Speak, Stomaphagus

We wish to be less influential

2005-09-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

The New York Times will shortly lock its op-eds and archives behind a paywall.

OK, then

2005-09-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

Bush is doing something I didn't expect from him. He's learning.

First, do no good

2005-09-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

The other day it was mentioned to me and my lovely spouse that all professions, not just medical doctors, ought to take a kind of Hippocratic Oath. In that case it was a college professor wondering if he ought to vow to "first, do no harm," but logically, we all agreed that the oath could as fruitfully be uttered by dental assistants, auto mechanics, and furniture salesmen.

Apparently now we must add the police to the list of oath-takers. Now I am aware of the average American socialist's penchant for rabble-rousing exaggeration, but apparently this latest outrage from the Man does contain a kernel of truth. Strange days.

From the Dept. of Misanthropy

2005-09-09T23:31:00.000-07:00

"The second message is about the Y chromosome - what in the human
species determines gender. For a long time (centuries perhaps?)
the Y chromosome has been decaying. It has lost many of its
genes, and become much less healthy. If this continues, it will
go away. And if it goes away, there will be no men. And of
course, with no men, there are no women either. Delightful book."

(John Matlock, "Gunny," reviewing Bryan Sykes's Adam's Curse
on Amazon.com.)

Fire them all. He shall know His own

2005-09-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

What did they know and when did they know it?

FEMA knew last year.

Modern evil

2005-09-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

I am so angry I can hardly think straight enough to post.

I just saw a body – a dead body, an American, in America – on the national news. NBC, actually. Whoever it was sat in the sun for five days until they died. No help. No food. No water. Elsewhere a man sick with cancer died for lack of oxygen. He and his wife were two of the obstinate ones who refused to leave – they simply refused to have a car, refused to be healthy enough to move.

An old lady died waiting. Yes, that's a dead woman in the chair. Maybe it's a Photoshop job. It illustrates the reality.

So this is it! Welcome to a renewed, strengthened America, with no safety net, no hope for you in a disaster. The money that could have saved these people was spent in Iraq. And isn't it just the breaks, that the hurricane hit before everyone's assistance checks arrived on the first of the month? Ah, well, nothing to be done.

In other news:

WASHINGTON — It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's 7 feet under sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said of federal assistance for hurricane-devastated New Orleans. AP/Seattle Times

If the President came up to me, I would spit on him. He should pay politically, for this, but racism is too embedded in our culture to pillory a good ol' boy over the misfortune of some irresponsible poor black people.

Reality-based reality

2005-08-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

From an article in Salon - oh, sure, Liberal Media - but I'm betting these figures are more or less correct.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

All based on the best science, we're told. What does the Corps know about this kind of thing, anyway? Emphasis mine. Good thing our National Guard is healthy, energized, numerous and ready to help.

Why the Dock works

2005-08-31T10:15:00.001-07:00

In the planning document for Gnome 3.0, Geert Schuring writes

The current generation of desktops really suck hard imho... why on earth does an app need a notification place when it allready has a icon placed in my menu? It would be really simple to use an icon both for starting the app and for notifications. This way my mail client could even tell me that i should start him because there is mail waiting for me.

There you have it. Emphasis mine. UI experts tear their hair out over the Dock, the triple-duty monstrousness of it. But these kinds of interfaces are everywhere. A basic example is a car's tachometer, useful for telling if your car is running - useful in a smooth, modern, insulated luxury car - as well as the engine's speed. Nobody needs or wants an idiot light telling them that Your Car is On.

Not just him, not just me: Tim Bray takes note of the Dock's exasperating perfectly-OKness.

[ I | you ] [ am | are ] what [ I | you ] [ am | are ]

2005-05-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Ye sexes, oft warring. A civil debate (what kind of old-schoolers are these?) between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Let's get ready to rumble! I'm afraid I am with Pinker, as I am usually: the existence of individuals, though rare, who were re-sexed at a young age, raised with a clear gender role yet feel "trapped in the body" of their new sex tends to place the decisive role in our initial makeup. But then wait, think. The debate isn't about gender roles generally, but about female underrepresentation in hard-science professorships. Isn't there a lot of socialization going on before one defends one's PhD?

Anyway, this nature/nurture analogue once again brought to mind the people who claim that homosexuality is a choice, despite the overwhelming testimony of homosexual people, where most of whom who are asked say pretty clearly that they were always homosexual. My personal belief is that those people who say "homosexuality is a choice" may deploying a cypher for "I am bisexual." As for those folks who agree that the queerness is born-in, yet decry the "choice" of sexual activity as evil, well, in addition to some tribalism and mild sociopathy happening, there's just a wee pit of picking and choosing, no? Let none wearing a summer blend speak ill, I say. You have bigger problems.

Tutankhamun's face

2005-05-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

You could not find a better example of the differences between the French and American aesthetic than the reconstruction of Tutankhamum's face. The French reconstruction shows a delicately-featured young man, almost feminine and innocent, until you see the sneer of cold command. Compare that to the Americans' creation: the head of a thug.

Wait, I hate you

2005-02-09T22:04:00.000-08:00

Love is so fleeting. These sad fools apparently missed the hint that they're perfect for each other. By Friday some screenwriter in Hollywood will have tacked a happy ending onto this and will be pitching it as the next Sleepless In Seattle.

The beatings will continue

2005-02-08T08:16:00.000-08:00

...until they stop. Finally, someone tries an approach that works and sheds no blood. This is the kind of thing that gives me hope. If Yemenis can be so sensible, why can't we?

Losing control

2005-02-04T13:41:00.000-08:00

A highly speculative article on IBM’s new Cell processor, which will be unveiled soon in a series of workstations and, oh, Sony's Playstation 3. I’m not man enough to comment on the world-shaking potential of the Cell (“Steal processor cycles half a world away!”) but a throwaway line in the article has prodded into life one of my pet peeves about the level of writing on the Internet.

[...] We’re in a funny time at the moment, because that settlement hasn’t been reached yet. But it will be, and once it is, the Cell vendors had better start thinking of a more attractive sales pitch than “stops you doing stuff.”

“Let’s you do stuff” will be a start.

That’s right, the Cell “let’s” you do stuff. Did no one edit this piece for apostrophe errors? Does the author not know the difference? This sounds like something a witty spouse might say – “Honey, let’s you do the dishes.”

Speaking as an English major, it makes me crazy.

Another example, which I have seen growing in use for several years now, and which my wife, an English professor, has seen as well.

We are in danger of loosing the war on terror.

Loosing? Loosening? Oh, losing. Does no one realize that “loose” and “lose” are wholly different words, as different as “fat” is from “flat”?

Where did this come from?

I feel better now.

The smoky pit of ProKit

2005-02-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

I discovered some interesting things buried in my Mac the other night.

I was poking around in the Frameworks (/System/Library/Frameworks/) looking for some indication of how the Finder sets the menu policy. Ever since OS X 10.0.0 came out, I’ve been interested in how the Apple (er, NeXT) engineers converted the floating vertical NeXTStep menus to the top-of-the-screen Mac menus in such a short time. Recall that in the early days of OS X, there was a hidden preference for turning back on the NeXT look and feel.

Anyway, I wasn’t successful in gaining any knowledge about that, but I did find some other cool stuff, which brings us, finally, to the meat of the post.

Not long ago Daring Fireball posted about the new look and feel of Apple’s media applications (it’s the last item on the page). Us longtime Mac users are getting a little bewildered by the constant L&F changes that have been coming with OS X, especially coming from a company that was so preoccupied with UI consistency that they originally burned the UI toolkit into ROM. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I found the bits and pieces that make up the “Media UI” on my machine. And it wasn’t at all like I thought it would be.

Look in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ProKit.framework/Resources/ and you’ll find a bunch of files that apparently make up the new UI. Many of the files look like gibberish (“3f229972612431b0e11cc095b7ef4d09”) – hex code for something, but my efforts at de-hexing the string resulted, naturally, in ANSI gibberish.

Curious about what was inside them, I dragged one onto TextWrangler; blessed TW, it obediently rendered an image – turns out the gibberish files are the images that make up the ProKit (Media) UI.

Wishing to see the file’s guts, I cracked one open in emacs and discovered that it is a Photoshop file. So I made a copy, appended “.psd” onto the end and the Finder obediently provided a preview image – of a scrollbar with the down button pressed. I opened it in Photoshop and lo! five neatly organized layers of various states: inactive, normal, pressed, etc.

So the Mac OS is rendering layered Photoshop files as part of the UI? I would have expected TIFFs, given the NeXT history.

Not sure what use this is, but it’s interesting to know it’s there. Perhaps the real scoop is that TextWrangler renders .psd files, I don’t know.

Et tu, HIG?

2005-02-01T19:33:00.000-08:00

So I’m designing a few dialog boxes for a company I do a little work for. It’s like five hours of work, total. Despite it being written in Java, I thought since everybody who uses this app is on Windows, and probably XP too, I'd get the latest XP HIG document (the Windows XP Design Guidelines) and give the users a break.

Do it right, 'n shit.

Notice something? Yep, the downloadable guidelines are an .exe file. Since I'm on the Mac, doing mockups in Photoshop (pretty common practice, actually), what am I supposed to do with an .exe file? What’s in it? Couldn’t they provide a Word file, or a PDF, or something? HTML, God forbid? Guess not.

Edit: a smarter person than me has pointed out that Stuffit opens .exe files; doing so to the above yielded the XP HIG as a collection of HTML pages. Arrighty then! Learn something new every day. A manifest of the file’s contents would still have been nice (for example, “Download ‘WindowsXPDesignGuidelines.exe’; HTML format; 5.2 MB Zip archive; Updated: March 5, 2002”). Including such information is free, and harms no one.

So with a little Googling I found a PDF that wasn’t that useful. Perhaps it is what is contained in the .exe, but without a manifest, who knows? It didn’t, for example, tell me how many pixels to put between related & unrelated buttons, nor the margin between the OK/Cancel buttons and the window edge, none of that.

Back to MSDN and I find an older Design Guidelines for what looks like Windows 2000. And I discovered why Windows applications are all totally different from one another, totally non-standard, all wonky. I quote:

The system defines the size and location of user interface elements in a window based on dialog units (DLUs), not pixels. A dialog unit is the device-independent measure to use for layout. One horizontal dialog unit is equal to one-fourth of the average character width for the current system font. One vertical dialog unit is equal to one-eighth of an average character height for the current system font. The default height for most single-line controls is 14 DLUs. Be careful if you use a pixel-based drawing program, because it may not provide an accurate representation when you translate your design into dialog units. If you do use a pixel-based drawing tool, you may want to take screen snapshots from a development tool that supports dialog units and use those images.

Did your eyes glaze over? Let me get this straight: I should measure my mockups not in pixels but in DLUs – which are different depending on whether they are vertical DLUs or horizontal DLUs – and I should steer clear of pixel-based drawing programs (ahem, Photoshop) to do mockups.

Could laying out a damn dialog be more of a pain in the ass? For one, isn’t a developer going to look at DLUs and say yeahh right (it’s what I said when I read it) and slap together whatever looks OK? Two, did they explain which design applications measure DLUs correctly? No, but I’m betting it’s a $1000 Microsoft product that runs on Windows, whaddya say?

The usability is hard to use. It’s beautiful, in its own special way.

I mean, comment-spam me if I’m wrong.

Driven to post

2005-02-01T17:13:00.000-08:00

More later.