I never thought I’d see the day when I would upgrade past Windows XP, but it is here. Windows 7 RC is nice; it is almost bug free, fairly well organized, supports Direct X 10, and seems to support most of my hardware. Additionally, I felt no growing pains with my current level of RAM, and system resources. It seems to be the best of XP and Vista put together. But here’s the downside…
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Category: review
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Sleeping with the enemy – I am running Windows 7
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Handcrafted CSS – and letting go of pixel perfection
Handcrafted CSS, the latest contribution of Dan Cederholm to the world of Web Design and Development is a fantastic book! To say that I’m a fan of his work is a bit of an understatement. No web designer or developer should be without these books; Bulletproof Web Design, Handcrafted CSS, as well as Designing With Web Standards, and DOM Scripting. These books are fantastic resources, and push web development out of the dark ages of table based layout, css hacks, and duplicating sites for each browser version. But there is a particular philosophy the makes Handcrafted CSS special. (more…) -
MusicTalk.org Owes Us Money
MusicTalk Inc. Labor Commission Settlement It is with much regret that it has come to this. It has been almost a year since the California State Labor Commission has awarded my wife a settlement in her case against her former employer MusicTalk Inc. Sarah worked for them for a long time as a paid employee and then the paychecks stopped coming. Bobbie Brown made repeated promises that this would be resolved as soon as she got her funding check.
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Wow! I love my iPhone…
What an amazing tool. The iPhone is such an enabler. I am writing this blog right now from my iPhone. I never would have thought that something like this would be this easy. At this point I can check email, write my blog, keep in touch through IM, social networks, oh and make phone calls.
The one thing I’m learning to appreciate is good design and development. Some of the applications I’m looking at are just not not very well thought out.
The real consideration needs to be me, the end user. What does the customer have to do to accomplish their job? If the developer can’t walk in the user’s shoes more likely than not the product will not do it’s best to aid the user in their task… Doing their job. So does that mean that the developer has not done theirs?
I think this is the challenge that all developers must accept. Their success or failure is in how well the product accomplishes it’s goals. My first goal as a user interface designer is meeting the user where they are, not where I want them to be. Know the task, understand the user, and always strive for the elegant solution.
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Where is web design today?
Many people now rely on the web as a source for their lifestyles; research, maps, gossip, movie rentals, shopping. Now that this tool is so heavily used I thought it would be good to think about where it started, and where it is today from a design perspective. In the early days websites were pretty horrible to look at, lots of blinking, flashing things, dancing hamsters, BIG FONTS, red text on black backgrounds etc… (I could go on, but I know some of you are already getting nauseous. Thankfully most of the world wide web has moved past designs like these:
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Don’t Buy Need for Speed Pro Street!
I’ve had it! I bought Need for Speed Carbon the day it arrived in stores. I ran out after work handed over my hard earned cash and ran home to install it. It was fun, and I loved it. Sounds great. But the game crashes all the time. (more…)
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Silly Lawyer, what are you thinking?
According to John W. Dozier, Jr., the “Super Lawyer”, viewing his site’s HTML source, as in, “right-click – view page source” is illegal. They are trying to claim that viewing their page source is a copyright violation. Additionally they have an End User License Agreement, EULA prohibiting this behavior, as well as forbidding links to their site.Now the interesting thing is that the code for the home page, as an example, is really poorly built. They still use tables for layout, and the JavaScript is embedded in the header. Worse still they are an internet law firm.
There are a few things that strike me as ludicrous from a developer’s standpoint. (more…)
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RIP Windows 2000, Hello again to Linux
I started out using computers a long time ago. Here is a brief re-cap: My first computer was a Commodore PET, simple and fun. I moved form platform to platform as different options became available for me to experience: Apple II’s at school, a Mac SE that my parents bought, PCs running DOS for Autocad. From that point on I stuck with DOS/Windows based machines because I had invested in software for that platform.
As most people know, Windows is a double edged sword, it seems easy at first but there are lots of potholes on this road. Windows 3.1 seemed to become corrupted almost weekly, and I was constantly re-installing it. Windows 95 was more stable, but you always had to exit into DOS to get some applications to run. Windows NT 4 suffered a similar problem as 95, and was drastically different in terms of system administration. Windows 98, and ME were really only patches to 95 to support USB and a few other technologies. And then finally windows 2000. Stable and robust like NT 4, but more inline with the workstation user than NT 4 which really felt like a server environment. I really liked Win2K. Even after XP came out, Win2K was better because it was just as stable as XP, but could be run on half the computer that XP required. Half the RAM, drive space, and video card. Eventually XP’s bells and whistles won me over and I switched. It made some tasks really easy, and the improvements from day to day were enough to convince me to switch. When I built my new PC I wanted to move XP onto it, so I had to decide whether I wanted to shell out for another license of XP, or try something more daring. I settled on trying Linux. (more…)
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2007 Scattante CFR Review
With the demise of my circa-1994 Ti frame I settled on the 2007 Scattante CFR. I opted for the full Ultegra, double chainring “Race” version. (more…)