From the "We really need to do something about our infrastructure" Department:

Obama's Hawaii retreat loses power for 11 hours

HONOLULU – President-elect Barack Obama's Hawaiian vacation was darkened for 11 hours Friday night and early Saturday when a power outage enveloped the island of Oahu.

Obama, wife Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha are staying in a $9 million, five-bedroom oceanfront house near downtown Honolulu. Power to the compound went out around 7 p.m. Friday and was restored just before 6 a.m. Saturday, about the time as that of the neighbors, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

"The Obama family is grateful for the offers of assistance from local officials," LaBolt said.

Full Article...

From the "Now will you be quiet during the movie, dammit" Department:

Police: Pa. man shot for making noise during movie

PHILADELPHIA – A man enraged by a noisy family sitting near him in a movie theater on Christmas night shot the father of the family in the arm, police said.

James Joseph Cialella, 29, of Philadelphia, faces six charges that include attempted murder and aggravated assault. He remained in custody Saturday.

Police said Cialella told the man's family to be quiet, then threw popcorn at the man's son. The victim, whom television reports identified as Woffard Lomax, told police that Cialella was walking toward his family when he stood up and was shot.

Detectives called to the United Artists Riverview Stadium theater in South Philadelphia found Cialella carrying the weapon, a .380-caliber handgun, in his waistband, police said.

Full Article...

From the "EVERYTHING Must Go!" Department:

Cash-strapped states weigh selling roads, parks

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota is deep in the hole financially, but the state still owns a premier golf resort, a sprawling amateur sports complex, a big airport, a major zoo and land holdings the size of the Central American country of Belize.

Valuables like these are in for a closer look as 44 states cope with deficits.

Like families pawning the silver to get through a tight spot, states such as Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois are thinking of selling or leasing toll roads, parks, lotteries and other assets to raise desperately needed cash.

Full Article...

From the "Confidence in the banks is not what it used to be" Department:

Calif. family finds $10,000 in box of crackers

IRVINE, Calif. – The box of crackers Debra Rogoff bought from the grocery store had some crackerjack in it — an envelope stuffed with $10,000.

Rather than go on a shopping spree, the family called police and was initially told the money could be part of a drug drop.

Police later heard from store managers at Whole Foods in Tustin that an elderly woman had come in a few days earlier, hysterical because she had mistakenly returned a box of crackers with her life savings inside. In a mix-up the store restocked the box rather than composting it.

Full Article...

From the "Moving toward the light" Department:

MP3 player lights rescuers' way to missing skiers

SAVOGNIN, Switzerland – Swiss rescue officials say they have found two missing skiers after spotting the light from their MP3 music player.

The Swiss air rescue association Rega says it received a distress call from the French tourists late Friday but the skiers' phone battery went dead before they could be reached.

Rega spokesman Gery Baumann says the two men were eventually found after midnight in steep, wooded terrain by a helicopter crew that spotted the light from their digital music player.

Full Article...

From the "Start your own biotech company on your kitchen table" Department:

(in collaboration with the "OK you can try this at home, but be realy, really careful" Department)

Hobbyists are trying genetic engineering at home

SAN FRANCISCO – The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

"People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process," she said.

So far, no major gene-splicing discoveries have come out anybody's kitchen or garage.

Full Article...

A careful reading of the history of science and technological innovation will uncover plenty of examples of contributions by self-taught amateurs. Many Fortune 500 companies were started on someone's kitchen table or in someone's garage. There is a long history of amateur inventors, backyard tinkerers, hobbyists doing astronomical observations with telescopes set up on their decks, and many other examples of relatively ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

It is a great reminder that not all of human progress comes from people in white coats with university degrees working in well-funded offices or research labs. Sometimes, the extraordinary is discovered or invented by people who have little more than a good idea and a burning passion to push the limits of their own knowledge. Whether or not we end up with major biotech breakthroughs from these kitchen table labs, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has value too.

The ingenuity and creativity of the human spirit is something that amazes me again and again. It's one of the things that gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, this world will be OK after all.

So I'm in the middle of going about my work and suddenly the Internet goes down on the laptop. Four hours on the phone with various tech support people from Time-Warner and Dell before we managed to fix it, as each company passed responsibility on to the other. The best part is that we're still not exactly sure what the problem was. Not fun at all. The perfect ending to a completely unproductive weekend.

I think that's my hint from the Fates to just go to bed and try this whole productivity concept tomorrow with, hopefully, a fresh start.

To put this in relatively non-technical terms, I'm attempting to run multiple sites using Drupal on my local computer so I can test things out before uploading to a live site. Everything seems to be working fine except for the tiny detail that for some reason, every time I go to 'localhost', I'm not able to access anything. 403 Error, Access forbidden.

I've checked, double-checked, and triple-checked everything to do with Drupal, the Apache server, the MySQL databases, and all the rest of the software. Turns out that the problem has to do with Windows Vista, go figure, right? Many of the folders used by Drupal are being made read-only by the operating system, even with the annoying User Account Control bug feature turned off. I go into the folder properties, un-check the read-only box so that the file won't be write-protected, then open the dialog box a minute later and the read-only box is checked again. I then change all the permissions to full control on the sharing and security tabs, but Vista mysteriously seems to change some of them back.

Well then. I guess Microsoft finally figured out a way to plug the persistent security holes in so many versions of Windows: simply lock everyone out of the functionality of the computer, even the person who owns it. Effective, you have to admit.

Poking around on Google, it turns out that this is a very prevalent bug that many people have had all kinds of problems with. This annoyance is affecting a lot of software. Microsoft has probably avoided the big storm so far, because it seems as though only a small portion of users have caught on that this is a Vista issue. Many software vendors are incurring extra support costs due to all the calls they're getting about this bug. Its reasonable to assume that if software won't work, its the software vendor's fault. That's not the case here, but you can't blame people for thinking that way.

I would guess that Microsoft is going to have one hell of an uproar to deal with once the proverbial shit fully hits the fan. Unless they get this fixed before a lot of people catch on.

In the meantime, I'm installing Service Pack 1 to see if that helps at all.

Just spent over four hours trying to get things to work with Windows Vista. First, the desktop wouldn't recognize the network hard drive, then the Vista backup program wouldn't work with it. Finally got the thing to see the drive (so it can be used for storage and what not) but it turns out there's no fix for the backup program issue. Guess I'll have to invest in Norton Ghost or something.

And then I couldn't get Apache installed on the laptop. Installing Apache on Windows XP is trivial. Not so with Vista. Turns out that some of the package programs with Apache + MySQL, PHP, and Perl don't even work with Vista at all--specifically Wampserver and Apache2Triad. Finally got XAMPP to work though and it was even fairly painless. Used to use Developerside.net, but they've gone to a paid version only now.

Bah. I'm exhausted. I think its time to call it a night.

People and companies put up websites for all sorts of reasons: as a point of contact for friends, associates, or potential clients; as a way to promote a business, a skill, or a hobby; or as a platform to sell things. Regardless of the reasons for having a website, what makes a site effective and keeps people coming back is not rocket science. Make it easy for visitors to see where they are and what options are available to them, make it easy for them to find what they want ("don't make me think"), give them reasons to keep coming back, and leave them with a pleasant memory of their visit.

The people who design and manage shopping malls understand this. Too often, the people who design and manage websites don't. Its very easy these days to simply grab some simple tools and throw up any old kind of website with no thought or planning put into it. Its also painfully obvious that a whole lot of sites are actually built this way. But a poorly designed or poorly thought out website will, at best, be ineffective. At worst, it will reflect badly on the person it belongs to.

So here's a few of my website design pet peeves. I'm not talking about nitpicking over obscure and technical details; I'm talking about the things I see over and over and over again that make me want to go and beat my head repeatedly against the nearest brick wall every time I see them. Without further ado...

Vague section titles and file names

How many websites do you see with sections like "About us" or "Contact us"? A lot. Too many. A quick Google search tells us that there are 1,970,000,000 results for "About us" and 1,830,000,000 results for "Contact us". Imagine trying to work your way up the search engine rankings against nearly 2 million other sites.

A website must be able to be found by search engines to be of any value. This means rich descriptive content and keywords. How many people do you know who go into Google or Yahoo and search on the phrase "About us"? Personally I don't know of any--even though there's nearly 2 million results if anyone actually did. Or how about websites that have pages with titles like "Memories"? Memories of what exactly?

Mystery Meat Navigation

I've seen websites where the only navigation available was a series of tiny little pictures that could mean almost anything. Some sites will even add insult to injury by making these little pictures into Flash or Javascript rollover effects that appear seemingly out of nowhere in random places on the page.

If I click your little picture of a camera, am I going to a place on your site that sells cameras, a gallery of photos you've taken, or some videos of your Aunt Bertha's latest trip to Maui? Making me guess what's on your site is not something I find amusing and is probably just going to make me go elsewhere.

Poorly thought-out navigation

A lot of web designers seem to have lost sight of the fact that you can make anything on the page into a link, not just the menu bar. I've been to websites that will actually say something like "To contact us or to request more information, please select the "Contact Page" link from the left-hand navigation menu". This to me is just bizarre. Why not just say "For questions or more information, contact us" and make "Contact us" a direct link to the Contact Page?

Or how about the people who write "For more information, click here". "Click here" contains no information whatsoever, either for the user or for the search engines indexing the site. Even worse, for a blind person viewing the site with screen reader software, there is no "here" to click.

Using graphics for text

Yes, the web has a limited number of fonts that you can safely be sure will show up as you intended. That's just a fact of life and at most its a minor inconvenience. There's other ways to brand your site besides use of a particular font. Using graphics--or worse, hundreds and hundreds of inline images for your site text--is no solution, its just incredibly annoying. My favorite sites are the ones who do this on their contact page--I'm sure their potential customers really enjoy having to type in email addresses and other information instead of simply cutting and pasting the text into their email program.

Frames

Wonderful way to send the message that "Hey, I designed this site in 1996 and haven't learned a damn thing about web design since." Frames break, they don't always show up right in some browsers, and more often than not, as a user, I'm going to come across at least one "orphaned" page in your site--that is, a page that shows up outside the frameset that I therefore have no idea what to do with and I'm simply left to guess about where it fits in with your site or how to navigate to anywhere else.

And as for search engines, given a choice between an index page that's nothing but a bunch of code on how to display other html pages and an index page loaded with descriptive text and keywords, which would you suspect will be ranked higher by Google or Yahoo?

There's no good reason to use frames anymore, as there is always a better way to do something. And with the advances in web technologies over the past decade or so and the huge amount of (often free) help available online, the ease-of-use argument doesn't even work anymore. If frames were not a web tool, I would say they need to be taken out back and shot--just do yourself a favor and stay away from them.

Flash introductions

God, please, just...don't.

Flash can be a very useful and powerful tool, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the most commonly abused technologies out there. Which leads us to...

Abuse of Java applets

At one time, there was this fad of people putting Java applets on their websites that showed this 3-D looking shimmering lake with twinkling stars overhead or other such nonsense. Yeah, really cool effect there--that is, until about the fifth time that you have to wait for the damn thing to load. Not even counting the five thousand other websites I've already seen it on.

Fortunately--praise be to whatever deities may exist--Java applets, largely thanks to such widespread abuse, seem to be on their way out these days. So this one's not so much of a complaint anymore.

And on a related note, unless you want to be pegged as completely clueless when it comes to the web (in other words, one of the people who keep me in business), don't confuse Java with JavaScript--they are two entirely different things. In fact, they were developed by two completely different companies--Sun Microsystems in the case of Java and Netscape in the case of JavaScript.

Page layouts with tables

At one time, it might have been a cool little hack to design pages with tables to get around some of the limitations of HTML in the web's ancient past (circa 1995). Actually, I used to do this myself back in the late 90's. But again, this is a great way to convey to everyone who comes to your site that you haven't learned a thing since that time.

This isn't to say that tables must be discarded. But tables have a purpose: to convey information in tabular form. Statistics, data, anything that you might put into a spreadsheet in other words. Page layouts are simply messy and limiting when done with tables and CSS layouts are far more flexible anyway.

...and a bonus pet peeve, which isn't limited to just web design.

"The computer made a mistake"

No, it didn't. Somewhere along the line, someone operating the computer made a mistake. Computers don't make mistakes. They are simply stupid machines that follow the instructions programmed into them by stupid human beings. Computers are tools, nothing more--and certainly not a substitute for critical thinking skills.

In the days before computers when businesses kept their records in paper ledgers, would an employee have responded to a customer complaint by saying that the ledger made a mistake? And if he did, would he have kept his job for long?

There's no more common new years resolution than "getting organized". For the most part, I'm a fairly organized person. That is, I know how to be organized, but sometimes I have to work on the self-discipline to keep up with it all. Now my business partner, he's not organized at all, but I digress.

Anyway, we're in this reorganization/re-evaluating phase with the business, simply because its good for all businesses to go through those phases periodically. Part of this is that we've been trying out some new software to help us keep track of everything that's going on.

I've looked at a lot of organizing and collaboration software over the years. But recently I found Egroupware and I'm impressed, to say the least. It has everything one might need to keep track of things--project management software, file management tools, a wiki, calendars, a knowledge base system, and a lot more all integrated into one package with a well-organized, attractive, and intuitive interface.

The website and user manual are nice as far as getting help. The installation instructions could use a lot of work, especially with explaining how to deal with the numerous problems that seems to come up. To put it bluntly, installation is a complete pain in the ass. It took me most of this evening, in fact (would have been a lot easier if I knew MySQL better). But the program is well worth it.

It requires a server and a database to run, but all that is easy enough to get with one of the all-in-one packages like DeveloperSide.net. Egroupware runs fine on your standard WAMP* or LAMP* configurations, so if you've had any experience running applications like WordPress or Drupal, you'll already be familiar with a lot of the installation tasks.

And you can synchronize it to use along with programs like Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and iCal. The best part is that its completely free and open-source. By the way, if you were wondering about Outlook--what the hell are you doing still using Microsoft products for anyway?



*(Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP or Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, respectively. For the non-techies out there, this refers to a standard configuration of operating system, server software, database, and PHP, a programming language that's particularly good for database applications. Many of the projects we work on in my company are built with programs that run on these configurations.)

The main computer system for my business has been in the shop for the past week due to needing some work done on it. Unfortunately, some issues came up that led to the work requiring a complete reinstall of Windows Vista. I've been spending the past few hours reinstalling programs and restoring all our data from backups, which is, I must say, tediously boring process. And as near as I can figure, there's at least a few hours left to go. Sigh.