Archive

Fonts listed - Sunday, 30 January 2005

 

Table of Font Analogs 

Familiar Name

Alternate Name(s)

Aachen®

Charlemagne; Ruhr; Vanadium; Westlake

Ad Lib

Alibi

Adsans™

Ad Gothic; Angro; Humanist 970; News Ad

Akzidenz Grotesk™

Ad Grotesk; Gothic 725; Grigat; Standard; Wayland

Albertus™

Adelon; Alburt; Flareserif 821

Aldus

Breklum; Luce; Mannucci Roman

Alternate Gothic No.2

Alpin Gothic; Gothic

Amazone™

Amazonia; Fredrika

Amelia™

Computer 651; Orbit; Orea

American Text™

Blackletter 851; National Text

Americana™

AM; American Classic; Aston; Colonial; Concord; Flairserif 721; Freedom; Independence

Antique No. 3

Egyptian 710

Antique Olive™

Alphavanti; AO; Berry Roman; Gibson Antique; Incised 901; Oliva; Olivanti; Olive; Olive Antique; Oliver; Olivette; Olivette Antique; Olivia; Provence™

Antique Roman Open

Roman Stylus

Antique Roman Shaded

Roman Shaded

Arnold Bocklin; Auckland

Bock; Expo; Medusa; Nouveau; Youth; Freeform 715

Aster™

Albany; AS; Astro; Aztec; Corolla; Dutch 823

Auriol™

Freeform 721; Robur; Skylark

Aurora®

Empira; News 706; News No.12; News No.2; Polaris; Regal

Aurora Bold Condensed™

Anzeigen Grotesk; Aura; Aurora; Grotesque Condensed

Baker Signet™

Keene; Signature; Signatur Vario; Signete

Balloon™

BL; Freehand 041; Lasso

Bank Gothic™

Bond Gothic; Commerce Gothic; Deluxe Gothic; Magnum Gothic; Square 021; Stationer's Gothic

Baskerville

Baskenland; Baskerline; Basque; Beaumont; BK; Transitional 401

Baskerville No.2

Euro Baskerville; Transitional 404

Bauer Bodoni™

Bodoni B; Euro Bodoni; Headline Bodoni; Modern 405

Bell Centennial

Gothic 762

Bell Gothic

Directory Gothic; Furlong; Gothic 761; Paddock

Belwe

Belter; Welby

Bembo®

Aldine 401; Aldine Roman; Ambo; BE; Bem; Bernstein vario; Bingo; Griffo; Latinesque

Berling

Carmichel; Revival 565

Bernhard Modern™

Beacon; Bernie; BN; Duchess; Engravers Oldstyle

Bernhard Tango™

Aigrette; Carmine Tango

Bingham Script

Freehand 591

Bison™

Bison; Blizzard; Brush 738

Bitstream Alisal®

Calligraphic 456

Bitstream Amerigo®

Flareserif 831

Bitstream Arrus®

Lapidary 721

Bitstream Carmina®

Calligraphic 811

Bitstream Charter®

Transitional 801

Bitstream Cooper®

Freeform 741

Bitstream Fournier®

Transitional 601

Bitstream Iowan Old Style®

Venetian 801

Bitstream Oz Handicraft®

Freehand 701

Bitstream Ventana®

Humanist 800

Blippo™

Geometric 755

Bloc™

Geometric 885

Block™

Black; Block; Gothic 821; Hobble

Bodoni

BO; Bodoni No. 2; Brunswick; Empiriana; Gorvind; Modern 421

Bodoni Campanile™

Modern 735; Palisade

Bookman

Bookface; Bookman Antique; Bookprint; Revival 710

Bremen

Exotic 011

Britannic

Gallery; Grenoble

Broadway™

Big City; BW; Deco; Hudson; Moderne; Modernistic; Ritz; Showtime

Brody

Brophy Script

Bruce Old Style

Bruce; No. 31; Old Style No.3; Old Style No.7; Revival 704

Brush Script™

Bombay; BR; Brush; Brilliant Bold Script; Brush 451; Punch

Cable™

Geometric 231; Kabel; Kabello; Kobel

Caledonia®

Calderon; Caledo; California; Cornelia; Edinburgh; Gael; Gemini; Highland; Laurel; Transitional 511

Candida™

Candide

Cascade®

Freehand 471; Kascade Script

Caslon 540™

Caslon 74; CL; Caslon 2; Caslon 484; Caslon 485

Caslon Bold™

Caslon No. 3; New Caslon; Caslon 74 Bold

Caslon Old Face

Caslon Old Style; Caslon; Caslon 128; Caslon 471; Caslon 76

Cataneo

Chancery 731

Centaur®

Arrighi; Centaurus; Venetian 301

Century Expanded™

Century Light/II; Century X; Cambridge Expanded; CE; Century; Century Bold

Century Oldstyle™

Cambridge Oldstyle

Century Schoolbook™

Century Text; Century Textbook; CS; Schoolbook; Cambridge Schoolbook; Century Medium; Century Modern

Chapel Script

Mahogany Script; Monterey

Cheltenham Old Style

Cheltonian; Chesterfield; Gloucester; Kenilworth; Nordhoff; Sorbonne; Winchester

Choc™

Staccato 555

City™

Square Slabserif 711; Town

Clarendon

Clarique; Clarion; Cerebral

Cloister Black™

Abbey; Cloister Black

Codex™

Calligraphic 421

Concorde™

Dutch 809; Chinchilla; Concert

Cooper Black®

Bitstream Cooper; Burlesque; Coop; CP; Ludlow Black; Pabst; Plymouth; Rugged Black

Copperplate Gothic™

Atalante; Copperplate; Formal Gothic; Gothic No.29; Gothic No.30; Gothic No.31; Gothic No.32; Gothic No.33; Lining Plate Gothic; Mimosa; Spartan

Corona®

Aquarius; Cardinal; CR; Crown; Elmora; Ideal; Koronna; News 705; News No.3; News No.5; News No.6; Nimbus; Quincy; Royal; Scotsman Royal; StarNews; Vela

Coronet™

Pageant; Ribbon 131

Courier

Messenger

Davida™

DaVinci

Della Robbia™

Cantoria; Canterbury; Dahila; Firenze; Westminster Old Style

De Vinne

Congressional; Industrial 731

Diotima®

Calligraphic 810; Diotima

Dom™ Casual

Ad Bold; Brush 431; Brush Roman; Dom Casual; Polka

Eckmann™

Freeform 710

Egyptian 505™

Egyptios; Egypt 55

Egyptienne™

Humanist Slabserif 712; Egyptien

Electra®

Avanta; Elante; Illumna; Selectra; Transitional 521

Embassy

Boston Script; Florentine Script; Hellana Script; Script No.1; Script No.2

Englische Schreibschrift™

English 157; English Script

Engravers Roundhand

Roundhand No. 1; Signet Roundhand; Snell; Snell Roundhand

Engravers' Old English™

Old English; Old English Text

Engravers' Roman

Lining Litho

Eurostile™

Aldostyle; Astron; ES; Eurogothic; Europa; Gamma; Micro; Microstyle; Square 721; Waltham

Excelsior®

Angeles; Berlin; Camelot; Commerce No.1; Commerce No.2; Digi-Antique; Esquire; EX; Excel; Excella; League Text; News 702; News No.10; News No.14; Opticon®; Paragon™; Primus; Victoria

Fairefax; Fairfield™

Fairmont; Savant; Transitional 551

Financial

Letter Gothic

Folio®

Haverhill

Fraktur

German Gothic

Franklin Gothic™

Gothic No.16; Pittsburgh

Frutiger®

CG Frontiera; Concorde; Freeborn; Humanist 777; Provencale; Roissy; Siegfried

Fry's Baskerville™

Baskerville Display; Baskerville F; Baskerville Old Face; Transitional 409

Futura®

Alphatura; Atlantis; FU; Future; Photura; Sirius; Utica

Gando

Gando Ronde

Garamond

Aldine 511; American Garamond; Canberra; Carrera; Garamond No.2; Garamond No.3; Garamond No.49; Garamont; GD; Grenada

Simoncini Garamond™

Garamond Simoncini; Garamondus; Italian Garamond;

Gill Sans®

Eric; Gillies; Glib; Graphic Gothic; Hammersmith™; Humanist 521; Sans Serif 2

Gothic No.13

Gothic No.4

Goudy Old Style™

Grecian; Number 11; Goudy; Goudy Bold; Goudy Extra Bold

Granjon®

Elegant Garamond; Garamont Premier; Grandeur

Grotesque™ 126

Gothic 720

Helvetica®

Aristocrat; CG Triumvirate; Claro; Corvus; Europa Grotesk; Geneva/2; Hamilton; HE; Helios/II; Helv; Helvette; Holsatia; Megaron/II; Newton; Spectra; Swiss 721; Vega; Video Spectra

Hanseatic®

Swiss 924; Geneva 2 Hanoverian;

Helvetica Inserat

Swiss 921; Geneva 2 Sera; Geneva Inserat; Helios Inserat

Helvetica Compressed

Helvetica Pressed; Spectra Compressed; Swiss 911; Claro Compressed; Geneva 2 Compressed; Helios Compressed

Helvetica Monospaced

Monospace 821

Hobo™

Hobnob; Tramp

Imperial

Bedford; Emperor; Gazette; New Bedford; News No.4; Taurus

Imprint®

Period Old Style; Dutch 766

Ionic No. 5™

Ionic-326; Ionic/2; News 701; News Text Medium; Rex; Windsor; Zar; Corinth; Doric; Ionic 342; Dow News; Ideal; Regal

Impuls™

Impuls; Brush 439

Italian Script

Lorraine Script; Lucia

ITC American Typewriter®

Amertype; AT; Newriter; Typewriter 911

ITC Avant Garde Gothic®

AG; Avanti; Cadence; Geometric 711; Suave; Vanguard

ITC Bauhaus®

BH Geometric 752

ITC Benguiat®

Beget; BG; Revival 832

ITC Benguiat Gothic®

BT; Informal 851

ITC Berkeley Oldstyle®

Venetian 519

ITC Bolt Bold®

Square 821

ITC Bookman®

Revival 711; Bookman; BM

ITC Busorama®

Geometric 075; Omnibus; Panorama;

ITC Century®

Centrum

ITC Zapf Chancery®

Chancelor

ITC Galliard®

Seville

ITC Garamond®

Garamet

ITC Kabel®

Kabot

ITC Korinna®

Kordova

ITC New Baskerville®

Transitional 402

ITC Serif Gothic®

Line Gothic

ITC Souvenir®

Sovran; SV

ITC Tiffany®

Jewel

Janson®

Jason; Journal; Kis; Kis-Janson; Nikis; Dayton; Jan/Dutch

Jefferson

Freehand 575

Kaufmann™

Swing Bold; Tropez

Liberty™

Bernhard Cursive; Bernhard Schönschrift; Lotus; Viant

Libra™

Libretto; Libby Uncial

Life®

Fredonia

Linotype Modern™

Modern 880; Telegraph Modern

London Text™

Belvedere; Blackletter 686

Lydian Cursive

Granite Cursive; Lisbon Cursive

Lydian®

Granite; Lisbon

Mandate™

Command; Freehand 521

Meridien®

Zenith; Equator; Latin 725; Latine; Maximal

Madison

Century 725

Matt Antique

Garth Graphic

Melior®

Ballardvale/2; CG Melliza; Hanover/II; Lyra; Mallard; Matrix; ME; Medallion; Metrion; Uranus; Ventura; Vermilion; Zapf Elliptical

Memphis®

Alexandria; Cairo; Geometric Slabserif 703; Nashville; Pyramid

Metro™

Chelsea; Geometric 415; Gothic No.2; Gothic No.3; Megamedium; Meteor

Mirarae

Calligraphic 808

Mister Earl

Freehand 651

Mistral™

Aeolus; Missive; Staccato 222; Zephyr Script

Neuland™

Othello; Informal 011

Neuzeit Grotesk®

Genneken; Geometric 706; Grotesk S

News Gothic™

Alpha Gothic; CG Trade; Classified News; Gothic Bold-131; Gothic No.17; Gothic No.18; Gothic No.19; Gothic No.20; Gothic-130; Lightline Gothic; Record Gothic; Toledo; Trade Gothic

Nuptial Script

Bridal Script; Floridian

Olympian™

Olympus; Dutch 811

Ondine™

Formal Script 421; Mermaid™

Onyx™

Arsis; Onyx; Poster Bodoni Compressed

Optima®

Athena; CG Omega; Chelmsford/II; Musica; October; OP; Optimis; Optimist; Oracle/II; Orleans; Roma; Ursa; Zapf Humanist; Zenith

Oscar™

Formal 436

Palatino®

Andover/II; CG Palacio; Compano; Elegante; Malibu/2; Paladium; Palatine; Palermo; Parlament; Patina; Pontiac; Zapf Calligraphic

Palette™

Brush 445; Palette

Park Avenue™

Parkway; PA

Peignot®

Exotic 350; Monterey; Penyoe

Perpetua®

Felicity; Lapidary 333; Percepta; Perpetual

Piranesi Italic™

Minuet

Plantin®

Aldine 721; Atlantic; PL; Planet; Plantin

Poster Bodoni

Bodoni Extrabold/No. 2; Modern 721

Prestige

Prestige Elite

Primer®

Rector; Scholasta; Century 751; Premier; Bancroft

Profil™

Decorated 035

Raleigh™

Cartier

Rockwell®

Slate™; Geometric Slabserif 712; Rockland

Romana™

Romanisch; De Vinne; De Vinne Ornamental; French Old Style; Lorimer; Romaans

Sabon®

Berner; Classical Garamond; September; Sybil/2; Symposia

Serifa®

Seriverse; Sierra; Monty; Seraphim

Shelley®

Operinia

Spartan®

Technica; Techno; Times Gothic; Twentieth Century; Geometric 212; Sans; Sparta

Star Trek

Square 051

Stempel Garamond™

Euro Garamond; Garamond; Garamond Antiqua; Garamond Royale; Original Garamond

Stymie™

ST

Stempel Schneidler

Amalthea; Bauen Schrift; Bauer Text; Brewer Text; Kohinoor; Schneidler; Schneidler Old Style

Stuyvesant

Wintergreen

Syntax®

Synthesis; Cintal; Humanist 531; Symphony; Synchron

Textype™

Century 731

Times Roman®

TmsRmn; TR; Varitimes; Claritas; Dutch 801; English; English 49; English Times; Euro Times; London Roman; Pegasus; Press Roman; Sonoran Serif; Tempora; Tiempo; Timeless; Times New Roman

Torino™

Contessa; Galileo; Industrial 736; Loren

Typo Upright™

French Script; Interscript; Kaylin Script; Linoscript; Parisian Ronde

Trump Mediaeval™

Activa™; Ascot; Continental; Knight; Kuenstler 480; Mediaeval; Olympus; Renaissance; Saul

Umbra™

Durante; Meandme; Plastica

Univers®

Alphavers; Aries; Boston; Eterna; Galaxy; Kosmos; Swiss 742; UN; Versatile; Zurich™

University® Roman

Ace; Celtic; Collegette; Forum Flair; Opera; Orna; Stunt Roman

Windsor™

Winslow

Wedding Text™

Linotext; Marriage

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Requirements are real work, episode 3217 - Wednesday, 22 December 2004

From Infoworld and the Delphi research crew comes the tale of an actual study of IT end users which tells a story you should already know: capturing requirements is hard.

Seventy percent of the respondents to an ongoing Delphi survey said they consider capturing and documenting business requirements a difficult process -- and more than 60 percent said their organization has trouble implementing changes to its processes and policies.

'In this survey, what was really notable was the very definitive responses,' said study author Nathaniel Palmer, chief analyst at Delphi (a unit of Perot Systems Corp.) 'Respondents were very explicit in identifying problem areas, like capturing business requirements. That's something that you'd think should be a core competency, but respondents overwhelmingly said they struggle with it.'

More than 75 percent of Delphi's respondents said their requirements data resides in a number of separate sources, and close to 90 percent said incomplete definition or capture of business requirements is at least a moderate problem in their organization.

Mr Gause, Mr Weinberg, the universe is finally ready for you.

Also noteworthy: the story casually mentions the latest SAP horror story. Hewlett-Packard "had done dozens of smooth ERP (enterprise resource planning) migration projects, but when its latest ran into problems, the cascading disruptions contributed to HP missing its third-quarter financial projections," Infoworld reports.

Reporting IT implementation disasters is high-risk for reporters (whose "sources" and PR story-feeders get cranky) and for publications (whose marketing departments face advertising withdrawals). The safest time to mention disasters is when everyone on the inside is so used to hearing about them that they can't strraight-facedly protest the occasional report. Back when I was still writing on IT, I heard about a dozen failed content management system implementations before I started writing about the issue.

So when you hear about one disaster, chances are there are others happening. In a sense, this is what Delphi's study confirms.

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Adam Bosworth on the (un)wired home - Tuesday, 21 September 2004

Adam Bosworth: he made Access.When I wrote an article earlier this year on the difficulties of linking stereos and PC systems, I wondered briefly whether I was exposing my technical incompetence. Turns out I can rest easy. Adam Bosworth wants to do the same thing, although his ambitions go a little further than mine: he wants an all-wireless system that he can run from his mobile phone.

Who's Adam Bosworth? The guy in the picture. The guy who's contributed more to important Windows client apps than anyone else on the planet. He designed the original version of Microsoft Access, managed the development of the Internet Explorer 4/5 HTML engine, and pushed Microsoft into XML. Then he did a startup called Crossgain and spent time at BEA after they bought it. Now he's at a little company called Google. He blogs infrequently, but well. And he can't make his music system and his computer system talk to each other sensibly either. Phew.

This problem will get solved soon (see Tom's Hardware for the latest contenders). Soon is just taking longer to arrive than I'd have thought.

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Hal Macomber's 10 rules for project managers - Saturday, 11 September 2004

In his Weblog, operations management consultant Hal Macomber derides those x-numbered lists of qualities that consultants turn into overpuffed business books. He does, however, have a more-than-usually useful list of his own: 10 Rules for Project Managers.

10. Adopt practices for exploring a variety of perspectives

We think we see what we see, but we don't. We really see what we think. Remember the blind men and the elephant. Make it your habit to inquire what others see. You'll see more together.

9. Stay close to your customer

Clients' concerns evolve over the life of a project. Take advantage of that to over-deliver. Stay in a conversation with your client to adjust what you are doing.

8. Take care of your project team

We've come to accept that the customer comes first ... the customer is always right. We can't take care of the customer if we first aren't taking care of our project team. It's a challenge. While there are some things we can do for the whole team, it comes down to taking care of each team member as the individual that he or she is. And to make it more difficult, then we must bring their various interests into coherence.

7. Keep your eye on the overall project promises

Project work can be difficult. It is easy to loose sight of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Remind your team and yourself of the overall promises and how you are doing fulfilling those promises.

6. Build relationships intentionally

Project teams come together as strangers. To do great work...innovation, learning, and collaboration...all take people who like and care for each other. Don't leave that to chance. Start your projects by building relationships among team members.

5. Tightly couple learning with action

Projects are wonderful opportunities to learn. Don't put that off for the after project lessons learned. Make it your habit to incorporate learning loops in all your project activities. Your team will appreciate it. Your customer will benefit from it. And best of all, it will make your job easier.

4. Coordinate meticulously

A project is an ever-evolving network of commitment. Keep that network activated by tending to the critical conversations. See that people are making clear requests, promises that have completion dates, and share opinions that advance the purposes of the project. Without attention to those critical conversations the project will drift.

3. Collaborate. Really collaborate.

Make it your rule to plan with those people who will be the performers of the plan. Don't wait 'til the project has gone south to get their help. Start out that way. Continue collaborating as the usual way you work through the project.

2. Listen generously

People are able to say what they can in the moment. For the most part, people are well-intended. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Take the time to listen. Ask questions. Seek others' opinions. And while you're at it, don't be so harsh on yourself.

1.Embrace uncertainty

Expect the unexpected. There is far more that we don't know and can't know than what we can anticipate. Be resilient to what life throws at you. Anticipate that your team will learn something along the way that can and should change what you have promised and how you can deliver on your promises. And when you take a set-back -- we all do sometime or another -- review the other nine rules for how you can work your way out of it.

Each of these is a rule I know, rather than believe, to be important.

Link: Hal Macomber's 10 rules

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Naming conventions - Thursday, 9 September 2004

This is highly influenced by my preference for the camelBack convention and the naming convention in CityDesk databases (and so owes a little to Charles Simonyi's Hungarian Notation). The different scheme that names a table TBL_ARTICLE is perfectly defensible. The key is a scheme that helps your eye pick up the elements of names and actually read the code, while keeping your finger away from the caps key most of the time. Pick one scheme and stick with it.

Database naming conventions

See http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss/articles/DatabaseNamingConventions.aspx

Names in general will:

Tables and views/queries

Field names:

Site naming conventions

Directory names

For simplicity's sake, only a few files stay in the server document root:

The following standard redirects exist:

The following standard directories exist:

Page names

To keep the search engines happy, we use underscores here: my_page_name.html. (There's an argument that my-page-name.html would attract more attention from Google, but I have used this scheme too long to ditch it now.)

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Intranets look vainly to knowledge management - Sunday, 5 September 2004

The online magazine Line56 is running an article entitled "Intranet Trends to Watch For". As with most articles about intranets, it starts with the premise that intranets are valuable. From there, it goes on to predict that search tools will improve, that more employees will have to create intranet documents and that - here's the big one - knowledge management will at last become important.

The Line56 article interests me not because Line56 is a great authority but because it is typical of eveything I see about intranets and knowledge management. To quote the article:

The killer applications that replace the corporate telephone directory and the cafeteria menu will be knowledge management tools. Irrespective of your organization type, employees will perceive knowledge as a key mechanism to stay competitive with their peers and competitors. Effective knowledge management initiatives delivered via the intranet will take advantage of this trend. Furthermore, CEOs will treat employee productivity and knowledge levels as their only surviving competitive advantages as they attempt to limit the damage done by off shoring. Knowledge management tools will gain more prominence in this business environment and the corporate intranet will be the natural place to house them.

I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function. I've thrown my lot in with Peter Drucker, who knows all about knowledge-based economies but who famously declared that "you can't manage knowledge".

Take eChoice, the business where I work. We have lots of knowledge. It's all in people's heads, and it mostly won't come out. You could spend months interviewing the eChoice staff to find out what they know, and writing it down to create a sort of encyclopedia of the organisation. It would be an expensive waste of time. Barely anyone would read it, and they probably wouldn't recall it when they needed it.

Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at.

To the extent that this is knowledge management, knowledge management can be useful. But we have words already to describe this process: "teaching" and "learning". Teaching and learning should be core disciplines for any well-educated person, and organisations should work hard to encourage these skills. 

But teaching and learning are not even inherently well-suited to digital media. At an individual level, this teaching and learning often happens best with the participants face-to-face or talking on the phone. if concepts need to be visualised, and pen and an A4 sheet of paper usually do the trick. And the digital media most often used for this sort of communication are email and instant messaging. Storing "knowledge" on an intranet is a poor substitute for real-time electronic exchanges, and an even poorer substitute for a yarn over a meal or a cup of coffee.

So here comes a massive generalisation with an extra dose of arrogance. The "knowledge management" industry seems to appeal to people with a natural bent for neatness and completeness, people who believe that if we could only capture all the knowledge then everyone would know what to do. It appeals to the librarian mentality. And this mentality is a natural response to the chaos of real knowledge. But it is nevetheless dangerous in a business environment which must value creativity and proactivity.

At eChoice, we have an intranet. Frankly, it needs a couple of days' work to neaten and straighten it. But the only bits I can actually bring myself to recommend spending time on are:

Now there's a sensible argument in favour of tidying this system up at the edges: poor implementation in one part of the organisation sends a message that the organisation will accept sloppiness elsewhere. But there's no real business case for expanding our intranet. In particular, there's no real case for the sort of knowledge management initiatives that so excite Line56 and its ilk.

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Mozilla will win - Thursday, 12 August 2004

Mozilla - the family of browsers that includes Netscape 7, Mozilla and Firefox - is headed above 10 per cent market share.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has held more than 95 per cent of the browser market since June 2002, according to WebSideStory. That ended in July 2004. In a year, MSIE will have less than 90 per cent.

How do I know? I've been recommending friends install Firefox, the lightest version of the Mozilla browser. My friends are all broadband users whose systems have been sinking under the latest slimy wave of spyware. They're sick of trying (mostly vainly) to debug systems to eradicate random pop-up ads triggered by programs that mutate right in front of their eyes. They cover the spectrum from struggling teachers to $2000-a-day executives. They've been installing it. It's great, they say. Decoded, this seems to mean "it's like Internet Explorer, but without the problems". A couple of people like the tabs, but what they mostly like is the security.

Getting the next five per cent of users to install Firefox in exchange for getting rid of spyware hassles ... this is a done deal, now that Firefox just works.

If you need to stick with Internet Explorer, try installing BHODemon for browser helper objects, CWShredder for the CoolWebSearch trojan and Ad-aware for miscellaneous nasties. Ad-aware has recorded 60 million downloads from CNET alone. Both Ad-aware and BHODemon's creators are struggling to keep their Web sites up under the demand. CWShredder's creator, Merijn Bellekom, has given up, telling The Register [link] that "I simply do not have the tools to remove the latest variants. They are too aggressive or too complicated to allow for automated removal."

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Ask the hard questions of the software vendor's reference customers - Saturday, 17 July 2004

Adam Kalsey, faced with the familiar task of talking to a software vendors' reference customers, has written a list of things you should ask. He prefaces his list with this insightful comment:

When interviewing references, people don’t often know what to ask other than non-specific questions about how they like the product and how good the vendor support is. This is certainly the information you want to get, but unless you ask specific questions, you aren’t going to get specific answers.

Kalsey recommends questions like:

I learnt this lesson in journalism, though I still struggle to put it into practice: if you want the truth, you have to ask about the detail. People who referee potential software providers, like those who referee potential employees, know things that can help you. Your problem is that they've made a vague agreement with the vendor to say nice things about them. Your opportunity lies in the fact that it's a weak agreement: no money has changed hands, and the referee hasn't actually promised to only praise the product in all its aspects.

So the referees will tell you what it does well and what it does badly, where it will delight you and where you will have to live with shortcomings. But they'll want to talk abstractly. You must drive them into specifics, make them tell stories, ask them to step through scenarios, get a picture instead of a generic thumbs-up. Kalsey's list gives you a starting-point.  

Adam Kalsey's full article

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Mystery solved: print Windows Media Player screens - Wednesday, 7 July 2004

If you use normal screen-capture software to take a snapshot of a video in Windows Media Player, it come out blank. This used to drive me nuts. Here's the seven-step solution:

  1. Open Windows Media Player
  2. Go to Tools
  3. Go to Options
  4. Go to Performance
  5. Click the "Advanced" button
  6. Un-check the "Use Overlays" tick-box
  7. Click OK

Now you're ready to print. Use a screen capture tool like MWSnap - or if you don't have one handy, Control-Print Screen on your PC takes a shot of the screen and puts it in the clipboard ready to paste.

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Celestia puts the universe in your computer - Saturday, 5 June 2004

Celestia throws away the conventional planetarium-style approach to astonomy software, in favor of 3D-accelerated virtual reality. Roam around Jupiter's moons; view your city from the International Space station; travel around Saturn with the Cassini probe. There's nothing better for teaching the kids astronomy - and even geography.

Download it from creator Chris Laurel's site, shatters.net. It runs on everything from slow old Windows machines to the latest Macs, and on Linux too. My current version is 1.3.2 pre-release 8 (to download, click here). Then check out the add-ons and all the other resources.

The pic below of the Cassini probe on its first approach to Saturn shows you a little of what you get. In the program, though, the scene is moving (in real time, slowed down or speeded up), you can change perspective instantly, and you can travel to places like the Orion Nebula, M42, which appears in the picture as a pink smudge between Saturn's ring and Cassini.

Like I said, it does geography too.

Among Celestia's finest features is the Celestia URL: a hyperlink reference that takes you to a time and place in the Celestia universe. Install Celestia and then try some of these.

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Google's weak growth story - Thursday, 13 May 2004

We live in the age of the growth story. In the technology realm, there's a presumption that things will get better, faster, bigger. That presumption is so ingrained, in fact, that it's hard to remember that things that get better may not get more valuable. Especially on the Internet.

Google takes this one step further than most by not even trying to explain why it will get more valuable. In fact, Google has engendered so much loyalty that other people are stepping in to argue that Google is building an "operating system", with the implication that this will be incredibly valuable. The idea has shades of Isaac Asimov's old Multivac, a single world-wide computer. The Google guys didn't need to write this story; their fans wrote it for them.

As Venturpreneur's Gordon Smith puts it:

The most surprising thing in this prospectus- which is full of surprises - is that the company does not articulate a growth story in the Prospectus Summary. If you are concerned about Google's future, as every investor should be, you want to know what's next. That information is simply absent. Their business model is simply stated: "We generate revenue by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising."

Google states repeatedly that it expects to keep growing. But margins (currently enormous) are declining as it grows. Each extra piece of growth is less useful than the last. Googfle is a geek toy, and all the geeks are already on board.

I admire the honesty with which Google is stating its case. Faced with a stratospheric valuation, it has decided not to try for low Earth orbit. It will keep its promises vague and its threats specific, in the sure knowledge that people will still throw money at it.

In a perfect world, the Google prospectus might say: "Management believes that Google stock is being hyped to buggery. Buy it and hold it, and you'll probably regret it. That's why we're selling it." But that's being picky. The Gooogle vendors are already a lot more honest than everyone else.

Link: Venturpreneur's long list of Google comments

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The economics of Google - Wednesday, 28 April 2004

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that today's equity markets don't understand a few key issues:

Quiggin is a professor of economics and an eloquent voice in Australian public policy debates, and his post is worth quoting in full. I hope he won't mind.

According to this report, the widely-predicted Google IPO is likely to value the equity in Google at more than $20 billion - others suggest $25 billion. I immediately wondered whether Google was really worth $25 billion.

I started on a standard financial analysis. Although, as a private company, Google doesn't have to publish annual reports, it's been estimated that Google has annual revenues of $500 million and profits of $125 million so that the return on equity is about 0.5 per cent. We can expect that to grow reasonably fast in the next few years, but the scope for expansion in Google's core business is far from limitless. Most people in the developed world are already online and most of the heavy users already use Google (Eszter might have more to say on this). Moreover,there's no strong reason to suppose that Google will be around in, say, 20 years time. I find it hard to draw a plausible earnings path that would yield a present value of $25 billion at any reasonable discount rate.

That's a problem for the investors, though. The Google example started me thinking about the more general problem of economic valuation in the Internet era. I started by looking at this piece by Simson Garfinkelhat tip - Tyler Cowen. As well as reporting potential competition from Akamai (relevant in considering Google's longevity), Garfinkel estimates that Google operates a network of 100 000 servers, but that clever design allows the use of very cheap computers as servers. Let's and suppose an average of $500 a piece. This implies that the main piece of capital equipment operated by Google is worth around $50 million1 - a hefty sum, but a tiny fraction of the estimated equity value (and presumably there's some debt in there as well) .

Next, it's of interest to look at capital-labour ratios. Google apparently has about 1000 employees, which would suggest a total labour cost of the order of $100 million per year - a little on the low side as a proportion of revenues of $500 million, but not implausible. On the other hand, the number of employees is minuscule in relation to the valuation above, which implies a capital stock of $25 million per worker. I feel sure that this kind of ratio would imply some pretty strange organizational policies.

Then there's the question of how much Google is worth in economic terms. I would think the correct answer must be lot more than the present value of its revenues. I use Google all the time, but unless text ads have a subliminal effect for which Google is being paid, I've never contributed a penny to its revenues, and quite possibly never will.

The general problem is that, in an economy dominated by public goods, like that of the Internet, there's no reason to expect any relationship between economic value and capacity to raise revenue. Things of immense social value (this blog, for example!) are given away because there's no point doing anything else. On the other hand significant profits can be made by those who can find a suitable choke point, even if they haven't actually contributed anything of value. Assuming for the moment that SCO prevails in its attempts to extract revenue from Linux users, it won't be because SCO's code was better than some free alternative but simply because it was widely distributed before anyone found out it was copyrighted.

If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.

Quiggin is a critic of several strands of the neo-classical synthesis which has dominated economics since the 1980s, but I think even he underestimates the extent to which Google economics is already taking hold.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an economist called Paul Romer started modelling a world in which technological change caused some traditional rules to stop working. He was inspired by what was happening in places like the software market, where Microsoft was moving towards dominance. His work pointed out that traditional economics worked well in a world where goods were excludable (sellers could keep their stuff from buyers) and rivalrous (if you had it, I couldn't have it) and where economies of scale and scope were weak (as you sold more stuff, you didn't get disproportionately more for them, or for other things you made).

Change those rules somehow - say, by changing the way technology works - and you change economics. And as it happens, software and information tend to be non-excludable, non-rivalrous and open to economies of scale and scope.

Economists Brad DeLong and Michael Froomkin set this out nicely in a paper called Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy, available - of course - on the Web.

Back in 1990, as a  journalist writing about Australian politics and economics, I used to walk out of my office on the second floor of Canberra's Parliament House, around the corner, and into the Parliamentary Library, where I could read this stuff to my heart's content. I loved it because it took economics beyond the debate over rules for preventing the next recession - not a bad debate, but a narrow one that was producing diminishing returns. Dozens of other economists began piling into the field (formally called "endogenous growth theory"). You could see it would soon start to affect the way people thought about public policy. And so it did. Its first effect was to make people worried that Microsoft was unstoppable, that technological change was creating a "winner-take-all" economy.

But the point that Quiggin is making is that you can equally create "winner-take-none" scenarios, where useful work creates less private profit than traditional economics would suggest it should.

 

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Content Management is management - Wednesday, 21 April 2004

Hotwired founder Jeffrey Veen notes how the great management IT cop-out manifests itself in content management systems (CMSs): too many managers decide that if since there's something called content management software, they can just use that to automate the management of a public Web site.

Big mistake. Content management software enables the managing of content, the same way word processing software enables the processing of words. When you're writing words, your word management software matters far less than the decisions on what you write. So too in content management. What matters is what content goes where, how the user gets to it, what they can see, what they can do.

Jeffrey Veen's full article is here. Highlights:

Companies swallow the enterprise software pitch of decentralization. They think that by distributing content creation they’re empowering business units to manage their own areas of the site ...

I’ve spoken to a number of Web teams that have used a CMS with varying levels of success. One problem I heard repeatedly was that the project worked fine, but nobody used the software once it was available ...

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? ...

Even the most thoughtful projects may be misguided. Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about these projects, "Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors" ...

Publishing is a skill set that most organizations have never needed, but one that’s integral to producing a quality site.

Bingo. Key processes need managers - owners, people with an intellectual and emotional investment in the process and the outcome it achieves. They work with their own staff and the rest of the organisation to achieve that outcome. They have a mission. Good ones have a vision. When you publish content, the person who manages that process is an editor, or a content manager, or a site producer.

(Veen likes the traditional "editor", which probably works if your site is Slate or Crikey. In many sites, "content manager" or "site producer" may better convey the role these managers play in crafting the user experience through not just through text but through navigation, imagery, interactive server software and everything else you can do on a Web site. Such a manager is to some extent an IT project manager, which is a long way from what a magazine editor does.)

Veen refers sceptically to "the enterprise software pitch of decentralization". As Google tells us, content management system vendors love telling prospects they can eliminate the "webmaster bottleneck". But this 60s-nostalgic flowers-blooming verbiage wilts under the glare of organisational reality. Companies, government bodies and non-profits are all established because they can do more as one disciplined organisation than they can as a collection of individuals. It is a necessary corollary of this that bottlenecks are often a good thing.

Consider a modern-day newspaper. Here the original content producers (journalists) actually are publishing-industry professionals. Yet those professionals are matched by a back-office team of editors and producers who impose discipline and enforce standards and make judgments. They're a bona-fide bottleneck. They're not a technical bottleneck; this has nothing to do with technology, because almost all newspapers have effective publishing technology. The back-office newspaper managers are there, bottlenecking away and getting paid by the profit-loving, paycheque-hating newspaper company each month, because publishing requires discipline and standards and judgment. As Web publishing expert Gerry McGovern puts it, "quality publishing is about saying no".

Because content decisions are hard work, asking individual departments to assume the full burden of this task on a Web site may have two not-so-obvious effects.

First, it may not save time. Someone still has to make decisions and exercise judgment. Individual departments probably know more about the subject, but less about making publishing decisions. So it's not actually obvious that you save time by moving the decisions from one point to another. In an organisation which doesn't hold people accountable for results, you may hide some costs. But you won't get rid of costs.

Second, a smart specialist who doesn't know much about making publishing decisions will probably back away from making them at all. If and when this happens, you'll find you're producing less content than you did when there was a bottleneck.

Mind you, that may be the right result. If the organisation can't justify giving the site an owner, it probably isn't very important. Strip it back to its bare essentials, update whatever needs to be update using simple tools and data feeds, and leave the rest alone. If you don't want to be a publisher, don't be. No existing law requires corporations to create or maintain thousand-page Web sites. To quote McGovern again, "many Web sites are still publishing content that is not core to their business.".

But have the guts to make a decision. Don't decide to be a publisher, and then pretend that software will make it all happen right. Old-fashioned management will and management discipline will make it happen right.

 

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This item first filed on Thursday, May 16, 2002 and last modified on Friday, April 16, 2004