Why does technology get lost?

Increasingly, the clocks in my house are of the auto-synching atomic clock style. You know, they have an ant and pick up the signal from WWVB in Colorado, so are pretty much always right. They vary in quality, of course, but I can see a day when they all work anywhere in my house. But I have to wonder why this is so hard. Does anyone remember the school clocks that auto-synched? They were cool, I thought when I was in grade school because they were magic. Once a week (others apparently did it once per hour) at 3:50, they'd all grind and move up the the right time. The technology was cool as hell also. They synched over AC power. No separate data wire, just something called carrier current. This is cool stuff. Limited in that it can't go thru transformers, etc. but if you build it on purpose (instead of making a pirate radio station) this is fine. Yet, this whole technology seems to be gone. Most clocks are totally out of synch with the real time, and no one cares. Do you fix your stove or microwave when the power outage is over? I got a great deal on these industrial grade clocks from the Sprint campus. They were just battery models hung off the wall, and some facilities operations team decided that changing batteries and keeping the time right wasn't worth the effort. If only they'd been built with any thought as to the actual need for clocks in conference rooms. But requirements vs. specifications is a discussion for another day. It seems they are even selling school clocks that are radio synched thru the NIST system. What was wrong with the old-fashioned system? Not electronic enough? Where would BPL be without this? I have a somewhat similar complaint about speed bumps. Cannot find quite enough info to quote in a book, but all speed bumps built now are "wrong." See, they were designed long ago to be related to speed they wanted you to drive. Drive 25 and you don't feel a bump at all. Drive much faster, and you feel a big bump. Get it? "Speed" bump. But now, every one is just a slab of concrete or asphalt that hurts your teeth at any speed. Worse to me is that you can buy pre-molded plastic ones and just stake them into the parking garage. These are also just arbitrary bumps, with no speed-rated technology. So sad.

What should be secret?

BBC tech commentator Bill Thomspon wrote on Monday about, well, several things. Ostensibly, about security risks on the iPhone, but it rapidly got into much more interesting core issues.

The problem is apparently that we are all giving away too much information that should remain secret, like our date of birth, address and even details of which schools we have attended or where we have worked. This information should apparently be carefully protected because criminals can use it to fill in applications for credit cards or loans, stealing our identities and causing all sorts of problems. This seems to be entirely the wrong way around. I have never kept my birthday secret from my friends, partly because I like to get cards and presents, and I do not see why I should have to keep it secret from my online friends. If that means that other people can find out about it then the systems that assume my date of birth is somehow 'secret' need to adapt, not me.

I couldn't agree more. The fact that I cannot say this well is why I don't have a technology column read by people in other countries. I think about this a lot due to the new FCC regulations I spend a lot of my time working on these days. The FCC seems to get it. We are not supposed to use that sort of personal information for any security. At all. Not even for recovery or anything. Security uses unique passwords, and other such stuff. Well, actually there is a "shared secret" recovery or bypass as well, but I think its just because no one could come up with anything better; eventually, maybe we'll loose that also. Anyway, in theory this leaves us capable of thinking about interesting uses of that personal information. The FCC burdens us with calling practically anything personal CPNI, but it doesn't mean the customer can't reveal it themselves if they want to. Well, they can't really now, but perhaps some future, web 2.0 version of our site will let users publish Picture Mail, or Game Lobby or other community-related info thru RSS feeds. Think of how cool, and useful, a mashup of mobile photography, mobile location and public mapping tools could be. I also respect Bill for publishing his school, his mother's maiden name, his birthday, and so on. I cannot tell you how many people tell me, as though its bad, that my home address is on my website. Yeah, on purpose. I just added my GPS coordinates, among other things. I'm not even sure I'd bother hiding this stuff even if I was a true celebrity. The same security principles hold, so door locks should comply with the proximate risk. As a stalker-worthy person, I'd just upgrade the locks.

Admissability

Most everyone associated with security is familiar with the standard four layer security model. Well, in August of last year Bruce Schneier published a brief update of this on his blog. Dave Piscitello proposed adding another layer. I liked it so much that I typed out the whole list and stuck it on my cube wall so I wouldn't forget it.

• Admissibility: Is the host device/channel valid and safe?
• Authentication: Who are you?
• Authorization: What are you allowed to do?
• Availability: Is the data accessible?
• Authenticity: Is the data intact?

Although its on my wall, staring at me for the last year, I hadn't made any connections to it yet. I was thinking of hard wired shielded networks with proprietary connections. And there is plenty of argument about the validity; if its on an open network, and you rely on the machine to tell you everything is fine, that can be spoofed as well. The end result is I was not sure how it would ever apply to me until I looked at it this morning. I spend a lot of my time now designing UI and specifying behaviors for a bundle of fairly restrictive FCC regulations coming online on 12/8. If you don't work for a telecom, this is the fallout from that pretexting stuff last year. One of the components is notification of...everything. Changes, possible spoofing, password resets, etc. It all goes to your contact addresses on file. You get an email, text message, letter or whatever. And for extra security, you have to wait 30 days before a new address can be used (till then, all comms go to the old address). Presumably this gives time to correct an improper reset action by someone hacking in. But the 30 day rule is exempted for wireless devices. Specifically (I have presumed and specified; as its not super-well written) our wireless devices. See, we own the network, head to toe. We have control over the device's access to the network. If you report it stolen, its functionally disabled, immediately. And so on. So, this is a great example of device and network admissability in practice.

Why don't we use italics online, anyway?

At the risk of publishing something that relates directly to my work, Sprint has recently changed their branding. The type standards, currently print-based, say everything is in italics (well, oblique, but that's another post entirely).

My kneejerk reaction (to no avail in the first iteration) is "no italics online!" But then I had to prove it. And this was way harder than I thought it would be. It was sort of interesting trying to investigate such a deep-seated heuristic.

As it turns out, I never found the text of any study that proves it. There's reference to one, and that's good enough for me. Instead, I am relying on the "everyone says it" method, as well as proving it thru demonstrations of the grid effect. Oh, and one disclaimer. I didn't find all these links myself. The whole list is a straight up ripoff of those emailed to me by Fred Pilgrim, off to the south about 3 yards.

Overall, its just about web-resolution. Type traditionally is smoothly drawn or pressed; pen strokes or lead type create lines going any direction. Any irregularity from beat-up type, or paper texture was inconsequential at normal sizes (usually) and regardless had no direction, so italics with their angles suffered no discernability issues. In reproducable print, from the dawn of photo-lithography to today, the screen (whether angled, straight or stochiastic, square, round or oval) is of such high resolution that all shapes appear essentially straight. Except for very straight lines very close to (but not quite /at/) the screen angle, everything looks smooth and sharp.

Digital displays are generally around 80 ppi. Some are higher, some even nudging over 100, but generally not. If resolutions exceeding 200 ppi become commonplace, this will begin to become moot, but this is possibly decades away due to low-cost and high-longevity of current display devices if nothing else. Anyway, unlike print, the low resolution of type on the digital display means that angled items, like the vertical in italic type are rendered as a series of steps. Cleartype, Smoothtype and other technologies try to mitigate this with anti-aliasing, but its imperfect; the sharpness cannot be preserved with such technologies. Its just a limit of physics.

There are additional issues with readability (comprehension, fatigue) of italics or oblique faces in print, but they are not quite as severe as the online component so I am ignoring it for now.

Anyway, here's what a bunch of others say about this. Interesting quotes about italics are here directly, but follow the link for context and more useful info. The IE box model bug is a great one I had forgotten about. Seen a similar one with Verdana (I think) having a space/letterform issue with their Ws.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/usability/textfontcss.html

Research has shown that people can read faster if words are written using mixed case rather than all upper case. Blocks of bold and italics text are more difficult to read. Black is easier to read than colored fonts.

http://www.jimbyrne.co.uk/show.php?contentid=53 Jim Byrne is the founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and has been a Web accessibility specialist since 1996.

Avoid using italics for small text sizes: the problems of screen display of outline fonts has not entirely disappeared. Italized fonts look particularly bad at small sizes - as italics do not easy to render using a square pixel grid. If you must use italics, avoid using them for large blocks of text.

http://www.bindu-design.co.nz/pcnz.html

Italics don't work on current low resolution screens: Staying with the same page we see that the chief executive's message, is written in italics. Research has established that reading from computer screens is about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know about this human-factor research, usually say they do not enjoy reading from a computer screen. Text in italics should be avoided on web sites, as italics are even harder to read on current low resolution (below 80 dpi) screens. I predict that the screen readability problems of today will be solved by the year 2008. By that time we will see screens of 300 dpi in common use.

http://www.smartisans.com/articles/web_writing.aspx

While the Stanford-Poynter study focused on reading news on the Web, the results were similar to various studies conducted by Jakob Nielson, Jarod Spool, and others in the mid-1990's... ...But don't use italics for emphasis because italics are difficult to read on a computer monitor. There are just not enough pixels to render italics clearly.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200501/ie_and_italics/ Interesting info about Internet Explorer & Italics

Ever seen IE/Win ruin a layout just because a few words are in italics? I have. Just the other day I was pulling my hair out over this bug...

Ha! CC numbers can be linked to issuer!

Back when I started with this whole web design thing I was able to find some scripts to take advantage of some of the check encoding built into credit card numbers. I think we even had a little checksum so we could tell if it was a validly formatted number, but most of all there was a system to the numbering, so we could tell issuer networks apart.

We had to provide this tag for whether the card is Visa, MC, AMEX or whatever to the processing bank, but we could determine that based on looking at the number. I knew this to be true from earlier in my life, so went looking and it was great.

Now, a few years after I get to Sprint I am told this no longer works. Though no one can show me proof, and I don't believe it fully, I'm told that due to the large number of cards issued, that scheme doesn't work so we'll need to ask the customer which card they are using. Its always lame to provide an extra step, but everyone else seems to have done it, so who am I to argue.

Well, its demonstrably not true:


I just recently bought something thru this store with a PayPal checkout scheme. On the left, you see they accept the usual assortment of cards. On the right, after entering my valid card number (that is not it!) it shows which one you have. No user input required. Neat.

I suppose its possible they are using Ajax to actually pre-process the card number, but for a bunch of reasons, I doubt that. I think its parsing the CC number itself on the client side.



Some other time I'll rant about how amazingly poorly the CVV2 code is implemented from a design, usability, comprehension and mostly security point of view. Note that mine was auto-filled by the browser. That's secure.

My Life Changing Device

I've been hearing people talking about the iPhone in excessively glowing terms for quite long enough now. I've even heard people in the cube next to me talk about how its world-changing, or life-changing. Remains to be seen, but I doubt it. For starters, yes I have played with one. Its a good PDA (needs software and a non-terrible network). By a long shot the best mobile browser ever. And its got some other neat interface stuff, seems well designed and built as all Apple products are now and the input is as good as can be expected (I wear gloves in the winter... not a lover of finger-only inputs). Anyway, its simply not gonna be anything like a life-changing device for me at least. Why is simple, I never had PDA, smartphone, even iPod. I used a spiral-bound datebook for 2 years in high school, but never really got into it. What I love is the laptop form factor. For the past few years of rejecting smartphones I have justified it as my need (or love) of graphics, cause that's what I do for a living. But maybe there's something else. I've always preferred this form factor. By my second year of college, I was using this pseudo laptop like thing for notes, schedules, etc. That died, and there was a gap, but for the last ten years or so I have carried a laptop with me practically everywhere. I can remotely look up pretty much any file, record my grandfather's WW2 reminisces, download listen to my entire music library, watch movies, output photos to TV, plug in an aircard and do internety things while on road trips, blog, or really whatever. Carrying around a computer all the time exposes them to damage, though. I coddle, but sometimes I break things when I fall or they get run over by a car. So the life changing device to me? A ruggedized laptop. Why? Its a real appliance. Like everything else (non-electronic) I carry around, or used to, its only marginally concerned with abuse. It gets scratched when I drag it across the street, but it still works fine. I don't even have a case. It's just got a sling for when I need to carry it more than across the room. Oh, and its a touchscreen. Yes, I've tried tablets. Too fragile, and just weird. Too much effort to be tablets if you know what I mean. Someday a ruggedized laptop might come out that's just perfect, though. This isn't the final state, I hate windows so its not my primary, and its too heavy, and its only got a 6x8 screen. What I hope for is not just that I can keep buying old, used ruggedized laptops, but that every electronic device (or at least most) are built to last. And in this, the iPhone may be a harbinger of something good. Apple's been slow on making their laptops really solid (though they are trending correctly lately) but the iPod series is almost the definition of rugged. People carry those around a lot, and they stand up to a lot more abuse than most phones or other devices I know. The wife's iPod (I don't have one, but I am exposed to them) is a 2G model, and runs like the day it came out of the box. I hope this degree of longevitity and ruggedness is where electronics are trending.

Recursive Cultural Iconography, $10.60

Okay, I normally don't fill my blog with posts from other people's blogs, but I just love this item: Stolen from the irregular but kick-ass History of the Button. If somehow its not making sense, its an eraser shaped like a delete key from Art Lebedev. Now, if I can just get my whiteboard "Undo" button to work.

Laser Floyd at the Qwest Center!

Alison got us tickets to see Roger Waters in Omaha (that's as close as he was coming to us) for my birthday, as I love him. Pink Floyd, sure, but Roger Waters solo stuff is my favorite. The show was to make money, so really was 80% Floyd and everyone else thrilled to that, held up their lighters and so on. So, I was a tad disappointed, but it was a pretty good show still.

Yes, lasers. But really, it worked out with the whole multimedia nature of the show. Arriving, there's music on like always, and a big image behind the stage.

All this is camera phone, so sorry for the quality. That's a close up of a radio, with other stuff (toys, liquor, ashtray) around it. It just sits there, but I notice the music is all from a certain era, and he likes using radios as a segueway between tracks, so I started to get a hint of what would happen. And, what do you know, a good 10 minutes before live music starts, the concert starts. An arm comes on screen, changes the station, etc. Lights and smoke effects tried (reasonably successfully) to bring the environment into the rest of the arena. Anyway, that still sounds cheezy, but they did a good job continuing to use the video screens, light effects, etc to make the show fairly multimedia. There were times I was not paying attention to what's happening on stage, and I had decent seats.

Speaking of phones, camera phones abounded. Any view across the arena looked like 50 people were holding up their lighters, but its all phones.


Funniest thing was that some people right in front of us were good bushies. Objected out loud to his anti-war politics, and actually said "boo" once when everyone else cheered. I'm not even gonna argue that the bulk of the music is based on valid WW2-era sentiment, and just wonder:

• Why would you come to a concert like this if you cannot handle the politics?


• Why would you speak up about it, when surrounded by thousands who disagree with you?