Here's how the browser on my desktop works.

I click on a link and immediately start reading the text on the screen.

When I click on a link in Safari, before I can read anything, I have to futz with the display resolution of the browser to make the text visible. This may not sound like a problem, but what a distraction, when following a link, before getting the idea, your mind has to take a detour into managing the device. In reading as in the movies, suspension of disbelief is broken when your mind has to exit the space of ideas and manage the projection device. It's wrong for the device to ask you this, even as a setup issue it shoudl work out of the box, but it's unacceptable that it make the user configure the browser every time it displays a new page. Today's iPhone isn't a reading device.

I thought I could overcome this by creating a special version of a site just for the iPhone that crammed all the text into a narrow column, thinking that the browser wouldn't see any need to make the text small because it would have all the necessary horizontal screen real estate to display every character at a fully visible resolution.

Nope. It still displays the text in an unreadably small font.

Here's a photo of the iPhone displaying a test page.

It's behaving like no web browser I've ever seen, and it's behaving badly. It's breaking an implicit agreement between all platforms that co-exist on the web. We create sites that assume nothing about the device they're being rendered on, and browsers should take care to make our text readable for users of their device. The iPhone web browser doesn't keep that promise.

An anonymous reader suggests we stop over to ZDNet for a case where Google may be stepping on the wrong side of that famous Don't Be Evil line. A Google staffer is offering to help the healthcare industry contain the damage that Michael Moore's film is about to do. (Here is the original Google Health Advertisement blog post by Lauren Turner; in case it disappears, it is reproduced in full in the ZDNet post.) Quoting from the Google post: "Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through 'Get the Facts' or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them? We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company's assets while helping users find the information they seek."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cagrin writes "On Tuesday the UN's World Heritage Committee added the Galapagos Islands to the list of sites in danger from environmental threats or overuse. From the article: 'The Galapagos Islands, an Ecuadorian territory situated in the Pacific Ocean some 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from South America, helped shape Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and in 1978 was the first site placed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.' Here is some background from Sea Shepherd on the insults facing the Galapagos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MBCook tips an article at Gizmodo that begins with a reader's experiences trying to buy an iPhone yesterday at an AT&T store and an Apple store. Many, but not all, of the comments on the post echo this reader's experience: Apple good, AT&T bad. "Day one revealed what all Apple aficionados fear. That AT&T, through the depths of its incompetence, could derail the iPhone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tom_evil notes a story up on Infoshop.org about a parody site and the lack of a sense of humor in a large multinational. "One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement of ExxonMobil's plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose source they will not identify. 'Since parody is protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody,' said Yes Man Mike Bonanno. Exxon's policies do already contribute to 150,000 climate-change related deaths each year,' added Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum. 'So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mitechsi writes "Dell has struck a deal with Emerson to sell advanced liquid cooling systems and services to data center owners. One type of supplemental cooling technology is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30%–50% compared to other types of cooling systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: Mike sez, "Prince is giving away a free CD in a national British newspaper, The Mail. The music retail industry executives are viewing this as an attack and are threatening to 'retaliate'. 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday,' said Entertainment Retailers Association spokesman Paul Quirk. Mr Quirk also said it would be 'an insult' to record stores. Obviously the music industry views anything that doesn't result in a sale to be subversive or unfair. I say it's Prince's music and he can bloody well give it away if he wants to." Link (Thanks Mike!)

Marc Smith writes "'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. According to a recent paper my co-authors and I have published in the Journal of Social Structure, less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. The paper Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups contains social network visualizations of the ties created when authors reply to one another. These images highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: The Christian Science Monitor has a long article on Chinese humanitarian efforts in Africa, including joining the UN Blue Helmets, creating debt relief and financial aid, and other efforts. The Monitor devotes some space to pondering the Chinese motives in Africa: colonialist? Charitable? Strategic?

China is such an enigma, capable engendering such massive change. Watching it work around the world is mind-expanding.

"The Chinese interest in Africa ... their coming into our markets is the best thing that could have happened to us," says small-business contractor Amare Kifle, during a recent meeting with a Chinese investor in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. "We are tired of the condescending American style. True, the American government and American companies have done and do a lot here, but I always feel like they think they are doing us a favor ... telling us how to do things and punishing us when we do it our own way.

"These Chinese are different," he says. "They are about the bottom line and allow us to sort out our side of the business as we see fit. I want to have a business partner and do business. I don't want to have a philosophical debate about Africa's future."...

"China is the most self-conscious rising power in history and is desperate to be seen as a benign force as well as to learn from the mistakes of the existing major powers and previous rising powers," says Andrew Small, a Brussels-based China expert at the German Marshall Fund, a public policy think tank. "It sees its modern national story as anticolonial – about surpassing the "century of humiliation" at the hands of the colonial powers – and still thinks of itself, in many ways, as a part of the developing world."

Link (via Thoof)

Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prostoalex writes "Dr. Dobb's Journal runs an article discussing the tools necessary for fuzzing (testing a system by generating random input in order to cause program failure or crash). Quoting: 'You are fuzzing a Web server's capability to handle malformed POST data and discover a potentially exploitable memory corruption condition when the 50th test case you sent that crashes the service. You restart the Web daemon and retransmit your last malicious payload, but nothing happens... The issue must rely on some combination of inputs. Perhaps an earlier packet put the Web server in a state that later allowed the 50th test to trigger the memory corruption. We can't tell without further analysis and we can't narrow the possibilities down without the capability of replaying the entire test set in a methodical fashion.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: Google's "Health Advertising Team" is trying to sell the health industry on buying ads to be shown opposite searches for "Sicko." The idea is to counter Michael Moore's amazing, enraging, must-see indictment of the health industry's grip on American society by running ads over search results for Sicko.

Another approach would be to reform the practices that Moore criticises in the film -- for example, refusing to pay for an insured individual's surgery because she didn't mention a 15-year-old yeast infection on her application; denying MRIs to patients with brain tumors; and paying medical directors bonuses for denying claims.

But why make your customers healthier -- at shareholder expense -- when you can just give money to Google to FUD and astroturf the issue?

The healthcare industry is no stranger to negative press. A drug may be a blockbuster one day and tolled as a public health concern the next. News reporters may focus on Pharma’s annual sales and its executives’ salaries while failing to share R&D costs. Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

I watched Sicko for the second time last night (I downloaded it a couple weeks ago via The Pirate Bay, with Moore's blessing, then went to see it in a cinema with a crowd), and it was incredibly moving. This is the kind of movie that can change the world -- no matter how much money the HMOs throw at FUD. Link (via Google Blogoscoped)

See also: Moore's "Sicko" leaks onto P2P

I just spent a couple of hours playing with my new iPhone.

I remember that the first few times I try a new cell phone, I wish it would just work the way my old one did. So I'm trying to factor that in, and imagine what it will be like to use it later, but it's not easy.

I was able to register with AT&T, choose a service plan, get a phone number, and make a phone call. I was able to use Google Maps to locate my house, and while YouTube was slow, and so was the email app, even though both were running over my fast wifi as opposed to the relatively slow AT&T network, they were all usable and useful, and in some cases represent features the Blackberry doesn't have, and would be nice to have. But there are optimizations I hope Apple makes soon.

This is my fifth iPod, and it works differently from the last one. I like to use my iPod with manual synchronization, but that doesn't appear to be possible with this one. I'm not happy about that! I have my iPod act down, and I want to use this relatively small one (it has just a 4GB capacity) the same way I use my larger, 60GB video iPod. It doesn't seem possible.

Look, all the other people reviewing the iPhone are gushing. I just don't have that in me, at least at the beginning.

And there's a major usability problem with the Safari web browser, it's hard to believe that Apple didn't see and fix this problem before shipping, because it seems to make all websites unusable in the default configuration, with the default font choice, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change their choice of font. Is it possible they made this choice so that the TV commercial would look good, and forgot to test the browser the way real people will use it? I must be missing something??

(After watching the commercial I have an idea how this might work. There seems to be a tapping interface that makes the text larger. Hmmm.)

Given that all developers are going to be using Safari as their development platform, this problem seems vexing.

I took a couple of screen shots to illustrate.

Here's my Blackberry, in its default configuration, being used to read this weblog. You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

And here's the same site on my iPhone. My eyesight isn't great, but I can't imagine even someone with perfect eyesight being able to read this.

Has anyone figured out how to change the default font size in Safari?

Postscript about "initial" reviews.

Dan Gillmor: "This feels like a beta product."

Dan Shearer writes "Three days before GPLv3 was released, Eben Moglen delivered the annual lecture of The Scottish Society of Computers and Law in Edinburgh, Scotland giving his thoughts on 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3.' The text transcription, audio and 384kbit video are up at archive.org. Eben looks back at the 'legislative action' achieved by the GPLv3 community over the last 18 months, and also from the 22nd century. A riveting presentation for all present."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: Kyle Baker's reworking of the stretched-out DC hero Plastic Man combines the best of MAD Magazine, Tex Avery cartoons, political satire, and balls-out Animaniacs-style mayhem.

Kyle Baker is one of the most versatile comics creators working in the business today. My gateway to his work was his side-splitting Why I Hate Saturn, a decidedly adult graphic novel. Since then, I've sampled his histories of slave revolts, family comedy collections, and many other works with wildly varying artistic and narrative styles.

In the Plastic Man books, Baker invokes the maddest, wildest spit-takes of comic and cartoon history, with silly plotlines that had me spraying water out my nose -- Plastic Man and his FBI girlfriend borrow Superman's time-machine to take Abraham Lincoln (who turns out to be John Wilkes Booth in clever disguise) back in time, end up bringing a dinosaur to civil-war America, where the maddened saurian squishes a Klan rally -- and that's just the set-up.

The artwork owes a debt to MAD's Sergio Argones and Will Eisner, by way of the Incredibles' stylish palette, dipping into Tex Avery for the spit-takes. Every layout has hidden gags for the attentive reader. This is what underwear pervert funnybooks should be like: self-reflective, over-the-top, and political. Vol 1: Plastic Man: On the Lam, Vol 2: Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits

See also:
Graphic novel history of Nat Turner's slave revolt
Kyle "Why I Hate Saturn" Baker's new collection

One of the things I've learned from being a developer is to keep a notebook with my impressions, the things that confused me, the questions I have. That was before I had a weblog. Nowadays that notebook is public, which helps me share my process with others.

This has a lot of advantages, for one, it gets me answers more quickly. It also teaches other developers how users think, think of this as a small contribution to improved usability in all products. It also provides feedback to the developers of the products I'm using, if they're listening (I find out later they often are).

So with that caveat -- I'm still not able to synch the iPod in the iPhone the way I want to do it. I turned off the automatic synching on the front page of the iPhone panel in iTunes, now all the songs appear, but they're grayed out. I want to remove them all. I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it.

Another problem, I tried connecting a set of Bose headphones into the headphone jack on the iPhone. No music comes out the other end. Huh?

PS: I was able to reclaim all the space used by the deleted songs by choosing to Synch only selected playlists, and selecting none of them. When I hit the Apply button magically my used space went from 3.8GB to 0.2GB. I have no idea why this worked, but it did.

gurps_npc writes "The explosion of portable electronic devices, can really weigh you down. Carrying a pager, phone, iPod, camera, and game is quite a lot. Worse, it gives you many more such things to misplace or get stolen. This CNN story discusses some of the retrieval services that help you keep what belongs to you. I particularly like the first one, about a new Singapore-based software that when you download it to your phone, messages everyone in your phone's database whenever a new chip with a new phone number is installed in the phone. This makes it very hard for someone to steal your phone as all your friends get their new phone number."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.