Design: October 2006 Archive Page

In the new SDK it is necessary to build the client and server DLLs before running the MOD. Please build them if you see this message when trying to run the MOD.

--Source SDK Known Issues (Valve Sofware)

Chris Sherman from SHU's helpdesk has spent several hours helping me try to get the Half-Life 2 SDK working in a classroom lab for EL 405: New Media Projects. We're making progress. Once we gave the students SuperUser access to individual computers in the lab, we've been able to install Half-Life 2 so that the game plays. We've also been able to install the editor, so that students can create levels. But when we try to compile and run the maps, we get the above error message. When I track down this error message, it looks like we'll need to install Microsoft .net (which is a huge mega-installation that opens up a whole new can of worms). I know I didn't install that on my laptop, and I remember reading somewhere that there's an alternative C++ compiler that works with the HL2 SDK. I also noticed that that particular lab has Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 installed, and there does seem to be a conversion utility that lets you change the HL2 files so that Visual Studio 6.0 can use them. But that's not something I can fiddle with at home -- I have to be at the lab in order to try that. So I'm going to keep looking.

Students have been able to install Inform 7 and Blender 3D on the lab computers without any trouble. We purchased site licenses for The Games Factory 2 and Flash, so those never gave us any problems.

I've still got a couple of weeks before I'm scheduled to teach HL2 modding. At the moment, while it would be awkward and silly, I could have the students e-mail me the maps they make during the classroom exercises, and they could run them on my laptop. But that's hardly an ideal solution. (I really wish Tim Holt's Half-Life 2 modding book were out... sigh.)

I'll return to my analysis of Kairos as a project identity later. But first I'd like to consider one other aspect of Jerz's critique--attention to audience. Kairos's design (referring to Issue 5.1), Jerz says tongue-in-cheek, "has drastically improved," making it "no longer an easy target." The only mention of audience in Jerz's critique is when he mentions his technical writing students, whom he asked to critique Kairos's design. While he concedes that they are "not the primary audience" for Kairos, he affords their comments ample room as support for his argument. His instructions to students didn't seem to include analyzing design, let alone content, with Kairos's actual audience in mind--writing studies scholars who teach with technology. Through his application of Jakob Nielsen's laws of web-user experience, Jerz does speak indirectly of an audience, the ubiquitous "users" (see also useit.com). These users, it would seem, include all people with access to the World Wide Web, suggesting that anyone and everyone is a potential audience for the journal just because a page exists in cyberspace. --Tracy Bridgeford --''Kairotically Speaking'': Kairos and the Power of Identity (Kairos)

Bridgeford offers an excellent, thoughtful response to my rather blistering 1999 critique of the journal Kairos, which Kairos was brave enough to publish. My main point was that design choices interfered with the journal's ability to get its content in front of its audience.

Even as I was working on that article, the navigation of Kairos developed and improved, so that my critique was out-of-date before it was even published. And the invention of KairosNews addressed several of the points that I raised in my Kairos review.

My essay did focus on the design and user experience, and I did report what I observed after asking several classes of undergraduates to use the site. While their motivation for reading a Kairos article would differ from the motivation a scholar would have, I don't think that a student's frustration in not being able to find a search engine and not being able to find where to click in order to read the whole article would be substantially much different from the frustration a hypertext theorist would feel while trying to carry out the same operations.

In my defense about the audience issue Bridgeford mentions above, I did acknowledge the academic audience obliquely, in subordinate clauses such as "If the purpose of Kairos is to distribute scholarly information..." And elsewhere I argued that the use of consciously "clever" and obscure navigation techniques perpetuates the mythology that hypertext has to be difficult and challenging in order to be effective. Even in 1999, when I wrote the article, hypertext had been around for long enough that hypertext authors who were not consciously informed by hypertext theorists had discovered a separate set of expectations and methods for communication in hypertext, and that that set of techniques was quickly becoming a standard that Kairos was not reflecting. But none of that really affects the value of Bridgeford's points.

From time to time, I have thought about possibly revising that original review, but Bridgeford's thoughtful essay does an excellent job following up on the issues I raised, and reflecting further on Kairos's accomplishments in the 10 years it has been pushing the boundaries of online scholarship.

Public education in America operates on a manufacturing metaphor. Line up the parts, send 'em down the line, inspect them, then ship them out.

The assembly line idea couldn't be more out of synch with the way a wired (and now wireless) teenager deals with information and with other people. They are social in fundamentally different ways than when we were in high school. Yes, there is still peer pressure and acne. But what'snew is what isn't there: Barriers to communication and sharing of information. Technology has reduced and in some instances eliminated the distances and timeframes that defined the way we learned 20 years ago. This is a destabilizing thought for some people. So was rock ?n roll.

The teenagers walking into my classroom have iPods, cell phones (with movies on them) and twitching fingers from constant IMing and video games they play when they are not in class.

So I jumped at the chance to try Making History when it first came out. To their credit, the company behind the game was extremely honest about how to use the game and how not to use it. --David McDivitt --Do Gamers Score Better in School? (Serious Games Source)

--Tetris - From Russia With LoveBBC | Google Video)

I didn't have time to watch more than the first few minutes of this documentary on Tetris, but it looks really good.

--Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Via boingboing.

The rosary that retired quarry worker Bernard "Chub" Clark has created in his rural three acre yard near Nokomis is made of old bowling balls and probably weighs close to 1,000 pounds, give or take. --Tony Reid

--1,000-pound rosary sends heavy message: Pray (Herald & Review)

Now that's style. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Is this the way we will all be 'enjoying' our television programmes and computer games in the future?
--One giant step for home entertainment? (Daily Mail)

This will exercise your neck muscles, that's for sure.

Wait a minute... someone forgot to put the flat broom head on top of that helmet. Ohh this makes me angry. Very angry indeed!

Anyone over a certain age -- and you know who you are -- will remember those wonderful days of peppermint sticks and electric dog-washers, a magic time when running barefoot through the grass and having your cocker spaniel buffed and pressure-rinsed to a glossy sheen at the flip of a switch was every boy's birthright. Of course Rags is long gone now -- that unfortunate business with the faulty shutoff relay -- but you'll always have those stains on the ceiling to remember him by. --''Junior -- put down that book and turn on the electric dog-washer'' (Plan 59)

I love the retrofuture.

From a collection of what metafilter calls 50s print advertisements.

Many a Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Just a bit of fun with Flash. (My work for chapters 3 & 4 of Flash Journalism.... I'm just barely staying ahead of my students.)

That's cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute.

Here's where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. --Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch)

An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia. Since the article I'm linking to is a transcript of a TV item, it's pretty much useless to read on the web. The title "Community Papers Anniversary Lift" is completely meaningless, perhaps because this story was introduced by an anchor who read a script that was not archived with this story, which is why I had to add my own explanation of what you were reading in order for this excerpt to make any sense.

There are highlighted screenshots and excerpts, but they're not connected to links. Wouldn't it make sense to link to the Wikipedia source and link to the journalist's article, and let readers judge for themselves?

A great example of how not to do online journalism. (Link via Metafilter.)

[Y]ou're running around on a big circuit board, powering up at transformers, dodging resistors, your path barred by ROM chips. This probably seems pretty weird to The Youth of Today. In the years since Tron we've been trained to think that a journey to "the inside of the computer" might entail running around on a desktop peering into manila folders and perhaps occasionally hiding in a trash can from a giant grinning paper clip. The kids I see tapping out IM messages during lectures probably have no more familiarity with or interest in the innards of the sealed boxes they're typing on than they do in the what the profs are saying.

But in 1982, juggling circuit boards was part of owning a computer. --Tron (Adam Cadre)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I've fiddled with Flash before, but I haven't yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed that all the shapes I drew had this dumb blue box, and I couldn't select line segments or cut shapes into smaller sections anymore.

The problem is I had clicked the "Object Draw" button, which forces Flash to treat each shape (in this case a circle) as a single unit. The interface mocks me... the relevant button in the Options section is, of course, a circle with a blue box around it. (Why didn't I think of that sooner? Duh.)

Spent about 10 minutes being frustrated by this, which was frustrating, since I'm counting down the minutes since I've got to get out of the office and head for home.

Update: It took me a little longer than the 50 minutes I alotted for the classroom exercise, but I did finish a simple Flash animation. Getting it to display online will have to wait for another day.

--Timez Attack (BigBrainz)

There are flashcard "games" and is multiplication bingo and multiplication Frogger, and they're all well and good. But this is something else. Watch the video on the home page.

But it turns out that even when I try to live an Apple life, that is a pretty lousy experience too. How could that be, you say? The apparent point of Apple's existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic design*. Actually interacting with the system is something else. --Ben Bederson --Switchback: Horrors of a Windows Power-user Trying to Switch to Apple OS X (HCI User Advocate)

>pick up axe

Taken.



>grind axe

You are now grinding your axe.



Seriously, I'm blogging this because I miss the love I used to feel for my Palm PDA and my Dell laptop. I still have a Palm and a Dell, but I don't love them anymore. I just use them.

I will never love the Windows/PC symbiont. (Is that the right word?)

I wanted Bederson to love the Apple, because I want to believe that it's possible to make complex technology that works beautifully and beautifully works.

Link via MGK.

Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman'shabitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. --Matthew B. Crawford --Shop Class as Soulcraft (The New Atlantis)

I'm in the middle of a unit that's causing some stress in my Writing for the Internet class. I'm asking my students to code simple HMTL pages by hand.

I love this group of students, and I'm sure they'll do fine. But I find their struggles noteworthy, especially since our initial discussion of Vannevar Bush's brilliant essay "As We May Think" focused mostly on how difficult many of the students found it to read an old-fashioned essay. ("Why did he go on and on like that? Couldn't he have just given us the gist in a few sentences?")

Through their blogs, the students have already had plenty of changes to write for online audiences. Asking them to code their own HTML will demand from them a deeper understanding of how technology affects our writing. When you code something by hand, there are no shortcuts; no resources that you can skim in order to get "the gist." Since they are Humanities majors, they are used to earning grades by being bright, by innovating and improvising, and by having great ideas. They're not used to being flummoxed because they used the word processor program that they were familiar with instead of the text-editing tool that I recommended, so that their code ends up with curly quotes that confuse the web browsers. For some of them, it's a huge mental shift to keep them from habitually clicking on an icon to open the file. (If we want to edit an HTML file, you have to open it in a text editor, but clicking on it will open it with the default application, a web browser.)

It's certainly not their fault that the GUI is such a part of their lives that they find this kind of coding foreign and unsettling. I am giving them lots of time to work on this, since I feel it's very important for them to get under the hood of the web pages that we'll be analyzing.

I did feel the HTML textbook I chose was very straightforward, with step-by-step instructions on what you have to type at each stage, but so far it seems the book lacks context (such as an introduction to the whole concept of icons and filenames and file extensions, which I've internalized because I used the command line interface for years before I ever touched a computer mouse). I've been able to supply that context after the fact, but the end result is still a bit of a disruption.

In grad school, I did computer programming on my own, for fun, because I found it personally rewarding to have a compiler tell me "45 errors" at 10:45am and to see that error list drop to 10, 3, 1, and finally 0 by the time I took a lunch break. There was no such software to detect logical flaws or factual mistakes in my literary analysis papers, which meant I had to develop a different mental model of what it means to "make progress" in my academic work. But I've found the methodical approach to bracketing a problem area and zeroing in on it is useful in any intellectual task.

If you have a 10,000 line computer code, and you work in one section at a time, changing one thing at a time, and trying to run the program after each change, you'll always know what you did to introduce the error. If you work on multiple sections at the same time, making radical changes all the time, and you're not methodical about checking your results, then you'll have no idea what you did to cause the code to generate 467 errors, you'll have no idea where to start looking for solutions, and you'll be tempted to throw it all away and start over.

It's okay to throw away a paragraph or a 1-2 page paper and start over, but it's a huge waste of time to wait until your 5- or 10- or 50-page paper is beyond all hope, and then throw it all away.

Writing for computers (code) and writing for humans (essays) require different processes of drafting and revision, and the feedback loops are different. But in both cases, knowing the process is vital to generating a good final product efficiently. Crawford notes that the craft of wheel-making includes knowledge of what trees to fell, what time of year to cut them, and how to preserve the wood. While I don't expect the students to be able to mine the raw materials to be used to construct the computers they'll be using, I do feel they need to have more than a surface-level understanding of the medium they'll be using.

Fortunately, I've built the "Writing for the Internet" course so that, at this stage, students aren't being evaluated on the quality of the writing that they're doing -- right now, all they have to do is get the example website working, and they are free to work together as much as they wish. So, while the students have blogged about being terrified by HTML, the atmosphere during the workshops has been positive.