So the United States shut down Megaupload.com today.

The United States is the major hub and remains over-represented in the management and delivery of the Internet (cf. ICANN) which, as I recall, has always been done in a consensual, multi-organisational, global environment without the need for tampering in the form of regulatory control or oversight. It’s a bit like Belgium sans gouvernement: you let people who know what they’re doing get on with it and you find that they do well enough without intervention from the political class and the money men (who are the only ones losing out here, let’s face it).

What the United States .gov has chosen to do here unilaterally – shutting down a Hong Kong company primarily serving out of China – has an obvious effect on the rest of the world, but we would be foolish to swallow any assertion that this has been done “to protect and to serve” the rest of the world.

This political blinkering is compounded by a general failure, as far as I see it, to find and support a proper, open global forum for the discussion of the Internet-specific issues beyond narrow and exclusive processes like ACTA which are about as open as a maximum security jail.

Certainly orgs on a supranational level such as WIPO have not really grasped the nettle. This may be because the ACTA process has cut them out of the deal.

Elsewhere the output of interesting developments like WSIS and WGIG has either remained fairly abstract or slowed to a trickle.

Old men with old ideas shuffling slowly

As I see it, this generation of representatives and legislators is faced with a phenomenon for which it does not really have a proper vocabulary. It continues to apply proprietary models that date back to medieval society.

These models are flawed in the online context because they are based on intrinsic notions of fixed physical boundaries and transactions conducted essentially between two parties, each with obligations that bind them to the other.

It is fairly obvious that the Internet does not slide nicely into this particular suit of armour.

To quote the Wikipedia article on WGIG:

IT experts have expressed doubts that a UN body that does not necessarily know enough about the Internet will effectively coordinate the Internet technologically.

If the Internet were a physical object, for that generation it would be a quantity of mercury: a marketable yet frustrating, shapeshifting and fairly noxious liquid which needs to be contained in a bottle.

In fact, the Internet is more like oxygen. It’s already out of the bottle, it’s all around us, you can’t measure it and even if we share a common need for it, we each have a unique relationship with it. You can package bottles and sell them in lots. You cannot package an atmospheric gas, you can only cut access to it.

So if the lawmakers have abdicated from addressing the more technical aspects of the Internet, how do they propose to address the issue?

The Internet is also, for want of a better term, a cross-cutting issue. What we are talking about here ticks an awful lot of boxes and individual institutions will find it hard to address these modern questions with the relatively narrow scope of their respective remits.

The Internet includes elements of intellectual property, the law of contract, freedom of expression, human rights, international law etc because it is the collective product of human intelligence.

If you focus on the tangible targets – the companies, the websites and the servers – you ignore the the way people behave and vice versa.

After all that, my feeling about the Internet is that it’s a reflection of our world. Some good, some bad.

Perhaps those few with the big vested interests are the ones who need to evolve instead of trying to impose their self-serving control on “the rest of us”.

For over a year, I’ve been working on a personal project and finally it’s time to share it: Dopeology.org, a website about doping in professional cycling.

Professionally I work in a fairly conservative environment with stable technologies. What’s more, the emphasis of my activities has been shifting inexorably closer to improvement and management rather than development.

So I decided to stretch myself a little, to take on something less familiar. I set about putting together a web application to collect reported instances of doping in European professional road cycling.

Rediscovering a passion and discovering the truth

I raced a road bicycle as a teenager and I was pretty decent rider even if I had no illusions about future prospects. At fifteen, I crossed the line in front of many other young riders, but then two new competitors entered the race and I could not beat them: beer and girls.

I met a cute girl and fell in love. I went to university. I smoked some cigarettes and then some other stuff. I didn’t train and I had fun instead.

So when pro cycling was rocked by the Festina scandal in 1998, I’d already nearly lost touch with the sport.

Source: W Sojka, Wikimedia Commons

Life goes on. Some years passed and then J and I relocated to Belgium, home of the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Home of pro road cycling. No surprise then that in 2009, I found myself checking a few results and then watching the Tour de France on television.

I’d heard of Lance Armstrong and the controversy surrounding the 1999 Tour de France but as the American now rode Mont Ventoux for the last time, it became suddenly more relevant.

When I’d last followed the pro cycling scene, Armstrong was a slightly heavy, promising one-day racer who got lucky in the 1993 World Championships and later scored a Tour de France stage victory. By 2009, the seven-time Tour winner was getting on in years. His career was almost over.

I cite Armstrong here, not because he was the trigger for my interest in doping in pro cycling, nor because of the FDA investigation currently involving him, but rather because he was one of the very few names I still recognised when I watched the Tour that summer.

So where, I asked myself, were all those other promising names I remembered? Jan Ullrich, Abraham Olano, Francesco Casagrande, Manuel Beltrán, Laurent Roux …

And if so very many of these promising careers were strongly affected by doping, why wasn’t that of Armstrong?

So as any old fan trying to reconnect might do, I searched the Internet. And I found that the chronicle of history, as it often does, had compressed and compacted my projected aspirations of yesteryear into a few concise paragraphs of coldest hindsight.

Caveat emptor

A litany of doping intrigues and revelations would put off many. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that.

Yet I found that my old passion for pro cycling had come this far and it would survive a shock or two more. Even though I was older and perhaps a little wiser, the colour and beauty of the sport of my teenage years could still hold me in thrall.

Indeed it was because I was a little wiser that I quickly accepted the prevalence of doping all through those years I’d blithely worshipped my cycling heros and beyond all to the very beginnings of the sport.

So if I found that I still loved pro cycling and if I wanted to catch up on the faces and exploits of the years I’d missed, I knew that I’d need more than just a sports almanac. I would need plenty more information to decide on how to interpret that history.

This is the reality of cycling – and many other professional sports more or less “outed” – in our world today: things are not often what they seem.

For fun and (non-)profit: the making of Dopeology

Doping and corruption in sport have always existed since the beginning of recorded history but I could not and did not want to cover everything, so the first step was to define the scope of my enquiry.

As I outlined above, my main interest has always been the European pro road cycling scene. I decided to limit myself to doping in that domain.

To render the volume and sourcing of data more manageable, I started out from 1980, a round number which captures some of the typical behaviour of drug use associated with earlier generations but which also fully encompasses the more sophisticated methods prevalent in our own times.

Next I examined the reporting of doping cases over that time period and tried to find the common elements between them.

I decided that every doping case boils down to one or more ‘things that happen’, which I call incidents. Each incident requires the involvement of people, teams and products. Finally, a Berkeleyan proposition: an incident can only be an incident when published sources exist as evidence that the incident happened.

Having proven the concept of incidents using a few real world examples, my partner J and I developed a database design. I don’t normally do this kind of work, so it was pretty exciting. To test and set up the design in MySQL, we got help from the database modelling software Modelright.

Next I developed the simple data entry tools in HTML5, PHP, jQuery and JSON. Once this process was complete, the biggest task then began: adding the data. Even if the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ of the data entry are straightforward enough, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the business rules are more sophisticated. I have since explained these briefly in the incident methodology on the Dopeology website.

I completed the public aspects of Dopeology with similar technologies, adding the excellent Highcharts SVG library for data graphing and an alternative layout for mobile devices.

In fact, the process of entering the data has taken the longest time. The quality of the website depends on the quality of the data, which of course might never be totally complete, since new information comes to light all the time. This ‘grunt work’ consists of a huge amount of internet (and some offline) research in several languages, building up sources and extracting the bare facts.

Conclusion: sharing is caring

I continue to cling (perhaps naïvely) to the purest notion that the Internet is about sharing useful information and generating knowledge. Online marketing and commerce, together with some of the less meaningful aspects of social networking, may be useful but not without the exigence of profit.

My intent has never been to judge any individual or organisation involved in doping activities within professional road cycling. My intent is instead to synthesise from a broad mass of published information, a structured, usable corpus of facts.

From a personal point of view, the project has enabled me to use my professional skills (and to try out some new ones) to closely examine one of my passions and to deliver something that I believe has genuine value to others.

• Visit Dopeology.org

I had never needed to know what actually happened when the translation crawls through a whole page until this morning, when I discovered that all of my custom meta elements were being stripped out.

The values of these meta elements were important to me because I was using them to determine on a page by page basis the parameters in a querystring for a JSONP service.

For those for whom it’s necessary to store data in meta elements in oft-translated web pages, consider yourselves well warned!

The “unknown runtime error” was at one time a common problem when working with innerHTML in Internet Explorer as for some elements it’s a read-only property. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised to see it this time, especially since I couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.

Then I suddenly realised that the source of the problem was probably the dynamically-created HTML5 figure element into which I was asking Highcharts to insert my chart. Rather than mess about with the Highcharts library and a homegrown workaround du jour, I decided to go with a simple div.

As with everything Microsoft, given time things will work out. Updated figure documentation from Microsoft and Caniuse.com confirm that support for HTML5 semantic elements (and therefore read/write innerHTML) should be available in IE9.

Information architecture for websites is about organising information into containers and content. Both of these require labels. This article is about the reasoning process behind website labelling.

How labels work

As with most information delivered electronically, users tend to scan labels rapidly, looking for familiar patterns rather than really digesting the language.

User behaviour on websites all about foraging, experimentation and discovery rather than grassroots comprehension. Initially the most important objective is to provide a strong foothold on our information architecture rather than to fully explain it.

If the user is required to think – to engage in a process of actually deciphering what is written and making a value judgment about it – then there’s an increased risk of confusion. That’s what labels are for: they’re touchpoints of familiarity, rungs on the ladder.

Website labelling mistakes

The three most common mistakes all self-respecting website labels should avoid are:

1. Ambiguity
2. Superfluity
3. Repetition

Since different processes can arrive at different results, it’s easier to illustrate the above with some examples of what not to do!

Poorly devised labels usually end up suffering from one or more of the three mistakes described above, such that they tend to be ambiguous, overlong, complex, superfluous or repetitive:

Facilities Management/BC

Who knows what “BC” stands for (it’s “Business Centre” actually)? Even an habitual user might not understand something that you take for granted from the inside. I have worked in my current environment for two years and I encounter at least one acronym that I don’t already know almost every week!

Next, labels containing acronyms require two processes from the user. The first is to decipher the meaning of the acronyms, whether or not this is a conscious thing, and the second is to decide if it is relevant.

If users do not really ‘learn’ the first process, the label could cause the same user to stumble again. Assumption is always dangerous, even in labelling!

Finally, the slash ‘/’ is a tell-tale sign of “tacking on”. Sometimes we find a bit of content that just doesn’t seem to fit. It’s too brief to warrant its own distinct content unit and it doesn’t relate to most of the other stuff we want to publish.

So we figure this pesky snippet – in our example, it’s ‘BC’ – is vaguely relevant to one lucky volunteer label and we ‘tack it on’ to the end of that, thinking nobody will notice and those that do will ‘get it’. Yet if the rest of our labels are nicely done, we can be sure that this is the label that people will notice for all the wrong reasons!

Let’s look at another example:

Strategic planning and programming

This is a lengthy label. It might even need to break onto two lines and thus become visually distracting.

It’s also ambiguous to some extent. Do we mean “programming” as distinct from “strategic planning” or do we mean to use a slightly shorter version of “strategic planning and strategic programming”? Or are these both wrong and we’re actually referring to, say, “computer programming”?

Finally, in semantic terms the distinction between the two participles (“planning” and “programming”) – which both describe very complex concepts – is probably not essential to deciding whether or not to view the content.

Information sources

This label is also ambiguous. What do we mean by Information sources?

Isn’t the website itself a kind of information source? So the page behind this label, is it going to tell users who to contact for further information? Or is it just going to be a list of links to other websites? Could it even be a map of services available within the organisation? Let’s face it: it could mean almost anything (and frequently does)!

Departmental policy

Policies and guidelines

Ethical policy

Facebook policy

Lots of different policies here. The word ‘policy’ itself is repetitive and does not connect with a simple concept.

What do these labels really represent? How are they different from each other? Are any of them actually related?

Think outside the box

True confessions

Get in touch

Everyone likes a service with a personal touch. Most people like a bit of mystery.

When it comes to website labelling however, these do not apply!

It’s tempting to try to be different on the Internet. Marketers often talk of ‘key differentiators’, for example: in a world of choice, what makes your offer different to anyone else’s? Being different in our labelling is likely to equate to confused users.

The labels in our example above are rather exotic. In fact, they actually stand for a company’s social events calendar, a manager’s blog and a contact form.

That’s another thing about being different: for some users we’re obfuscating the truth of what’s there, while for others it will be a terrible disappointment to click on True confessions and end up with something as banal as a manager’s blog!

Best practices in website labelling

We’ve seen some of the pitfalls and the problems. Now let’s consider some best practices. It will come as no surprise that these best practices are just the mirror opposites of the mistakes we discussed above.

• Every label that we formulate must be clear, concise and simple.
• Each label should mean the same thing to as many people as possible.
• Each label should not require users to “think about” what it means, nor to reflect unduly on whether or not it is relevant to them.
• Each label should be understandable outside the context of parent-child relationships – we shouldn’t have to know in what section a content unit appears to understand what its label represents.
• Labels are just labels. The content they represent is the thing in which users are really interested, so in this case deliver to expectations, not to aspirations.

Labelling etiquette

I take a reductivist approach to information design. I try to reduce things to their purest meaning, like cooking down a sauce. Designers are not artists: we are working for users – not for ourselves and our patrons – so we have to deliver only what is essential and be consistent in our approach to doing so.

I try to apply this idea to all types of information design, including labelling.

In practical terms, that means removing distractions from labels wherever possible. By ‘distractions’, I’m referring to any word or character that is not essential to visual or textual meaning.

Reducing labels is a process that should be approached with a certain amount of caution and sensitivity to the environment in which we’re working, always checking that the result benefits from reduction and that stakeholders are comfortable with it.

With that proviso in place, let’s look at a couple of possibilities:

Grammatical taekwondo

Prepositions, conjunctions, definite articles and sometimes even plurals can be unnecessary. Consider the label Members of the Council. Couldn’t we do better with just Council members?

Noisy capitals and common case

Too much capitalisation makes labels more difficult to read. Consider the label EU-Wide Ex-Parte Decisions: it looks like the profile of a Tour de France mountain stage!

It would work better as European ex-parte decisions. Note that I have only used a single capital letter at the beginning of the label.

If I apply this practice consistently as a rule, the visual appearance of the labels when displayed en bloc will improve.

Punctuation and special characters

In the previous example – EU-Wide Ex-Parte Decisions – I also removed one of the dashes by using a synonym “European” instead of “EU-Wide”. Of course, the stakeholder should approve of this type of choice, particularly when the label embodies a commonly-recognised phrase.

In any case, the dashes subtract from the overall facility of reading, as do any non-alphanumeric characters because, as explained above, they usually require an additional process of deciphering.

Another example might be a service called Helpers@Home. Even with the pervasiveness of modern technologies, not everyone knows the meaning of the “@” symbol. Indeed, in some linguistic cultures this same character conjures up references as diverse as mice, cats, dogs and even elephants.

So if throughout the labelling process we avoid …

• Potentially confusing symbols. and
• Unrequired prepositions as described above

… we could end up with Home care.

Of course, that ignores that prize-winning branding expertise peculiar to middle management, but it delivers to the user exactly what she expects.

Labelling as a collaborative exercise

Formulating labels is not easy. If your experience suggests otherwise, then you probably work alone and don’t do much usability testing.

Labelling is not something that should be done in an hermetically sealed environment, especially when a collaborative process is so easy to set up.

All we need are stakeholders, a spare wall and plenty of sticky notes. To begin with, we encourage and accept any label suggested by a participant.

Then we start to narrow the collection down to just the labels that all participants can validate, sometimes coming up with an entirely new result, but always discussing our reasoning out loud.

We can later use the selected labels to develop hierarchical information structures, which should be the next collaborative exercise.

I’ve spent much of this week struggling with a Google Mini, a server that plugs into a network, crawls what it’s told to crawl and then returns search results using the vendor’s famous technology.

The Mini had been sitting there in perfect anonymity – as far as being bright yellow allows – on the server rack, looking like a slab of emmental. It’s a cheaper and therefore more limited version of the Enterprise search which I first came across over five years ago while working for Research Machines.

One fine day, someone vaguely remembers the Mini’s existence and I’m asked to “look into it”. Good things rarely come of these three words.

Getting started

I’ve never been keen on Google’s documentation and the bumph that ships with the box is no exception.

The information is properly formatted but it just never seems to get inside my thick skull. In my experience as an information designer, this tends to happen when the writer fails to provide a context. It helps to know the purposes, reasons and consequences of one’s interactions.

I’m not a sys-admin, but I’m not exactly a technology virgin either. Even so, getting to grips with the new vocabulary (“OneBox”, “Host Load Schedule”, “Freshness Tuning”) is a difficult experience.

Background activity

According to the log file, I learn that the Mini has been happily crawling away for the last almost three years already. Perhaps the licence limit has been met.

Could this go some way to explaining the steampowered search speeds I’ve been getting? With 50,000 items of content in the index and me the only user querying them, an enormous recordset of 269 results is rendered in a dizzying 34 seconds!

Front-ends

One of the better aspects of the box admin is the ability to alter the search/results UI. There’s so much bad code in the factory XSLT that this comes as a big relief.

Customised search results

As this autumnal week of long shadows draws to a weary close, I’m left plugging away at what originally promised to be the most interesting aspect of the Mini for me.

OneBox modules are self-written keys to leverage information from other datasources when returning Mini search results. In theory, you can poll another server when users ‘trigger’ the functionality in their search terms. Here’s an example:

1. User submits a search query for who: mike padgett
2. Google Mini checks the query for triggers – keywords or phrases that trigger a OneBox
3. Google Mini runs the search for mike padgett normally and polls the location defined in the OneBox, say, http://myserver/?q=mike+padgett
4. Google Mini processes the results and returns custom-formatted content above the ordinary search results

This offers fantastic opportunities for the “joined-up” organisation. Rather than simply go ahead and dump the output of the crawl matches, we can first offer customised boxes of information. Google already uses many examples of OneBox modules in its own online searches, including geographically aware weather summaries and unit conversion.

I decided to adapt an “internal organisation” example outlined by Google by developing a little box for staff member contact details, triggered by a who keyword similar to that mentioned above.

So far, however, I’ve been unable to get anything working. What I’ve been left with are: a blank search log, no error logging and a mild headache. Watch this (vacant) space…

Epilogue

It’s not easy to say whether the Mini – or indeed big brother Enterprise – has been a success. Of course, the Gartners of this world probably told you that it was the best thing since Sharepoint.

As for the people who actually have to work with the stuff on which management bursts the budget, there are some pretty jaded reviews out there.

Michael Cottam talks of hardware failure, while Justin Deltener’s problems were all software-related.

Finally, I think that Ville Laurikari sums up many of my own frustrations when he says: “It’s like shining a bright light on a big pile of crap. It’s still a pile of crap, but you can see it more clearly.”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Summer’s over and that means it’s business time in the public sector. It’s time to get down.

We now have the unenviable task of managing the transition between the current, mostly monolingual version and our eventual target of providing support for over twenty languages.

So we fill a small room with ourselves the web team, our opposite numbers in communications and the translators. The first salvo is fired by the translators.

“As part of our terms of engagement,” says their self-appointed spokesperson, “we need to have a detailed analysis of our intended audience. We will translate,” she adds, “but first we will need to rewrite. So we need to know for whom we’re writing.”

A simple enough question, I think, while savouring the scent of high quality grammar in the room.

But our communications representative is lost for words and moments later my eyebrow’s raised so far, it’s using my forehead as a launch platform.

Despite the airing of a few vague keywords, it becomes pretty clear that we do not know our audience. So it falls to Muggins the Web Consultant to find out:

• Just who are these mysterious 1.4 million visitors a year, and
• Are we saying the right things to them?

Audience analysis

When you operate in the echoey corridors of the public sector, few things are straightforward.

And when the only things you’re selling are policies, messages and a mass of gauzy statistics, you get no customer service, no focus group insights and no sales trends.

So how do you analyse your audience? The answer, it seems, is to gather as many different sources as you can find and make some informed conclusions.

Visitor profiles

I already have a few visitors – over 1.4m annually as mentioned above – so provided that I have good quality analytics, I can learn a lot from them.

Analytics software should tell me the following:

• Physical location
• The organisation from which the visitor originates (sometimes)
• Locale/language to which the visitor’s system is set
• How often the visitor visits
• How long the visitor spends on how many pages
• The probability that the visitor found what she was looking for

Free, hosted and effective solutions such as Google Analytics cannot always be used when there are issues around data rights. So, as often happens, an expensive, unusable and ineffectual commercial solution tends to be available instead, just to enliven a slow afternoon.

Inbound links

The same software should produce a table of inbound links: clicks on links from other websites that lead to my own. I can also use search engines for similar though somewhat more laboriously attained results.

The character of these originating websites can tell me a lot about who’s interested in my website. Typical examples might be:

• Businesses and interest groups with direct links
• Blogs maintained by academics
• Twittering activists

Such a trawl can be both fun and informative and should be recommended to the business side of the organisation: it’s a useful way of staying connected to the vox populi, particularly when anticipating those difficult questions for the next press conference!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Commissioned studies

Sometimes these big, chunky and expensively bound documents can be a goldmine, particularly when the scope of the study included aspects of communications.

I vigorously ransacked a number of these documents (don’t drop them on your foot) in which the writers used qualitative and quantitative study methods on a range of handpicked interviewees. The kind of profiling done throughout that handpicking process helped me to polish my own audience analysis.

Our great leaders

So far, I’ve looked out at all the folks coming in like a wide-eyed kid at the docks.

Now it’s time to look inside, into the dark inner soul of the organisation, at the denizens of this public sector underworld who speak in whispers, spread bizarre and macabre rumours, drink sour-brewed coffee and blank one another in the corridors.

I ask them what they think about the composition of our audience. After all, the policies, messages and statistics are coming from their marvellous minds like some gushing fountain of knowledge.

Enquiries

Finally, let’s not forget who we’re working for here. Every public sector organisation that isn’t replete with subterfuge, secrecy and skulduggery has some sort of enquiry system in which people can get in contact and ask questions.

Lucky for me, my communications chums are in charge of this bit, so it wasn’t so difficult to get information about who these people were and what they were asking of the organisation.

And since the method of contact was a form on the very website about which I’ve been making all this fuss, I can be pretty certain that these are live, real, actual, three-dimensional members of our audience!

And so I face the final curtain

Armed with all that data, I feel confident that our translators will be satisfied. In the hush of the meeting room, only the throaty burr of the air-conditioning can be heard, along with the twanging of a few nerves before the proceedings begin.

I have drawn up a set of profiles that define my audience, based on all the sources of evidence I listed above, each with their own succinct, respective conclusions. I found, to my complete lack of surprise, that each of these sources tended to agree with one another anyway. Of course they would, there are no ghosts in the machine round these parts.

I have photocopied my analysis – enough copies to go around whilst equally minimising the effect on tree life around the globe (think before you print, folks) – and I have passed them out. The translators’ self-appointed spokesperson is eager for a cross-examination.

Finally, our communications representative breezes into the room.

“Don’t worry everyone,” she cries, “the directors have decided not to go ahead with the translations because they would be too expensive!”

I was disappointed to learn that Google had a hand in recent proposals on Internet neutrality.

Google-Verizon proposals: telling tall tales

These proposals purport to underwrite the future of an open internet. To quote the BBC story on the subject:

“The set of seven proposals guarantee equal access to the internet and call for the prohibition of wired broadband providers from discriminating between different kinds of internet traffic to ensure that no-one can pay to have their traffic treated more favourably.”

Ostensibly it all sounds laudable, but given that only wired providers would be affected, it’s only one side of the coin. The future, we are often reminded, is wireless and between them Google and Verizon have everything to gain as the market continues to grow.

56% of Americans have accessed the Internet wirelessly

- Pew Internet & American Life Project (2009) [Source]

I sincerely hope that, with these “compromise proposals” as it calls them, Google has backed a loser.

Self-interest and the public interest

According to the blog post above, Google aimed for these two goals:

1. Users should choose what content, applications, or devices they use, since openness has been central to the explosive innovation that has made the Internet a transformative medium.
2. America must continue to encourage both investment and innovation to support the underlying broadband infrastructure; it is imperative for our global competitiveness.

The only choice guaranteed by the first goal, given the content of the proposal, is Hobson’s choice. Even if access to everything is open, a two-speed wireless internet will dissuade users from consuming information and applications not already sanctioned by wireless providers and their online partners.

The ‘explosive innovation’ of which Google speaks is the fruit of unrestricted choice based on a level playing field of user access, whatever the connection.

Then there’s the second goal. Despite all the WTO-encouraged talk of stamping out protectionism, these proposals seek to bolster American interests in a global economy.

These are words designed to sound sweet to American regulators burned by the Comcast case, the American public whose jobs are threatened by cheap labour, cheap imports and massive offshoring and to Google and Verizon shareholders everywhere, who will no doubt be salivating in anticipation.

Corporations and public policy

We have reached a point in time at which corporations can now define public policy by the front door. Where once lobbyists had to ply their trade in hidden corridors, today the democracy of money and influence is out and proud.

The Apples, the Microsofts and now the Googles of this world are no longer content with telling us what to buy.

These proposals on the future of the internet show us that pervasive product marketing is no longer enough. A corporation now needs to be willing enough to dictate our future, our moral principles and how we should live.

Whilst working for a company obsessed with customer service, I once learned that 95% of customers won’t bother to report a problem, they’ll just go elsewhere.

That figure is probably higher still on the Internet, where anonymity and choice are key aspects of the customer experience.

Support personnel at the Belgian edition of online recruitment website Monster clearly have much to learn about customer service.

Since the last time I updated my profile, Monster has ajaxified, widgetised and fetishised many of its interfaces. Most of them work fine.

However, I wrote to Monster the other day about a problem in Firefox with the tabs in their My Profile page. When I click these tabs, I explained, the content below is supposed to change. Instead, the click event is not being captured by the appropriate script so that the browser is navigating away to an error page.

Here’s an abridged reply from Davide Palaia of Monster Global Customer Services:

Dear Mike Padgett …

First of all, I would like to thank you for putting this to our attention, I will contact the right department and investigate for you.

However I would suggest you to either clear cache and cookies of your FF or eventually, if you still notice some difficulties, download Internet Explorer … [My emphasis]

I rest my case.

In addition to my earlier article on Getting started with a Garmin eTrex H GPS for walking, here’s a brief explanation of how I create routes and transfer them to the eTrex H.

Before we get started, there are a few points to mention:

• We’ll be using proprietary software and map products on Windows XP or above
• When creating a very basic route, we have no real need for waypoints, just via points – so I won’t be discussing waypoints here
• Sometimes the workflow might seem a bit convoluted, but as a routine I’ve gotten used to it and it will probably apply to almost any basic Garmin handheld device, not just the eTrex H!

Using Mapsource

As I explained in my Getting started… article, I use Garmin’s Mapsource software to plan and create routes, which doesn’t ship with the eTrex.

Mapsource (v6.15.11 illustrated here but v6.16.x works the same) is surprisingly clunky for a desktop software client. As the main interface between the eTrex H device and the computer, however, it’s pretty much essential and I can live with its limitations.

So with that in mind, let’s start up Mapsource now.

Drawing a route

First we’ll need to select our map product. Assuming it’s properly installed and unlocked, select it.

Select the map product you want to use

We need to find the starting location for our route. I often use Google Earth or Google Maps to do this: a satellite view offers a more human picture of car parking facilities and other features.

Use the Find menu and the Hand tool in Mapsource to drag to the location. The “+” and “-” keys will zoom in and out respectively.

Now select the Route tool and click on the map at the desired starting point.

Click on the map at the desired starting point

Point by point, draw a route out on the map. If you’re walking, you’ll obviously want to stick to paths and trails rather than proper roads. Mapsource isn’t too intuitive when you make mistakes, so try to minimise them wherever possible, making use of Edit > Undo / Ctrl Z. If you do need to go back and edit your points, then you should learn how to do that with the Route tool. Since I need to keep this article simple, I won’t cover it here.

Tip!

When drawing out a route, I again tend to use Google Maps or Google Earth with the pictures layer(s) turned on. This helps me ensure I don’t miss any beauty spots or places of interest (because people tend to take photos of them).

Showing the picture layer in Google Maps

Tip!

Always think of the real world when planning a route:

• Shorter is not necessarily easier or safer
• Map data (especially Garmin’s own topo maps) can be infuriatingly inaccurate, so check for updates and also your paper map
• Little details on the PC can help a lot on the trail – for example, if I’m going straight over a crossroads, I eliminate doubt by placing my next via point after the crossroads

Placing a via point after the crossroads

Caution!

It’s important to remember when drawing that the eTrex H only accepts a maximum of 125 points per route. This limit increases as we go up the food chain of Garmin GPS models. So what can we do with a long and/or complicated walk? The options are limited but I don’t mind. More on that below in the Preflight section.

Once you’ve finished drawing out the route, you might want to save it. The default file format is GDB, a Garmin proprietary format specific to Mapsource and as such not necessarily transferable to other software. Personally, I stick to GPX, which is an XML standard (albeit proprietary itself) and supported by all software and devices I’ve so far encountered.

Preflight

Years ago, I used to do graphic design. After the creative work was finished and in order to send the artwork off to the printer, a final – and sometimes highly technical – workflow would usually be necessary: Preflight.

In the same way, if because of length or complexity the route contains more than 125 via points, we will need to do another workflow before we can transfer our route to the eTrex H. If the route contains 125 or less via points, you can continue to Transferring GPS routes to the eTrex H.

With longer routes, we need to consider one of the following options:

1. Cutting out superfluous via points to get the total down to 125 points – this is easier than it sounds, because a clearly-defined trail rarely needs every kink to be marked with a point
2. Dividing a big route into multiple smaller routes – this in turn triggers another eTrex H-specific constraint, the grand total of points across all routes cannot exceed 500!

If you can’t work around the point limitations of the eTrex H by option 1, then option 2 will work for all but the most complicated routes. You just need to be comfortable with the idea of switching routes on the fly during your walk.

So speaking personally, the only practical inconvenience for me is having to keep an eye on the device when I know we’re nearing the end of one route, because then I’ll need to switch to the next one on the list.

Tip!

Cutting out the flabby via points or splitting a big route into a series of smaller routes could be a big headache. Mapsource certainly won’t help us.

Enter the resourceful Dutchman Edward Sackman and his brilliant WinGDB utility. Alongside Mapsource, I use WinGDB almost as much.

WinGDB is a multitool of functions that the folks at Garmin neglected to include in Mapsource, including facilities for route simplification (based on some excellent mathematics) and splitting. You can output the results to a file or to another instance of Mapsource.

Edward Sackman’s WinGDB (v3.44 shown)

If you’re planning more complex routes and you’re willing to accept the eTrex H’s limitations, then spend some time getting to know WinGDB.

Transferring GPS routes to the eTrex H

Without Mapsource or an alternative [1], you cannot transfer routes or tracks to or from the eTrex H because the serial interface cannot be read like a disk in the way that we might do with, say, a digital camera. So you’d otherwise be reduced to entering the points on the device manually, which is no fun at all.

So far we’ve prepared our route using Mapsource, so let’s go back to it now.

If you’ve installed the correct drivers for your eTrex H (see the Getting started… article for more information), transferring routes to it is simple using the Transfer > Send to device... menu:

Be sure not to pull out the cable or stop the operation before it’s finished. Also check the device to confirm that the transfer has completed. If your route contains too many points, the device (not the computer) will truncate it and display a message to that effect.

And finally, as this is serial and not USB, be patient because the transfer process can take a while!

Footnotes

1. “… or an alternative”: alternatives to Mapsource as an interface between a computer and the eTrex H are rare. GPSBabel and EasyGPS are two examples of which I have no personal experience. Most of Garmin’s other, higher specification devices are more simply managed since they feature removable memory cards ↑