The BEA / Oracle Saga

A rather long post on The BEA / Oracle Saga over on my neglected IT blog for anyone who might possibly be interested.

Ten Reasons Why ALUI from BEA Sucks

Plumtree was a small company that had a complex portal product (albeit in the best-of-breed class) and minimal support. Trying to do a global implementation of Portal, Collaboration, Content Server, Studio Server and PT Tracker with a technical staff of two people and a tech writer was difficult (to put it mildly).

So when BEA Systems purchased Plumtree, I was quite excited. As long as BEA didn't try to integrate Plumtree (a platform-independent portal framework) with Weblogic (a Java-based transaction portal), then everything would be fine. And they didn't — all they did was rename Plumtree Portal to "Aqua Logic User Interaction", or ALUI for short. (And to think, some marketing major probably got paid a ton of money for that awful idea!)

But things didn't improve. Here, in a nutshell, is why I would never recommend buying BEA ALUI:

1. Buggiest code ever commercially sold:
   Seriously, has BEA ever heard of quality control? There are bugs in the product that even the most cursory of looks should have found. So far this year, our (relatively) tiny company has opened new issues with BEA support at an average rate of one every 1.6 every business days. That is astounding. I once upgraded my production environment to a beta version of Datacom/DB on VSE and had fewer problems. Seriously.
   
2. Part-time support:
   BEA is a global company, as are we. But even though there are three BEA support centers spread around the globe, issue resolution does not "follow the sun". When BEA support in California goes home, so does any hope of getting an issue fixed. True, "production down" type problems gets the attention of the guy on call, but before you get too excited about that see #3 below.
   
3. Can't set issue priority:
   If the issue isn't perceived on the other end of the phone as critical, by a tech that does not know your environment or your business, then it is set to priority 3 or 4. No matter that you tell him that this is a production problem affecting the community of a member of the board (yeah, that would be the board that decides whether to spend any more money on technology from BEA).
   
4. Slowest support known to man:
   When you call in an issue, do not ever think you are going to talk to a tech. You leave a message and hope the tech gets back to you in the next few hours. SLA for "medium" issues (priority 3) is 24 hours, and almost all issues are entered into their database as medium.
   
   When you get a callback, the tech is going to do two things: ask for a description of the problem (no matter how detailed you were on the first call) and ask for you to send logs and/or trace files. Once you send the logs and/or trace files, the tech has another 24 hours to call you back. At which time he will ask for a GTA (go-to-assist) session that must be scheduled. At which time you can count on another slice of time up to 24 hours to go by until they get back to you with something to try. You then try something, call and leave a message, and they have another 24 hours to respond with the next idea. Well, you get the idea. End result — weeks go by before your issue is resolved.
   
5. Can't purchase better support:
   We do half a billion dollars in sales every year, selling products in over 80 countries. Yet we were told by BEA that we are not a large enough fish to purchase increased support from them. They wouldn't even name a price. We are not a Boeing or a Weyerhaeuser (both BEA ALUI customers), so they won't even discuss it with us. What kind of vendor turns down an opportunity to extort more money from a client?
   
6. Upgrades introduce bugs disguised as "features":
   For instance, our last major upgrade (which required five new servers to reduce down time from a week to "only" one day) completely reworked the security schema in Publisher, and required over 100 hours work by the Portal Administrator to make changes just so people could publish content again. Oh, and did I mention that it opened up security holes so big you could drive a tank through it?
   
   For another instance, PT Tracker was replaced by something called Analytics. This "upgrade" took away ad-hoc queries in return for a few, canned queries poorly implemented in a web browser. To see any detail, the Community Manager must export the data to Excel. And what do they then see? Data for all projects, whether they have access to the project or not. So either we remove the ability to see how your community is being used, or we give you access to document names and forum subjects for every project. Do we really want lowly Community Managers being able to see that a document titled "Downsizing Options" was uploaded to the secret Strategic Planning project? I think not.
   
7. Must buy improvements:
   Plumtree was sold to us because it made publishing web content easy. It doesn't. It is incredibly complex and takes hours of training to be a full-fledged Community Manager. Which is why most companies use a centralized group to set up communities, allowing users to then use news or announcement portlets to publish information.
   
   But BEA is coming out with Pages, a Web 2.0 product that is touted to deliver on the easy-publishing promise and is scheduled to replace one of the products that we already bought: Studio Server. Yet we are being told that we will be spending tens of thousands of dollars if we want this product. Oh yeah, and the licensing changes from user-based to CPU based so we'll have to buy new hardware too. (We'd never be able to afford to run it on the hefty servers we already have.)
   
8. Support site rarely works:
   When attempting to gain insight into where your open support issues stand by logging onto the support web site, you are immediately presented with this announcement:

   Intermittent Errors - Profile Center & Service Request Portlets
   IMPORTANT: Due to problems with our back end servers you may experience poor response or time out errors in the Profile Center and in the Service Request portlets. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you that we are working on a resolution as soon as possible. Thank you.

   What makes this so bad is that this announcement has been up over a month (close to two, I think). In other words, a company that sells a portal product is having extended problems with their portal and can't get it fixed!
   
   How's that for an endorsement of their product?
   
9. Can't get support reports:
   Speaking of the support site, to see what issues have been opened this year you must page through a list of the issues ten at a time and count them. There is no way of getting a report of last quarter's support activity, average response time, average resolution time, etc. This is business as usual for most vendors. But no, if you want that kind of information from BEA then you have to buy the additional support package, which BEA won't sell us (see #5 above).
   
10. Lack of newsgroup support:
    BEA has something called Dev2Dev which is where customers and employees can share information, code, and so on. Take a look around the ALUI groups and you'll see that messages are posted infrequently, and even more infrequently answered. In fact, the most active (and useful) participants are from outside consulting firms.

The worst of it all is that BEA stock, currently selling at $14 a share, is way overpriced. This means that a potential buyout by IBM, HP or Oracle (all of whom are rumored to be eyeing BEA) is improbable at best. But a purchase is the only thing that could possibly save this company. Oracle or IBM either one would whip the company into shape, coordinate product lines and provide world-class support.

Yo Larry, buy this company! Are you listening?

Safari for Windows

The big shocker at the Worldwide Developers Conference was Apple's CEO Steve Jobs announcement that Safari (the browser used by Mac users for years) is being released for Windows. For you daring types, the beta is available for download now.

First impressions from a Windows user's perspective:

1. Slow, slow, slow!!! In his announcement, Jobs said that Safari on Windows XP is twice as fast as IE. I ran it in side-by-side simultaneous comparisons and found that IE6 on Windows XP is over twice as fast as Safari.
2. The install tried to put QuickTime into my boot sequence not once, but twice. Thankfully, I am running StartupMonitor and was able to stop it.
3. Most sites work well (mine, for instance). I can watch videos on YouTube (like the one of Bush making his way through a wildly-cheering Albanian crowd), digg articles on Digg (like the story about studies that confirm that the death penalty deters crime) and look at the cool street view on Google Maps (like the guy breaking in or making his escape in SF).
4. Some don't work so well. Although I haven't found anything in the public sphere in my ten minutes of surfing, our it screws up some elements of the display on our company's internal portal: inconsistent buttons and panes that are listed one after another rather than appearing side-by-side.
5. A couple of slightly irritating bugs, to be expected in beta software. For instance, if the window is maximized on my primary display I can no longer drop down and get my task bar to come up (it's on auto-hide). Weirder is when I try to maximize the browser on my secondary display (I run side-by-side monitors) and Safari suddenly disappears! The only way to find it again is to right click on it in the task bar, choose "Move" and arrow the guy back onto the screen. It jumps left so far that it goes right off the display!
6. YouTube videos embedded in posts that I view in Google Reader don't show.
7. The Google search works (yeah, I'm still number one when searching for "rousseauian")
8. The flat gray look is boring, although I rather like the pretty blue thingies in the scroll bar.
9. It locked up every time I tried to log on to my Gmail account.
10. Did I mention that it is god-awful slow?

Still, it's a pretty solid start. I've had more trouble with some "production" software, so you have to give Apple kudos for that.

What I don't understand is Job's reference to gaining "market share" in the browser market. Is there "market share" for something that's free? Wouldn't gaining "user base" be more accurate?

Update: Errate Security found 6 bugs (4 DoS and 2 remote code execution) in the first afternoon of fiddling with Safari, and was able to weaponize one of them. Click over to see links to others that have found bugs as well, including a different weaponized security hole. [HT to Slashdot]

Digital Furniture Ushers In Era of "Home 2.0"

This is not only a radical new technology (new to the consumer world, anyway), it is a new approach to product development and marketing by Microsoft.

Microsoft Watch declares that Surface signals a sea change in how Microsoft does business:

Surface, which was developed in part by Microsoft Research, is coming to market from the Entertainment and Devices division—the same folks responsible for the Xbox and Zune. At least in the early years, Microsoft will provide the basic end-to-end hardware and software. There will be plenty of third-party software developer opportunities, as with Xbox and Xbox Live, but much less for hardware. Microsoft has no immediate plans to license Surface to other manufacturers.

In a separate article, Joe Wilcox applauds Microsoft's marketing of the product:

The blog and broader news media reaction to this announcement will be interesting. If Jobs had made the announcement, it would have been heralded as another breathtaking Apple innovation—that "one more thing"—that sets the company apart from others. Will Microsoft get as much fanfare or credit? Probably not. Should Microsoft deserve big buzz as innovator. Probably yes.

One parting thought: "Home 2.0" — you heard it here first, folks.

10 Most Common Online Passwords

From the Chicago Tribune, via ThreadWatch, via Digg:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10. (your first name)

If you use any of these, shame on you. And don't be surprised when your online bank account is suddenly emptied.

Meaningless Error Messages

While using Google Reader to peruse some RSS feeds, I clicked on "Home" and got this:

Yeah, thanks. Not even a suggestion to reboot?

CIA Certification Error

Anyone notice that trying to go to the CIA World Factbook with IE7 results in a security certificate error? It may just be me, but I find that rather humorous.

Free MS Software

The Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft, compliments of the Road to Know Where.

There's some pretty cool software here, like an Alt-Tab replacement that actually displays a preview of the app instead of just the icon (handy for multiple Explorer windows). It's not as slick as the built-in functionality in Vista, but it's pretty slick.

There's also a couple of upgraded calculators, some great media tools and utilities like Fiddler (". . . an HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data.).

Search Engines

Ah, the things you have to research for work when you're in charge of the portal initiative. For instance, who are the biggest players in internet search traffic? According to a website called Search Engine Watch:

According to ClickZ, the majority of Internet searchers use multiple search engines. (I'm one of those.)

And in the stupidest search engine factoid ever generated, 7% of doctors recommend Google, 4% recommend Yahoo! I don't trust my doctor to get my diagnosis right. Why would anyone take their recommendation for something so far outside their field?

Technorati tags: Internet Technology, Search Engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask.com.

Google and the Treaty of Versailles

Google is cracking down, telling people to stop using "google" as a verb, as in, "He asked me out and I googled him to see if he was a crackpot or something."

Most people would have the same reaction as the bloggers quoted in the CNET article linked above, but there are reasons to try and take steps to protect a trademarked word. Remember Aspirin?

Aspirin (with a capital "A") was trademarked by Bayer (along with "Heroin", a pain reliever that Bayer thought had a better future) in 1899.

But the German company Bayer teamed up with BASF and Hoechst to manufacture clorine gas for use during the First World War. In retribution, the Treaty of Versailles included a provision to strip Bayer of its patent and trademark in Britain, France, America and Russia.

The US government sold the right to use the trademark Aspirin to Sterling Drug in 1918. But:

Even before the patent for the drug expired in 1917, Bayer had been unable to stop competitors from copying the formula and using the name elsewhere, and so, with a flooded market, the public was unable to recognize "Aspirin" as coming from only one manufacturer. Sterling was subsequently unable to prevent "Aspirin" from being ruled a genericized trademark in a U.S. federal court in 1921.

A trademark is said to be "genericized" when the word enters into everyday use as a description for a product or service, a process sometimes refered to as genericide.

I remember Xerox running ads asking people to please make "photocopies", not xeroxes. That's because there has been a long history of genericide. All of these were once trademarks: aspirin, brassiere, cellophane, cola, corn flakes, escalator, granola, gunk, heroin, jungle gym, kerosene, linoleum, raisin bran, shredded wheat, tabloid, thermos, touch-tone, trampoline, yo-yo, and zipper.

Now for some terms that, so far, haven't lost trademark status:

Some products which are still registered trademarks despite the assault on their names include AstroTurf, Baggies, Band-Aid, Beer Nuts, Breathalyzer, Brillo Pads, Dacron, Dumpster, Frisbee, Hi-Liter, Hula-Hoop, iPod, Jacuzzi, Jeep, Jell-O, Jockey Shorts, Kitty Litter, Kleenex, Kool-aid, Laundromat, Liquid Paper, Magic Marker,  Muzak, Novocain, Palm, Ping-Pong, Play-Doh, Popsicle, Post-it Note, Q-Tip, Realtor, Rollerblade, Scotch Tape, Scrabble, Seeing Eye (dog), Sheetrock, Slim Jim, Styrofoam, Super glue, Technicolor, Teflon, TelePrompTer, Vaseline, Velcro, Walkman and Ziploc.

We can add Google to that last list, for now.

As for me, I have to go google something on Yahoo.

Offshoring Good for IT Industry

While researching project methodologies today, I came across a study performed late last year: The Impact of Offshore Software and IT Services Outsourcing on the U.S. Economy and the IT Industry.

Commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) [a group that consists of 375 corporate members -- including Microsoft and IBM], the study researched more than just America offshoring IT jobs, but rather looked at global sourcing of programming and services.

The findings include:

• The cost savings and use of offshore resources lower inflation, increase productivity, and lower interest rates. This boosts spending and increases economic activity;
• Worldwide sourcing of IT services and software increases total employment in the United States. This activity generated an additional 257,042 net new U.S. jobs in 2005; by 2010, net new jobs will total 337,625;
• Workers enjoy higher real wages. Global sourcing adds to the take-home pay of the average U.S. worker. With inflation kept low and productivity high, worldwide sourcing will increase real hourly wages in the U.S. by $0.06 in 2005, climbing to $0.12 in 2010;
• Demand for U.S. exports increases due to global sourcing. Countries can buy more because they can sell more; the U.S. has more to sell through increased investment in new products and services, better productivity and lower inflation. Global sourcing contributed $5.1 billion to U.S. exports in 2005, growing to $9.7 billion by 2010;

I find the continuing frantic desperation of programmers over the offshoring trend surprising. Sure, at first we were all worried. But I've been in IT long enough to see how these things go in cycles.

I've seen companies make drastic reductions in staff in order to hire contractors and save money on benefits. I've seen that cycle end as companies decided that keeping the experience and knowledge in-house made more sense, and that employees are more committed to quality and are willing to be held accountable.

I've seen companies turn to application service providers (ASP) to run whole sections of their IT services. I've seen companies decide that the SAs (Service Agreements) that ASPs promise can't be counted on and that doing it themselves results in faster turnaround and increases production uptime.

IT offshoring is the same. It works great for some projects (well defined requirements, documented specifications, enough time to allow for differences in time zones to stretch the project out). I can get a skilled programmer in America for $60/hour (and up) or one in India for less than $15/hour.

But nothing will ever take the place of meeting with users, showing prototypes, flexibility in project management and iterative software development.

Our jobs are safe as long as we continue to do them well.

Technorati tags: Offshoring, Economy, Exports, Wages, IT, IS, Information Technology, Information Systems, Project Management, Information Technology Association of America, ITAA, Software Development, Programming, Programmers.

MS Launches LiveWriter Blogging Tool

Microsoft made it's LiveWriter WYSIWYG tool available to beta testers today (download here).

It's a fairly massive download and can install much more than just the blogging tool (like their new Desktop Search), but the installation was painless and error free.

This is my first post using it (hence the lack of any meaningful content) so I am playing with things like inserting pictures:

This is Bubba, whom I named because he is a little bit fat, a little bit lazy and a lot smarter than he lets on.

In this picture Bubba is engaged in his second-favorite activity. His first favorite involves a lap and a hand that can be coaxed away from the laptop which he displaced when jumping up on the lap.

So far, the user experience of LiveWriter is very favorable -- if you can use Word then you can use LiveWriter. On the other hand, there are some things I don't like, but I'll wait to write about those after a few days testing when I can make a good analysis.

Gartner's Buzzword Bonanza

Gartner has released the 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle in which three "key technology themes" are identified. These are "new or heavily hyped technologies" that are expect to mature and have significant impact within the next ten years.

Predictably, the list starts out with Web 2.0 and includes AJAX. On this one they are undoubtedly correct. On the others, I'm not so sure.

For instance, the hype about Unified Modeling Language (UML) being used to create platform-independent applications sounds awfully familiar. Anyone remember the promise of CASE tools and how they were going to change the software industry? Probably not. That's because the reality never lived up to the hype.

HT to NeoBinaries, who also informs us that the second beta of release of Firefox 2.0 has been delayed until the 15th of August.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Geek Stuff.

Slow Boat from Millington

According to Mapquest, it is just over 15 miles from the middle of a small town called Millington (population 10,433 in Y2K) to my front door. Driving time is estimated to be 21 minutes.

So you can imagine my incredulity when I ordered a printer and watched this unravel:
 

Date	Time	Activity	Location
08/07/06	20:00:00	Sortation Center Departure	EARTH CITY, MO
08/05/06	14:13:48	Sortation Center Arrival	EARTH CITY, MO
08/05/06	06:10:31	Sortation Center Departure	GROVE CITY, OH
08/03/06	13:18:00	Sortation Center Arrival	GROVE CITY, OH
08/03/06	02:51:42	Sortation Center Departure	ATLANTA, GA
08/02/06	07:00:00	Sortation Center Arrival	ATLANTA, GA
08/01/06	23:00:00	Pickup	MILLINGTON, TN

The package was shipped using SmartPost from FedEx, which I have used once before. That time it took two weeks for a memory card (about the size of a half a book of matches) to get to me from California. Bad enough, but eight days to go 21 miles and instead it traveled about 1,755 miles?!

Ain't modern technology (and free shipping) wonderful?

Slowboat from California

In this day and age of rapid transport, this just ain't right:

Date	Time	Activity	Location
07/20/2006	16:06:00	Sortation Center Arrival	EARTH CITY, MO
07/20/2006	06:15:43	Sortation Center Departure	NEW BERLIN, WI
07/13/2006	10:59:00	Sortation Center Arrival	NEW BERLIN, WI
07/11/2006	13:42:28	Sortation Center Departure	LOS ANGELES, CA
07/10/2006	19:26:52	Sortation Center Arrival	LOS ANGELES, CA
07/10/2006	00:00:00	Pickup	CITY OF INDUSTRY, CA

Today's the 24th, which means that after two weeks this package is still sitting in a warehouse in Missouri. "Anticipated" delivery date is the 28th. It spent one week sitting in Wisconson! Why? This is a tiny memory card for a digital camera (2 GB SD).

This is my first experience with shipping via SmartPost from FedEx and I have to say that it sucks big time. No wonder shipping was free. I guess they don't count the frustration factor.

NetStumbler

I've been having trouble with my wireless router lately and ran across Net Stumbler, a utility that finds wireless networks, tells you how strong the signals are and the signal to noise ratios, and even graphs connectivity. This is a "must have" utility that I wish I had on my PDA.

Geek News

Oracle: compulsive acquirer from Oligopoly Watch.

Protolize, the Ultimate Web Designers Resource, via Digg.

IE7 reviewed by Pamibe.

Help the spread of Firefox and make money too! Explorer Destroyer, via Slashdot.

A new RSS ticker for Firefox,

Download videos from 60 sites using Firefox extension VideoDownloader.

Scientists make water run uphill, via Digg.

Semen is an anti-depressant, via Digg.

Financial Experts Debate Implications Of Aging Population from FuturePundit.

The world's first USB turntable.

Gadgets for the Lazy from Wired, via Slashdot.

1/20^th of a Second to Judge a Website

Do you like a website's look? Chances are, you made that decision in the blink of an eye:

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

What should be taken away from this?

So what are the key ingredients of a good-looking website? Caudron suggests that the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image. "It's not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible," he says.

These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach, Caudron adds. It's about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that's where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.

Something that Right Wing Nation should keep in mind, given current activities.

HT to Digg

Technorati Tags: Website, Geek Stuff, Web Design.

"Spooky Action" on a Chip

This is too cool:

A simple semiconductor chip has been used to generate pairs of entangled photons, a vital step towards making quantum computers a reality.

Famously dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein, entanglement is the mysterious phenomenon of quantum particles whereby two particles such as photons behave as one regardless of how far apart they are. It is widely regarded as essential to the development of quantum computers and quantum cryptography. ...

Entangled photons have been previously generated using laser beams, but this is bulky and complex. “Semiconductor devices are attractive as they are compact and robust,” says Shields. “Furthermore, since they can be produced using standard techniques, they could potentially be mass-manufactured for a fraction of the cost.”

When Geeks are Craftsmen

This computer case was handcrafted by 19-year old Nicholas Falzone from mahogany, ebony, and spruce woods:

The design is primarily based on Japanese lamps and shoji screens. The Japanese attention to detail carries over to the craftsmanship of the case since it took approximately 300 hours to construct and contains approximately 130 wood joints, most of which were done entirely by hand with my Japanese chisels and dozuki saw.

 

The Japanese influence is obvious. The craftsmanship takes a closer look:

Everything that was painted, including fans, PSU, and all of the screws and nuts in this case were first sanded, primed, sprayed with gloss black, then clear coated, and sanded and polished to give everything a mirror finish to match the plexiglass.

Nicholas is an architecture student who had never built a computer before. Not only is this one a beauty, but the benchmarks show that it is a fairly decent gaming machine as well.

More pictures are available.

Holographic Memory in 2006

Imagine a disk that holds 60 times as much data as a DVD (300 GB) and can be read and written to ten times faster. Now consider that it should be out by this time next year.

Firefox 1.5 Review

PC Magazine reviews the soon-to-be-released Firefox 1.5 (due by the end of the month).

The good news is that the interface is basically the same and the browser is "still lean, mean, fast, and clean." Improvements include being able to drag-n-drop tabs to reorder them and faster navigation due to "intelligent caching" of some pages already visited.

But the most important Firefox tuneups are under the hood. Application and extension updates are now pushed to the background. This relieves the burden of having to upgrade the application and extensions manually, as with Firefox 1.0, and ensures that the latest security patches are applied. Mozilla will have the ability to shut down holes as soon as they are found by pushing security patches to the browser. Many of these updates will be, according to the Mozilla Organization, less than 500KB, so they'll be unobtrusive (if noticeable at all).

Excellent news which will no doubt contribute to the continued growth of the product (23% of the page views of this blog are from Firefox as IE drops to just under 70%).

Creative Spamming

The "from" field said Post@cia.gov. That'll get your attention! Then it gets cheesy with the the subject line: "Your IP was logged":

Dear Sir/Madam,

What, you don't know my gender? You're the CIA for Pete's sake! I live right here. No dealing with shadey characters during the investiagation. No life-threatening tours to the exotic foreign lands to get information. No wonder you blew it on WMD in Iraq!

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Uh . . . yeah. I'm an international terrorist and you're sending me email? Or are they animal porn sites, maybe penquins and pandas engaging in unspeakable cross-species acts? So why would the CIA care? The message begins to lose all credibility to even the most moronic net-clicker.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Ah yes, a zip file. The CIA wants me to fill out a questionairre about my surfing activities? Perhaps they want to know if I secure my wireless with 128 double-byte, DoD-developed, super-secret encryption or if I'm letting the neighbor kids download movies and music straight from the talented minds of Hollywood denizens before it's even been recorded via my criminally-open web channel. CIA, dedicated to protecting the wallets of the super-rich that support the RIAA!

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

OMG! A search for "Steven Allison" finds a concert organist and a gas meter reader and pizza delivery driver in southern California, but no one even remotely connected to the CIA. So it must be true!

I really don't have time for this, but every once in a while it's fun to make fun of spammers, even though they are the most loathsome form of life in existence and deserve to be hunted down and tortured until they die in screaming agony.

Hmmm, I wonder if I can make any money on this spam thing. "Dear Sir/Madam, do you hate Bush with every fiber of your being? Please click on this innocent-looking link that says 'BusHitler' but really takes you to a chat room filled with fat, middle-aged men pretending to be lesbians so I can make a dollar." What's wrong with that?

Update: It seems that the FBI has also been listed as the originator of this kind of email, has issued a denial and a warning to users not to open email attachments (duh!) and is investigating.

And yes, the attachment that was sent to me was infected with a worm: W32.Sober.X@mm.

Office 12 Beta Started

Microsoft Watch reports that beta testers will be able to start downloading the first beta of Microsoft Office 12 at midnight tonight:

Microsoft is calling the next version of Office "the most significant release in more than 10 years," according to a corporate statement. ...

Company officials said they will offer Beta 1 versions of Word 12, Excel 12, PowerPoint 12, Outlook 12, Access 12, InfoPath 12, OneNote 12, Publisher 12, Project 12, Visio 12, and Groove Virtual Office 12. ...

The new charting/graphics engine is aimed at allowing users to "apply design options in a matter of a few clicks," the spokeswoman said. And the aforementioned "To Do" bar, which will be built into Outlook 12 Beta 1, will bring together appointments, tasks and e-mail in a single view, she added.

Beta 2 will be much bigger and broader, and is slated for this spring, the spokeswoman said. Users interested in testing Beta 2 can sign up now on the Office Preview Web site.

Only one more year to wait for general release. Ah, who am I kidding? It'll be 2007 before we get to see the real thing (along with Vista — which Gartner says to ignore until 2008 anyway).

Gates Takes On Google — in Israel

Bill Gates takes a trip to Tel Aviv, where he promised to aggressively pursue Internet search technology:

Gates also said Israel's vibrant high-tech sector will play an important role in the global marketplace and pledged to strengthen cooperation with the country. He offered $1.4 million for local startups and pledged to connect tens of thousands Israeli children to the Internet.

"It's no exaggeration to say that the kind of innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business," Gates told reporters.

OK, support startups in the only real democracy in the Middle East earns my support for Bill. I promise to quit calling him Satan — at least for a while.

Gates said Microsoft is quickly branching out beyond its core business of desktop software, saying the company is developing software for use in automobiles, videogames and cell phones.

Oops, that didn't take long. My car is going to reboot in the middle of traffic and it's going to be Beelzebub's fault!

Opera Goes Ad Free

The creators of Opera are going to remove the ads from the browser in an effort to expand its user base, thereby gaining more revenue from agreements with search engines:

Christen Krogh, Opera's vice president of engineering, insisted the move was not prompted by the success of Firefox, whose rapid growth in usage has threatened to push Internet Explorer's market share below 90 percent for the first time in years.

I'm sticking with Firefox, although Opera is a pretty good alternative.

How to create: 3 Columns, Same Length, Content First

This post is to demonstrate how to create a page with these characteristics:

• Fixed-width three column layout
• No tables: the columns are done using CSS
• Includes a header and footer
• All three columns are equal in length, no matter which has more content
• The center content is coded before the static stuff in the side columns (better for search engines!)
• A rollover menu across the bottom of the top pane (easily removed if you don't want it).

This framework is used for my default skin (click here to change skins). I created it by combining ideas from these sources:

1. The basic 3 column layout is from Douglas Livingstone at: http://www.redmelon.net/tstme/3colfixed/
2. The equal length columns are achieved by using a background image as suggested at A List Apart at: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
3. The menu is a direct ripoff of that used by A List Apart. I stole it and hope they don't mind.

We'll take a look at each of these in order.

Getting the Columns Right

First we'll build the framework for a three column layout that has the content for the middle column coded before the other two columns. As I said before, this comes directly from Douglas Livingstone.

The columns are created by coding a series of divs to create boxes within boxes. Let's look at each box.

The first box is called iehackwrap. The only reason for this box is to solve a centering problem with IE5. If you don't want to coddle people that are still using IE5 or if you don't want to center your content then you can just leave it out.

Next comes boxwrap. This fits within iehackwrap and sets the total width for your 3 columns. I've set it to be 800 pixels wide with a solid, dark blue border around the whole thing. The CSS, html and result look like this:

.iehackwrap { text-align: center; } .boxwrap { width: 800px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 1px solid #00a; } /* ie hack: */ .iehackwrap { text-align: center; } .boxwrap { text-align: justify; } <body> <div class="iehackwrap"> <div class="boxwrap"> </div> </div> </body>

Next we create the header that spans all three columns:

.boxheader { width: 800px; border-bottom: 1px solid #00a; background: #CAD4E3; clear: both; } <body> <div class="iehackwrap"> <div class="boxwrap"> <div class="boxheader"> Header text goes here </div> </div> </div> </body>

So far so good. Now it starts to get tricky. We draw a box that encloses the two left columns. Don't worry, well get to the right-hand column in a minute, although we do have to calculate it's size now. I want the right column to be 190 pixels, which leaves 610 pixels for the other two. (The grey box below is for illustration only — there isn't a background color for this box, or indeed for any of the column boxes.)

.boxbody { width: 610px; float: left; } <body> <div class="iehackwrap"> <div class="boxwrap"> <div class="boxheader"> Header text goes here </div> <div class="boxbody"> </div> </div> </div> </body>

We said that we wanted the center box coded before either side column, right? So it comes next. We just draw that box inside the box we just created and float it to the right. You must remember that the two column widths in boxbody must add up the total width of boxbody, which in this case is 610 pixels. I want to leave 130 pixels for the left column, which leaves 470 for the center.

.boxcenter { width: 470px; float: right; font-size: .9em; } <body> <div class="iehackwrap"> <div class="boxwrap"> <div class="boxheader"> Header text goes here </div> <div class="boxbody"> <div class="boxcenter"> Center text goes here. Lots and lots of dynamic content! </div> </div> </div> </div> </body>

It's time to fill in the other two columns. Notice that the left column fits within the "boxcenter" box while the right column gois outside of it, like so:

.boxleft   {
   width:      130px;
   float:      left;
   }
.boxright  {
   width:      190px;
   float:      right;
   }
<body>
<div class="iehackwrap">
<div class="boxwrap">
   <div class="boxheader">
      Header text goes here
   </div>
   <div class="boxbody">
      <div class="boxcenter">
         Center text goes here.
         Lots and lots of dynamic content!
      </div>
      <div class="boxleft">
         Text for left column goes here
      </div>
   </div>
   <div class="boxright">
      Text for right column goes here
   </div>
</div>
</div>
</body>

According to Donald, we need to add one little hackish thing because some browsers don't like the fact that boxbody doesn't have any floated content:

.boxclear  { clear: both; }
<body>
<div class="iehackwrap">
<div class="boxwrap">
   <div class="boxheader">
      Header text goes here
   </div>
   <div class="boxbody">
      <div class="boxcenter">
         Center text goes here.
         Lots and lots of dynamic content!
      </div>
      <div class="boxleft">
         Text for left column goes here
      </div>
   <div class="boxclear"> </div>
   </div>
   <div class="boxright">
      Text for right column goes here
   </div>
   <div class="boxclear"> </div>
</div>
</div>
</body>

All that's left is to draw the footer. This will go outside the "boxbody" div. Here's the whole thing in one file so you can just cut and paste in a text file to easily try it out:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <STYLE TYPE="text/css"> .boxwrap { width: 800px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 1px solid #00a; } .boxbody { width: 610px; float: left; } .boxcenter { width: 470px; float: right; font-size: .9em; } .boxleft { width: 130px; float: left; } .boxright { width: 190px; float: right; } .boxheader { width: 800px; border-bottom: 1px solid #00a; background: #CAD4E3; clear: both; } .boxfooter { width: 800px; border-top: 1px solid #00a; margin: 30px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; background: #D7D40F; text-align: center; clear: both; } .boxclear { clear: both; } /* ie hack: */ .iehackwrap { text-align: center; } .boxwrap { text-align: justify; } </STYLE> </head> <body> <body> <div class="iehackwrap"> <div class="boxwrap"> <div class="boxheader"> Header text goes here </div> <div class="boxbody"> <div class="boxcenter"> Center text goes here. Lots and lots of dynamic content! </div> <div class="boxleft"> Text for left column goes here </div> <div class="boxclear"> </div> </div> <div class="boxright"> Text for right column goes here </div> <div class="boxclear"> </div> <div class="boxfooter"> Text for the bottom of the page goes right here. </div> </div> </div> </body> </html>

Simple, yes? Remember to go to Donald's page for additional explanation. He has some excellent documentation on what each of the divs are for and how to calculate the column widths (as well as a possible bug).

Fixing the column lengths

As suggested by A List Apart, I created Faux Columns by creating a background graphic that looks like this (only bigger — mine is 800 pixels wide and 12 pixels high):

Note that not only does this result in equal column length no matter which column as the most content, it also allows you to have cool effects on your background like color fades.

Of course, you have to put the image in your CSS code:

.boxwrap   {
    width:        800px; 
    margin-left:  auto; 
    margin-right: auto;
    border:       1px solid #00a;
    text-align:    left;
    margin-bottom: 1em;
    background:    #fff
       url(systemfiles/ap-3-col-background.jpg) repeat;
    }

Epilog

I'm not even going to try explaining how to do menus. You could just copy the code from this page but a better thing to do would be to check out A List Apart. Lists are, after all, their specialty. Some examples:

• Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style
• Suckerfish Dropdowns
• CSS Design: Taming Lists
• Sliding Doors of CSS
• Sliding Doors of CSS, Part II
• Hybrid CSS Dropdowns

Notice that by using the techniques from A List Apart I am able to display menus horizontally in skin 1 and vertically in skin 2. Same html, just a different CSS file!

Epilogue

I am as much unlike a web designer as a cantelope is unlike a round, brown rock. They make look the same, but just try to eat a rock — or smash a nut with a cantelope.

The veracity of my disavowal of advanced web knowledge should be readily proven by the choice of color scheme for this page. An artist I'm not. And advanced CSS is beyond me.

But I have hopefully given someone enough to do what I did — start with a little something and hack around until something useful and semi-pleasing comes out.

Good luck!

Dual Processors In Your Future

The next version of Microsoft's operating system, codenamed Longhorn, isn't due out until "holiday 2006". Given Microsoft's track record, we can reasonably expect to see it sometime in the second quarter of 2007.

This is good news, because in order to take full advantage of the new OS you are going to have to start saving your pennies for a pretty hefty computer:

"Longhorn will provide an absolutely fabulous gaming experience," Russell told WinHEC attendees. In order to be able to take the fullest advantage of Longhorn as a gaming platform, Russell suggested PC makers gravitate toward 64-bit dual-core processors, 1 GB of memory, 56 MB of graphics memory and advanced LDDM support.

I wonder what that'll cost?

Redecorating

As you can see, I've converted to the new layout. Please report any problems in the comments.

Thanks to Patrick of Lowest Common Denominator for telling me to tone d