Flyover Blues

An Indianapolis acquisition.

2012-01-31T00:00:00-06:00

I spent last weekend in Indianapolis avoiding the Super Bowl. On Sunday morning I headed back to Chicago, having gorged myself on blueberry waffles with peach butter at Maxine's Chicken & Waffles, and carrying a new knife:

It cost $5 at Reclaimed so I really had no choice but to buy it. I didn’t know what “Camillus” meant:

Apparently the Camillus Cutlery Company (of Camillus, NY) was one of the oldest knife manufacturers in the US. In 2006 the workers (represented by the United Steelworkers) went on strike after the company cut working hours and pay. The strike turned into a lockout; eventually the plant was shut down in early 2007, a few months after the workers approved a contract and went back to work. The factory is being turned into a medical center and condos. The Camillus name lives on as a zombie brand used to sell imported knives.

You can get a sense of the history of Camillus in this official company history from the Wayback Machine.

It seems a lot of people collect these. There are websites and forums devoted to the company, full of much more exciting examples than my simple scout knife. But I like it—it reminds me of my mother’s pocket knife that she’s had since she was a child growing up on a farm in upstate New York.

Industrial design of the MacBook Air and the Thinkpad x120e.

2011-09-05T00:00:00-05:00

Somehow I find myself recently the owner of both a Thinkpad x120e and a MacBook Air. Since to me these two machines represent near-opposite approaches to the same problem, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare them. Specifically—because it is what interests me—I will be focusing on issues of industrial design, build quality, and human factors rather than performance. (On performance: the Macbook is very much faster, but then it cost more than twice as much. I ordered the x120e with less RAM and and a traditional hard drive; an SSD is an option, and its RAM can be configured to match that of the MacBook, which would give us a fairer comparison.)

It is initially clear that the MacBook Air was designed to be a beautiful machine, and the Thinkpad (although not without a certain charm) was designed with other priorities in mind. Even the underside of the MacBook is “designed,” with thoughtful typesetting of the regulatory information, highly-polished screw heads, and sleek rubber dome feet:

The underside of the Thinkpad is tidy but unexciting:

The MacBook is—as you will no doubt have tired of hearing by now—very, very thin:

The ThinkPad is not:

But arguably the ThinkPad’s form factor is superior. Thinness has a high gee-whiz factor but does not seem to make the MacBook more portable. On the contrary, the MacBook is substantially longer in its longest dimension than the Thinkpad—11.6” vs 11.1”. It doesn’t sound like much but it really makes a difference in the kinds of kinds of spaces in which you can comfortably fit these computers. The Thinkpad nearly fits within the footprint of a standard 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper while the MacBook doesn’t. To my mind, in an ultraportable, you get the most additional versatility out of minimizing the size of the device along its longest dimension; Apple chose to focus on minimizing the shortest dimension, the least important, more as a show of engineering and design prowess than in service of any real user needs. This is all the more baffling since both laptops have a display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

The MacBook’s aluminum body has a finish reminiscent of metal-flake automobile paint:

This is not especially to my taste (nor, to be honest, is the High 80s silver-and-black-and-polished-glass color scheme in general). This latest iteration of the Apple aesthetic makes me think it was designed to fit in at the clubs on Rush Street. I almost expect to see Patrick Nagel prints in the ads. The praise that Apple’s aesthetic decisions customarily receive is more reflective of the universally grim state of design among its competitors than of real excellence here. The striking thing about those comparisons between Apple’s (then-)current products and Braun’s products of the 1960s that were going around a couple years ago (e.g. Gizmodo's and this one which was linked from Daring Fireball) isn’t how similar some of the designs are—it’s how chintzy the Apple products look when compared to the real thing.

But the body of the Thinkpad is no better. It’s simple flat black plastic. It is not very good or very interesting plastic. If I were going to change one thing about this machine, I’d add the rubberized coating that IBM and Lenovo have long used on most of the Thinkpad line, and which is still used on the other, more expensive, machines in the X-series line. It is immensely more attractive than this plain black plastic and it also makes the machine much easier to grip.

Let’s talk about the keyboards. The Mac’s:

And the Thinkpad’s:

There’s no contest here. The MacBook’s keyboard is simply very bad. The keys feel like they are made of styrofoam. They rattle around. The key travel is brutally short. The keys do not move in a straight path when depressed—they lurch from side to side like it’s last call at a 4:00 am bar, probably because of the too-short key travel combined with the use of inferior keyswitches. The Thinkpad’s keyboard is very good, as Thinkpad keyboards tend to be. They’ve moved to a chiclet-style keyboard on the x120e (albeit with curved keycaps rather than the flat ones more commonly found on chicley keyboards) but they’ve retained the deep key travel and solid switches; in fact I prefer the x120e keyboard to even the old and beloved Thinkpad keyboards. Unlike most of my criticisms of the MacBook, this one is not a matter of taste or different design goals; it’s simply that Apple has used a cheap, shoddy, worse keyboard. Lenovo spent money making the keyboard work better and Apple spent money making it light up in the dark.

Both machines have pleasantly substantial hinge mechanisms:

The Mac’s glass trackpad has gotten a lot of praise, and there are some things to really like about it. The multitouch scrolling is delicious, and while I don’t find myself using pinch-to-zoom very much, it’s a nice feature. Unfortunately, the design of the trackpad makes it deeply frustrating to click.

Although Apple advertising says “Press anywhere to click,” the trackpad is actually hinged along the top edge, so it takes the least force to click at the bottom edge and progressively more force as you move toward the top. I personally can’t click at all nearer than about half an inch from the top edge. It’s really only the bottom half of the trackpad that is as easy to click as a typical trackpad or mouse button on a non-Apple machine. This is deeply frustrating both because the top edge of the trackpad is where I naturally find myself trying to click (probably because it is the only part that is easy to reach without moving your hands entirely off the home row) and because there are absolutely no affordances to tell you where you can click and where you can’t:

It’s baffling to me that Apple would make this decision. If it’s not possible to make a trackpad that can truly be clicked anywhere, why not put the hinge along the bottom edge? This problem can be mitigated somewhat by enabling tap-to-click in the computer’s settings (it is off by default), which causes the trackpad to register taps as clicks like an iPhone’s display does—but, inexplicably (and unlike the iPhone), even with tap-to-click enabled it is impossible to drag items without physically clicking the trackpad.

The Thinkpad, as one would expect, possesses a trackpoint, that god among pointing devices. Unfortunately its designers had a failure of nerve and shoehorned in an ugly, crowded trackpad complete with a second set of buttons:

It’s much too close to the keyboard and too easy to accidentally brush with your thumbs to be usable, and is best disabled. (It’s also, as you can tell from the photograph, a dust trap.) The smallest X-series laptops have traditionally shipped by default with only a trackpoint, not a trackpad; it’s too bad that Lenovo changed that here. There is no reason to cater to people who do not prefer the trackpoint since they are so clearly mistaken.

You can probably tell that I prefer the Thinkpad. Its screen is disastrously inferior to the MacBook’s lovely IPS panel (although it gets points for its matte finish), its body is constructed cheaply of cheap materials, its edges and underside are cluttered—but it is still the more humane design in a hundred little details. But the MacBook feels like it is from the future—which is certainly not a small thing at all.

WebKit Bug 29055.

2011-09-02T00:00:00-05:00

After this last redesign I spent days tearing my hair out over one nasty little alignment issue I couldn’t figure out. In the masthead, this markup:

    <p>
      <i>by</i> Eli Naeher
      <br>
      (<a href="http://portfolio.flyoverblues.com">
        hire me
      </a>)
      <br>
      (<a href="mailto:eli@flyoverblues.com">
        send me mail
      </a>)
      <br>
      (<a href="http://codeanddata.com/pgp.txt">
        encrypt it
      </a>)
    </p>

looked like this in Chrome:

As you can see, the last line is slightly to the right (or, more accurately, all lines but the last are slightly to the left of the rightmost edge of the containing paragraph).

It turns out that this is WebKit bug 29055 (though the bug describes an issue where text-align: center rather than text-align: right, the problematic behavior is the same). It seems to manifest only when a series of lines are interrupted with <br> elements—if the text is allowed to wrap naturally it renders correctly.

Of course, you can easily work around this bug by adding a trailing <br>. Nonetheless it worries me that the ticket was opened in 2009 and has apparently seen no activity whatsoever since.

Stupid font tricks.

2011-09-01T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve changed fonts again. There was a lot of drama with resource forks. It’s been that kind of a day.

Font disappointment.

2011-08-30T00:00:00-05:00

Wilson Miner wrote:

Some people might suggest that it’s hardly worth redesigning a site I’ve only posted to twice in the last year. I say those people are missing the point.

Quite so!

Having just redesigned this site, I am going to complain about font companies. ("Foundry" is just pretentious designer bullshit when you aren't making them out of lead anymore.) In the previous incarnation of this page I used as the title face Century Gothic, a typeface from 1991 that is owned by Monotype Imaging. I wrote a little plugin for Habari that generated PNGs of my post titles with ImageMagick using the font of my choosing. For a while it even generated inline PNGs with data: URIs.

I'm not using Habari any more. It was too heavyweight and too fragile and now I am running Jekyll and writing this in Emacs and life is good. But in the course of switching software I decided that I should really use @font-face this time around, since it seems that it works now, and not my hacky little PNG solution.

Unfortunately it appears that Monotype is not going to sell me a license to use Century Gothic with @font-face for any amount of money, although it will happily sell me a subscription to this font (which it may revoke at any time) for a monthly fee. So now I am using Beteckna, which is not really a very acceptable substitute at all.

However, this is the real reason I am complaining today is that I bought a couple new notebooks from my favorite notebook company only to find that they have replaced this lovely cover with the style name in some kind of Optima type thing:

with this

which is not terrible but is not nearly as nice. And I choose to believe that it is because some multi-million-dollar company masquerading as a "foundry" wants to charge a fucking monthly fee for people to use the fonts they've been milking for decades.

48th ward blogging.

2010-05-08T00:00:00-05:00

I was pleased to see that my alderman Mary Ann Smith has set up several blogs for her staff to address issues of interest to her constituents:

Action Uptown
Action Edgewater
...and, while not a blog per se, it runs on WordPress: Ridge Avenue Livability Study

This last has attracted a good number of commenters, which is unsurprising if you happen to have been in attendance at any sort of block club or planning meeting in the ward for the past six months, at which meetings the alderman's plan to allow parking along Ridge to slow traffic has been hotly debated.

I am reminded of the protagonist of Scott Simon's Windy City, a (fictitious) 48th ward alderman, who mused:

A voter might forgive a congressman for voting for or against war in Iraq, the medicinal use of marijuana, or expanding gun controls; but never an alderman who had opposed installing a traffic light on the corner of Ashland and Wrightwood.

There are all sorts of rumors being bandied about as to why the alderman might want parking put in on Ridge by people who are disinclined to believe that it is because the street is a pedestrian deathtrap peopled by four lanes of drivers leaving Lake Shore Drive for the Edens Expressway, or vice versa, who clearly believe themselves still to be on a highway and give every appearance of believing that pedestrians are there to provide you with extra bonus points when you run them down. (I live a half-block off Ridge, don't drive, cross it daily, and would like nothing better than to see its outer two lanes turned into parking.) To bring this entry somewhat back on topic, I'll close with one of my favorite maps from brilliant radical cartographer William Bunge:

Happy developments.

2009-02-05T00:00:00-06:00

Tracy Siska at the Chicago Justice Project has another excellent blog post on the need for and lack of transparency in the police and in the courts in Chicago and Cook County. Tony Peraica wants the Cook County check register put online. Milan Andric and Brad Flora of the Windy Citizen have put up RepSheet, where you can look up your alderman, state representative and senator, and US congressperson in one place, along with the boundaries of their respective wards and districts and relevant press, which they discuss on Eight Forty-Eight here. It's as though I've woken up in an alternate Dick Simpson Chicago. Even the CTA, it is alleged, is just fine with people documenting and building a caching proxy around its Bus Tracker API.

Things that have happened.

2008-12-19T00:00:00-06:00

In December 5 ILCS 140 had a brief moment in the sun when Jay Stewart of the Better Government Association, a BGA lawyer whose name I managed not to catch, and Paul Orfanedes of Judicial Watch testified before the House Special Investigative Committee (then considering whether to recommend impeachment for Blagojevich) to the governor's pattern of wrongly rejecting, or ignoring, FOIA requests, appeals, and court orders. The committee took pains to clarify that they were not looking for isolated instances, but an overall pattern of disregard for the law. Everyone was tired after the morning's testimony on JCAR and the state auditor's testimony about the flu vaccine debacle, and I have to assume that nobody found the FOIA testimony very compelling, since it was barely mentioned in the coverage I saw. To me, of course, this was the good part — the sale of a senate seat is momentarily titillating, but ignoring FOIA requests? That's the kind of thing that puts me in a fighting mood, as I sit here at the time of this writing having received no response whatsoever to a request of mine signed for by the office of the mayor of Chicago three months ago.

Jay Stewart's written testimony
Judicial Watch's press release
Committee Exhibit 34
Committee Final Report (FOIA-related material starts on page 52)

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn has created the Illinois Reform Commission, the latest in a very long line of efforts to convince voters that this state is finally going to get its shit together, no, really, we mean it this time. (Given that it never does and that the voters keep electing the larcenous and deranged anyway, I don't quite see the point.) Among its members are Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald, who hasn't had anything to do with government, ethics, or reform as far as I can tell and whose qualifications to sit on such a body are not immediately apparent to this observer but whose name does catch one's eye, and Douglas L. Johnson, M.D., Ph.D, a neurosurgeon whose presence one might suspect of serving as a commentary on the difficulty of reforming so much as a block club in this state. Its initial meeting today was held in conspicuous compliance with the Illinois Open Meetings Act during the day when nobody can attend. (No, some of us aren't ever happy.)

And lastly President Obama has reversed the infamous Ashcroft FOIA doctrine and brought transparency to the country's robots.txt file, laudable steps which I am sure his many vocal supporters among the elected Democrats of Chicago will waste no time in emulating, doing everything in their power to avoid unnecessarily denying a single FOIA request. Any minute now.

1. I know that Paddy Bauler actually said Chicago ain't ready for a reform mayor. Regrettably I find myself preferring the canonical lie.

Where is CloutWiki?

2008-11-23T00:00:00-06:00

A few weeks ago CloutWiki started serving up 404 error pages. Now they've got a 301 permanent redirect to clouttracker.org, which is serving up a page with a meta element http-equiv redirect back to cloutwiki.org, and round and round. I haven't gotten any response to my email. Does anyone know what's going on?

(My apologies for the thin updates ~~lately~~ so far. There are things in the queue.)

Torture & sunlight.

2008-10-26T00:00:00-05:00

While Chicagoans congratulate themselves on having charged Jon Burge with perjury some twenty years on (never mind that it was the Feds who acted after a long line of local DAs — beginning with the guy we've elected mayor six times and counting — failed to do so, or that John Conroy was insufficiently popular to keep his job in a city that's made the RedEye the fastest-growing newspaper in the country, according to Bill Adee at the Tribune), Tracy Siska at the Chicago Justice Project reminds us that the past, in Faulkner's words, isn't dead; it isn't even past:

Joseph Lopez, 18, was arrested on July 19th, 2000 without a warrant for the murder of 12-year-old Miguel DeLaRosa. He was held for 4 days and nights in an interrogation room with the lights on all the time, cuffed to the wall most of the time. At the end of the four days, Lopez falsely confessed to the murder; he was subsequently released weeks later when the real culprit was apprehended.

...

For all the bellowing about the fact that more should have been done twenty years ago to stop Burge, nothing is being done to stop the illegal and abusive tactics of today. Neither the Independent Police Review Authority nor the Chicago Police Board is equipped either financially or with the necessary political power to gain the access they would need track this abuse. With policy makers continuing to pay the same attention to this issue they have Burge over the last thirty years we are left with no options.

You should really read the whole thing.

Of particular note to advocates of transparency and open government are Siska's tireless efforts to use the Illinois FOIA to shed light on CPD oversight and disciplinary procedures, chronicled in detail at that link — he has been successful in obtaining City Council Committee on Police and Fire meeting transcripts (including transcripts of the committee's hearings on the Burge investigation) as well as Chicago Police Board hearing documents, and has done us the additional favor of posting these documents online for anyone's use. (In a city where FOIA requests are commonly ignored — illegally — without even the courtesy of a "no" response, and where even the most mundane requests are routinely denied through maximally-broad construal of the statutory exemptions, Siska's successes in obtaining these fairly sensitive records are nothing short of astonishing.)

Fun with HMDA numbers.

2008-10-11T00:00:00-05:00

In August, Brian Boyer wrote:

If I had to pick the one craziest thing about journalism, it’s this. We closely guard our sources, even from our colleagues at the same organization. We make FOIAs and file them away. And now that we’re online, we don’t link to our source materials, we don’t publish our data, and we’d never, ever link to another news source for background. WTF!?

David Cohn of Spot.Us followed up in the comments:

Welcome to the world of fighting “the scoop.”

“The Scoop” is what has made journalism what it is today. It was the lifeblood of the craft. It’s what every journalist always wanted. If they had it, they treated it like a pretty, pretty pet. They would spoon it and talk to it in a cute little voice.

The scoop mentality is killing us.

That's why I was pleased to see that the Chicago Reporter's analysis of national data on high-cost mortgages included a link to its version of the data [Excel file]. (You can find the underlying pre-Reporter-analysis data at the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's Home Mortgage Disclosure Act site.)

I was considering writing a post on how great this is and how they get it and are doing the right thing, etc. — but if you're reading this you've probably heard all that before. So I thought, well, everybody likes pictures, and so here they are, courtesy of the Reporter's data, in pleasant, seasonally-appropriate colors:

Here we've got high-cost home loans (either percentages within the demographic, or raw numbers) broken down by race/ethnicity and annual income. (That's thousands of dollars on the x-axis.) Note that the income categorizations are not uniform, though they're spaced equidistantly here for readability — the higher income brackets are broader than the lower.

Also note that if you look at the absolute numbers rather than the percentages, you'll see two lines for each demographic — one indicates total home loans, the other high-cost loans. (The criteria for high-cost loans are explained in the article linked above.)

And here we've got loans broken down by gender and income:

These graphs were an excuse to play with Flot, a jQuery charting plugin, in my ongoing search for the perfect infographic platform for the web. While it's a slick plugin and simple to use, it's not quite as flexible as I'd like (the absolute-number versions of the above two graphs might be better handled as some sort of simplified box plot, which Flot doesn't support).

The Knight News Challenge meetup.

2008-09-26T00:00:00-05:00

I'm just back from the Knight News Challenge meetup downtown — this is the grant program that funds the Chi-Town Daily News, the Knight Foundation Scholarships for programmers at Medill, and EveryBlock. (If I'm missing anyone here in Chicago, please let me know.)

Frank Edwards from the Chi-Town Daily News and Brian Boyer, a recipient of one of the Medill scholarships, spoke, along with staff from the Knight Foundation. There were nearly 30 prospective applicants present, a turnout that surprised me, though perhaps it shouldn't have.

Some interesting numbers from the Foundation: the fifteen winners came last year from a pool of around 3,000, whittled down to 64 for the final judges by a panel of screening judges.

(It's worth noting that I also got my first glimpse of the Zoom H2 audio recorder at this meeting, a device au courant among the more hifalutin' of your podcasting types and one I've been wanting for some time.)

It was a fun event which drew an interesting group of people — I regret not having been able to meet more of them.

A first look at CloutWiki.

2008-09-23T00:00:00-05:00

Mick Dumke at Clout City directs our attention to the newly-launched CloutWiki, from Mike Fourcher and Jay Paul Deratany. It does what it says on the tin — most Chicago-area politicians (including all aldermen) have pages describing their background, alliances, political leanings, etc., with more to come. I've often felt the lack of a resource like this for observers of local politics. There are a few implementation details with which one could quibble — for example, miscellaneous pages for groups, events, or concepts (e.g. Team Jan) are not collected anywhere, leaving the reader to stumble across them while browsing individuals' pages. At this early date, many politicians have no entry at all, though the site's creators make it clear that this is a work in progress, and incomplete. In the comments on Dumke's post, Hugh find fault with the citation of sources — facts are not cited individually, but only as a list of sources at the bottom of each entry, which can make it difficult to discover the basis for some of the more surprising statements. For example: As the liberal banner carrier in the City Council, [48th Ward Alderman Joe] Moore has regularly (and vocally) voted against Mayor Daley. I don't know where CloutWiki gets this or how it defines its terms; by my count, Moore has voted against Daley exactly twice this year (though vocally, to be sure), opposing the repeal of his foie gras ban and the children's museum in Grant Park.¹ (Then again, by City Council standards, perhaps semiannual opposition is regular enough.)

A particularly nice touch is the licensing of the content under the GNU Free Documentation License — though this:

[Q:] This is great! I'm with a newspaper/a blog/the media and I'd like to use some of the content here.

[A:] We'd be happy to talk to you. Drop us a line at editor (at) cloutwiki (dot) org.

...makes me suspect it may have been chosen inadvertently or without an understanding of the rights it confers.

The name CloutWiki strikes me as a little disingenuous — the pages cannot be edited by readers, so as far as I can tell its only claim to wikihood lies in its use of MediaWiki as a publishing platform. While the frequent intemperance of Chicago political discourse perhaps makes this a wise choice, I hope the editors can find a way to provide a little transparency as to which submissions are accepted and rejected.

All in all, though, this is a great quick source of information and background that was often difficult to find online in the past.

1. I tried so very hard to write this entry without bringing Joe Moore into it, I really did. Today my restraint has failed me.