jawfish

Pardon Me Boys
john posted in politics & culture on November 22nd, 2005

The rumors are flying, another outrage from the President who is capable of anything. He’ll pardon Scooter and Karl, and later on Rummy and Dick, too.

Mere noisy outrage doesn’t mean it’s sure to happen. Last year I ran around headless just before the election, saying Iran was next on the invasion list. But the battle is half won when your opponents think you’re capable of anything. After the draconian proposals, the cronyism and giveaways seem almost benign.

Machiavellian Democrats take note: the Republicans take care of their own.

Just what are all those conservative think-tanks for anyway? Are they a genuine contribution to political and historical study? Of course not, that sort of stuff is for weenies in sandals. Along with their propaganda function, they are a place to put the ex-officio out to pasture. You can give a loyal underling a lifetime sinecure with dignity and substantial income, and be sure he’ll never write that tell-all book. For the verbal, there is an endless round of paid speeches, free trips, and stock tips. It’s a permanent place in the back-patting world of Babbittry. Most important, it allows the quadrennial Santa to retain the loyalty of the elves. When Christmas is over, and Santa is a lame duck, the elves have a great retirement plan which is still under Santa’s thumb.

Bill Clinton should have known that those eager, bright young things on staff were loose cannon, just waiting to roll around the Presidential deck. He had been one himself, and yet he didn’t seem to know that the demands of power required more control. Perhaps that was more of the Arkansas Effect. He should have made sure that they understood he was in control of their afterlife, too. Instead, he let them behave like college students at a seminar.

Nowadays, those endowed chairs, the chairmanships of political committees, the lobbying firms, the radio shows, are all under the control of the Republican party. If you want to stay on the air after your little brush with hillbilly heroin, just stick to the message, and all will be forgiven. Let it slip that you are a big loser in Vegas, and they’ll find a little something to make up for your slumping book sales. There are always revolving-door CEO chairs to fill, and there was even a Supreme Court seat for the faithful sidekick, almost.

Andrew Jackson invented big-time American patronage, and Lincoln deplored it. Nixon was too insular and too far from the Republican mainstream to control it. Reagan was like a protected figurehead, nominally in charge, but living on a kind of upside-down patronage. As long as he colored within the lines, the system continued to lionize him. Dubya follows the Reagan model, but with lifetime patronage. He may be more aware of what’s going on, and his family ties run deep, but he’s clearly not capable of running the show. Because he’s theirs, he walks the line. Because they need him, they’ll make sure that anyone with a sharp tongue gets a chance at the goodie-bag.

Publishers can put away their checkbooks, this administration won’t have any juicy tell-all books. I’d say there’s also a good chance the homeboys won’t do jail time either.

Open Document
john posted in technologies on November 22nd, 2005

Ever had trouble opening someone else’s documents?
Ever tried to open an old word processed document?
Ever wondered why Word’s documents are so huge?
Have you actually paid for Microsoft Office so your kids could make reports in Word for school?

How many documents does a state government have?
How long do they have to keep them?
Are government documents supposed to be available to all citizens?
How many different governments have to create and maintain documents?

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stable, open document format that is free to all users, works in all languages, and is supported by all software vendors?

um, yeah.

Well why in hell haven’t we got one by now, 25 years after the first commercial word-processors were delivered?

We needed a document language that is self-describing. That is, we needed a way of controlling not just the text itself, we’ve had that, but the way it’s displayed on the page. Each word-processor company invented their own, but they were intentionally non-universal, and most important they weren’t self-describing. You couldn’t read the raw document and understand what the control characters meant. The advent of XML fixed that problem. Even Microsoft agrees with this.

Then, we needed to create a standard XML format that was open to everyone, and free to use to read or create documents. The standard had to be developed by a group willing to make it public- no patents, no secrets, no ownership.

Then we needed organizations with the clout to come forth and demand standards.

Lately, we have the state of Massachusetts and the European Union each trying to choose a document standard, plus lots of onlookers like the US Defense Department and Brazil. It seems a no-brainer that by its very nature this is a standard that will spread quickly once a significant organization adopts it.

So What?

Well, there is a player on the field, whose most profitable application is threatened by the choice of an open standard, Microsoft.

Microsoft wants governments and everyone else to buy Office in order to create Word documents. The best way to do this is to get an XML standard adopted that Microsoft controls. They’ll give away a free reader, but you’ll still have to buy Office to create documents. Microsoft watchers will recognize a familiar pattern.

What’s Happening?

An office suite called Star Office, created mostly at Sun, has morphed into an open source suite called OpenOffice. With this year’s release of version 2.0 of OpenOffice, the default document format is Open Document, developed with OASIS, an independent standards organization created with industry backing. Not only is OpenOffice free of charge, and set up to create Open Documents, it runs on all the major operating systems ( OOo runs in X11, not native on Macs as of this writing ).

So governments finally have a viable choice of software, OpenOffice, and a viable format, Open Document, to compare with commercial offerings. In practice this means Open Document vs Microsoft’s proprietary XML. Microsoft and any other software vendor can choose to support Open Document, but it’s easy to see that even when they do so, many organizations will choose no-fee software over any paid license.

What Can an Individual User Do?

The good news is you have a choice between free, standards-based open software, and familiar, purchased software from Microsoft. You may be also able to use the WordPerfect bundle that came with your Windows PC, as well. You don’t have to give up Word, in order to use OpenOffice. OOo ( OpenOffice) will read and write .doc files as well as .ppt and .xls. It also saves to .pdf and docbook formats. It’s a sure bet that Microsoft will eventually offer a non-MS OpenDocument format if it is widely accepted as I predict. I would also expect them to offer numerous proprietary extensions to it in their never-ending attempt to grab control of independent standards.

What Can an Organization Do?

You can implement a test program to use both OOo and Office. I would suggest you let a few power users try OpenOffice rel 2, without removing Microsoft Office. The potential raw savings are easy to calculate. You’ll have to make a judgement about how your employees adapt to change.

What’s the Problem with Doing Nothing?

It’s a valid argument to say, “Microsoft will support the government requirements, so there’s no need to change.” If you really love paying Microsoft for a site license, and you think their support is great, then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you? If you think you might be able to switch some users from Windows altogether, then you have to evaluate all the software you’ll be relying on. OpenOffice is the key office software on Linux.

What About Support?

Support works differently in the Open Source world. The documentation is often unfinished for the latest release. But there are forums ( mailing lists ) for questions, where users and developers and documentors answer questions, even on the weekend. Microsoft and other commercial vendors essentially supply zero support, though their documentation is usually quite good. Googling a question on popular open source software will result in hits on many different websites. Usually you can get an answer on the first page of hits. Tough questions may take a day or two on the forum. OpenOffice has pretty good documentation, and a very active set of mailing lists.

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Resources:
The longest, most thorough analysis of the Massachusetts decision I can find.

Rocking Chair Interface Part 1
john posted in technologies on November 14th, 2005

How to build a transparent computer system for the elderly, or, how to dignify a person’s actual needs rather than changing the world.

As with most other commentators on the subject, this quest started with my own Mother and her outdated laptop. In trying to decide whether to replace it, and with what, I read this thread on TidBits.
( play with the buttons to get the forum software to show all the posts)
Many interesting points were made about what older people can and can’t do.

This article relates the experience of adapting a standard Linux distro for an older Windows user. From these two sources and my own experience, a few groundrules emerge:

1 An interface that changes is a big problem.

2 Older users will tend to learn computing tasks by rote, not by understanding the system. ( see first item)

3 Reliability is even more important for these users. ( see first item )

The first three observations are all change-related. Let’s not, however, get in the habit of associating fear and distrust of changing computer interfaces with mental rigidity. Just assume it might well be wisdom, and all the hours you’ve spent messing with computers would have been better spent tending children or gardens. Does anybody here think car stereos, VCRs, camcorders and the like have a good interface, worth learning? Case closed. Just figure that your novice elderly user sees the computer that way too.

So the interface must be stable, buttons and icons must stay put, and be clearly marked. A toaster which has the blue temp dial on the left one day, and changes to a red slider on the right next day, is a Bad Toaster. Humans don’t like uppity machines. Even if the interface is clumsy, people can learn it quickly if it stays put.

It’s reported that older users want to write down breadcrumb trails of how to do things, instead of the usual grokking the interface. Obviously some users will want to understand how things work, and they should be directed to the usual learning channels, like the Dummies books and classes. For the users I am describing, assume they have bigger things to worry about than industrial toys. When your joints hurt, when twisting a jar top sends shooting pains up your wrist, when getting out of a chair hurts, and when you take five really strong medicines every day, each of which has a nasty side-effect, you won’t be wishing for O’Reilly books for Christmas either. And, it’s depressing enough to see what your children’s generation has done to the place, without having the smug little pricks treating you like a custard-brain. As my Mom says, “Getting old ain’t for the faint of heart.”

So oldsters will happily write down a list of tasks, and unlike some of us younger folks, they won’t lose it. So in order to make their task-list accurate, we also have to make sure that the interface doesn’t crash, burn, and mangle itself. The more stable it is, the better our users will like it. But we are going to have to prevent interference and attacks too. Enter the twin threats of viruses and automatic updates.

This piece was written not long after the Sony rootkit scandal, and malicious tinkering with one’s operating system is on everybody’s mind. Microsoft XP’s auto updates have burned me and countless other users, and nobody loves a virus. OK, we can avoid Windows, and use anti-virus and firewall software, and we can use a filesystem with good security. But what about the insidious application that pops up a dialog that asks ingenuously for your root password? What about those fake error messages popped up in websites? We need a read-only operating system and applications, with some ability to retain and backup personal data. As an ultimate fix, we want to be able to tell the user to “just reboot it” and have the system reliably return to the expected state.

4 The physical interface must be accessible.

Another friend points out that the physical interface is specially important, that the keyboard, mouse, and monitor have to be better than normal. Getting a good monitor ( i.e. 19″ LCD or better ) may be out of budget, but it’s worth a thought. The resolution needs to be set to large type, and be made as readable as possible. Some folks are even going to need to run at VGA size, or 800×600. Check that your user can see the colors and that there is enough contrast.

Here’s a mouse add-on that damps hand tremors to make the cursor more stable. See the source list at the end of this article for a number of accessibility resources.

5 The interface must be simple.

Along with the mandate for stability, the interface also needs to be “just the facts ma’am.” Resist the impulse to describe all the wonderful things that could be done. A few users will advance later, but many will happily stay put with basic tools. If the user doesn’t need a tool or button, don’t present it.

Here’s a starting list of essential applications-

email
Web
writing & printing
viewing photos or video off DVD-CDROMs
playing music or radio or podcasts
viewing pdfs
games

The applications are a bit problematic. Most of the common ones are geared to more sophisticated, or at least more unflappable users. It would really help to be able to hide most of the features in them. Some have that ability already. It might be wise to use yahoo mail or gmail instead of a local mail app. Games seem to be widely liked, though you could decide that online access to games is good enough.

6 Avoid fancy iconography.

Seniors are often afraid of breaking their computer, and they have a very hard time gaging the importance of error messages and pop-ups. An icon that obviously is just a cutesy gee-gaw, may seem like a warning to them. Conversely they may be too willing to allow spyware onto their computer. The jumping MS paperclip or the KDE lightbulb are just going to confuse them. Not to mention being as irritating as muzak.

Despite the PARC and Mac evangelists, the click and drag icon is not intuitive. It doesn’t act like anything in the real world. When you think about it, the whole concept of an icon is artificial. In the real world things don’t present a tiny crude symbol to your eye - they present themselves. The 32×32 icon is pretty thin stuff compared to a rose or a doorknob. P-N-R-D-L is not much help either - we need Park-Neutral-Reverse and so forth.

7 There must be provision for system administration.

Things are going to go wrong, and someone needs to be able to get in and fix them. If the OS & apps are on a CD or DVD, that just means sending a new one. But there will be some data saved locally. There needs to be automatic backup of the data, and there need to be system logs so the admin can trouble-shoot. There also needs to be remote access for the admin.

And here’s a list of automatic system administration needs:

dialup and connect
firewall
virus checker
backup
logging

The final guidelines are:

1 An interface that changes is a big problem.
2 Older users will tend to learn computing tasks by rote, not by understanding the system.
3 Reliability is even more important for these users.
4 The physical interface must be accessible.
5 The interface must be simple.
6 Avoid fancy iconography.
7 There must be provision for System Administration.

See future Part 2 of this article for implementation ideas.

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Other Sources:
Newsforge Article
Linux Access Org
KDE Accessibility
Gnome Accessibility
Free Standards
Linux Accessibility Site
Universal Usability

Print, Eyeballs, and Publishingcomments
john posted in technologies on November 10th, 2005

On one of my favorite mailing lists the members tied themselves into knots today, fretting about how to get a series of back articles from a well-known motorcycle magazine. Forays into scanning musty old copies from boxes, and discursions into copyright law, eventually resulted in a plan to just buy the back issues. Knowing the publisher very slightly, I emailed him and asked if he could give the articles in digital form, and I offered my wiki as a place to put them. Through the course of a couple rounds of back-and-forth his position was essentially - I paid to get that content and every time I put it up on the Internet, even in pdfs, people steal it. Pointing out that few people will go to the trouble of breaking into a pdf, and that he could sell them for $5, got me nowhere.

At the same time my good friend returned from an Applescript conference, full of stories about how really big publications like the New York Times foresee a decline in print, and are planning a major push into Web sites. They won’t be pursuing subscriptions, they’ll depend on advertising revenue. Neither of us are businessmen, but I have always heard that newspapers barely cover delivery costs with their subscriptions, and the paper-printing costs are really a substantial part of their overhead. Not to mention the trees and streams. Web sites aren’t free, but the formatting work for paper is roughly like the formatting for the Web, web service is getting cheaper, and so there must be a very considerable saving in going all digital. Surely advertisers will follow the eyeballs, and they’ve little other choice: it’s radio or TV or the Web.

Recently the venerable New Yorker made its entire catalog available on eight DVDs, for about $70. Now, to a library, this is a darn good deal compared to $175 for another Jessica Mitford audio book. And there is some appeal to New Yorker fans, but $70? Then you find out the bad news. The thousands of articles, cartoons, covers are not available through a transparent medium like a web browser, or even the unlovely, but serviceable Adobe Reader. No, these massive DVDs come with a proprietary viewer. If you want to quote one, you have to re-type. If you run Linux, you are completely out of luck. I don’t know how good the search engine is, but its not Google. This article pretty well savages the whole thing, saying among other things that the Windows version won’t run at all without resetting your date formats, and the run times are excrutiatingly slow.

The point here is why they screwed up so badly- they were trying to keep people from copying. Anybody can throw a print New Yorker on a xerox machine or a scanner, and do what? Resell a newsprint knock-off? Pass it out to a class? Maybe it would bring a lot more eyeballs to their web site if they just forgot the stupid software they wrote, the dumb book that goes with it, and just posted the back issues. Nobody will steal and resell it if it’s already publicly available, and they might even get some extra advertising revenue. So what if some 10th grade teacher in Scarsdale copies it for her overhead slides, isn’t that free advertising for the magazine? Maybe some graduate student will write a thesis on Changing Mores in American Dipsomania: The New Yorker Cartoon in History? Heavens! Conde Nast bean-counters everywhere spill boullion on their laps.

My writing is more at the bike magazine level than the New Yorker, so when a perfectly good magazine fails to make articles accessible, it makes me think that I should just call up the original authors and ask if they’d like to recreate the information for the Web. If I, for instance, provide a library of useful stuff, those eyeballs will come to me, instead of to the magazine. Google already provides an elegant and unobtrusive ad service, and voila - I have a viable product. Best of all, its a product whose success depends on quality, not topicality or the latest fad.

Newspapers have already lost the classified business to various sites, and the now ubiquitous Craig’s List. Bloggers are taking away the editorial and news-bite traffic. Newspaper ads are trash. Every Sunday we get two huge papers at my house. The first thing I do with them is separate the ad pages, save the comics, and throw the ads in the recycle bin without looking at them. At least on the Web, when I am looking at an article about motor vibration patterns, I may actually look at the context-driven ad next to it for some arcane technical book on Amazon. If I click on the ad, Amazon will know exactly where I came from. Even if I don’t click, the page-view counter will record that somebody at least looked at the page. The advertisers are getting a much better deal on the web site.

In trying to protect the sanctity of their content, publishers are driving away the resource they need most - readers. Maintaining their intellectual beachhead is the best way to keep their readers, and access to their readers, not their content, is their saleable commodity. The advertisers who pay to keep all this running never know what happens to a print ad, but they do with interactive web ads. A drift away from print seems inevitable, and the publishers who understand the new medium will survive best.

Bikes Get Options
john posted in rides on November 9th, 2005

Performance and racing motorcycle fans take note: the age of options is upon us. Maybe. Well sort of, and it took too long.

In my youth you could walk into your Chevrolet dealer and get a 2 or 3 speed automatic, a 4 speed stick, a straight six, a 307 -327-396-454 V8 all available on the same car. There was much bragging that no two cars were ever identical. Most of it was silly, but hot rodders could get the 4.11 positraction and 4bbl carb of their dreams. Motorcycles traditionally come in different models, with paint color the only option. BMW offered the S and RS models, in the old airheads. They still offer an S model. Ducati sell S and R models of the 749-999, which have radical engine modifications and suspension, but that’s about it for factory mods.

Manufacturers are limited in the pipe and tuning areas by law, but there is nothing to stop them from selling upgraded suspensions, wheels, shocks, brakes, and some engine mods. You wonder why they haven’t grabbed a piece of the market. Wouldn’t you rather not have to pay for that crappy shock and fork on your new SV, when you are just going to replace them anyway?

Along comes Yamaha to shake up the superstock classes with an upgraded R1.

R1 LE : picture by Yamaha

It has Marchesini wheels, full Ohlins suspension, and a slipper clutch. It also costs a bundle, $18,000, though even that’s not in Ducati 999R territory. Even if Yamaha doesn’t quite get the setup right for you, any suspension shop should be able to dial it in for the street easily. Never mind if this makes sense for the street. After all, a stock 2005 R1 is famously capable of running in the top 10 in AMA. This is drooling lustful racer-boy fantasy stuff, and the price is reasonable if you look at the components.

I think there is a bigger market for options in the cheaper bikes. For instance, the hugely popular SV650 is inexpensive, and comes with a suspension to match. Racers typically transplant GSXR forks and wheels, with an aftermarket shock, and transform a pleasant street bike into a capable race bike. The new Kawasaki 650, BMW F650 and 800, and of course the hot-selling 600s are prime candidates for shocks, wheels, brakes, fork bits, and so forth.

Adding the options into the loan would be an advantage for those who use the financing. Sure the manufacturers have offerred coupons and such for accessories for years, but folks would snap up the opportunity to have the bike delivered custom. There’s even more opportunity in the touring, cruiser, and dirt markets.

I’ll take three from column A and two from B. Check the tire pressures, I’ll pick it up in the morning.