Stupid mailing list my wife happened to be on sent out a conference
invitation -- 4.5 Mb of doc files!!! Some people are so
clueless about how to use a mailing list. They can't even do a proper
BCC, so first you get the huge To-list of names as a preamble to
a one-liner of text info, at best, and at worst...
And no, it wasn't a worm as far as I could tell.
Jacob Nielsen's
Alertbox
this
time provides a 5 year retrospective.
(later) Wife's project paper culminated today. Lots of printout,
discussion of this, that and th'other to make sure the (largely incompetent)
teacher doesn't fail the paper on a technicality. Many web visits to ferret
out the updated versions of the legal paragraphs that the paper had to refer
to. All about the hab/rehab system and how it works (is supposed to at least).
Obviously there were cases of interview transcripts that were unusable, because
the officials interviewed literally did not know the current laws, so their
careful explanations were at odds with the legal framework, and likely with
reality as well. References to obscure authorities to try and figure out
-- is that state or municipal? And who's
responsible?
Oh well, I'm glad it's not me...
Interesting to note how much of the sources are now available on the web.
A lot has happened in the past few years, and while the language of legislation
has not become more accessible, at least the words have. This may have
interesting consequences in the long run, because having access to it in
digital form potentially allows some fun analysis to be done by someone...
Tom Syroid, currently
working away at FrontAge in a Nutshell (likely to be a
bestseller, methinks), asked for views on using
frames for webpage layout: "Actually, I'm trying to
understand why so many people I know dislike frames -- is it shoddy
implementation on the part of the webmaster? or something else I'm
missing?"
I've mentioned my views on frames in earlier writings, both here and in the
"DisISay" articles,
and I sent him a new summary of these. For general interest, I'll expand
on that here. Feedback and discussion welcome on the
wiki, as always.
Yes, I dislike frames. Both on principle and in terms of the way
most webdesigners use them. From the user point of view, frames don't give
much except disadvantages, page-load delays and complications. The apparent
attractions (like many "browser improvements" over the years) are largely
targeted at the convenience of the designer, who is here usually thinking
of some cool, always-present logo header, footer and toolbar-like page-link
features.
The main objection to frames is from a navigational point
of view -- it goes against a number of the basic conventions for how
web page navigation and linking was intended to work. This
has admittedly been in part addressed by later browser versions. In earlier
client versions, the browser back button did not get you back to previous
frame, but instead backed you right out of the site itself, no matter how
many links you had followed in the framed site. Even when this works in the
"modern" clients, however, many users still find it difficult to know where
their current navigational focus is, which makes "back/forward" operations
confusing at best.
Also, have you noticed, the browser address box often shows only a single
URL for a framed site, the root one
(http://(www.somewhere.com/), no matter which "page" you're
currently at. You are thus navigationally at the mercy of the site "map"
and can not draw your own conclusions about where you might be in the site
hierarchy of pages. This is great for webmasters who always want visitors
to "come in the front door", but how do you bookmark that vital page of
information for later retrieval? I know that personally, I rarely use the
"front door" at sites I visit regularly for content -- or put another way,
if a site forces me to always drill down from the top level (and makes it
difficult to bookmark a specific page), I generally don't go back.
Further, frames do not "degrade" nicely -- it tends to be a question of all
or nothing. The thinking webdesigner does provide a "noframes" alternate
page, just as there should be a "low graphics" alternate URL, to
accommodate users who can't or don't want to use the full-featured default.
Unfortunately, many webdesigners for large sites don't think that far --
for example a bank trying to move all customer contact over to a
high-feature-dependent services webpage, or some company making "Customer
Care" absolutely impossible to use unless you have java, cookies and ActiveX,
and of course IE5 (Windows version). Not everyone has the latest and greatest
IE5. Not everyone uses Windows. Should the web be a playground only
for the fully upgraded wintel32 userbase? You are as webpage designer free
to publish what you want, but do you really want to exclude particular
categories of potential visitors by using features that can be both confusing
and unsupported?
Like with "webpage design" in general, there are a lot of otherwise good
people out there who are clueless to the fact that the web is
not wysiwyg, that a page can look and function
very differently on a system other than the application and platform it was
designed on. Tools that simulate wp and dtp functionality in setting webpage
styles and fonts foster this misconception of layout control. Frames provide
another level of "illusion" of complete layout control. (And no, I'm
not advocating editing plain HTML1-tags by hand. I do use
"wysiwyg", or better expressed "rendering" html editors,
but always with the awareness that the more I try to control layout and the
more "features" I use, the greater the proportion of users who will see something
other than what I intend.)
The second navigational objection to framed sites still
stands despite browser improvements, due to the way most sites are designed
(i.e locked to the perceptions of the designer and what it looks like on
his/her screen). With the common design using a sidebar or top "buttonbar"
frame with site links (or worse image/java, or pseudo-explorer tree metaphor),
the individual content pages are often left without any navigational links
at all.
The all-too common scenario: you are looking for something via a search engine,
follow a match, and get up a specific content page that looks interesting
but is not quite it. Trouble is, there's nothing on the page to lead you
anywhere else on the site, because the "intention" was that the page should
be viewed in a framed context. Truncating the URL only yields some variant
of "you are not allowed to list this directory" until you get to the top,
which unfortunately gives no clue as to the context that the original page
was in.
While not a "frames" site, Yahoo news provided an example
of navigation problems similar to frames, in this case when you have scripted
layout. I had once bookmarked the "daily headlines"
text-only
page,
because the then default page with animated banner ads was simply "too busy"
for me. At some point Yahoo redesigned the site, and I subsequently noticed
that all the site links disappeared from this headlines page. No
site navigation remained, not even to "home", much less the "business" or
"science" section headlines. There's not even a clue apart from the URL where
this page is. The content is designed to work in a particular, greater context
-- without it the user is adrift.
A third issue has to do with resources. Each frame corresponds
to a server-client socket connection, plus one for the frameset window itself.
A typical framed "page" thus consumes anywhere from 5-10 concurrent sockets
on each client request, not counting graphics or other advanced features.
While webservers do have a very large number of available sockets, that number
is still finite. It also takes additional time to negotiate and set up extra
sockets, which translates into delays loading a readable page. A heavily
trafficked and underpowered site will not be able to serve all comers at
a much lower usage threshold than one with unframed sites. (It also sinks
faster under DoS attacks.)
A fourth argument against is also in part based on
design. Many framed content pages turn out to be composed
for some fixed "full width" size, hence you need a larger client window to
accommodate that and the surrounding frames without scrolling. Worse, an
undersized window can clip the navigational frames in unhelpful
ways, so that some links are simply not accessible unless you are running
full-screen at 800x600 or better (the clipped links cannot be scrolled to).
Some add-ons, such as Proxomitron, allow you to resize and scroll
frames more freely, but otherwise you are pretty much at the mercy of the
designer's layout there. This is less of an issue for users that have large
monitor resolutions, but could even then prove inconvenient or intractable
for someone like Jerry Pournelle who uses much larger-than-normal font sizes.
Finally, frames do not translate well or at all into non-visual
contexts -- they are far worse than using tables for layout from
the point of view of the blind.
So much for frames.
I noted that yet another crash/fire disaster rehearsal took place for the
new bridge, or more properly the 4 km sub-Sound tunnel segment. Once again
it was observed that rescue efforts took far too long, in part because of
the extreme communication problems encountered in the tunnel. While not
specified, I might hazard to guess that personnel are using either cellulars
or some special-frequency handsets. Is that a surprise then? Is there no
body of experience to even suggest that high-frequency rf connectivity might
be problematic from underwater tunnels?
I am absolutely overloaded by the current campaign to get the Swedish people
to invest in the (finally) publically offered shares of what was for a time
the only wholey state-owned public share company, the formerly state-run
telco. Billboards, bus-ads, posters on all sides, junk mail in fabulous glossy
print, and dopey tv commercials ad nauseum for the past week. Minimum
stake is seemingly a block of 100 shares, i.e. an investment in the USD 1000
range, although the stated goal is at least 200 per investor. The IPO commitment
period ends on June 8.
I suppose I should have lunch, get out (intermittent sunshine), and pay the
rent and some other bills.
PS, see the discussion about the FreeFind search engine user tracking on
Jerry Pournelle's
current mail
page.
Some reactions to the frames issue. I dropped these and my replies into the
wiki page WebMistakes
-- follow the subheading "Frames" on that page. (Reminds me that I
should implement full in-page linking with wikipages.)
Hmm... Internet connectivity to some parts of the US broke at about
10 AM local (4 AM EDT). Tracert times out on both ATT and
ALTERNET routers (using different ISPs) trying to reach these
sites. This sort of thing is becoming a bit too frequent lately -- some people
(like Jerry Pournelle) have started to wonder if this is the beginning of
the Death of the Internet. There were several Outlook worm alerts out before
the weekend, notably the "resumé" one -- could it be, worm-poo mucking
up the routers as businesses finally got around to opening the doc attachments
late Tuesday after the Memorial Day break, and worm propagation peaking in
the wee hours?
Zeppelins are coming back! The Zeppelin NT
proof-of-concept
airship has been flying about since
1997, and a scaled down prototype of CargoLifter made by another
German company (framed :)
homesite) was shown off yesterday. These
are semi-rigid designs, a kind of hybrid of the original zeppelins and later-day
blimps.
The big Öresund Bridge marathon (on 12 June) has over
90,000 participants registered. Now comes the warning that with so many runners
going into the 4 km tunnel, the automatic fans will rev up to clear the air.
Noise is the problem -- up to 100 dB in an enclosed space. However,
nobody has tested how bad it really would be. Runners are however recommended
to wear industrial-grade hearing protection. And longjohns, mittens and other
winter accessories! -- the current mid-tunnel temperature is about 7C. Many
runners will experience problems in the second half of the tunnel (from
Copenhagen towards Sweden), when it becomes a steep uphill slog, climbing
some 90 meters (300 feet) in the about 10 km stretch to the bridge level.
Well, I went out for a walk and when I came back, connectivity is fine again.
I hiked down one of main streets leading North and paid a personal visit
to one of the plumbing retailers in town, bearing with me a faucet attachment
that needed replacement. Of course it turned out that they needed the part
serial number to order in the replacement (never in stock it seems), and
that was supposed to be imprinted on one of the faucet components I didn't
have with me.
Nice long walk in the sun (almost warm), which I needed, but nothing was
accomplished.
Public holiday (Ascension day)
I won't be posting much today. I will be trying to catch up on some negelected
reading, while my daughter uses the system for furthering the life of a family
in The Sims. (Worse than a soap opera, to judge by some of the stories she
tells...)
Anyway, go to the
wiki and make
your own reading material :) Try the new page and search function
LookingForInspiration
if you don't know what to add -- there are a number of open references to
fill in.
I'm putting some time to tracing down a chronic connectivity problem. I have
a list of URLs to various edu sites that dropped out of sight months ago.
It's been such a consistent thing that I started digging. What it
looks like at this point is that the router paths used by my Swedish
ISPs to US sites aren't configured to switch from internet to
internet2. Interesting is that the browser simply reports "host
unknown", but tracert does resolve an IP for the same URL. Yet the
trace dies at specific routers with the report "net unavailable". This has
nothing to do with congestion or other transient problems, but looks more
like a configuration thing. I've filed a tech support report with one of
the ISPs and will see what comes of it. I hope something does, because I
need to access some of those sites for background material for the book.
Today is an ordinary weekday, but being a Friday "squeezed" between a public
holiday and a weekend, it's known in Swedish literally as a
"squeeze-day" and most Swedes who can have taken the day off.
Nothing of importance can be accomplished today, unless it's something
you can do yourself.
Looking into e-payments, I ran across
PayPal. This seems promising (and free
for individuals so far), especially if they expand as promised to deal with
payments and account holders outside of the US, and businesses. Although
the primary payment medium is credit card (Mastercard and Visa), they do
handle payments to and from anyone with a valid email address and bank account.
Worth keeping an eye on in the absence of a ubiquitous micropayment
infrastructure.
Strangely, my NT installation of Partition Magic has stopped working. After
some fruitless investigation, I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling it,
but nothing changed. The main PM, Mover and PartitionInfo applications trundle
for a while when started, long enough to show on task manager, then die without
a murmur, not even coming as far as a taskbar item or anything on the screen.
Weird...
Reader response from Matthew D. Rider provided a welcome quick
fix/workaround to the connectivity problem I wrote about yesterday. Details
on wiki page
AlternativeRouting.
Using a webproxy as suggested immediately brought up the sites I still can't
reach in the ordinary way.
I was aware of web-based proxy browsing, usually associated with "anonymizer"
functionality, and had also heard that this was a workaround for people sitting
behind firewalls. It never occurred to me that using one would (of course)
mean a different router connectivity to the same sites and thus make a
difference.
Having this sort of published forum and helpful readers is really a remarkable
asset, a sort of parallel thinking that finds the things I miss by myself.
In any case, this allows me without futher delay to collect the background
and screen captures I need for the wiki book.
Following a tip in Dave Farquhar's book, a couple of days ago I
downloaded
EVWM. An intriguing shell alternative
for Windows. Unzip and just run it, no "install" required -- in NT; for Win9x
you need to tweak ini to have it as shell. I'm trying it out for
a while on my production NT system -- have found a few minor issues, but
on the whole I have no real complaints. I think I work faster with
it -- both with mouse and with keyboard shortcuts. I've started a wiki resource
page about the subject as
AlternativeWindowsShell.
I think Windows users owe it to themselves to sometime examine and experiment
with some alternative shells and get a rest from the Microsoft
defaulty way of thinking. Especially when some of these alternatives
are such easy, no-brainer "installs" -- just unzip, run and try.
Here's a tip from the local newspaper:
A journalist one day had the entire home lose electricity when she plugged
in that last appliance. Going through the fuse box she came upon a "wired"
fuse, i.e. one that had been short-circuited with a length of wire. This
meant that the distribution fuse upstream had blown instead. The utility
repairman sternly told her that if anything had happened, e.g. a fire, she
would have had to bear the responsibility. She couldn't figure out how the
fuse had got there. But then she remembered that the parquet floors had been
sanded when she moved in. Some investigation turned up the known fact that
"handyman" jobs often "require" home fuses to be wired because the equipment
otherwise blows home-rated fuses.
Moral of story -- always check the fuse box after so-called
professionals have used power tools in the home. You cannot count on these
"pros" to remember to remove their illegally wired bypass fuses when the
job is done.
Hmm... must do some houshold chores, so until later, have a good weekend!
Ah #"%¤&! While we were out doing other things, Edward
took a break from The Sims and caught part of what was supposed to be the
re-run of Babylon 5 Season 4. Hah!. It turned out to be the second episode
of Season 5, which hasn't been shown here yet! No advance info of any
kind, despite shifting airing times as usual. The channel website doesn't
even list the series except for a menu selection that leads elsewhere, let
alone any schedule info. And contrary to earlier statements that the new
season would start this autumn, they start showing it now, just as the summer
reruns for other series start. (And I bet they'll complain again about poor
viewer stats and screw up scheduling halfway through.)
TV on demand, that's what we're waiting for.
Drizzle-type day. We shifted beds for my mother-in-law, who was adamant about
this after her bad fall out of bed yesterday. The usual number of minor
complications before it was done.
The day started off very well however, as we were woken up by the kids coming
into our bedroom (at a decent hour for a weekend), singing "...for
you are jolly-good parents, for you are jolly-good parents, which nobody
can deny..." , and bearing a tray with morning coffee and toast, which
they had prepared for us. And delicious it was too! Clearly, we must be doing
something right...
