY tedium six weeks before my tenth birthday. He was over at the apartment to ask us if I could spend my weekend with them — never a problem since I loved staying over there, and in any event their house was only a few miles away from the apartment. I could’ve walked over there with ease anytime I had an invitation (though at the time I was just getting into the habit of hoofin’ it at length).

The point to the request was to put me to honest work the following day, as my grandmother had leased a new space and was due to move into it in just over a month. Since the merchandise at issue was yarn and thread, the entire south wall of the store was due to be covered in several hundred cubic-foot display boxes — all folded and stapled into shape by hand.

[My mother’s parents are the sort who achieve inner calm by making things with their hands; I take after my parents, for whom writing has been the path to the same result.]

Preparatory to this, Grandpa wanted to know hard I could squeeze, which is a valid question when you’re only nine years old and being called upon to spend an entire Saturday with a heavy-duty stapler in hand.

…So he takes my right hand and tells me to give him the firmest handshake that I can. I comply. He frowns.

“I don’t know if your hands are strong enough.”

I start feeling a bit crestfallen, then realize why I’m feeling the impulse to giggle.

“Uh, Grandpa? I’m left-handed.”

As I recall the next day’s work was tedious as hell, but went well enough.

Eight months later, beside a classic Chevy pickup

The school year following the shop’s move to a new space, I started at a new school. I wouldn’t develop social grace around my contemporaries for another four or five years, and I didn’t relish the thought of coming back to an empty house, so often I would stay on the school grounds for another hour or so after school let out, reading in the library or shooting basketball. Because of this, and because I was no stranger to the principal’s office, I became well-liked by Mrs. Anderson, the school’s lead admin assistant. One of the afternoons I stuck around, her husband dropped in to take her home; she’d christened her own car the “Navy Blue Lemon” because it spent so much time in the shop despite the fact that it was a late model.

Mr. Anderson had a project car, a classic ’57 Chevy with white paint but no finish. I very nearly became a gearhead at first sight. After I was done ooh-ing and aah-ing over the truck, and after he threw around the obligatory atta-boys, he asked for a handshake.

I game him one.

“Ben, you can do better than that.”

I gave him another handshake. The reply I got to that was…

“You’re like an Oldsmobile.”

Given my ignorance of cars, I was mystified — and feeling more than a little snappy, because I knew it wasn’t a compliment, even if I had no idea why. “How’s that?”

“…No clutch!” And he looked me in the eyes with a smile running from ear to ear. I was turning a bright shade of red, but even I couldn’t help but laugh.

I gave him a third handshake, and really put myself into it.

That one turned out with bit more success, and I’ve given deliberately firm handshakes ever since.

…To everyone but Dad.

Oh, how the issue of quotes refuses to die

2008-01-20T00:16:00.000-06:00

Every once in a while I will encounter someone, whether online or off, wondering how much it costs to get a site built.

The most accurate answer is, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” At least, not if it’s going to be any good and more than a weblog.

I’ve already talked about the thought that goes into estimating. Lacking the answers to those very basic questions, I usually answer “$1500 and up.” [It used to be $1200, but inflation, ya know.]

…So I will say it one more time: tell me what you actually want, and I will tell you how much it will cost, mkaythxbai. If you don’t know what you want, expect to pay more for the time I will spend helping you figure it out.

Update, 3 hours later

Ross has a much pithier reply to the question at hand.

Reflections on a month of MacBook experience

2008-01-18T16:13:00.000-06:00

I received my first Mac ever on 17th December.

This past month does not represent the first time I’ve used a Mac regularly; when I was in school and working on academic Web projects, I relied for the most part on Macs (generally Quadras running 6 & 7, if anyone’s curious). Since then, I’ve used Macs from time to time onsite, and on a few occasions borrowed at length from friends. To make a long story short, I’m no stranger to the Mac platform, and I’ve always been fond of it.

(Mostly pleasant) surprises

I don’t typically use my mouse, even at home.
This is due in large part to the fact that I haven’t yet gotten Photoshop installed on the MacBook, but even so you would think that with all the tabbed browsing I do, I would be lost without a mouse. This is oddly not so.
I *heart* Exposé.
Simon Willison took the time to show it off for my benefit back in 2004, and I thought of it at the time as a neat toy. However, the past month has taught me its usefulness, especially because there's no easier way to jump between running windows within a single application (while Windows puts all taskbar items into the Alt-Tab pane).
There’s not nearly as much benefit in collapsing windows in OSX as in the Classic GUI; in fact, doing so actually creates hassles.
This has been the hardest adjustment for me to make in the process of unhinging myself from the One Microsoft Way.
The magnetic AC adapter plug is an instance of sheer genius.
Every laptop should have this feature; the need to re-solder AC adapter connectors would become an historical artifact.
…So that’s what it’s like to have a real notebook battery.
My Windows notebook only weighs four pounds, and the battery could only manage about two hours brand new. The ability to play DVD’s for three hours or more is refreshing, to say the least.
Perhaps only because I’m a cheap bastard who hasn’t owned a decent hi-fi rig since he was twenty-one years old, I find myself impressed by the sound card.
I’m no fan of iTunes, but I find myself neglecting the speakers connected to the Windows desktop, in preference to listening to my music over headphones connected to the MacBook.

Brickbats

The finish on everything has an unbelievable affinity for crud.
Apparently, the sole prerequisite for display smudges is that I merely need to think about touching the damn thing. I have a bad and entrenched habit of doing more than just thinking about it. The keycaps, bezel, and case finish (both inside and out) suffer similarly; household dust adheres to the outside case in much the same way as gauge blocks.
Two. Mouse. Buttons. Please.
…Especially now that Boot Camp is part of the factory install.
The “lock” in System Preferences is a pain in the ass.
The Cat Frob won’t change the settings on accident, so what’s the deal here?
iTunes doesn’t offer alternate key bindings, unless you want to set them up one-by-one in System Prefences.
For those of us who’ve been faithful Winamp users for eight years (like meee), the adjustment is brutal. [I’ve already sent a lengthy feedback message to the appropriate authorities on this very subject.]

…I could go on a bit, but hence we get into some heavy duty minutiae. I’ll skip that.

The enigma that is Safari

I find that I don’t object to using Safari as my primary browser on the Mac, relegating Firefox to development and testing. The reason I did this originally was that the rig was purchased for testing purposes, which means that I have multiple Firefox installs, thus multiple profiles, thus an extra step when I start up Firefox. However… I discovered that Safari is hypersonic next to its brethren, and apart from intermittent hangs on server replies, I have every reason to suspect that Safari’s network interface can’t be beat. It doesn’t drive like a yacht with respect to RAM, either.

My *ahem* most-favoritest feature of Safari is that Flash objects in unfocussed tabs do not start loading or playing until the tab is brought into focus; I cannot understate how intently I wish that feature was present in Firefox.

I also bear witness to a number of boogers:

no direct keyboard shortcut for Search
Contrarian tab layout (argh!)
no visual cues indicating the load status of off-window tabs
Alt-click saves a link, notwithstanding the fact that Cmd-click opens it in a new tab (WTF?!)
there's a full-screen mode in every other Mac app and every other browsing title, but nooo, not Safari
target="_new" opens by default in a new window, not a new tab, and this behavior can’t be altered near as I can tell
no version-and-title-specific CSS filters (more of a Work Gripe than anything to do with being a user, but still)

…And that, for now, is that.

Geekery: the march of progress

2008-01-17T04:43:00.000-06:00

[The following was copied over from a post I wrote on a different blog back in December 2006.]

One of the tracks on my playlist is of a Canadian guy doing a stand-up routine that parodies an Internet helpdesk call (but not by far). The comedian mentions "a computer with a thousand times the power of the one we used to land on the moon" and prompted by a photo of the 5MB-capacity great-grandaddy of the hard disk in the computer you're using right now, I thought I'd do the math.

IBM 305 RAMAC disk storage unit vs. 1GB SanDisk Cruzer:

The IBM drive has roughly 60 cubic feet of cabinet volume, the jumpdrive roughly three-tenths of a cubic inch. Once the storage capacities of the two systems are factored in, the contemporary gadget enjoys almost two million times the efficiency of its ancestor (though it probably doesn't have nearly its ancestor's service life).

In terms of the volume of the actual storage media the numbers aren't nearly so far apart, as the flash storage on the jumpdrive takes up a significant proportion of the unit's overall volume, while its predecessor's magnetic media only occupied rougly 1/18th of its cabinet (with much of the remainder left over to vacuum tubes and machinery).

...And we won't even get started on the weight difference.

Apple MacBook vs. AGC Block II:

It's harder to compare these two machines, as they have completely different hardware architectures in almost every imaginable respect, designed to wholly different requirements. However, a look at the MacBook's spec page and various pages describing the the Wikipedia entry for the Apollo Guidance Computer yields the following factors of increased performance (bigger = better):

ROM: 3⅔x
RAM: 280,000x
CPU clock speed: 894x
Weight: 9x
Power consumption: 0.53x (the MacBook uses almost twice the electricty!)

And for the same reasons I didn't go into the subject of weight before, we'll avoid the discussion of the cost difference between these two pieces of hardware, except to point out that the MacBook is possibly something you can still afford even if you need to ask how much it costs.

These huge numbers are the result of a positive feedback loop. Computers are used to design more powerful computers (lather, rinse, repeat…) until the computers grow powerful enough to bump against constraints in the laws of physics (which is what this dual- and quad-core processor nonsense is about).

Intellectual Property vs. the market

2008-01-14T16:48:00.000-06:00

I’ve spent most of the afternoon vetting my iTunes library, which leaves me spurred to comment about a recent post passing through the intertubes in which the RIAA whines again about intellectual property rights.

First off, as a Web guy, I like to think that I’m pretty hip to the upside of intellectual property laws; if my stuff was worth ripping off, I’d probably be pretty steamed if it actually was.

However…

When you’re the RIAA, and you circumscribe what the mass media promote, you’ve just made yourself a gatekeeper of popular culture — part of folks’ common experience. When you heap on the injury of ensuring that your product is partially crap, you encourage your market to cherry pick. You also lose respect — how much over-compressed, lowest-common-denominator-pandering crap do you expect us to take in tandem with the stuff we genuinely like?

Finally, you add insult to injury by treating us like thieves when we assert our rights to protect the embodiment of our licenses from theft and damage.

It’s true that lots of people have lost respect for intellectual property. Meanwhile, it’s been my experience that people pirate music (ooh, scary!) because:

their desire to listen to the music outweighs their ability to pay for it;
they want to try it before they buy it;
they want to encourage others to listen to it;
they can download the music more easily than they can rip it from media they already own; and/or
they want the gold without the dross.

I’m serious as a heart attack about the last one — seriously, why else would I be vetting a music library composed in great majority of tracks from CD’s I’ve purchased, in many cases more than once?

Respectively, these listeners are:

not giving you the money, because they don’t have it;
exercising the rights of a conscientious customer;
DOING YOUR MARKETING FOR YOU (oh, fercryinoutloud, are you ever STOOPID);
taking the path of least resistance to the goal of protecting their investment in their legitimate license of your music; and
hinting that y’all oughtta get your shit together.

So, you wanna raise your numbers and regain relevance? Here’s how to do it:

Quit insisting on stratospheric margins.
Make DRM-free downloads available sooner rather than later.
Make free tracks available. Ratchet the bitrates down and bracket them with ads and notices if you feel you must, but make the music available for trial in some format.
Quit treating your customers like criminals.
For the love of all that is good, stop marketing CD’s that are half-or-more composed of crap tracks, and compressing the whole so extremely that it makes the results physically exhausting to listen to.

When I look at the situation from a perspective of opportunity cost, I come away knowing that I'd rather buy a good CD than download any day. Why?

I can’t use P2P networks effectively without leeching and allowing myself to be leeched.
I have no way of knowing until the download is finished if I’m getting tracks that were ripped from media in good condition.
I may not be able to find the music at an acceptably high bitrate, or for that matter at any bitrate.
Chances are that I’ll be forced to rename or re-tag my files, so hell, I might as well rip them my own damn self.
Oh. Liner notes?! Buahahaha!!!

On the other hand, it’s altogether satisfying to take the best while throwing the rest away, and giving the mass media a well-deserved virtual middle finger in the process.

Get the memo and the clue already, hmmm???

And in the news…

2007-12-17T18:37:00.000-06:00

Some movie fans apparently broke out of jail recently.

Power plant pollution: a few personal thoughts

2007-12-15T14:39:00.000-06:00

Over at SciAm’s blog the point is made that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. My instinct says that the headline is at least somewhat dishonest — power plant ash can’t undergo runaway reactions and unlike nuclear power generation waste, isn’t likely to find its way into the nooks and crannies of the body if/when it’s released into the environment.

For all that, I’m sympathetic toward the prospect of a resurgence in nuclear power generation, and atmospheric carbon is the least of the reasons why.

Somewhere in the boonies of Missouri…

As regular readers know, I spent eight years living 160 miles’ drive from where I am now, in Columbia, Missouri. I finished high school and undertook my abortive undergraduate studies there, and spent most of that time living within easy walking distance of one of the three coal power stacks in town. As a result, I have a couple of anecdotes.

Pretensions to be Los Angeles

During my first week at HHS, I distinctly recall sitting in my biology class, looking out the window during a brilliantly sunny day… and seeing a layer of smog on the skyline, not unlike whipped-cream frosting slathered between two layers of a cake. That I would see something like this in a town of 70,000 people, located two hours’ drive from the nearest large city, annoyed and mystified me.¹ Since the power plants were, apart from engine emissions, the only sizable sources of atmospheric pollution in town, I can only assume that they were the greater source of the smog I saw.

On the other side of town…

The University of Missouri’s public works are completely separate from those of the surrounding town, so they have two coal stacks of their own. During my time as a student, the conventional wisdom was that living at Twain — the res-hall closest to the power plant, and then the ritziest of the lot — would do one hell of a job on the finish of your car. This begged the question of what power plant emissions were doing to folks’ health.

About two months after I moved to San Diego, the Maneater trotted out the story once again, and not without cause.²

Footnotes

¹ In Portland, which has run for the longest time on hydroelectricity and for fifteen years (ending in 1992) on fission-generated electricity, smog is usually the consequence of layer inversions during the winter, and increased economic activity during the summer. Of course, at the time I moved to Columbia, Portland had a population roughly 20 times greater. Seeing smog in a much small town was, as I said, a shock.

² A quick scan of search results from the Maneater story archive reveals that the prospect of switching the MU power plant to alternative fuels has gained some currency. Also mentioned is Columbia’s unique practice of using power plant waste to clear the roads of snow.

Opera and Microsoft: whither standards?

2007-12-14T14:35:00.000-06:00

…Ummm, what Eric Meyer said.

Notwithstanding the very real progress made by IE7 in the bug resolution department¹, and notwithstanding Bill Gates’ very public declaration that IE.next is every bit the real thing, it would seem that Håkon Lie wants to pile on.

The part of me that’s still pissed off at Microsoft for three years of resting on its laurels — and only being stirred to act after uncounted Web standards advocates began attacking Microsoft publicly — is gleeful, not unlike the Normal Kid who feels some satisfaction after seeing someone stand up to the Class Bully.

However, this complaint misses the point. Forcing Microsoft to ship install binaries of its competitors’ titles (which is what I would do in their place, if ruled against and interested in good faith compliance) is the worst possible subversion of the marketplace. And then there’s what Eric said.

¹ I use conditional comments, but the stylesheets linked therein tend to number in the low dozens of lines (notwithstanding a production style that is generous with vertical whitespace). If I had to name two habits that make testing so easy, they would be box zeroing — i.e. * { margin: 0; padding: 0; } — and an approach that resolves hasLayout issues as a matter of course.

Note to self: functions of social networking

2007-12-11T12:23:00.001-06:00

Christina Wodtke recently posted some presentation slides, two of which describe the “Webb/Butterfield/Smith Model” of social network functions, as follows:

Identity
- Profile
- Connections
Presence
- Availability of profile via search
- Network design encouraging frequent updates
Relationships
- Friends
- Degrees of separation
Reputation
- Recommendations
- Positive moderation
Groups
- Common interests
- Signalling acquaintance but not friendship
Conversations
- Comments
- Forum posts
Sharing
- Broadcasting talent
- Creating resources

I’m posting this model because of its value in demarcating the areas of social network and application design — any successful network or application needs to do an extraordinary job of simplifying at least one leg of the model.

For the sake of focus, I reiterate that social networking fulfills the following objectives for those who engage in it:

Formation of new relationships
Maintenance and reinforcement of existing relationships, particularly those hindered by geographical or time constraints
Conduct of asynchronous conversations
Reputation/image management
Contribution of capital to the “gift economy”
Measurement and/or development of support for specific social/political/professional/business goals

Not all networks need to fulfill all goals.

Doomed to repeat history?

2007-12-08T12:58:00.000-06:00

There’s an article on Nature’s site that announces the finding of a gene which, when absent, softens the impact of negative reinforcement. The article goes on to say that those without the gene are constitutionally more intent than others on seeking highs — that is to say, engaging in addictive behaviors.

When reading this, I get another takeaway: that this same “flaw” reduces its carriers’ risk aversion, which is a big boost to successful serial entrepreneurship, the pursuit of applied knowledge, &c.

This leaves another mystery to be solved: why do those same people so often have an aversion trending toward pathology of conceding their mistakes? Is that a consequence of acculturation, or some other genetic flaw?

So that’s what a pedigree is

2007-12-03T19:44:00.000-06:00

When I see the list of the first 100 .com domains ever registered, I note that my stepfather’s two biggest clients are on the list.

Any vestigial doubt as to how I came into my trade has vanished.

Note to self: Windows XP fonts (and reasons why you can’t really uninstall them)

2007-12-03T14:31:00.000-06:00

Early last week, I went through a boatload-and-a-half of hassle over font uninstallation.

What I learned

Do not ever attempt to install fonts with a limited user account. Doing so does not leave you with corrupt files, but they will behave as if they’re corrupted.
Always copy your font file(s) to the Fonts folder.
When you uninstall a font, any font, also delete \%WindowsDir\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT immediately thereafter. Failure to do so may cause your font to come back to life unexpectedly.
Immediately after taking the preceding step, reboot your system, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. Do not worry about FNTCACHE.DAT, it will be resurrected in an appropriate form. If, however, you ~~skip~~ postpone this step, your system will crash hard — not a mere BSOD-style crash, but more of a scary MacOS-9-style BombIcon crash. When this happened to me, I was forced to fully power-cycle my IDE devices (i.e., open the computer and unplug them from the motherboard) in order to see them again, even in the BIOS. Just sayin’.

Failure to heed all of this advice may result in fonts that are in the appropriate folder, but cannot be used and cannot be uninstalled short of doing a nuke-and-pave on the entire system.

Please, for the love of all that is good, learn from these implied mistakes.

Thoughts on the Kindle

2007-12-03T12:19:00.000-06:00

[If you don't know what a Kindle is, use Google to find out.]

Much as I would love to have a widget that can easily store an entire library and spare the hassle of distributing paper, the need for electricity could get pretty annoying, pretty fast. The fact that the Kindle’s fairly useless without a network connection makes it a total non-starter, moreso than its price.

What I like are portability, storage density, and technology that pays for itself, and the Kindle does not appear to offer any of these except perhaps portability (while using the network connection as an opportunity to encourage impulse buying, uh-no-thanks).

Whatever the case, this is what I would want from an e-book reader:

lasts an average of 24 hours between charges for the first 150 charge cycles
can be used while charging
uses interchangeable/replaceable batteries
charges from a wall outlet
weighs 500g or less
occupies a volume of 650cm³ or less
runs (under emulation if necessary) various reader software titles
contains a 3- or 4-in-1 card reader including support for two USB jumpdrives)
requires little or no backlighting given tolerable ambient light
costs €125 or less
supports titles typically priced in the €3.50-4.00 range
allows imaging of a user’s current library for backup purposes, under fair restrictions
none of this wireless nonsense
simple controls (on/off, next/previous page, next/previous chapter, set bookmark, hard reset)

You’ll notice that I’ve implied high value on reliablity here: I wouldn’t want to buy something that could die unexpectedly and leave me S.O.L. for reading my books until I actually save up money. The price point is also spelt out from a logical bearing; 125 euros fits nicely inside of the amount of the tax refund check someone working at minimum wage would be likely to receive.

What some people might find interesting is that I dislike the idea of wireless, but want external storage support. In tandem with multiple-platform support — which spares the need for multiple devices — the bottom line is simplification: network support is a pain in the ass to implement, compared to the opportunity cost of tacking on external storage; furthermore, someone is forced to pay for an ongoing network connection.

Done right this could even help out traditional libraries:

The patron checks out a title.
The title is uploaded from a central server (or Web-based service) to the patron’s media and flagged as checked out, in addition to being flagged on the patron’s media as a loaned title. The same scheme could also be used to benefit readers who want to loan out their e-books the same way they can loan out their hard copies.
When the loan expires, the user can get a one-time key via phone, post, or e-mail to renew their loan, or the loan will expire, resulting in lockout of the loaned title.

The best part is that the entire evolution just described could be handled easily by an extended filesystem spec.

Given the right circumstances, the investments libraries would forced to make in physical plant would decrease tremendously, the benefits telescoped by the fact that libraries need to be carefully temperature controlled.

…But the Kindle is none of the things I describe; it is specific to Amazon, it requires a network connection, and it’s more than twice as expensive, meaning that it’s an early-adopter toy.

Update, eight hours later:

it occurs to me that a network connection would be nice to have, but I still firmly believe that it shouldn’t be a necessity. Either way, two USB ports — one for the media to which your book is being uploaded, another for a wireless transceiver — would be required for appropriate operation. My initial thought was that firmware updates and books could first be deposited on media connected to a PC and then transferred via sneakernet to the reader, but it doesn’t take much consideration to realize that this is impractical.

How many tags can I name?

2007-12-02T11:56:00.000-06:00

A quickie online HTML tag quiz has been making the rounds. I got about half of the tags on the first pass, and almost three-quarters on the second — while forgetting many of the elements I listed during the first pass.

For guys like me challenges like this verge in some respects towards irrelevance, because…

When you’re using CSS for your presentation layer, you don’t need that many elements in your markup

Solid knowledge of CSS obviates a lot of elements, leaving the producer with only a few that are essential:

Document structure: html, head, title, and body
Document metadata: link and script
Headings: h1…h6
Containers: div, span, and p
Lists: ol, ul, dl, li, dt, and dd
Links: a
Emphasis and de-emphasis: em, strong, big, and small
Forms: form, input, select, option, and textarea

To that producers working on diverse projects might add a few more:

Images: img
Plug-in content: object and param
Quotes and sources: blockquote, q, and cite
Data tables: table, tr, th, td, and col

Once you open the book of document usability and cross-media accessibility, things start to telescope a bit:

Parent element metadata: legend and caption
Form control helpers: fieldset, label, and optgroup
Table containers: thead, tbody, and tfoot
Acronyms and abbreviations: acronym and abbr

…These three lists comprise 50 of the 91 elements officially supported in HTML 4, and the core of the namespace occupies only a third of the total.

What I omitted altogether, and why

base and style
You only truly need these elements if the behavior of your publishing platform encourages or requires it.
applet
The inline-Java train left the station in 1998, boys and girls.

What I relegated to the secondary lists, and why

img
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s been my experience that on most sites, images rarely comprise principal content. Getting full mileage out of the CSS background attributes is often more structurally/semantically appropriate.
legend and caption
If you’re on top of your editorial game, these roles are often (though not always) handled by headings.
fieldset
This is too easily abused … hell, even I abuse it because there’s no easy way to sequester label-control pairs. I’m not convinced that the design oversight doesn’t make div equally applicable.
label
Have you ever noticed that this element is only truly useful if you have a pointer input device? Yeah, me too.
optgroup
Though not actually obscure, the scope of this element is limited to situations in which the best alternative would be to use empty options as separators.
Table containers
As currently implemented, these acquire their greatest usefulness in paginated media — so using them is simply a signal that you’re really on top of your cross-media accessibility game.
acronym and abbr
Between their relative obscurity, their uneven implementation across user agents, and their limited scope, these really cannot be considered part of a core toolset.

The point to this dissertation (other than the fact that I’ve often thought of prettifying it and submitting that prettified version to A List Apart) is that… folks, HTML ain’t rocket science, folks. At least, not by itself.

Thence the Email Standards Project?

2007-11-29T06:43:00.000-06:00

Over the past 24 hours everybody and their first cousin seems to be talking about this e-mail thingy per the title. I'm going to read up on it in a bit, but…

It occurs to me that as a proverbial Neanderthal who still believes HTML has no place in e-mail, I find the whole idea to be a non-starter.

Let them eat attached PDF’s, I say.

Update, 45 minutes later:

I scribbled more (similar) opinions on the subject over at Zeldman’s.

Thoughts on The Game

2007-11-26T11:39:00.000-06:00

I thought I would be happier.

It’s a testimony to how well Lawrence has treated me — all bitching and drama and the fact that I want to move on aside — and how well Columbia didn’t¹, that I of all people would be disappointed to see KU lose the game.

Now I find myself anxious to see MU win its next two games. That’s the only way I can be convinced that KU earned its loss.

I’m not saying that KU was robbed, either, just that KU’s poll position represents three years of hard work by players and coaches, while for MU I figure it’s a lot to do with chemistry-by-chance.

…Or maybe I’m just jaded after spending so damned many years watching MU’s athletics program swing between extremes of sharp dealing and screwing around.

¹I lived in Columbia, I went to MU, I came of age in that place, and hardly a day goes by that I’m not reminded of the person I became while I was there. I even feel touches of nostalgia from time to time. But none of that changes the fact that I left that town with my tail completely between my legs, dammit.

Thoughts: typesetting print-only pages

2007-11-22T06:13:00.000-06:00

Earlier today I posted a comment on Twitter about the habit of some sites in which they set fixed-width columns for their bodycopy on print-specific layouts.

In short, this habit annoys me.

Print-only page audience

Other than printing, there’s one other reason to visit a print-only page: to click to an un-paginated article. I’m a fan of pagination, but not if it requires me to load a series of brand new pages; a solution like the one used for several years on iht.com is far preferable, to a point.

The result is that I, like so many other people, will click over to the print-only page for the benefit of making one single page request more, rather than three or more.

The point is that print-only pages get a lot of online use, because I know I’m not the only person who feels hostile toward excessive pagination.

…Which leaves us with bad and thoughtless typesetting

The practice of producing print-only pages with static column widths and auto-leading is, in short, a bad one.

Auto-leading on long pages underscores the best reason for pagination, namely avoiding the discomfort of keeping one’s place in the copy while scrolling.
However, I don’t believe that oversight is intended as a disincentive. Someone probably believes that auto-leading will conserve paper, but decreasing leading on magazine articles won’t conserve that much; increase leading by one-sixth of a line and, if you’re using twelve-point type, you reduce the number of words that can fit on a page by 60 or so (15%). Assuming stories of 500-1,000 words and plugging in this metric, auto-leading suggests that most of your stories will print across two or three pages.
Where does this leave the cutoff?
Pagination points in words for stories printed with 12-point bodycopy, with and without increased leading
Page Auto-leading + 1/6
1 400 340
2 800 680
3 1,200 1,020
The conclusion that can be drawn is that the only common story length likely to cause paper “waste” as a result of an increase in leading is 700-750.
Unless 750 words is a happy place in your editorial guidelines, why not increase leading on the print-only pages? Your visitors will love you for it.
Fixing the column width in pixels is an inconvenience to those who use text zoom rather than page zoom.
Once Firefox 3 (which will support page zoom) ships, this concern will go away. In the meantime, it’s a pain to see my words-per-line decrease when I increase the type size.
If ’twere me, I would:
1. Link a stylesheet of type="print,screen”
2. Create both @screen and @print blocks in that stylesheet
3. Emplace width: 50em; in my screen bodycopy rule and no width attribute at all in my print bodycopy rule (which will allow the copy to occupy the full width of the printed page).
…Why a line length of 50ish ems?
50ish ems often translates to twelve or thirteen words, which is at the low end for optimizing the legibility of long passages of text. That approach also allows for fully justified margins, which for all but the longest paragraphs convey the idea of higher production values. Especially long pieces should avoid justified margins, however, as the ragged right margin eases place-keeping.
The alternative is to allow the lines to run completely across the screen in both print and screen media, which at higher pixel pitches will improve readability at the expense of legibility.

Pagination points in words for stories printed with 12-point bodycopy, with and without increased leading
Page	Auto-leading	+ 1/6
1	400	340
2	800	680
3	1,200	1,020

This is all rather pie-in-the sky thinking, and when I look at my most recent print-only ruleset I see that I let the bodycopy run across the breadth of the page — you could say that I’m thinking this through for the first time.

Frameworks: it’s the fidelity, stupid.

2007-11-18T07:07:00.000-06:00

Jeff Croft asks:

What is it about CSS frameworks that bothers you so?
What bothers me about frameworks in general is that they fool inexperienced users into believing that their tool of choice can solve any problem efficiently, when in fact one-size-fits-all tools wind up being so complicated to learn that the student is better off just learning the fundamentals of the underlying technology anyway.
When I limit the answer to the scope of CSS, the same objections raised by one of my own A List Apart articles rear their proverbial head: by pouring your work product into a framework, you’re building around the abstractions it creates, rather than the objectives and specifications of your project.
Do you want CSS and (X)HTML to be easier for everyone, or would you rather it be a highly-skilled craft that requires the assistance of experts?
I want Web publishing to be easy for all of those who want to engage in it, a desire which I hope is adequately expressed by the fact that I’m publishing this post on Blogger (of all possible platforms). Ideally this publishing will be done right, and I fart in the general direction of tool developers who are too lazy to ensure that their tool will, in fact, do it right.
[I am far from convinced that framework developers in general are undeserving of that particular wrath.]
Why is this just coming up now? Why did no one mind when Yahoo released their CSS framework, but people are bothered by Blueprint? What’s the difference?
…The responsible parties at Yahoo have made a number of good faith efforts to engage with the WebDev community generally and the standards advocacy community in particular, while Google does things their (secretive, paternalistic) way and expects everyone to like it, no matter what. It stands to reason, then, that Google attracts criticism from the people who accommodate Yahoo.
Do you simply oppose the idea of frameworks as a whole? Do you also dislike the JavaScript frameworks that have been so popular recently? Do you also dislike backend frameworks like Django, Rails, and CakePHP? Or is there something specific to CSS that renders it somehow inappropriate for these frameworks?
Yes, yes, yes, no. See my answer to question [1], and don’t forget that when given a tool that permits laziness, lazy people will take full advantage of that permission. This is partly informed by my own experience: the vast majority of Web application developers I’ve worked with are lazy as hell when it comes to learning client-side fundamentals, and limp along on crap markup unless and until their jobs require them to take things up a notch. To this I can add that during my recent week in the Bay Area, I was surrounded by people who have been going toe-to-toe with just the sort of lazy developers I’m railing about here.

The bottom line of this argument is not about the accessiblity of the technology, but rather about the work habits and professionalism of the people who work with it daily.

Jeff’s post closes with the following:

“…[Top tier CSS experts are] realizing, quite frankly, that their skill set may be less valuable in the future than it has been for the past couple of years.
“I’d love to be proven wrong, but until someone speaks up with some good reason why CSS frameworks shouldn’t be used, instead of simply asserting that they shouldn’t, I’m convinced these folks are just trying to drum up some false job security.”

Congratulations, sir, you’ve just maligned as cowards people whose only wrong was disagreeing with your position. That is not the way to win an argument.

I ask you to win against this argument:

Until adequate compiler-like tools exist that make possible automagic transitions from two- to three-column layouts (to say nothing of more sophisticated evolutions) in the course of (re-) designing a site, frameworks serve the purpose of allowing the lazy to be even lazier, the ignorant to be even more clueless, and the shortsighted to be even more thoughtless toward the poor s.o.b.’s who will be forced to live with the unintended consequences of their implementation decisions. Furthermore, it is unconscionably irresponsible for framework developers to tout their work as broadly useful, even in the hands of inexperienced people who haven’t learned any better.

The good, bad, and indifferent southpaw

2007-11-18T06:03:00.000-06:00

“Things Lefties Are maybe Not So Good At!” turned up on StumbleUpon, and I found it whiny. My own take:

Public telephones: not a problem. If ya just gotta do the full smash left-handed, you hold the receiver between shoulder and ear and let your fingers do the walking just like anyone else. Working a cellphone keypad right-handed is hell, though.
Remote controls: huh? They suck, end of story. See also my comments about cellphones.
Tone arms: again — huh?
Writing: since this can’t be taught with the mirror method, it takes a lot of practice to get up to speed with one’s right-handed peers... but after controlling for extensive computer use, my printing’s always been spiffy. My cursive is another story entirely. And I never, ever bother with felt-tipped pens for writing, and I would sooner take the time to do a slideshow than attempt a whiteboard presentation; while more time-consuming, the former approach ensures that people will actually be able to read the ideas I’m trying to express.
Scissors: like so many items on this list, a non-issue for kids (and consequently adults) who suck it up and go to the effort of catching up.
Trousers with one back pocket: again, a non-issue. You get into the habit, and on blue jeans and the like, the left pocket always goes empty.
Zippers: not a problem, except that I didn't get the hang of them until I was well past my ninth birthday.
Recreation requiring sticks or clubs: now this list starts to make some real sense. I refuse to learn golf because of the hassles that go along with being a left-handed golfer. I’ve never shown any aptitude for hockey or baseball (though I suspect that has more to do with my comparatively poor depth perception), and I struggled through learning billiards, which I shoot right-handed except when forced into shots that other players make behind-the-back.
Shoelaces: the mirror method rulez, people. Problem is, no-one figured that out to my benefit until I was seven years old. That was one of my more significant humiliations as a kid.
Notebooks: looseleaf paper, sewn/perfect binding, and top-set spirals are da bomb — and chances are on any given day that you can go to a store that sells them.
Checkbooks: oh, puh-leeze. Tear the leaf out before you write on it. How hard is that?
The chained pens at the bank: oh yes, now you’re cookin’ with gas.
ATM machines: huh? The greatest risk for me is losing my card in the older machines that don’t return your card before spitting out your money, because the focus of my attention drifts to the left as a matter of course. Actually operating the things is not any particular challenge, though.
Keypads and mice: again, practice makes perfect. I can easily pass ten-key tests aimed at non-experts, have been able to since I was a teenager. And mice pretty much need to be on the right, since the housings of most mice are molded specifically for the right hand. Even a mouse that’s symmetrical on the axis parallel with the direction I’m facing is a pain in the ass to use left-handed, after so many years of right-handed mousing.
Duelling elbows in restaurant booths: now, this one I feel with my gut. If I’m out to eat with you, I will insist on sitting on your left, and that will be the end of the conversation.

Moving on from the list on the linked page, the two things that always drive me up the wall are cabinet video games and kitchen setups, which almost universally demand the greatest dexterity from one’s right hand if one is to avoid crossing or switching hands in the course of using them. Bleh.

In Silicon Valley, oddly enough for the first time

2007-11-12T15:37:00.000-06:00

Courtesy of a friend and colleague, I’ve been asked to spend this week in San Jose working for a Company You’ve Probably Heard Of. (…Not the first, but the first I’ll be allowed contractually to claim once the gig’s done.)

Given that today makes the first time since high school that I’ve been in the Bay Area, and given further that the Valley presents something completely different from what I expected, this trip is a little bit like something out of film. (…Less so than I would expect of San Francisco, but enough all the same.)

Give me ’til Friday, and I’ll surely have some thoughts to share… but until then, I must get my lappie back to usable condition (I restored from image immediately before leaving Lawrence) and get my head down so that I can bill some hours and impress the client (which is the whole point of the trip).

Google as the new Microsoft, and what it might mean

2007-11-07T13:32:00.000-06:00

[Much of what follows is speculative and based on my memory of things I’ve read online, mostly in blogs but less frequently in personal communications.]

I should be working, but a thought finally coalesced with respect to Google: they suffer from the same hubris that makes Microsoft so intolerable, similar not only in degree but also in character.

[As if to support my point, this item just turned up on my Twitter stream.]

By all reports Google is a great place to work, and despite its size still retains a hothouse vibe. Their decision to open a data center in the Columbia Gorge warms my native-Oregonian heart. It’s undeniable that some Really Cool S--t is finding its way out of Menlo Park. As it stands, the Web is better for the fact that Google’s in the marketplace.

However…

Google’s recent business moves, their defensive silence toward the community of Web standards advocates, the tone of their press and public relations — not least Eric Schmidt’s conniptions after he was thoroughly made by c|net on the strength of data provided by Google itself — and a small number of personal communications leave me feeling uneasy about the stamp that Google is bound to put on the Web.

Whether they realize it or not, Google’s gone out of their way to convince me that they know what’s best for the Web, doing so in a tone so paternalistic and annoying that my reaction can be best summed up in words of one syllable.

While I may be part of a tiny minority now, I’m certain that I’m not alone — and that I’m likely to be among climbing numbers of distinguished company as time goes on, if current trends remain in place.

A List of Bad Things I Don’t Want: Google Edition

A monopoly market in the Web ad brokering space
Yes, I know that there are other vendors out there, and some of them are doing quite well. I’ve even had one of them as an end client. However, Google stands by silently while the press insinuates that they’re in direct (and hostile) competition with Microsoft and Yahoo for brokerage market share — a silence which speaks quite loudly.
This is a problem because: as the clear leader in search, and being the only one of those Big Three whom I can count on to really Get It and innovate (sorry, Yahoo, but that’s the writing I see on the wall, hooray for overly-deep orgcharts), I reckon it’s a matter of time before they have a commanding market share. With that outcome supposed, consider further that Wall Street loves revenue, and that Google’s rank and file have a personal interest in the health of their stock holdings. Given this intersection of interests and the lack of transparency about Google’s ad revenue payments to publishers, I’m discouraged by the thought of what might happen over time.
Ubiquitous — if not inevitable — single-source toolkits
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Google’s been working overtime to make pretty new toys for us Web developers. Google’s people are smart, and their tools are terrific, but what happens when those tools achieve ubiquity? I would think that all hell will start to break loose, security-wise.
This is a problem because: monocultures are bad, yet Google seems quite happy to try and create some.
Process opacity
Google refused to yield on privacy issues. They maintain strict silence about details of subjects such as blacklisting and revenue payments to publishers. Despite experience and contacts, I know exactly squat about their application beta test process, and not for lack of keeping in touch. To be honest, when I consider those things I wonder if I’m looking at a company that has a Politburo rather than an executive team.
This is a problem because: in a future where a single company has its hands into every page request, that company ought to be transparent to a point for the sake of the public good… but Google’s culture militates toward secrecy, a fact which is unlikely ever to change.
Horizontal integration and/or presence to the point of absurdity
Rather than focussing on “killer apps” Google is getting its fingers into every-damn-thing, and they’re not terribly shy about their intention to plaster their name on as much online real estate as possible. Whether we realize it or not, we as users are already forced to deal with Microsoft’s omnipresence on our desks. The last thing I want is for any company, even Google, to homogenize the Web in the spirit of Microsoft’s example.
This is a problem because: in the long run it will hold the Web back by limiting the avenues along which innovation and creativity can move.
Significant privacy-destroying design flaws in critical applications
This is related to the fear of toolkit ubiquity outlined above, and to a degree my feelings on this matter are due to Google being a victim of its own success. People rely on GMail to conduct business, and in fact I may be cornered into doing the same thing before long. The prospect of Yet Another GMail Hole is the one thing that’s stopped me, though.
This is a problem because: at the bottom line, it’s the same problem suffered by Microsoft — get enough valuable data or resources in one basket, and some unscrupulous and/or attention-whoring shitbag will go out of his way to ruin the days of several million people… in this case, using Google’s platforms and infrastructure to do it.
A market environment in which one company can be coerced by any authority into surrendering personal data by the metric boatload
Search, GMail, Desktop, Maps, Blogger, Analytics, and AdSense all provide data that in appropriately intelligent and resourceful hands can be used to conduct all manner of surreptitious surveillance. When I consider the attitude toward civil liberties of the sitting Presidential Administration, and further the precedent set by Yahoo when it rolled over for the Chinese government, I am deeply discouraged about Google’s ability — even given the best of intentions, and its public interactions with the U.S. Government to date — to protect its users’ right to privacy.
This is a problem because: societies without effective safeguards of personal privacy melt down eventually, and Google is going out of its way to be part of the problem — in part because of the market it’s in, but also because of its own strongly-hewn culture of secrecy.
“The standards are what we say they are, ’n y’all can just f--k off.”
Microsoft’s already doing this, and has been for years with its foot-draggin’, platform-embracin’, interface-extendin’, market-assimilatin’, monopoly-havin’ ways. And here’s Google, twisting-spindling-mutilating the Web toolset and screaming from on high that that’s just they way it has to be.
After more than five years of being called upon to live up to the requirements of being attached to the best-known Web standards advocacy organization on the planet short of the W3C itself, I am here and now calling Google’s position a steaming heap of lies — all the more because in search and ads, they are clinging to lowest-common-denominator implementation methods that actually retard market adoption of up-to-date platforms… in spite of the fact that they have literally hundreds of people in their organization who are far smarter than I ever dreamed of being. If I can make it work, and if I can imagine ways in which it can be made to work in environments I haven’t worked in, why can’t they?
This is a problem because: the evolution of the Web will only move at a glacial pace (with respect to its potential) until both Microsoft and Google wise up. So, why is a company for which the first standing order is “don’t be evil” being part of the problem, rather than being part of the solution? In all cases save destructive mutation. evolution is a good (i.e., not-evil) thing, yet as part of the problem Google is stunting that evolution. Good job, guys!
All of the above, plus willful ignorance of the wisdom of crowds.
I’ve heard tell of many smart people who’ve been recruited by Google, which should not come as a surprise. What will surprise you is that the potential roles for these prospects were worked out by management before they were ever contacted, to the point that they were told in great detail what they would be doing if hired — not unlike a military officer being sent to a new billet. This speaks for some sort of grand vision on which the public’s not being let in, and that’s the part that really scares me.
This is a problem because: any company that seems inclined to ignore its customers, preferring instead to follow an analogue of a Five Year Plan, is not a company I want anywhere near the Web that is my living and my link to the outside world. And I don’t give a damn how smart the people at that company are, if that’s how they wanna play it.

And before you cry “Godvinski!”

The more thoughtful among you have probably noticed that I’ve made two archly-put comparisons between Google and the Soviet Union. Part of that editorial position is by way of introducing an additional element of fear into my rhetoric, for sure. More to the point, however, years of private and academic study of post-1812 Russian history make the comparison too easy for me to make. Maybe I’m just seeing Sergey Brin’s stamp on Google’s culture and freaking out¹, but on consideration I see that as a bit of a stretch. There’ve surely been a lot of changes since Google brought aboard professional managers.

However, that Google reminds me of Russia² for any reason should by itself be instructive, even without the quasi-political subtext.

Conclusion

All of the points I outlined above, especially the last, leave me under the inescapable impression that Google thinks it knows what’s good for us, better than we do. Thanks to Microsoft we already deal with one company that’s foisted that view on its market, and we’re all familiar (to a greater or lesser degree) with the manifold consequences of that attitude. The thought that we’re letting it happen all over again is bothersome, to say the least.

Footnotes

¹As cultural traits go, mania for secrecy is pretty well a Russian one. All generalizations, comparisons, and contrasts aside, I really do hope that I’m looking at an absurdly misplaced but mostly harmless cultural artifact, and not some flaw in an important system (Google as a company) that could bring down the full smash to the detriment of the entire Web.

²Yes, I know better than to conflate Russia and the USSR, but in this instance I’m referring to Russia as the latter’s predecessor and successor state. Yeah, that’s me, being pedantic so that you don’t need to. You’re welcome.

Asus Eee: forward to the past for graphic design on the Web?

2007-11-06T11:10:00.000-06:00

Well, it’s not the world per se that’s getting smaller. The Web is another story, because of developments in the ultra-mobile PC space — and I strongly believe that these developments will have far-reaching consequences for best practices of graphic design on the Web, if they take hold in the marketplace.

Think small

Almost two years ago, I tore open a box with a buy.com shipping label and removed my brand-new subnotebook computer, which since then has earned a lot of oohs and aahs — it’s obviously not a Macintosh of any description, and it was somewhat underpowered even when I bought it (1GHz Celeron M CPU, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, XP Home), but it’s still a piece of work. I’m a Web guy. I don’t need tons of juice to get my job done.

More to the point, I’ve spent my entire adult life living the car-less lifestyle, so a rig that I could easily carry and shoehorn into small-ish public spaces was (and is) a wonderful thing to own.

Now that it’s been two years, I’ve started looking casually for a replacement… which means that I’ve noticed the announcement of the Asus Eee and its appliance-ish cousins that are already on the market.

I may well buy one, even if I need to get a portable disk drive too; $400 is a hard price to beat for a widget that can support everything I need except graphics, and my professional development is definitely taking a sharp turn toward the programming end of things.

Don’t misunderstand me — the Eee is a 1.5G product at best, and it’s a matter of time before OEM’s concede that keyboards are both necessary and constrained by a hard lower bound on size. Kids and petite women can get mileage from machines like the Eee, and so can folks like me who are smallish-handed and know how to type. As for bigger guys¹, or power users who are tethered to ergonomic keyboards², fuhgeddaboutit… and if you rave on stylus interfaces, expect me to guffaw in your general direction.

My point is that people want small and affordable machines that they can actually use, and I strongly believe that eventually the 7" display, or something close to it, will gain share in the user population.

Necessity is the mother of invention ’n allathat. Touchscreens will improve, or someone will come up with a more-usable yet adequately-simple keyboard design that will fit into that form factor.

If I’m right, that means that the march to 1024w layouts will falter. Ponder that.

Footnotes

¹My best friend in town stands 6'4" and weighs 240#. He runs in terror from the prospect of borrowing my notebook.

²…But I can’t stand ’em. I do not need some smartypants industrial designer telling me how to use my hands; as a sinistral, I have my own way of doing things. I also have a ton of acquaintances who swear by ergos.

Pajamas and production

2007-11-06T10:09:00.000-06:00

“Facts and Opinions about Zeldman” is a fair assessment of my own frame of mind as well. It’s just… instructive, I guess, that I can’t claim the high-toned appointment calendar.

I’ve actually given much thought to the matter of dress lately, usually in a spirit of disbelief — “I get paid how much to walk to my desk and make what every day while wearing whatever I please?! You can’t be serious.”

[For those who might be wondering, typically I do don street clothes before putting myself to work each mor^H^H^Hday.]

In the inaugural post of this weblog (which is linked in the sidebar, for those of you visiting Blogspot directly) I hinted at tremendous ennui, and the question of dress is part of that — how much effort and attention to detail does it cost to even out the karma of someone who works in the environment I do, but was brought up to take stock in the Teutonic work ethic?

Over in another corner, you have outposts like Web Worker Daily which fairly glorify the advantages of offsite telecommuting.

So as I flounder — what was my original point going to be, anyway? — I can’t take my mind away from the fact that whatever this laid-back freelancing life can be called, it’s nothing that many people would recognize as a job. Even my once-stepfather, who telecommuted intermittently during the last five years of his long career as a freelance software engineer, promptly retired into circumstances where he was called upon to work long days with his hands. My father spends all of about ten or twelve hours on campus, yet teaches two online courses and thus draws a full package — but worked on mind-blowing schedules when I was a kid.

Oh, hell, I should just stop questioning it, and remember four things:

I’m damn good at this job.
I’m damn lucky to have it.
I certainly could stand to put in more hours, billable or not.
Gratitude is the point, not guilt.

Scribbles: benefits of Web standards

2007-11-05T14:49:00.000-06:00

One of the ongoing discussions in The Biz has to do with the business benefits of {x}. Since I’m formally attached to the Web Standards Project, the {x} on my mind today (as on many days) is Web standards. (Betcha didn’t see that comin’.)

So… there are three ways I can think of to improve a process or deliverable:

make it faster,
make it better, and/or
make it cheaper.

For the sake of note-taking and reading aloud as much as any other, I’m writing to answer the implied questions as they relate to standards-friendly site development.

Web standards are faster because…

…The reduced overhead of standards-friendly markup improves load times — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

…That same markup improves the signal-to-noise (i.e., content-to-markup) ratio, resulting in content that’s easier to maintain.

…Given effective project management and sufficiently trained operators, standards-friendly processes and tools allow for narrower specialization by virtue of separation of content, behavior, presentation, and business logic. This in turn makes it possible to throw more people at projects in parallel.

Web standards are better because…

…They make feasible technologies such as Ajax and third party applications which can add depth to the user experience.

…The same separation and cleanliness benefits that can improve time-to-delivery and load times also simplify modularization and thus provide greater facility for extending sites and applications in lieu of redesigning them from the ground up to account for new features.

…Well informed use of CSS makes possible layout techniques that table-constrained producers and designers can only dream of.

Web standards are cheaper because…

…The same parallel production approach outlined above can be eschewed in preference to a serial approach involving smaller teams, reducing capital investment in projects down to a manageable rate. (This is one of the more important reasons behind my preference for small teams.)

…Modularization and cleaner production values at the code-and-markup level reduce maintenance requirements.

…Improved load times result in incrementally reduced investment in bandwidth and hardware.

Sounds great, but why the hard sell?

The only reasons these plusses do not make a slam-dunk case for Web standards are:

increased testing requirements, and
the need to re-train.

The more important of these issues is re-training, which is usually difficult, but not always difficult.

A wealth of resources such as w3schools, the MSDN Library, CSS Zen Garden, and A List Apart (among many) exist to bring along those who are just starting to learn about the current state of Web technology.

For those who need ongoing support in their education, css-discuss and other communities keep the fledgling learner in good company.

The rest of the re-training task is taken up in the course of actually doing, a process which culminates in the production of a site built entirely to the spirit, and quite possibly the letter, of established W3C Recommendations and other recognized best practices… entirely from arbitrary design documents.

Once an operator is properly trained, testing is simplified, because he or she will already have become quite familiar with many of the bugs and other pitfalls faced in the course of undertaking standards-friendly development. The others can — as a rule — be sussed out in community/form threads and, as a last resort, via search engine queries. I can speak for the effectiveness of both of these avenues for avoiding and working around browser bugs.

This leaves the conscientious project sponsor with two questions:

Who bears the cost to train my people?
How can I best make the switch?

The answer to the first question is somewhat academic, in part because your people will learn in the course of applying knowledge to their work on your projects, and elsewise because the added skill will make them more valuable to the marketplace. Either way, operators will rightly expect you to share some of the wealth gained from your improved bottom line. If you do not pay for formal training, you’ll only be putting off raises demanded either by your operators directly, or by the marketplace.

However, the share you give up from the improved bottom line will only be incremental; your organization will still enjoy the lion’s share. This is a fair expectation because among other benefits, your people will experience fewer hassles and less tedium in their jobs (all other factors being equal).

The answer to the second question is more complicated, because you've essentially got two choices: either go cold turkey from one approach to the other, or travel slowly.

Of these the latter offers the least aggravation for all participants. If you can start with some smaller projects — e.g., product marketing microsites and internal applications — you can set up your operators to act on what they’ve been learning, while simultaneously reducing the risk to your bottom line.

The reduced risk does not automatically translate to reduced hassle or delays, but when people are being trained, when is that ever the case?

One other contingency: transitioning from the contract build to ongoing maintenance

Let’s suppose you hire some hotshot hired gun (like, uhhh, meeeeee!) to equip your site with the newest, shiniest standards-friendly bells and whistles. Let’s suppose further that your fulltime Web team can’t tell asses from elbows when it comes to Ajax or CSS. What then?

This scenario requires multiple remedies.

Excellent documentation

Exhaustive explanation of the template, stylesheet, and code structures used during the design of the project is a must-have.

Onsite training

Somebody should come onsite and put your team through an ad hoc boot camp. Alternatively — if your hired gun isn’t especially facile at public speaking — there should be an internal forum or mailing list set up for the benefit of maintainers, along with contractually defined support requirements. This turns your contract team into little more than a glorified helpdesk, and they may choose to refer some other team for the job. The bottom line is that untrained people will have questions — and lots of them. Someone should be on tap to answer those questions.

Effective management

Project and department managers with the communication skills required to successfully track and define problems at the appropriate level — who have a clear idea of the obstacles their people are facing — can make the best use of the time and other resources spent to ensure that the problems are solved.

In short, Web standards adherence is an endeavor that rewards those with initiative. Why not become one of them?

Web pet peeves

2007-11-05T10:22:00.000-06:00

[I first posted this on 21 October to Chapel, where I’ve blogged sporadically for quite some time. It belongs here, too. I’ll still be posting the really weeeird stuff over there, because that’s what it’s for.]

I ran into a major Web pet peeve and posted it to Twitter, in the process remembering that I have several others (a few of which I spent all afternoon working around)…

Web sources cited by mass media outlet content that don't link directly to them
e-commerce sites that break at ANY point when you’re using a browser other than Internet Explorer
e-commerce sites that don't create a semi-permalink to a customizable cart item
any application that breaks the instant you press the Back button, without warning you in advance of the consequences of doing so
failure to provide range selection support (beyond “check all”) for series of checkbox selection inputs (e.g. mail inbox)
applications that crash on purportedly tested platforms
process-critical services and applications that do not have a System Status resource
sites and applications that treat content sections like static search results
project sponsors who fancy themselves graphic designers despite a total lack of training and experience
ads with sound on otherwise silent sites
categorically, ads that talk
news and social linking sites that toss resources down the memory hole without consequently returning a 410 (Gone) status code along with the title of the clobbered resource (or at least some indication that something formerly lived there)
applications that enforce user behavior by limiting choice in a bizarre way (here’s looking at you, Facebook Status)
sites that are only useful if you pay, yet imply otherwise in their create-an-account pitch
anyone anywhere in any context asking how to “hide” source markup and things of the like
anyone anywhere in any context believing that because their fucking nephew can “make a web page” in twenty minutes, they’re entitled to a full custom e-commerce site for a few hundred bucks…
…and contrapositively, anyone who bilks the clueless out of thousands at a time for crap they build in twenty minutes with Flash or Dreamweaver
anyone who thinks that just because they’re entitled by the right to free speech to an opinion, they really just ought to share it, despite the stench of banality and/or thoughtlessness it emits
anyone who mistakes ignorance for willful malice
anyone who mistakes obstinacy for courage
anyone who thinks it’s okay to be narrow-minded about the narrow-minded

Aaahhh. Now I’m done.

If you bear any witness to irony, by all means bask in it.

THAT movie is SCARY? …Ye-ep.

2007-10-30T14:31:00.000-05:00

Time labels Bambi one of their “Top 25 Horror Movies,” which may seem incongruous, but really isn’t.

I feel that way because of my own experience, and I have a secret:

The thought of watching E.T. makes me heebed and nightmare-y.

That unfortunate fact is down to an even more unfortunate congruity in my own childhood.

Background: an offer made

In Spring 1981 I was a first grader and an enormous discipline problem in school. My soon-to-be-divorced, brazenly alcoholic mother was made an offer by her then-best-friend: the latter would agree (along with her husband) to be my guardian so that Mom could dry out, on the condition that Mom and Dad made $200 a month in support payments for the duration of the arrangement.

I was never asked for my opinion, presumably because all participants knew that I would scream bloody murder.

Dad agreed to the transfer of guardianship, on the condition that Mom make the near-term support payments on her own, and permanently waive her right to demand child support from him.

[She would break that verbal contract ten years later, at the very instant she learned from me that Dad had secured a tenure-track teaching job… but that’s a different story.]

When the music stopped playing on the evening of 7 June, I was living with the Fergusons in San Antonio… and if you know both San Antonio and Portland well, you probably have difficulty imagining two cities in the United States that could have been any more different at the time.

That dissimilarity, plus two thousand miles’ distance, plus finally the disruption of submitting to the (much stricter) discipline of two people whom I cared about but had a difficult time accepting as authority figures, made me absolutely miserable and lonely.

I’ve felt worse misery and loneliness from time to time in the years since, but not often, and in all cases because I’d been badly let down.

I look back on that time as a character-building exercise, if only because I was forbidden more than one hour of television a day, plus occasional ballgames … a rule which was enforced with some latitude, but not much.

Enter film

Deprived the anesthesia of television, I was encouraged to read books and newspapers at length, and during the two years my library cards got a lot of mileage. I was also taken to the movies frequently. I may have been miserable and lonely, but I can’t fault the Fergusons for trying to keep my mind and imagination fired up.

Most of the films I’ve forgotten, with the exception of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan… and E.T., which scared me practically to death.

Yeah, I know.

If you think it through, it should be pretty easy to figure out: a kindhearted young boy stuck thousands of miles from home watches a film about a kindhearted alien stuck billions of miles from home, and all hell breaks loose for the poor alien.

I walked out of that theatre knowing that a Speak & Spell wouldn’t do me a damned a bit of good, choking back tears, scared shitless, and beside myself with a really unpleasant flavor of empathy for that giraffe-necked fictional character.

I had nightmares of abandonment for weeks afterward. Not even Threads sends me into a headspace nearly as bad.

To this day, I still cannot bring myself to watch that film… and I default to Crankypants Mode until I become genuinely familiar with a new place.

whois on the s--t list?

2007-10-30T14:21:00.000-05:00

Privacy advocates dislike the openness of whois databases.

That an article like this could be written offends me for two reasons:

There are manifold mechanisms for private individiuals on whois records to protect their privacy. This means that in practice, lockdown of whois info would give even more negotiating strength to domain name speculators than they already possess.
Why is any privacy advocate on life obsessing on this issue when they should be bugging Big Telco about warrantless wiretaps? Jeez.

My personal take on the issue is somewhat informed; when I registered my domains in 2004, I put them into a whois proxy, unaware that Sunflower had screwed the pooch and listed my telephone number against my express wishes. Oddly, however, neither disaster nor hilarity ensued.

…Just sayin’.

Web 2.0, traditional IT, and Chicken Little ledes

2007-10-30T14:10:00.000-05:00

From InfoWeek by way of Slashdot, there's word that Web 2.0 technologies threaten the control IT has traditionally had over info management in the enterprise. The content’s solid, though the editorial slant’s annoying,

Preemptive tulips, anyone?

2007-10-27T03:49:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has handed 240 million dollars to Facebook in return for an exclusive relationship, and I am mystified as to why. If Facebook has their act together, that sum of money makes Croesus out to be a piker.

[I have long been of the opinion that given clear objectives, five tightly focussed people, and half a million dollars, any site or application that needs building can in fact be built in less than a year. So why on Earth would Facebook need nearly five hundred times that much money, unless their hosting bills are higher by orders of magnitude than I suppose?]

What I beg to understand is, why? What’s in it for Microsoft? I see benefits, but not 240 million dollars’ worth of benefits.

The more I struggle to spin golden knowledge from the straw of this purchase, the more lost I become.

The environment feels altogether too much like that of late 1998, but at least the attendant false hopes are confined to a much smaller place in the public consciousness.

Well, so much for that.

2007-10-27T02:51:00.000-05:00

I give up. The music business is going to change, that transition is going to be slow and painful for everybody, there is no silver bullet, and that’s just the way it is.

Or I could be wrong, but in any case my attempts to discuss it have done a terrific job of making me sound like I’m too big for my britches. Go me!

What will the future sound like?

2007-10-26T02:14:00.001-05:00

In my previous post, I defined three constituencies in the music business. None of these seem likely to leave it, since two are requisite and the third — the middle-man, of course — can do things well that content creators typically cannot.

I’ve assigned myself the task of speculating on what those three players in the game can do to maximize their benefit, so...

The consumer gets what he wants through recommendations and listening opportunities. The musician gets what he wants through hard work, good luck, patience, and probably too often a dash of bootlicking.

The record companies get what they want through savvy decisions and an inordinately fortunate position of control over the full smash, to which they are desperately clinging.

As it stands the consumer is in the best position over the long term. The production values of newly available music may fall, but not so precipitously as to make it unpalatable.

Musicians need access to, or possession of, marketing expertise in inversely proportional measure to their attractiveness to listeners — expertise they currently gain from their association with recording labels.

Traditional recording companies need to set up Internet-compatible methods of distribution, or die.

One solution capable of preserving the status quo has been screaming in my face...

Use the full capabilities of the network

It is feasible, if not entirely easy, to accurately meter filesharing traffic. It’s no less feasible to work out who got downloaded, with a workable degree of accuracy.

Ultimately, telcos and ISP’s are the ones best suited to figuring out the winners of the game, passing on the fair cost to their customers, and managing the payouts accordingly, but I am mystified as to the excuses for not having tried.

Encryption and spoofing exist as easily implemented methods for zarking the numbers, and widespread attempts to break the system would create a tragedy of the commons. At the same time, the motivations for such an outcome would result only if listeners:

Genuinely felt entitled to get their music for free, or
Considered themselves unconscionably abused by the recording industry.

Cogitate on those, kids, because they’re instructive in understanding the current music marketplace.

If the current distro model shatters, whence comes the money?

First, let's not forget that the Compact Disc (or at least optical media) will not go away. Files get clobbered, common formats tend to deliver poor quality even when played through the best amplifiers and speakers, and these days, at least, low-volume pressings are hard to find online.

In addition to this, if we assume that services and tangibles are all that can be obtained at fair value, what can musicians sell from those categories of goods?

Shows

This is a no-brainer, folks, even if it's a total forward-to-the-past item.

High quality collateral items (e.g., liner notes, posters)

For all the advances in consumer-grade printing technologies, few listeners will happily invest in fancy offset printing or screenprinting hardware, but given sufficient capital, musicians can contract someone who has. Of course, this only works if listeners are keen on identifying themselves as afficionadoes of a given artist or ensemble... but judging by the t-shirts I see, this happens pretty often.

Sponsorships

Superstars everywhere get sponsorships that are often worth more than they make at their day jobs. Can’t this scale?

I suppose that in a world of consumer-friendly, recording-industry-hostile distribution channels a premium would be put on the average contribution to these revenue streams that is far greater than what we see today, but I’m not convinced it’s not feasible.

Another thought that occurs to me is that casual CD purchases may well drop in long run as a matter of course, for the same reasons that photography as a profession has taken a beating: background music will become flatly common, leaving the listeners who really care to fund more and better musicians, instead of swallowing recording industry pablum that allows the mediocre-yet-marketable to become superstars.

...And the record companies?

Middlemen are middlemen, so I don’t worry about how they will keep food on the table. The sharp ones will cut through the marketplace, and the dull ones will be ground down to nothing, end of story.

What happens if the recording industry gets the market protections it’s demanding?

To be honest, I don’t see that outcome having much shelf life even if it does arrive, for the same two reasons listeners already have for ripping them off. Technology will escalate; in the worst case the entire Internet population will be composed of petty criminals and their household-mates. How do you sue them all and get away with it?

Have I offered any sure solutions here?

No.

In the process I’ve confirmed the basis of Matt’s prediction, if not its particulars — I believe that the futures of live performance and niche recording have a much broader and more interesting scope than that offered by public-domain chamber music alone. However, that broadness can only come to life if the middlemen stop trying to shove the lowest common denominator down the throats of their entire market.

What does the present sound like?

2007-10-26T01:11:00.000-05:00

Matt Haughey wrote today-ish about his “half-assed” take on The Future of the Music Business, and after reading it I realized that the matter could stand more thought.

While I do not approach this subject as a musician aspiring to stardom, I have a number of friends — some of whom I’ve rejected as prospective clients by advising them to start out on MySpace — who are so aspiring. One or two of them have actually come tantalizingly close to notoriety, if not actual fame. (Only in Lawrence, folks.)

I care, and consider myself entitled to share my opinion, because:

I like music, to the point of its near-omnipresence in my life; and
I may well be one of the professional cohort who help bring about the form into which modern music marketing morphs.

[Say that last one fast ten times.]

What today looks like, from my perspective

You have these BigCorp entertainment companies who find the most marketable musicians, put them into straitjackets also known as “contracts,” and proceed to leverage the hell out of those same properties by recording, advertising, and distributing their creative product in the ways that maximize their return on investment.

[My choice of language is deliberately sterile here, especially when you consider that I haven’t yet mentioned the unfortunate consumers of this music.]

The end result is that traditional record companies — including indies — have the entire market for traditionally marketed music, between them occupying a vast but slowly shrinking majority of the sales graphs.

When I stop to game this out, I see three constituencies with entirely different (but not mutually exclusive) goals:

Record companies want to make the greatest possible profit at the smallest possible level of risk.
Musicians want to make a good living doing something they love, for wildly varying values of “good” and “love.”
Listeners want to get the greatest possible amount of enjoyable music possible per dollar of expenditure.

The way the system works now, most listeners buy Compact Discs with anywhere between six and twenty-plus tracks on each, amounting to a maximum of seventy four minutes of audio recordings. Of these, it’s typical that only half of them are good.

Musicians often wind up playing what they’re told to, of which half is typically crap they can’t stand.

Record companies, meanwhile, operate in a web of legal and political intricacies, which if navigated well result in receipt of the whole profits.

At least, that's what Steve Albini thinks, and he has no good reason to lie about it.

Meanwhile our three constituencies have devolved in parts to the following:

“Pirates” sit in one virtual corner, all of them merrily downloading stuff they only pay for as part of their Internet service bills, no portion of which go to the recording industry.
The recording industry sits in another corner, raising barriers of entry to music broadcasting in order to maintain control over their most important promotional medium apart from word of mouth. Simultaneously they make grossly negative examples of loyal listeners, forcing Internet service providers to spend on discovery what could just as easily have been handed over to the record companies without a ruckus.
Musicians run the gamut. Some whine and others innovate or experiment. Most just sit tight silently and do what they’re told while they wait for the dust to settle.

From all of this the writing on the wall is clear: the music industry as a whole must adapt to rapidly altering modes of distribution, and until it does, revenues will continue to drop.

In the next entry, I’ll discuss where things might go from here. Some of them might even put the lion’s share of the money where it belongs: in the hands of musicians and writers.

More about what you can expect to find here

2007-10-25T19:53:00.000-05:00

As follows, my priorities:

This space is for clients, too.
These posts will be moved over to henick.net and circumscribed.net painstakingly and on a case-by-case basis, once my Mother of All Publishing Platforms (well, that’s what it will feel like to me) is ready to push.
Some of the spelling, grammar, and syntax conventions I follow are anachronistic and/or technically correct yet borrowed from the conventions of languages that aren’t American English. Deal with it.
I’m not a fan of feeling sorry for people. I keep a paper journal for pity and soopa-deep introspection, but I don’t often write in it, because I prefer to work those thoughts out aloud.
I’m not sure yet how I’m going to handle code examples, but I’m sure they’ll crop up eventually.
If I go somewhere to do something, it’ll go on Twitter. If I need to discuss the journey and/or event in some kind of detail, it’ll go here, too.

For the first time in three years, I’m actually blogging under my own banner.

2007-10-25T15:57:00.000-05:00

Maybe I’m being impulsive, but what the hell.

It's time for me to start writing again without delay... mostly about Web-related topics, but there are others on my mind, too.

The item at the bottom of my to-do list for the past three years has been a publishing platform far more sophisticated than the one I built for my Illuminati Online site from back in the day (disable JavaScript before going to the actual content, if you’re really that curious), and my intent has been to write it before going back into regular blogging.

Meanwhile, life is — as they say — what happens when you’re not paying attention.

The good news is that I now have a client willing to finance that work in part (I think). The bad news is that my urge to bloviate has overtaken the march of time.

...So here I am.

Where is that, exactly?

First, some background

There was a stretch of about eighteen months where I had my heart ripped out of my chest repeatedly if only proverbially, most significantly by the unexpected death of my mother from cancer.

Nearer to the end of this spell I moved from Portland to the much different (if not necessarily greener) pastures of Lawrence, Kansas, encouraged by a few now-erstwhile friends.

A move away from Portland was something I was already planning when Mom fell ill, though how ill she’d become wasn’t at all understood until a week before she died.

In Portland, memories would be redolent on the air at every turn.

I have a good enough memory that I do not need to be reminded of the stretches of the lower Valley where I spent the years of my childhood that passed before interacting with my mother became an exercise in supreme patience. All I need to do is close my eyes and concentrate. The sights and sounds of memory will return on demand, vividly enough to make me cry.

No less difficult is recall of the sights and sounds of the afternoon during which I travelled to the hospital, trudged up to the ICU, told Mom — by that time so immersed in pain and the drugs meant to manage it that she could no longer see — that I would be okay and that she could let go, and then only moments later watched her do exactly that.

[...And the conversations I had with my grandparents that afternoon were even more poignant. Let’s not go there.]

That I would willfully choose to remove myself to the oh-so-cosmopolitan place known as Kansas was a mystery to practically everyone with an opinion. Everybody asked what my deal was, so to speak, and my response to everyone was if it was good enough for William S. Burroughs to die in, it’s good enough for me to live in for a while.

Apart from the previously mentioned encouragement and personal considerations too private to lay out in detail, there was the fact that at the time of my decision, I had an outside hope of obtaining a job with the online division of the local paper.

Northeast Kansas had (and still has) the virtues of being 1500 miles from my mother’s family, which became far less dysfunctional after her death but still has more issues than I want to deal with.

[...And lest you wonder, yes, I would move back with dispatch — and some ambivalence — if asked to do so.]

I had attended both high school and college in Columbia, Missouri (during and after my father’s graduate study in American history at the latter institution), which gave me insight about the values and virtues of the area. I knew Lawrence quite well by reputation.

To me, the choice seemed like it had possibilities.

The whole point was to get over myself already in a place where I would be able to steer clear of drama.

...And now?

After more than three years, I know I need to gear up and move on. As years go, 2007 has been full of questions and fears in full measure: is this all there is to life? For the sake of my own health, the answer to that question needs to be a resounding NO! If I stay in Lawrence too long, however, that's not the answer I’ll get in practice.

Having an apartment that I can stand to live in by myself has proven to me how far into my proverbial shell I can go, and at the heart of the matter I am neither young nor parochial enough to get the most out of Lawrence.

I need badly to raise my bill rate (or so I’m told). I need to go legit on software and paperwork. I need a car. But most importantly I need to start connecting with people around me, and starting a new blog is part and parcel of that task.

Beyond the demands of maintaining my own good mental health, I am forced to concede that so much has changed in the past three years. RSS and social networking have come into their own, which makes resource collection fractionally as difficult as before. The maturation of production processes for latest-gen browsers has begotten a lot of conversation in which I’d like to take part, and the evolution of Wikipedia has reduced the hassle of link research. All of these things together mean that blogging is a lot more fun and productive than when I was last into it.

So... "Hello, World!"

MumbleMumbleCoffee

The anatomy of a windproof lighter, or when your Zippo doesn't light

Symptoms and problems

The striker rolls with difficulty, or not at all

The lighter throws sparks, but doesn’t light

Refuelling the lighter

Resolving fuel starvation

Wick repair and replacement

Tools

The parts of the lighter

Copyrights and treaties and jails and oh, my

The realities of a level playing field

Living in the attention economy

The big disconnect: production cost vs. market value

The necessities of intrinsic value, effective marketing, and ease of access

Ease of access: should I stay or should I go?

Back to the problem: why restrictive legislation is wrong

How to set things right

Make stuff that’s truly greater than the sum of its parts.

Get the word out to as many people as possible, as often as possible.

Once you’ve got their attention, make it pathetically easy to obtain your stuff.

Make that stuff usable on the user’s terms.

Footnotes

Metered residential bandwidth: wave of the future

The best kind of insanity: thoughts on KU's national championship

On the subject of hoarding

For those who might wonder: what about me?

Two worldviews for the price of one?

But before you Sci-Fi Nerds Throw a Party…

To sum up the numbers

When you’re a Web nrrd, this passes for news

Angry thoughts about IE7 and IE8

Reasons I get mad about IE7’s twitchiness

My own experience

Gun rights, abortion, and frustration with Congress?

Blow by blow

Gun rights

Abortion

Frustration with Congress

Footnotes

Another memorial to EGG

Lessons learned from D&D: a list

There are lots of different ways to believe, and most of them are silly. Better to deal with it sooner than later.

If you want people to do something, you need to give them the tools and the incentives requisite to the task.

Work smarter, not harder.

The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes is valuable beyond price.

It took a long time for us to get to where we are, and in the meantime we thought up plenty of imaginative ways to betray, abuse and kill one another.

Computers. So. Very. Rawk.

Footnotes

After an entire month, a few observations about the day's experiences

Today I learned…

Meta tag mishmash

Who wins, who loses

Autobiography: stapling and car parts

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree

Remodeling

Eight months later, beside a classic Chevy pickup

Oh, how the issue of quotes refuses to die

Update, 3 hours later

Reflections on a month of MacBook experience

(Mostly pleasant) surprises

Brickbats

The enigma that is Safari

Geekery: the march of progress

IBM 305 RAMAC disk storage unit vs. 1GB SanDisk Cruzer:

Apple MacBook vs. AGC Block II:

Intellectual Property vs. the market

And in the news…

Power plant pollution: a few personal thoughts

Somewhere in the boonies of Missouri…

Pretensions to be Los Angeles

On the other side of town…

Footnotes

Opera and Microsoft: whither standards?

Note to self: functions of social networking

Doomed to repeat history?

So that’s what a pedigree is

Note to self: Windows XP fonts (and reasons why you can’t really uninstall them)

What I learned

Thoughts on the Kindle

`base` and `style`

`applet`

`img`

`legend` and `caption`

`fieldset`

`label`

`optgroup`

`acronym` and `abbr`