July 2008 Archives

Haven't been publishing as frequently as I would like. Some excuses:

We finally moved into our new building at work. Everyone is now sitting together, at last. Lots of serendipitous hallway/kitchen conversations generally means more stuff going on in the day.

I'm working on two projects full time right now, and I'm consulting on a third. I'm managing 4 visual designer contractors concurrently. I'm making work calls in the middle of the BBQ dinner with my family, and I'm browsing stock photography at 10pm looking for the right brand feel for one of my projects. I haven't been this busy at work maybe ever.

My social life is full. My wife and I are trying to burn through our Planet Granite guest passes before the end of August, so we've got lots of rock climbing dates on the calendar. Plus we have weekend plans pretty much until the end of summer, like going to Boulder, CO for the long weekend. Leaving tonight.

I'll be back next week sometime. If I don't decide to eschew all technology and start reading books by candlelight.

Sunday nights are generally pretty crazy at the airport; All the weekend travellers maximizing their away time are getting home just before the start of another work week.

I was at SFO last night around 11:00pm picking up my wife and a friend. The arrivals area was a mess. Both lanes of cars had backed well down the approach road. So I veered right and went up to the departures level. What a difference. Hardly any cars. Hardly any people. Plenty of places to park and wait. No pseudo-cops milking their Hoarace Small uniforms for all the authority they can muster.

I got a call on my cell phone just as they were getting off the plane. I told them to come upstairs, then simply pulled around and picked them up. We were gone in 3 minutes.

Here's a photograph of the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris -- it's essentially a museum of the history of science and engineering, with an emphasis on the latter. They have great displays on scientific instruments, energy generation, bridge building, communications, computers, robots, and so on. It is a cool, geeky, science and rational-thinking kind of place, and definitely not on the usual "top five things to do in Paris" list. That's a shame, because the museum is a real treat. Many displays work for kids too, with nice interactive learning experiences. My son learned how to build a classic Roman arch, and how a back-and-forth piston in a steam train works, for example.

All of that would be only moderately interesting, but look again at the picture (click it for a larger image): the museum space looks a bit -- ecclesiastical. That's not an accident -- the it used to be a church (an abbey church actually, but close enough). There is something wonderfully ironic about a museum dedicated to the accumulation of scientific, rational knowledge being housed in an abandoned church. +10 points to the first comment that analogizes on the "beating swords into plow shears" biblical verse.

My wife and I have worked out  a system where one apologizes to the other when they do something that hurts the other one's feelings. This can be a bit challenging, especially if you don't think the situation warrants an apology (I think this is one of those Mars/Venus differences  -- woman tend to be more interested in the feelings of others regardless of value judgments of right or wrong. Me -- I've got a pretty strong sense of justice that clouds my empathy).

So initially when I apologized, I would often say something like "I'm sorry you took that the wrong way" or "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt." Of course the "I'm sorry you..." part isn't taking personal responsibility for the action at all. It's an apology loophole; the words sound like an apology, but the meaning isn't there. We've agreed that "I'm sorry you..." apologies don't count as a true apology. And in fact we now use them as a joke way to apologize in our little amusing banters.

I bring this up because a couple years ago, the Pope tried to get away with an "I'm sorry you..." apology to Muslims for an offensive quote he cited in a recent speech.

I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address which were considered offensive.

And here I thought this guy was supposed to be infallable.

I've been thinking further about fake small caps after my post on it last week. CSS is part of the problem too, with its font-variant: small-caps property. I did a cursory check, and none of the browsers use the true small caps characters, even when they are built-into the font.

So what we need are freely-licensed small caps versions of all the common web fonts: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times, Tahoma, Trebuchet... Once we have that, we just need the browser to use these fonts when font-variant: small-caps is applied. If the browsers don't support it natively, we could write extensions to do it, much in the same way I described my idea for a font-family service.

Surprisingly, there doesn't appear to be any small caps versions of these common fonts (even Helvetica!), except for Tahoma. Although I've had practically no experience creating fonts, creating small caps version seems like a bit easier task than creating a new font from scratch. I might give it a go. Anyone else interested?

Computers and the internet have changed the face of music. I remember downloading a 30 second audio sample of some popular Huey Lewis song on my Amiga back in the mid-80s and being blown away by the whole concept of sampling. I even bought a sampler dongle for that computer and did it myself (I still remember listening to Elton John's Candle in the Wind piano solo over and over, trying to figure out how to play it).

Then came MP3s, Napster, LaunchCast, BitTorrent, MySpace music, All Music Guide, YouTube, iMeem, SeeqPod, Pandora, JukeFly... the list goes on. And now iLike is part of that list.

iLike is a pretty deep product, but at its core, it is a place to list all of the artists that you like, and get up-to-date information about them. There is a certain set of artists for me (and others I presume) where I'm such a big fan, I want to know every new song & album that they release (even if they are buried on soundtracks or compilations), and I want to know when they are having a concert near me.

It's amazing that such a simple need took so long to get filled. In fact I'm really surprised Amazon doesn't have this as a feature. I already use Amazon to mine for music I don't know about. It's through this I discovered Toad the Wet Sprocket doing a down-tempo cover of Rock and Roll All Night on a Kiss tribute album. But it's a labor-intensive process. I want a service to do this work for me.

I'm not sure that iLike is perfect here, but they do have an RSS feed of news for all of my favorite artists, and it already notified me that Ben Folds' new album is coming out in September. Cool. I can't wait.

When did it come to this? My Mac told me this morning that I was almost out of disk space. Entourage quit, telling me to not bother opening it until more space is available. This is just crazy. Since when is 55GB not enough?

I don't even have movies or much music on this computer, since it's my work laptop. Adobe CS3 takes a lot no doubt, and I found a ton of cruft in the Developer directory that I will never use. (I kept XCode, though. It's a really amazing text editor for code, and it's free!)

The sad thing is after all of my work, I still have just under 3 GB free. I guess I'll have to shuttle more stuff over to my Windows partition. And it might come down to a repartition. Or maybe I should just upgrade my computer...

Observed in Oakland, CA yesterday. My own contribution to the FAIL pict community.

I've been looking for a status syndication tool for several months now,and finally found one that looks promising. Ping.fm supports a bunch of services including the ones I care about: Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Twitter, Pownce. In fact the one one I want that they don't support is Yahoo Messenger. But I've put in a request for that.

The down side seems to be that FriendFeed ends up with duplicate entries in my feed. I think I'll have to remove the services I'm not really using so as not to annoy folks.

If you're interested in trying it out, let me know. I can give you a code that will get you into the closed beta.

There have been a few articles recently about how the top searches on all of the search engines are actually navigational. People search for yahoo, ebay, hotmail, etc. rather than typing into the address bar. I have my own theory why this is the case, and it comes down to the simple fact that people are lazy.

People already know how to search the web, scan the results, and click the one they want. It works for them every time they do it. Even when they have incomplete information, get some of the details wrong, or throw a typo in there, Google is very forgiving and generally gives people what they want. Compare that against the address bar that requires the exact proper URL syntax to be typed or it gives you an error page. I think it's particularly pathetic that the error message suggests a common typo, yet the browser isn't smart enough to actually check for and correct this typo.

Additionally, the address bar is a second tool. Using it requires making a decision each time of whether to search or whether to type directly in the address bar. Sure the search path is a little bit longer, but it is more forgiving. And since only one tool is ever used (search), there is no cognitive load in selecting which tool to use.

Given all of this, how about a browser setup that only has a search bar in the chrome rather than an address bar? Steal this idea, browser developers!

I'm traveling in Europe right now, and I wanted a local cell phone number to make the long trip a bit easier. After a bit of searching around, I bought a UK T-Mobile pay-as-you-go SIM card, and popped it into my unlocked GSM phone. It's amazingly easy to "top up" the balance on the card -- just drop into almost any local convenience store or phone store, and give them your phone number and some money.

Buying another SIM with another number for France turns out to be not worth it, so I decided to just pay a bit extra per call and stick with the UK number. Trouble struck when it was time to "top up" again while staying in France -- no local T-Mobile shops or top-up locations here. My plan was to use the web-site to add funds to the SIM -- but T-Mobile UK does not accept a US Visa card -- only American Express (so much for the Visa commercials...).

Not expecting much, I called T-Mobile UK customer service from another phone to ask for help. I like the US T-Mobile service because of their flexibility, but I still was not expecting a good outcome. Not only did T-Mobile UK pick up on the second ring with a real human, but they spotted me 10 GB pounds so long as I promised to add that to my account when I get back to the US! Amazing -- they gave me, a person with whom they have nothing more than a $40 pre-existing relationship, a $20 advance on a "promise."

I promised to not only add that money on to the account when I get back to the UK, but also to write this post. Done. That is how customer service is supposed to work -- not as a cost center to be  whittled to the bone, but as an opportunity to cement or enhance a customer relationship. T-Mobile will continue to get my business because of it -- both in the UK and in the US.

When I design interaction flows, I use a drawing program like Visio or OmniGraffle. The challenge has been sharing these files with others. I finally settled on PDF as the optimal solution. The text remains selectable and the drawings retain all of their vector goodness.

Enter PowerPoint. Sometimes you want to present the designs in a click-through format, either to users for a low-fi usability test, or to executive types (investors, advisers, press, etc.). After much trial-and-error, I finally found the optimal workflow. Save out each page as an EPS or PDF file, then import into PPT. All other formats either don't support vector, or they risk degraded fidelity.

It's really too bad the clipboard doesn't work, as it's a PITA to save each mock-up out as an individual file, then insert it into a new blank PPT slide. I suppose I should look into an automated solution for this. I used to be quite the AppleScripter back in the day...

I've signed up for all the web 2.0 services out there like Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, Pownce, etc. Nothing has really stuck for me. But now I think I'm going for FriendFeed. They have the best model out there. Tie into all of the popular services and allow you to do basic stuff with their service too. When they add the ability to syndicate my updates out to these various services, I'll be stuck. It will be the central service to manage my vitality feed.

In case you're interested in my banal existance...
http://friendfeed.com/davecort

Courier is simply a horrible font. It is barely legible with its thin strokes and clumsy serifs.OK, really it's Courier New I have a problem with. Courier isn't quite that bad. But I'm amazed at how many web sites hard-code Courier rather than simply using the browser's default monospace font.

If you don't want to trust the browser's default, at least use higher-quality alternatives Andale and Monaco instead. They are widely available and have been around forever -- Andale as a part of Microsoft's core web fonts and Monaco as a part of every version of Mac OS I've ever used (I started with 6.0.8). Consolas is an even better choice, but it's only on systems running Vista or Office 2007/2008 (or anyone who has downloaded the PowerPoint 2007 viewer, wink wink).

So here's my solution. I created a GreaseMonkey script (inspired by this one) to replace all references to Courier and Courier New to my default monospace font (which is Consolas). Install it from here.

I admit it: I've not been biking to work much these last few months. My team have been nomads since our office doubled in employees and there was nowhere for us to sit. There are literally people sitting in the halls. We're currently squatting in an unused corner of an obliging start-up. But it's nearly 20 miles away, and I'm not that hardcore with the bike commuting.

I started biking to work back when I was about a mile and a half from my job. It was short and the route was extremely bike friendly, with most of it on a bike path along a river. Then I bought a house five miles away. Longer, not as nice of a ride, but I still kept it up. It was about the same amount of time as driving, since the path was all along surface streets.

Then I switched jobs. I was now eight miles away. I transitioned from a casual bike commuter to a serious one. I upgraded to a road bike from my old heavy college commuter. I got a bike locker at work. I biked hard enough to work up a sweat and need a shower at the end. It was a good 2½ years. I switched over to my current job without missing a beat. Similar distance (seven miles) with some hills thrown in. Not a problem.

And then we got kicked out. I didn't realize how much I relied on the bike commuting for my physical and mental health until I lost it. It was how I was getting nearly all of my aerobic exercise. I biked to work on Friday and really noticed how out-of-shape I've become. And it got me thinking of all the ways in which bike commuting is good:

1. Aerobic exercise
2. Cheaper than driving
3. More environmental
4. Reduced travel stress
5. Fresh air and sunshine
   
6. Combines exercise with commute to save time
7. Get to know your local neighborhoods better (you'll want to stay off the busy roads. Believe me.)
   

Thankfully, we're moving to a bigger office at the end of July. It's biking distance and they have a shower, so all will be well again soon.

On a recent trip to Yosemite, I was reminded of a simple bit of driving etiquette that hardly anyone follows: use turnouts to let vehicles behind you to pass. It's even called out in the CA Driver Handbook:

Special "turnout" areas are sometimes marked on two-lane roads. Drive into these areas to allow cars behind you to pass... If you are driving slowly on a two-lane highway or road where passing is unsafe, and five or more vehicles are following you, drive into the turnout areas or lanes to let the vehicles pass.

I'm never quite sure if these folks are oblivious, ignorant, or simply trying to somehow "enforce speed limits", but it's annoying and illegal. It doesn't matter if you are going the speed limit. The law states that if you are "proceeding at a rate of speed less than the normal flow of traffic", you need to pull into a turnout and let the traffic behind you pass.

RVs are some of the worst offenders. I especially wish the RV rental shops like Cruise America to hammer this point home with their customers. In fact, it'd be great if I could call or SMS and report one of their renters who is creating a mobile parking lot in their wake. If enough people call in, they get an "asshole tax" levied when they pay.

Here's a fun game to play: go up to a random hard-core fan of The Lord of the Rings, and ask him (or her...) if he would rather go see the theatrical, musical production of the story live on the London stage, or eat a pound of bugs while sitting in a vat of cold vinegar...

I suspect that nine out of ten of these fans (or more!) would choose the former. But they would be very, very wrong! I have just done the former my friends, and I would rather have spent the night with a big plate of ants and vat of the malted liquid. I don't go to a lot of plays -- perhaps one or two a year, but I suspect anyone can recognize crap ipso facto. This play was crap.

To be fair, some of the show was good fun -- the hobbit songs and dances were roughly equivalent to a good Renaissance Faire procution, and who can resist orcs on stilts? ("Orcs on stilts everybody! It's orcs on stilts!") (Also, is it just me, or does the Rennaisance Faire website look a bit "olde fashioned?")

Sorry -- back to the "play." The fundamental problem I think is one of the audience. Who is this thing for? Fans of the book (me) will be very disappointed by the very many changes. Obviously a great deal of change is unavoidable, but I found it difficult admire a work that largely ignores some of the central themes of the book (e.g. the victory of the small but stout and good over great evil; oh and Sauron -- he didn't show up much in the play either). And those who are not familiar with the book will just be confused by all of the characters and unstated motivations. In the end, the only sure audience for this play is the kids who came for all of the fireworks and big spiders and the hot Cirque du Soleil action (and the orcs on stilts of course).

Even if all that was neatly figured out -- even if they managed to find just the exactly perfect three hour edit of a 1000-page book, nothing would save this play from Galadriel. I don't know whether the actor who plays her was having a career-ending bad night, or if she was just the victim of truly awful direction (or both), but I now we were not supposed to laugh at her speeches. But we did -- many times -- and it felt good.

None of this matters that much though, because the current run closes on July 19, 2008. At least I got my tickets at half-price.

I've been reading The Economist recently. Overall they have excellent page design and typography. But being the detail-oriented designer that I am, I noticed a problem with their headings.

The Economist uses Officina Sans for these headings. Overall it's a great font. However, the lowercase i has a partial serif which causes some problems with several letter pairs. I first noticed it with the ri pair, but it also shows up with ti. You can see it at the right. It doesn't look quite as bad at 72pt, but the problem is exacerbated at body text sizes, where the thin space between the letters becomes muddied.

The crossbar of the first letter runs into the serif of the i, which makes a strange gestalt and draws the eye. I thought about creating a typical ligature where the letters are purposefully joined together, but that didn't look right to me. So I went the other way; I dropped the serif off the i for these ligatures. I think it really improves readability. It even works for other pairs, like rn.

I'd be honored if ITC included this concept on their next OpenType revision of Officina Sans.

Jesus wasn't white. He didn't have long, wavy brown hair, an impeccably trimmed beard and hazel eyes. He was from the Middle East. He  had olive skin, coarse black hair, and dark eyes. If he were around in the US today, people would think he might be a terrorist in a sleeper cell. He'd be detained and searched "randomly" at airports -- if he was lucky. He'd be detained and searched anally at Guantanamo if he was unlucky.

(This reminded me of the type of incendiary stuff that Scott Adams writes on his blog. And like most things Scott publishes, I am nowhere near the first person to have thought of this.)

A recent news release from The CalorieLab ranks the US states by obesity levels. And California is 41st with a declining relative rate! Of course the actual rate is going up, but we're getting fatter at a slower rate than the rest of the country. Yay.

The graph reminded me a bit of the 2004 US presidential election results (you can draw your own conclusions from that), and that motivated me too seek other correlations and sources of nice data and graphs. What I found way exceeded my expectations: StateMaster. This site is is a treasure chest of data and graphs and correlations. Looking for a chart of oral health as measured by loss of natural teeth by state? They have it. Want to compare that rate's correlation versus energy consumption as a percentage of GDP? No problem (and just what the heck is going on in West Virginia anyway?).

Besides feeding stereotypes, StateMaster is an great (and perhaps educational) way to spend 30 minutes. But remember correlations does not imply causation (except maybe in Louisiana).

Rhapsody MP3 launched with great fanfare this week. Finally some competition for DRM-free music. Well it turns out Amazon doesn't really need this sort of craptastic competition; they're doing just fine by themselves, thank-you-very-much.

As a launch promotion, Rhapsody was giving away $10 credit if you sign up for an account, so of course I did. I went through my list of favorite artists searching for gems I may have missed (like Peter Gabriel's Ovo, which I only discovered about a month ago.) And I found it: Jason Falkner doing a cover of Do Ya on a Jeff Lynne Tribute album. Sweet.

So I order it up, and click the download link. 32 tracks at 256 kbps is nearly 250MB. But no worries; I'll just leave it going in the background while I finish up some work. I flip back over to the download an hour later, and it's stuck at 72 MB. I try kicking it by pausing and resuming, but it's officially hosed. No worries, I'm heading home, so I just kill it outright. I log into my account from home, go to my downloads page, select all, and download. And I end up with 22 tracks.

That's right. I am missing the first third of my album. Rhapsody thinks that my stalled download from earlier in the day was a unmitigated success, and happily turns off my ability to get these tracks again.

So I ping support. I try to explain how my partial ZIP file is corrupt and I don't have access to the tracks, either on my computer or on their web site. They send me back inane boilerplate such as "try redownloading the ZIP file again. You should be able to do this through the My Account" and "Our policy is that you can only download the tracks once" (which I take to mean at most once. Apparently zero is OK too). I go through two exchanges with "customer support" over 2 days, and finally give up. This is "support" in name only.

I'm on my own now. I spend far too long looking for a free tool to recover files from a corrupt ZIP archive (why the heck don't all ZIP programs do this?). I am unsuccessful and as a bonus, I acquire a virus on my Windows virtual machine. Fabulous. Something else to deal with. In my final act of desperation, I sign up for yet another Rhapsody account and purchase the album using a fresh $10 credit. Again.

I had an unbelievably crappy first experience. Maybe I just got extremely unlucky. Maybe their store isn't that bad. But I'll never know. I already had a bad impression of Real Audio going in from their craptacular Real Player software, and this only solidified that for me. I do know Amazon. I use them all the time. They have great prices, a great customer experience, and great customer service. So go on over to the Rhapsody MP3 store before July 4 and get your $10 credit to milk them for some free tunes. Then abandon that account and get your music through Amazon's MP3 store.

Having nine months of time away from Yahoo has given me a bit of perspective. Things really gelled for me as I was listening to Jeff Housenbold (CEO of Shutterfly) on the Stanford Entrepreneurial podcast. In his Tips for Career Success, #3 is "Go where the money is made in the company."

Yahoo makes its money from advertising. To make money in advertising on the web, you need to have "inventory" (popular web sites that a lot of people visit). But you also need a way to sell those ads. You need tools like campaign management, analytics, budgeting, reporting, A/B testing, and a whole host of others that are compelling, easy-to-use, and generally encourage advertisers to spend as much money as possible. In short, you need to meet the needs of advertisers, who in turn will give you money.

And as far as I knew in my three years at Yahoo, we weren't doing that. I worked on the inventory side of things in the groups that built Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups and 360. The primary exposure we had to ad sales was the requirement to include space in your design for IAB standard ad units.

The people I worked with on these inventory products were some of the best and brightest out there. Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Delicious, Front Page and (if I do say so myself) Messenger are truly best-in-class services. Why couldn't the same be said for our ad sales tools? Why didn't Yahoo spend equal time promoting the ad sales side of things internally? Why wasn't I or more importantly my superstar peers actively recruited to go work on the ad sales tools, the very products that most directly generated money for the company? Inventory is important, but from where I sit now, generating ad sales is even more important. If you have the sales, you can easily create or find the inventory on the web.

A colleague of mine in research wanted to become a product designer. My advice to him was to go over to the ad sales group where there was a ton of low-hanging fruit and a ton of opportunity to tangibly improve Yahoo's financials. I only now realize how bad that sounds. Why would Yahoo treat such an essential piece of the business a second-class citizen? Why should that be the entry point for a rookie designer? Why isn't that where the rock star designers go after paying their dues on the "lowly" inventory products?

A friend of mine who was a PM at Yahoo shared his story of going down to LA to visit the Search Ad Marketing team. He was shocked. He said it was huge; at least as big as the main HQ; maybe bigger. It's the biggest secret Yahoo is keeping from its own employees.

This in contrast to Google. When I interviewed there in late 2004, they made it quite clear there were two main groups: end-user web sites, and advertiser (plus internal) tools. The groups were equally well respected. Both groups got similar exposure in internal communications. Employees moved between the two regularly.

Brad Garlinghouse got it partially right with his peanut butter manifesto. But it's not just redundant inefficiencies that are hobbling Yahoo; it's also inequalities in their product lines. Yahoo needs to make ad sales tools a high-profile, career-accelerating -- and yes even sexy --job where the best and the brightest vie for limited positions on great teams, and the ones who succeed are known and revered by all throughout the company. I hope the new organization is geared up to fix this, but from what I've seen in the press, it unfortunately doesn't look like it.

If you're a Yahoo employee, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

GraphJam is a great blog about graphs. Not interesting or deep or boring graphs, but funny ones. Here's an example:

I was on a road trip last weekend with my trusty old 1999 Honda Civic HX (love that continuously-variable transmission!). During the second half of the trip, my mileage maxed out at 41 mpg. It's the best I've ever gotten, probably in no small part due to the fact that the driver was not me and driving less -- shall we say -- assertively.

But it's not unusual. I often get 38 mpg on a long road trip. Even around the city I get 33-35 mpg. Pretty good. And the great thing is that I've been getting this mileage for 10 years now--for the 100,000+ miles I've put on the car. As a back-of-the-envelope guess, I average 35 mpg. That translates to about 2857 gallons of gas consumed in the past 10 years.

Now I think it's great that more people are getting hybrids, which can average 44 mpg. (It's amazing how a 2-3× increase in gas prices will motivate.) But if they were driving an average car or truck for the past 10 years -- which gets 20.2 mpg according to the EPA -- it would take them another 16½ years to equal my 35 mpg average for the same time span. By then I'll hopefully be driving a Tesla.