Author: Davin Granroth

  • Prognosticating on LAMP vs .NET, J2EE

    Dvorak wrote an article on PCMAG.com, “Windows Vista: Where’s the Buzz?,” in which he made some predictions on the future of web technology. It all started with his observation on the lack of excitement about Microsoft naming their coming OS as “Vista.” Linux/Apache will own the server space and with the emergence of MySQL and…

  • Email or e-mail?

    Searched Google for “email” and returned 802,000,000 results. Searched Google for “e-mail” and returned 1,300,000,000 results. But, also got Google’s “Did you mean: email?” prompt, which suggests that Google, at least, has “email” as a preferred term with “e-mail” as a variant term. I almost always write “email,” but when I think about it, putting…

  • Securing the Mac 10.4 laptop

    I talked with a guy from the MSU Computer Store this morning about getting Norton AntiVirus or Internet Security for the Mac laptop I’ve been using. His recommendation is to just get AntiVirus 10 for the Mac and change a few settings on the laptop. Here are his recommendations: Turn off Bluetooth, Discoverable, so that…

  • Melt-down proof, modular nuclear power plants

    This is one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while. Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom Explosive growth has made the People’s Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy. By Spencer Reiss at Wired.com

  • Teaching DW MX 2004 L2

    Today I taught Dreamweaver MX 2004-Level 2. It was the second time I’ve done the course, and I don’t feel like it went as well as the first time I did it. The feedback from the students was fine. No major complaints, though I had a suggestion to go through some of the examples more…

  • Down like Rumplestiltskin.

    You know when you lie back to take a little rest and you wake up eight hours later? That was me, last night. I finally had the girls in bed, and I wanted to get some laundry going and do some client related work. But, I was really feeling a little groggy. So, I laid…

  • Dreamweaver MX 2004: Less than great for dynamic web applications

    So, I’m supposed to teach a course in Dreamweaver Dynamic Web Applications and one in Dreamweaver/PHP Web Development. In preparation, I’m working on a little project that should help with some internal LCTTP record keeping as well as give me practice using DW to build web apps. Here’s the trouble: Web applications generally require some…

  • Phi, phi, design notes

    Just for the sake of me jotting this down somewhere… Phi (the golden ratio) is approximately equal to 1.6180339887498948482. phi is the decimal part of that: .6180339887498948482. When laying out two column widths on a web page, using phi as the percentage of the wider column often provides a nice visual balance. So, two columns…

  • Web Site Visibility class

    Today I taught a course in Web Site Visibility. It was fun. It is really the first course I’ve been able to teach that I was actually able to draw heavily on my experience with the web. It was a small course, and I realized after talking with the participants that the name of the…

  • Online services bypassing distribution problems in markets like music and videos, the Long Tail article

    The Long Tail is an interesting article. Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.