Tag: web

A Week of Tweets on 2011-03-13

Stuff on the Net
  • SpongeBob SquarePants is always fun if a little strange & The Great Patty Caper is no different. @Shakefire http://bit.ly/h4pxAK #
  • Can I please stop supporting IE6 now in my web design? http://www.ie6countdown.com/ #
  • @ysharros I can't actually open the map. It just downloads a .kml file. in reply to ysharros #
  • @ysharros I surf dangerous and don't block anything. in reply to ysharros #
  • Synerginistic? Really? Do people grasping at buzz words ever listen to themselves? #
  • Started my Friday off right with a bowl of Peanut Butter Crunch. #
  • Thoughts & Prayers. #
  • Is it 2am yet? I mean, 3am yet? I hate the time change. Just stop it. #

Powered by Twitter Tools

A Week of Tweets on 2010-11-21

Stuff on the Net
  • Went to McD's, ordered an Angus Bacon & Cheese. It came out with neither bacon nor cheese. Guy was upset he had to remake it. #
  • @Krystalle They have one simple goal: to own your entire social graph. in reply to Krystalle #
  • The downside to living longer is retiring later. It's not mean, it's just math. #
  • Oh dear… Human Centipede is available on Netflix Streaming. I don't want to watch it… but I probably will. #
  • It's surprisingly hard to write a mission statement without sounding like a pretentious douche. #
  • @etcet Well, yes. But since our business is neither in chewing bubblegum or kicking ass, I can't use that one. in reply to etcet #
  • @etcet "We're here to design web sites and kick ass. And we're all out of web sites…" in reply to etcet #
  • I think I'm going to change my name. Jason is just so boring. I'm thinking of going with Ja$on. #
  • @angelaadams Mostly they don't, because they are used to the smell. in reply to angelaadams #
  • Today, I am building a spam machine. I mean, an automated newsletter. #
  • Preparing Secret Santa gift for its long journey through the postal system… #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Facebook wants to turn you inside out.

Random Thoughts

This is a post I started about a month ago and had left sitting in the draft bin, but due to yesterday’s post and topic, I decided to dig it up and polish it…

Most people, unless you’ve grown up entirely in the Internet enabled world, think of “being social” as joining groups.  You play sports.  You have a book club.  You form a tabletop gaming group.  You go to a party.  You sit at a lunch table.  You go to the company picnic.  Your kids play at the same park.  And so on.  Being social involves joining people doing something.

When I first joined Facebook, it was all about joining groups.  Your college, your high school, your jobs both past and present.  Groups still exist on Facebook, but just barely.  When people post things in the groups I belong to it doesn’t show in the feed, in fact it doesn’t show anywhere unless I go look at my list of groups.  Groups are a thing of the past, now everyone are “friends”.

Facebook is all about getting all your “friends” together from every activity and dumping them all into one place.  Of course, people in general don’t really function that way, and it has caused issues for many folks as they have dived into the “social web”.  Work friends and other friends used to be separate groups, and with a lot of work on your part they still can be on Facebook, but by default they are all the same.  Facebook doesn’t want you talking about things in groups privately among your friends, they want you to put everything in your feed where everyone can see it (unless you’ve taken the time to protect your feed and group your friends).  Facebook wants to take your segregated group, integrate them with the whole and put them on a stage, and they want to put ads on the page in the column next to it.

Facebook, Real ID and other such efforts are slowly eroding privacy.  Is this a bad thing?  Not everyone cares, especially younger folks, but many of them haven’t run into an issue where something they said on Facebook or Twitter or some other forum has cost them a job yet.  Maybe they won’t.  Maybe by the time it matters for them, the people doing the hiring and firing won’t care.

I can see the draw, I really can.  I grew up watching Cheers on TV and singing alone with “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name” and the social web feels like that sometimes, it feels like this intimate group of people who you can talk to, who you can trust.  But can you?  Once you’ve racked up over a thousand “friends” on Facebook that includes former coworkers and employers, current ones, old friends from a decade ago, ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, and all the other random people who’ve come into contact, can you really trust them all with that thought that just ran through your head, down your fingers and spilled out onto your keyboard?  Do you want that random thought to exist on the Internet forever?  I know I actually consider everything I put out there before I hit the publish button here.  I’ve scrapped entire posts because I didn’t feel comfortable with the content, and others I’ve hacked up and removed specifics to keep a level of separation.

What the hell am I getting at?  I don’t know… perhaps I’m just an old man yelling at the kids to get off of his lawn…

The Littlest Server

Random Thoughts

I have eight computers in my house.  The wife and I each have a “main” machine, identical Dell XPS machines we bought a few years back.  We have a Media PC where we download and watch TV shows (it has 6 analog tuners, which was awesome until Comcast ditched analog and the PC can’t handle 6 digital tuners, but it makes a good media server).  There is a PC in the bedroom (when the last DVD player died we just moved an old PC in there to watch stuff on – bonus, it lets us watch Netflix Instant in bed).  There is an iMac, which barely gets any use at all, but we sometimes drop it in a room that we want to stream music to.  I have a netbook and the wife uses my old laptop for portable computing around the house and out of the house.  And lastly my wife’s old laptop that she lugged to England while she went to university over there about 8 years ago.

As someone who does web development for a living, one thing I’ve always lacked at home was a server.  Sure, I’ve installed the dev environments on my main machine to be able to test things out, but I’ve never had a server that worked like a real server.  Monday I decided to rectify that.  Not wanting to buy a new machine I had to repurpose an existing one.  Obviously, the main machines were out, as was the Media PC, the bedroom PC, the netbook and the laptop the wife uses.  So my options were the iMac or the decade old HP laptop.  The iMac still serves a purpose, and not just as the occasional music streamer, but from a web development standpoint I sometimes use it to see what sites I build look like under other browsers.  I might still turn it into a server one day, for now though I went with the HP laptop.

The HP Pavilion n5150 latop.  This beast had Windows ME installed on it.  Yes, I said Windows ME.  This, above all other reasons, was why it was chosen for the server.  Plus, I like the idea of being able to put the server on a shelf out of the way where it doesn’t take up much space.  My current webhost (Dreamhost, who I am very happy with) uses Debian OS based servers.  As such, I decided that Debian would be my choice as well.  I downloaded the network install ISO, burned a disc, put it in the laptop and booted up.  It took about 2 hours, maybe 3, to finish (the network install puts the base OS on and then downloads everything else).  Clearly, the PIII-600MHz processor, the 256MB RAM and 10GB HD are woefully below the specs of a PC you’d actually want to use these days, but as a little web server it chugs along just fine.  Then I put MySQL and a few other bits on it and it is ready.

I am excited as I move into the next phases of my own little side projects, both the business app that will make me rich and the zombie web games that I’ve always wanted to build.

Storming the Brain

Random Thoughts

So, as previously noted, I’m working on a little side project for myself and as I get into it and through it, I figured I would blog about steps that I have taken and maybe get some discussion going.

To begin with, I had an idea.  It was a very general sort of thing which I then nailed down to a few specifics.  In this case, what I am building is a web based tool, so I nailed it down to being web based, likely written in PHP, and with a database for a back end, likely to be MySQL.  With the initial idea fairly solid, the next phase is the brainstorming…

How I usually approach this is to get out a blank piece of paper and ask “Given no limits at all, what features can this thing have?”  And I start filling out the page with lots of craziness.  After I have a nice sizable chunk going, I start to go through the list and try to group them.  The first group is the “1.0” version, these are the features that are absolutely required in order for the product to be worthwhile, the foundation, the core.  Of course, in my world, version 1.0 is almost never the release product.  1.0 is the version you test the waters with to see if people actually want what you have.  Once you’ve locked in those base features, you take all the rest of your ideas and start looking for ways to group them together.  In my opinion, you never want a release of a product to be scatter shot, adding tiny features all over.  It is better if your release overhauls one section and really fleshed out one piece with new ideas and fixes, at least until tiny scattered fixes are all that is left.

Once I’ve got most, if not all, of my original brainstorm ideas grouped together, its time to actually make the core a reality.  Brainstorming is part of the iterative design process.  When the core is done, we’ll do another round of brainstorming before deciding what elements will make the next release.

Have any things you do in your brainstorming design phase of a project?  Feel free to share…

Remembering GeoCities

Random Thoughts

If you haven’t heard, GeoCities is being shut down by Yahoo.  Back in 1998, after a short period of putting updates in a finger file on my mIRC client, I decided to build my own web page.  GeoCities was the leader in free web space, so I signed up with them.  I honestly cannot remember the account name I used or the URL I had.  But I remember the page, and somewhere on a CD I burned a few years back I still have some of the graphics I used, though I’m not 100% sure I could find that CD.

The thing I remember most about GeoCities was in trying to comply with their advertising requirements without making my page design look like garbage.  They had various schemes of watermarking and drop downs and popups and floating toolbars and other things, and each of those could be avoided by putting certain branding on your pages.  If you threw a GeoCities graphic on the page some stuff would go away, if you included links more stuff went away, and if you voluntarily put a static version of their ad panel on a page on your site then most of the rest of it would go away… at least until they changed the rules and the hidden branding you put on your site failed to comply and the annoying elements returned.  But then again, GeoCities wasn’t meant for real professional design, at least not for free.

Ultimately, the branding and the ads and the bandwidth limits drove me off to find my own space on the net, a trail of providers and domains that would eventually lead me here.  As much as I disliked working with GeoCities, if there had not been a GeoCities its possible I might have never started a web page, and I’ve enjoyed the last nearly eleven years of posting junk to the Internet.

So, farewell GeoCities, I may have hated you, but I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.  Thanks.

Fight me!

Gaming

Another in a long line of web pages diversion from productivity is My Brute.  You create a little gladiator, and then you send him to fight.  Three times a day, and you can enter tournaments.  And you control absolutely nothing.  You pick the opponent and that’s it, sit back and enjoy the carnage.

So, come, fight me and be my pupil, then take on other brutes in single combat.

Chrome

Random Thoughts

In case you have been living under a rock, Internet-wise that is, Google released a beta of their new web browser called Chrome.

I’ve been playing with it, and my official review is that I love it.  Its fast, and when a web page does lock up for some reason being able to kill just that one page without killing all my web pages is really nice.  Of course, being a beta, it still has flaws.  There is no integration with many of Google’s other tools (I’m a big user of Google Bookmarks, and while I can use the web page I would prefer to have my bookmarks available in browser), and various plug-ins don’t function (if you use any Cold Fusion web sites that make use of the database table grid tool thing, it doesn’t work).  But I am sure many of those will come in time.

However, playing with chrome introduced me to another thing which had previously been available but I have never used and that is using a single link to read my RSS feeds from my Google Reader.  I have subscriptions to 87 RSS Feeds, and its only growing.  Now, up in my bookmark bar in Chrome, I have a link that says “Next»” and when I click it, my browser navigates to the next unread RSS entry, or rather to the page of that RSS entry.  Now, when I find myself with a few minutes to spare between work items, I just click the Next link and start making my way through my RSS feeds one article at a time.  It really is quite nice.

Another really nice feature is the adaptive search engine capabilities.  Essentially, any website that uses a search where the search terms are in the URL (not passed as session or cookie values), Chrome will parse the URL and add it as a search engine.  When you start typing in a URL and you have enough characters to correctly identify the page (i.e. – it shows as the first option to select in the suggestions under where you are typing), hit Tab.  This will change the URL bar into a Search Bar for the selected web site.  Enter in your search terms and hit enter and Chrome will submit the search as if you had gone to the site and entered your terms into their search field.

And it works with any web site as long as you have performed one search on it.  If you have Chrome, search for something on my blog.  Anything.  Now, go back to the URL, type in “weblog” (or whatever you need to type to make my web site the first suggested option) and hit Tab.  Now type in a search term and hit enter.  You should get back a page of search results.  This kind of thing is fairly nifty as long as you have searched the site before.  Like, if I know that Scott over at BrokenToys.org has written about Hello Kitty before and I want to find it, I would just type in “bro”, hit Tab, then type “Hello Kitty” and press enter.  Bam.  Search results!

Overall, I’m really looking forward to more improvements being made to Chrome.  They have a great start going, and I am optomistic that it can only get better from here.

RSS and Advertising

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I decided to go through and make sure my RSS feeds in my reader were up to date.  I ended up dropping a couple where they haven’t posted anything in a while (a year), and decided that while I was doing it I’d try to see if feeds were available for some websites that I visit frequently.

Out of all the web comics that I added to the feed reader, only one (xkcd) actually had the comic in the feed.  The rest, at best, gave you a feed item letting you know that a new comic had been posted and you needed to visit the site to see it.

Now, I am not stupid.  I know exactly why they do this… advertising.  See, most of these sites, in order to offset the cost of hosting the comic (bandwidth and all that), have advertisements.  And as is the trend of ads on the web these days, most sites don’t manage their own advertising directly, they sign up with a banner providing site and then throw snippets of code on their site that will request an ad from the ad provider.  They do have some control over the ads, usually the ability to block ads they don’t wish to support, and overall I suppose they do a good job of keeping the ads “on message” with the rest of the site.

My problem is… well, why can’t the code snippets live in the RSS parser as well and tack on an ad at the bottom of a feed item.  Same banner image (though not the Flash “punch a monkey”/”you’ve just won two free ipod nano” ads), a line of text and a link/url to follow.  The capability exists.  WordPress has a plugin that does exactly that by putting a footer on RSS items.  Of course, not all web comics are using WordPress, but if it exists for one system it has to be possible for other systems.

Anyway, the result is, after adding a bunch of comics to my feed reader, I then removed all of them except xkcd.  For all the ones I removed, I’ll go back to visiting them when I remember to, which is usually once a month.  Just think, if they put the comic and an ad in their feed, they’d make me a daily reader of both their comics and their ads…

Mafia Matrix

Gaming

Since dumping Urban Dead, I was looking for another free web game to play and thanks to Ryan over at Nerfbat, I was pointed toward Mafia Matrix.

In an odd way, Mafia Matrix is almost the complete opposite of Urban Dead.  While the zombie game only penalized you with time, death was just becoming a zombie and you could be revived, this little mob system simulator is much more harsh.  Death is death.  You can make a new character, but a dead character is dead for good.  Of course, there is much more to do in the Matrix than just killing people.  You work jobs, collect money, buy stuff, steal from people, and there is a real community.  See, in Mafia land, players get to be the Mayors of the cities, the judges, the lawyers, the store owners, and the gangsters.  If you go whack someone without permission of the local don, you might find yourself dead.

It makes for interesting game play.  I, for example, have gone the route of being a legit lawyer.  I don’t commit crimes, but I will take any case and make sure that all my clients are given the best defence the law allows.  Of course, every criminal I get off means that the city doesn’t get that fine as revenue, so even defending criminals could get me killed, or at least run out of town, if I deny the city too much money.

Anyway, for now I’m enjoying the game.  If you play and want to look me up, I’m Jhaer and I spend most of my time in Miami.  And if you do decide to play, do so from one of the links in this post, I get something for the referral if you stick with the game.