Ten years ago Microsoft Windows 95, a product which changed the world for better or worse, was released. It wasn’t the most elegant operating system on the market. It wasn’t the most stable. But it had buzz. Everyone was talking about it regardless of whether they were a Mac geek or a Windows 3.1 user or even the few of us who were already into Linux (that’s a story for another day).

I remember buying my copy of Windows 95 within a week of its release to try it out. It worked good. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. I still remember my basic insight at the time between the Macintosh and Windows. It had to do with the double-click sensitivity in the mouse control panel. On the Mac, you had three settings. On Windows, you had a slider with an infinite series of choices. The decision to design the Mac mouse control panel that way was a creative decision: 1) you don’t need a lot of settings for this, so why make it complicated? 2) Being creative is working within limits (the absence of barriers limits creativity IMO). The Windows design was purely American. It’s all about choice. So you had an effectively infinite number of settings for the double-click sensitivity.

That is but one example of the fundamental design difference (at least 10 years ago) between Mac and Windows. It shows that each operating system was designed with different goals in mind. At that time, the Mac operating system was known as a “get things done” system. There wasn’t a lot of extra cruft so it was all about getting your work done. With Windows 95 it was easy to spend hours fiddling with all the different settings and configuration options. (Linux too had lots of configuration options mainly involved the editing of config files. This was a lot more cumbersome than using the control panel in Windows, but it was also a lot more satisfying in the end.)

Ultimately my fascination with Windows 95 didn’t last. It didn’t survive the hype. By 1997, I had bought my first Mac (my first computer from Apple was an Apple ][+). Let’s kick Intel’s ass! and The fight against tyranny begins!

Pat Robertson, Yet Another Right-Wing Nut, who also once ran for president of the USA, is getting himself into the headlines as he likes. Robertson was speaking on the 700 Club, his long-running “Christian” show, about Hugo Chavez the leader of Venezuela:

If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.

Is Chavez a thorn in the side of the Bush administration? Certainly. Henchmen like Robertson are simply voicing the opinion of the conservatives.

As reported in a NYTimes article entitled Robertson Is Pilloried for Assassination Call (and widely reported elsewhere):

The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, just as it did when Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed during a Superbowl broadcast. “This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ball game,” he said.

Jackson is giving Robertson too much credit, but ultimately Robertson should be investigated. It’s only right.

Sergio Pereira’s Developer Notes for prototype.js is be dated July 2nd, but dosen’t seem to have been bookmarked via del.icio.us until Sunday. The bookmarks are now 270 strong and growing. Combined with the documentation found on Thomas Fuchs’ scriptaculous wiki, it should not be very long before someone writes a Prototype tutorial.

Good work Sergio and thanks to Michael Schuerig for the heads up.

It’s been a week since our lasting posting here. Can you tell we’re busy? Tomorrow we find out if it was all worth it. The start of the academic year is either a cause for celebration or consternation, but at any rate, the moment we’ve been waiting for has arrived. After moving to a brand new building in January, it’s been a year of change and hard work. We here at Manufactured Environments are definitely looking forward to this semester. We’re even taking a class for the first time in a long time.

If you haven’t stopped by ManufacturedEnvironments.com, you definitely should check out our re-design in progress. Special kudos go to Mike Rohde for designing our new Manufactured Environments logo. Thanks, Mike!

Special kudos also go to our very own Faust Gertz who has joined Manufactured Environments as a full-fledged partner. He’s no longer a guest blogger. We wish him the best in his blogging endeavors.

And for those of you who were wondering, the Arabic below the logo in the upper-left means: Manufactured Environments. Thanks, Mervat!

The NYTimes has a great article about the minimalist Figge Art Museum in downtown Davenport, Iowa. It is David Chipperfield’s first building on this side of the Atlantic. From the article:

The Figge Art Museum here, the first major American building by the British architect David Chipperfield, is a monument to that notion of good taste. Mr. Chipperfield has a knack for making Minimalism look fresh, and here he has designed a very pretty box. Tasteful almost to a fault, the building’s sharp-edged forms and carefully buffed surfaces, which have a soft, reassuring glow, will be especially comforting to those who like their world organized in neat compartments.

The article continues:

The main facade overlooks a vast plaza paved in concrete bricks, which put the museum at a slight remove from the city. Pierced by the lobby entrance and a service door, the facade has a symmetrical, buttoned-up look. But that symmetry breaks down as you circle around to the back, where a grand staircase cut directly into the facade leads to the main lobby and a restaurant, offering sweeping views of the river and the riverboat casino. (Some of the development costs are being covered by Vision Iowa, a state fund that channels gambling proceeds into cultural and civic projects.)

I am overdue for a visit over to see my friends in Davenport. So I will make a point of getting some photos of the Figge while I’m there.

A foggy winter day, originally uploaded by dstout.

The heat wave we’ve been experiencing in the middle of the country broke finally a couple of days ago. The academic year here starts a week from Monday. The cooler weather and the flood of students in town got me thinking about winter days.

I’m not ready for summer to end, but I’m looking forward to the fall semester.

From left: Pastor Carol Tomer, Jerry Vagts, Rachel Vagts, Val Vagts, and Amalia Vagts.

(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

AP Photographer Phelan M. Ebenhack snapped a photo of good friend Amalia Vagts and members of her family during a break of the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Ninth Churchwide Assembly in Orlando, Florida. A measure seeking to ease the church’s complete ban on ordaining sexually active gays and lesbians was defeated 503-490. The vote might look close, but the measure actually would have needed a two-thirds majority to pass.

To learn more about this story and see the photo, see Rachel Zoll’s ‘Lutherans Reject Easing Gay Clergy Rules.’

I remember getting Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films for Christmas in 1990. It was one of those all-star tribute projects produced by Hal Willner. Normally, I wanted nothing to do with anything connected to Disney. I had hated Disney ever since I found out Walt named employees who participated in the 1941 strike which held up the release of Dumbo as Communist sympathizers during his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I wasn’t fond of his role as a propagandist or his “Disneyfication” of German fairy tales either. But, since Tom Waits, Buster Poindexter, Ken Nordine, Suzanne Vega, and Sinéad O’Connor were on the album and Roy Leonard gave it his stamp of approval, I got it for Christmas.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t like the album. I think I liked the contributions by Suzanne Vega and Ken Nordine, but was disappointed in the rest of it. I probably didn’t even give Sun Ra’s contribution much of a listen. Since then I lost the LP, I got hooked on Sun Ra, and wished I could hear Sun Ra’s ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’.

Well, now I can and you can too. Here are two links to a 17MB movie of the pink elephants clip from Dumbo set to Sun Ra’s music.

• sunrapinkelephants.mov(yeahoksure.com)
• sunrapinkelephants.mov(Boing Boing mirror)

(via PCL LinkDump (via Boing Boing (via Enjin)))

William Gibson, my favorite writer, has an article in Wired magazine about the new U2 world tour. He attended a concert on the Vertigo//2005 tour and traveled with the band. He writes about it as U2’s City of Blinding Lights.

The confetti cannon takes me by surprise as U2 opens the concert with “City of Blinding Lights”: glitzy, glittering, emotive kitsch. This glorious falling cloud is designer radar chaff, die-cut metallic PVC film. I pick some up, feeling like a rube at Roswell. The red rectangle is textured, the golden disc smooth, mirrored. Someone’s worked these reflective differences out to get just this effect under exactly these lights. More crucial, though, the Vegas confetti storm is a bridge, a liminal device for the audience; we’re over that threshold now, into the show.

Just got back into town after being gone for a while. To fill in for the moment, I offer this link of jumping cats. Enjoy!

In the meantime, we’re headed out west again to speak at a conference on Wednesday. Expect light posting here until we’re back in town (again).

AJAX and Ruby on Rails seem to be some of the hottest buzzwords on the web. Not surprisingly, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. But what if you just want the cool AJAX and DHTML stuff without learning Ruby or Rails?

Prototype, the object-oriented JavaScript framework used by Rails and self-proclaimed codebase of choice for Web 2.0 (Yikes! Another buzzword!) developers everywhere, can be used in any environment. But, it is embarrassingly lacking in documentation. That is to say, there is no documentation other than Sam Stephenson’s “fairly easy to comprehend” source code. That least there wasn’t until this weekend.

script.aculo.us author Thomas Fuchs set up a wiki so people could help document how to create wonderful effects with his JavaScript libraries. As a bonus, since script.aculo.us builds upon Prototype, at least part of Prototype can/will be documented in the wiki. So besides learning how make your pages dance with the script.aculo.us libraries, mere mortals who don’t consider source code a form of documentation will be able to learn about the core methods and functions of the Prototype framework. After all, since they have to load it to use script.aculo.us, they might as well know what it does.

Thank you to Thomas Fuchs and all of the wiki contributors.