My boss had me write, rewrite, change, edit and perfect an online project request system. After all that work I had to add a "Print Document" button to the bottom of every page. Not only did they want a fully functional advanced online system, they wanted the paper trail too. And not only that, but with everyone printing out each page, the paper trail is about 10 times as big as the one sheet handed around the office.
They never gave me a clear reason for this. All I can think of is that the big bosses don't trust computers. But this is a web design company. Go figure.
Back when I worked for House of Blues a couple years ago they started doing Yahoo chats with artists. To test the system and ensure that there were at least a few questions ready to be asked, we always submitted a few questions ourselves. I couldn't tell you if this is still the case, and I couldn't find any of the chat transcripts, but I remember my one standard question was what the artists thought of mp3s and people downloading their music off the internet. All the artists who I asked this to were on a major label, and none of them had any problems with people downloading mp3s. I specifically remember the Indigo Girls had the best answer. They were totally cool with it, but wanted those same people to go to their shows. If only these artists would all stand up together like the Offspring tried to do and try and bring about some change from the inside.
Hmmm. After further investigation it appears that the tracks are hosted elsewhere and you upload them to your server and just link to them. Better for the dude that runs the site, but unfortunately that type of setup usually ends up in a high percentage of broken links. I'll cross my fingers and hope it works though. It's a promising idea.
I thought about starting a similar site a few months ago, but I think in the end there will be too many bandwidth issues. I would guess the same will go for this site too. The "Groundhog Day" track is 17MB and I'm sure everything else will be pretty big too. Unless they get some kind of revenue source I think they'll have a hard time. And although this sounds like it would be a great thing for the movie industry to get behind, I'm sure they think it'll hurt their profits or infringe on their copyrights (they'll try to find a way) in some way and won't support it. A better idea might be something like Audiogalaxy (minus the spyware).
At one place I worked all the machines were named after cheeses - Gouda, Parmesan, Swiss, Stilton, Feta, etc. My favorite was Head for the firewall. The only problem was when we added servers we'd spend an hour at cheese.com looking for a short cheese name that was easy to spell. It got pretty tough after a while.
Plus it must have done something to me subconsciously, because I'd often have cheese sandwiches for lunch.
Dammit, it wouldn't have been redundant if this little worm at work hadn't come over and wasted my time for 5 minutes. And now i'll probably get an off topic for this. All that hard karma work down the drain.
If you're going to have a complicated DHTML / Java / Flash / whatever site, I'd suggest also having a bare bones site. I don't have a browser that supports Flash and I've been shut out of countless sites who just assume everyone has Flash. Granted, most people do, but I come from the school of thought that websites should work for everyone, not the just Microsoft majority. Also, if you're going to use a Flash intro, for the love of God have a "skip intro" button in the HTML.
Also, what about skinning your site? I just redid my entire site to work with different skins and it's very easy to do if you keep the content seperate from the actual design of the page. You could try XML and XSLT for that, or you could just do it with a decent backend. I don't have the most beautiful site, but I can change the appearance of it in under 5 minutes by changing 1 line in a config file and then adding the skin.
Style sheets and included files are wonderful. I'd highly suggest using them because it cuts down on the time it takes to update the site. But don't go overboard because it could eventually slow things down.
I despise frames, for the most part, because it makes it difficult to link to different pages. If you have your navigation in a frame, make sure if someone links to a frame directly that they can still navigate the site. You can do this by having a navigation footer or something, or by using Javascript to check and then redirect them to the framed version. But again, I warn you about relying on Javascript.
As many people have already said, content is the most important thing. Don't try to fit your content in a pretty design. Design the site to work with the current content. It will save you hours of agony.
The spy gadget gallery sounds like an excellent idea, but unfortunately most of the gadgets on display hardly measure up to the items on display from movies and TV shows, such as the "Get Smart" shoe phone. Obviously real gadgets won't measure up to ficticious Hollywood gadgets, but you'd think they could do better than the binder for the president's daily intelligence briefing. I wonder why they'd want to overshadow the real gadgets if their goal is to spread the word about why so much money is put into the intelligence community? It seems like some of those items are just filler so the exhibit is a decent size. Still, the cameras and the microdot sound interesting.
They've been doing this in England for a while. I saw a show about it on TV last year and among other things, it showed the police tracking down a bank robber. A bank clerk noticed that the robber asked them to put the money in a new shopping bag that had just been designed, and that he was wearing a brand new jacket. So they went to the surveillance tapes of the store where the bag came from, and saw the guy buy the jacket, and then saw him going to the bank on some of the outside cameras. They caught him from the credit card receipt used to buy the jacket. I'm glad he was caught, but damn that's really frightening. I sure as hell don't want my whole life on surveillance tapes.
No more AOL chat rooms for Biff the big hairy trucker pretending to be Buffy the sweet little virgin. Now he can securely coerce little kiddies to visit without worrying about being traced.
One more thing about Time ...
on
The End of Cyber BS
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. As he investigated different kinds of eBay auctions, checking back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came home, and go back whenever I wanted."
The same exact thing goes for books. This isn't revolutionary and new. For hundreds of years people have put down books when their son came home and gone back whenever they wanted.
- Space. All those eBay servers have to be housed somewhere.
- Time. This guy is stretching it a little if he thinks eBay is unrelated to time. Since, you know, their auctions are pretty much based on a closing time and they tell you how much time you have left to bid, down to the second.
- Self. I'll give him that one.
- Knowledge. I hope he took it all with a grain of salt. Even if he was learning about quilts. There's all kinds of misinformation out there.
Actually, after writing way too much DHTML, I've come to the conclusion that IE 4 has been holding DHTML back. And unfortunately, enough people still use it to make this a valid issue. NS 4 is much better than IE 4 for most Javascript and DHTML stuff. And don't forget about the Javascript Console, which is invaluable for debugging a lot of things. At least with NS 4 you can work around a lot of the issues. IE 4 just flat out refuses to work.
Why would the Post Office let a competitor advertise in their building? I'm sure whoever uses XP will use email, which means less snail mail for the Post Office to deliver.
So... is the government trying to decrease the public's need for snail mail so they can lay off postal workers, or are they smart enough to know that XP is such a poor, insecure excuse for an OS that they know it'll crash and people will go back to snail mail and increase their business?
I wonder if that's why they're interested in Red Hat too?
Social Retardedness
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've noticed that my already retarded social skills have become worse since I've been talking to my friends on AIM, ICQ, IRC, etc. I've always been shy and bad at talking to people, but since I've been using the Internet it's been getting noticeably worse. I spend much more time talking to friends online than I do in real life. And these are real life friends I'm talking about here, not people that I met online. It seems that after chatting online for several years I've become accustomed to having a while to reply and the ability to read and re-read what they've written. So now in the real world I "um" and "ahh" for a little while or just don't say anything at all.
The problem with eBay is that the morons get into these insane bidding wars days before the auction closes, which invariably raises the price to ridiculous levels. I stopped buying from eBay for that very reason. The only time I'd ever bid on something was a minute before the auction closed. It should be obvious that only bidding in the closing minutes of the auction and only raising your bid the minimum amount would be the sensible thing to do and would get you a much better price than consistantly bidding and raising the price for several days. I wish that they'd figure this out for themselves, but I guess it'll be tough getting anyone to spread the word because everyone that knows this is probably smart enough to take advantage of it and sell their junk on eBay.
"the Hollings bill would make it a civil offense to develop a new computer or related technology that does not include a federally approved security standard preventing the unlicensed copying of copyrighted works. In at least one version, the law would make it a felony to remove a watermark or flag from copyrighted content. It would also outlaw logging onto the Internet with any computer that removes or sidesteps the copy protection technology."
So, if this gets passed, would we all be forced to upgrade our computers before we can legally log on to the internet? I can't imagine that most Americans would be able to afford this. Will the Cyber Police haul away Joe Poorman for not being able to afford an upgrade? And what about people in other countries? Could they use their old computers?
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 170mb 17" LCD and it looks excellent. It's also got a TV tuner built in, which I haven't had as much luck with though. I've played a little PS2 on it and it looks pretty bad. But for a monitor it's great.
Slashdot Mirror
My boss had me write, rewrite, change, edit and perfect an online project request system. After all that work I had to add a "Print Document" button to the bottom of every page. Not only did they want a fully functional advanced online system, they wanted the paper trail too. And not only that, but with everyone printing out each page, the paper trail is about 10 times as big as the one sheet handed around the office.
They never gave me a clear reason for this. All I can think of is that the big bosses don't trust computers. But this is a web design company. Go figure.
Back when I worked for House of Blues a couple years ago they started doing Yahoo chats with artists. To test the system and ensure that there were at least a few questions ready to be asked, we always submitted a few questions ourselves. I couldn't tell you if this is still the case, and I couldn't find any of the chat transcripts, but I remember my one standard question was what the artists thought of mp3s and people downloading their music off the internet. All the artists who I asked this to were on a major label, and none of them had any problems with people downloading mp3s. I specifically remember the Indigo Girls had the best answer. They were totally cool with it, but wanted those same people to go to their shows. If only these artists would all stand up together like the Offspring tried to do and try and bring about some change from the inside.
This might be a little OT, but I found this link which has all the Sierra games and when they were released. Just in case anyone else was interested.
Hmmm. After further investigation it appears that the tracks are hosted elsewhere and you upload them to your server and just link to them. Better for the dude that runs the site, but unfortunately that type of setup usually ends up in a high percentage of broken links. I'll cross my fingers and hope it works though. It's a promising idea.
I thought about starting a similar site a few months ago, but I think in the end there will be too many bandwidth issues. I would guess the same will go for this site too. The "Groundhog Day" track is 17MB and I'm sure everything else will be pretty big too. Unless they get some kind of revenue source I think they'll have a hard time. And although this sounds like it would be a great thing for the movie industry to get behind, I'm sure they think it'll hurt their profits or infringe on their copyrights (they'll try to find a way) in some way and won't support it. A better idea might be something like Audiogalaxy (minus the spyware).
I don't know about the Massachusettes licenses, but my California license has all that information printed on the front already.
At one place I worked all the machines were named after cheeses - Gouda, Parmesan, Swiss, Stilton, Feta, etc. My favorite was Head for the firewall. The only problem was when we added servers we'd spend an hour at cheese.com looking for a short cheese name that was easy to spell. It got pretty tough after a while.
Plus it must have done something to me subconsciously, because I'd often have cheese sandwiches for lunch.
Dammit, it wouldn't have been redundant if this little worm at work hadn't come over and wasted my time for 5 minutes. And now i'll probably get an off topic for this. All that hard karma work down the drain.
If only they could screen for the Trolling gene. Troll Free /. in 50 years?
If you're going to have a complicated DHTML / Java / Flash / whatever site, I'd suggest also having a bare bones site. I don't have a browser that supports Flash and I've been shut out of countless sites who just assume everyone has Flash. Granted, most people do, but I come from the school of thought that websites should work for everyone, not the just Microsoft majority. Also, if you're going to use a Flash intro, for the love of God have a "skip intro" button in the HTML.
Also, what about skinning your site? I just redid my entire site to work with different skins and it's very easy to do if you keep the content seperate from the actual design of the page. You could try XML and XSLT for that, or you could just do it with a decent backend. I don't have the most beautiful site, but I can change the appearance of it in under 5 minutes by changing 1 line in a config file and then adding the skin.
Style sheets and included files are wonderful. I'd highly suggest using them because it cuts down on the time it takes to update the site. But don't go overboard because it could eventually slow things down.
I despise frames, for the most part, because it makes it difficult to link to different pages. If you have your navigation in a frame, make sure if someone links to a frame directly that they can still navigate the site. You can do this by having a navigation footer or something, or by using Javascript to check and then redirect them to the framed version. But again, I warn you about relying on Javascript.
As many people have already said, content is the most important thing. Don't try to fit your content in a pretty design. Design the site to work with the current content. It will save you hours of agony.
I'll finally have a legitimate excuse for constantly tapping my foot while I'm sitting down. Take that, $whiner.
The spy gadget gallery sounds like an excellent idea, but unfortunately most of the gadgets on display hardly measure up to the items on display from movies and TV shows, such as the "Get Smart" shoe phone. Obviously real gadgets won't measure up to ficticious Hollywood gadgets, but you'd think they could do better than the binder for the president's daily intelligence briefing. I wonder why they'd want to overshadow the real gadgets if their goal is to spread the word about why so much money is put into the intelligence community? It seems like some of those items are just filler so the exhibit is a decent size. Still, the cameras and the microdot sound interesting.
They've been doing this in England for a while. I saw a show about it on TV last year and among other things, it showed the police tracking down a bank robber. A bank clerk noticed that the robber asked them to put the money in a new shopping bag that had just been designed, and that he was wearing a brand new jacket. So they went to the surveillance tapes of the store where the bag came from, and saw the guy buy the jacket, and then saw him going to the bank on some of the outside cameras. They caught him from the credit card receipt used to buy the jacket. I'm glad he was caught, but damn that's really frightening. I sure as hell don't want my whole life on surveillance tapes.
No more AOL chat rooms for Biff the big hairy trucker pretending to be Buffy the sweet little virgin. Now he can securely coerce little kiddies to visit without worrying about being traced.
- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. As he investigated different kinds of eBay auctions, checking back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came home, and go back whenever I wanted."
The same exact thing goes for books. This isn't revolutionary and new. For hundreds of years people have put down books when their son came home and gone back whenever they wanted.
- Space. All those eBay servers have to be housed somewhere.
- Time. This guy is stretching it a little if he thinks eBay is unrelated to time. Since, you know, their auctions are pretty much based on a closing time and they tell you how much time you have left to bid, down to the second.
- Self. I'll give him that one.
- Knowledge. I hope he took it all with a grain of salt. Even if he was learning about quilts. There's all kinds of misinformation out there.
Actually, after writing way too much DHTML, I've come to the conclusion that IE 4 has been holding DHTML back. And unfortunately, enough people still use it to make this a valid issue. NS 4 is much better than IE 4 for most Javascript and DHTML stuff. And don't forget about the Javascript Console, which is invaluable for debugging a lot of things. At least with NS 4 you can work around a lot of the issues. IE 4 just flat out refuses to work.
bad joke.
think.
Why would the Post Office let a competitor advertise in their building? I'm sure whoever uses XP will use email, which means less snail mail for the Post Office to deliver.
... is the government trying to decrease the public's need for snail mail so they can lay off postal workers, or are they smart enough to know that XP is such a poor, insecure excuse for an OS that they know it'll crash and people will go back to snail mail and increase their business?
So
I wonder if that's why they're interested in Red Hat too?
I've noticed that my already retarded social skills have become worse since I've been talking to my friends on AIM, ICQ, IRC, etc. I've always been shy and bad at talking to people, but since I've been using the Internet it's been getting noticeably worse. I spend much more time talking to friends online than I do in real life. And these are real life friends I'm talking about here, not people that I met online. It seems that after chatting online for several years I've become accustomed to having a while to reply and the ability to read and re-read what they've written. So now in the real world I "um" and "ahh" for a little while or just don't say anything at all.
Go ahead and flame me now.
The problem with eBay is that the morons get into these insane bidding wars days before the auction closes, which invariably raises the price to ridiculous levels. I stopped buying from eBay for that very reason. The only time I'd ever bid on something was a minute before the auction closed. It should be obvious that only bidding in the closing minutes of the auction and only raising your bid the minimum amount would be the sensible thing to do and would get you a much better price than consistantly bidding and raising the price for several days. I wish that they'd figure this out for themselves, but I guess it'll be tough getting anyone to spread the word because everyone that knows this is probably smart enough to take advantage of it and sell their junk on eBay.
"the Hollings bill would make it a civil offense to develop a new computer or related technology that does not include a federally approved security standard preventing the unlicensed copying of copyrighted works. In at least one version, the law would make it a felony to remove a watermark or flag from copyrighted content. It would also outlaw logging onto the Internet with any computer that removes or sidesteps the copy protection technology. "
So, if this gets passed, would we all be forced to upgrade our computers before we can legally log on to the internet? I can't imagine that most Americans would be able to afford this. Will the Cyber Police haul away Joe Poorman for not being able to afford an upgrade? And what about people in other countries? Could they use their old computers?
I have a Samsung Syncmaster 170mb 17" LCD and it looks excellent. It's also got a TV tuner built in, which I haven't had as much luck with though. I've played a little PS2 on it and it looks pretty bad. But for a monitor it's great.
That gives a whole new meaning to the term "cluster bomb".