Saturday, January 15, 2000

Luke Tymowski: "Why isn't @Home running software to detect crackers instead of trying to catch people running servers? Why aren't they scanning their customers machines, and warning them that their machines have been compromised by a Trojan Horse or other security issue? Why aren't they helping their customers use the Web safely? Why don't they at least make a point of warning their customers about the dangers, and recommend methods to protect their machines?"

EditThisPage.Com is back on the air after a bit of maintenence this morning. Sorry for the outage.

A new macro on EditThisPage.Com makes it easy to link between sites. Also notes on a networked spell-checker service we want to develop.

Another new macro that will help the DavosNewbies site keep track of how long before the meeting starts.

Pet peeve time. Jakob Nielsen has given us some incomplete advice. He says that readers rarely venture beyond the bottom of a page. I think Jakob is talking about pages on e-commerce sites that sell sneakers or record albums. When it comes to writing docs or specs, please don't break them up. It means more navigation for the reader and renders the Find command in the browser useless. The vertical scrollbar in the browser is a good navigation tool too.

Here's an example of a successful spec that's all on one page. It wouldn't have worked as well if it were split across several pages, imho.

In the last few days I've gotten a lot more comfortable with ImageReady. Not sure why it's happening now.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks we're going to have to have a half-day shutdown, or at least a half-day read-only period. One of the databases is getting pretty large. That's good! Keep on writing.

Now I'm getting a sense of what goes on on the other end of an ISP pipe. So far Frontier has been quite well-behaved. Thanks to Murphy, my teacher.