Arial is everywhere. If you don't know what it is, you don't use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft's influence in the world.

Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

The Scourge of Arial

Web design and development involves three levels:

* Web management
* interaction design (navigation support, homepage layout, templates, search, etc.)
* content design (the actual writing on the pages, as well as the design of any other media types used to communicate content as opposed to site interaction)

Just as in a hamburger, the middle layer is the most tasty and attracts the most attention, including much of my own work on Web usability. I have come to realize that the outer two layers are more important in many ways: users only care about content (in other words, no, the medium is not the message; the message is the message) and the usability of a website is more a function of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.

From 1997, but still surprisingly relevant.

Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management (Alertbox June 1997)

Registries are close-mouthed about the number of domains that are refunded, but informed estimates from Bret Fausett, citing VeriSign’s Stratton Scavlos, and from Godaddy’s Bob Parsons say that it’s grown in recent months to be about 99% of them. That’s bad.

In Bad Taste

A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years

Amara's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

These documents were drafted to offer a "template" set of public domain model legal documents that are "fair [and] avoid bias toward the VC or the company/entrepreneur" and reflect "current practices and customs". By providing these documents, the NVCA has made my job much easier. I routinely use the NVCA docs as the baseline for First Round Capital's term sheets. Doing so allows me to (1) clearly communicate to entrepreneurs that I am not looking for any non-standard terms, (2) reduce the legal fees of both parties, and (3) get a deal closed much faster than I would if I had to start from scratch. The documents also note where the East coast and West coast differ in their standard terms - a feature which has been useful as I invest bi-coastally.

Redeye VC: Open Source Venture Financing Documents

DARPA announces Urban Challenge. Teams will compete to build an autonomous vehicle able to complete a 60-mile urban course safely in less than 6 hours.

Grand Challenge Home

JPL video comparing frameworks that compete with J2EE: Rails, Zope(Plone), TurboGears and Django.

[ Very cool. I have used and am using TurboGears, but may try out Zope again on some of my small one-offs because it looks fast enough. -Dan ]

JPL's better-web-app.mov (video/quicktime Object)

k wrote:

Let me just note, I fucking hate the Rational Tools. I find them to be either minimally functional or so full of "features" that they're obtuse and are universally ultra-unfriendly. I'm 90% sure that's purposeful so that they can sell you expensive training / consulting.

I'm starting a new job next month that apparently extensively uses Rational Rose. I haven't used it before, and that wasn't the great appeal of the job itself... but hopefully it won't be too bad. It is a SCRUM shop with my project manager being someone who teaches software engineering methodology at CMU as a side thing, so if anything it will be a great contrast to the grad-school research programming I've been doing most recently.

DevShop got very nice reviews on TechCrunch.

RE: Uncommon Sense (for Software)

McNealy it seems to me, is ultimately a product of California Uber Alles thinking, one of the cadre of executives that evidently believe the rest of the world will fall into line with the US West Coast. The only real innovation happens in the USA. The only real innovation happens at Stanford... But the global economy is not a clone of California, Starbucks notwithstanding.

When the boat nearly sunk, Europe bailed it out. Why replace Sun products partly for fashion reasons? Europeans are far less likely to throw out IT infrastructures because of what the chatterati are saying. That is what the aggressive conservatives at the major financial institutions on the US Eastern seaboard do...

James Governor's MonkChips: A Change at Sun: From Exclude to Include. On Jonathan Schwartz as CEO

Will Stephens (a reader) pointed me to this story which says that Crazy made it to #1 in the UK charts without ever being released in physical form. Downloads alone made it #1. That's never happened before. But it will again, and again, and again.

A VC: Gnarls Barkley