Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for June, 2005
Google Payments?
The news broke late last week by way of the Wall Street Journal with rumors of a payments service akin to PayPal forthcoming from Google, seeming new masters of the web world.
Some of the speculation was cleared late last evening with comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt who claimed the wunderkid of online search would not venture into eBay’s turf. However, other innovators have been known to use the ‘head shake’ to brush off early competitive concern while they take the pulse of a market sector and possible room for additional players.
Google does wave a big stick, with revenues and a stock price enabling it to venture into many arenas, however, eBay being an equally entrenched global brand, the cost could be too great to go head to head. Much speculation now points toward a possible electronic payment service tied to Google’s existing Froogle shopping search property.
I have used PayPal personally and professionally nearly since its inception, and am one of its 72 million registered members. I have found it valuable both as a consumer and as a developer for its ease of use, low cost of entry and sensitivity to changes in Internet commerce. My own concern of …
Lists of things to know
Christian Heilmann has been busy making lists; six JavaScript features we do not need any longer and DOM scripting health and safety tips. There’s a lot of bad practice out there. Readers of this weblog, being the sensitive and handsome people that you are, will no doubt know about these bad practices and be assiduously avoiding them. (If not, I can, er, recommend SitePoint’s DHTML Utopia, written by, er, me. Heh. :)) I’d be interested to hear firstly what you think are the current “bad practices” which should be abolished as soon as possible, what you think they should be replaced with, and what obstacles you’re finding (or falling over) in your respective quests to both implement modern DOM scripting and to update all that old stuff to work the right way. Follow up with your comments!
Use information products to establish value, trust, and credibility
One easy way to set yourself apart is by creating a CD disk or audio recording that you give to clients and prospects, and that gives them valuable information about web design and development.
It is so easy these days to create these products, using free Wavpad software plus a decent PC microphone.
The key is to create valuable content. Don’t talk about your firm, but rather the key things your target market needs to know to succeed using the Web.
Keep your talk short, no more than 10 minutes.
And make some sort of offer for them to contact you to learn more or get started.
These types of products are easier to “sell” than your services. Give them for free to your prospects, and ask for their feedback. Offer them on your web site. Bring a few along to networking meetings.
Do this well, and people will view you as a thought leader, the go to professional in your field.
PHP 5.1’s Killer Feature?
PHP 4 didn’t really catch fire in terms of real-world server support until its first major update, version 4.1. Will the same be true of PHP 5, the first point release of which is now in its early beta stages?
PHP 5.1 Beta 1 has been out for ten days, and Beta 2 has just become available. Neither of these releases has yet been announced on php.net, nor has an official list of changes been posted, but if you’re especially curious you can read the detailed breakdown maintained by the developers.
Upon its release in early 2002, PHP 4.1 made some important changes to the language. It was the first release that recommended register_globals be switched off to improve security. The long-named variables like $HTTP_GET_VARS for accessing submitted values securely were replaced with shorter, more convenient superglobal variables like $_GET. All up, PHP 4.1 almost had a greater impact on the way developers used PHP than the major 4.0 release did.
At this stage, PHP 5.1 is not looking to be quite as spectacular. Some enhancements to Perl regular expressions, a few extra array functions… nothing to write home about. But there is one significant enhancement to PHP in 5.1: PHP Data Objects …
Jetty really is lightweight!
Today I took some time to deploy and fine tune a new MP3 jukebox with a Web interface to improve the level of aural democracy here at SitePoint HQ. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve written it as a Java Web application because what it needs to do on the server side is a lot more complex than anything I’d like to tackle with, say, PHP.
When the application starts up on the server, it creates a socket connection to the jukebox server (which happens to be running on the same machine). The jukebox server notifies the Web application of changes made by logged-in users. Speaking of which, each logged-in user creates an additional connection to the jukebox server, in order to issue commands on behalf of that user.
Although the interface is still fairly utilitarian, it’s coming along nicely:
Getting the application up and running took all of 30 minutes, including downloading and setting up Java, Tomcat and Ant, building and configuring the jukebox server from CVS, and installing my compiled Web application. But my work didn’t end there.
The computer in our server rack that is dedicated to the MP3 jukebox is quite a crusty old thing (a Celeron 533MHz …
Eric’s Universal Child Selector
A couple of weeks ago Eric Meyer published a little revelation on mimicking the Universal Child Selector. Although I read it at the time, it probably took a week to sink in to the point where it was of real use to me. I thought I’d look at that here.
In case, you’re not familiar with the child selector, here’s the exec summary.
Although it sounds like some weird ’sci-fi cloning experiment’, the ‘child selector’ is actually a nifty idea that allows you to set rules that will only be applied when a given element is directly inside a specified other.
In practice, where:
‘div#box p {…}’ effects every P anywhere inside a DIV called ‘#box’
‘div#box>p {…}’ effects only the P’s one level inside the DIV called ‘#box’.
Now, this would be pretty handy, if it wasn’t for the fact Internet Explorer completely and utterly ignores it. As a consequence, the child selector has generally only been of limited usefulness — most often used as a hack/filter which allows you to target styles specifically to non-IE browsers.
That was the state of play until a few weeks ago when Eric pointed out you can get a rough equivalent of the child selector by using …
The unsell
To many professionals, selling is a dirty word. And that’s okay, because by not selling, even unselling, you end up selling more.
Example:
My hard drive just crashed on a laptop I’ve had since 2000. I went to the local computer repair shop to get a new hard drive for this laptop and to buy a long-overdue desktop.
On fixing the laptop, the computer salesperson said, “You know, if you don’t want to get the new desktop now, that’s okay.”
I poked some polite fun of him saying, “You have to be the worst salesperson I’ve ever met, offering to give up a $1,000 sale.”
He said, “Not at all. I only want you to buy something if you really want to. We don’t sell people things they don’t want or need.”
Of course I bought the system. Plus, I’ve already been back a few times to get some upgrades.
This salesperson has been extremely responsive, and quick to turn around any upgrades. And I now know he has my best interests in mind.
So it is okay, and even a good idea, not to sell, in case you were worried. So long as you ask good questions and deliver a solution to your customer, you will …
Intro Glossary to Linux Distributions
Kudos to Martin Ferretti, a stockbroker by day and web junkie by night, has rolled out a nice starter guide to the major and some minor Linux distributions. That not to mention that his site also broadly serves as a resource to many other tools available to web professionals.
This is something I pine for often being a researcher myself, which is encouraging a broadening collection of data on open source for professionals to use in technology planning and spending. Ferretti has provided a good starter glossary of the various operating system flavors.
A logical next step would be a deeper look into the strength and weakness of each and which distros might target specific areas of technology use (web serving, desktop, file server and so on).
As an example, I initially used RedHat exclusively and really did not explore other flavors of Linux (1997-1999). However, having built various distros since I have found RedHat Enterprise ideal for file serving, mail serving and storage, Mandriva (Mandrake) as a good desktop model and Fedora and SUSE built as servers-only excellent for web serving with a simple and efficient patching models.
Not to ignore a loyalist favorite - I do like Debian and …
OpenBSD versus Linux, Gentoo meets Microsoft
OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has gone on the record in an interview with Forbes Magazine, slashing at Linux and Linus Torvald’s oversight of the OS as low in quality.
Raadt also does not care for the likes of IBM, HP, Sun and others garnering profits from the free contributions of the open source community without giving more back. There may be some substance to that - though those companies and some others did make positive moves in indemnifying customers and releasing a certain level of patents for free usage.
It would be good to perhaps see more investments in the open source community in some broad consortuim manner to perhaps improve the amount of research availble on open source trends, usage patterns, return on investment, etc. However, we do need to remember that these companies do commit staff to work on Linux projects during paid work hours as part of the contributions back to the community.
I have spent so much time in multi-platform environments that I do not get quite as religious as others may about Linux versus OpenBSD versus Windows versus other Unix variants and so on. However, being a heavy OS X user both personally and server side …
Quick reminder on vendor relations
I consult to many types of professionals. Some are better than others when it comes to paying bills on time. Attorneys tend to be the worst, for whatever reason. (Perhaps they focus too much on legal compliance, instead of on building human relationships).
If you have a vendor/contractor who does great service for you, pay them the day they send the invoice, if not earlier. Most sole proprietors or owners of small firms live invoice to invoice, and appreciate clients who pay on time. It is a business practice that goes against the grain of how large corporations work (net 30 or worse), but in the world of small business, makes lots of sense.
To give an example from outside IT, I know a mortgage broker who pays his best appraiser when he gives an order, not when the property appraisal is delivered. As a result, this appraiser bends over backwards for him and works hard to stretch for the best possible appraised value of the property.
In contrast, I worked with a business colleague who paid professionals only when he was 100% sure he got what he wanted from them. He withheld payment, sometimes for months, until he was 100% …
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