Brian Kerr

I hereby catch George’s creaturely e-mail meme. After reading his post, I decided to see what I could do from my e-mail client, Microsoft Entourage.

(Can somebody explain why Mac e-mail clients are pretty much all terrible? Entourage isn’t very good, but it beats the competition — Mail, Thunderbird, and numerous other commercial clients which don’t support IMAP.)

Entourage doesn’t do GPG signatures of messages or attachments. There is an abandoned project called EntourageGPG meant to address this, but it appears to not have been updated for the last major version of Entourage (2004), and I couldn’t even download the disk image.

It’s possible, and not even that hard, to sign Entourage e-mails with a certificate from Thawte — the company whose zany founder, Mark Shuttleworth, spent a week as astrotourist at the ISS three years ago.

Here’s how.

1. Grab a Thawte certificate. Use Firefox to sign up; I tried and failed with both OmniWeb and Safari.
2. Opt out of the Thawte promotional e-mail list of which the prior step will make you a member.
3. Export your certificate. In Firefox preferences, it’s hiding under the Advanced tab, inside the Security microtab (or wtf the Firefox kids are calling it these days), on the business end of the View Certificates button.
4. Import it into Microsoft Cert Manager, which is likely at /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/.
5. In Entourage, go to the setup window for your e-mail account. Under the Security tab, you can select your certificate and indicate whether or not you’d like to sign outgoing e-mails by default.

(tags: mac)

Book and Volume is a new interactive fiction by Nick Montfort (author of dead tree book Twisty Little Passages, co-editor of New Media Reader, and culprit of ultra clever interactive fiction Ad Verbum).

Dan and I played through “Book and Volume” tonight. Which is to say: we each played through it, but passed HINTs and lists of AMUSING interactions back and forth over IM.

What’s the game about? It’s about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. (”Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.”) What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it:

Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.

It’s about spaces. Mapping. Learning. And easy pop culture / English major references.

I’d recommend this game to anybody, although it is fairly dense and telegraphic — like “Ad Verbum,” it presumes a certain amount of familiarity with nerd culture in general and interactive fiction in specific.

If it wasn’t so short, the game’s weird style would get old very fast. Stylistically, it achieves what For a Change tried to do, while supplying enough structure — if not quite significance — to reward the player’s efforts.

(tags: games narratives)

Remember this? I changed my mind again — no more del.icio.us links on the index page. After two weeks or so of having it on, I decided against it. In the unlikely event that you are now crushed, you can always get to ‘em from the sidebar or at del.icio.us/bkerr.

(tags: metacrap)

After a few months at the School of Information, I have a notebook page with the following open compound nouns incorporating the word “information.” While some of these may be familiar and several are quite handy, if many seem like hand-waving to you, you’d be right.

If I had a dollar for every paper I’ve read which props up some information metaphor and then chucks a very few qualitative data points into the resulting information mess, I’d have a nice information lunch.

Note that, even though I’ve been carrying this damned albatrossy list around, I verified each item for mentions and usage in LISA (the Library and Information Science Abstracts). I’d recorded a few disastrous examples which I can define but — since I couldn’t find them in LISA — didn’t list here.

• information architecture
• information artifact
• information barrier
• information behavior
• information center
• information concept
• information context
• information culture
• information design
• information economy
• information gap
• information ground
• information habit
• information history
• information management
• information object
• information path
• information poverty
• information product
• information resource
• information society
• information space
• information storage
• information strategy
• information superhighway
• information technology
• information universe
• information vehicle
• information wave
• information wealth
• information weight
• information world

(tags: umsi)

This is my del.icio.us tagroll:

Tonight, I’m playing with a new free-form web discussion tool called Say-So. It is an elegant way to ask a question and collect responses. Say-So takes a minimal approach to content and user management, but does offer some access control. (The designers explain it all at their blog.)

It also pushes offline calls-to-action in a style similar to PledgeBank: by generating attractive posters with short URLs to slap up and draw people to your conversation. Say-So posters, in a very clever move, have tear-off tabs along the side.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the design, but there’s not a lot happening on the site yet.

If you’d like to check it out, I started the following conversation:

→ Say-So | Who would win in a fight: Steve Jobs or Bill Joy?

(tags: collective design web)

An observation. The panopticon is passé, having been replaced by the always-on synopticon.