Learned

I leaned that, "senior citizens, although slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose." I went down to the museum after dad-in-law pimped out my knowledge of macs and offered for me to help an elderly coworker, Marcia, to "get the web working." It turned out that Marcia I was assisting was 74, had an awesome rig (23" AND 30" Apple Cinemas running on a G4 with a Wacom tablet the size of the fattest of our two cats) and by "get the web working" meant "publish things to the museum website with Dreamweaver." I'm not a Dreamweaver expert, but it turned out she knew her way around the application and just needed a refresher on how to find files on the mac and move things from development to test to live. She'd been used to a PC - so we worked to get some similar key commands operating in the Mac version of Dreamweaver. At first, Marcia seemed slow. Then I saw her open up a picture in photoshop and deftly remove a strap going across someone's shirt using more key commands than I could count. Next, she flipped over to the HTML code behind the dreamweaver design to get the dimensions of the image off of the <img> tag. I was impressed.

It's seldom I meet someone over 50 let alone over 70 who still has such passion to learn new technology and the patience to do it. Marcia is an illustrator and sculptor by trade, but taught herself photoshop and dreamweaver as they started to become required technologies.

Cruising around the live site looking for what she was supposed to edit, she pointed to a butterfly flying across a banner.

"That's what I want do learn how to do: make butterflies," she said.

"Oh. That's Flash stuff. I don't even know Flash," I said.

"Well I want to do it, so I'd better get to it and learn Flash."

Truly inspiring.

Learned

I learned that ticket prices from DC to Portland for the end of July really suck. Big time. Meh.
I also learned that wikileaks has some pretty badass stuff on it. From Frat Ritual Handbooks to Bomb diagrams.
I also learned about this Opera Unite thing that no one will use... well, at least one one (me). It probably would have been better if they just sold this as a browser data store like those in Google Gears or Safari. Or maybe I'm missing something. But then again, if a full time web developer can read your "Here's what it is" article and still not get it, you've got other problems.

Learned

I've been playing with subversion a little bit for version control and I learned that I really, really like bazaar better. Git is probably better, too. My main complaint is how hard it is to move files around once they're in subversion, having to explicitly add things, and that the methods for ignoring files aren't very clear.

I also learned how to make German potato salad from this recipe. The secret? Bacon makes most things good. It actually came out much more like hash browns... which are also tasty.

Learned

I learned that bing.com is just another Microsoft snafu.

The first time I learned about bing was when I went to do a search on farecast and instead of being redirected to "live.farecast.com" like I'm used to, I ended up at "bing.com/travel". I briefly considered entering my password to check my alerts... but one shouldn't enter one's password into a different domain. Also, there was nothing to tell me that bing.com was a microsoft or anything to tell me that farecast.com hadn't just been hacked and was directing to some spam site. So, I closed the window and planned to try again another day to see if Farecast.com had sorted themselves out.

Later that same day, I learned about the release of bing.com, realized that it wasn't hacked and thought to myself, "Microsoft really isn't very good at this."

Then, last night, I was reading this article pointing out that the bing.com logo is just a stretched out font and thought, "maybe I'll see how terrible this thing actually is."

After searching for a random word ("nonsense" if I recall), I noticed that there was a "maps" link, which I decided to check out. Herein I found several awesomely dumb mistakes:

(1) No clean URLs. Unlike google maps, the maps on bing.com have the totally useless "default.aspx" in the address. Hasn't IIS Mod-Rewrite been around long enough that these shitty URLs should go away?

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

(2) If I click on this interesting "3D" button, I get a message that tells me it's not available in my browser and that I need to "See Help". Microsoft appears to have eschewed one of the more useful aspects of the World Wide Web: linking. Instead, they just tell us to see something.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

(3) After a lot of searching around the page, I finally found the "Help" link in the bottom right corner. Once in the help pop-up window (yes. pop-up window), I do some searches and find that the 3D feature is only supported by Windows XP and, even then, won't work in Chrome or Safari. Once again, Microsoft decides that even if the world wide web runs on open standards, they can still just code for some of them. I will admit it's nice to see Firefox 3.0 in the list of supported browsers as I think it means we're winning the war.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Learned

I learned that smelling salts smell like a really dirty cat-litter box... which I believe would be ammonia. Don't ask. Didn't I already say it was an awesome weekend?

Learned

Went out with the guys this evening and got to discussing the next wave of technology a little bit. I've been thinking about this analogy for a little while, but let is loose tonight:
Mobile is definitely going to become the next desktop. We've already seen a wave from desktop to laptop, and I see phones as the next platform. The analogy I'd like to draw is between the command-line days of DOS and UNIX and the way that a lot of mobile apps work now. If I want to add a new item do daytum or netflix, I have to know a series of commands (e.g. "d daytum drink:beer:2" or "d addnetflix Terminator"). With iPhones and Android, we're staring to see the Graphic User Interfaces that we've come to expect from desktops and laptops on our phones.

This is the next wave.

I wonder what's after it.

What else are we doing in a command-line fashion now that's going to be accessible to non-command-line capable folks in the next ten years? Five years? Five Months? Manufacturing? Flying a plane? Scientific Research?

Learned

Today I learned to clean up after myself... again. I got an email around noon that my host (Site5) had found my account to be compromised and somebody serving a phishing site off of it. I went in, started looking around and found a bunch of random folders that had been popped in - no idea how. I'm still not completely sure how they did it... I know now that my file permissions were all screwed up, making a lot of things world readable that never should have been.

I spent the better part of this evening locking everything down and especially cleaning up nasty old code from when I first started developing sites. I couldn't believe some of the junk that was in there. I think I lost a few things - but nothign that shouldn't be sitting on one of the computers or hard drives around the house.

Next, I get to do a complete code review of everything that's left to see if I can find the hole where someone tunneled in... hopefully I closed it accidentally already.

Learned

I spent a long weekend with the CodeIgniter PHP framework and learned a lot of new crap about it. The newest feature I found out about was its built in logging ability, which came in handy when I had some errors that I wanted to know about, but not crash the program.