KPAO by Dave Cortright

The truth about the AZ immigration law

This is the best article I've read on the Arizona immigration law. It seems that many, including President Obama, do not really understand what the law says. In summary:

• Since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime
• The law prohibits racial profiling. Section 2 [of the new law] provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status.
• Reasonable suspicion does not give police the power to arbitrarily check anyone's papers. Federal legal precedents define and list the factors that contribute to "reasonable suspicion".
  

Satire: Contradictions in the Bible as a game show

May 20 is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

Count me in.

In light of recent 'veiled' (ha!) threats by bloggers on Revolution Muslim's website aimed at the creators of the television show South Park for depicting the prophet Mohammed in a bear suit, we hereby deem May 20, 2010 as the first annual Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!

Do your part to both water down the pool of targets and defend a little something our country is famous for... the first amendment.

Sponsored by Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor or CACAH (pronounced ca-ca).

Convert grayscale to B&W alpha with Photoshop

I've needed to do this a few times, and I always forget how and end up stumbling through it via numerous web searches. No more! I will document it here for my own reference, and hopefully others out there will also find it useful.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Click Image→Mode→Grayscale (confirm if needed)
   
3. Select All
4. Cut
5. Layer→New Fill Layer→Solid Color..., OK
6. Choose black (#000000), OK
   
7. Delete the Background layer
8. Click the Channels tab at the top of the Layers palette
9. Click the eye icon to show the Color Fill 1 Mask channel
10. Click the eye icon to hide the Gray channel
11. Select the Color Fill 1 Mask channel (if it's not already)
    
12. Paste
13. Invert (Ctrl+I)
14. Click the Layers tab at the top of the Layers palette
15. Click the eye icon next to Color Fill 1 to show it
16. Save As PNG

I did this for a B&W photo of me dressed up as Chris P. Carrot shown at the right. It's sitting on top of a colored bar background image so you can see the alpha blending.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, and AOL: what drives their business?

These charts from businessinsider.com are a fantastic visualization of what really drives the business at these computer industry giants. As an ex-Microsoft employee, I think this one is particularly telling:

Basically, the company kicks ass at Windows and Office, and the Server & Tools group does pretty well too (though they are a bit of a rounding error given how big Windows and Office are). But the telling story is that the company has no ability to make money elsewhere. Online is consistently negative, and Entertainment and Devices have their ups and downs, but summed up is still down. Both are subsidized by the profits of the other divisions.

Apple is interesting. I remember when their market cap was about $4 billion and there were rumors of Sun buying them (and renaming the combined company Snapple). I thought iPod and iTunes had transformed the company, but the iPhone is making that business look paltry in comparison.

Google, well there's no surprise here, other than just how massive the market for text ads is.

And finally for completeness, the disaster that is the AOL sinking ship.

Permanently delete your Facebook account

Click here to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Want to know why you should? Read this, this, or this.

A better Bing logo

Update: I worked around the CSS bug and have posted my GreaseMonkey script: A Better Bing Logo (and favicon).

I'm all for search engine competition with Google. Yes Google is great at what they do, and yes I use them 99% of the time. But I am glad—now that Yahoo is getting out of the search engine business—that Microsoft finally has a worthy alternative.

However, as a UI designer, I am still—nearly one year after Bing's launch—horrified by the simply awful amaturish logo they've used for their product brand. The fact that the designer of the logo claims that it was hand drawn and not simply scaled horizontally does nothing to make the logo better. In fact it says that either he is incompetent or lying. My bet is both.

At any rate, designers know that people will judge a UI based on its appearance, and in fact bad visual design contributes to reduced usability. So I wanted to do my part to help Bing be more successful. I've created this new logo for the product, and I'm working on a GreaseMonkey script to rebrand the site.

If  any Microsoft brand folks are reading this and like what you see, please feel free to use it. You don't even need to credit me. Just get your official logo vendor to recreate it and claim it as your own. I'm ok with that. Just please, please, PLEASE replace your ugly logo, and soon.  Thanks.

Microsoft .Net installer is an over-achiever

It goes to 11! or in this case, 202%

Steal these ideas: Font projects for the greater good

As you all may have deduced from the recurring font/typography posts here, I'm a bit of a fan. But to this point I've been mostly a consumer of type. I do want to contribute and give back to the community. And I see some pretty big holes that need to be filled.

Helvetica Small Caps
It amazes me that the most popular typeface of all time does not have a small-caps variant. This seems like such a no-brainer to me, and something that would be fairly straightforward to do. I even started it myself, but as I am just learning the tools, it was pretty slow going. I think I ended up doing 2 or 3 characters. And while we're at it, you could do an Arial Small Caps as well.

Tahoma and Lucida Grande Italic
These are UI system fonts for Windows and Mac respectively, and with both are well designed fonts with a bold option, neither have italic versions. And while we're at it...

Helvetica and Verdana true italic
Yes, both of these fonts have "italic" versions, but they are simply mathematically slanted versions of the regular font, aka "oblique". Ugly, and not fitting fonts of this popularity.

Maybe someday I'll get around to doing these projects, but in the meantime, I'm throwing these ideas out there in case any budding (or even experienced) typographers might want to take up the task.

Control your web experience with GreaseMonkey and GM_addStyle

GreaseMonkey is one of those tools that at first seemed frivolous, but now that I've been using it, I can't imagine browsing without it. It puts me in control of the web sites I visit. If a site is doing something annoying, a simple tweak to the CSS fixes it up nicely.

In the course of writing a script to remove the annoying "Next Story" panel that flies in from the right at the bottom of a NYTimes story page, I found a simple yet powerful function: GM_addStyle

Previously I had been jumping through hoops using getElementById, getElementsByTag with a for loop, and all other sorts of crazy DOM walking tricks to get references to HTML objects. But GM_addStyle makes it really easy. It simply creates additional CSS style declarations on the page, allowing you to override the existing styles.

Be sure to include a !important modifier after every style declaration so you can override styles applied at the element level.

If you want to see some of the scripts I've created, check them out on the Dave Cortright GreaseMonkey User Scripts page.

Oh, and here is the entire script needed to remove the annoying NYTimes fly-in panel:

GM_addStyle("#upNextWrapper {display:none !important}");