Wired, September 2005

ID: 050825.1616

Wired magazine makes me crazy. All I want is a digital version. I'll pay the same as the paper version. I'll accept any Digital Rights Management scheme Wired wants to impose. All I want is the same thing MacWorld and Scientific American provide: Digital editions of the magazine I can download as soon as they're released. I don't want paper, and I don't want to wait a month between the time Wired content is on the streets, and when it's available on their website.

The name of the magazine is Wired, right? Not Papyrus?

There are lots of reasons I don't want paper magazines, not the least of which is waste. After I remove and discard the plastic wrapper, and any inserts therein, I fan the magazine over a trash can to let all the loose inserts fall out. Then I quickly turn to the heavier weighted pages and attached inserts, tear them out, and throw them away. Then I'm ready to start reading the magazine. When I find something interesting, I tear it out and place it aside. Within an hour, I have a small pile of things to read online in a month. The Wired carcass goes into the trash.

But now I have a small pile of paper to keep for about a month, to be replaced with a downloaded digital version. Where do I put this? It usually ends up in a pile of other things I don't know what to do with. Like vegetables secreted in refrigerator crisper drawers, these (literal) tear-sheets slowly rot until one day I rediscover them, determine they are out of date, and throw them away unread. (A lot of vegetables go this way.)

Here's my new plan: Instead of saving paper as references to things that will be online a month later, I'll simply list what I'm interested in. No more paper. Here's the list (by page number) for the September 2005 issue:

034: Monkeying with the Web. Grease Monkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to change how others' websites appear and function. Anal-retentive, paper-fixated Web Designers — probably those working at Wired — hate it.

038: Check Your iPod at the Door. Now that word's getting out iPods are not much more than small multi-GB storage devices, everyone from the UK Ministry of Defense to the New York Department of Education wants them banned. I use mine to store contact information, and recipes, as well as music, and audiobooks. What'll you store in yours?

042: Pulse: How would you prefer to watch digital video content? Nice graph showing 57% of Wired readers would prefer to watch digital video content on their computers, versus 33% who prefer to watch such content on TVs. I wonder how many of Wired readers would prefer to read the frigging magazine on their computers.

044: Late to the Podcast Party. "For months, the secretive podcasting startup Odeo [planned to make] it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content." Now that Apple's iTunes version 4.9 offers several thousand podcasts, the first question Wired asked Odeo cofounder Even Williams was, "Did Apple eat Odeo's lunch while you were still working on the secret sauce?"

046: Access Denied! Intriguing two-page spread of what's banned (besides pornography) from the internet in Saudi Arabi, Uzbekistan, China, Bahrain, Myanmar, and Singapore (who bans nothing). Lots of strange interpretations possible here. For example, what does it mean that Saudi Arabia bans most gambling and drugs sites? Pent-up demand?

058: Nixing the Compact Disc. Musicians are releasing on DVDs rather than CDs. The roomier formats allow for music videos to accompany the music. What does this mean for iPod video?

066: Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: The Finest Print Ever. This is my favorite Wired feature. (Sounds so, well, William Gibsonish.) Currently, it's Mitsubishi's Uni-ball Signo bit 0.18mm ballpoint pen; perfect(er) for writing tiny notes between the lines of text books. Sadly, our local Japanese stationery store doesn't carry them.

079: Sunglasses sans Glasses. Bausch&Lomb Nike MaxSight UV-filtering contact lenses. Comes in amber and grey-green. Drat! I just bought transition lenses.

109: The Big Picture: What We Watch. Five graphs about TV watching habits:

• Cable TV viewing surpassed Network TV around 2001.
• Time-shifted (DVR) TV watching has grown to about 30%.
• TV-DVDs now account for 19% of all DVDs purchased. (I own DVDs for every season of The Sopranos and don't even have HBO.)
• Live 8 online concerts had more than three times as many viewers as saw them on VH1, MTV, and ABC combined. (Maybe Wired can learn something about online markets here.)
• Most popular TV shows (I watch) downloaded at BitTorrent were CSI, Desperate Housewives, and The Sopranos.

129: The Dream Factory. My April 6, 2005 blog (From Mind to Matter) centered on Neil Gershenfeld's March 28, 2005 talk at the Library of Congress, From the Library of Information to the Library of Things. It was an amalgam of his October 2004 article in Scientific American, The Internet of Things, and bits of his current book, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. Wired finally hopped aboard.

So: There you have it. Everything else in the September 2005 issue is now in the trash.

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U.S. Copyright Office Charges into the Past

ID: 050811.1118

In an August 10, 2005 article for CNET News.com, U.S. Copyright Office poll: IE-only OK?, Paul Festa reports the U.S. Copyright Office is soliciting opinions (through August 22, 2005) on the Copyright Office's decision to make the October 24, 2005 launch of its online preregistration system for unpublished, commercial works-in-progress, based on Internet Explorer 5.1 and higher. The decision to create a proprietary website will be based exclusively on "whether any eligible parties will be prevented from preregistering a claim due to browser requirements of the preregistration system."

Apparently the reason for this anachronistic decision is "Siebel software that guaranteed compatibility with only selected browsers — including both IE and Netscape 7.02, a browser with negligible market share — in the current Siebel 7.7 software." The Copyright Office plans to "upgrade to Siebel 7.8, which supports Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla 1.7.7, but not in time for the Oct. 24 launch." Current versions of these browsers are 8.2, 1.0.6, and 1.7.11, respectively.

The most absurd comment was that of Stacey Schneider, director of technology product marketing, who said: "We're running a business, and testing is extremely costly. We optimize against what our customers' demand. For Siebel 7.8, it became clear, especially for the government sector, that there's demand for Mozilla. But there are hundreds of vendors out there with their own browsers. And not many applications support many more than what we do."

This is precisely the reason sites should not be optimized to a particular browser. Why should one's browser choice have any more impact on what can be read online than one's choice of paper for the printed word? To optimize for one browser, practically means making it compatible for at least one other, then another, until we're back into the prehistoric days of multiple versions of pages (and websites) for multiple proprietary standards.

The tragic irony is it's the US Copyright Office, a division of the often future-leaning Library of Congress, that's proposing this atavistic step. (I shudder to imagine they are also designing the site to use fixed-width tables complete with 1-pixel "invisible" spacers.) Given this level of backward thinking, I wonder if the site will even pass the government's own Section 508 accessibility standards.

The way to avoid the problem of designing for "hundreds of vendors out there with their own browsers" — an overstatement at best — is to design sites to comply with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards for (X)HTML and CSS. Designing to web standards minimizes costs, and saves invaluable design, development, and testing time. The onus of correctly rendering W3C-compliant pages should fall on browser vendors, not on web site designers.

Can you imagine how absurd it would be if print authors were told they needed to write one way when using one manufacturer's paper, and another way when using another type of paper? Can you imagine how absurb it would be to tell readers they need one pair of glasses to view what's written on this type of paper, and another pair to view what's written on another type?

In my September 2002 article, The Tyranny of Typography, I wrote:

While it is tempting to create Internet Explorer-specific web pages only, remember that five years ago Netscape was the dominant browser. … A prudent strategy is to create W3C standards-compliant web pages that will be rendered similarly by standards-based browsers, both now and in the future.

The final sentence is as true today as it was then:

A prudent strategy is to create W3C standards-compliant web pages that will be rendered similarly by standards-based browsers, both now and in the future.

I encourage Stacey Schneider and the other dinosaurs at the Copyright Office (and Siebel) to at least visit the Web Standards Project, and to read yesterday's blog, IE7: Half a Loaf on Internet Explorer's poor compliace with W3C recommendations.

I am sending this blog (and five copies) as my comment by mail to:

Copyright GC/ I&R
P.O. Box 70400, Southwest Station
Washington, DC 20024-0400

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IE7: Half a Loaf

ID: 050810.2033

In an August 1, 2005 article for CNET News.com, Next Explorer to fail Acid test, Paul Festa reports Microsoft's upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 will not pass Web Standards' Acid2 test that demonstrates whether a browser complies with desireable W3C standards for HTML 4, CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs. (The article reports "Apple Computer has already said that its Safari browser passes the test in preliminary builds." I tested Safari 2.0 that shipped with Mac OS X 1.4, and it does not pass the test.)

This is discouraging for several reasons, not the least of which is the W3C has moved beyond CSS1 to CSS2, and is working on CSS3. Failure to support CSS1 sets IE and any other non-compliant browser years behind the times, and unnecessarily complicates webpage design. When I reviewed Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos' 1997 book, Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web — it's now availablle in its third edition — I had to write "The bad news is, like HTML itself, no browsers support all CSS features. While Internet Explorer 4 and 5 support most of the W3C CSS1 and CSS2 standards, Netscape 4.5 supports less than half. Hopefully, the next version of Netscape will at least match Internet Explorer's support." Close to a decade later, IE has lost its lead to Netscape (Firefox), and most other browsers. IE went from the most compliant, to the least.

There is a glimmer of hope. As reported in Kevin Yank's DHTML and CSS blog, IE7 Beta 2 fix list posted, IE7 will provide support for the ABBR (Abbreviation) tag.

On May 25 and 27, 2004 I gave a talk to the STC (Society for Technical Communication), titled The Best Markup That Never Was, wherein I chided Microsoft for its lack of support for the ABBR tag, and incomplete support for the Q tag. On the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog, hosted by Chris Wilson, lead program manager for the web program in IE, I put it this way:

When I give talks about markup, I single out two failures of IE W3C compliance:

1. Failure to support CSS rendering for the ABBR tag. The current workaround is to either contain non-acronym abbreviations within SPAN tags, or use the semantically absurb markup of containing an abbreviation within an ACRONYM tag. (Acronyms are a subclass of abbreviations. Abbreviations are a superclass of acronyms.)
2. Failure to support CSS rendering of quotation marks for the Q tag. The only workaround here is to reference HTC files to provide this feature for IE without causing double sets of quotations in compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera, etc.

While the ABBR and Q tags may not be well-known or commonly used at sites like MSDN, they are critical for all literature-related sites where dialogue, for example, is a major portion of the content. (And, unbeknownst to most developers, other countries use different quotations delimiters than we do!)

Of course, every developer has their favorite gripe, depending on what IE prevents them from doing. The ABBR and Q tags are mine. I get half of what I wanted, which is better than nothing at all.

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Mighty Mouse Diagonally Scrolling

ID: 050803.0823

In my May 12, 2005 blog, My New Mouse, I said:

It's a mystery among all but the most ardent Mac-heads why Apple persists in providing only one-button no-scroll-wheel mice, requiring users to press the sole mouse button (or the trackpad's single click-bar) while pressing the Ctrl key to display shortcut menus. But, that's the Mac way, and there's no changing it. (How's that for thinking different!)

The problem's exacerbated for left-handed mouse users, because (at least on the PowerBook keyboard) there's only one Ctrl key, and it's on the left. Ctrl-clicking for left-handers means crossing the right hand over to the left side of the keyboard. But now, the problem is almost solved.

Apple released the Mighty Mouse, an optical, "scroll-wheel" multi-button mouse. At first glance it looks like the standard Apple white lozenge-shaped mouse, but with a tiny ball in the top that is, in fact, a kind of scroll-wheel — a scroll ball. Not only can this scroll ball receive a click, and scroll horizontally and vertically, it can also scroll digonally. (More about that in a moment.)

There are no obvious left and right mouse buttons, but the top is pressure sensitive such that pressing one side or the other is equivalent to pressing a left or right button. "Ardent Mac-heads" who "prefer the simplicity of a classic one-button mouse" can use Mac OS X Tiger to restore one-button clicking.

Mighty Mouse — Apple was granted permission to use the name of the 1942 Terrytoons cartoon hero — is also squeezable: "Force sensors on either side can be configured to activate Tiger features such as Dashboard, Exposé or a whole host of other customizable features."

What's significantly missing, and why I won't replace my Macally BTMOUSEJR Bluetooth wireless optical two-button scroll-wheel mouse with Apple's optical multi-button scroll-ball mouse, is wireless Bluetooth capability. "As anyone who's felt the tug of a mouse cord can attest, wireless mice are a must-have," and Bluetooth is my favorite kind of wireless.

Now: What's this about diagonal scrolling? Why won't vertical, or vertical and horizontal-only scrolling do? I admit to being partially blind to the underlying problem since I use wide monitor laptops with high screen resolutions — 1920 x 1200 on my Dell Inspiron 8500 — that permit me to use wide windows that rarely require horizontal scrolling. For narrower and lower resolution screens, horizontal scrolling may be as important as vertical. Being able to scroll diagonally reduces scrolling from two actions to one.

An underlying issue however, is why should even narrow, low-resolution screen users have to scroll horizontally? In particular, why should web pages require horizontal scrolling? The answer is simple: About half of all web pages do not use "liquid" design that reflows content when window size is changed. This is true with many public sites such as CNN or Fox News. The use of layout tables rather than CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is usually the culprit.

In short, diagonal scrolling is partially a solution to outmoded web page design; design that still cannot free itself from the paradigm of the printed page. As quoted in my 2002 essay, The Tyranny of Typography, the Tao Te Ching, 38 Ritual says:

Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So ritual enthralls generation after generation.

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Razr in My Pocket

ID: 050802.1619

Fashion Discovery of the Week: The Motorola VS GSM Razr cell phone (see my June 28, 2005 blog, Razr's Edge) fits perfectly in the coin pocket of Levi jeans.

Why is this important, and what does it mean for the future of clothing design?

One of the reasons I like the Razr is because it's thin (0.54 inches) and light (3.35 oz.). My previous cell phone, a Nokia I affectionately nicknamed "The Brick," was bigger; a lot bigger. It weighted down my gym shorts to the point of embarassment. It was a displeasing bulge no matter where or how I carried it. It intruded.

The Razr however, was not without problems. If I put it in my jeans pocket, there was room enough — in fact, too much room — that when driving a car and receiving a call, fishing it out of that pocket was awkward at best; embarassing when there was a bus or other high-center-of-gravity conveyance alongside. Of course, the Razr fits perfectly in a shirt pocket, but my normal mode is shirt-pocketless. Also, carrying anything in a shirt pocket without a covering flap treats the wearer to breath-taking moments watching pocket contents slide onto the sidewalk when you bend forward. (On such occasions, I've discovered most cell phones are very sturdily constructed.)

Levi jeans coin pockets however, are a different story. They are wide enough to easily insert the Razr, yet narrow enough to prevent it from turing sideways. They are deep enough to cover all but about the top quarter inch, but not so deep that the phone becomes difficult to retrieve. And besides, who puts coins in jeans coin pockets anyway? The space is available.

There is a catch. Coin pocket size is not constant. I checked some other brands — Calvin Klein, for example — and found coin pockets too narrow for the Razr. Caveat emptor.

Leg side pockets, as available in Cargo pants, are a good alternative, but suffer from being a bit too wide, and defintely too deep. On the other hand, located as they usually are — at hand level in non-pongids — they're certainly convenient.

In much of the world, cell phones are at least as common as wallets, pens, or pockets full of coins, all of which have informally designated storage areas — pockets — on clothing; especially, men''s clothing. How long will it be until clothing routinely features a special pocket for cell phones? I'd opt to have it located either on an upper, outer arm, below the shoulder on shirts, or midway on the front of the thigh on pants.

There is of course, the Bluetooth option: The Borglike, perennial earpiece designating the wearer as one who must be always connected, but even I reject that as being, well, … too Borglike. A Razr in a jeans pocket is perfect counter-urban techno-trash-faux-haute couture.

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Widgets (Erratum)

ID: 0508010.8044

In my July 5, 2005 blog, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Widgets, I said "A disadvantage of Dashboard however, is that its widgets cannot have the focus at the same time as the Desktop or any open window. Users have to alternate between viewing Dashboard widgets, or working with the Desktop and open windows; not both at the same time."

This is not true!

You can simultaneously display both a functioning widget and the Desktop, permitting for example, keeping the dictionary widget open while writing in TextPad, Pages, or Word. As far as I can tell however, how to do this is not documented in Mac Help.

To display a widget in both Dashboard and on the Desktop, do the following:

1. Press F12 to display the Dashboard.
2. At the bottom left corner, click the Open button to display the widget bar.
3. Select a widget icon, and begin dragging it off the widget bar.
4. When the icon clears the bar, assuming its normal size, press F12.
5. Release the icon.

Dashboard vanishes, and the widget now displays on the Desktop. Pressing F12 to display Dashboard, also displays the widget at that screen position. To remove this widget from the Desktop, activate Dashboard, and remove the widget from Dashboard.

It's odd Apple didn't document this feature, since it expands the usefulness of widgets. I now see this feature as much more useful.

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Daylight Saving Time Redux

ID: 050724.0648

Three months ago, Fox News carried an April 7, 2005 AP story, Energy Bill Would Extend Daylight Savings, reporting that the House Energy and Commerce Comittee "approved an amendment to the upcoming Energy Policy Act of 2005 to extend daylight-saving time by two months, having it start on the last Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November." Currently, Daylight Saving Time is observed in the US from the first Sunday in April through the last Sunday in October.

Michigan Representative Fred Upton, one of the measure's co-sponsors, was quoted as saying "Extending daylight-saving time makes sense, especially with skyrocketing energy costs." The measure's other co-sponsor, Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey noted, "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," citing Transportation Department estimates that the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day; approximately 0.05% of the 20,000,000 barrels the US uses each day. At oil prices hovering near $60 per barrel, the savings could amount to $600,000 a day; approximately $36,000,000 for the additional two month period, or something like $0.15 for every man, woman and child in America — a penny every four days or so.

On July 22, 2005, CNN carried another AP story, Lawmakers move to extend daylight-saving time, reporting the House's April agreement was approved in part; namely, to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it one week to the first Sunday in November. Reasons cited for the scale-back were farmers complaining that "a two-month extension could adversely affect livestock, and airline officials [saying] it would have complicated scheduling of international flights." The Senate also called "for a study on how much daylight-saving time actually affects oil consumption," — information I would have thought useful before passing the amendment.

Representative Markey also scaled-back his endorsement, remarking, "The beauty of daylight-saving time is that it just makes everyone feel sunnier." Because Daylight Saving Time will now extend through Halloween, Representative Upton also recrafted his endorsement: "Kids across the nation will soon rejoice," because they'll have another hour of daylight for trick-or-treating.

According to the Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S.C. 260a) however, "any State that lies entirely within one time zone may by law exempt itself from the provisions of this subsection …"

Does this sound familiar?

In his entertaining and authorative book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time (see my May 2, 2005 blog, Daylight Saving Time), Michael Downing recounts similar legislation in the 1970's. In October 1973, OPEC's embargo against the US and Europe drove up oil prices 400 percent in three months. By 1974, American gas prices had risen 60%; from $0.35 to $0.56 per gallon. (Those were the days!) At President Nixon's request, Congress passed amendments to the Uniform Time Act to extend Daylight Saving Time year-around for two years.

In very short time, however, no apparent savings were noticed. Moreover, annecdotal evidence was collected to show sending children off to school before it was light resulted in increased accidents and fatalities. To justify their legislation, Congress asked the Department of Transportation to document the energy saving brought about by extending Daylight Saving year-around. Although electrical demand might have decreaed 0.5 to 1.0 percent, no gasoline savings were noted. Heating fuel use may have actually increased. "Year-around Daylight Saving was abandoned, and the nation's clocks were set back to Standard Time on the last Sunday of October in 1974."

Downing points out other attempts to extend Daylight Saving — in 1976 during the Carter administration, and in 1981 and 1983 under Ronald Reagan — failed to pass. As noted in my June 15, 2005 blog, Lynchings, "Rather than passing redundant laws, and meaningless (nonbinding) apologies, the Senate might spend its time more productively. Leave the drama to Hollywood."

While Daylight Saving Time may still be "the most unscientific public policy ever perpetrated," keeping Congress busy with meaningless legislation reduces the time they have for real mischief. It's like the old practice of sending husbands off to boil water while their wives give birth; keeps them out of the doctor's hair.

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