Live from Austin!

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The Boston PD was doing the job the people of Boston hired them to do: Protecting the innocent. They knew that if those Mooninite Terrorists linked up, Boston would be a pile of ashes. You cannot escape the Quad Laser. Jumping is useless.”

—Dirkus Maximus

It’s also worth noting that someone actually made and planted fake pipe bombs in Boston in the last few days, but he wasn’t arrested.

The police and government in Boston are just looking dumber by the minute.

When Apple launched Mac OS X, they made a big thing about its typographical capabilities. To show off the new type rendering engine, they licensed and bundled…

More than $1,000 of the best fonts available today, including Baskerville, Herman Zapf’s Zapfino, Futura, and Optima; as well as the highest-quality Japanese fonts available, in the largest character set ever on a personal computer.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Microsoft’s approach. Back when they launched Windows, they needed some fonts too. Since every laser printer on the planet (and most non-laser printers) had Helvetica and Times in, it would have been really useful if Windows had had Helvetica too. Macintoshes at the time shipped with Times and Helvetica, and it enabled them to display on screen a reasonable facsimile of what you would get on printout.

Of course, doing what Apple had done and actually licensing the fonts wasn’t an option. Bill Gates didn’t get to be as rich as he is today by paying people for the use of their intellectual property. Instead, Microsoft got a couple of knock-off fonts made by Monotype that were close enough—Times New Roman and Arial. In the case of Arial, the emulation was painstaking, right down to using the exact same character and stroke widths for every symbol.

Much the same happened with Microsoft Office. Microsoft saw a font they rather liked—Hermann Zapf’s Palatino—so they called in Monotype to make a quick copy. The result was named Book Antiqua, and bundled with Office.

Unlike Helvetica, however, Palatino was a wholly original design by a living designer. Hermann Zapf got rather angry, and Microsoft agreed to license Palatino retrospectively.

With Microsoft, history has a way of repeating itself. The forthcoming (some day) Windows Vista has a font called Segoe, used for all user interface elements. Microsoft recently filed for a visual trademark on Segoe, to try and ensure that nobody else would be able to use the font in their logotypes or software. Because, you know, everyone wants the caché of looking like Windows.

Unfortunately, some spoilsports at Linotype noticed that Segoe (as shipped in the Vista betas) was almost identical to the font Frutiger Next, designed in 1997 by Adrian Frutiger for use on signage in Munich. Microsoft had tweaked the tail on the ‘Q’, added a baseline to the ‘1′, left everything else identical, and then filed for a trademark as if the font was their own original design.

The European Union denied the application. Microsoft attempted to appeal, arguing that Linotype hadn’t actually sold Frutiger Next. Unfortunately, Frutiger is a very popular font, and the evidence of its Next variant’s existence prior to 2005 was overwhelming. Denied! Microsoft must pay all the lawyers’ fees for Heidelburger Druckmaschinen AG, aka Linotype.

Frutiger is very similar to Adobe Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly. Consensus seems to be that Myriad is original enough to not be considered a rip off, however. Myriad is used by Apple for their corporate publications (replacing Apple Garamond), and is also used by my team at IBM. It’s worth noting that Apple license the font from its owners, and I use a legal licensed copy too.

So…will Microsoft license Frutiger or Myriad? Or will they tweak Segoe some more?

I got my desk today. I’m starting to hate ready-to-assemble furniture, but really, who can afford any other kind? Plus, my desk is from Anthro, who are the Rolls-Royce of RTA.

I think the first time I saw an Anthro desk was in MacWorld Expo Boston back in 1997. It was a split-surface desk, with the Mac on the back surface, slightly higher than the front keyboard and mouse area. The guy demonstrating the desk pulled a small lever under the front surface, and lifted it higher with one hand. He started to show me the tilt control too, but I was already convinced.

The desk surfaces are extra-thick particleboard with the an industrial-grade wipe-clean coating. The legs are wide steel tubes, and the other metal parts are laser-cut steel. The carts move on rubber-wheeled castors, so as not to scratch the floor–no corner-cutting here. Their primary market seems to be the world of big business, where things like radiology workstations and industrial benches are expected to be able to stand up to years of abuse. The Anthro people like to demonstrate the strength of the furniture by having three people stand on a small computer cart without breaking it. Everything is made in Oregon, shipped in recyclable brown cardboard with all the necessary tools, and has a lifetime warranty. There’s just one snag: it’s kinda expensive.

I know that in business $800 for a desk is not a big deal, but it’s still about 4× what I’m used to paying. That’s for the smallest Adjusta cart; to be fair, the entry level cart without the fancy height adjust lever comes in at $300. But I really wanted that lever.

And then, a miracle happened. I’d been watching the special offers at the Anthro web site for a few weeks, when they announced an April Fool’s Day Special: 35% off almost anything.

So I’m writing this to say: if you’ve always lusted after a really ergonomic desk, go order an Anthro now before the prices go back up on the 30th.

Then when your credit card has recovered, you can order the extras–like the CPU rack and the industrial-grade coffee cup holder.

Yesterday I got up at 06:00 and worked until 22:00, so this morning I skipped the early morning sessions and caught up on sleep. After that, I went to Krispy Kreme for breakfast, and got a classic frosted doughnut straight off the conveyor belt. It was like biting into an angel.

Today I did some room monitor duty, passing out evaluation forms and collecting them at the end. The forms have a checkbox for which session you’re attending. It’s surprising how many people don’t know what session they’re in. Everyone has smart card badges which get laser scanned or read with a card reader at the door, so nobody can pull a Ryan this year.

Tomorrow I get to help staff an information booth. Unfortunately it’s unlikely to be like in the Airplane movies; probably just people asking about where various rooms are.

Sony have announced the DSC-F828 digital camera. The details to drool over:

• Carl Zeiss T* coated Vario-Sonnar lens. It’s f/2 to f/2.8 / 7.1, with a zoom range equivalent to 28-200mm (7x). The T* coating cuts lens flare and reflections.

• CompactFlash slot. Yes, finally Sony give in and support CF.

• 8 megapixel. 3,264 x 2,448. That’s better than ISO 400 35mm film.

• Four color CCD. Sony have added blue/green sensors to the CCD grid, for better resolution at the frequencies where the human eye is most sensitive—which means more accurate and natural-looking colors.

• Macro focus down to 20mm.

• Fully adjustable double lens rings. Adjust zoom and focus manually like on a conventional SLR.

• High resolution digital viewfinder.

• RAW image support so you can get the full 14 bit resolution of the CCD.

• Takes 58mm filters.

• Selectable focus point. Use a joystick to indicate exactly which part of the scene to focus on.

• True TTL flash.

Plus it has all the DSC-F717 features such as laser focus, night shot, spot/multipoint/center weighted metering, exposure lock, proper flash hotshoe, custom white balance, 100-800 ISO, shutter speeds from 30 seconds to 1/2000, 3+ hour battery life, and live histogram in the viewfinder.

It also records MPEG1 video with sound at 640×480 30fps. And it’s black.

All I did was order a couple of belts and a cheap winter coat for sara. But the surplus catalog sold my name to another catalog with a slightly more miltary bent. They sold my name to a third catalog, which has practically everything short of actual firearms—if I wanted to buy a crossbow, some laser sights or a serrated folding knife, I now know where to go.

So today the inevitable happened. I got an invitation to join the NRA.

Dammit, I am not a gun nut. I’m just cheap.

I’d really like an iPod. Apple are now selling them laser-engraved with the message of your choice.

Do you think they’d sell me one engraved “Fuck you, Hilary Rosen”?

I’ve burnt some more CDs of annotated photographs and MP3s… and also my first coaster after over 50 successful burns. I also installed the developer tools and built the latest version of the LAME MP3 encoder.

I thought Mac OS X had finally crashed earlier on, when all my Internet applications locked up… but it turned out the router had crashed. Power cycled it and everything worked again.

We need a new printer. Currently I print by producing a PDF and sending it over the network to sara, whose Mac is attached to the printer. This works, but it’s a pain. The new printer has to be shareable between OS X, OS 9 and (ideally) Windows too. I’m not sure about color inkjet vs monochrome laser. (A color laser is way too expensive.)

Some people may wonder why my web site was left unchanged for over a year. Well, I’m engaged in a lengthy project to digitize my entire photo collection, using a Nikon film scanner to produce 3000×2000 scans direct from the negatives.

Some of the images are decades old, and often the film has deteriorated and needs careful restoration. Color film in the 70s really wasn’t very stable, and these negatives haven’t been particularly well cared for either. My plan is to scan them, fix them, and archive them onto digital media.

Of course, this requires some care—five years ago, it might have seemed like a sensible idea to archive onto Syquest cartridges, after all. Who’s to say what will be around in another decade? Will we even be able to read most of today’s file formats? (How many art programs read NeoPaint files?)

A lot of people use TIFF. Few of them realize it, but TIFF is a really ugly file format originated by Microsoft. I say it’s ugly because I’ve read the specification. It has a zillion variations, including different byte ordering on different platforms. I’ve seen graphics packages which both claim to read and write TIFF, but won’t read each other’s files. So for archiving, TIFF is a definite no-no.

PNG is an open standard, it’s lossless, and it gets better compression than practically every comparable format, including TIFF. Because it uses no patented algorithms, it’s likely that every graphics program will at least have code to read it. Because Open Source implementations of the algorithm are available, I know that if the worst comes to the worst I can always write my own program to read PNG and write it into whatever’s the appropriate format in ten years’ time. So it’s PNG for me.

Anyway, after months of work my hard drive was getting dangerously full, so this weekend I bought a CD burner. Of all the data storage media out there, I think CD is the one most likely to still be readable in a couple of decades. I’m planning on using the Kodak pro-grade gold CD-Rs, which have a rated life of 100 years.

CD is a bit of a bitch to use, however. You have to burn the discs, verify them afterwards, and so on. On PCs, this generally involves a lot of dicking around with flaky driver software; the ThinkPad at work refuses to boot if the CD burner is plugged in, so you have to boot first, then plug and pray, and about half the time it’ll then recognize the drive. Assuming that worked, you can then try and burn a disc, which works about 80% of the time. The rest of the time the CD burning software hangs while updating the catalog at the end of the burn, and you have another coaster.

I was determined not to have similar experiences at home. Of course, I have a Mac at home, so that was a good start. Then I picked out a CD burner which was Firewire, so (a) I wouldn’t have any buffer underrun problems, and (b) I wouldn’t have to dick around with SCSI or USB drivers and termination problems.

Next, I narrowed my selection down to CD burners which were approved by Adaptec (who now want to be called Roxio), who make the Toast software used by practically everyone who burns CDs for a living.

Finally, I picked a drive which had the latest BurnProof technology. This is a hardware feature where if the drive stops receiving data fast enough—say, because Internet Explorer chokes while you’re browsing the web—the laser stops in a controlled fashion, marking how far it had got so it can continue when the data flow resumes. Which means fewer coasters, and the option of burning CDs while doing something else.

That’s the theory. Of course, no matter how careful and prepared you are, the universe has a way of screwing you over. In this case, I managed to get a faulty CD burner, and wasted most of yesterday trying to coax it into working properly. It would act just like it was working, but the CD would never verify and would be full of random (but sonically interesting) flipped bits.

Fortunately, I foresaw even this eventuality. Rather than trying to save $50 by buying online, I had decided to slum it and buy from CompUSA. So instead of paying two sets of shipping charges and waiting several days for a replacement, I picked up another burner this morning. The new one works fine. Rips at 40x, burns at 14x. Sweet!

I’ll carry on using DVD-RAM for day-to-day stuff, as it’s just vastly more convenient than CD. But now when everything’s finalized and annotated and cataloged, I can burn it on gold for keeps.

The CDRW drive I picked was a QPS Que! and in spite of the initial problems, I’m happy with it on balance.