Archive for July, 2007
What’s in A Name, a Look at Brand Loyalty
Posted on July 31, 2007, under Tools and Services.
A recent fiasco with a new grill purchase, really gave me a different perspective about brand names and their value. I know you must be asking; what the heck does a grill have anything to do with technology. Well it’s not entirely unrelated, brand loyalty exists in every market.
Back in May I purchase a Model 463268107 Char-Broil grill to replace my old broken down grill from a past life. I paid around $370 at Lowes for it. In doing my research for Grills I looked at Weber grills but the price for the features that I wanted were a good double what others were charging. I like Webers, have used Webers, and know they are quality but just could not bring myself to pay $650 for a grill. When I got my new Char-Broil grill home, and went through the painful installation all was good for about a week. After a week were were hearing a very loud and annoying noise coming from the gas regulator. Back to Lowes I went, and they offered to replace that part. After a week with the new part, here comes the noise again. Back to Lowes… they brought out a new Grill and took away the old Grill. A week later, the noise is back on a brand new Grill! After that the money was no longer worth it. I gladly went out and paid more for a Weber grill, and got the EP-320 paying around $650 all together. The assembly on this grill was much easier, Weber though of everything down to the packaging. The grill is much sturdier and you can tell made of quality parts. Weber has long been a brand name of grills, and Char-Broil is becoming a house-hold name so I was surprised at my experience with my Char-Broil. I recently found out that the reason the noise was being created on the Char-Broil was because you has not enough gas going through the grill. If you have all four burners and the side burner on, it would make this noise. To me, it’s not unreasonable to use the grill in that manner; but Char-Broil has seen reports of this in some situations. With my new Weber I can use all burners and the side burner with no problem, and I got the Weber up to 500 degrees where my Char-Broil never got hotter than 350. So something that Weber is doing with gas regulation and heat dissipation is much different than the competition, and I went from not wanting to shell out %650 for a grill to gladly paying that much because I had a bad experience with a lesser brand.
Before this experience, as many Americans, I would bargain shop and would only by brand names for things that have no equal replacement. The grocery store is a big market for bargain products, and I would buy generic butter, cheese, etc. To lower the grocer bill and because I can not tell the difference.
In relating this to technology I found that I do this to a certain extent with software, as do my friends, and companies I have worked for. Sometimes to search for the cheapest and fastest solution beats out the solution that is more expensive and longer setup investment, but might be a more reliable solution. This also plays into the open source vs. proprietary debate.
You can also think about it from Lowes perspective. They really lose out because now they have two used grills they have to send back to Char-Broil and if you add up the initial stock investment and the extra work they had to do to replace those grills , they are probably eating the cost; I got all my money back. As for Char-Broil well they eat some of that cost, but they now have one less customer because one summer they had a grill model that had a serious flaw in the engineering. It only takes one experience like this for me to never buy from this company again, there are too many options for customers. That, and the fact that I will not have to buy a grill for another 7-10 years if the Weber stands up like it promises, even then I could probably just replace certain parts to keep it up and running.
Where do you cut corners in purchasing generic vs. brand name?
2 Comments
Stock Art for Your Website or Product
Posted on July 30, 2007, under Development, Tools and Services, Web Design.
I have seen this a couple times before, and I just saw it this weekend on a new service. Where a company will use stock art with the water marks still on the image. It bothers me for several reasons: 1) Photographers and painters spend countless hours on their work, and it’s a challenge to display sample work without it being stolen. 2) Stock art is not all that expensive, especially when you get into the royalty free work. So why not support good work and purchase it?
So instead of just “complaining” about the people I see ripping off work, I thought why not share some of my stock art resources that I use.The sites below have top quality work, most royalty free and at good prices.
Enjoy and support your artist!
1 Comment
I Have 6 Pownce Invites for My Readers
Posted on July 26, 2007, under Blogging, Tools and Services.
So I have been using Pownce lately, the new IM like service with the driving force of Kevin Rose from Digg fame. A little birdie sent me an email this morning letting me know that I have 6 invites to give out. So what better way to give back to my readers than give them an opportunity to be in on an early beta, right?
So if you want a Pownce invite, leave a comment with your REAL email address (it’s hidden nobody can see it) and a sentence using the word Pownce in it (be creative). The best six responses (chosen by me) will get an invite.
16 Comments
How to Setup a Subversion Server on Windows
Posted on July 24, 2007, under Development, How To, Operating Systems, Software, Tools and Services.
A while back I wrote an How To on how to setup a Subversion server on Linux. So anything you can do on Linux you should be able to do on Windows, right? Well I am not getting into that debate, but yes you can setup a Subversion server on Windows. Much like Linux there are many ways to accomplish this, today I will be talking about how to set it up using Apache. So let’s take a look…
Downloads:
These are the recent versions of this date, please check for the latest stable versions at time of install.
Install:
First lets install Apache. You should be able to select all of the defaults during the installation process, unless you know what you are specifically trying to accomplish. Be sure to select “Apache Modules” where it talks about the SVN module.
Second lets install SVN, again the defaults work fine.
Third, and last install TortoiseSVN, yup defaults work good for this as well.
Configure Apache Password File:
First lets create a Apache password file, from a command line run:
[ftf]
C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\bin\htpasswd.exe -c C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\passwd myuser
[/ftf]
Be sure to replace “myuser” with the username you wish to use for your login.
Create a Repository:
Next we need to create a subversion repository:
[ftf]
C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnadmin.exe create C:\MyRepos
[/ftf]
Configure Apache:
In Notepad open up the file “C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf” and put the following at the end of the file:
[ftf]
DAV svn
SVNPath “C:\MyRepos”
AuthType Basic
AuthName “My Subversion Repository”
AuthUserFile passwd
Require valid-user
[/ftf]
Presto! All you need to do is restart Apache via the neat little system tray icon, and import your repository and you are up and rolling.
10 Comments
Java’s Filthy Rich Clients
Posted on July 23, 2007, under Development, Software.
If you have not been following Filthy Rich Clients for Java, they are up to chapter 11 and have some really amazing demos available on their site. There is a print version of the book coming in August, but you can also buy the online version at their website.
I have had zero free time lately so my side projects have really suffered, but that will change here shortly. I remember a while back asking my readers why they liked or disliked Java applications on the Desktop, and the there was a lot of mixed feedback. Some stated it was too slow, especially on the user interface side. Some did not like the install process of Java applications. And some brought in why they disliked Java as a development language.
I have been really torn lately between what the whole Java debate, and before starting new projects I am doing more research on what the market likes and dislikes it. Yes, both Java and C++ have they set backs, and in turn they both have their strengths. I have found that Java applications do not do as well on the Shareware market as other Windows-centric applications, and I am still trying to figure out why that is.
To come full circle, with Java making advances in user interfaces like the ones shown in the book above, I wonder if it will improve Java’s appeal on the desktop. with the iPhone, Vista, OSX; eye candy is definitely where the future is.
Once again I would like to open up the floor to comments on the whole Java on the desktop market. Again, please be kind as I stand on mutual ground looking for others view points.
3 Comments
How to Make a Password Strength Meter Like Google v2.0
Posted on July 16, 2007, under Code Snippets, Development, How To, Security, Web Design.
Previously, in Part 1 of How to Make a Password Strength Meter Like Google I went over the basics on how to get a password strength meter up and running on your site. I got a lot of feedback on this article, mostly commenting on needing a better algorithm to determine if a password is secure or not. The algorithm I implemented in part 1 was mostly just for show. I did not further build out the algorithm because I wanted to leave it up the end user to determine what they considered a secure password or not. Furthermore, I did not want to make a scenario where a flaw in my code would be present in any sites out there that implement this.
After further research in the area of secure passwords, I am further building out the original code base to better determine a secure password from an insecure password. Here are the parameters used for measuring a secure password in version 2.0:
Password Length:
5 Points: Less than 4 characters
10 Points: 5 to 7 characters
25 Points: 8 or more
Letters:
0 Points: No letters
10 Points: Letters are all lower case
20 Points: Letters are upper case and lower case
Numbers:
0 Points: No numbers
10 Points: 1 number
20 Points: 3 or more numbers
Characters:
0 Points: No characters
10 Points: 1 character
25 Points: More than 1 character
Bonus:
2 Points: Letters and numbers
3 Points: Letters, numbers, and characters
5 Points: Mixed case letters, numbers, and characters
Password strength is measure by the percent of the above:
>= 90: Very Secure
>= 80: Secure
>= 70: Very Strong
>= 60: Strong
>= 50: Average
>= 25: Weak
>= 0: Very Weak
Implementation of the code should be the same as version 1.0. The next version will have the ability to blacklist common dictionary words. Hope this works out better than version 1.0.
Code: Version 2.0
20 Comments
PHP 4 Product Lifecycle Comes to an End
Posted on July 13, 2007, under Development, Web Hosting.
PHP.net has announced that the product life cycle for PHP 4 has come to an end.
Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.
The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
Even though this is great news for the PHP community, there are a still a lot of Web Hosts that have been slow to upgrade to PHP 5 on their servers. A lot of claims that PHP 4 was more secure and stable. It seems they might have created an upgrade nightmare for themselves. It will be that much more difficult to go out and make sure all of their clients scripts are compatible with PHP 5 and complete the upgrade on all of their servers.
Non-the-less a great milestone for PHP. Congratulations!
No Comments
How To: Setup FeedBurner’s MyBrand Service
Posted on July 11, 2007, under Blogging, How To, Networking, Tools and Services, WordPress.
With Google’s recent purchase of FeedBurner all pay services from FeedBurner are now free. One of those services is FeedBurner MyBrand, a great service that allows you to complete mask FeedBurner by redirecting a domain or subdomain to your feeds on FeedBurner.
One thing I noticed off the bat with this service, is MyBrand works for all feeds under your account. So if you have multiple feeds and multiple domains setup under MyBrand all possible feeds and domain combinations will be available. So www.domain1.com/feed will be the same as www.domain2.com/feed. This is kind of an annoyance if you are doing this for multiple blogs and want to keep one FeedBurner account.
So how do we get started?
1) Well first login to your FeedBurner account and select “MyBrand” under “My Account”.
2) Add the domains or subdomains you wish to use for this service.
3) You now need to add a CNAME entry for the domains or subdomains you told FeedBurner will not be coming its way.If you are not sure how to do this with your hosting provider, you might need to submit a support ticket. Go Daddy has some instructions on how to do it with them.
Finished! DNS changes usually take about 24 hours to fully propagate. After that you will be serving up your FeedBurner feeds under your own domain name.
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WordPress Plug-in of The Day: Ultimate GA
Posted on July 9, 2007, under Blogging, Tools and Services, WordPress.
If you use Google Analytics, you should take advantage of it to the fullest potential. With Wordpress a great plug-in called Ultimate GA. Ultimate GA makes it easy to do work with Google Analytics, it automatically adds the necessary code to the bottom of your template in the footer. My favorite feature is the ability to track outgoing links by attaching JavaScript code to all href’s without you having to do this yourself by hand. Ultimate GA has some other great option features like the ability to filter admin pages and filter the content of your postings to add the onClick event to track certain links. Full features below:
- Start with a simple configuration screen and hide more advanced/complex configuration in an Advanced Configuration mode
- Do not make any changes to feeds, as it is not wise to include JavaScript in those
- (Optionally) add Google Analytics JavaScript tracker code to the footer of all weblog pages
- (Optionally) add the same JavaScript tracker code to the admin pages if you want to track those as well
- When adding the JavaScript tracker code to a page, put it at the end of the body. There are quite a few WordPress plugins for Google Analytics out there. Most of them include the JavaScript in the head section. This can delay the loading of your page and is not advised by Google
- When using a WordPress theme that does not invoke the wp_footer hook as it is supposed to do, the JavaScript tracker code will be added to the head section. This can delay the loading of your page. The only way to prevent this, is to have the theme author implement the correct plugin calls, fix the theme yourself or start using another theme
- (Optionally) check for updates of the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin and warn you for updates on the Options page
- (Optionally) not adding the tracker code to the pages when a logged on user of a configurable userlevel requests a page. This can be used to ignore your own page views and not skew your statistics.
- (Optionally) filter the content of your postings to add the onClick event to track certain links
- (Optionally) filter the content of your comments to add the onClick event to track certain links
- When filtering the content of your postings and/or comments, you can select what links to track:
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to outgoing links. You can also specify links to which hostnames should be considered internal (e.g. www.example.com, example.com and example.org). Links to these hostnames will be considered internal and the tracking event will not be added to those links. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your outbound links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what pages visitors clicked on to leave your site.
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to download links. You can specify which file extensions should be considered downloads. Only internal links to these filetypes will be tracked. Internal links are either relative links (without a hostname) or links to the hostnames you defined as internal. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your download links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what files your visitors downloaded.
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to mailto: links. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your mailto: links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what mailto: links your visitors clicked.
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Code and Coffee Will Resume Monday
Posted on July 6, 2007, under Site News.
Sorry folks I have been super slammed this week, with the holidays and all. So I apologize for not having the time for researching new articles and content. I am taking the weekend to recharge and catch up. See you on Monday.
