Category: User experience, web, technology

  • Troubleshooting OS 10.4 connection to Windows share using Active Directory authentication

    I’m trying to mount a shared volume on the Mac OS 10.4 laptop I use at MSU. The shared volume is on a Windows server and it uses Active Directory to authenticate user names and passwords in the domain. I have all the right information (server address, share name, user name, password), and I have…

  • Trouble with PHP5 and SQLite 3

    After fiddling for a while with SQLite 3 and PHP 5.0.4 on the Mac PowerBook (OS 10.4.2) I’ve been using, I just saw that the current version of PHP does not include support for SQLite 3. Only for version 2. Dangit. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing SQLite 2 just so it can…

  • LAMP or WIMP?

    I was walking on campus last week thinking about the acronym LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and realized that if it was on a Windows server running IIS, it would be WIMP.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Rewrote the main page code and css of this blog

    Just a note, this evening I rewrote the markup and css for this blog. I basically just deleted both and started over. This page is now more lean and the css is much less bulky. I also ditched the monthly archive link list and the calendar. Instead, there is now a longer list of recent…

  • UX is a quality, not discipline, thoughts spurred by Peter Merholz

    I thought this post from Peter Merholz was a nice philosophical step-back for usability. User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and…