Backdoor Tech

Friday, October 10, 2003

CSS getting easier than ever

This piece came out today and struck a cord: Developers gripe about IE standards inaction: "CSS has gained in popularity for a number of reasons. By letting developers specify design elements that apply to any number of individual pages, CSS makes Web pages more flexible, easier to change en masse and lighter by half. The end result, developers say, is Web sites that are not only faster to load, but cheaper to build and maintain." CNET ews.com

The night before Chris Pirillo sent out a list of automated, online CSS generators in his Windows newsletter, which I have added to my CSS page. These services provide the code that can be pasted into the heading or in a separate file.

Joe Firmage makes an important argument about open source/science

An open-source letter: "Public and private organizations around the world are now choosing the fundamental character of information infrastructure likely to serve human civilization for decades to come, possibly for centuries to come. The stakes of this choice reach far beyond the trivialities of the case of SCO vs. Linux. They reach far beyond the market cap of Microsoft. Our choice will inevitably shape the very purpose, freedoms and ethics of the medium through which human beings will communicate, trade, govern, learn and play in the 21st century and beyond." Cnet / News.com Joe Firmage is a former manager at Novell and knew about the build-up to the dispute between SCO Group and the Linux community. He provides some compelling, knowledgeable reasoning, the best I've heard so far, about why the SCO Group's claim is unfounded. But he also broadens the perspective to look at what's really at stake.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Dueling Tech Blogs

Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation now has a blog, a kind of group grok with postings by four contributors. We'll have to keep our eye on this one. MIT may have gotten jealous of the folks over at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Certainly, law and engineering produce different takes, but the Berkman Center has had major impact in the blogging world, especially after the BloggerCon gathering earlier this week.

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Daily read

I spent part of my lunch hour going through Corante's weblog cluster. Starting with Many2Many and on to Instant Messaging and Ideaflow, there are interesting people writing about ideas that excite me. I almost makes me shut down this blog and leave a permanent link to Corante. I also receive their news summary by e-mail so they are also doing a news survey every day as well. I just hope that the business is viable.

I continue to beef up the regex page by reorganizing the material and adding links about JavaScript and regex. The use of regex in JavaScipt is fairly widespread and since most web developers start fiddling with JavaScript early in their learning process, it should be easy to pick up in that way.

Saturday, October 04, 2003

New additions and old thoughts

Although I have not added many entries to this weblog, I have been beefing up the other parts of the site. First, I added a page on outliners and organizers. I found a lot of instructional material on Inspiration, my main thinking tool. In some previous entries here, I had made some initial comments, which I've now augmented.

I also started up a page on regular expressions. That may seem like I'm going off the deep end since I'm not into Perl, the main scripting language for regular expressions, or some of its peer languages. But for my main client, GlobalSecurity.org, I have to convert tons of pages. I suddenly figured out that I already have lots of tools that can use regex: HomeSite, Dreamweaver, HTMLKit, Textpad, and BK ReplaceEM, for a start. It's kind of like learning a foreign language -- syntax and vocabulary.

I've also tried to add a little more consistency to the site structure, adding index pages to the web and XMIT sections. I've also shuffled around sections of pages to more appropriate places in the site organization. Stuff coming off gci275.com and eliminate duplications. For instance, my CSS page is getting a once-over.

My goal is to make this site an extension of my learning process, both at the OAS and with my consulting clients. Write it down, record it, fit it into a framework so that I don't have to learn it again or go to Google and sort through 40 links. In other words, I am writing for myself, but sharing it with anyone else who might want to look over my shoulder. My one concern is how much of the specifics I can put out on the Web without betraying my employer/client relationship.

Friday, October 03, 2003

Cover your back

CFO Magazine surveys the advantages of Voice over IP for corporations. The article came out before the Hurricane Isabel disasters in the Mid-Atlantic states which resulted in loss of power for more than a week for some people. I was without power and Internet access for about three days. That meant I could not use my Vonage VoIP service. I have kept my landline so we still had access to a phone during that time. The lesson is to cover all options so that you are not trapped by technological choices that boomerang.

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Hurricane Isabel knocks me offline

I was without electrcity and Internet access at home for about three days following the passage of the hurricane through the Washington, DC area. By Sunday evening, I was back online, but treated connectivity as if it were a fragile state. With two unscheduled days off from work, I felt like I should have been putting that time to good use, so it was frustrating. Instead, I caught up on some reading, did whatever necessary to clean up after the storm, and waited. Saturday evening, we hooked up a portable TV to the car battery so that we could watch the evening news.

Having lived in Peru under pretty severe power rationing (electricity only 12 hours a day) for long stretches and frequently blackouts due to terrorist sabotage, I should have felt nostalgic being pushed back into darkenss. During the day, I used to do my reporting, phonecalls, interviewing, notetaking and then drafting my stories by hand , and then sit down at the computer at 8:00 PM and work through until I was finished, sometimes at 3 or 4 AM. I begged that the power did not go off unexpectedly. Luckily, I had a small UPS for my computer.

But now I am addicted to being online, both for communication and information. There are still people in the area who are living without electricity, and there's talk that some may not get it back until next week. In Norfolk, VA, it will take them another two weeks to get power on for all users.

Sunday, September 07, 2003

Menu Problems with Mozilla browser

I just spent a good part of the evening trying to figure out why my navigation sidebar is not working in Mozilla. The offset submenus are not showing up and only the home button works when in the subfolders. The most bewildering thing is that everything works fine when in Network subfolder. Mozilla is also not picking up the CSS formating for the menu either.

For those visitors using Mozilla 1.5b (and perhaps other versions), I apologize for this shortcoming. I am trying to get to the bottom of it. It's really frustrating because I'd rather devote time to new content or a redesign of my sites, not staring at pages and trying to spot the flaw.

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Another knotch in the belt for IP telephony

More Companies Are Routing Calls via Internet: "Even though the traditional phone companies have billions of dollars invested in their older technology, they are likely to move toward offering some form of Internet services. But they will probably be collecting significant revenues from their local and long-distance services for some time to come. For one, a company must make a considerable investment to switch to Internet telephony. And calls to parties outside the company often must still use the conventional public network for at least part of the call." NY Times Registration required (free).

Monday, August 25, 2003

VoIP starts to attract the attention of regulators

Free ride over for VoIP?: "But as U.S. IP telephony subscribers near the 2.5 million mark, and some 10 percent of all calls are VoIP generated, a growing number of states and the FCC have begun exploring whether to put VoIP providers on their regulatory radar. Analyst group In-Stat/MDR believes there will be 7 million VoIP phones in circulation by 2007." CNET News.com I did a paper on this issue about five months ago.

Friday, August 22, 2003

Goofs on the 4DOS/Take Command page

I did some checking of the links of the Flashback to Command Mode and found there were several broken links. Some were my fault because I did not make the necessary changes after reorganizing the structure of the site. That meant that several archive and example pages did not work. In other cases, sites have disappeared from the web.

The latter is just the ongoing shift towards Windows and Unix operating systems. Products like 4NT and Take Command are so deeply rooted in the past, representing 15 years of work, that many newcomers don't want to learn from the old way of doing things, even if it may be better in some respects. I know that JP Software has undergone some downsizing recently, relocating to here in Maryland from Boston.

4DOS came into existence because of the memory limitations imposed by MS-DOS, and the incomplete implementation of features. In the shaky shift to graphical interface, 4DOS and its related programs provided the powerful continuity of the command line. DOS was still the foundation of Windows 95 and 98. Now many of the original limitations of Microsoft operating systems have been, for the most part, been overcome. If you want a geeky dip into the operating system, you can try out Linux.

Monday, August 11, 2003

Cash from the Web

Making the web pay: "What's more, the answer may well turn out to be a hesitant yes. Six years on from the start of the popular web explosion, people are adjusting to paying for content on the internet. The Wall Street Journal, for example, announced last month that its subscriber base had brought in $80m (£50m) last year. Revenues for the online wing of the New York Times have grown more than 20% in this past quarter to $21.6m (£15m): operating profit increased to a record $4.3m (£2.7m). The Guardian started to charge for some services this month. It goes on." Guardian (UK) An area that I am interested in because my main client, GlobalSecurity.org, needs to start generating some cash flow to improve its long-term viability -- and its ability to pay me for consulting work. Obviously, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are in another league, but Google's AdSenses has shifted the balance in favor of medium-sized websites who were at the mercy of online ad agencies.

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Grunt work

I have been bogged down in converting hundreds of web pages to a new site design for my main client, GlobalSecurity.org. This process has been time consuming and painstaking because the original pages were in such a mess, HTML-wise. Some pages date back from 1995 when little concern was given to Web standards. It was not a smooth process, but I now seem to have a system cobbled together that is speeding up the process. That's a good thing, because I may have thousands more to do.

I have employed a really useful set of programs. HTML Tidy and its multiple implementations has proven to be a god-sent. It can clean up a lot of bad coding and when part of a batch file, it can go through a folder of files in seconds. I resurrected my affinity for 4DOS, 4NT and Take Command, all JPSoft products, to do the batch work. They have a more powerful set of commands than DOS. I even got around to upgrading from the versions that I had from four years ago.

I suggest that anyone who wants to use it should start with a user interface version, something like TidyUI for Windows. Because HTML Tidy is a command line product, you have to configure it with an archaic ini file (in other words, command line switches). TidyUI allows you to experiment with the settings and see how the conversion turns out, then go back and tweak it some more. Once you're satisfied, you can save the settings to a Tidy configuration file and have the command-line version read in the settings. You can also use HTML-Kit, my favorite editor.

I suspect that my use of HTML Tidy in batch operations is pretty primitive because there are versions that can be used in more sophisticated languages, like Java, Perl and Python.

The other key to this exercise is employing search and replace to morph the code into the new format. That means that you have to identify specific HTML or text patterns and then use that as the search target for the replace part. I happen to like the search and replace features in HomeSite.

It can be pretty daunting to set a batch process loose on hundreds of files because you can never be 100% sure that it will work the way you planned. Be sure to have backups. That's why I took the slow route of doing a bunch of operations by hand, then working on smaller sets of files and finally on the whole group. I still have to open each file to make sure that there are no surprises left behind. I found some web pages with no HTML code at all.

Where We're Coming From

In October 2001, I was a member of a group of 17 IT professionals that took their first tentative steps together towards a graduate degree in information technology. Over this period, we learned together, we griped together and we ate stirred-fried vegetales together for lunch until fast food started looking good. Our classes took place at the Shady Grove campus of the Maryland University System.

In April 2003, we finished our course work and we graduated on May 17. But our professional journey does not end with that ceremony. This site is meant to be a landmark for the classmates who shared 18 months. I also intend to use this site as a learning area. It's part of my mental makeup to register things on the Web as part of my continuing learning process. After all, the technologies that we studied are in constant evolution and flux.

Resources

ACM Library ::: Ars Technica ::: How Stuff Works ::: Techtionary ::: ITPapers ::: BitPipe ::: Search Networking
Knowledge @ Wharton ::: Working Knowledge ::: Strategy+Business ::: McKinsey Quarterly
First Monday ::: MIT Technology Review
Business Communications Review ::: Forbe.com's Technology ::: TechWeb ::: IDG.net/ITWorld ::: Internet.com ::: CNet
Jim Romenesko's media gossip ::: Cringley ::: Clay Shirky

Site Index

Courses: computer concepts ::: project management ::: security ::: systems engineering ::: Internet technologies ::: capstone
Areas of Interest: Web Tools web development ::: weblogs ::: CRM ::: Peer-to-peer ::: VoIP ::: videoconferencing
XMIT stuff: pictures ::: Graduation ::: people ::: course evaluation ::: about this site