On his personal weblog, Navarik staffer Derek Miller—whose academic background is in marine biology and oceanography—has been posting information (and many links) about the science of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 26 Dec 2004, as well as online ways to donate to the relief effort. Though he is not a tsunami expert, Derek has also recently started answering reader questions as best he can.

“For the first bug of Christmas, my manager said to me…”

Rob Routs, a key executive at the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, recently spoke (315 KB PDF file) to the AspenWorld 2004 conference about simplifying, standardizing, and integrating Shell’s oil and chemical business to make it more efficient and competitive. Navarik is part of that operation; since 2003, Shell has been one of our major customers.

Routs said that:

Our complex organisation has developed many different ways of doing things and many different—often incompatible—systems to do them. This adds to our costs and reduces our effectiveness. […] For example, in Oil Products we use over 150 different Enterprise Resource Planning systems to provide management information.

As one way to help reduce the number of incompatible systems Shell uses, Navarik provides electronic data capture, standards-based data exchange, and other services for Shell offices and ports around the world.

Capturing information that previously traveled in haphazard email messages, faxes, telexes, phone calls, and courier packages ensures that reporting and analysis are more straightforward. Using open data and storage standards makes it easier for Shell’s IT staff and other vendors to move information between data systems, and also means that the information can remain readable long into the future, even as Shell changes the way it is stored and processed.

Navarik was founded in 2000 to help shipping firms reduce communications overload. Is the same kind of overload now starting to happen in people’s personal music, photo, and video consumption?

If you have an LCD panel for your computer display, such as those on laptop computers or flat-panel monitors, you can dramatically improve the display of text with simple settings, if you use Windows XP or Mac OS X. Here are the details…

In Windows XP, the feature is called ClearType and is not turned on by default. To activate it, choose Start > Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Effects > method to smooth fonts (checked) > ClearType. You can make it even better by visiting Microsoft Typography and running the ClearType Tuner utility.

In Mac OS X, the feature is called Font Smoothing and is available in versions 10.2 and higher of the Mac operating system. It is usually activated by default, but to adjust it choose Apple Menu > System Preferences > Appearance, and then pick from the “Font smoothing style” drop-down menu at the bottom of the window. You need to quit and relaunch applications for the new setting to apply, or you can log out and log in again, or restart your computer, for the whole system to use your new setting at once.

Incidentally, the technique used, called sub-pixel rendering, does not work on traditional CRT picture tubes because it depends on the way LCD panels are built, and neither Mac OS X nor Windows XP lets you control what kind of font smoothing gets used on different monitors independently. So if you use an LCD and a CRT connected to one computer, you must pick one setting for both displays.