Ross Phillips

So, I watch a lot of films and a select few really good tv programmes like Dexter, Burn Notice, 24 etc… and I thought it was about time I posted something on my favourite things I’ve seen recently.

I also like the watch he wears which is apparently a Chase Durer Special Forces UDT 1000xl, which for those of us not in the know looks like this:

As much as I like it though there are two more watches I’ve seen recently that I prefer.  Mr Bauer in 24 wears one of them - a MTM Special Forces watch which looks a bit dull comapred with Michael Westen’s it does have a cool light function on it

There is one I prefer even more though - but its difficult to say exactly which one it is I like (bear with me on this) as its a Rolex Daytona (specifically the one given to the winners of Le Mans) but there are so many versions of the watch then I’ll just have to pick the one I like the most.  Which is this one, called a Paul Newman (could it be any cooler?):

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This week saw the release of Windows 7 RC1 (I think that’s right).  I’ve installed it on the machine I’m using to write this on and having struggled to get to grips fully with Vista (finally there though) I had to admit that Microsoft seem to have got things right with 7.  I do think though in Windows 7 is geared towards family users at home - big clue on this given the adverts on tele recently showing very young kids emailing pictures of rabbits etc…  I’m not sure all IT professionals will love the ability to automatically share files through any machines connected to a network but I’m sure some one will make lots of money doing all the training…

Some of the features are pretty good though - like if you hover over one of your open programmes on the taskbar it brings up a preview.  This is like Vista but I think it works that little bit better.  Not sure if my 4gb of ram speeds things up though.  One small pain for me so far is this machine uses a usb dongle to connect to our wireless network (like the laptop) but while the Vista powered laptop can find our NAS drive every time the Windows 7 powered desktop seems to only find it when it feels like it.

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I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned how much I like Linux but this week saw the roll out of Ubuntu 9.04 (and therefore Kubuntu 9.04 too) so I’ve upgraded on my normal work machine to Ubuntu 9.04 and then also on the work laptop and then the machine I use for testing has had it’s Kubuntu distribution upgraded also.  So is there much difference?  I don’t know about the technical details.  They do seem to load very quickly compared with Vista.  Visually though there are a number of improvements such as the loading screens look more professional (for my money much better than anything Microsoft has ever produced) and the new default wallpapers are very nice too.

There are a couple of things though about in Linux that still niggle - I’ve installed the latest beta of Firefox in windows on my normal desktop machine which is simply download, double click and it runs.  Now adding this to Ubuntu seems more problematic - I was speaking with Ubuntu Geeks on Twitter yesterday and they didn’t know how to do it but promised to get back to me.

This is very minor but a doddle to change in windows - the only thing I personally dislike about Kubuntu is the pointer arrow.  I can’t give you a rational explanation why it just annoys me.  But I’ve looked everywhere I can think of and I cant change it.

I have tried other distributions (I’m quite fond of Mint and discovered a new one (new to me at least) called Vine from Japan yesterday) but I have to say I think Mandriva compared with the progress others have made (visually at least) looks a bit behind the times.  I’m sure the programmers could point to a number of areas where it might out perform Windows or Ubuntu but for me it lacks the professional “sheen” of Ubunutu and Mint.

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I don’t normally plug other people’s sites but this one is definitely worth a mention.  I needed to convert a PDF document to Word so I hit Google and this is the first site that came up.  I was expecting to have to download and install some software but this is done live by the site and worked perfectly.  So double thumbs up from Purepages Group!

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We have done a number of email campaigns recently and yesterday I was allowed to flex my few design skills on an advert for us so for once I wasn’t constrained by a customer’s requirements.  Anyway, there are still a certain number of considerations when designing your mail shot.  Size - too big and it will require people to scroll to the right which is a definite no-no.  Too small and the impact is compromised.  So I tend to go for 800 pixels across with the least possible amount of downward scrolling possible.  We in the office all have 22 inch monitors which are great (Apple HD trailers look awesome) but 1024*768 is still a widely used resolution so we have to work around the lowest common denomiator.

Then the design itself.  You might fill a web page with flash and transparent PNGs which look lovely but wont work through an email service.  Our original idea (click here) I thought looked fantastic but had a number of issues for a successful mail shot.  The background is static - which actually worked with Thunderbird and on Mac books but didn’t work anywhere else.  Gmail & Hotmail refused to show it at all while Outlook 2007 didn’t keep it static.  Then there are the PNGs.  They work but make the file size too big and I try to keep the mail shot to under 300kb otherwise can affect loading times for those not blessed with a 24mb connection like we have in the office.  So they need turning into JPEGs to make them smaller.  Which then effectively makes the tranparency useless as it saves the background as white.

So in the end I designed the whole thing in Fireworks (which I find easier to use than the more powerful Photoshop) and saved it as one larger image even though its a half the size in terms of file size (248kb compared with over 600kb for the preferred design).

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So, we recently upgraded our servers in the office so some of the older machinery was made redundant (as servers at least) so I decided in my spare time to change them all to desktops and currently I have the following linux distributions installed: ubuntu 9.04 on my own machine (which I like to a certain degree), kubuntu 8.10, mandriva and linux mint.  Personally I think Linux Mint is the most user friendly and also the most like Windows.  Ubuntu looks the nicest closely followed by Kubuntu and appears to my untrained eye to have the most functions closest to Windows XP.  Mandriva - I haven’t really had a lot of time to have a play around with recently but I have installed it on my daughters desktop machine and she has not complaints and it loads quickly (on a desktop machine that is only 1 year old and was knowingly sold by a reputable high street retailer with 256mb of RAM!  That should be illegal! Photoshop requires 2gb ram minimum…).  In my humblest of opinions there are only a handful of things about Linux that wind me up.

1. Installing new software.  I find this a pain in the backside beecause unless I find the “deb” package for ubuntu for example I have to go the package manager or whatever its called and search for what I want to install - in fairness though from then on in its dead easy and can install multiple programmes in one go so there’s a tip for the microsoft boys. 2. Lack of support for simple things. Here’s a good redcent example.  We use our webcam via skype extensively at the moment and Skype have a linux version which sounds great.  Its even a deb package so I can save to my desktop and double click and it installs itself… Downhill from there sadly.  It’s total pot luck figuring out which of the four choices is the correct speaker setting which is more annoying as all the sounds on system start up come through pleasantly enough…..  Then its persuading the damn thing to recognize the in-built microphone on the webcam……  Then theres actually starting a video chat.  And why can’t I have my contacts list and chat history in the same window like Windows?

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Personally I hate it.  No tabs, NO SECURITY!, no add ons, pitiful rendering.  But working in IT on machines we can adapt as we like means here in the office we are able to choose which browser we use.  Personally I prefer Chrome (I like for example the way it highlights boxes when entering information though I realise this is copied blatantly from Safari…) but until Chrome allows me to add as many add ons as I have in Firefox then for day to day work Mozilla is still king of the hill on this machine.  On the laptop at home where I simply browse then Chrome wins out due to its light weight on system resources.

Anyway I digress.  Working on and with websites means sadly this horrible little programme will be the bane of your life.  In more ways than one too.  On top of the actual issues in using this to browse the internet there are other issues which are arguably more important for the general well being of your computer.  Many moons a go my fiance’s desktop machine became infested with a number of viruses and trojans that proved a devil to remove.  I was almost at the stage where the whole thing was going to be wiped clean.  Anyway, one of the major problems was the number of pop ups that kept opening in ie6 even though we had long since been converted to using Firefox.  I still to this day do not understand how they were able to open a programme I wasn’t even using and bring up their insidious adverts for casinos to naked women in my area and seemingly everything else in between.  In my frustration I went to the search option and searched for “iexplore.exe” in all local drives (why were there 4 local drives?  I never found out…) and it brough back 7 files.  So in my efforts to stop the pop ups I worked on the theory that if there are no more copies of IE6 for them to open then that will solve the problem.  Well it did solve that particular problem but caused even more of its own.  I didn’t realise at the time how much Microsoft uses this truly awful programme within windows itself.  To say the computer went into full on strop is an understatement.  Thankfully at the time we only really used Firefox and not much else.  Which was lucky given that anything related to Microsoft wouldn’t work at all.  But strangely it did eventually go back to normal which I can only put down to automatic updates as I didn’t once change any settings myself.

So from this there are two additional warnings against using IE6 - it has more holes in it that a Tetley teabag.  What other software requires so many fixes/hotpatches etc… to remain secure?  And then if (I personally think more like when…) it is compromised then your computer’s reliance on IE6 further reduces the machines speed and/or reliability.  It always feels to me like Microsoft get as far as beta testing and then think “Well we have a captive audience as they can’t use anything else so instead of paying testers to do the work properly we’ll just release this as it is and wait for the avalanche of error reports to come in to tell us what went wrong and we’ll save a fortune.”  Nice one microsoft.

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Just a short post for the moment but I was thinking about magazines and buying myself a subscription.  We are subscribed to two here at the moment.  .Net is interesting (sometimes funny) and covers in decent detail a lot of relevant and contemporary issues.  We also get Webdesigner but in retrospect this was a mistake as many of the design ideas while good are beyond my limited Fireworks and Flash skills.  So we wont be renewing that one this year.  I wouldn’t dissuade anyone else from buying it - my only word of caution is you need a certain level of skill to make the most of it.

.Net covers SEO, web design, hosting options, reviews of software and so forth.  So basically a jack of all trades kind of deal.  On the other hand Webdesigner is excellent assuming you use on a daily basis the programmes invloved.

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I thought before writing this post about all the great and good of the world who in all seriousness we should attempt to emulate ourselves and well their lives are actually kind of boring.  Here’s an example:

Ghandi.

6am wake up. 6.15 prayers. 6.30 Breakfast - bread and water. 7am.  Preach. 12 noon lunch - more bread and water. 12.10 preach. 5pm evening meal - finally something substantial. 5.10pm Preach. 11pm bed.

So not the most exhilarating of lifestyles despite the unbelieveable difference one man was able to make.

So someone from the other end of the scale now.  Kim Jong-Il - despot tyrant leader in North Korea.

6am - wake up and lie in bed deciding which village to persecute on the flimsy excuse some one dared tell the truth about where I was born.  Don’t these plebs read the books we gave them at school?

7am - breakfast.  Cognac and anything else I fancy.  Spoilt for choice in here as I can have whatever I want despite millions of my slaves people dying from starvation.

7.30am - put on my Albert Einstein inspired outfit.  Don’t worry about what to wear when I have 20 copies of the exact same jump suit and 20 pairs of platform shoes - for posture you realise.

8am - time to shout at those minions in the government as my copy of this month’s Playboy hasn’t arrived yet.  Someone will pay dearly for this.  Spend 10 minutes contemplating the most horrible death possible.

8.20am - time to go online.  Those filthy dogs in Washington have been calling me evil again!  They will pay.  It is great though having the country’s only broaband connection as I can watch what I want on youtube.  There are some good videos of my troops in action!

Anyway, you get the picture.

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A recent article in .net magazine got me thinking.  The gist of the article was, as internet based companies, how do we secure money coming in given the tough times we are all bound to be facing over the coming months/years.  And one of their suggestions was to update your current sites.  Which I thought was a good idea.  I’m sure we’ve all done sites which at the time were technically impressive and looked the part.  But the internet more than any other form of communicaiton or advertising evolves the fastest.  So what was good 18 months a go can now look a bit stale.

So the key question is in what way do you change it?  Do you reskin the site to give it a new look - possibly the quickest and easiest option.  But not updating the back end further limits what new technology can be easily added further down the line.  Or another (and my preferred option) would be to completely revamp the site, incorporating the latest technology and crucially adding the facility to update the site quicker further down the line.  So how do you do that?  There is the expensive option of writing something from scratch - which we have done with Pureadmin, our bespoke CMS platform.  Whilst expensive it does have the huge advantage of being written by us for us so will naturally include everything we want and feel is necessary for the future.

On the other hand there are services such as Wordpress & Drupal which are free and offer off the shelf useability.  Their advantages are clear - cheap (its doesn’t get any cheaper than free…), you know it works straightaway as all the hard work and testing has already been done and there is a huge library of add ons for a huge diversity of requirements.  It has to be said however that it can be both time consuming and daunting scouring the wordpress plugins to find exactly what you need.  But if you go down this route what happens when wordpress and drupal are either old hat or usurped by another programme?  Using your own software platform then hte changes required to keep up with the fast moving internet can be relatively easy.  But if you have used drupal and it no longer fits the bill?  If there aren’t the add ons or patches available then you are left with no other option than to install yet another new programme which can be time consuming and problematic in its own right.

So what do we recommend?  Well if you can afford it writing your own.  If not then use something like Drupal or Wordpress - they do at least work out of the box and the add ons whilst many do at least provide functionality to your site easily and at no cost.

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