Why web design isn't easy: Case study- Campbell Soup product recall

While on the way in to work this morning, I caught the tail end of a radio news item about a product recall of Campbell's Chunky soup.  Since I frequently wind up cooking for "just me," my pantry is stocked with enough Campbell's soup to outfit a small convenience store.  And though the report didn't give any details, being the internet-savvy geek that I am, I knew it'd be a cinch to find complete details on the Campbell's website.  Silly me!

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Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 00:00:41 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Be careful what you ask for

Beldar considers the Michael Richard execution, and explains why precision in communication is vital:
Was Michael Richard executed because Presiding Judge Sharon Keller ordered the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' doors closed at 5:00 p.m., before his emergency stay of execution application could be filed?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 18:45:11 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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"...a perfect storm of institutional contortions..."

So says Lileks. About this:

The University of North Dakota's affirmative action officer says campus departments and programs that oppose the school's Fighting Sioux nickname and logo might create an "unwelcome" environment for nickname-supporting students.

Sally Page says in a Sept. 24 memo that such an environment might expose the university to a lawsuit...

Page's memo references a newspaper advertisement that lists 27 UND programs, departments and governing bodies that have stated their opposition to the nickname and logo...
 -- AP Story posted at WCCO.com [highlighting mine - o.g.]

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:45:22 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Fearless Leader! Our plan has ALMOST succeeded!

Playback Problems Reported on 'Silver Surfer,' 'Day After Tomorrow' Blu-ray Discs

Only the RIAA could match this stupidity • (Score:5, Funny)
by nrich239 (790194) on Thursday October 04, @03:48PM (#20856791)

From the head of the MPAA: "I KNOW! Lets put so much protection on the new discs that people can't even watch the movie! That'll stop those pesky pirates..."

Re: Only the RIAA could match this stupidity • (Score:5, Insightful)
by Starteck81 (917280) on Thursday October 04, @03:58PM (#20857019)

MPAA Underling: Sir, unfortunately the pirates cracked the 'no play protection' within 24 hrs and are now the only ones that can watch the movies.

Re: Re: Only the RIAA could match this stupidity • (Score:4, Funny)
by cstdenis (1118589) on Thursday October 04, @04:11PM (#20857229)

Excellent. Now we know anyone watching one of our movies is a pirate and can sue them more easily.

Re: Re: Only the RIAA could match this stupidity • (Score:2)
by Minwee (522556) on Thursday October 04, @06:49PM (#20859739)

Excellent. Now only we are protected from the horror that is Catwoman. Unleash the sequels!

Re: Only the RIAA could match this stupidity • (Score:2)
by moderatorrater (1095745) on Thursday October 04, @04:38PM (#20857763)

At that point they don't even have to put the movie on the disc.

Sometimes the gang at Slashdot says it all...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 23:41:51 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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American Academy of Pediatrics - turning your kids into spies

Michael Graham:

“The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it’s too much,” my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. “She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house.”

“What!” I yelped. “Who told her about my stasher, I mean, ‘It’s an outrage!’”

I turned to my wife. “You took her to the doctor. Why didn’t you say something?”

She couldn’t, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife’s knowledge or consent.

“The doctor wanted to know how we get along,” my daughter continued. Then she paused. “And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable.”

Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.

We’re not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.

We used to be proud parents. Now, thanks to the AAP, we’re “persons of interest.”

The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement^[1]” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get. [Highlighting mine - O.G.]

Communist playbook 101: Use the kids to spy on their parents.
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Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 20:06:04 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Federal government accidentally deletes California (.gov)

Who needs terrorists?

A hacker's diversion of traffic from a California county government Web site to a porn purveyor spiraled into IT chaos yesterday after a countermeasure applied from Washington essentially "deleted the ca.gov domain."

"...we opened our emergency operations center. Unfortunately that was about 3 in the afternoon and folks back East were already going home, so it took us some time to get hold of the right people in the General Services Administration to get this address reinstated." -- Network World Buzzblog

Later:  Not a good day for federal IT:  DHS Gets Spammed With Its Own Reports

Via: Slashdot

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:39:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Flight 93 Memorial and Islamic Symbolism

In his introduction to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R Tolkien warned readers against confusing "allegory" with "applicablilty"-- one is the intent of the author, the other in the eye of the beholder. One might also say "hindsight reveals symbolism," even where there was no symbolic intent originally.^[1]

But since September 2005, when bloggers first raised the issue of Paul Murdoch's "Crescent of Embrace" design for Pennsylvania's Flight 93 Memorial resembling the Islamic crescent moon symbol, Alec Rawls and others have accumulated enough additional evidence of Islamic symbolism in the design to tell me that it goes beyond coincidence. Despite objections from the public, it appears that construction will proceed.

Rawls has written a book collecting his findings (to be published early next year), which he has made available for download in the interim . I've linked several other sources below, and I urge you to check them out.

In the face of the controversy, the western-Pennsylvania press seems to be in denial. In fact, they're backpedalling:

Professor Daniel Griffith, who is serving as a consultant to the Memorial Project, told the Post Gazette that: "anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round."… He made similar statements to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and the Johnstown Tribune Democrat...
[But when the] Tribune Review... commissioned Professor Griffith to analyze the blogosphere's Mecca-orientation claims..., the first thing Griffith [did was] calculate the direction to Mecca:

I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°. [Extract from Griffith's Tribune-Review report. The complete report is available here. - O.G.]

"Azimuth" is the technical term for "direction," measured in degrees clockwise from north. Now Griffith is denying that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca, and the Tribune Review refuses to tell its readers that Griffith is contradicting the report that he wrote for them. -- John Stevenson, "Pennsylvania Newspapers Pretend There Is No Direction to Mecca" [Links in original, highlighting mine - O.G.]

Check out the entire NewsBusters post. Read Rawls's analysis. Seems like there's sufficient smoke to justify yelling "fire!" to me.

Elsewhere:

• Zombietime's images (produced September, 2005) of the memorial with superimposed crescent.
• Alec Rawls's (detailed) analysis of the "redesigned" memorial
• Error Theory weblog (complete list/links to memorial posts in the right sidebar)
  
• Cao's Blog: Filght 93 Memorial category (warning: lots of annoying Snap.com popups)

Via: Right On the Right
-------
Footnote:
^[1] For a likely example of "interpretation in retrospect," review the recent flap over the Navy's "swastika-shaped barracks" in California. (One reader comments here: "It's a good thing the Nazis didn't use a rectangle as their symbol or we would have to tear down most of the buildings in the US...")

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 16:53:37 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Okay, I see why

...Pixy changed the page width from 800px to 750px.  (To allow room for the scrollbar, if anyone else wants to know.)

Now I need to decide whether to set things back to 750px and check the past 200-some posts for layout problems, set things back to 750px and say the heck with the old posts, or leave it at 800px and have a non-standard layout that also does hinkey things to the editor when I'm using an 800x600 screen.

Decisions, decisions... 
-----
Previously:  Site Update

Posted by: Old Grouch in Meta at 23:03:12 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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The censorship's in the policy

Via C.G. Hill: Doc Searls dug through AT&T's 10,000+ word "legal policy," and found something interesting:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries... [Bolding is Doc's - O.G.]

In a comment to Doc's post, Seth Finkelstein says, "It's common boilerplate." In his own post, Seth continues:

[A Google search on "damage the name or reputation"-AT&T] ...shows that a TOS clause about "damage the name or reputation" is a common boilerplate, and has nothing to with AT&T trying to supposedly CENSOR CRITICISM. It took me around a minute to find that.

I used to think this sort wolf-crying needed to be affirmatively opposed because it reflected badly on net activism. Now I've come to believe I'm just not cut out for politics.

I can't buy Seth's "common boilerplate"=="nothing to see here" argument. If the clause is meaningless, it wouldn't be there. If it's not designed to punish critics, then what is its intent? And if AT&T doesn't want to be able to exercise it, then including it in the policy is stupid, because it risks just this kind of a flap as soon as somebody notices it.

Unenforcable? Perhaps, but for the customer that translates to, "Sue us if you don't like it." Providers have been known to shut down service, claiming TOS reasons.

As to whether AT&T would pull the plug on someone who posted something that AT&T didn't like, well, I guess we'll just have to trust them.

UPDATE 071002 18:21: Richard Bennett adds to the discussion:

The way I read this is that you can’t damage a man’s or a company’s reputation simply by criticizing them; if you’re truthful, the issue is the deeds you’re describing, not the description. If you’re not truthful you still have to cause some damage to the target’s reputation to be afoul of the law. So I can talk smack about AT&T all day long so long as I don’t invent facts about them, and I can even make up facts about them as long as nobody pays any attention to me. And so can you.

AT&T is simply invoking slander and defamation law to its benefit and short-cutting the legal process. If this provision were removed from their AUP, they would still be protected by the law, but they would have to sue to assert the right. Is that what we want? [Highlighting mine -O.G.]

Umm... yes?

UPDATE 071002 19:34: from Ars Technica:

...an AT&T spokesperson tells Ars Technica that the company has no interest in engaging in censorship but stopped short of saying that AT&T could not in fact exercise its ability to do so.

UPDATE 071011 16:33: Fixed.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:41:29 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Site update

Okay, in a few minutes I'll push the button to update to Minx's 1.1 version. According to the boss, the layout shouldn't change any. We'll see...

Minutes later: Well, everything certainly got blue!. I'll try to restore things as the day goes on...

UPDATE 071001 17:47:  Okay, page wants to be 800px, not 750px, sidebar stays at 250px, restore sidebar graphics, titles now live in applets, top banner has to be 790px (which means modify with GIMP) to keep links from running off the end, reset link colors, reset post title color & size, restore post category links, got it...

Posted by: Old Grouch in Administrivia at 14:47:44 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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