anil dash on the Windows Add Font dialog. Here’s an excerpt from his note to Microsoft…

“Please understand: You have about fifty five thousand employees. That’s bigger than the town I grew up in. That’s enough to fill a stadium. I know everybody still wants to see the company as being just Bill Gates, even though he’s not even CEO any more, but you’ve got piles and piles of humans lying around. What incredibly massive pile of bureacratic idiocy has to be weighing you all down that you can’t get one little box changed in a decade? You’ve amassed more than forty billion dollars since the last time you took a look at this dialog box.”

I’d like to add to that the Date and Time dialog. As Steve pointed out the other day, the dialog for setting the date and time on Windows contains what is quite possibly the ugliest analog clock ever rendered by a computer.

See?

Moving my weblog to movable type broke a number of links which probably should still be available. More mod_rewrite rules and the important stuff is back. Basically, between Alias and RewriteRule, the virtual and physical file layouts can be almost completely different from each other. It’s cool. Confusing, but cool.

I just read an email (spam), that said “… plus all the rich functionality and fluid interfaces users prefer.” It occurred to me that I honestly don’t know if this is an assumption or a fact. What about people who grew up on the net using a web browser? My daughter, for example, absolutely refuses to use Outlook, Eudora or any other GUI mail client. She won’t use anything but Mozilla to read her mail via one webmail service or another. I’m sure it depends upon the application we’re talking about. Case in point, I’m writing this using Zempt, which is a desktop app for posting to Movable Type. I use it because I think editing text in a browser is a nightmare and I only compose things like email or blog posts that way when there’s nothing else available. I’ll bet there are many cases, though, where people just say “Screw it, I’ll just open my browser and do it that way.”

Anyone have pointers to research or discussions on this topic?

Mailinator is a new service which allows anyone to create throwaway email addresses when they don’t want to give a real address, yet need the given address to work. Type in any address, like and you can check any mail sent there by simply entering “foobar” and clicking “Go”. No signup, passwords or other nonsense required. Their FAQ is fun to read and the tagline is “It’s like flicking a booger at spam.”

Joel on Software says it’s “More proof that great UI design is done by taking away, not adding things.”

After moving things around here recently I seem to have broken one of the legacy RSS feeds at /news.rss. The real feed is at /index.rdf, so a little mod_rewrite magic was required to fix it…

RewriteRule ^news.rss index.rdf

Sorry ‘bout that.

adaptive path: the nine pillars of successful web teams

Forgot about posting this one a while back, but it’s worth mentioning now. Jesse James Garrett diagrams nine competencies which make up successful web teams.

Firebird 0.6.1 rsn

This isn’t going to be Firebird 0.7 since we haven’t met our goals for features and fixes but we think it’s important to get the autocomplete crash fix (and a few other fixes) into the hands of all the people currently using 0.6.

I’ll take the autocomplete crash fixed now, if you don’t mind.

If you’re like me (and you are), you loathe the latest 2 or 3 releases of Windows Media Player. Make it all better with Media Player Classic. It’s about a 700k download and a single executable. No installer, no bloat, just plays movies. It also supports Quicktime, AVI, Realmedia, DVD and anything else you might need. Really nice change of pace for a media player.

I was evangelizing Wikis today at the office - badly. Mary mentioned later that she heard about Wikis on NPR earlier in the day and was very curious about them. Seems NPR was doing a better job than I was. I’ll try to find a link to the story.

Tim Bray, once again worth the read…

“People, on average and in the long term, arenÂ’t stupid and arenÂ’t patient and arenÂ’t cowards. When thereÂ’s an obviously better way to get the job done, they go out and get it, and management canÂ’t stop them, and Forrester and Gartner canÂ’t stop them, and Accenture and EDS canÂ’t stop them, and not even Microsoft can stop them.”

He’s talking about many things, but the relevant example is in the browser space…

“Explorer, writes Peter-Paul Koch at evolt.org, cannot support today’s technology, or even yesterday’s, because of the limitations of its code engine. So it moves towards the position Netscape 4 once held: the most serious liability in Web design and a prospective loser.”

He goes on to advocate a grass-roots effort to push Mozilla in front of enough of the right people. Count me in.