Forced Air.

Record Store Day tomorrow

2010-04-16T12:20:00.001-04:00

Ahh, Record Store Day: the national holiday commemorating the physical artifacts by which music used to be transmitted, and the cultural outposts set up to sell them. If you're local to Northside, check out Shake It Records, they're participating. That's tomorrow -- April 17th. Lots of limited-edition releases just for the occasion. Cocorosie, Bonobo, other good stuff.

David Byrne on the demise of music packaging in The Bicycle Diaries: "The era of the data cloud surrounding pop music as representative of a weltanschaung might be over."

Illusory Pattern Recognition, a.k.a. the Virgin Mary in a Piece of Toast

2010-02-03T15:01:00.002-05:00

I just read about a study that explored the idea that when people feel powerless, they tend to latch on to a superstitious, fatalistic worldview.

Feelings of control are essential for our well-being -- we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, so we instinctively seek out patterns to regain control -- even if those patterns are illusory.

Anthropologically, one can certainly look around and interpret a lot of marginalized beliefs through this lens if one is so inclined, be it AIDS as a CIA plot or Obama as a Manchurian Candidate. It seems we are storytelling creatures, and we'll just make up a story if we have to to satisfy that pattern-finding urge.

In the workplace, one can see this effect when it comes to the rumors of what "Management" has in store for "the rest of us." This is why transparency and accountability is so important -- to prevent learned helplessness.

For an antidote, here's an interview in the NYT with Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga:

One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

New music I liked the most in 2009

2009-12-30T09:33:00.001-05:00

Nosaj Thing, Drift, Alpha Pup

The Embassadors, Coptic Dub, Nonplace

Radian, Chimeric, Thrill Jockey

Dwayne Sodahberk, Interdikt, Tigerbeat6

Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport, ATP Recordings

Cluster, Qua, Nepenthe

XX - Xx, Young Turks

Thao, Know Better Learn Faster, Kill Rock Stars

Do Make Say Think, Other Truths, Constellation

Talking Heads

2009-11-12T07:20:00.001-05:00

Every information technology has its particular limitations and specialties, which define the ways in which it can present its information. These conditions evolve into the formation of a style.

I think of this phenomenon every time I'm listening to NPR and the sound guy has designed in all these auditory cues -- cowbells dinging and cattle lowing behind the reporter's voiceover, or what have you.

But sometimes the style persists even after the initial limitations have melted away, and that's interesting.

Example: The first newspapers were printed in black ink on letterpress. Thus they were restricted to the written word and -- initially -- the engraved illustration style. One side effect of these restrictions was that the illustrator could play a real dramatic role in influencing the storytelling (drawing things that never happened, for one extreme).

If you look at a current issue of the New Yorker, you can see a continuation of this style which persists now not because of technological need, but to reach a particular audience which has been prepared by newspapers to prefer its information to be delivered in a particular way. Lots of column inches, set off by illustrations. I mean, they have artists create caricatures to accompany their movie reviews -- who does that? It's not like they have to send Robert Risko to the sound stage to sketch the actors. At this point, the aesthetic is a stylistic choice.

The New Yorker looks the way it does to please the aesthetic of the magazine's creators and audience, and this is all right and proper. But this aesthetic has been more formed by technological constraints than we know.

Television, of course, is the new newspaper, defining an aesthetic for pretty much everybody now.

When I look at the video library on Businessweek.com, I see an information delivery technology which inherits the aesthetic of television, with clickable rows of talking heads instead of a sequence of talking heads, and I have to wonder what the Web would look like if it hadn't been preceded by both the newspapers and television.

I also can't figure out whether what I'm looking at is information-sparse or information-dense. One thing's for sure -- it'd take a whole lot of clicking and watching to find out.

Krautdub

2009-10-05T13:44:00.001-04:00

Some places on Earth seem to be musical loci: Kingston, Bamako, the Lower East Side. I just realized how much of the most interesting music I have been listening to lately comes from Cologne. Sonig and Nonplace are two great Kölner labels.

Nonplace in particular seems to have picked up where Can and Cluster left off, continuing to base the music in live instrumentation, but noodling over it fairly thoroughly on the computer afterwards.

For example, The new album from the Embassadors sounds absolutely smokin'. The individual musicians recorded their tracks in different cities over a couple of years, and it was all assembled in the Nonplace studio.

Way more interesting than most purely electronic music, this is using the computer as a bricoleur to assist in the assembly of ever-denser human sound-artifacts.

I'm also reminded of something Brian Eno said he was aiming for when he was assembling Nerve Net. He said he was looking to create music that sounded like it was created by "African robots."

Also regarding the intersection of the robotic and the human in music, David Byrne wrote some amusing liner notes to go with his curation of partly-Kölner music a while back.

I Am Enthusiastic

2009-10-01T12:11:00.001-04:00

We're all getting free personality testing at work. I'm excited to see what will be done with the data.

Nostalgia for the Now

2009-09-18T09:35:00.001-04:00

Someone was telling me a story about how they were in traffic the other day watching the driver of the car next to them actually reading a newspaper folded across his steering wheel while he drove. Standard trope about distracted driving.

How far we've come from the days when you put on goggles and driving gloves before you got behind the wheel -- it was almost like an athletic event, certainly physically and mentally demanding, requiring knowledge and concentration to keep the elaborate contraption running. Every car was a sports car.

But closed cabins took away the need for driving goggles; automatic transmission, power steering and brakes made athleticism unnecessary; the roads were paved; seat belts and air bags were put in place to protect our frail bodies. We grew quite comfortable in our driving lives.

Now, out of our comfort, we grow careless, and the engineers invent car radar to keep us safe. How far away can full autopilot be?

It suddenly seems like this moment is a kind of dangerous valley, where we've already mentally given up control of our fate to the machines, even though the engineers haven't quite gotten them fully finished for us.

And it reminds me of something Bill Joy famously quoted in his article about Grey Goo:

Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

I prefer to think of this a bit metaphorically, not just as the individual giving up control of his fate to a machine, but as the individual benefiting from the creations of the group. The robot is really a stand-in for the ever-more-complex apparatus of society.

But for now, anyone is still free to wake up and drive like an athlete, mindfully inhabiting the present moment, fully in charge of the ton of steel they're riding down the road.

Hire slowly, fire quickly. At a cocktail party.

2009-08-13T07:03:00.004-04:00

"Hire slowly, fire quickly" is a Jack Welchian adage. This post at the always-interesting Signal Vs. Noise explains one reason why growing companies should bear it in mind.

Hard Drive Formatting on Mac OS X

2009-05-29T12:21:00.001-04:00

If you're using a Mac, Disk Utility should be your first stop after plugging in a new drive, which will probaby come formatted for Windows. Windows formatted drives are not unusable on the Mac, but are also not optimal. This is a good article by Matt Neuburg about the proper settings to use.
It's painful to have to redo these settings if you don't get them right while the disk is still bare...

How real is real?

2009-04-15T17:27:00.001-04:00

Go read this thought provoking news item about how much Photoshoppin' is acceptable in photojournalism.

In a nutshell, a Danish photojournalist turned the saturation and contrast in his RAW files up to 11, as is the fashion these days in editorial / design photography, and entered them into a contest. Judges said, that's not what journalism looks like, and demanded to see his RAW files for comparison.

It's interesting to see how those original files are needed to stand in for some kind of objective reality. It's not as if stuff like this wasn't possible in pre-digital darkrooms, and it's not like you can ever view a RAW file without some rendering/intent decisions being made -- either by you or some software engineer.

Nobody's asking me, but I would say there's a big difference between local and global adjustments. Anything you can do to a digital file without making a selection falls in to one level of manipulation, and anything involving a selection or other pixel-pushing (layer, mask, rubberstamping, etc) falls into another. Any time you open a RAW file in Photoshop, you're already at level one.

And this bit is just incorrect:

"He deliberately chose a chair and made it yellow, and so he chose the wall and made the blue," said Peter Dejong. "For me it is unacceptable."

To me it seems like the area in question is well within the possibilities of global color adjustment from RAW.

From John Nack.

(Update -- machine-translated link above can be wonky; here's a page on the original site -- in Danish.)

Adobe UI Gripes

2009-04-15T06:28:00.001-04:00

Adobe UI Gripes is an awesome kvetch-blog with plenty of screenshots of the funny things that happen when Marketing makes the decision about when the software is ready to ship. I can already think of an error message dialog I need to screen capture next time I see it.

Ridiculously Lean

2009-04-08T15:03:00.001-04:00

Xerox brags about how much time they're going to save P&G:

Using Lean Six Sigma-based methodologies, Xerox Global Services will deliver an enterprise-wide strategy, expected to free up hundreds of minutes of employee time annually.

I can't figure out any way to legitimately read that sentence to mean "hundreds of minutes of time per employee," can you?

So it's time to get out the calculator.

Given that P&G has 138,000 employees, even if we're as generous as we can be and call it nine-hundred and ninety nine minutes, that still works out to less than half a second per employee, per year...

But how much time is really spent waiting for laserprints of regular Office documents anyway? Not much, compared to how much time a large design firm spends spooling gigabytes to presentation printers.

Illustrator team blog

2009-03-12T13:56:00.001-04:00

Infinite Resolution is a nifty name for a blog. Via John Nack.

I hate refill streams

2009-02-27T14:18:00.001-05:00

Painfully familiar rant at Gizmodo called Why I Now Hate Epson Printers, and the answer boils down to, they've taken the refill stream of ink cartridges to an almost DRM-ed level of insanity.

Familiar for me; I just trashed my Canon and replaced it with a $150.00 networkable black and white laser printer. At 3,500 pages between cartridges, I hope to go many years without having to suddenly run out to Staples in the middle of a print job.

The Future of the Layers Palette

2009-02-07T10:49:00.001-05:00

John Nack, product manager for Photoshop, requests input on ways to improve the interface for managing the increasingly complex variety and number of layers in a typical design PSD. This should sound familiar:

People end up heavily overloading the few tools they've got--layer names, layer visibility, and nesting layers into folders/groups. Naming conventions work up to a point, but they're clumsy and fragile.

The Layers palette is really a simple outliner of visual data right now, and a lot of the ideas Nack proposes have to do with ways to make that outliner better able to respond to the need for a more automated, error-free design pipeline.

It is a quick and anonymous survey so I encourage you to fill it out if you would be affected by these changes. The last time I took an Adobe survey I got a personal follow-up; it seems like maybe they're finally getting on the clue train.

Brutalism

2009-01-17T11:45:00.001-05:00

You know those full spectrum "sunlight therapy" lamps that supposedly relieve us Ice People from Seasonal Affective Disorder? Someone needs to engineer flat panel monitors so they use the same kind of light source.

Since we just sit in the gloom staring at screens all the time.

Font Explorer Pro

2009-01-11T17:19:00.001-05:00

Linotype just launched a Pro version of Font Explorer; Jon Hicks blogged about the icon he made for it.

I like the way the current, standalone version feels; it's like iTunes for fonts, replete with a Store. But mostly I'm just rooting for Linotype to give Suitcase some pro-level competition, since Suitcase + the Adobe Creative Suite = Wristwatch Land. It's pathetic that Linotype can use "Finally an auto-activation function that really works!" as a sell line.

Hmmm, the blurb on the brochure says that "...Landor will definitely be switching..."

Best music of [Date added] is in the last [12 months]

2008-12-31T16:24:00.001-05:00

I looked through my iTunes library to look for the best music I put into it this year. Some of this music didn't come out in 2008, but that's apparently when I found out about it. Some of this stuff is rooted in traditional musical forms, but towards the end of the list it gets a little further out there.

Most of the links are to eMusic pages where you can listen to samples.

The Carter Family — I had a blast tracking down covers of "John Hardy" especially.

Camera Obscura — They're all good, but I'll pick Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi.

Rothko and Caroline Ross — A Place Between

Department of Eagles — The Cold Nose. — That's not the record that came out this year, but the other led me to this one.

Anouar Brahem — Le Voyage de Sahar

Twilight Circus Dub Sound System — Horsie

My Bloody Valentine — Loveless — My old copy was a cassette!

Gang Gang Dance — Saint Dymphna

Fuck Buttons — Street Horrrsing

Method of Defiance — Inamorata — Laswell and his friends make drum n' bass listenable.

Charlie Hunter & Bobby Previte — Come in Red Dog, this is Tango Leader

Shining — In The Kingdom Of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster

Burnet Woods

2008-12-07T15:28:00.001-05:00

A plastic bag within a glade.

LaunchBar 5

2008-12-06T11:26:00.001-05:00

Looks like a lot of long-wished-for improvements are coming in the next version of LaunchBar -- support for multiple (global) clipboards is the big one for me. There are a lot of programs that provide this service, but the way LaunchBar is doing it looks very clean and robust -- a lot of data formats are supported. The ability to add an event to iCal from LaunchBar is also very cool.

Go look at the beta.

VoodooPad 4

2008-11-20T00:33:00.001-05:00

VoodooPad 4 is out. It was already a great tool... and now it finally looks at home on Leopard.

I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me if I remembered some design project we did way back a couple of years ago, and who was the printer, or why did we have to bla-bla-bla, and I'm able to recall it instantly.

It's the best way I know to make your coworkers think you're a genius.

Of course, it only looks like magic if you are diligent about putting stuff into it, and keep your VoodooPad documents available all times.... which is why 4.0 features like document synching and "The Bucket" are cool.

TextExpander gets an update

2008-10-30T01:30:00.001-04:00

Many programs have the ability to assign the current date or time to a shortcut. For instance, I have TypeIt4Me set up so that if I type "dd" it will insert "2008-10-30 Thursday" into whatever I'm writing. But, I've never run across an easy way to have a shortcut that expands to, for example, tomorrow's date.

But, I have now. If you are one of those people who keeps plain text files around in order to Get Things Done, then you may actually be thinking to yourself, why yes, I do hate struggling to type out future dates in year-month-day format all the time. If so, check out TextExpander 2.5.

3D for retail planning

2008-10-01T19:24:00.001-04:00

A big data visualization exercise.

Oracle buys maker of 3D retail software

Unilever tries extended-gamut

2008-09-10T22:10:00.001-04:00

A division of Unilever is moving away from spot colors for their packaging printing. I would guess the six "process" inks are CMYK plus green and orange, like Hexachrome, or rich blue and orange -- seems like rich blues are more sought after than bright greens.

Most of the advantages to moving to such a system have to do with cutting makeready time, and allowing more flexibility to gang up unrelated labeling together. This might be more important in markets that require a lot of regional adaptation than it is here in the U.S...

Judging by a similar trial I've seen, a six color system still leaves a lot of colors a bit out of gamut. I also have to imagine that this isn't targeting traditional flexography. Small type on a flexo label, built out of two or three inks, would look pretty bad.

This system has serious implications for the design "end user." No area of the design could have more than four different inks in it, so the ordinary human brain wouldn't be trusted to pick colors directly: familiar desktop design applications won't give you a palette with six sliders in it. If I recall, the old Hexachrome system dictated that designers go over to an RGB workflow, with separations created by proprietary software once it left the desktop.

For most imagery, the designer would never know what the exact color build was. Instead, they would only know what the values in RGB on the desktop were, and color management software would do the rest.

So the color management business would have a lot to gain by adoption of extended gamut printing.

Thanks to David Johnson for the tip.

Rules of design

2008-08-28T07:13:00.001-04:00

From an article in Business Week about designing Coke:

Another example of working within the peculiar constraints of Coca-Cola is a Web-based software tool that Butler calls the Design Machine and describes as "the Nike ID of internal design." The tool allows designers at the company's many bottling partners to create new bottle or can label designs or even promotional posters. Because of parameters built into the tool, the final design will always conform to the global standards set by the corporate design team. The neat internal use of Web 2.0 technology cuts back on the need for top-down control from the brand managers in Atlanta, allowing greater brand flexibility.

I'd love to see what that looks like.

use your memory usage as your iChat status message

2008-08-25T18:51:00.002-04:00

This script will let you use your iChat status message to brag to your friends about how much RAM you've got in your Mac -- or more usefully, petition the IT overlords for mercy if you're scratching to disk a little too much.

I have this triggered periodically by Keyboard Maestro, but there are other ways to get it to run every so often. Not too often, or the overlords will have an easy (if specious) excuse for why it's your own fault you're running out of RAM.

Briefly, it runs a "top" shell command and extracts the two most rhetorically significant memory usage figures, and pipes that to iChat.


set myoutput to (do shell script "top -l 1 | perl -pe " & quoted form of "

my ($unwanted, $wanted) = /(.*inactive,)(.*free)/sm;
$_ = $wanted;

")

tell application "iChat"
      set status message to myoutput
end tell

New Features In Adobe Illustrator CS3

2008-07-04T13:26:00.001-04:00

From the Help pages:

Work more fluidly and efficiently without waiting for Illustrator to catch up with your hands and your thoughts. The underlying architecture of Illustrator has been improved. You’ll notice increased scroll and zoom times...

I can vouch for the increased zoom times, but it's a bit odd they'd tout this as a feature...

little black notebooks

2008-06-18T19:33:00.001-04:00

I found a blog covering Moleskines, Miquelriuses, and other little blank books. You love 'em, I love 'em, and this guy loves 'em so much he has a blog devoted to them. And if you go there, you'll see the reason I'm linking to him in this post....

The blog has a prejudice for smaller rather than larger, the idea being that if it can't be with you at all times, it won't be with you when you need it.

Personally, I go for the 200 sheet SM Grid Miquelrius. Barely fits in my back jeans pocket, but it's good for about a year's worth of pensees...

Brad Bird on Innovation

2008-05-31T16:45:00.001-04:00

This is a must-read article clipped out of the McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Brad Bird on "fostering innovation" in the workplace. One feels the pain of recognition in every one of Mr. Bird's points:

When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

"Innovation" seems to be the way in which capitalism can understand and harness creativity, which makes it a
buzzword with a future.

You can tell the idea of innovation has arrived because The New Yorker this year added a themed issue around it, right between the fashion issue and the fiction issue...

Mound Magnet Part Two

2008-04-22T11:10:00.002-04:00

New album from Lithops (a.ka. Jan St. Werner) released today. Available now on eMusic and iTunes. Highly recommended for all Mouse on Mars fans....

1,000 True Fans

2008-03-07T21:17:00.001-05:00

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

From a thought provoking article by Kevin Kelly about how to make it as an artist in whatever age we're in now, the one after the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Thanks to the Internet, there can now be far more idiosyncratic artists in all disciplines who are able to make an honest living, with high status within a certain subculture. The corollary to this may be that after a while there will be fewer expensive blockbuster movies and platinum albums.

And while I haven't been a "true fan" of Trent Reznor, the first music he's created after being free of Interscope is, by far, his most compelling. I encourage you to download it. For free.

Si usted no entiende la etiqueta...

2008-03-01T20:52:00.001-05:00

Really funny text below the Caution Statement on this label for Clorox Disinfecting Kitchen Cleaner. Everything that appears on the label in English also appears in Spanish, so I'm not sure why they'd need to single out their Spanish speaking consumers to tell them what they should do if they couldn't understand it.

Torschlusspanik

2008-02-26T22:58:00.001-05:00

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors is a nice take by John Tierney on the power of letting go -- accepting realistic limits on how many possible futures you can entertain.

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

And thanks to Time putting some of its archives online, I can provide the name for the trope of the closing door: Torschlusspanik, as felt in East Germany, 1961:

Last week a curious and serious malady was affecting Communist East Germany and reaching almost epidemic proportions. The name of the disease was Torschlusspanik, which literally means "fear of gate closing." Everything East German leaders did to shut off the flow of refugees to the West seemed, instead, to spur it on.

So the fear of a closing gate spurs people to finally take the hard path to the desired outcome.

There seems to be a lot of Torschlusspanik in the air these days.

unreleased Marumari EP

2008-02-26T20:03:00.001-05:00

Has been available from the source himself for quite a while now, here. It is quite good, as usual. Simple, blissful, wordless electronica. I would have paid money for it...

Name Mangler

2008-02-14T17:54:00.001-05:00

New version of the file renaming utility formerly known as File List. I have used several such utilities and this one's the best. Powerful regexes and conditionals, though I still manage to find things I can't make it do. Probably my fault. New version Leopard-only.

more tropes

2008-02-06T18:26:00.001-05:00

Tropes of the Times -- words which occur more frequently in the NY Times than anywhere else.

madeleines

donnybrook

hardscrabble

hustings

more?

Biometric database

2008-02-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

Did you see the story about the gov't's biometric database? Storin' your iris patterns, etc.

What will be convenient will be when the gov't underwrites the cost of the program by renting access to the database, because it will mean I can buy a Coke just by winking at the Coke machine.

À la recherche du temps perdu

2008-01-30T17:17:00.000-05:00

BBC reporting Electrical stimulation of areas deep within the brain could improve memory, early research suggests.

Fairly poignant stuff. Cyberpunk meets Proust. When it's reported in the NY Times, I hope they pull out a reference to madeleines from their trope-bucket.

Phantom Orchard

2008-01-20T14:51:00.001-05:00

Phantom Orchard is an album by Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori which is growing on me greatly. I truly possess no technical musical vocabulary to bring to bear to explain what about this complicated noisescape is so arresting; all I can say is it feels uncomfortable and restless, but somehow compels the listener (me, at least) to pay attention -- something missing from most music of this type.

NetNewsWire now free

2008-01-09T23:58:00.001-05:00

I've been using the previously-free "light" version of this RSS reader for a while; now the full version is free too.

windshields of the midwest - week 52/week1

2008-01-01T18:48:00.001-05:00

North Dakota

Indiana

One of those other states that begins with an I.

Happy Solstice

2007-12-21T22:28:00.001-05:00

Two shots outside my office window near the end of the year.

Software I Use

2007-12-04T12:57:00.001-05:00

I hereby present my list of Geek Force Multipliers.... with URLs now:

Effort Reducers

LaunchBar — CLI for the GUI. A revolution away from pointing and clicking.

DragThing — the opposite of LaunchBar; still better than the Dock.

Path Finder — still better than the Finder. Gets routine things done more easily, and copy operations are faster.

Typeit4me — now I can type 80 wpm.

Hazel — rule based refiling to keep up with the torrent. For instance, anything on the desktop with "receipt" in the file name gets moved to the receipts folder.

MenuCalendarClock — I use this just because it lets me see the date in the menubar in yyyy-mm-dd format, and I don't suppose I need to say why that's so great.

Outboard Brains

OmniOutliner — for a while every project had an outline; now I use it mostly for structured writing.

TaskPaper — for the daily hit list.

VoodooPad — like an extra large messenger bag, it's simple and versatile. Requires a change in mindset to get the most use out of it. Hoping it gains all of taskpaper's abilities over time.

System Utilities

Cocktail — once every 6 months or so. Good for clearing out font caches, etc.

Growl — good for use with hazel so you know what your robot is doing.

By the way, a couple of these are on sale this month only through MacSanta.

Buyn'large

2007-11-29T08:34:00.001-05:00

Looks like Pixar's getting their mojo back: www.buynlarge.com. Is there a word for this kind of bleedover-from-a-fictional-universe website? There should be.

Leopard

2007-10-29T08:49:00.000-04:00

John Siracusa's Leopard review for Ars Technica is, as usual, the "Sunday New York Times" of Macintosh reporting. Highly recommended if you're looking for thorough and forward-looking GUI-to-kernel coverage.

Here's the bit that's most intriguing for folks with lots of data locked up in Adobe or Microsoft formats:

Yep, it's (finally) the end of the line for Carbon GUI applications in Mac OS X. Oh, sure, they'll be around for years and years to come, but the lack of 64-bit support is a long-term death sentence.

I can only dream about what Photoshop or Illustrator would be like if they were rewritten in Cocoa...

TaskPaper

2007-10-26T11:30:00.001-04:00

TaskPaper is actually a lot more useful than it looks like it might be at first glance. Zero bloat. "Fiddle-proof" as Merlin Mann says....

and it's at least a little bit AppleScriptable. I'm sure Jesse will be working on making that more robust... would be nice to have a QuickSilver-like method of text entry.

Canadian Signal Word Type Height Calculator

2007-10-01T08:29:00.002-04:00

If you're in the business of designing packaging for Consumer Packaged Goods to be sold in Canada, you may have run across the amazingly complicated formula for calculating the size of the word "Caution" as it sits at the bottom of the package, warning the consumer not to drink the Drano, or what have you. The corresponding icons for "poisonous," "contents under pressure," etc. are quite punk rock, I will have to upload those later.

So, this is the kind of thing you only have to do twice before it's safer and easier to offload the entire calculation off to the computer.


#! usr/bin/perl
# a formula used to calculate size of "signal word" for Cdn cautionary copy.
# Find diameter of a circle with an area equal to 3% of the PDP. 
# That's how big any required symbol needs to be.
# The signal word then has to be 1/4 that size.

use Math::Complex;
use constant PI  => 4 * atan2(1, 1);
print "enter the X dimension of your PDP in centimeters\n";
my $xDim = (<\STDIN\>);
print "enter the y dimension of your PDP in centimeters\n";
my $yDim = (<\STDIN\>);
my $PDPArea = $xDim * $yDim;
my $SignalWordHeight = (sqrt(($PDPArea * .03)/PI))/2;

printf "the area of the principal display panel is %.3f cm square, and the signal word should be at least %.3f cm high.\n", $PDPArea, $SignalWordHeight;

Update: Had to escape "STDIN" with backslashes for Blogger. Remove before use.

Visualization

2007-09-29T12:37:00.001-04:00

In which I start out talking about decision trees, and end up talking about shelf sets.

Matt Neuburg has an interesting writeup at Tidbits of a decision making tool called Flying Logic. The program creates "intelligent" decision trees that provide visual feedback as to how to navigate the complex web of dependencies required in order to get to a goal.

Yes, you can do this with a whiteboard (or Omnigraffle), but those don't let you offload logic out of your head.

This is a tool that's probably only worth checking out for major initiatives, but more broadly, the power of visualization in aiding group decision-making can't be overstated. Without visual reference, planning meetings are essentially Socratic dialogs, which is unnecessarily hard work.

Even in the world of brand design, I am often sitting in a meeting talking about "the chosen design" and what needs to happen to it... without any visual reference. Looking around the table, you can see everyone's eyes focussing off in the middle distance as we recall what that design looked like. More unnecessarily hard work.

Think ahead about what needs to be in your library of visual reference material, and keep it at hand in your team's public discussion areas. For CPG design, this means comprehensive shelf sets, and reference for visual equity elements and physical materials. Don't have your meetings in conference rooms, you'll just have to bring your stuff there, and that's too much work, so you won't.

History is written...

2007-09-25T00:46:00.001-04:00

as seen in Bill Gates: Helping People Use Computers.

About a certain type of article which seems to be typical of the New Yorker

2007-09-23T19:01:00.001-04:00

Simulacra in the high culture bazaar.... (via BoingBoing)

There was an interesting article by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker this week about fashion design knockoffs, and the unacknowledged link in the chain of commerce which they play:

The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s.

It seems the real depends upon the simulacra in order to exist, or at least to have value.

There have been many other articles about the phenomenon of the simulacra over the past few years in the New Yorker. Here's a few off the top of my head:

Calvin Trillin's claim that white wine served at room temperature tastes just like red wine if you close your eyes (I think Cal should stick to food writing).
The story I blogged earlier about Argentinian sunflower-seed oil etc. being labeled as extra-virgin Italian olive oil.
Last week's incredible story about Joyce Hatto, the greatest pianist who never was, and her Svengali-like husband, who assembled hundreds of Joyce Hatto CDs out of bits and bobs of other recordings, and turned her into a star, until the hoax was discovered. I liked the bit at the beginning about the cottage industry of recordings issued under false names.
The story the week before that about the hard-working counterfeiter of bottles of wine reputed to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson, which sold to collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Robert Parker was a fan.

Each of these articles takes as their subject a culturally freighted pleasure which forms one of the cornerstones of their target demographic's highbrow, luxury lifestyle: gourmet food, wine auctions, classical music, haute couture. In each case, received wisdom about the hierarchy of the Good is tested: blindfolded, could you tell white wine from red? How can critics praise the same recordings when attributed to Joyce Hatto which they dismissed when presented under their true performer's name? If a blind stranger came to dinner and you served him dog food, how much trouble would you be in when he turned out to be Wotan?

I guess part of what this supports is the idea that with the New Yorker you get the unvarnished truth, including cultural metacriticism.

So what is clearly needed to complete these categories of counterfeitings is a story about a literary fiction. It's surprising the Raymond Carver - Gordon Lish authorship dispute never made it to their pages.

But yes: in this aisle of culture, the New Yorker is a producer, not a critic.

More cocoa image editors

2007-09-14T09:29:00.001-04:00

Iris, another Cocoa pixel graphics editor coming on line with Leopard. From the makers of Interarchy. No beta until Leopard ships. No idea what that will look like.

And Line Form, a Cocoa vector graphics editor which lets you apply Core Image filters nondestructively to any vector or raster object. Sort of like what Illustrator CS3 would be if it were rewritten from scratch, just for Mac OS X. It's fun.

More Acorny goodness

2007-09-10T19:32:00.001-04:00

There's a buried plist entry in Acorn to turn on the "Save a copy" menu item... which is as close to "Export for Web" as we get for now.

defaults write com.flyingmeat.Acorn saveACopyMenuItem 1

Thanks, Gus, and I'll be sure to let everyone know this is unsupported ;)

Vs. the 800 lb Gorilla.

2007-09-10T08:04:00.001-04:00

Acorn looks like an awesome little image editor, and it comes from Gus Mueller, the author of VoodooPad, so it's automatically worth downloading to check out.
Core Image effects, Python scripting, small footprint... looks like it leverages a lot of Mac goodness. I admire the move away from the paletted UI, but the combination of "tools" and "layers" into one palette might take a bit of getting used to. Many years of Photoshop make me want to break the tools off and put it on the far left, and put the rest of the palette on the far right.
But this is just the thing if you want to keep something around that starts up more quickly than Photoshop, especially if, like me, you're still working with a pre-Universal Binary version of Photoshop, which I never want to keep open for fear of Rosetta gobbling up all my RAM.

handy mac key modifier

2007-09-09T20:11:00.001-04:00

Next time you're hitting the backspace key to delete some words, hold down the option key while you're doing it.
It makes not holding the option key down feel incredibly stupid.

Scutching

2007-09-09T16:55:00.001-04:00

My wife's family uses the verb scutch exclusively to mean "to enjoin," as in "Mom was scutching me to get my homework done before dinner." Sort of like the evidently related heckle, but with the object of improving the person whom you are addressing. It was just one of those family words.
Then I came across a brochure for an old-timey "Flax Scutching Festival" in Pennsylvania, and the etymological mystery was solved. The root, physical meaning is to beat stalks of flax to obtain fibers which can be made into linen. The metaphorical meaning is thus, to abuse, with the intention of a practical improvement to the abused object...
Above are two images from the brochure, illustrating scutching, and also the root, physical meaning of "to heckle," which looks painful too.
So many words have drifted this way, concrete meanings suggesting metaphorical ones, until in time the metaphorical meaning obliterates the concrete one. Few English speakers make flax into linen any more, but many have the experience of bothering someone to their betterment, or of being so bothered.
As far as I know, this is an undocumented usage of the word, and I do not know of anyone outside my wife's family who uses the word this way. I would appreciate feedback if you have also heard this usage.

Yes

2007-09-07T12:07:00.001-04:00

It's really true about surgery these days; everyone shows up asking you for your full name and birth date, and why you're here today, and which knee it is that they're going to operate on.

And someone really did inscribe the word "yes" on me, like a charm, to affirm to all who could see that I was going to get arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Without seeing the charm, the surgeon cannot make the cut.

"I'm only into their old stuff"

2007-09-04T19:59:00.000-04:00

To Dolan's list of rock n' roll bands that got better over time, counter to the prevailing Romantic idea equating quality with origin-ality, I was going to add Pavement. I remember selling Westing (by musket and sextant) back to that snooty CD shop in Iowa City because it just seemed like the noisy flailings of a bunch of smart-ass kids who had recently encountered some musical instruments. They exhibited that sense that they knew they had genius in them because they could feel it oozing out of their pores.

Almost a decade on, after everyone else was done with them, I caught up with the later Brighten the Corners, and thought it was fantastic.

So when the deluxe 2 CD edition of Slanted & Enchanted came out in 2002, I eagerly put down my $18.99 for an actual hard copy, but when I put it on I could not get past track 5. Back on the rack it went, for years. Once in a while I would get it out just to admire the deluxe should-have-been-there booklet, tucked along with the CD into a slipcase which ran an emboss over the original artwork's brushstroked title.

But just the other day I finally ripped both CDs to iTunes and put it on the iPod, and listened to both disks straight through several times in a row. It's a beautiful mess.

nice blog

2007-08-23T23:08:00.000-04:00

via hicksdesign

it takes a village.

2007-08-22T18:00:00.000-04:00

Time for my story about how when I was a kid I lived in Pakistan for a year, and saw that road crews consisted of a lot of men, some donkeys pulling wagons with truck tires, lots of gravel, and a few shovels.

There was this technique they had where one man would hold the shovel normally and do the downstroke, and a second man would then pull on a big rope attached to the shovel shaft, to actually toss the gravel.

Seemed odd but I'm sure it makes sense in a world with more men than tools.

This picture takes it to a new extreme. I found it on a google search as I was trying to explain the concept to a team mate.

The particular circumstance that led me to be sitting in air conditioned comfort, using Lotus Notes to compose an explanation of the "two man shovel" technique is not interesting enough to be described here, but I do find enough need for the picture to keep it around.

desert of the real, part two

2007-08-19T20:00:00.000-04:00

Same story in Italy; In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union... Even Carapelli; I quite like the Carapelli.

We'd just have to fix it all the time

2007-08-19T16:29:00.000-04:00

That's the story about why IT won't tell people that they know why Illustrator gets the "can't find any linked images in any of your documents anymore" error periodically. This is a very annoying issue, as it means that one person on a team is creating files that nobody else can open without having to relink to all the placed images. And every file everyone else creates is similarly broken for them. It's kind of a waste of everyone's time. We've been dealing with it since we upgraded to CS2.

So the issue is that when a mounted volume disappears while Illustrator has files open, it recreates a "phantom" volume in which to store the files. This phantom volume is actually a subdirectory of the /Volumes/ directory. Then, when the mounted volume reappears, the OS says, "hmm, I already have a volume named "The Server," I think I'll refer to this one as "The Server-1." From that point on, an image that I put on /Volumes/The Server/will be linked in to an AI file at /Volumes/The Server-1/...

Obviously, that's a dumb thing to do, and it's related to the change in CS whereby you can't rename a folder containing a file that's currently open in Illustrator. If you do... Illustrator recreates the old folder hierarchy so that everything can be as it was when the file was first open. In a networked workflow, this sucks because you may not know what files your team has open at any particular time. The version control issues are nasty. Compare this to how a nicely written app such as Omnioutliner handles it.

It was kind of a surprise when I emailed IT saying I thought I'd figured out what caused the issue... only to find out they already knew how to fix it, but weren't publicizing it, because "we'd just have to fix it all the time."

So believe it or not, I'm not actually interested in making IT run from floor to floor manually fixing the issue. I don't want them to waste their time any more than I want my team to waste its time.

But until Adobe fixes the issue, somebody could write a simple little shell script to periodically check for and correct it on the user's computer.

Then all of us -- IT and the rest of the company -- could stop wasting our time today.

So somebody should do that.

the desert of the real

2007-08-18T15:22:00.001-04:00

There was a lot of chat about China in the office this week -- the Mattel recall, the melamine in the pet food, et cetera. Since this town is the former home of Hasbro, there are a lot of connections to the toy industry, and of course we make our living embellishing the brand promise for the Consumer Packaged Goods sector.

But the China story that got me was the one about the counterfeit NEC factory -- not just an anonymous building secretly turning out fake NEC electronics, a fake NEC factory turning out fake NEC electronics.

To the extent that consumer brands form the epistemological bedrock of a consumer society, this pretty much undermines everything. It's like the Ship of Theseus which sailed out on a long voyage, over the course of which, every plank and rope was replaced... with cheaper components of unknown origin... sourced from the global marketplace...

I also dug this one up out of my del.icio.us tags, the story of a simulated Disneyland in China. Funny that one of the complaints the Japanese had about this simulacra was that the talent kept taking the giant heads off of their costumes, breaking the fictive dream.

worst of both worlds

2007-08-18T09:35:00.001-04:00

Here's the progress window from the printer software installer from Canon. It manages to combine 8-bit Windows 95 style iconography with OS X "Panther" style brushed metal. Icky.

Music Monitor

2007-08-17T16:18:00.000-04:00

I showed someone at work the contents of a find . -name '*mp3' run on the contents of the server's transfer folder. It came back with about 500 entries... the new Public Enemy, some weird Swedish ultra-pop music, and a whole lot of David Gray... The idea now developing is to create a program that automatically notifies you when new MP3s are dropped into this folder. I'm thinking about hooking into Growl to provide the notifications.

It'd be kind of interesting to use this raw data to chart the company's musical taste over time. What seasons saw the most megabytes of Mogwai, et cetera (I'm predicting January).

For you system admins, I'll point out that this would be a great tool for automatically deleting these files as well...

Rune Grammofon

2007-08-16T12:53:00.000-04:00

Wow, emusic just added the Rune Grammofon label. That almost makes up for John Zorn taking all of Tzadik away. Check out Supersilent....

Seals at Chatham

2007-08-14T11:21:00.001-04:00

They silently bobbed up and down the beach after us, heads pointed in our direction.

Some interesting shell commands

2007-08-10T23:51:00.000-04:00

zipinfo
sips
curl

-- these are pretty useful for folks who make a living pushing image files around (especially to and from remote servers).

And as I get more comfortable with the shell, I find I totally avoid using Spotlight or command-F and go right to

find

instead. I feel like it's faster, maybe partly because of that insane find-as-you-type behavior in Spotlight. Also, if I'm trying to page through a couple of gigs of stuff on the server, it's nice not to bog down the Finder while the search goes on. Of course, I don't actually live in the Finder much; jumping into the shell wouldn't be nearly as convenient if I weren't using Path Finder instead. The drop down Terminal pane is killer.

Hazel

2007-08-10T17:14:00.000-04:00

This is a pretty innovative Mac OS X utility for robotic filing which I've been using since the early 2.0 betas; it's great. I had already given up trying to get everything off my desktop by finding just the right cubbyhole for it. Instead I had started a chronological dump bin system for anything but obviously project-related files. There's a large middle ground of miscellaneous "Might want this later" attachments and ephemera which 120 GB+ hard drives seduce one into keeping around... but one can get pretty distracted with all that interesting junk on one's desktop. Now I'm letting Hazel clean it up for me.

prospect park

2007-07-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

Stigs and Marcie had their first birthday party in Prospect Park, and we happened to be passing through....

to do list

2007-04-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

Seen on a WW2 sub at a submarine museum at Pearl Harbor. The diving officer would stand at his station and call back (through some kind of pipe) to each post to verify verbally that each hatch was closed, etc. This metal indicator panel was just a physical checklist for the officer to go through before issuing the order to dive.

Don't you hate it when you get ready to dive and there's just one thing you forgot to check? Kind of like thinking, hmm, did I turn off the iron?

I would improve the survivability of the device by making it so that you couldn't see the words "Rigged for diving" and"Rigged for surface" simultaneously. You'd only see the phrase which was true, like a big if-then statement.

Jack

2007-02-21T07:45:00.000-05:00

die geist von frankfurt west bahnhof

2007-02-15T21:58:00.000-05:00

Photoshop CS2 is so nifty. Still finding new menu items like "Lens Correction..."

frankfurt west bahnhof

2007-02-15T07:53:00.000-05:00

23 hours in Brussels

2007-02-06T22:27:00.000-05:00

Checked in to the hotel at around 10 PM and found that it was in a fairly anonymous outlying suburb, near the client but far from any restaurant. The bartender advised me not to go outside, for though the night looked cold and empty, gangs of North Africans roamed the neighborhood looking to mug anyone who didn't speak French or Flemish. Must be some kind of rougher version of the Académie française. So all I had for dinner was two Leffes from the bar and a bag of peanuts from the hotel room fridge.

the mercure

2007-02-06T21:19:00.000-05:00

Building in back is the hotel.

Mouse on Mars

2007-02-05T21:24:00.000-05:00

Saw them at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. These are the only pictures on this blog with no adjustments in Photoshop.

Rucola mit Parmaschinken am Elba

2007-02-05T21:13:00.000-05:00

Took me a while to figure out that this tart leaf was the same thing as arugula. This place just off Hamburger Allee put it on the pizza after the bake, along with thin panes of parmesan. At left, Carolina has her Parmaschinken raw.

Frankfurt Hochstraße

2007-02-05T00:04:00.000-05:00

Through Günter's car window.

Frankfurt -- outside the Mercure apartments

2007-02-04T22:25:00.001-05:00

Victor Hugo a habite cette maison

2007-02-04T20:02:00.000-05:00

Browsing for chocolate in Brussels feels like going to the jewelry district. And neither chocolate nor diamonds can be found in the Belgian earth.

Stuttgart park

2007-02-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

Walking around the morning after the Mouse on Mars concert.

Concrete Volcanoes in Stuttgart

2007-02-02T08:22:00.000-05:00

I called Henry from this park and he surfed over to maps.google.com to try to identify what these things are: art, or some kind of Morlockian forced-air cooling system. Ideas?

Die Lusthaus Ruine

2007-02-02T03:16:00.000-05:00

Found this abandoned temple of the Eloi in a park in Stuttgart. Becoming a fan of the Tilt-Shift effect. They really added a lot of digital photography tools in Photoshop CS 2. I guess that's kind of obvious.

Gutenberg Statue

2007-02-02T03:15:00.000-05:00

Interesting that they did not rebuild the top of the statue. Downtown Frankfurt.

Frankfurt Fog

2007-02-02T03:12:00.000-05:00

This was the view from my hotel balcony while jetlagged. Converted a lamp to a tripod for this shot.

Keyboard v. Mouse

2006-06-26T22:24:00.000-04:00

After many years of loyal DragThing use, I finally gave in and installed Quicksilver. Documentation for all the little key commands is hard to track down, but I already find that for me, the keyboard is a lot faster than hunting for an icon in a dock. Even if my hands start from off the keyboard, it feels like zero effort to hit control-space (to bring up Quicksilver) and type i-c-a, enter, to launch iCal.

This definitely has something to do with visual vs. verbal proficiencies, so YMMV. My hands are clumsy at most things, but not at operating a keyboard. There is probably some way in which the linguistic centers in the brain can get in the driver's seat to operate my fingers so long as I am using them to manipulate abstract symbols, instead of, say, a hammer. I wonder if anyone has done any research around this?

Amazon's Mechanical Turk: someone tell Thomas Friedman

2006-06-26T21:13:00.000-04:00

"What if... a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"

Well, um, I think that would be The Matrix.

Note to self: defaults write

2006-06-24T19:15:00.001-04:00

restarting the finder, and logging out and back in, so far seem to be two methods to force manually updated plist files to take effect. Random example from macosxhints:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1

Afterwards restart the Finder and all hidden or system files/folders should be visible. Now copy the "~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist". Finally, enter this command to hide hidden/system files again and restart the Finder:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 0

(better option, man killall)

note to self: applescript syntax for catching multiple errors

2006-06-24T19:15:00.000-04:00

This is from the AppleScript-Users mail list...

try
display dialog "enter the file name" default answer "text.txt"
on error msg number num
if num is in {-1, 25, -128} then
-- respond in the same way for any of the above
else
-- do something else
end if
end try

Note to self: Plists

2006-06-24T19:14:00.000-04:00

Mac OS X stores all (text) styles for all (cocoa) applications in the hidden file "~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist"

Hello world

2006-04-14T09:53:00.000-04:00

Apparently the only way for me to leave a comment on Scott's blog was to create a blog meself, so I've done it. Who will care? To be determined.