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.

We are hammering away behind the scenes on a major retooling of our website’s design and source code to embrace HTML 5 and CSS 3. There has been a lot of innovation in the browser space and we are doing our best to take advantage of it. As a result, we won’t be able to maintain our current level of support for older versions of Internet Explorer, but we really aren’t doing anyone any favors by helping them delay an upgrade to a more capable browser. As always, even if a page doesn’t look particularly aesthetic in an old browser, you should still be able to read its content. But seriously, why make yourself suffer? Upgrade to a current browser release now, so you’ll be able to fully enjoy our new site when we roll it out later this Summer!

Remember, current versions of the major browsers are all free and fast downloads for anyone with internet connectivity. For Mac Users, the latest incarnations of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox will serve you well. On Windows you can look forward to an impressive Internet Explorer 9 as well as Chrome and Firefox. Firefox and/or Chrome should already be pre-installed on current Linux distributions. Modern cell phones and tablets generally have mechanisms in place to keep their browsers updated and any new device is apt to provide strong support for emerging web standards.

Keeping any of these programs updated couldn’t be more painless or important since they are all undergoing very rapid evolution at this time. Each new release is adding new features that will noticeably improve your browsing experience as more sites like this one roll out HTML 5 & CSS 3 based designs.

Of course if you are dealing with a school, library, or corporate setting where you can’t just install it yourself, remind the IT Powers That Be, that running older browsers exposes their organizations to countless security vulnerabilities and reduces your productivity and access to important websites!

If you are a Screen Reader User, the situation is slightly more volatile, since HTML 5 support may take some time to arrive. We are doing our best to use the new features in a manner that won’t compromise your experience, but it is vital that you contact the developers of your Screen Reader of choice to let them know that support for HTML 5 features like its outline model are important to you.

Remember, your Assistive Technology Vendor is the one in the best position to improve your web surfing experience. It makes no sense to force web developers to delay rolling out support for improved standards that benefit everyone’s usability when a software upgrade on your part can yield a superior web surfing experience to that produced by millions of ill informed attempts to tweak web sites for compatibility with obsolete assistive technologies.

In many respects, today’s Web Browsers have become just as important a computing platform as the operating systems they run under. Beyond surfing the web, you can now find plugins that extend their capabilities to everything from helping you follow Twitter and Tweak to your friends, to managing the sea of academic citations that go into a Ph.D. Dissertation, to taking some of the pain out of developing web content of your own, to helping you blow off steam with cleaver in-browser puzzle games.

By allocating a few minutes each week to making sure your web browsers are up to date, you’ll be doing your part to make the World Wide Web work smoothly and securely while unlocking countless new possibilities!

Upgrade now and surf safely, the Web awaits! ]]> http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/632/feed 0 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/627 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/627#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 15:35:25 +0000 The IEUC http://weblog.ieuc.org/?p=627 In Safari Version 5.0.5 (6533.21.1) on the Mac, using CSS3 to generate multiple columns can lead to truly ugly artifacts if the last line before a column break contains prominent descenders. These are the portions of a lowercase g, j, p, q, or y that project below the “baseline” of your text.

Apparently, for some fonts and column widths, Safari will crop the bottoms off of these letter forms and display them at the top of the next column as if they were projecting down from an otherwise invisible line of text sitting above the actual column in your layout.

This effect can be suppressed by increasing the line height of your text to trigger this “rendered text image wrapping” bug with transparent pixels, which when shuffled to the top of the next column will remain blissfully invisible to your reader.

We have found that a simple css declaration of line-height:2em; did the trick for us. Depending on your choice of fonts and other typographical variable you may need to fiddle with this value to eliminate Safari’s display glitch, which will no doubt be corrected in a future release. Until then, slightly exaggerated vertical line spacing is a small price to pay for the convenience of multiple CSS3 columns.

From the earliest days of the industrial revolution there have been fears of machines destroying jobs as automation substitutes for ever increasingly skilled levels of manual labor. But by so doing, these machines have driven down production costs and thus increased the level of profit to be split between labor and management making for a rising tide that could lift all boats. The cost savings from automation have been invested in and led to new lines of business, with the computer industry itself being the foremost example.

It is only the efficiencies introduced by our information technologies that support our Western lifestyles, and for many decades the Computer seemed to be a net win for Labor particularly as robotics have reduced the toll in human suffering paid by those laboring in dangerous occupations.

However in recent decades, broadband international communications have leveled the Global playing field introducing competition from third world labor forces. Even high tech economies in Asia like Japan, which initially benefited from Western outsourcing have seen their own workers displaced by competition from lower wage labor in the developing world.

But there are limits to the degree of automation and outsourcing that will be palatable to customers and no level of sophisticated programming is likely to attain the level of flexibility when confronted with an unanticipated situation that a human can. This is why many in the medical profession fear standardized computerized medical records, since individual cases often don’t fit into preplanned categorization, raising the chance that it might not be possible to pass the right information through the web of automation leading to a misdiagnosis, coverage denial, or harmful treatment.

What this says about the future is that the outsourcing and automation trend will likely reach a natural limit with computers doing what they do best — amplifying and augmenting human intellect — and people doing what we do best — innovating, creating new ventures, bouncing back from the unexpected, and providing a warm human touch.

Increasingly, these dynamics blur the line between Labor and Management and point to the way to avoid having one’s services outsourced or automated away. Each worker needs to find a personal balance between roles of artist, technician, and entrepreneur. The Key is not to fight management or to fight automation, but to find mutually beneficial ways to work with them. Only by adding unique value to create goods and services desired by our fellow man can any of us secure true career security — be that by working for others or by going our own way to start a new venture.

It doesn’t depend on a Union Contract or a Government Job, or on Going to the Right School or Knowing the Right People. It depends only on your ability to creatively make the most of your God given gifts and the technologies and opportunities that abound around us.

The future is not bleak. The future is not written in stone. The future is what you make it!

We are here to help.

Happy Labor Day! ]]> http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/452/feed 0 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/323 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/323#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:44:58 +0000 The IEUC http://weblog.ieuc.org/?p=323 It gives us great pleasure to report that with the start of Summer we are going live with a Public Beta of our latest website redesign. We have done some serious retooling of our infrastructure to simplify things and provide better hooks for future enhancements, like the versioning system that permits major revisions of our site to be accessed simultaneously as well the hooks we have in place to track version changes at the page level.

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.

Invoking the automatic upgrade link took us to the usual upgrade page, but nothing happened after the initial upgrade message was drawn on the page.

Disabling all of our active plugins did seem to free up the Automatic Upgrade process, although one data error was reported.

It also looks like some of our old plugins stopped working after the upgrade. We will wait to see if they get upgraded in a next few weeks before permanently deleting them.

Here you can find up to the minute reports of all the major javascript based libraries and related tools that you can use to take a site to the next level. You’ll also find discussions of hot web accessibility topics like yesterday’s revelation that many screenreader users have javascript enabled — a situation not contemplated by most site designers.

You can also sign up for newsletters, grab podcasts, and find out about the latest conferences and job offers.

The site also features rich indexing by topic in the left sidebar, making it is easy to go back in time and bring yourself up to speed in any area of interest.

While its homepage is rather sedate and has shown less activity of late than in years past, the site’s many high quality articles have remarkable breadth and depth.

Here you will find detailed expositions of most of the web design techniques that undergird today’s state-of-the-art. Alongside such technical content, you will also find discussions of accessibility, information architecture, and the business side of web design and engaging designers.

In short, there is something here for everyone.

Since we are working on a major look-and-feel upgrade for our site, we have installed this temporary WordPress Theme along with the update to save the time it would have taken to retrofit our old custom theme.

All of us at the IEUC wish you a safe and Happy New Year’s Eve.

In other news, we are also working on a major revision of our static pages to simplify their organization and better support a certain legacy web browser that is still used by a significant percentage of our site’s visitors who no doubt can’t upgrade due to institutional decisions outside their control.

Installation on our end was completely painless.

Do let us know how you like it or if you run into any problems viewing this content on your device!

Planned features include, back-end PHP versioning integrated with third party browser detection, nested grid layout using Faux Absolute Positioning, automatic detection of font size changes, auto-balancing columns, and custom rounded corners based on the Canvas element and images embedded in our source code via DataURI’s.

When done, we will concatenating and minimizing everything so our pages should load significantly faster at low connection speeds.

Of significantly more interest to other web masters, we will also be releasing the source code, so you will be able to use our framework on your site.

We also strongly recommend that if you are one of the dwindling number of Internet Explorer 6 users, you should upgrade to a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox at your earliest convenience. Any of these browsers are far more capable and standards compliant that IE 6.

Accordingly, we will no longer be supporting IE 6 when we next revise our pages.

IE 6 users should still be able to read our substantive content in a bare bones format. But we will no longer invest the countless hours needed to hack our code in a futile attempt to fully replicated a modern browser experience for IE 6 users.

Things are finally settling down and we have completed all of our annual paperwork.

Indeed, our 2008 990-EZ has already been received by the IRS and we have a new Cumulative Annual Report ready for distribution.

We will be posting these key documents this week and updating our main pages to reflect these new offerings as soon as possible.

Once we have our 2008 990-EZ out the door and CHI 2009 behind us, we will shift back into gear online. Until then, hang in there and get your seedlings started for the Spring.

Error: Download of 'http://weblog.ieuc.org/wp-admin/css/press-this-ie-rtl.css?ver=20080915' failed, status code 404

Further investigation revealed that the press-this-ie-rtl.css file in question was delivered with 0 bytes of content causing Gears to hang.

To fix the problem, just insert the following CSS Comment at the top of that file and upload the edited version to your server:

/* nothing here */

It should weigh in at 43 bytes. At that point, disable Gears for your site, reload the Turbo admin page and re-enable the feature. This time all of the files in the Gears manifest should download smoothly.

We have our Archives back online and we will be restoring more of our legacy content in the next week or so.

There may still be some glitches and some of our non-critical user interface functionality (i.e. the animated in-page visual transitions) won’t be available in Internet Explorer for technical reasons outside our control.

We are inviting in Volunteer Website Testers to help us ferret out any problems that still need work.

In the meantime, bear with us, and drop us a note if you run into any serious problems.

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.

It will live at photos.ieuc.org when it goes live.

While we were off conferencing a number of new software announcements came out, sending us once again into frantic upgrade mode.

Stay tuned to see what we have brewing!