Michael Richard Murphy

Check out Panic.com’s Goods to see a cool drag & drop shopping cart. Pick a t-shirt and a size and drag the image right into a big wide footer area that acts as the cart. Even better, once added, see the image there. As near as I can tell, it’s accomplished all through Javascript and CSS. Smooth.

I can’t remember where but I read recently that it you wanted to see cutting edge work and hot design, that one need look no further than Panic.com. After talking a look at their site, that certainly seems pretty accurate. I’m definitely impressed.

I downloaded a del.icio.us Add-on for Firefox today. It adds two buttons to the browser that easily allow users to post to or access their del.icio.us bookmarks. It also adds right-click posting functionality and the ability to search their tags right in the Firefox search box. I’ve been using del.icio.us more and more as I discovering interesting reading material during my research at work that I might not necessarily have time to read just then. With my del.icio.us account set up on my home and work machines, I can tag items of interest as ‘new’ and come back to them easily from either location. Although del.icio.us automatically adds itself to users’ Bookmarks folders and toolbars, the extra functionality of this Add-on makes it worthwhile. Highly recommended.

On a side note, the Azerty III theme for Firefox has replaced Plastikfox Crystal SVG as my theme of choice. At least until Plastikfox is available for version 1.5.

Here’s a post on the interesting history of the Arial font and why the article’s author can’t stand it. I know someone who would say the same about Papyrus.

On a related note, here’s Typographi.com’s favorite font picks for 2005: http://typographi.com/001045.php.

With the new year rapidly approaching, everybody is talking about and/or setting goals for themselves. Here’s two of mine off the top of my head:

• Within 5 years…have my own business with at least two coworkers (I already know who they are)
• Within my lifetime…write a book

I found interesting research involving eyetracking the other day at PoynterOnline. When I went to the home page, I wasn’t quite sure what a site about journalism had to do with eyetracking for websites…until I realized the research is specific to news sites. Nonetheless, where a user’s eyes focus on a web page is useful information to designers regardless of the type of site it is.

Worth checking out, there’s very detailed graphs, etc showing the movement of a user’s eyes as they scan a page from top to bottom, highlighting where they spend the most amounts of time. They also spend a good deal of time discussing navigation location, advertising, paragraph length, writing style, image size (dimension), headline format, type size, and more. An interesting read to say the least.

Everybody is making predictions for trends in 2006. Of particular interest to me of course are the predictions involving hot technologies, design trends, etc. While I’ve read recent posts by Andy Budd and Cameron Molla, I’d like to draw your attention to a comment about those posts made by Roger Johansson at 456 berea street and a response to that by Chris Heilmann. Chris is known for writing great articles over at A List Apart and his own personal site http://www.icant.co.uk/.

Chris thinks there is too much concentration on the new hot thing, ruby, ajax, etc and not enough focus on what those technologies can do, ie: using technology for its own sake rather than to accomplish something. I agree. The focus should be on the end result rather than pieces in the middle. Does a client really care if you’re using bleeding edge X if the end product meets their needs? From a project management and ongoing maintenance standpoint, they should probably understand the technology but realistically, end users most likely won’t, so what does it matter?

He also mentions he’d like to see more focus cleaning up the functions of CMS to better use and write cleaner CSS. This was of particular interest to me because of my recent research of the Sitecore CMS.

I think CMS is a great tool for businesses. We had this discussion many many many many times in my old position when it came to visibility on the web and search engine results. We just didn’t have it because we didn’t have fresh content on a regular basis. It shouldn’t be a web developers job to generate content for a web site about skin care or financial products and you wouldn’t expect an aesthetician or banker to be writing their own HTML and publishing content. CMS is a happy medium. The web developer sets it up and gets some templates in place for the general site layout and then writes some CSS rules to enforce branding guidelines. If you’ve chosen the right CMS, for the content authors, it’s as easy as using MS Word to publish. Do you think I’d write here as often as I do if I had to start a new HTML page from scratch? And upload it? And go into my old pages and create links to the new material? Fat chance.

A lot of the mundane details of my current position could be alleviated if we used a CMS. thankfully it’s a small portion but does anybody really want to pay an experienced developer to copy and paste from a Word document into HTML when the document’s author can write it directly in the CMS? Probably not. This would be a huge help in freeing me up to do more productive things.

So, for 2006, let’s concentrate on solving problems not technologies.

So we had our first usability test of the new recognition web app I’m writing and things went swimmingly.

Imagine that, usability testing…with real users. It was a pleasant change for me. We got tons of great feedback and fortunately it tells me that I’m really on the right track.

This is a high visibility project and it can’t be bad when the CEO drops in to see how things are progressing and the Director of HR comes down to participate in the tests. The project sponsor told me today people are pressuring her to get things wrapped up because they want me on their upcoming projects. Not bad for 6 weeks on the job.

Ok, time to stop tooting my own horn and write something useful to somebody.

As soon as I saw this posting on The Web Standard’s Project web site, I forgot what it was I went there for.

I know plenty of people who will be glad to hear Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer for Macintosh is dead! Microsoft will end security and performance updates for IE/Mac effective December 31^st and they even recommend Safari as a replacement. Happy New Year!

While IE/Mac was actually one of the first browsers to at least partially support standards, it had become the bane of my existance in my old position. Perhaps it was more the expectation by the powers that be that every layout look exactly the same in all browsers than IE’s CSS issues but I really have come to *hate* IE/Mac.

Naturally people will still have to support IE/Mac depending on their audience, especially since it will still be available for download at MS’s site until the end of January 2006 but the sooner it disappears, the happier I’ll be.

IE is dead. Long live Firefox.

I got turned onto reddit.com when Paul Graham mentioned it in one of his posts. It’s like del.icio.us…but not.

This is for all my single, male, college friends who have to spend the next three weeks in the computer labs finishing up their quarters or semesters, whatever the case may be. Wait…I can only think of one person off the top of my head that meets that criteria. I hope he enjoys this.

Go to http://www.keen.com/zenza1964. Read it. Enough said.

Laurie Sullivan from TechWeb says in the latest InformationWeek that a recent patent application filed by TiVo suggests that they plan on allowing the units to take advantage of RFID technology. With companies from all sorts of industries talking about inserting RFID chips into all sorts of products, TiVo could pick up on these in a household and customize media content on an individual basis.

Remember the RFID-equipped gallon of 2% you brought home last week? TiVo says it’s within a day of expiring. Get ready to see some very specific ads. Got Milk?

The Toyota Landcruiser of the 70’s and 80’s is possibly one of my all time favorite trucks, probably followed closely by the old school Jeep Wagoneer (you know the one I’m talking about). They’re big, boxy, and beautiful. The kind you see in L.L. Bean catalogs and in rural New England driven by bearded, wool-clad curmudgeons.

When I saw the picture in Forbes I knew right away what it was. It’s the 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser. Toyota’s VP of marketing says the idea is to “…step back toward the heritage of Toyota with the old FJ40 and the heritage of the original SUV”. It looks like Toyota will continue to sell the Land Cruiser as we’ve known it lately, in all it’s massive luxuriousness. It’s departed so far from it’s roots that it’s even sold under Lexus branding as the LX. That’s about as far from a working truck as you can get.

Automobile magazine gives it great reviews, although they do lament that it doesn’s have the removable roof sections that the original Cruiser did. The standard V6 version will have 245hp and 282lb-ft of torque which is higher than the competition offered by Jeep in their Wrangler Rubicon package but slightly short of the Nissan XTerra. It should also check in between 25 to 30k, depending on the trimmings.

It’s definitely different than anything out there now but I like it. There are clearly design elements taken from the original which allowed me to recognize it immediately. But as the article mentions, Toyota opted not to be too true and jump on the retro bandwagon that VW did with the new Beetle and Ford has with the Thunderbird. I like both of those cars as well. I’ve always liked the fit, finish, and reliability of Toyota so hopefully my Audi will make it to 2007 so I can take a serious look at the new FJ.

It was cold and clear when I stepped outside to get something out of the car. Maybe it was the crunching of my boots on the snow or the crisp air or the stars in the sky or the darkness or being alone and surrounded by trees but it made me think of the Battle of the Bulge. How cold were those guys sitting outside with ill-fitting coats and boots (if they had them at all) waiting to fight. It was about 5° here yesterday. How cold was it there? What was that like?

That made me think of the HBO series “Band of Brothers” which follows Easy Company from the first days of the war through the very end. I’ve heard rumors that HBO plans to make another series following another company, possibly one that served in the Pacific Theater. When? I’ve watched those ten episodes from the boxed set about five times each since getting them a year ago. It definitely ties with Lord of the Rings for title of my favorite epic.

Lord of the Rings, what a great trilogy. Peter Jackson did an amazing job. What does he have planned for King Kong? I hear it’s long. The reviewer on NPR last night said 3 hours 7 minutes. He also said Jackson probably could have shortened it to 3 hours 5 minutes if he took out all the unnecessary boring stuff. That sounds like a glowing endorsement.

Then I went back inside. It’s funny how the mind works.

I’ve learned two things already in my new position.

1. Only a sucker shows up for a meeting on time.

   Maybe it’s that all the clocks in the building seem to be set for different times but inevitably, if I show up for a meeting at the time it’s supposed to start, I’m alone in the conference room.

2. Ridiculous is the new smart.

   Here’s a department objective from one of our corporate intranet sites:

   Organize our initiatives to better secure our systems, our data, and our processes to create more commonality and reduce unnecessary complexity in our infrastructure and our business applications and processes, leading to enhanced risk management.

   Holy run-on sentence Batman! Never mind our infrastructure, why don’t we start by reducing unnecessary complexity in our sentences? It sounds to me like somebody is trying to say that simplicity and modularity (or re-usability if that’s a word) lead to better security and less risk. How can we encourage that if we can’t even communicate it effectively?

   At some point people became more concerned with sounding intelligent than actually being understood. I suspect that anybody who heard that objective and didn’t quite understand it (lots of people in that room I’m sure) kept their mouths shut for fear of being thought stupid. Little did they know that the people to the left and right of them were most likely facing the same fear.

   To help you in the battlefields or corporate boardrooms, I present to you The Corporate Bullshit Generator courtesy of Office Diversions: The Productivity Reduction Discovery Center.

   Good luck out there.

Larry Beinhart, the author of the novel that was the basis for the movie “Wag the Dog” was a guest of Diane Rehm this afternoon talking about media spin. He has a new book out called “Fog Facts” in which he turns his attention to spin on real world events. A fog fact is a fact that has been published or could be easily known that has disappeared from the public consciousness. He uses the events of September 11^th as an example and backs up that assertion throughout the rest of the interview using examples of facts that seem to have been forgotten.

While I don’t intend to use this space to push any political beliefs or spout conspiracy theories, I think it’s important to sometimes examine things from an objective point of view. Critical thinking, especially when applied to subjects that are slightly uncomfortable produce the greatest results. I digress…

According to Mr. Beinhart, the media and government would have us believe that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use hijacked airplanes to attack the United States and that there was no way the hijackers could have been detected and stopped. It’s important to note that in order for this to feasible, then:

1. Ultimately no one can be held responsible for failure to stop events that were truly unbelievable.
2. Events that cannot be imagined cannot be stopped by normal means.

The events of September were truly unimaginable

The pilot episode of “The Lone Gunman”, a Fox spin-off of the X-Files, from March 2001 involves a terrorist plot using hijacked airplanes. Somebody made a television show whose plot was similar to an unimaginable event that wouldn’t occur for another six months, huh? Beinhart also mentions activities at a 2001 G-8 conference in Genoa that were temporarily suspended because of a suspected threat of attack by air. In fact, George W. Bush stayed on an aircraft carrier at that time rather than accomodations in Genoa. On December 24^th 1994, terrorists hijacked an Air France flight and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. This plot was ultimately stopped after a raid on the plane by French commandos.

These events aren’t madeup. They can easily be verified with a little research. If events so close to those of September 11^th have been attempted in the past, suspected in the past, or even fictionalized on television, then how can they be unimaginable?

Events that cannot be imagined cannot be stopped by normal means

On April 21^st 2001, one of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi, was stopped by an Oklohoma State Trooper for speeding. Al-Hamzi had been photographed at Al Qaeda meetings and the CIA knew he was a terrorist conspiring against the United States and suspected he was in the country. If the CIA shared any of this information with other agencies, Al-Hamzi would have been arrested on the spot. If I get stopped by the police, they can tell whether the car I’m driving is stolen or whether I wear contact lenses or not. Given that, why is it extraordinary that a man wanted by the CIA, FBI, and everybody else should get stopped by the cops and drive off with a fine? Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected 20^th was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001 on immigration charges after flight school instructors became suspicious and called the FBI. Moussaoui’s name had been on the CIA’s radar since April when they were tipped off by an informant who met him at extremist gatherings in 1997. This association is confirmed by French intelligence in mid-August.

These guys weren’ master criminals. They made mistakes. At least two were in the custody of the police at some point after entering the United States. Al-Hamzi obtained credit cards and a social security using his real name. He also had a listed number while living in San Diego. How come nobody that knew who they were could find them? Who come no agencies that came into contact with them knew who they were?

According to Beinhart, government spin tells us we need to take extraordinary action (possibly including tortue) to protect our safety; that we that we needed to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and/or that we should suspend people’s rights in order to stay safe. The facts are, these guys were right under our noses for many months. Some agencies knew their backgrounds and were looking for them, some agencies had contact with them but had no reason to suspect they were anything other than ordinary. Nobody put two and two together. That doesn’t sound extraordinary to me.

Again, it’s not my intention to espouse any particular political beliefs but just to get people to think. These examples are all real news items that were published and probably widely talked about at the time. What happened? Is it true that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it?

I had an interesting conversation with a coworker at Citigroup this week. He’s been successfully consulting for close to 18 years now and loving it. By successfully, I mean consistently working. I’m not really certain how we started talking about it but he had some great insight on staying employable and advancing when it’s your job to go from job to job. He broke it down like this: Scope.

Scope is defined as the breadth or opportunity to function. Scope keeps you employable. Having a diverse skillset gives an individual a much more vast range of opportunities and projects to choose from. Becoming an expert in a field or technology is great but ultimately limiting. Narrow but deep technical skills decrease marketability by limiting a person’s opportunities. There are opportunities but few companies have a need for very specific skills and they’re usually limited to specific projects. Once that project is wrapped up, it’s on to the next thing. It might be a week or it might be a year but once it’s done it’s done.

Always take the project doing something or working with some technology with which you have no experience; even if it’s less money. Learning a new skill will pay you back, with dividends. Diversify and be able to tackle anything.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately how experts are predicting a shortage of qualified I.T. people in the United States within the next ten to twenty years. The most common reasoning during these conversations is that the scarcity of jobs in this industry in the recent past has scared students into other fields. Add to that the large number of baby boomers retiring in the near future and apparently that amounts to a shortage of experienced technical people.

Most recently however, someone mentioned a factor I hadn’t heard before. I wish I could give credit where credit is due but I tuned in during the middle of a local radio show and turned off before the program ended. Currently the corporate mindset is to outsource low paying technical jobs overseas and keep high paying ones here. The guest had all sorts of facts and statistics which I don’t remember but let’s operate under the assumption that some of those high paying positions are filled by foreign nationals here for school or because of lack of opportunity in their homelands (China and India).

In the news almost as much as Paris Hilton is the fact that the economies of China and India are growing faster than that stuff in the bottom of a fraternity house refrigerator. It won’t be long before the appeal of opportunity in the US is worth less than the prospect of being with family and these workers leave for better opportunities at home and take their skills with them. In parallel, as quality of life and opportunity increases overseas, how long will workers there be content with lower paid support positions?

With a portion of our highly skilled workforce heading home, fewer entries into the field, and overseas contracting no longer as affordable, what does that mean for I.T. workers in the US?

If you see the same content appearing in multiple areas of this site (I know, I know, there aren’t that many to begin with) it’s only because I’m working on getting static content into the CMS where it will be searchable (when I get around to implementing search that is).

I’m currently Director of Technical Services for a small E-Commerce company in Upstate New York. Being the main I.T. guy for a small company means you do everything. If it plugs into a wall, they want me to fix it; computers, fax machines, copiers, telephones, anything. Sometimes I also take out the trash, pick up lunch (not the tab, just the food), and run to the post office. I don’t want these achievments however to overshadow the other stuff I do, like help people be more productive or save the company money. Those things are important too.

If you havent already, I’d like to invite you to download my resume. It highlights a few things that I consider fairly important achievements on my part. Below are some other successes I’d like to point out.

• Right now I’m in the process of writing an ASP tutorial for Spoono which I hope will be published on their web site.
• Implemented real-time, online credit card processing for a series of E-Commerce sites which saves 20 hours per week of manual processing time. Additionally, order filling staff no longer needs to wait for manual payment processing before shipping orders. They operate more efficiently and customers receive their orders more quickly.
• I devised a method of generating dynamic META tags for my current employer that gave our E-Commerce sites first page ranking for our keywords at Google.
• At Unisys, I assisted field sales reps and interfaced directly with large clients such as International Paper and the Marriott hotel organization.