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Monday, July 29, 2002
I stumbled on the Alternate Reality Gaming Network today via . Lots of discussion and pointers to information about games like Majestic, the unsuccessful experience-game that was played over the phone, via faxes, in email, and in IM. The newest one, called "Push, Nevada" looks to be quite David Lynchian.
Boo. This is what, the third time since January 2001? Fired again, company out of cash. For what it's worth, our boss Johnny Hausler is a really nice guy, who I think has personally lost money so that his employees could continue working for a few more months. It's really a shame that a small company that does good, award-winning work, doesn't really waste time or money, and genuinely cares about giving clients more than they deserve can't survive. Maybe I'll go back to German class?
Sunday, July 28, 2002
Congratulations to my friend Niels Wolf, who's landed on his feet at Moccu after leaving defcom.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Sneak previews of the new Polar Bear book.
Another series of unpredictable and awful crashes with Microsoft Entourage led me to some useful resources: Office 2001 Service Release 1 fixes the unforgivable problem of Entourage not exporting standard MBOX format mailboxes (plain text files). I also learned about the hidden option to rebuild the Entourage database by holding down Option when launching the program. Hopefully these will solve my problems
That's a long way of saying: if you wrote to me in the last week or so and expected a response but didn't get one, please write me again!
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Lou never seems to note in his blog when he puts a new presentation online, but his AIGA Advance for Design talk is available.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
iTunes' new 'Smart Playlists' don't seem that smart to me: tracking my ratings of songs in order to make playlists of good songs is an ok idea, but it doesn't really go far enough. Why not suggest music to me? If it knows I gave ..and you will know us by the Trail of Dead good ratings in the last month, why can't iTunes go out on the web and see what people who like Trail of the Dead reccommend, then tell me where I can hear those mp3s?
For example: here's a map of similar items generated by a service at mockerybird.com. Kind of boring suggestions, though..
Or this application also at mockerybird (which didn't seem to be working when I just checked). This one does include the "Amazon customers who bought x also bought y" in the page. No reason that iTunes can't know about that information.
Salon's Tech section has an article today which points out that not only are large technology firms facing potential accounting scandal, but potential product scandal, too: they sold lots of products that don't work. The article points out legitimate and common problems with big custom software "solutions": manual updating of batches of data, huge amounts of error and over-complexity, and profound frustration over simple tasks.
The one big Vignette installation I peripherally worked on was a clear example: the client was simply lied to about the product. It was haphazardly designed as it was built, with essentially no consideration for any of the productivity, workflow, version-tracking, or archiving that CMS systems are supposed to provide. Instead of a set of clear content types (Press Release, Product Data Sheet, etc.), the temps who were entering data were using one generic content type: Content. And guess what? They hand wrote HTML in it as they went, completely negating the purpose of the CMS. That's an error that the client might never be able to correct.
I was there to write user documentation for this monstrous system, and to explain stunningly complex design features, like why the Content Heirarchy is actually different from the Navigation Heirarchy, even though they look the same in every part of the interface. Or what it meant to "create multiple aliases for a content instance within the polyheirarchy" (an instruction that appeared in the UI).
Monday, July 22, 2002
That awful html coding project mentioned below is over. Same as the summer weather, great. Two obnoxious things I learned about Netscape 4.x's support of CSS: you can't use the underscore character in a class name ("foo_bar" doesn't work), and setting a line-height for the table cells affects everything in them: even images get some extra margin due to "line height." Guess I should have known those, but I was probably busy with something else in the last five years.
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Weather: about 85 and sunny, boats going by on the Spree, people lying in the park.
Job: fixing complex nested tables, forms, and Flash files to work in Netscape 4.
Fun: no chance.
Thursday, July 04, 2002
I've been playing around with Dreamweaver MX. Its ability to write server-side code and to include live database data at design-time is pretty cool. Unfortunately, you still need a pretty good understanding of databases, PHP (or whatever server language you use) in order to get it to work. It also seems incredibly fragile on my Mac; not just crashing, but also forgetting about important settings like database bindings, which then have to be deleted by hand from the code, and rebuilt in the dialog box. Too unpredictable for real work, I think. It also seems to refuse to allow nested SELECT statements, although that might just be my bad code. Still, it's pretty impressive that Macromedia's gotten DWMX to do as much as it does, and I can imagine for pretty simple database projects, it would be enough to get by with.
Monday, July 01, 2002
I finally downloaded and installed MoveableType (although it's not running here yet). This new feature Trackback is very similar to something that occurred to me over the weekend while we were shivering on the Ostsee beach: can I track outside links to my pages/posts? One way to do this might be the Google API which could give you "pages that link to page x", how nice that the MT people have come up with a better way. The scenarios here seem especially appealing, like the mention of a forthcoming "standalone tool that will display a threaded view of the entries involved in a discussion across multiple blogs whose participants are using TrackBack."
