Misoverestimated
Jan 12, 03:03 PM by Rich Webster
There was a book published a couple years back called “Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, Media Bias, and the Bush Haters” (Bill Sammon)
Clearly this President was Misoverestimated. Clearly he’s the Worst President Ever!
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10 Things I gleaned from MacWorld Expo
Jan 12, 02:54 PM by Rich Webster
There’s been much hooha about MacWorld Expo these last few days. I’ve been going to this thing sinch the ‘80s. I was there on Tuesday, I have little to add, but here it is:
*The iPhone is great. Issues/problems be damned, it really does great things with the whole smartphone idea.
**It needs to be opened for developers **It needs to be available through other providers than Cingular/AT&T **It needs a bigger storage capacity **But, once again, Apple has leapfrogged the whole marketplace. Ta Da!
*Apple TV is nice. Not an urgent “got to have” but nice.
*MacWorld Expo needs to be split into “iPod Expo” AND “MacWorld Expo”. Those pod accessories clutter the place up.
*Developers need to embrace the Expo again. There just aren’t enough vendors to justify attending the whole show. One day was (barely) enough. I would’ve liked two days so I could sit through some more demos.
*The weather was beautiful while I was there.
*People got in line for the keynote at 1am. That’s crazy. We decided we should hire homeless to hold places in line. They’re on the street anyway. We’d auction the positions off. You arrive at 8am, hand over the cash, all fresh and rested.
*All the games are first-person shooters. The motion makes me nauseous. Can’t we have some nice CivII/StarCraft kind of games again?
*Coolest thing outside the Expo: Hannspree a store on Union Square with LCD TVs and monitors, dressed up, nicely. Good prices! I wish they had an affiliate program.
*Coolest thing inside the Expo, not from Apple: Photoshop CS3 .
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Great Articles from A List Apart
Jan 12, 02:29 PM by Rich Webster
A List Apart has the best web-design articles out there.
White Space clarifies the least understood and biggest bugaboo of web design, in my opinion. Let your effing website breathe a little, people!
How to Grok Web Standards was personally useful (I already Grok whitespace) because I’m perhaps 2/3 of the way through this process. This article nicely describes the challenge, and how to approach it. When I first started designing websites, it was relatively easy: the visuals all queued-up in the order and arrangement they were presented. Learning tables, when they came, was not much harder, though they eroded the simplicity of the HTML, they were so useful it was worth it.
But CSS2 (the “position” elements) are a bitch, for me. First: my WYSIWYG authoring tool, DreamWeaver, does not faithfully represent what will show in the browser. Then, whatever I do to the standards and in a logical way, goes haywire in at least one browser. I design for Firefox/Safari (the most logical) then correct for MS Exploder 6. It is just now getting to the point where I can sort-of routinely build a page mostly right the first time.
Heck, looking at this very blog, I have a problem with the left column (I’ll get to it, I really will!).
Honestly, I think I could’ve done a much better job than the folks who did CSS2. And then there’s forms. There is still not much you can do to make form elements behave.
My clients typically do not have the budget for me to spend an extra day making their sites fully CSS-adapted and compliant. So, I still build the page structure with tables, which are very quick and reliable, then I use CSS to fine-tune the presentation within the “td” tags. This works pretty well, because it isolates any CSS position problem to a single cell.
Still, I’m making progress, and quickly. Each new project I make CSS do more, with less fuss and frustration.
If I keep reading A List Apart I might just get there.
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In San Francisco for MacWorld Expo
Jan 8, 12:49 PM by Rich Webster
Saturday night we arrived, early evening, in SF. Our hotel is on Bush St. just above (literally) Stockton. Stockton dives under our hotel and under Bush St., goes through a tunnel, and arrives on Sacramento St. on the other side of the hill.
This is a great location. Chinatown is a couple blocks one way, Union Square is a couple blocks another way, it’s shopper’s heaven. But I’m not a shopper, really.
My wife’s working setup on the Expo, but I’m working, today, at the hotel, and attending the Expo when it opens tomorrow.
So I played tourist yesterday. I had lunch with my wife at Firewood in the Metreon. There are Firewood’s everywhere around here, and it’s a regular place for us to eat, when we’re in the city. Its quick, not expensive, and real food. The rotisserie chicken is excellent.
From there I walked to the hotel, did a little work, and then headed out for some excercise. I walked a block down to Chinatown, walked down the main drag until I reached North Beach (Italian neighborhood) where I stopped for some OK gelato (not great, as gelato goes, but very tasty nonetheless) and then walked up to Coit Tower. Price of admission $4.50. The views from the base of Coit Tower are free, and almost as good as those from the top, but since I’ve been visiting The City since childhood, and had never been up there, I went. Observations: they could use better signage: every elevator load of people faced several who didn’t know they had to pay first, or where to pay. Seemed obvious to me, but go figure. The view was great, but through plexiglass sheets that take the immediacy and some of the clarity away. People poke coins and business cards behind the plexiglass onto the window sills. Silly. But it’s a great historic landmark.
Last time I had time to kill in the city I went out to Golden Gate Park. I hiked to the top of Strawberry Hill. That was a great hike, but trees blocked most of the views.
Anyway, after Coit Tower, I walked down, found stairway off a side street, and wandered out to Pier 39 at “Fisherman’s Warf”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman%27s_Wharf. This, to me, is the least interesting thing in SF. So I walked straight thru and back to the Cable Cars. I rode the Cable Car back to the top of the hill, and walked back to the hotel.
When Laura got off we had a Mexican meal at Sotano’s Grill on Powell and Bush. Good, but not quite on par with the best Mexican I’ve had. Sal’s in Selma, CA, Tres Amigos in Grass Valley, Guapo’s in DC all are a bit better. But it was good.
This morning I found the payoff. I’m a big fan of a great breakfast. In Berkeley, there’s the famous Betty’s Oceanside which is just excellent, but you typically have to wait a minimum of an hour to get in. I found the equivalent in SF, and you don’t have to wait because it is (relatively) undiscovered: Dotties’ True Blue on Jones St. It ain’t fancy, it ain’t beautiful, and it doesn’t even have a dramatic menu… it’s just damn good.
This rates right up there with Betty’s, with the Squeeze Inn, in Truckee, with Morning Glory in Ashland, with Morning Thunder in Quincy… Go for it.
I also had breakfast at Roxanne Cafe on the corner of Powell and Bush, which seemed promising, but was just OK. Great location, though.
Another thing I’ve got to comment on. San Francisco seems healthier economically than in my memory. It is also more pedestrian friendly, and the city parking garage’s are a paragon of usability. Maybe that Gavin Newsom is more than just a pretty face. He certainly won points with me for the whole gay marriage thing… too bad it didn’t last.
It’d be nice if the homeless, weren’t. But what city doesn’t have that problem? Maybe Anchorage in winter. If they weren’t there, the city would be truly beautiful. But humanity is too damn human. Maybe national mental health programs could reduce the problem. Maybe, since California is one of the largest economies in the world, we could do it ourselves. But dealing with the mentally ill is probably the most complex thing we can do. The civil liberties, social and financial costs, the medical conundrums, all make it very difficult.
I read today that Arnold wants to cut welfare in California. Maybe if he provides universal healthcare, we’d break even, but we really don’t want to make the homeless problem bigger, by sending the remaining marginalia out into the streets. As our population increases we face these problems—at all times throughout history, a percentage of people simply couldn’t earn enough, or depend on family, or whatever for whatever reason: cognitive problems, social/mental problems, physical problems, or whatever, some people just don’t have what it takes. But most people who go on welfare, even before there were federal time limits, were on and off it in 2 years or less, and most of those were single moms. So I don’t think we should cut welfare. Increase job programs, yes, and that may reduce the welfare roles. But don’t cut people off.
MacWorld’s tomorrow, and I won’t take my time to post, until Wednesday at the earliest.
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Great Books by Neil Stephenson
Jan 6, 01:31 AM by Rich Webster
I’ve been rereading “The Baroque Cycle” a trilogy of books by Neil Stephenson. I just finished “The Confusion”
“The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)” (Neal Stephenson)
But you should definitely start with the first in the series:
“Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)” (Neal Stephenson)
I honestly think this is the most fun I’ve had reading a book. The possible exception might be the Terry Pratchet books, but as fun as those are, they are a “quick read”. The Baroque Cycle is three physical books, but could easily be six. These babies are fat! Yet every paragraph is fun, interesting, intriguing and even educational.
The time period is the 1600’s and the advent of the modern age of science is at hand. The characters include real people: Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz, various kings, queens, and sundry nobility of France, England, Russia, Germany, and more. The story exposes early economics, venture capital, political science, warfare, alchemy and “natural philosophy” in a delicious multithreaded storyline spreading over most of the lifetime of the lead characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza a woman who works her way from slave to Duchess. If you read Cryptonomicon, some of these names may ring a bell. The thread of characters that spanned from WWII to the Dot Com era now reach back to some 400 years earlier.
It is for geeks, but perhaps the swashbuckling and historical context might spread the target audience. The sheer audacity of Stephenson to write such massive tomes of such broad scope with such phenomenal detail makes him a great writer. When you read the details of London burning, or the intrigues of the court of Versaille, you suspect that Stephenson must have been there, taking notes.
If you can hack these, go back and read everything of his. There are no bad Neil Stephenson books. He became famous for Snow Crash.
“Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)
But my favorite before this series, was Diamond Age.
“The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)
If someone sat down today to cover the possibilities of nanotech in a novel of the dystopian future, you could never imagine it would become so interesting a study of social constructs, much less that it would be a great read. But if you take into account that it was written back around ‘95 you’d have to believe, once again, that Neil Stephenson owns a time machine.
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New Years Resolution: Post more than once every other month
Jan 2, 12:29 PM by Rich Webster
I’m not really one for New Years Resolutions. But I really should post more often.
My friend Dave created this site for a friend
That’s my post for today.
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Have You Gotten Spam from Richoid.com?
Jan 2, 12:02 PM by Rich Webster
Over the last couple months, some evil spammer out there has hijacked my domain to use in the “from” field of their Viagra, etc. junk emails. Research so far appears to give me no recourse. These spammers are apparently offshore, beyond the reach of authorities, lawsuits, and apparently, from basic human decency, as well.
If you’ve gotten spam from richoid.com, I feel for you… I get that spam too, and the bounced emails that don’t reach anyone, as well! I will continue to try to find a way to do something about it, if I can.
This seems to be a case of having my email out there too much, which is the inevitable result of having created numerous websites and having a blog.
I am going to begin to work to obscure my email links within my sites, and use form-to-email scripts whenever possible, however that is a bit like closing the barn door after the livestock has left the building.
Anyway, it isn’t me. I consistently council my clients to not spam, never respond to spam, and support whatever mechanisms exist to fight spam, at all times.
If anyone has any good and useful advice, I welcome it.
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Ajax and Information Architecture
Nov 23, 12:21 PM by Rich Webster
For the last year, I’ve enjoyed watching the emergence of Ajax as a revolution in web design and architecture.
For those unfamiliar with Ajax, you might want to read about it here, on Wikipedia. The basic idea is to use JavaScript with the “XMLhttpRequest” call. This allows server-side interaction to occur without reloading the web page. A single web page can replace a series of user actions and page loads that can be tedious and confusing.
The design challenge is not such a big deal for those who have designed software on the desktop… this kind of interaction has been there all along. Even those of us who don’t do any serious programming can understand the design issues if we’ve used tools like FileMaker to create databases, or complex Flash user-interactions. The whole point is to make a page responsive to user actions. In fact, what Ajax allows is real web applications. While Flash has allowed that for awhile, Flash is somewhat rigid, and is proprietary. The upside of Flash over Ajax is that browser presentation is absolutely consistent with Flash, while the variability of form elements between browsers is very limiting. Really, the biggest failure of CSS2 is the ugliness of forms.
Unfortunately for non-coders, creating Ajax pages will require you to learn coding, or to get really friendly with someone who knows code, both client-side (JavaScript) and server-side (PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, etc.). Note that I don’t include the Microsoft-centric technologies… there’s no need, and no percentage in learning the Microsoft way, unless your paycheck depends on it. Just stay with the open stuff.
The biggest mistakes I’ve seen with new Ajax web applications is intentional obscuration of interactivity. I see this a lot in Flash stuff, too. The ability of Ajax (really DHTML) to hide a form element, like an “input” element (a field), and have it pop up when the user clicks is pretty awesome. But this is a new, and a learned, behaviour for the user. It’s good to have this ability, but include an “edit” button, too. Be obvious.
Always remember, most websites are not applications: the user does not learn a site (with some exceptions). Most website visitors will only return to the site occasionally, and doesn’t have the time, the energy, or the motivation to figure out how to use a site. The user must be able to intuitively, or by reading, understand what their next action should be, and what the result of that action will be, prior to committing. It is up to the designer to provide these cues.
Also remember: While many people have broadband, and most web designers can barely remember a time before they had broadband (being early adopters), at least 40% of internet users still connect with a modem — poor bastards. It always strikes me as odd when web designers go on about “accessibility” for the visually handicapped, that they then go and fail a much larger percentage of users: the bandwidth deprived!
If you want to learn about Ajax, I’d recommend watching the Ajaxian blog and consider the excellent Head Rush Ajax book.
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Memetic Heretic
Nov 10, 06:26 PM by Rich Webster
I just had the pleasure of talking with a grad student from University of Toronto. She included me in a survey of “meme makers” regarding media, society and the Internet in a “post 911 world”.
My li’l meme is the “worst president ever” logo.
It’s a little disturbing talking about memes, mainly because the meme-master of the universe has been Karl Rove for the last few years. The key to a meme is to get it repeated so many times people accept it as a defining “wrapper” around whatever cultural, political or business dogma is floating down the river of collective consciousness. The Repugnicans had one for every occasion from “it’s too complicated” which they all repeated to kill the Clinton Health Care plan, to the “FlipFlop” meme for Al Gore or the Swift Boating of John Kerry.
Memes run like wildfire through the conservative community… they dribble through the liberal/progressive community. Free thinkers don’t trend well. Go figure.
For awhile, it seemed the biggest meme about Democrats among Democrats was that they were too disorganized—not “unified” enough to defeat the Repugnicans. That, in fact, is the one thing I like most about Dems. They are free thinking, non-unified debaters. That, ladies and gents, is what democracy is SUPPOSED to be. If everyone just dittos the leadership, that is NOT democracy. Get that meme through your head: unified is NOT democratic.
So some of us decided to take certain weak memes floating out there and amplify them. Not cynically, mind you. I do think history will reflect on the Bush administration as among the worst in history. So, I made a design supporting that, and tweaking the noses of those pickup-driving dudes with the oval “W04” stickers.
To me, the last 10 years should be known as “the great American stupid” (this won’t catch, people won’t admit to stupidity – especially semi-smart people who were caught up in the big stupid). We threw out everything that was creating progress and flushed it, became addicted to fear, and lost our claim to being the greatest nation. Economically, socially, environmentally, we’ve declined. At least a dozen other nations have better economies, better health care, better education, better salaries, better vacations, fewer people in jail, and more respect in the world than the USofA, and that’s just a fact. No matter how often the liars try to create the meme “greatest nation in the world” we just aren’t any more.
Don’t get me wrong, I think we can come back. But to get there, we have to watch, and learn, and experiment, and yes, spend tax dollars on people, before weapons systems. Let’s start with clean energy/energy independence, and diplomacy. Let’s move on to create universal healthcare. Let’s create open and free curriculum for every subject and every grade, and improve teacher training – it’s for our common good, lets put it in the creative commons. Let’s treat drug addiction as a health care problem, rather than an excuse to lock people away forever. Let’s realize these people are self-medicating. If they didn’t have problems to start with, the drug problem would never have gotten a foothold in their miserable lives. Mental health care has a long way to go, but rapid progress is being made.
Let’s divert the military space budget to peaceful ocean studies. That’s where we can get all the water and power we need, without environmentally disastrous damming and burning and nuking. Let’s disassemble the nuclear bombs and the nuclear power plants and stop manufacturing by the ton the most toxic substance known to man, so we don’t have to find a place to store any more than we already have. Think how long 10,000 years is, folks. That’s a long time to store anything, much less something as lethal as nuclear waste.
Conservatives have labeled environmentalists as crazy, extreme, anti-business. Crush that meme. We all eat: we need healthy food; we all drink: we need clean water; we all breathe: we need clean air. It’s that simple. Companies can make as much money serving these purposes as they do spewing waste—probably more. What’s more, workers won’t be staying home on “spare the air” days taking care of their wheezing kids (10% of children in most cities in America have asthma, and emergency room visits radically increase on bad days). Allergies and asthma are skyrocketing: partly because of our diets, partly because of the amount of toxic materials in our lives, partly because of antibiotic abuse, and partly for reasons no one knows yet. I’ve lost 3 out of the last 5 years of my life to this. If my house hadn’t doubled in value, I’d be bankrupt because of this. Pollution costs us real money, people.
Progress is starting again… I’m hopeful.
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Post Election Rumination
Nov 8, 08:01 PM by Rich Webster
Phew, glad that’s over.
We failed locally: Doolittle’s still in the House. But with the tide turned, at least he’ll be reigned-in, and who knows, maybe the investigations will turn something up, and turn him out.
Part of me just wants business to get done, and part of me wants to see the Republican Party and the White House investigated so thoroughly that a day-to-day, minute-by-minute history of the Bush administration can be written from it.
Locally, the little old ladies at the Lake Wildwood Clubhouse couldn’t get the machines turned on, so all the ballots were paper, at least for the first few hours. There was one Diebold. They said “the door wouldn’t close” but I’m not sure which door. The other machine was just a paper ballot scanner, which dumped the scanned ballots into a big, locked plastic box. But this wasn’t working either, so they had opened the little side door to the “auxiliary box” which, after only 40 minutes (I finished voting at 7:40am), was refusing to receive the big 14” paper ballots gracefully. The ends kept poking out.
I called the elections office after I left, and it took three tries over an hour to get through. I talked to a very concerned volunteer who assured me that the Registrar would be notified ASAP. That’s where I left it. The folks running the polling station had apparently not called in the problem. My call was the first they’d heard of it.
And this morning they announced Rumsfeld’s out. Too bad Bush and Cheney can’t be dismissed so easily. We need to switch to a parliamentary system. They’d have gotten a vote of “no confidence” and been out months ago.
The really sad thing is how many people still think the Republicans still should get their vote! It’s really sad people don’t pay close enough attention to see the broad swath of destruction they’ve wreaked on our government and the world.
It’s also amazing how many people will trade lower taxes for a shredded Constitution. In fact, the vast majority of people will get the same tax treatment from Democrats as Republicans. But in the end, it is going to cost us all more to have Republicans than Democrats… assuming the Dems still have Clintonomics on their minds. But the real savings will come from a renewed interest in worker and consumer rights and protections. Corporate lawlessness costs us all, in a very big way.
I don’t expect “corporate rule” to be ended by Dems, but it might get brushed back a bit. Another reason for a parliamentary system: small parties like the Greens could get a few people elected and pressure/work with either party to advance common goals, like global warming, and consumer protection. The Dems might’ve been less of a powerless minority, the last 10 years.
In the end it is both about individuals we’ve elected, and our ability to reach them. It is about grinding through boring policy work, and setting aside the stuff that sets off the extremist base, like flag burning and gay hating.
Will the tide turn for average Americans who aren’t benefitting from the “roaring economy” that I keep hearing about on CNBC? Let’s hope… and let’s call our representatives and complain if they get off track.
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