Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

There’s been a lot of problems with this site lately, all caused by the quality of my hosting service going down hill. These issues mostly show up as 404 errors (even when the page exists) and slow load times.

To combat this, I’ve purchased a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from ModWest to address the problem, but the move will take a couple weeks to finish. My apologies for the hiccups and downtime while I make this transition. Things should be much better after the move to the VPS.

I’ve already got two of my other domains on that server, and they are running as smooth as can be.

Spotted across the web:

• Atmostheory - Some cool creative posters using keyboard shortcuts.
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Draft -  Looks like theW3C has published the Release Candidate for the WCAG 2.0.
• Quipsologies - An Interesting way to spend a lunch hour. Primarily for designers.

I finally broke down and joined Twitter. Anyone I know on it?

Perhaps the most artistic element of typography, the ampersand can add a touch of class to the visual form. Check out Adobe’s quick info on the evolving form of ampersands.

Cool Tide Commercial.  Reminds me of the effect those flashing ads have on how I view a website. Thank God Firefox has it’s own version of the Tide Stick for websites.

Via Authentic Boredom.

Software giant Sun Microsystems has just acquired MySQL AB (the makers of the open source database, MySQL) for a sum of 1 billion dollars in cash and debt.

I’m not sure if I should be excited or weary of this gobbling up of open source projects by large software companies (Yahoo! just acquired Zimbra, and Citrix got XenSource). In this case, I think things will turn out for the better–for everyone. Sun has a great history of providing flagship quality programs in an open manner… Java, Solaris, and now MySQL.

The MySQL blog writes of how this acquisition will be good for the community, as the developers will have access to the worlds leading Sun experts (MySQL was originally developed for the Sun platform, and it continues to drive it now). Sun has probably purchased MySQL to further its’ reach into enterprise web applications, knocking down the gate of the Oracle castle with Java running on Solaris and MySQL.

The heartwood of the internet though, is not enterprise level applications: it is the plethora of small sites that make up the fiber of the internet; most of which run on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). What does this mean to the majority of us running all open source? Well, the answer looks pretty good there too.

According to the press release on the MySQL blog, “MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable… Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community.” [emphasis in original]

Ars Tecnhica hit the take-home message perfectly: “Regardless of the underlying platform implications, Sun’s acquisition of MySQL broadly validates open-source database solutions as viable alternatives to proprietary commercial database products like those from Oracle and IBM. In the long-term, this could be a very positive development for open source on the server.”

I’m pretty sure that it will be several years before the implications start to truly surface. Perhaps it will mean a more open, accessible, web.

I love doing freelance web development; however, as with any business, I have to do quite a bit of administration that is significantly less fun, and provides substantial overhead. My philosophy is to only bill the client for the work that directly benefits them, so my personal policy is to not bill the client for a single minute of this administrative overhead–I simply absorb it into my cost of doing business.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize it’s in my best interest to develop a process (or a program) to minimize this overhead.

For starters, I use Basecamp to manage my tasks and milestones, but for a moonlighter like myself to upgrade to the $50/month plan to get time tracking as a feature is absurd, and would by no means make a positive influence to my bottom line.

Stand-alone time tracking solutions exist, and some of them are even free (for a single project), such as Tick. For $9/month you can even integrate your Tick account with Basecamp, though I have no idea if a prerequisite for the integration is the $49/month Basecamp account and I don’t plan on forking over money to find out.

To be honest, I don’t really trust my data on other companies servers. I have no control over downtime, and I can’t customize the application to fit my needs–so I’m rolling my own. This weekend I spent a few hours playing with the CodeIgniter PHP framework and I have a working  time tracking application that sits on my servers, is extendable (I do have the source code, after all), and is free (as in beer that I had to make myself.)

Before I release the source to the world as an open source project I want to cinch up a few of the last loose ends, and maybe make it a little more feature rich; so I ask you: what do you want in your time tracking program?

Good suggestions will probably get incorporated into this application.

It seems that this new year has already reached its quota of problems, with the false positive on antivirus software, and most recently my domain expiring without my knowledge (and bringing down this website and my email), things are finally all taken care of.

On the upside, I’ve found some good topics to make some useful posts on, so stay tuned for something actually worth reading.

Dan

Over the holiday McAfee and CA both issued new virus definitions that incorrectly identified common external JavaScript files as potentially dangerous virus carriers. Mint, my web stats program, was (incorrectly) flagged as well.

I apologize if this has caused any concern for my users.

I’ve uploaded a unique set of pictures to flickr of my roommates cat. Check it out.

For those of you in the Missoula, Montana area, the monthly Missoula Web Discussion Group meets tonight. The meeting is held the second Tuesday of every month at 6PM at Sean Kelly’s Pub.

Life has been busy, and I need some motivation to finish up some quality posts… help me out by showing some support and de-lurking (posting a comment). Comments with post ideas will be keenly listened to.

Don’t worry, I’m still working on a good write-up of the new UM Admissions site mentioned earlier.

The other day I moved my Windows Media Center onto my second monitor (a projector), and forgot about it. After closing Media Center, removing the projector to bring it to my new apartment, I found I couldn’t find Media Center again. It was lost off screen, with no way to get it back (or so I thought).

Thanks to some creative search terms and a resulting forum thread, I found out the solution. In Windows, you can right click an item in your task bar and choose move… the catch is that you have to hit an arrow, then you can drag it around. Problem solved.

Sigh.

Sorry I haven’t been very active blogging as of late, it’s the end of summer, and working in higher ed, that means crazy busy.

Between all the printer woes and other side projects, I’ve been working heavily on the first major overhaul of the UM Admissions website since I started my position on their team. Today I finished the core of the work and sent it around the office for feedback. I hope we get all the little bugs out by the Tuesday launch.

Perhaps this weekend I’ll work on a writeup of what all went on for this project. In the meantime, why don’t you check out our universities dabbling in the YouTube craze with two characters named Josh and Noah.

I spotted this one on the interwebs today and thought I would share…

Old Unix joke:

Newer Windows version:

(via Digg)