Tag: me

Typography

sooz introduced me to joshua darden. he is a type designer with the hoefler type foundry, working under the world-renowned tobias frere-jones. i took josh to the reorient party, and we talked a lot about typography and design. after a couple hours of non-sleep, i met joshua again, and we went to a flea market to look for type specimen books and other objects of interest. we then went to an appointment with irving oaklander who has one of the most exquisite collections of typography books in the world. standing in his store room in a nondescript NYC warehouse and browsing through the dusty tomes of the high art of typography awed me. my interest in typography was instantly rekindled, after it had been more or less sleeping for 10 years. with an expert guide like joshua it will be a total pleasure to go back into it.

NYC pros and cons

my trip to NYC was totally awesome and reaffirmed my earlier experiences with manhattan. i love it for the intensity of every waking moment, the vanity people display with their huge lofts, the density of cool people to meet. i hate it for the arrogance of most manhattanites (although totally understandable from an urban lifestyle perspective), for the emphasis of form over substance (contrast to cambridge, where it is completely the other way around). i definitely will spend more time in NYC. in fact, it looks like i will be in NYC the next 2 weekends anyway, first to attend a halloween party in manhattan and hang out with sooz and josh, second to meet up with michael wechsler again who is always up to interesting stuff.

The inner sanctum

i visited the w3c headquarters today to meet with martin duerst. we had a good chat about various topics ranging from the xml spec stack to the state of unicode adoption to the quality of our alma mater (martin is a university of zurich alumnus). martin was quite impressed by the virtues of the bitflux editor. apparently, only editors with PUT support get the nod from TBL. maybe this nice piece of software can make some inroads at the W3C.

IA frontier

having met christina wodtke of boxesandarrows.com fame, i am convinced that the frontier for CMS is in the user-facing layers (information architecture especially), not in the bowels. The lower CMS layers are being commoditized, or at least are maturing considerably.
as a tool vendor, it is our quest to help users develop accessible sites with a sound information architecture. if the tools could somehow steer the users to do the right things by virtue of following the path of least resistance.. this is the real frontier. i will ponder this subject a bit more in the coming days.
oh and christina referred to me as the crazy swiss and was very intrigued by our experience with oscom. in fact, she invited me to a IA conference in february in austin. i’m intrigued.

Mindmap to outline

continuing with my mindmanager x5 experiments, i wrote XSLT that converts the native mindmanager xml format to OPML. as it turns out,
if you disregard the presentational information that mindmanager stores for each node, the 2 formats are quite alike. it was very easy to convert from one to the other.
i have yet to do the inverse, opml2mindmanager. i guess i could figure out the minimal requirements for the mindmanager xml representation, but i will probably wait until mindjet releases their mindmanager x5 developer docs. you’d want to round trip to make this useful beyond satisfying your inner geek.
i always liked outlines, being very much a list person, but when i discovered mind mapping software, something clicked. i realized that i could harness latent visualization skills to help with retention of ideas. my clumsiness with analog media had prevented me from experimenting with mind maps earlier. not so with mindmanager.
the biggest improvement of mind maps over outlines is the ability to relate nodes in a mind map to each other. also of interest, embellishing a mind map with visual clues. i know that some outliner let you attach links to a node, but unless i am missing something, there can only be one link per node.
i am not yet sure what i will use this XSLT for. here are some ideas:

  • export mind maps as outlines (obvious)
  • annotate imported OPML blogrolls
  • prototype sitemaps (though i am not sure if any CMS besides the userland products uses OPML for that)
  • aggregate with other XML data (RSS, FOAF etc)

mindmanager ships with some XML aggregation samples, such as the ability to associate RSS feeds with certain nodes in the mind map. upon first glance, it struck me as a toy, but i am sure they are only scratching the surface there. mac users have had software to correlate feeds, contacts, bookmarks, pictures etc for a while, but i am not sure if these products hit a sweet spot just yet. then again, they exude cool, and that is reason enough 🙂
i am pretty confident that interesting stuff like XTM support will fall into place quickly once mindjet builds upon it’s quite active community and encourages it to innovate. being of the geek tribe, i am not very often prepared to pay for software (with all the open source solutions out there), but i gladly pay for mindmanager.
anyway, let me know if you think this is hot area, or have ideas for exploration.

Enforcing netiquette

Paradoxic: so given your apparent dislike for forums, you have never found any useful information off forum ?
Paradoxic: I find myself discovering a wealth of information off forums almost everyday
gregorrothfuss: i guess the kind of info i am looking for is not on forums
gregorrothfuss: and your in the business of caring about forums
gregorrothfuss: so that figures
Paradoxic: you have never found anything from a forum tho /
gregorrothfuss: well, maybe some posts from the googleguy
gregorrothfuss: but since most forums have horrible urls they are not indexed
gregorrothfuss: so how would i find the gems
Paradoxic: what is your solution for forums then
Paradoxic: there needs to be a way for communities to discuss
gregorrothfuss: forums are ok for nebies
gregorrothfuss: because novice web users do not realize they use the medium ineffectively
gregorrothfuss: if you work on the web all day, you appreciate better tools
Paradoxic: i don’t wanna argue with you on it, just seeing what solution is more effective
Paradoxic: mailing lists aren’t
gregorrothfuss: yeah
gregorrothfuss: mailing lists suck too
Paradoxic: you waste a shitload of time downloading useless crap
gregorrothfuss: for different reasons
gregorrothfuss: and blogs suck for yet other reasons
gregorrothfuss: i think you can do a lot with netiquette
gregorrothfuss: if you have good titles, concise posts, forums work well
gregorrothfuss: same for mailing lists
gregorrothfuss: i would focus on educating people how to use the tools properly
gregorrothfuss: seems the best ROI
gregorrothfuss: i wonder if tools can be made to enforce netiquette
gregorrothfuss: for instance, it should not be possible to send email without a subject
gregorrothfuss: that is just plain broken

Censored?

sooz: Do you have something to be concerned about on your website/server? The firewall thingie here is blocking my access to your blog LOL
gregorrothfuss: eh?

help me seth!!

Witty kookiness


I went to see Rose Polenzani last night in the company of Sooz and Susan (mit.edu webmistress). I was quite mesmerized by her songs. I definitely have a knack for people with wit who exude kookiness.

the llama
To ride on a
black winged Llama over desert
in the chill of night
wasn’t my idea.
stirrup me.
Now that I’m here I’ve got nothing to lose
for the record.
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
A blue land
and besides that everything in sight
has lost its color.
And if it was
hiding beneath the surface
of this great scape,
I would still want to wait.
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
I want to be brave
and believe that this fierce flapping creature
is heaving in good faith.
Holding on
but there’s no part of him that doesn’t
disappear
under my hands…
Carry me away,
but CARRY ME!
Carry me away,
but CARRY ME!
CARRY ME!
CARRY ME!