Seasons Greetings!

We are delighted to wind down the year by adding several new reports and filings to our Online Archives. You may now follow these links to review:

• Our Amended 2009 990-EZ
• Our 2010 990-EZ
• The Minutes of our 2010 Annual Meeting
• And Most Importantly, Our 2011 Annual Report

The Minutes of our 2011 Annual Meeting are still in production and will be available soon.

If you are a resident of New York State, please consider sending a tax deductible donation in any amount to The Institute for End User Computing, Inc., Box 1717, Ossining, NY 10562 so we can continue to serve you!

All too often we think of End User Computing in service of entertainment or business needs. But as we approach the tenth anniversary of the barbaric attacks against the World Trade Center we can see how much more meaningful it can be.

Consider the example of life long New Yorker, Brian August, who came to the troubling realization that people’s memories of the Twin Towers were beginning to slowly fade with time. Rather than sit by and watch us drift down a road that might one day lead to 9/11 deniers questioning whether they had really been there, he seized upon the potential of modern cell phones and tablets to determine their location and orientation in space to create 110 Stories.

110 Stories is a social application of augmented reality that lets users within sight of where the Twin Towers once stood to see a composite of today’s skyline with a stark outline of exactly where the towers would appear had they not been destroyed on that dark day.

As users experience the poignancy of seeing just how tall and massive they had once been and realizing the true magnitude of our loss, they are then invited to capture a photo of their augmented perspective and share their thoughts and stories through a linked website in fifty words.

Mr. August created this touching tribute by assembling a solid team of collaborators backed with End User and corporate contributed financial support permitting the App to be offered to the public free of charge.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to him, his colleagues, and all of the supporters of his landmark project.

And as always, we shall never forget those who perished because of any of the attacks on 9/11, nor those whose lives were touched by their loss.

We hope you all had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend and a wonderful Summer as well.

Like you, we are most eager to kickoff the Fall Semester. Over the Summer we have been working towards a Mobile Friendly HTML5 revision of our web pages. But it may be some time before our new page templates are ready for production use. Making things as useable on a cell phone as a wide screen monitor is a serious design challenge that we are still grappling with.

There has been a lot of activity on the Public Policy front of late with a growing sense of urgency about the problem of Patent Trolls who are systematically targeting the engines of innovation in the computer industry, with attempts to use highly dubious Software Patents to go after corporate giants and solo developers alike.

At the IEUC we are closely monitoring this issue and will do our best to keep you informed.

On the Education front, we want to hear from students interested in learning to program and would very much like their thoughts on what works and what doesn’t in any programming courses they may be taking.

In terms of Research, our near term interests are tightly focused on End User Programming and finding ways to use multi-modal interfaces to make Computational Thinking easier to approach. We will probably be employing the latest generation of Web Browsers and/or Android as our research platform in this regard. So if you are a programmer and would like to help, please contact us!

Finally, we are always looking for volunteers and potential Board candidates to join our ranks.

As part of our ongoing educational and community outreach, we would like to hear from any students in Ossining, New York and the surrounding communities who are interested in learning to program computers and/or develop websites over the Summer.

Depending on the number of participants and their level of interest, instruction may be individualized via email correspondence or provided in person by having participants meet as a group somewhere in the community.

Instruction will be provided free of charge to suitably prepared students at the high school level and above. The Institute is happy to customize the material presented to best meet student needs from introductory level through advanced graduate topics.

We would also be happy to explore the possibility of providing similar services to any adults in the community who want to master such skills.

The IEUC would also like to work with any Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers who are currently teaching or would like to develop computer science course offerings for students in the area. We can help in identifying instructional materials and assist in curriculum development. If you are a teacher who wants to learn to program over the Summer so you can introduce your students to this exciting field in the Fall, one-on-one instruction can be provided.

We will also consider working with select students and teachers from other communities if we have sufficient time and resources to accommodate them.

2011 promises to be a banner year for the IEUC. We have a lot of new ideas in the works and look forward to serving our fellow End Users!

Stay tuned for more news as we ramp up for the Spring Semester.

The Hacker News highlights a mix of stories ranging from hard core technology postings, patent wars on the legal front, the occasional spot to technology related political commentary, and a healthy sampling of topics related to launching high tech startups. Periodic pointers to postings with advice for students will be of particular interest to many of our readers.

As the summer draws to a close we will be getting back in touch with our volunteers. Then once the initial semester kick-off dust settles, we will be blogging and updating our website with more regularity.

Enjoy the lazy, hazy, crazy days of August.

Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.

Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!

The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.

Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.

Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.

While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.

The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.

In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.

If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.

The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.

As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!

Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.

We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.

Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!

We hope and trust that they will recognize the critical importance of information technology literacy at a much deeper level than mere button pushing to make things work.

Students need to understand what computing can and can’t do; they need to be able to recognize, anticipate, and minimize risks; to be able to make informed business and public policy decision about the implications of emerging technologies; and they need to be able to roll up their sleeves and delve into End User Programming lest they loose those opportunities to offshore outsourcing.

The IEUC stands ready to work hand in hand with all sectors to help bring about these vital changes.

As we noted last month, Rob Akscyn has now rotated out to our Advisory Board and Kirk St. Amant and Jeff Smith have joined our Board of Directors, restoring our Board to full strength for the challenging year ahead.

2008 was a bad year for the US economy and the nonprofit sector was particularly hard hit. With donors at both the institutional and individual level re-directing their giving to Social Safety Net causes, our donations were sharply off. Since, it is now clear that online fundraising for an organization with our profile generates far more regulatory compliance overhead than actual revenue, we stand ready to totally re-think our fundraising strategy going forward.

We will have more financial details on the year past as final bills and donations roll in over the weeks ahead.

While the financial outlook for 2009 is murky, our prospects have never been brighter on the Operations Side. Our new Directors are already exploring the feasibility of several potential Special Projects and last year’s complete online infrastructure overhaul has us well positioned to dramatically expand the range of content offered on our website. We are also preparing to share most of our back end code, which will let other sites leverage the thousands of hours of R&D that went into our website relaunch.

These are exciting times and scary times. The nonprofit sector remains in crisis and their is a very real risk that a number of charities will fail this year. However, the IEUC will not be one of them. With no paid staff, truly minimal overhead, and a mission that involves channeling IDEAS rather than DOLLARS we are here to stay.

So if your New Year’s Resolution is to volunteer some of your time or  to share some of your financial good fortune with a worthy cause, we invite you to join us in Forging The Future.

The future is what we make it, so by supporting our work, you can choose economic recovery, increased freedom & security, and a new era of personal empowerment ushered in through the wonders of information technology!

Since the system consolidates all of your accounts into one, it is critical that you trust your OpenID provider even more than you would a single site, since someone with database access to the OpenID server could usurp your identity everywhere by resetting your password to a new one and then logging into any of your accounts elsewhere.

The logical way to minimize that risk is to host your own identity provider server, which is supposed to be quite painless and easy to do.

Be warned, it is not.

For the last few weeks we have been trying various OpenID servers and have yet to find one that can pass all of the OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests.

If you do want to experiment with this technology, we recommend indirectly specifying your OpenID End Point. This means that you should point any services requiring you to use OpenID to a web page that uses link tags in its headers to redirect them to your current OpenID provider of choice. Then you can, in theory, change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID Identity with respect to third party sites. However, different implementations may place restrictions on your account name choice which could foil your attempt to seamlessly swap servers.

If you can find a solution that reliably performs well in the real world, do let us know so we can share your good news. Until then, beware the hype and avoid diving in prematurely since this sort of experimentation can be a real time sink.

So in the meantime, if you must use OpenID, go with a large trusted “name” provider and if there isn’t one that you truly trust, consider establishing multiple OpenID’s for different accounts, even though doing this would of course defeat the point of the entire exercise.

But every day, we, as End Users, make countless little choices that in aggregate resonate far into the future. What operating system will we choose? What programs? Which websites and traditional publishers will we trust to inform us? Which vendors do we want to see grow and prosper? What user groups will we join and support?

It is so easy to dismiss the impact of these little choices but they give us far more leverage to steer the coarse of history.

At the IEUC we do a lot with very little, indeed for the cost of a single major network TV ad we could run our annual operations or pay down a big chunk of our startup debt.

So after you cast your vote in the political area, consider lending us a hand in the financial arena.

We will put your hard earned dollars to productive use.

We have finalized our latest artwork and verified our new page template in A-Grade browsers.

Our only major dependency is active javascript support so we can accommodate Internet Explorer 6 and inject non-semantic markup to serve as scaffolding for style-sheet based visual effects like our translucent rounded corners.

In-page navigation will be handled by leveraging the Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript libraries to support our own animated user interface code. Retrofitting this new code to provide Explorer users with a comparable experience is proving to be a bit more daunting than we anticipated, so we can’t venture to say when everything will be good to go live, beyond our good faith estimate that we should be back up and running early in the Fall 2008 Academic Semester.

At that point we will be able to revise most of our old materials and consolidate them into a smaller number of content rich composite pages to dramatically reduce the navigational overhead of exploring our offerings. Until then, most of our legacy content is offline, but you can still find much of it through The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if you are so motivated.

Presented by Sony Creative Software, the National Crime Prevention Council, and the Ad Council.

Sony Creative Software, the Ad Council, and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC), are pleased to announce the winners of last fall’s public service announcement (PSA) development contest organized to raise awareness of the problem of cyberbullying.

Over the course of the summer, The IEUC has been struggling to improve the quality of our website to better serve you. Countless hours have gone into developing the templates and backend automation facilities that make these pages possible and most of that time has gone into supporting the “web standards” developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

At the end of the day, virtually all of our pages validate against the “strict” variant of the HTML 4.01 standard with their *intended* appearance being defined by valid CSS style sheets. In theory this means that our pages should look gorgeous to you regardless of what platform and browser you are using as long as your choice supports these key international standards.

Indeed, if you are a Macintosh user browsing with Safari or have downloaded the latest release of Mozilla Firebird or one of a handful of *nearly* compliant browsers things should look pretty good for you, with informational rollover effects and user modifiable display preferences to increase the contrast and font size of our pages.

Unfortunately, our server logs reveal that the vast majority of you are using various releases of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is perhaps second only to certain versions of Netscape Navigator in notoriety for its buggy support of style sheets. As a result, if we provided you with the same content that we serve to more compliant browsers, our pages would be so mangled as to be virtually unreadable – a sad fact you may have noticed if you visited us during the last week and a half before we had time to address the issue.

There are of course several possible fixes. We could try to write our pages to older non-standards compliant flavors of HTML that are better supported by today’s dominant browsers (an exercise that would likely wreak havoc with disabled visitors dependent on screen readers). We could move to XHTML, but if served according to official guidelines, it would make our pages inaccessible to a number of older browsers. We could apply a number of relatively popular CSS-bug workarounds in which we would rely on bugs in how Netscape and Explorer read our style sheets to prevent them from recognizing the instructions that would cause their screen layout routines to mangle our pages (but this violates the very spirit of using standards in the first place and makes our layout dependent on one set of bugs to circumvent another set of bugs making it susceptible to failure if the former are fixed before the latter). Finally, we could try to detect which browser you are using and patch our pages on the fly to use a different style sheet that avoids triggering the known bugs.

Of course none of these approaches will work for all browsers on all platforms and to make matters even worse, our logs show that you are using over 300 uniquely different browser/platform configurations. We can’t even *begin* to test how our pages look on all of them, let alone start to identify and work around their bugs. It is that very fact that argues most persuasively for one to follow the advice of a Microsoft whitepaper and standardize on a single browser. But even Microsoft’s own Explorer has completely different rendering engines (and thus bug sets) in its Macintosh and Windows releases.

At one point, frustrated webmasters tried to take the initiative with a “Browser Upgrade Campaign” that would shunt visitors to a page urging them to switch browsers if they attempted to access their sites with non-standards-compliant browsers. It proved a mixed success and was ended when commercial scammers began to abuse its browser diversion code.

So what can we or any web authors do? There is no known bug free totally complaint cross-platform solution we can recommend and any advice we can give would leave you trading one set of bugs for another. As noted at the start Safari and Firebird come pretty close to the right thing, and our pages look quite good inside them. But we can’t ignore the fact that most of you use Explorer and many of you might not be in a position to do anything about that fact, despite the many serious problems with its interpretation of modern web page.

Since there is no way to please or accommodate everyone, we have made the hard decision to play the numbers and patch pages being served to Explorer with a small number of additional stylesheet rules to override our default styling and hide the display customization routines that don’t reliably work in your browser. The result will be a slight reduction in attractiveness and functionality (eg. you won’t see our informative style sheet-based navigation menu rollovers), but it will leave you with pages you can read today without having to switch browsers.

If you have some other browser, we are sending it our unpatched standards-compliant pages, in the hope that it has a modern layout engine that can properly display them. If you are using a really old browser it should ignore our style sheet and give you an acceptable text-based display. If you are using an old buggy Netscape, you are probably having an awful time viewing many sites and not just ours and we apologize for not having the resources to directly accommodate you.

The bottom line is that today’s web is broken and webmasters can’t save the day until we, as End Users take responsibility for our role in the circle of dependency and move to a new platform with self-verifying standards. The current status-quo is a disaster, what should take hours takes months of “write once – test everywhere” debugging, and we aren’t talking about complicated software. All web designers want is to be able to position photos and text on a page, control what happens if page elements don’t fit, offer popup menus with rollovers, and embed multimedia objects. This isn’t rocket science, the current standards are far from optimal from the web author’s perspective, and their support is buggy beyond belief. Moreover the underlying HTML and XHTML that describes the content of your pages pale by comparison to research hypertext systems that have been in operation for decades.

We need a new platform that different vendors can extend in different directions without breaking basic compatibility with its core standards. We need YOUR support to make it happen. When we succeed, the new platform will make both authoring and browsing painless. It will save you time, it will save you money, it will increase your productivity, and it might save your job. Or you can stay with the status quo and grit your teeth as you view mangled pages or invest countless hours tweaking your work until one day your employer decides that it is taking you so long to debug your web pages that it is more economical to outsource your job to a low cost overseas supplier. The choice is yours.

A tour of the HCIL’s web pages provides a tantalizing glimpse into a future rich in possibilities.

Of course, for us, “here” is a state of mind, because it doesn’t make sense for us to try to package our quest as a drive to create yet another brick-and-mortar lab. One day, perhaps, we will enjoy a level of support that will make it feasible to build, rent, or lease such a physical plant in support of a residential program like that of the Stanta Fe Institute.

Indeed, it would unquestionably be a good thing to dedicate a substantial facility to furthering research into End User Computing, so there would be a neutral site at which visiting researchers could collaborate on such issues. But there are already labs a many chipping away at different facets of the technological problems facing End Users. The real problem lies in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and figuring out the best ways to put all the pieces together, and that won’t be happening any time soon at an established lab, since all of these organizations have a primary interest in maintaining support for their own site. This is why collaborations among such peer labs tend to fizzle out in a few years when most participants start to fear that the fruits of any initial success are disproportionately accruing to the host site. In other words if a distributed project is administered from Lab A, in time its partner Labs B, C, and D will fear that Lab A is getting more money and prestige from the project than they are so they will start to pull back and the project will die. This same dynamic also dooms most interdisciplinary and interdepartmental projects within a given institution.

Thus for now, we need to run a lean operation and channel our resources into Forging a non-threatening network of colleagues from all labs and requisite fields of endeavor who care about breaking this vicious cycle and are in a position to make things happen. Indeed, as we embark on our quest to reboot the computer sector and knit together the many critical strands of relevant research, our not being attached to an existing institution or trying to compete with any of them in the brick-and-mortar building game will be absolutely critical.

If and only if we can draw on public support from enlightened computer users like YOU, will we be able to do what others can’t and make it possible to leverage each of our supporters’ contributions and undertake the needed work that wouldn’t otherwise get funded.

Alas, there is a tremendous amount of inertia centered around maintaining today’s desktop computing platforms. Whole careers have been built around mastering the quirks of yesterday’s hardware and software. Decades old decisions based on then appropriate technology tradeoffs have become ossified into bad designs that make our lives miserable, but the risks of trying to make a clean break and offer a real alternative are too great to be undertaken in the commercial sector.

We all know that today’s operating systems are sources of endless frustration and that it doesn’t matter which one we are talking about in this regard. Apple’s OS X works smoothy out of box and looks gorgeous, but even if you are a single user using your machine in the total security of your own home, there is no way to escape being forced to “prove” your identity by retyping your password thousands of times over. Despite their rapidly improving user interfaces, the many flavors of Windows remain subject to constant worm and virus attacks that make them a security nightmare. Likewise, while Unix and Linux may well have the potential to do anything an end user could ask for, often at little or no cost, unlocking that potential requires a deep immersion in highly arcane knowledge much of which is grounded in historical accident. Moreover, none of these environments makes coherent use of the many advanced technologies and common sense insights accumulated since the dawn of the personal computing revolution.

But despite these clearly manifest and utterly pervasive failings, just image going to your friendly local bankers and asking for funding to start from scratch and design a real alternative to ALL of these platforms – not just some sexy looking veneer grafted on top of Linux or some other current offering, but a REAL alternative. We all know it is needed, but from a commercial standpoint it is untouchable. That is why we have formed The IEUC to do what needs to be done in the not-for-profit space.

We all need this to work. You need us to succeed. There is a silver bullet, and YOUR Support is it!

This is the first entry in “Forging The Future”, the official web log of The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

If you found our site through this page, it should be noted that The IEUC is a New York State not-for-profit corporation currently in the process of preparing to apply to The IRS for a Section 501(c)(3) federal tax exemption. We anticipate that this process will be completed by the end of the year.

Our charitable purpose is to advance the state of the art in information technology and advance the interests of End Users like you!

What is an End User? An End User is anyone and everyone using computers and related technologies as tools in their work or play. Indeed, even computer programmers are End Users of the tools they use to develop new programs, as are the developers of those tools when using other tools to develop them! Likewise, your next door neighbor, your son or daughter’s teacher, and your employer can all find themselves in the role of an End User as can bleeding edge technologists, liberal arts faculty members, and those brave patriots who put their lives on the line to man all levels of our homeland security infrastructure.

In short, all of us are directly or indirectly End Users of computing technology, but our needs often take a second place behind short term technological, economic, and marketing considerations. The problem is that up until now it hasn’t been anyone’s job to worry about The Big Picture and take a long term view of where we are and where we should be.

That is why we founded The Institute for End User Computing and made it our Job to look out for you and focus on doing The Right Thing rather than the fast and easy “Worse is Better” thing.

But The Institute is young and while we are truly gifted in terms of the brain trust that we can draw on, we are starting off on a shoestring budget. So we need your support!

If you’ve ever wanted to tear your computer off your desk and hurl it out a window or lob a brick through your screen in a fit of “Computer Rage”, stop complaining, and do something about it!

We know what needs to be done! We know who knows how to do it! But we need your financial support so we can fund them to do the work. After all, even the most public spirited and magnanimous providers of free and open source software need to put food on the table. So we need your donations so we will have the resources to employ them to build the next generation of tools to make your life easier, your employer more productive, our cyber infrastructure more secure, and just maybe indirectly change our information technology environment enough to one day save your job or even your life.

We are already hard at work in the trenches and hope to prove worthy of your generous support!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled commentary.