05.30.02

It’s about *teks-

Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship, Culture and Society at 10:20 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Ted Nelson via Scripting News:

Today’s nightmarish new world is controlled by ‘webmasters’, tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web’s exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats.

Nelson makes some good points about the uses of text. Later though, in his discussion of linking, he makes some troubling assertions.

I want to write a more thoughtful post in response, from the stand point of someone with a lot of experience with digital and analog text, and the worlds of vellum and and silicon. I’m going to have to find some time to sit down and write a bit about hypertext, and glosses, and manuscripts, and linking and annotation. This is a good opportunity to try using the Radio Story feature, for longer posts.

But in the meantime, I want to point to the proto Indo-European root for text, and subtle and architect and technology (but probably not badger)—they all come from *-teks. Yes, that’s right, Nelson’s “tekkie,” an epithet that always irritates me, is in fact derived from the same linguistic DNA that gave us his revered text.

And while you’re waiting for my magnum opus[sic], go read Stalking the Digital Rhetoric. It’s about text.

05.29.02

Hypertext and Mackers

Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship, English, Silly, Culture and Society at 5:25 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Wired has a review of multimedia artist dlsan’s HyperMacbeth. dlsan’s web-based piece of interactive performance art uses phrases from the play and places them against an annoying Flash annimation. He has also translated the Macbeth bits into Italian, and accompanied the production with music from Nine Inch Nails and others.

I hate it. Yeah, I know, it’s non-linear, it’s hypertext electronic literature, it’s art. I think it’s annoying and ugly and silly. I’d much rather look at and listen to the Mackers à la Eminem parody.

And for those of more scholarly bent, why then, you can’t do better than the Voyager Macbeth E-book CD-ROM.

Real Names

Posted in Blogging at 4:35 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Much to my amusement, I discovered a faculty member who typically located items on the web by opening up Internet Explorer and typing in words or phrases she thought would be “reasonable.” Just the words, no scheme/protocol heading, and no www or domain suffix.

More often than not, her search strategy worked. That’s because of Real Names‘ keyword technology, licensed by content providers and deployed by Microsoft via I.E. It was a clever technology, and was particularly good in that it supported non-Roman writing systems like Japanese and Korean.

Microsoft, the key invester (Verisign was another), decided to shut down RealNames earlier this month, and not for money reasons, or a lack of faith in the technology (oddly, they recently registered a patent of their own that’s strikingly similar in intent to Real Names), or the company. You can read about it on former Real Names’ CEO Keith Teare’s web log, though Microsoft doesn’t want you to.

This strikes me as a suspicious set of circumstances, but even if you’re not a cynic like me, the technology is a good one for both naive uses, users who want to browse the web in lanuguages other than English, and smart companies with a desire to market their products and services

05.28.02

It’s About Writing

Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship, English at 9:22 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Dave Winer, in an old Wired interview he doesn’t much like, is quoted as saying:

To me, the Web is not about getting rich. It’s about users, designers, stories, and pictures. It’s a writing environment..

I think he’s exactly right. Blogging, for all the ability to add or link to images, is one of the ways the primacy of text is still apparent on the net. Text is an efficient low-bandwidth form of data, and writing is an artform (well, other people’s writing is).

The next time I teach, whether it’s a freshman composition class or a literature class, I’ll definitely be blogging, and I’ll do my best to incorporate blogging into the syllabus. People take their writing far more seriously when they know they have readers, and when writing is made public, it suddenly is taken far more seriously.

05.27.02

SCORM and Modules

Posted in CMS/LMS at 10:48 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about standards for courseware and CMS allowing “mix and match” development:

For the first time, evolving technical standards for software are making it possible for colleges to customize distance-learning programs by easily mixing online-learning software from multiple companies.

This is of course exactly the approach to a CMS system that makes the most sense to me. One of the standards the article refers to is SCORM, “the Sharable Content Object Reference Mode.” Here’s a good overview of SCORM. The difficulty is that talking about a standard is one thing; actually adhering to it is another, far more important step.

Why Unicode Won’t Work

Posted in Development, Security at 10:38 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

The SlashDot article on Spoofing with Unicode linked to this provocative essay about the inherent flaws in Unicode, especially in terms of supporting Asian languages. There’s some good background info there as well.

Spoofing URLs with Unicode

Posted in Security at 10:35 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Over at SlashDot there’s a discussion about an article in Scientific American describing

how a pair of students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology registered “microsoft.com” with Verisign, using the Russian Cyrillic letters “c” and “o”. Even though it is a completely different domain, the two display identically (the article uses the term ‘homograph’).

Because the letters look very similar, a user will blithely click on a “spoofed” URL, and instead of going to the “safe” site they expect, experience any number of Nasty Things.

Radio is Complicated

Posted in Blogging, Software at 6:20 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’m beginning to get the hang of Radio, I think. I wanted to move my IT blog to Radio from BloggerPro, not because I don’t like Blogger (I do like it, very much, and am still using Blogger for my Digital Medievalist blog), but because Radio has some intriguing features.

The Categories option in Radio in particular appealed to me. It strikes me as useful for readers interested in reading about a particular subject, or find resources they knew they read about at some point.

I’ve found the help written by other users to be invaluable, since there’s no help, or decent documentation from Userland, the Radio developer. I’ve used user help in tandem with the Radio documentation, but I’ve especially appreciated the helpful tutorials written by Jenny, the Shifted Librarian. Her Radio tutorials are here. The UserLand documentation, and invisible (or rather, hostile) user support are pretty awful, so I’ve been grateful for other users’ help.

Moving from Blogger to Radio

Posted in Blogging, Software at 8:13 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Thanks to Lawrence Lee, Robert Occhialini and Aaron Cope, there are instructions and a script to download and run that allows you to import xml formatted blog entries from Movable Type and Blogger into Radio. You can read all about it here.

I had to import the xml file three times before the imported entries worked correctly, and even then there were some problems, but I think they are resolvable. It’s very very important that your system data and time, and the time and date setting in Blgger (or BloggerPro) are exactly as described MMDDYYYYHHMMSS. In my case that meant changing my Mac to use leading zeros. When I tried to import the xml file without the leading zeros setting, the dates were bizarre, ranging from 1904, to 2052.

Then, after getting the imported entries dates to display properly, and after telling Radio to republish the entire site, some of the past entries didn’t show from the public Home page; users got an error.

I was able to get most of the past entries to display by hand editing and republishing them—I wanted to use Radio’s Categories anyway, so I didn’t mind. But some entries are still not displaying properly. By now, I know it’s too much to hope for support directly from Userland.

05.20.02

Commenting Code

Posted in Development at 9:39 am by Lisa Spangenberg

There’s an interesting thread on SlashDot about when and how to comment code.

Lots of programmers seem to think that comments are a waste of time, but when I interview a programmer I always ask about how and when the programmer comments. I’ve been known to ask a programmer to walk through commented code, explaining what it does. If you really know what you’re doing, and your code, you should be able to explain it to someone who knows the basic concepts of programming and understands the task at hand.

I think comments are important, not only for future maintainers, but as a help to the coder who writes them. You will forget what you meant a particularly brilliant bit of code to do when you come back to it six months later, or even the next morning after an all nighter. Comments will help you remember. Make them descriptive, and specific, and you’ll find that thinking about what the code does will often help you stream line as you discover flaws in your “narrative strategy.”

Yeah, I know, code doesn’t have a narrative strategy, but are you sure? Think about it. There’s an order in which steps must happen, a process, with a defined beginning, middle and end. Use comments to gloss the process. User short descriptive variable names, not, please, Polish variable names, as one programmer I worked with did, unless of course, you’re coding in Poland. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve looked at a lot of code, and worked in a few scripting languages. I usually write some comments first, outlining the basic parts of the routine, to help me organize my thoughts. I learned that from the person who taught me to use my first scripting language, and it does help.

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