Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category

Ethernet power on switch

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

Dear internet,

After my laptop’s screen has died I’m looking for an ethernet power switch (one you plug into the ethernet port and uses wake-on-lan to turn on the computer). If you know where to buy one or you are capable of creating it please leave a comment.

Thanks.

UPDATE: It seems that wake-on-ring is much easier since you only need 5V between pin 5 (ground) and pin 9 (ring indicator) to wake the computer up. I got instructions from an expert (thanks!) and will now try to create a prototype.

There once was…

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

A few years back there was this web agency that had a sister company that was into online advertising. At about the same time a lot of changes were happening in the advertising market and some innovations were needed. There was also a young web developer that was eager to create something impressive. Something cross-browser which wasn’t as easy then as it is today with YUI and others.

The developer took on a challenge of creating a new banner format that was already being used on some foreign sites. With a twist – the idea was to make it work on more than just the most popular browser. It was possible but some advance testing and expert “guessing” needed to be done. The challenge proved to be difficult but not unsolvable.

Since the script were to be used on advertising sites that already had their own JavaScript the functions needed to be ‘namespaced’ in order to avoid clashes. The developer wasn’t going to create an object but instead prefixed all his functions with an acronym. The acronym was chosen as an experiment – its meaning was hidden to see if others would just adopt it.

Every now and then I still get a floating banner to implement to a site. Not my primary focus anymore but still. And I always get a smile on my face when I see that the closing function is called “praHide” – “pra” is the acronym and it stands for “Parsek Rich Ad”. The code has changed since the first implementation and different agencies have different JavaScript functions. The name stayed the same though. I guess it became a sort of a standard. As has the 500×500 which we started using back in the day…

Dying out

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

Today my laptop decided that it had enough of being carried around and working nicely as it should. The screen now displays a limited number of pixels so it seems the most fragile part of the computer – the only movable part – went sour. When the same happened to my last mobile phone I decided not to buy clamshell phones ever again. Unfortunately with laptops I have no such option.

Hopefully the hardware experts can extend the life of my loyal friend for a few months since this is not really the best time to buy a new one. Until then I’ll only be using the external monitor.

Fortunatelly I’ve been thinking ahead.

Designing for web on A4 paper

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

Today’s talk about design was easily one of the most interesting talks we’ve had on Spletne urice ever. Žiga really thought about the problem and formed the whole talk as a big metaphor to explain his point. Even with all he said I’m still left with a bunch of thoughts floating around my mind that popped up during the talk. In the end we actually ended up realizing that developers and designers actually have a common ancestor and that we’re just on different branches of historic development.

What we consider to be design is not only the shape, the colors, the fonts. This means we might fall into a philosophic debate about what design really is and who designers actually are. And I’m not going there now. What I know is that as you divide the work between people in a team you can’t just have one designer – everybody has to be a part designer. The sooner we all get to acknowledge this the better. And we need to expect it too.

Being ill

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

It’s funny how most people will assume you’re an idiot when you’re over clothed – e.g. wearing a hat, scarf and coat in the office. Nobody will think that just maybe you’re cold cause you’re about to become ill and you just want to add an out of office reply, send that report you promised and delegate all your work to your colleagues.

I’m not that ill anymore, I’m quite ok. The only problem is that I can’t spend 8 hours at work since after about 4 my energy plunges and I can barely sit anymore. It’s a hint to go home and lie down and have a midday nap. Funny how you can loose all the power you had in just a few days. Fighting illness seems to be quite a difficult task. Almost like weightlifting.

The next bubble

Friday, September 15th, 2006

I started reading TechCrunch a while back and what struck me today is that Web 2.0 (or whatever you call it) looks like a bubble.

Let me explain. At the start of the first bubble everybody had his own business idea and a new way to improve the world with IT. It’s true that the first time around people thought that throwing money at the problem was the way to go. Somehow they didn’t get that not every web app has a market to cover a few millions of expenses and earn the investors the few hundred percent they were hoping for. The bubble burst. Many companies died and the web looked like a forest after a fire.

After a few years of almost zero development some smaller companies started doing great things. A few old technologies were discovered[1], a few buzzwords coined[2] and the web was in a new cycle. From day one people were skeptic about it and a lot of articles were written about why this time it’s not going to leave hundreds of web developers jobless.

Maybe they were right. But it doesn’t mean there is no bubble and that it won’t burst. In the last few days and weeks I’ve seen too much ‘startups’ go into public beta or announcing what new and amazing problem they’re going to solve. Well I don’t really have any of those problems. And those I do are already being solved by a few Web1.0 and a few Web2.0 applications. Why would any of the new apps be any better? Because they use glows, fades, XHTML, CSS and AJAX?

This time around fewer jobs and less investor money will be lost. What will be lost though are the hopes and dreams of many developers that believed that del.icio.us, flickr and other success stories of the Web2.0 era were just really smart ideas. Naive we all were…

  1. XMLHttpRequest is one of the trademarks of Web2.0 that was available at the time of the Web1.0 but was rediscovered later and is used by most project managers to sell stuff. back
  2. AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and was coined by JJG @ Adaptive Path to sell the idea of ‘asynchronous’ updates of the page. back