Blog

Web standards are a good thing.

Depending on your relationship with the internet, you may have no idea what I am talking about. Web standards have been evolving for many years. They started off with a handful of ‘best practices’ to follow when designing and coding your webpages. Today’s definition of web standards means giving your markup semantic meaning so the information would be understandable even with no design elements applied to it. This means properly coding headlines with headline tags, paragraphs with paragraph tags and so on. It also means giving your markup a structure and using naming conventions that make sense.

HTML5 takes cues from web standards programming and goes one step further. More »

What comes to mind when you see the word ’spam’? The iconic can of smeat (specks of meat)? Unwanted email? Hawaiian food?

To me, spam means search engine results which have been manipulated by tactics the search engines don’t approve of.

An old school example of spam is automating comment submission to Wordpress blogs with a bot. These comments then link back to a website you want to rank in search engines. Another would be dynamically inserting unauthorized links into a website you don’t own via hacking.

According to Aaron Wall, one new school approach to spamming can be seen over at Mahalo.com. More »

Samba is the result of some clever reverse-engineering to create reliable Windows file sharing without the headaches of a Windows server. Mac OS X clients can also use these shares, making Samba a great option for cross-platform environments. It’s not a common scenario to use an Open Directory server to control Linux systems, but here’s how to do it if you have one already, and want to use Samba on Linux with your OD users.  If you are finding the Xserve platform to be a little out of your budget for the amount of performance you get, or you don’t want to administrate yet another Mac OS X Server system, this could be a great alternative to an AFP solution for your Macs.

We could host SMB shares directly on our OD server, but ideally we keep our OD server just as a directory and authentication server, and let other servers do the file sharing heavy lifting. More »

In keeping with my current trend of posting ridiculously easy tips and solutions, I thought I’d post a story about a recent client experience where we used an off-the-shelf solution that’s not always thought of as either cheap or easy. Here’s the situation: my client has videos that he needs to share with his clients in a far away land (LA), and he’d like to do this on his MobileMe website. Ideally, he’d like to have a webpage setup for each of his clients so that they could choose their clip by clicking on a thumbnail of the video, and each page should be limited to just those clips that a particular client would need to see. In other words, the same basic web-based client review process that just about every other creative pro would like to have. More »

For anyone on the Mac platform looking to transfer large documents too big for email, but don’t wish to open up insecure FTP ports and deal with cumbersome FTP applications, Rumpus is worth a look.  It brings the power of FTP file sharing to the masses, and allows for the easy transfer of large media files.   More »

For all the benefits the iPhone has going for it, there is one glaring omission, turn-by-turn navigation. It’s true that the Google Maps app provides some of this functionality (and may provide more in the future), but it is awfully difficult to follow a Google Map on your phone and keep yourself out of danger.

Up to this point many of the top GPS navigation companies have released apps for the iPhone. The only problem here is that they usually hover in the $50 – $100 range or require a monthly fee. On the other hand, Waze is a social and community-driven GPS application that is completely free. More »

It appears like the regulatory heat is about to be turned up on cloud computing services.

Spurred by last years high profile outages amongst cloud computing finest services including Gmail, Windows Azure, and Salesforce.com, the FTC will hold a privacy roundtable Jan. 28th.  The FTC has decided this should be part of the public debate concerning its recommendations for the FCC’s upcoming broadband plan coming early this year. More »

Font management software is a utility that allows multiple users to manage font files. More »

Pay per click marketing has gone from a niche marketing tactic to a staple of any organization’s marketing efforts. And for good reason – super trackable results, data falling out your ears, no more faith based marketing, virtually real time feedback – I know many companies who spend 100% of their marketing budgets on PPC marketing alone (although longer term thinkers will certainly incorporate SEO efforts as well.)

With all the data it products managing PPC can seem pretty daunting. Which metrics are the best for your business – Click through rate? Impressions? Conversion rate? Some unknown uber metric? More »

Apple Mail is the best email client available. That’s a controversial statement (as controversial as a discussion about a mail client can be), but I’ve never found another client that is as fast, easy, and uncluttered as Apple Mail. That said, like any email client, it has it’s own share of irritating problems. I’m going to show you how to solve a very common one. More »

The iChat Server module in Mac OS X Server provides a great interface to the jabberd daemon, getting you up and running quickly with standard and Kerberos authentication using your Open Directory users. Unfortunately, there are a few useful features that are not yet accessible in Server Admin. One of these is a simple tool for automatically setting everyone to be a buddy with each other. In smaller organizations, it’s a great way to get in touch with everyone without having to ask everyone to become a buddy individually. More »

Are you tired of only being able to choose between Helvetica or Arial for a nice sans-serif font on your website. Perhaps Georgia or Times New Roman doesn’t really have the panache you are seeking for your corporate homepage?

For years, the selection of ‘web-safe’ fonts has been limited. Typekit is attempting to undo some of this old thinking when it comes to typography on the web. More »

With the new year comes new worries.  However, some old ones never seem to go away.  Such as it is with spam.  According to PC World, it makes up 86% of all email traffic, and it’s a constant cat and mouse game (more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon) for spam-block software developers to keep on top of it all.

Anti-spam software itself has become extremely complex and relies on learning algorithms, blocklists and other tricks, which makes it a herculean task to keep it all together and working properly.  Of course, like other complex pieces of software, it doesn’t always. More »

Port Channeling – a low cost way of increasing bandwidth and redundancy utilizing existing network infrastructure, such as turning four 1 Gigabit connections into one 4 Gigabit connection (if one link is lost the channel stays up with 3Gig functionality). More »

I’ve been involved in some major Software Development projects both as a Developer and a Project Manager. In fact, over the last year we’ve been developing a large scale Java application to replace a number of systems for our parent company Computer Stores Northwest, Inc (The Mac Store, Bodelin, PowerMax, Iris Professional Services).  We’ll be releasing the software next month for our first round of user acceptance testing. More »

I’ve posted on a variety of topics here, but usually in a long-winded manner. It’s time for me to put something useful for everybody, and to get right to the point! So, today I’d like to offer up three very easy, very productive, but often overlooked shortcuts. More »

In the dark ages of compiler technology, symbol names were frequently only significant to eight characters. This limitation forced a certain brevity and style when choosing variable and function names. You would often find variables with names like ‘empOTRt’ or ‘cur’. More »