In case you hadn't noticed, schiller labs has officially closed. Technically the labs closed in September of 2006, though I continued to blog until 9 May 2007. Now I'm finally getting around to migrating the content on this site to my new (and permanent!) blog at JeffreyBarke.net. The following posts were moved today:

• Call to Action: Help Keep Accessibility and Semantics in HTML
• The New York Web Standards Meetup
• Standardistas…
• Locating Google Earth KML/KMZ files using Google
• Serving XML and XHTML with PHP
• Serving XML and XHTML with Classic ASP
• Three about the Google Maps API
• NYT on Flickr and geotagging
• Free Google Maps Icons
• SQL does not stand for “Structured Query Language”
• MCAD boot camp…

so, day one of the stanley burroughs master cleanse has almost concluded, and we're surprised at how low morale is… hell, we haven't even started to seep yet…

jqln suffers with us—you can read her take on the cleanse here.

from Dan Saffer's Newest Essay: "Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology":

Here are some research guidelines that I use for my projects. Only use design research when:

1. You don't know the subject area well. I'm not an expert in investment banking, so if I had to design a product for investment bankers, I'd need to learn about what they do and why they do it.

2. The project is based in a culture different to your own. Chinese culture isn't the same thing as the culture of the United States. Or India. Or Western Europe. Cultural differences can cause differences in behavior and expectations for a product.

3. You don't know who the users are. This should be self-explanatory, but amazingly enough, many companies don't know who uses their products or why. If you find that your view of the users is different from the stakeholders', you might want to establish a consensus around that—the type of clarity that only research can provide.

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are we greater or lesser standardistas? are you? we're not sure, but you can check it out and tell us…

[ welcome to the matrix, right? while the labs has yet to enter second life [hell, we struggle enough with the first one], did you know that reuters has opened a bureau in second life? ]

via GameSpot news:

At the end of March, Second Life had 165,000 "residents," and now it boasts more than 1 million. But just like in the real world, as the population grows, so do the crime statistics. There have been a series of phishing scams, last week a copybot threatened the intellectual property created for the game, and now a rapidly replicating worm has briefly closed the online world to visitors.

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so gis day 2006 has come and gone, and, unfortunately, we have very little to report and no pictures from the event! we arrived in milwaukee on tuesday afternoon and were immediately shuttled to uw-milwaukee, where we started work on the waukesha trip planner application. at five pm, we lectured and did a workshop on mashups with prof. peng's grad students.

since the labs are less teachers than hacktivists, our presentation did not go as well as planned and we left campus pretty unhappy. luckily, the margaritas at beans and barley were able to slightly assuage our disappointment.

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moving to nyc via plane, so i have to sell my books. over 750 books, priced to move…

politics, history, graphic novels, literature, geography, urban planning, architecture, philosophy, cookbooks, etc.

approx one dollar for paperback, $2–10 trade paper, $5–10 hardcover, $10+ for some rare, special editions.

book sale
10 September 2006
12–4 pm
schiller labs
307 e schiller st
milwaukee, wi 53207
414.630.5883