I had a crazy weekend. Funeral in Florida, then holiday preparations. I am so beat. however, I had an interesting conversation with Bill Johnston about the state of technology. Bill worked for Lawrence Berkeley labs, Nasa and the department of energy running a major network, so I always appreciate his views on technology. The question…
In technology development, there is a famous triangle. It shows how you prioritize your efforts. By focusing in one area, you mess up another. It is a brutal game that never has a happy ending. No matter what you choose, something suffers. Even the “balanced” approach has flaws. I created a game to play with…
CompUSA is closing it’s doors. Apparently they are being liquidated. So now is the time to purchase electronics if one is near you. Maybe a color printer! It’s amazing to me how long it takes for predictions to come true. In the 80’s they said, “Computers will make a paperless office”. We still aren’t paperless,…
I saw an article that caught my eye this morning about how to introduce jQuery to a large organization. Interestingly, on the post there was a link to “Digg this story”. I thought that was pretty cool and tried to Digg the story. Lo and Behold, it worked. That was my first time, “Digging” something…
I added print.css to the blog. This is something I hardly ever do, but should. Printing is important. Now commadot.com prints properly. Mostly I hid things. But I found I had to update a few fonts and alignments. #body_left, #hero, #search, a.postToggle, div.item_panel, #header2, #footer, div.navigation, #comm_form { display:none } * * { font-family: verdana;…
Yesterday, I was struggling to achieve a basic goal. I wanted to list out the sections of the application and specify all the different buttons and menus and features. It was basically a quick outline of the product to be used as a UI specification doc. There are lots of task managers, but none achieved…
The first company I worked as an interaction designer, Remend has officially closed it doors. Here are some lessons learned for dot-coms building a product: A dollar spent in architecture is 10 dollars saved in maintenance. Never hard code anything if you can help it. The lesson is that things change. Details change. You have…
In any non-trivial piece of software you have alot of features. Often, there is a bug in some of those features. In the rollout phase of software, there are usually ALOT of bugs. People use the word “beta” to mean buggy, but it carries a deadly payload. When a user encounters one bug, they will…
I love the Web. I have loved it since Netscape 1.0 in 1994. Here is why, in the form of two stories. Thanksgiving, 1996, there were not that many websites in general, but there were a bunch. My step-mother said, “The internet is a fad. Mark my words, it will be gone in a couple…
We had a nice Thanksgiving this year. Penny was happy. Katie was happy, but not taller than Darcie. The kids got to ride their bikes in an empty mall parking lot. Ethan got to cook a little. Ben and Darcie were happy with their new baby Henry. All the extended family was there. Everyone had…
A new updated Internet Explorer tool is on the scene called DebugBar. I was excited at first for this tool because I think IE has no decent tools. However, my hopes were soon dashed. I might be stupid and it was there and I couldn’t see it, however, I could not find out how to…
Mozilla has launched Firefox 3 into beta. I quickly downloaded and installed it. I realized this might be a mistake based on the fact that I need to use Firefox 2 for my development work. Turns out there are two major problems, which caused me to uninstall the program almost immediately. I couldn’t run both…
I wanted to gzip the javascript and css files on marketo.com. Again, this technology should be DEFAULT on every web host in the world. I have no idea why they don’t have this turned on. Anyway, after another couple of hours, I found this solution which seemed to work. Specifically, it only worked on MediaTemple.…
This is a major invention. It is a new kind of solar panel that can be printed on anything. Glass windows in your car or office building, roof shingles, parking lots, whatever. The cost per watt of solar is currently $3. This stuff is 30 cents. We need action. We need our government to buy…