Category Archives: Review

Reviews of products, services, and experiences.

Invalid Gnome

Design, Review,

I get Chris Pirillo’s Windows newsletter (currently called “Windows Fanatics”) in my inbox this morning and was shocked that he seemed to assert that Lockergnome was going back to its old style, or lack thereof. Maybe it’s just Chris’ flourishes, but several things gave me cause for concern.

Remember what the Web was like when the BLINK tag roamed the earth?

Off to a bad start. We all know there’s only one good use for <blink>.

There were only a handful of browsers, and it didn’t take much to make a page “look good” on all platforms.

Maybe I missed these times. I remember pages “Made for Netscape” or that “Require Internet Explorer.” I remember having to essentially code two sites to work with two radically different browsers. I remember single-pixel GIFs and tables nested ten deep and bad typography. I try to forget, but I can’t.

It doesn’t take much to push the envelope, but sometimes (as we discovered) the envelope pushes back. You might recall the somewhat-simplistic design of our site before we dove head-first into Cascading Style Sheets. Despite its shortcomings and lack of finesse, the sucker worked – and we had few complaints.

I find that surprising. Here’s one: it was one of the ugliest sites I’d ever visited, and the bizarre look turned me off from subscribing to the newsletters even when I had heard several recommendations, because I assumed they must be unprofessional. I’m not trying to be mean, just honest.

Lockergnome.com is about to become less confusing as it goes back to more a basic code structure. We’re going to unbury the menus and options and chalk up the past few months to experience. I’m not saying that we won’t employ fancy scripts now and again, but we’re refocusing our new(er) layout on the thing that most likely brought you to us: the content. Right now, Jason’s putting the finishing touches on the overall structure and functionality…

The attraction of Lockergnome is the content, and the site could use better information architecture, but I hope this does not come at the expense of clean, fast-loading, semantic code and the distinctive aesthetic the site currently has. Though I’m not crazy about parts of it, their current design is pretty good in my opinion. It has some very nice elements that are impressive to me both as a web developer and a consumer. It’s not perfect, but a darn sight better than what was there before.

Is this going to be a step backward? In a way, yes. I’ll certainly miss certain aspects of our ultra-hip CSS implementation. However, until 99% of the installed browser / e-mail client base supports the same standards, we’re gonna leave the fancy-schmancy stuff to other online resources.

Mind pointing out these fancy-schmancy online resources so I can read them instead?

For what we do, and how we need to do it, advanced “hacks” just don’t work well.

What about web standards? Graceful degradation? From a purely business and marketing point of view, is the couple of percent of users on browsers so limited and hardware so old that they can’t appreciate modern web pages (and not just yours, also ESPN, Wired, PGA…) a demographic you want to cater to at the expense of the other 95%?

Furthermore, the old Lockergnome got eaten by spam filter several times because its markup was similar to the spam I got. Since the redesign, nada. Maybe it’s just my Bayes scores or installation of SpamAssassin, but I can’t imagine my setup being different from many others. If a newsletter falls in the spam box and no one sees its ads, does it make a penny?

I doubt it.

I could just be worried over nothing, their redesign could be impeccable markup combined with simpler CSS that works better than their current across browsers and platforms. The only reason I put my thoughts to words is that I’m on the cusp of several decisions. I’m examining my subscriptions; they recently cancelled the Linux channel (which was quite good) and the Web Developer channel is in a state of flux (it was pretty bad for a while). Also the affordable Gnomedex is coming, though my decision on that will probably be more influenced by its speakers. On one hand I have a lot of faith in the Lockergnome team to do the right thing, but the standards-lover in me is just terrified of the prospect of a site going backward. Not to mention the masses who subscribe to the newsletters that will draw the conclusion that “CSS isn’t ready for big sites yet,” in 2004. I can think of nothing further from the truth or more subversive.

Browsing

Politics, Review

Just a few links and excerpts I’ve come across lately.

Use absentee voting ballots so there will be a paper trail:

Michaan said, “I consider this to be the greatest threat to our democracy of anything we have ever faced in this country. There is so much possibility of fraud that there has to be a voting system that is verifiable with paper trails. Absent that we’re totally at the mercy of whoever controls this equipment.”

I have always thought it interesting that Diebold, known mostly for ATMs, has said that it would be too much trouble to have voting machines give voting receipts or some physical record of the vote when ATMs have no problem giving you a paper record of every transaction.

Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech:

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.” The local police, at the Secret Service’s behest, set up a “designated free-speech zone” on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush’s speech.

Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, “At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators — two of whom were grandmothers — were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome.”

When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center told the Oakland Tribune, “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

Why does this secure CIA form for reporting terriosts use a Netscape favicon? I suppose I would be more scared if it was a Microsoft favicon. Maybe they should read my favicon tutorial.

The Myth of SUV Safety:

In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade–the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator–has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan–a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame–are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

Matthew Thomas: Why I use WordPress:

WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License. I generally prefer GPLed software, because over a period of decades, it maximizes the rights of those who use it. (In the short run things may be different, but Iā€™m a long-run sort of person.)

Right on. Plus all the cool Matts are doing it.

Grants for captioning? How quaint:

The U.S. Department of Education has apparently decided that certain programming will receive sponsorship for captioning and certain other programming will not.

Joe is also running WordPress. He uses more lists than anyone I know. I wasn’t sure if Joe, a militant hand-coder, would appreciate a fully dynamic content management system, but he has taken to it swimmingly.

Hardware Rant

Review, Tech

The problem with too many modern day manufacturers is that they’re too concerned with selling the whole package. I for one would be more than happy to buy a nicely designed laptop from say, Sony, sans an operating system, free internet from AOL or MSN, an office suite, and any other fluff that I’m convinced accounts for several hundred dollars in final cost. In addition, I would like the option to buy a laptop without a hard drive or memory, because from the manufacturer it’s going to be overpriced and I’ll probably upgrade it anyway. Why should I have to pay twice for things like a hard drive or Windows XP when I already own what I need? There are of course a number of third party manufacturers from which I could buy just a laptop shell, or something equivalent, but their design is laughable. I don’t need to give my Mac friends another reason to laugh at me ;).

Let It Be

Review, Software, Tech

This site looks different in different browsers; that should be a given. All I can do is offer the HTML up to the world and let people take it from there. Now I do some testing in different browsers mostly because I use a number of browsers normally, however on this site I write the code for the code itself, not with the presentation quirks of any particular browser in mind. That said, I think the overall design looks better in Mozilla than it does in Internet Explorer, which is funny because IE is what I used the entire time I was putting this site together, even though I coded some things into the CSS I knew IE didn’t support (yet). Speaking of which, is anyone else perturbed that with IE6’s service pack they didn’t fix any of the CSS bugs? I guess they’re doing all they can to keep up with security venerabilities. Back to the topic, if you haven’t tried this site out with Moz or one of its derivatives yet, give it a run, if just to see what things are intended to look like, and will look like whenever IE gets the act together. The reason this all comes up is I’m bopping so much to this Daoist groove that it is really painful to go back to commercial projects where I spend thrice as much time tweaking things in 5 different browsers on half as many platforms then I do on the actual design, which is not right. Now it’s a skill like any other, and I consider myself pretty good at it, but I hate it. It’s not what the web is about.

RoboForm

Review, Tech

I like software that just works, is set up once (or not at all) and forever goes about its tasks, quiet and unassuming. Right up there with the Google Toolbar, some of my favorite browser software is RoboForm. What does it do? It makes the tedious process of filling out the hundreds of forms web users are presented every day a breeze. I’ve tried form fillers before, but I was always turned off by them not , being flexible enough, not recognizing a form element if it didn’t have the exact same name as one you’ve filled out before. The Internet Explorer Autocomplete feature is the same way. RoboForm fills out whatever personal details you want to put in the form, remembers your logins and passwords, generates good passwords, and best of all has no adware or spyware like some of the other products in this category. I’ve set up multiple profiles that I use depending on what information I want to give where ever I’m signing up, for instance I have a “Spam” profile that gives the form my throwaway email address and no personal information.

RoboForm is free for personal use, and the free version is more than good enough for pretty much everything you do. I plan to buy the full version soon not so much because I need the features it offers, but simply because I want to support the authors of this software. My main warning with this software is that it can have the same effect on your online buying habits as the Amazon one-click system can. In the past filling out those forms gave me a little time to consider my purchase, but now you can having something being Fedexed to you before you know what happened :). This is another one of those products that goes in my “Indispensable Web Software” category, so check it out.

Google Toolbar

Review, Software, Tech

The Google Toolbar is always one of the first things I install when I work on a new computer because it is simply one of those tools that is so elegant, well done, and useful that you can’t imagine how you functioned without it. Unfortunately it is only available from Google for Windows users running Internet Explorer version 5 or over. You can use it straight “out of the box” and be quite happy, but I tweak it a little to make it fit my experience best. If you click on the Google graphic it will bring up a menu where you can select “toolbar options.” This is where they hide the good stuff.

Once you’re in there it actually loads a page that lets you customize your toolbar experience. The first thing I do is change the search box size to wide, because I’m running at 1600×1200 and have plenty of screen real estate, I also uncheck the box that keeps a search history because I don’t like the dropdown box, and I also seldom search for the same thing twice. Next I kill the descriptive text for all the buttons; they’re pretty well designed and even if you haven’t used the toolbar before you can figure out what they mean in a few minutes. The text also takes up too much space. Then I add the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, because that’s just fun :). I add the voting buttons, which adds two buttons that let you vote up or down for whatever page you’re browsing. I don’t know if that actually makes any difference to anything, but I’m all about spreading Google karma to good pages so I use them anyway when I find something nice. Finally if you go into “experimental features” you’ll see an option to suppress the onUnload javascript event, which I think is annoying and also kills a few popup ads. Isn’t that cool?

One of the more useful features of the toolbar is that it lets you type things into the search box and then search for those terms within the current page, even if it hasn’t been indexed by Google. This can be a huge help on big pages that I know have the information I need, but it could be buried anywhere. I can just jump right to the spot on the page that has the information I need. It’s functionally identical to the “Find (on this page)” function under the Edit menu, but much easier to use. Optionally using the highly button you can also highlight your chosen terms on the page, which works just like if you look at something in Google’s cache and it highlights the terms you searched for. If you ever look for stuff on the web and you meet the system requirements, you should get this. It’s going to be an invaluable tool in helping me rebuild my computer.

How It Was Fixed

Gallery, Review

Well, now that I’ve gotten the Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed and running successfully. I think the main problem with my original installation was that I had Lilo loading the operating system rather than a Windows bootloader. When I tried to reboot after the SP1 installatiion I would just get an endless string of “40” on my screen, which is really hard to explain so I put up screenshots (taken with a camera) and a video here. I tried repairing the installation using my Windows XP installation disk, but that didn’t touch the bootloader. What I ended up doing was installing a fresh version of Windows on my second partition, which did recreate bootloader and redetect my installation on the C partition. I thought that would be all I need, but when I tried to boot to the installation on the C partition, it would go into an infinite reboot sequence, which, needless to say, was quite frustrating.

It became obvious that the installation on C was beyond repair, literally, and so I made the always tough decision to scrap it and start fresh. This was a very big deal for me, because I abhor having to reinstall programs and losing settings and such. On my last desktop it was actually upgraded incrementally from DR-DOS through early versions of Windows, all the way to ’98 when I was forced by a hard drive failure to start from scratch again. I used Windows before they messed it up with a graphical interface :). I’m hoping that like a phoenix this new installation will rise from the ashes of the last and turn my laptop into an ultra-efficency machine that is easy, intuative, and functional.

So I backed up everything important from the drive and did a “clean” install of XP over the current one, deleting all the past files in the process. Then I downloaded the 134 MB network install of SP1 just to be safe, and installed it on a almost perfectly fresh Windows. It worked fine, and I’m appreciating some of the new features already such as the Bluetooth, and the “anti-trust” addons.

Now all I need to do is delete the installation of Windows from the D partition, because it’s just taking up valuable space that could be better used for some movies or music. Also in hindsight I probably should have just formatted the C partition because now I have a Program Files directory chock-full of stuff that isn’t actually ‘installed,’ though maybe when I reinstall programs they may pick up their old prefs. Cross your fingers.

Whew!

Music, Review

Well SP1 installed just fine, and a number of other updates did as well. Now the tricky part is going to be getting all the Sony laptop goodies back into everything, then the long and arduous process of reinstalling my software. My email is groovy though, because IMAP works like a charm, so I actually had no email downtime. I also discovered that Outlook Express works better with IMAP than Outlook XP does, so that might become my primary email client. There was also another one someone recommended to me that I’ll try, but I have to dig its name out of the archives. Outlook XP has a number of quirks when working with IMAP, and installing the second service pack for Office didn’t seem to make anything better, in fact it got a little worse. When sending and receiving the program doesn’t respond to any input, and it seemed to randomly disconnect from the server, and the only way to get it back on was to restart the program. Also it even have a button for purging deleted messages, I had to make my own. Outlook Express seems to do everything that doesn’t work with Outlook XP pretty well, and it just feels cleaner since it just does email. I keep all my organization things in Palm Desktop, which I would recommend people trying out even if they don’t own a PalmOS device.

It’s too late now to do anything else meaningful on the computer. Hopefully I can get everything taken care of tomorrow and get back to actual work, plus I won’t have to post from the ‘music’ computer anymore. (Yes, I do have a computer whose sole purpose is to play music. I still haven’t figured out why it needs a multi-gigahertz processor and a 3D accelerator card to do this. I keep telling myself I’ll play games on it sometime. Where’s the time?!)

Last Straw

Review

I have many wonderful things to post, exciting things to talk about, places to be, but unfortunately my life has grinded to a halt due to Service Pack 1 for Windows XP wiping my bootloader and corrupting everything. It actually gives a screen that’s very scary when I try to boot, which I took a picture and video of and will post as soon as I get my MemoryStick reader (laptop) back. So once everything is back up I’ll post what I think caused this, and how I (if I can) fix it. It looks like I’m going to have to reinstall all my software too, so maybe I talk about that to, try and turn this into something positive. Macs are looking mighty nice right now.

Productive Day

Meta, Review

I feel like I’ve had a very productive day, espescially compared to yesterday when it felt like I did nothing. Here’s a summary of the day thus far, with the boring parts (and classes) taken out:

  • Good breakfast
  • Human Situation Discussion class
  • Re-printed some business cards for a client, had to tweak design
  • Took David his graphics card
  • Checked if David’s processor was just underclocked or if they actually sent him the wrong one (wrong one)
  • Filled tank
  • Deposited some checks
  • Made some important phone calls, did email
  • Installed my $7 copy of Windows XP Professional bought using UH’s new site liscene (more on this later)
  • Had long lunch with Kel at a nice deli whose name escapes me, oogled at his iPod
  • Picked up Kel’s grandmother’s ten-year-old computer, which she’d like me to fix. We’ll see; I’m not a miracle worker šŸ™‚
  • Took client her new business cards, decided on another change, talked about website
  • Spent too long in traffic, but it’s okay because I made a new mix disc
  • Finally arrived home at around 4:15 PM

Whew! I think now I could crash for the next week or so, but I’m waiting for a call from someone . . .