New article
A friend alerted me to a paper by Susan Herring that I hadn't read yet: Gender and Power in Online Communication.
And there are some other interesting articles in the working papers section of Indiana University's Center for Social Informatics, like another paper by Herring, Searching for Safety Online: Managing "Trolling" in a Feminist Forum and an article by Adam B. King, Mapping the Unmappable: Visual Representations of the Internet as Social Constructions.
Apr 5, 2002 @ 14:16 » no comments » Research
More links
Opera keeps all the open browser windows within the main program window, using 'tabs', so you can quickly switch between them. This keeps your taskbar from getting cluttered with all the open browser windows you have around during the day and as a plus Opera can remember all the windows you had open and start up where you left off last time. Here's a bunch of links from windows I've had open in Opera for a week or so, I can't remember where I got the links originally:
Death of a game addict, fascinating rehearsal of all things evil about games... I'm still considering if I should try to contact the journalist and ask him why, apart from writing a sensational story, you'd want to rehash all those points...
IPv4 address space utilization, a very interesting graph down there... is it me or does the graph indicate that we have loads of available IP addresses? Then why, apart from new features, the hurry to move to IPv6?
IJIGS, International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation.
Breaking out of Binaries: Reconceptualizing Gender and its Relationship to Language in Computer-Mediated Communication, by Michelle Rodino in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
The Architecture of Level Design, at Gamasutra.com.
ULTIMA ONLINE: An Interactive Virtual World with Multiple Personalities, by Amy Jo Kim.
The Laws of Online World Design, by Raph Koster.
Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer games, by Espen Aarseth.
Apr 6, 2002 @ 16:16 » no comments » Research
Auto-updating and worms
In the wake of the news that the 'million-downloader' KaZaA, a file-sharing utility, contains a hidden, auto-updating peer-to-peer program written by a company called Brilliant Digital, some disconcerting facts have surfaced (apart from the fact that this piece of unrequested software got bundled with another program and went live on your computer).
Slashdot reports on a short article by Nicholas Weaver that details how the Brilliant Digital P2P software constitutes the threat of becoming a Single Point of 0wnership. The term "single point of ownership" means that if the Brilliant Digital software or their auto-updating system is hacked in any way, the potentially malicious hackers could gain access to millions of machines on the internet. When a machine is hacked and under control of the hacker, it is "0wned". Weaver points out that the potential vulnerabilities of the Brilliant Digital could be very easy to exploit indeed. Put that together with the threat of a "Warhol Worm", described by Weaver in another article, and you have some pretty explosive stuff on your hands. I wonder if Brilliant Digital can be held liable if such a scenario happens.
Apr 8, 2002 @ 10:25 » no comments » General
Weblogs and the news
JD Lasica has a page with a roundup of Weblogs and the News: Where News, Journalism and Weblogs Intersect.
Apr 8, 2002 @ 15:23 » no comments » Research
Infinite matrix
Heh... InfiniteMatrix.net is a place where, amongst a couple of other really cool people, you can find Bruce Sterling and his blog called Schism Matrix.
Apr 9, 2002 @ 14:57 » no comments » General
Everquest on PS2
News.com reports that Sony will release a networking kit and a console version of Everquest for the Playstation 2. As usual Slashdot provides some heated discussion on the topic. With some of the Slashdot posters I wonder about how they will adapt the textual/typing interaction to the PS2. News.com mentions that the interface will be streamlined so that it's going to be easy to use for the PS2 gamers, plus, note!, that the PS2 version of Everquest is called "Everquest Online Adventure" and possible is not compatible with the PC based version of the game.
On a related note, I notice that when I report on stuff relevant to my research, it's mostly on games and gaming... The simple explanation probably is that there's a steady stream of game-related news on the Net, whereas "gender", "the body", "real and virtual", MUDs and IRC are not so prone to getting hyped in the various media. Would there also be a more complicated, in-depth explanation? Enlighten me :-)
On a gender related note, currently reading: Hall, Kira & Mary Bucholtz (eds.) (1995) Gender Articulated. Language and the Socially Constructed Self New York and London: Routledge. [link... I love that picture!]
Apr 9, 2002 @ 17:06 » no comments » Research
Hooga chakka
This is at number 13 of the Blogdex fresh index. Don't ask me why... or why I link it up too!
Apr 12, 2002 @ 11:12 » 2 comments » General
Aldus
A journey through a longtime object of fascination of mine: typography.
There are fonts called Palatino installed on millions of desktop computers; inevitably a weak and ugly parody of the original. Regrettably every book published between 1987 and 1991 was set in some bad Palatino or other; this may be why I watched so much television in those years.
I find Textism on a whole a rather refreshing discovery. Love the photographs too.
Apr 12, 2002 @ 12:19 » no comments » General
Smurf communism
Oh yeah! The Smurfs Were Communists!
Apr 12, 2002 @ 15:01 » no comments » General
Cheap
I feel cheap. I installed MovableType to see if I'd like it, but I'm still blogging this with Greymatter. Long time ago I started blogging with Blog. I feel strongly about abandoning some piece of software that basically does what you want it to, that the author(s) gave you for free and that you used to your content for quite a while. Unused software doesn't go stale, it gets lonely.
Apr 15, 2002 @ 13:18 » no comments » General
On the internet
In case you were looking (and you were, weren't you?!), the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is located here.
Apr 15, 2002 @ 17:34 » no comments » General
Usability
Usability Problems Hurt Kids! Adults Too!
A while ago I remarked on good interface design and the horrors of navigating my university's websites. Today I ran across a short article by Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Ratings fame, and he comments on a study done on children using/navigating websites.
Not that the facts found are shocking, but if you take the basic demands for usability, the university websites I'm referring to manage to break all the rules:
A) Unclear navigational confirmation of the user's location confused users both within sites and when leaving them.
B) Inconsistent navigation options, where the same destination was referred to in different ways, caused users to visit the same feature repeatedly, because they didn't know they had already been there.
C) Non-standard interaction techniques caused predictable problems, such as making it impossible for users to select their preferred game using a "games machine."
D) Lack of perceived clickability affordances, such as overly flat graphics, caused users to miss features because they overlooked the links.
E) Fancy wording in interfaces confused users and prevented them from understanding the available choices.
Read a longer analysis of the university sites I'm referring to and you probably agree with me that they're not very kid or adult friendly...
The sites I'm linking here are in Dutch, but you should get the gist, it's about the navigation after all. Check out site #3 (which actually is a subsection of site #2, which again goes under site #1... note the differences in style and changes in navigational elements!).
Okay, so you're looking at site #3, now this is an 'aggregate site' for different departments, so to get to 'Communication Sciences' you need to select if from the drop-down menu. Right?! The navigational elements to the left change and nowhere do they give you any sense of where you are in the hierarchy of the site or how to get back. Some of the navigational links to the left will send you to another page/site altogether, some will simply load some new info on the right side of the page... no difference made in the presentation of the links. Plus (go back to site #3) if you click on "Onderwijs" you get a bunch of new links, but to get to the courses you're looking for, you again have to pull down the right department and go through their pages to find what you're looking for. Again, no visible hierarchy, no clue where you are on/in the site, no clue where you are going when you click a link.
Now for the fun part... suppose you found the Communication Sciences department (hover over link and check out the horrible structure of that link.... not the kind of logic that would allow you to remember it and enter it into the address bar, right?) and now you want to go the the research school that's part of the Communication Sciences department (where we PhD students work and study). Shouldn't be too hard to find it, right? Well... This whole site #3 is only for BA/MA students. If you want to find the research schools, you have to go back to site #2, click "Onderzoek" (Research), click "Onderzoeksscholen" (Research Schools... note the huge difference between "research schools" and "research institutes"!), click "Amsterdam School of Communications Research", click on the highlighted URL of our research school. That was fun, wasn't it?
One more complaint regarding points A, B and C of the usability list: go to site #1 and hover over some links. Links in the text change color, in the navigation some links get a little block displayed on the left of them (doesn't work reliably in Opera) but they don't change appearance, some links in the navigation don't change at all. This bad habit is repeated all over the sites.
Ah, one more gripe... finding the digital expense forms... go to site #2, click on "Diensten", click on "Werk" and note that the navigation keeps changing, so I am primed to find a link to the expense forms there, but no... they appear in the text of that page on the right, "Digitale formulieren", which sends you to a page where you have to click on a link, which sends you to a way different site that doesn't have a proper domain name, just an IP number. (In Opera the italicized text at the bottom doesn't show up properly.) When you have finally picked your expense form from the drop down menu, you'll find yourself on a webform, that you have to fill out, print and send it in like that, because you cannot submit it electronically. Never mind that you can't keep an electronic copy for yourself, because saving that page locally won't save the data you entered.
Although you may not read Dutch, let me assure you that at various points I too have great difficulties in figuring out what the different terms that are presented in the navigation would mean... they're just too vague. Only going through the sites time and again will give you some idea of where to find what, but that's not because there's a logic to it, but simply because you've learned where stuff is, you've memorized the location (or at least the path).
Not a very kid proof site.
Apr 16, 2002 @ 10:09 » 1 comment » General
Sorting is cool
One of the reasons I installed MovableType the other day is that it will do sorting and allows you to attach categories to your posts. This makes for a rather versatile system of organizing stuff, not just 'plain old' blogposts. I've been fiddling with the settings a bit and if you promise not to mind the current crappy layout (IE5 gives trouble, so use something else when you proceed), you can have a peek.
If you look at test page 1, you see a couple of articles and books. They're not sorted, they simply appear in the order that I entered them, for they each are a single blog entry. Don't believe me? Just check out this page. If you just leave off the "date" and "posted by" remarks, who will know it's simply a blog entry...
Now for the fancy stuff. Check out test page 2, and you see suddenly the entries are organized alphabetically. MovableType does the sorting, neato! Now let's combine this with the categories that you can use in MT. Check out test page 3, and there you will see only the entries belonging in the "Online Articles" category, sorted alphabetically. That means it becomes real easy to put all the stuff that's spread out in HTML in the Cyberculture, Identity and Gender section into one simple to administer blog database and generate single webpages instead of mucking about with frames. Pukka! Jamie Oliver would say.
Apr 16, 2002 @ 16:18 » no comments » General
Slashdot rehash
Linking up some open browser windows, probably all found through Slashdot, but I'm not terribly sure anymore:
Triumph of the mod, article on Salon.com how mods contribute to the gaming scene.
Google Adwords Happening, a really great tale of an artist who bought some Google adwords, not to sprinkle ads on the searching public, but to present them with some poetry.
Bots chatting up kids, nefarious development of chatbots chatting with kids on instant messengers and feeding them cleverly disguised info about products.
Browser back button a risk, yet another silly IE bug that causes the use of the back button to execute JavaScript in the wrong security zone. Won't it ever stop?
Real audio streaming from a Commodore 64, not quite steampunk, but way cool retro nonetheless!
Apr 17, 2002 @ 09:54 » no comments » General
Xbox
Slashdot reports imminent Xbox price drops to current PS2 level in Europe and Australia, i.e. 299 euro. Now let's just see how much money I've got left after our equally imminent holiday in Australia and we'll talk again.
Apr 19, 2002 @ 10:11 » no comments » General
Tom's VGA charts
It's the hardware loving nerd in me who enjoys Tom's VGA charts, which lists the performance for a lot of 3D graphics cards from the TNT2 up to the new GeForce4 Ti 4600 speedmonster.
Apr 19, 2002 @ 10:57 » no comments » General
Teddy Borg
Teddy Borg, a huggable network switch. I think the cats wouldn't let it do much switching in our house.
Apr 20, 2002 @ 13:23 » no comments » General
Shocking facts
Google says there are about 139.000 "shocking facts" reported on the internet. The most shocking facts apparently are about pet food, electricity and the church. It's Monday morning, sue me.
Apr 22, 2002 @ 09:18 » no comments » General
GIF history
In an article I'm writing I make an offhand reference to animated GIFs and the blink tag being all the rage back in 1995 and I end up doing a little digging. So here's a quick account of the journey.
GIF Info is a comprehensive site about the GIF image format. According to this information image-animation was not originally a part of the spec, but it was added by Netscape as an extension in the 2.02 browser and later incorporated in the GIF87a spec, with speed control implemented in the GIF89a spec. Now this begs the question when the Netscape 2.02 browser was released. So with a bit more digging I found this timeline of computer history, that says the 1.0 version of Netscape was released in 1994 and the 2.02 version in 1996.
So we didn't actually have animated GIFs in 1995? Only from 1996 onwards? Phew! I'm not going to try to find out when the tag was introduced, this already took me way too much time. Some links though I found while searching:
Netscape 2.02, you can still download it!
Netscape 2.02 release notes, in case you were wondering what changed from the 1.1 release.
The GIF Controversy, a historical account of the controversy that ensued when Compuserve and Unisys decided to enforce their patents on the GIF format and levy a tax on the use of GIF images... remember?! That was a big deal back in the day!
Yahoo's entry for GIF and Webopedia's entry.
W3.org HTML home page, HTML 2.0 became a standard in 1996, only to be superseded the same year by HTML 3.2.
A short history of animated GIFs, not to be taken too seriously I recon.
Apr 22, 2002 @ 18:58 » 1 comment » Research
Blinkety-blink
Just a quick addendum to my post on animated GIFs: I recon the blink-tag is not a HTML standard, which meshes with what I vaguely seem to remember from "way back then." Modern browsers such as IE5/6, Mozilla and Opera consequently don't support the blink tag. But no fear! Good old Netscape still supports the blink tag and if you're reading this post with a Netscape browser, even the latest Mozilla-based version 6 incarnations, you will see the tag show it's schtuff!
Apr 24, 2002 @ 14:20 » no comments » Research
Online reading
I want one!!! Well, I want one that doesn't have a black on green display, but the layout looks like what I've been wanting for a long time. You didn't click there yet? It's a picture of an 'electronic book reader' type thingy with a foldable screen. I want to read electronic documents just like I read a book. In the subway, on the balcony... anywhere. Preferably with integrated wireless internet access (I can live with that being restricted to my own home) and plenty storage capacity.
In related news, researchers have found the half-life of hyperlinks to be 55 months. This means, just like radio-active elements have a half-life, link-rot will halve the number of working links over a period of 55 months, while in the next 55 months half of the remaining working links will go bad, etc., etc. Wired reports on it here. So statistically speaking, in 55 months time from now *check* one of these two links will have gone bad. Bugger.
Apr 24, 2002 @ 14:35 » no comments » General
Desperately seeking Ogre
I've been on another somewhat silly search. There's this really cool search tool that will let you search a humongous amount of library data, called Picarta. I'm not sure if you can search in it if you're not logged in through one of the Dutch universities, but the point of the story is that at some point someone has been putting loads of online sources into one of those databases. I found an intriguing reference to a long gone website, and the description reads:
Features information on Firepower, a video tank game that can be played over the Internet by up to 32 players. Notes that Firepower has no relation to any other tank game and is currently available for UNIX machines running X only. Offers a profile of the game's developer, a mailing list for reporting bugs, and playing instructions. Provides access to the Bolo tank game Web site and to the FTP site of the X Consortium for downloading Firepower.
Well, with the website gone, why not search for the author of that page, Joe Rumsey. No results searching on the name in combination with firepower. There's a realtor name Joe Rumsey, but I recon there's more luck trying a game-programmer last seen working for Activision. A search on the Activision site turns up a bunch of answers by one Joe Rumsey about Civilization - Scenarios, but no contact information.
Wait, what is the webarchive for? Okay, input the URL mentioned above... tadaa! results! The page found actually has a "This page has moved" message on it, but the very old new location of Joe "Ogre" Rumsey's website has been indexed as well, here.
Ogre? Ogre? Could that be the Ogre quoted by Troy Whitlock in his famous "ruthlessly pillaged" MOO.Terrorism: Fuck Art, Let's Kill!: Towards a Post Modern Community piece on pmc-moo? It seems about right time-wise...
Anyway, the Firepower page that sparked the whole excercise is archived as well. Not really relevant to my research after all... or maybe it will be one day. Who knows. A fun excercise for the reader... follow the link from Ogre's page to the also archived page of Tatsuya Murase, then check out her picture, then find her phone number. Hmm, yeah, right, take another look at that picture. Link-rot? Archive.org spillage? A good sense of humor?
Apr 24, 2002 @ 17:33 » no comments » Research
101st post!
This is the 101st post! I know the permalink says this is post number 106 [update: in the old system yeah], but the first four messages posted to this blog were just to test out the system and they were retired before opening the blog publicly, making post no. 5 the first public post. Right?
Apr 26, 2002 @ 11:30 » no comments » General
Vacation
It's going to be quiet here for a while, because I'm off on vacation. I'm not planning on doing any travel updates, but maybe opportunity and inspiration hit simultaneously... you never know.
Apr 26, 2002 @ 15:43 » no comments » General
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