Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Friday, April 20, 2007

RealWorldIS.com

Just completed some updates to RealWorldIS.com. Basically refreshed it with some information that had been badly out of date since my move back to Sacramento, CA last year. And adding some links back and forth to the blog.

The site turned out be over-engineered in the past, was intended to have a database of projects, technologies, etc. which would then be exposed via the web. Just got unwieldy to keep up to date. The new scheme simplifies that, and will just have all of the content in the web pages vs. making it db-driven. Definitely a case of the cobbler's kids going barefoot, as the client web sites I've built over the past 2-3 years use much new tools, more standards compliant.

Future directions will be pulling it more towards being a showcase site for techniques I'm using on client web sites (some public, some intranet)
- Updating to .net (current in classic ASP)
- Scrapping frames
- Standards compliant (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
- Updating recent project descriptions

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Unattended Install Scripts

Blog with a compendium of unattended (i.e. 'silent' installs for some common Windows utilities (i.e. Flash Player)...

http://www.stealthpuppy.com/blogs/travelling/archive/2007/01/23/shameless-self-promotion-unattended-install-scripts.aspx

Still testing how to get them to run under limited rights permissions, or be able to run remotely through WMI. Some solution where an admin would just be able to queue up the install or kick it off, without having to remote in.

Usability and Adobe/Macromedia Flash

Came across this article when looking up some info on Flash, this guy wrote a treatise of sorts on bad Flash design in the early 2ks

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html

Interesting the correlation between him changing his mind, and getting hired by Macromedia. Still not if Flash == Evil or not... A few co-workers going through training on it, but am inclined to steer more towards standards-based HTML.