I downloaded the latest version of Skype and connected with my Bluetooth headset. I noticed a new tab for the Skypecasts service, which is a way to have group conversations in Skype. In theory this sounds like a good idea. I sorted and found a channel called “Happy Talk” with 8 other people and intruded. As I lurked and listened, a few non-english speakers were attempting to communicate with each other. It was an audio car wreck. Thick Chinese and Indian accents talking over one another, the echo of feedback, and crappy sound quality. Finally, it resorted to a good-natured game of “Shut up” / “No, you shut up.”
Technology
Trend spotting: Circa 1997
Entrepreneur Magazine posted an interesting article by Faith Popcorn about spotting widespread consumer trends. Read the list below and decide for yourself how accurate trend-spotters have been over the past ten years. It is strange to think that you’re just caught up in the zeitgeist of an era, rather than directing your own reason for being.
Considerations for ecommerce software
I’ve had to locate good ecommerce software (online shopping carts, etc.) a few times for various projects. Each time the details of the project are different, which often requires using something entirely different. Here are some of the things you need to consider when shopping around.
Try to pick the right product for the right platform. What server platform are you using? Pick the ecommerce application that fits in with everything else you’re doing and it will be a lot easier to integrate and maintain. If most of your site is running on Windows 2003 Server using ASP .NET and MS SQL, go with an ecommerce application that uses that. If on the other hand you’re running on Linux with PHP / MySQL pick something that fits in. Most popular cart apps are written in either PHP or ASP. I generally avoid anything that is written in its own proprietary scripting language. While it may be more secure and flexible it usually just ends up more difficult to maintain. It’s just easier to do everything with a common language since you might find yourself pulling in data from the cart in other places around your site. Also, applications written in common scripting languages often have larger communities dedicated to using and extending the product.- Consider the software license. Examine the license agreement. What kind of license do you get? What are you allowed to do? How many times can you install the application? What are the limitations? Many popular ecommerce solutions like OsCommerce are open source, which means that not only is it free to download, but you can do whatever you like with it. Some will allow you to install multiple times if you buy one license, others will only let you install and use once. I had a situation recently where we purchased a license for an application we’re using and later found out the license only allows for one install, even on the same domain, so we couldn’t install it twice on the same site even for non-public use. This was annoying, especially considering it was not an inexpensive product.
- What payment types are supported? How will you be accepting payment? Paypal, credit cards, egold, etc.? If you plan to take credit cards, you’ll need some sort of online payment processing gateway usually provided by companies like Authorize.net. Most ecommerce applications support Authorize.net and Paypal, but you should make sure you know two things: how you will be accepting payment, and are your desired forms of payment supported by the ecommerce application.
- How easy is it to template or reskin? This is a big one unless you don’t mind having a storefront with that looks like everyone else’s. One of the things you’ll notice about many of the ecommerce packages is that the end result always looks very similar. This is particularly true of many of the cheap and free alternatives like OsCommerce. You may have a different banner or background colors, but otherwise one OsCommerce site looks pretty much like another. Do some research on how easy it is to reskin or re-template the application output, especially if you want the storefront to be integrated into the look and feel of your website. When I’m looking at different products, I basically look for something that can spit a product listing into my overall site design. I stay away from stuff that has too many modules and extras because this tends to get in the way of reskinning. It also helps to visit sites that are using the product to see what they’ve done with it.
- What support is available? This is one of those things that is highly variable, but generally what kind of support will you get with the product. If it’s a free product, don’t be expecting any hand holding. Raise your expectation level as the price goes up. For any product, you’ll need to read the documentation. Look for good documentation and an active community when working with a free product. For more expensive products, do your research on what type of support is provided by the vendor. Many vendors will offer free installation or other services that will help you out. On the flip side, some companies specialize in nickel and diming you to death. They’ll sell you the base product for next to nothing, but the necessary payment modules and normally included functions will cost you 50-100% extra. If you want software upgrades and customer support you’ll need to pony up another 50-100%. Support can be a big deal and an added headache if it sucks.
When you need to search of text
I had to sift through tons of server logs today. On Linux, there is a ‘grep’ command that does this, however for Windows you can use a nice freeware program called Windows Grep. It works very well.
Assassinating comment spam
After I logged in to discover 152 friendly (“Great site! Ci@lis!”) spam comments from Cialis and online poker sites, I had to move to a new solution for fighting comment spam. It seems the spammers circumvented my previous solution and implemented it into whatever scripts and tools they use to troll the vast blog geography. Luckily, due to the open source nature of WordPress there were several available solutions for preventing automated comment spam through the use of ‘captcha‘ images. There was one WordPress plugin, SecureImage, that stood out due to its simple drop-in functionality. You just throw the plugin into your WordPress plugin directory and activate it. You must also have the ImageMagick module installed on your server, which is usually the case. If not, it’s an easy install. I had to make one change to the plugin script since it was not detecting the presence of ImageMagick’s convert utility. If you have the same problem, simply comment out the section where the script checks for the location of convert. To see the captcha script in action, try to leave a comment.
Cool things you can do with Google Calendar
- Subscribe from iCal
Using iCal you can subscribe to anyone’s Google calendar. Just open up iCal then right-click the calendar pane on the left and select “Subscribe…” At the prompt, just paste in the link to the .ics file you would like to subscribe to. If you want to send someone an iCal (.ics) file link open up Google calendar and go to “Settings” then select the Calendars tab. Each of your calendars has Sharing settings that lists private and public links to your calendar. Send these to your friends and they can add you to their iCal. - Find or promote local events. Many people are starting to create public Google calendars to promote their events. A cursory search for “Dallas” turned up game schedules for the Mavericks and the Dallas Cowboys, as well as local concerts, and even event calendars for local churches and LARPers. If your group has something planned, add it to a public Google calendar.
- Organize your life. Calendaring is not new, but using an online calendar can help you keep track of all the different aspects of your life. Create separate calendars for work events, hobbies, family, birthdays, etc. Create a public family calendar you can use to schedule events and stay abreast of important family functions. Then just invite your family to the calendar as users.
Tips on Getting Started With Web Design
Designing and creating websites is not difficult. As with anything else, with enough practice, experience and knowledge of the basics anyone can be a “web designer”. 
The important thing is to start somewhere and work from there. Here are a few suggestions:
- Learn basic HTML. HTML is not a programming language. Writing HTML is not programming. Disavow yourself of this idea immediately. It only creates a mental barrier for people like me who are intimidated by math and programming. While HTML has some things in common with classic programming languages (like the use of its own rules and syntax), it is better to think of it as a formatting language since you’re just using HTML to change the appearance of what would normally be just text and pictures. The great part is HTML is super simple. Really. If you’re a total newb where HTML is concerned bookmark w3schools.com. They have great beginning tutorials and even little sandboxes where you can write and render (view the output) HTML all in one place.
- Practice, practice, practice. Build your own starter website. Volunteer to build one for someone else. This is how everyone starts out. It’s fun, low pressure, and it’s for yourself. Make a website where you can putter around and change things any time you feel like it. Don’t hold yourself to an unrealistic standard by comparing your site to everyone else’s. Remember, you’re just a beginner, and you have a lot to learn. You’re going to make a lot of crap before you make something halfway decent. When we’re kids, we all start out drawing stick figures and sausage-headed people. Then gradually, with practice, you start filling in the blanks and progressing. It’s the same thing here. Don’t start out comparing yourself to the people who’ve been doing this stuff for 15 years. If you stay after it, you can be be better than 90% of people within days or weeks.
- “Plus it.” The biggest thing that will help you progress with designing and building web pages is knowing when something does or does not look good. I’m not talking about having good taste. I’m talking about knowing when something looks like crap. If you have high standards for how something should look, it will drive you so crazy when something does NOT look good that you will push yourself to figure out how to make it look better. This sense of dissatisfacton is central to the learning process. Walt Disney had a standard phrase he used to squeeze the best work out of his artists. He would tell them to “Plus it.” Even if you think something looks pretty good, “plus it”. Push it a little more.
StealLearn from other people. As the old saying goes, good artists borrow, great artists steal. Everything you need to learn, someone else has already learned. Use their knowledge and benefit from their experience. Don’t just borrow what other people know, steal it and make it your own. If you see something cool someone has done, right click their webpage and “View source” to see how they did it. This shows you the unrendered source code, which is the blueprint for how a website is put together. Acquaint yourself with every good resource you can get your hands on and soak it up. I’m a big believer in mental osmosis. If you listen to other people talk and write about something long enough, you’ll gradually pick up little lessons and bits of knowledge and experience. Here are a few places that will speed your education: Webmasterworld (a great place to ask questions and lurk), StyleGala (check out what the cool designers are building), A List Apart (the unofficial academic journal for ‘web designers’). There are tons of other equally good places. Just start reading and cribbing from your fellows. 99% of the ‘web designers’ out there are unremarkable (myself included). Do not be intimidated.- Know a few good tricks. Most web designers have a bag of tricks they use over and over. Little things like how to build a website that looks good, but is actually very simple. For example, check out Cameron Moll’s pretty website. As a well-known web designer, he knows how to make things look pretty sharp, but if you look closely you’ll see that his site is actually not that complex. It’s basically a header image, a background, and a two column CSS layout. There are a few complexities, but it doesn’t get much easier than that. If you look at this project he did recently, you’ll see that he uses many of the same tricks. While the site looks very nice, the actual architecture is not that difficult. It’s a navigation element, a large header, and three columns beneath the header. Cameron’s most effective trick is that he’s a whiz with Photoshop, which makes everything else he does look pretty snazzy. Most good designers are very good with Photoshop. I highly recommend spending lots of time in that application as it can account for 60-75% of your success with clients and projects. In my experience, most of the actual ‘designing’ is concepted and performed within Photoshop anyway. I don’t even mess with the HTML part of a project until everything is created in Photoshop. This guy has a similar workflow, which he outlines here. Buy, borrow, or steal a copy of Photoshop if you don’t already have one. It’s a necessary tool that everyone uses.
- You don’t need books or classes. You need to work. Some people will inevitably disagree with this, but I think books and classes (especially on web design) are almost universally worthless. Why? In any class, you are usually either way behind or way ahead of everyone else. This is a bad place to be. The teacher’s job is to make sure everyone gets through the class together, so you’ll usually only end up learning the very basics. Someone else is always more stupid than you are and holding everyone back. Furthermore, most people who write books and teach classes are not that great. The great designers are out designing and creating. Writers on the other hand are not paid to simplify and teach a subject. They’re paid to trick people into buying massive, expensive books that have no resale value. Most truly great designer / writers freely part with their pearls of wisdom to any with the ears to listen. They’re not interested in foisting more unreadable, unnecessary garbage onto the world to further confuse people who just want to learn. There are a few good classes worth taking, but try very hard to learn on your own first. If you spend 1-2 hours a day just playing around building webpages and graphics, you will eventually learn everything you need to know.
I hope you find some of these tips useful. Remember that you can do anything anyone else can do. Do not be afraid to make mistakes or ask questions.
Martin Random: Bullshit Genius or White House Insider?
This guy is either a great liar or he knows some things. It doesn’t have to be true to be entertaining. Be sure to read the whole thread. From Something Awful:
Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.
Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.
Solutions to Laptop Theft
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story recently on an increase in laptop theft in San Francisco coffee houses. One victim was stabbed in the chest for his laptop during a recent robbery.
Lynch said people working on the high-priced computers are easy targets. “You walk by any Starbucks and you see people with a laptop, it’s so tempting for the crooks. They walk in, right on top of the person, and the person has all their attention on the laptop. They snatch it right out from underneath their fingertips. ‘
It’s surprising that there aren’t more incidents of laptop theft considering how expensive laptops can be, especially a nice Mac with titanium case and 17″ LCD. There are tons of people out there who walk around with thousands of dollars in their bags: laptops, ipods, digicams, etc. Luckily, there are a couple of options out there to help prevent laptop theft:
- Get a laptop cable lock. Lock down your laptop with a cable lock that snaps into a specially designed loop on most laptops. Then loop the cable around something that can’t be moved. Unless thieves threaten you with body violence this is a good solution since it actually prevents theft.
- Install Laptop Lojack. There’s a company called Computrace that makes a product by the name of Lojack for Laptops. They even licensed the name and everything. The idea behind it is simple: as soon as your laptop is stolen, you call the police to file a police report then you call Computrace and they set your laptop into “I’ve been stolen” mode. Basically, once the stolen laptop is connected to the Internet it sends notifications back to Computrace that help pinpoint its location by using the IP address, which is tied to your physical address. Computrace then notifies the police with information sufficient to serve as a search warrent. This is a good solution unless the thief wipes the hard drive before he connects to the Internet. Computrace has partnered with Lenovo, the maker of IBM Thinkpads, which now include the Computrace software on the actual BIOS chip. So, even if the hard-drive is wiped the software is still able to run and report back when stolen. Eventually all laptops could include something like this. Computrace claims that 90% of the laptops its customers report lost or stolen are either recovered or the data on them is destroyed using remote commands.
- For Mac Users: Orbicule Undercover. Orbicule makes a similar program called Undercover that dials home when the laptop has been stolen. It also features support for iSight if you have a built-in webcam and will take snapshots of the thief. One interesting feature is that it simulates a hardware failure by gradually darkening the screen. The hope is that if the laptop is sent to Apple for repairs and connects to the Internet while at Apple, Undercover will detect the network settings and launch a special screen with instructions on how to return the stolen laptop to its rightful owner. It’s a novel approach, but who knows how well that works.
Attention board game geeks: Settlers of Catan
Every month at my apartment complex there is a “game night”. It’s hosted by this couple who work for a group called “Cares”, a non-profit that tries to build community in large apartment complexes. The idea behind Cares is that if you make the complex feel more like home the tenants will want to take better care of things and stay longer. That saves the landlord money.
We have a young married couple on site who run all the events. They’re very nice. My guess is the complex gives them a free or sharply discounted apartment in return for their services. I can see the point behind trying to build community in a 300 unit complex, although every time I go to a Cares event there are usually fewer than eight people and most of them are regulars like me who can only be coaxed from their apartments to play board games. The last couple times I’ve gone it’s been a total sausage party, 4-5 guys and occasionally a couple women playing Scrabble. Out of the three times I’ve gone in the last three months, we’ve played Risk once and Settlers of Catan twice. I’m new to Settlers of Catan, but it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s Chess meets Risk. Although there is no combat, it is very strategic and competitive. The basic idea is to get to ten victory points before anyone else. You start out building roads and villages and each village gives you one point and helps you to collect resources like ore, wood, sheep, timber, and clay every time the dice are rolled. These resources help you build or buy development cards. Like Chess, there are several ways to win, and as you play you will see the most popular strategic gambits: the race for the longest road (2 victory points), the race for the largest army (2 victory points), etc. Many people go all out for the development cards, which like Chance cards in Monopoly can often throw you some sort of bonus. For example, there is a card called “Monopoly” that allows you to strip all of one resource out of every player’s hand. The game itself is relatively new as board games go, having been created in 1997 by a small publisher, so many people have not heard of it. It will become one of those classic games, if it hasn’t already. It’s that good.
Poking around online, I stumbled across a free knock-off of Settlers of Catan called Sea3D that you can play over the Internet. It’s a direct translation of the game into digital form produced by Jason Fugate, a programmer at EA in Chicago. It even just looks like a board game on your computer since it uses 3D representations of the game pieces complete with wood grain. In addition to a fantastic iteration of Settlers, Fugate created a ladder ranking and online game matching system, so you can actually compete against players from all over the world. The game application allows you to host your own Settlers matches as well as join games hosted by other players. In some ways, I wish I hadn’t found this because I’ve spent several hours playing since last week. Last night I laid awake at two in the morning trying to figure out why my strategy using the sheep port didn’t pan out. I think I’m coming out too strong in the beginning which results in unwanted attention from my opponents who check me with the Robber and slow me down. The Robber is placed on a tile whenever someone rolls a 7 or plays a Soldier card. If the Robber is on one of your tiles he can keep you from producing resources until the piece is moved.
If you’re interested in playing The Settlers of Catan Sea3D is be a good way to start. It’s still more fun to play in person since you can enjoy the petty little rivalries and arguments that inevitably take place as players become frustrated watching their fortunes change.