Archive for October, 2004

It’s getting totally ridiculous. And by ridiculous, I mean very very sad. :(

I’m in Asia right now, and being out of the States makes the dishonor and shame that my government has brought upon America all the more obvious and painful.

According to the Associated Press today, Bush and his conspirators now contend that the “invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.” The AP correctly points out that “This week marks the first time that the Bush administration has listed abuses in the oil-for-fuel program as an Iraq war rationale”

Kerry has an appropriate response: “You don’t make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact.”

John Marshall has a good take on it:

The whole thing makes me feel not only sorry for my country but also sorry for the Kerry campaign’s strategists and opposition researchers because what sort of supple and outside-box mind can possibly predict what arguments the president and his advisors will come up with next?

• In post-9/11 world, we can’t stand idly by while third-world politicians take bribes and kickbacks!
• War was justified because not enough schools and hospitals were open before the invasion.
• War was justified by back taxes owed to Kuwait by Iraqi occupation soldiers stationed in Kuwait during the second half of 1990.
• War was justified by Iraqi mendacity in fooling Americans into thinking that they had WMD.
• War was justified because the UN had to be freed up to work on East Timor and Sudan.
• War was justified because Kuwait is still called Iraq’s “18th province” in the Encyclopedia Iraqiana.
• War was justified because Saddam was discriminating against faith-based organizations in handing out government contracts …

Even granted that politics may be a less-than-fully-honorable occupation, there need to be some limit to the outright and continual lying.

Check out the latest beta from Yahoo!

From the site:

Personal Search - search for what you want, the way you want.

• Save the results you like. more
• Block the ones you don’t. more
• Share what you’ve found. more
• Find anything you’ve saved. more

Read more about it on John Battelle’s Searchblog, on Jeremy’s blog, at Search Engine Watch or directly on the Y!Search Blog.

There are at least two pieces of software that will increase the quality and functionality of the Treo 600 camera.

The first is qset, which allows you to modify the compression ratio used when saving your photos. Treo photos are stored in JPG format, which is a lossy format. By default, the Treo uses a compression/quality factor of 20, which results in files weighing approximately 20kb. Using qset, you can specify a factor up to 99. Any increase beyond 20 will be immediately noticeable, with 99 generating photos up to about 200kb. (I don’t know what scale this quality factor is on.)

I definitely recommend this piece of software. After you’ve added it, launch it from your apps menu and enter a new number. I recommend 90. With this new number added — which is a low-level system preference — all photos will be at the new quality.

The second program is called Pickem. Pickem provides quick sharing of photos as attachments, and more seamless web sharing, but it’s two other features are more noteworthy. First, it provides zoom functionality. Pressing “z” while in picture-shooting mode toggles the zoom mode. It’s digitial zoom not optical, of course, but it still helps in certain situations. Second, many users have suffered from the ‘blue dots of death’ problem that plagues the Treo 600’s camera. Pickem cures that problem.

If you’re using Pickem, it can exist in parallel with Pictures the default camera program. You can remap your launcher buttons to always use Pickem if you want, by going Apps -> Prefs -> Buttons.

Happy shooting!

I’m flying to Hong Kong tonight. I’m excited. Expect fewer posts the 7 days I’m away.

InformIT.com, a strange site that always suprises with great content, has an article up today called Searching for Substance: Web Browser Olympic Scorecard. In it, Nigel McFarlane “boils down all the competition between browsers into a single score for each browser.”

The premise is that a “web browser should strive to give the user perfect access to the World Wide Web. Not good access or great access, or this week’s access — perfect access. That goal might sound achievable, but it turns out to be something of a technical Holy Grail. It turns out that issues such as big buttons and smart, labor-saving features are far easier to achieve than silent, perfect access. Perfect access is what web surfers need, though. If the TV has drifted off the station, putting it into a nice cabinet won’t help. You need a clear picture.”

The four contestants are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera and KHTML/Safari. There are 5 events:

1. Recognize the type of any web document
2. Recognize the content of any web document
3. Understand the content of the web document
4. Display the web document
5. Keep users safe from villains on the web

I’ll let you read the article for all the good details, but here’s the summary:

Competitor	Score
Mozilla	4.87 (97%)
Opera	4.87 (97%)
KHTML	4.78 (96%)
Internet Explorer	2.79 (56%) or 3.79 (76%)

The tie between Mozilla and Opera is no doubt contentious. Such a tie is good for consumers, though. Even if IE gains points for setting de facto display standards instead of using public standards, it still lags behind the other browsers. It’s pretty clear from these scores why the confidence of the other browser engine makers is sky high at the moment. IE is being left behind, and anyone who has done this kind of analysis knows it. No wonder there’s a browser war.

(emphasis mine)

It’s fun being a Web Developer because we’re right in the thick of it all. I once defined a Web Developer as the team member with the most software. Webdev’s are in the middle of a triangle between (1) Project Management/Business, (2) Design and (3) Engineering. Therefore, we use all their software, and often act as liaison between the groups. I often use:

• Photoshop and Illustrator, tools of the Designers trade
• InDesign and Viseo, tools of the Interaction Designers trade
• MS Project, Excel, PowerPoint - tools of the Project Manager
• Apache, PHP, MySQL, vi, SecureCRT - tools of the Engineer
• Homesite, about 30 browsers, validators, and various small tools like sruler, Iconico…

Anyways, one of the more common questions a Webdev gets asked relates to the different between designing and building for The Web versus the controlled and familiar world of Print.

I’ve been reading Web Page Design for Designers for years now, and in this months issue Joe talks about just that in part 3 of Paper vs. Pixels. It’s worth a read, as he covers key points including:

Apart from providing an index or glossary, navigation is not usually an issue in print. …

Unless you produce comics that require special 3D glasses, print never requires on the reader having a ‘plug-in’.

Once the artwork has left your studio, duly checked for correctness and signed-off, what you get depends on the printer. There are lots of variables but you will have certain expectations and decent printers will do their best to meet them. If they don’t, you will have good cause to complain and if they don’t satisfy you, stand a good chance of losing future business.

The equivalent of a printer on the Web is the browser, the piece of software that interprets your instructions and displays it as a page on a computer screen. Just in the same way that you wouldn’t expect different printers to produce identical results from the same artwork, browsers won’t either. Sadly, there will probably be a much greater divergence in browser results than you would expect from printers.

This installment, the third, covers Navigation, Plug-ins, Browsers, and Multimedia. For the full story, be sure to read the earlier Part 1 (The ever-changing screen, Statistics, and Judging a design on your own screen) and Part 2 (Font sizes, Colours change, and Resolution).