30.09.06

New Horizons

Posted in News, Random Thoughts at 11:54 pm by Liv

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, New Horizons is NASA’s mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The mission started back in January 2006 — and if you visit the mission’s site, the counters on the first page will tell you exactly, down to the very second, how long has the mission been going for and how long until the next encounter with one of the planets in our solar system. (Incidently, at the time I’m writing this, there’s still about 150 days to wait until it reaches Jupiter — d’oh!)

The best thing I like about the mission’s website though is the live images of the mission trajectory — which basically shows you where the mission is, how far from Earth, Sun and the next planet it’s due to meet. Check it out: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php. Don’t get fooled by the first image, by the way — while you might look at it and think oh well, there’s not that much left until it reaches Jupiter (encounter due in January 2008), if you scroll down to the next image (which shows you the full trajectory relative to all of the planets in our system) you will see that really it has only done about 1/6 of the full length to reach Pluto! And from there on it will go further into the Kuiper Belt and even further than that! To put it in perspective, it is due to reach Pluto in 2015!

There’s all sorts of interesting things and up-to-date news about the mission that you can read on the site, but one interesting fact captured my attention: the mission’s FAQ. The team behind the project worked out that the project budget ($650 million), as much as it sounds like a lot of money, actually means only 10 cents per each US citizen per year during a period of 10 years (which is the duration of the mission — obviously, bearing in mind the fact that the mission’s main goal is to reach Pluto and the Kuiper Belt and everything else from there will be a bonus). Which really, is nothing — 1 USD spent every 10 years by a US citizen! Imagine how much more we could possibly do if we expand that to all the other countries! Imagine how much more it can be done if we say increase that amount ten-fold (which is still 1 USD per year per US citizen!). I’m sure that out of all the rubbish that our taxes get thrown at, no one would have any problem donating say 10 dollars a year (which is 100 times more than the money spent for this mission!) to develop more missions to explore the space! Hell, I wouldn’t have a problem giving 100 GBP a year for that cause — would you?

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24.09.06

Protect your online content

Posted in Blogroll, News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 1:55 am by Liv

This has happened to me recently:

Normally I check my webservers logs regularly — partly to find out whether my page views have increased (if only ), partly to see where my visitors come from (and more importantly to make sure that I get other visitors than my friends ), partly to see who’s linking back to my pages and also to see whether there were any “illegal” requests that would give away some wannabe hacker trying to find some exploits in my sites. While doing so, recently, I have noticed that I kept getting a lot of hits from a certain page from jamosoft.com. While this normally wouldn’t worry me — as there are a few people out there who have made links to some of my pages in their blogs and/or sites — I found it unusual that possibly a company was linking back to my site!

A little investigation revealed that in fact they are not linking back to a particular page, but instead to a zip file which contains a project of mine. So I decided to visit the page that was referring visitors to this zip file on the jamosoft website. And it turns out that these guys provide a set of applications (with title and description and even screenshots!) without mentioning anywhere that the applications are not in fact written by them, but also without stating otherwise — which, of course, would lead most of the people in believing that it is the owners of the site who have actually developed them. The links for downloading the applications, stupidly enough, though points back to the original developer’s site — so one of them was actually pointing back to my server! So while I was happily offering this application for download toally unrestricted, in fact, a part of that was actually giving this guys credit for my work!

I’ve emailed the webmasters asking them to solve this issue by either removing the listing for my application from their pages or by adding a visible note and link back to my site. Surprise, surprise, of course no reply came back and nothing happened.

So then I finally decided to add a referrer protection onto my website so that any file type apart from the webpages themselves can only be downloaded if the link to them comes from one of my sites. (Read more about this here.)

No matter how much I support the idea of free software (hence the reason for providing my applications with sources free from my site), I don’t want some idiots to put together a page which links back to my site, claiming silently that they wrote the application. And I would suggest to anyone to start looking into configuring your server so that you only allow downloads from pages originating on your sites only. This indeed limits someone who is genuine providing a link for the purpose of download only, but I would argue that such a genuine person would have no issues in emailing you directly and requiring access for such a facility and also making sure that the link back to you clearly states that the download will begin from your site, and that the application belongs to you. And obviously, for such a genuine request, you wouldn’t have a problem to allow them to place such a link on their page.

Lastly, as much as I don’t like generating traffic for them, the page I was talking about is this : http://www.jamosoft.com/applications3.htm and my application (at the time this was written) is J2ME Convertor 1.0.2 (meanwhile, the version provided on my site has reached version 1.0.3!). If you recognize any of the other sites linked to from this page and have a way to contact the owner of these sites, it would be a good idea to drop them an email and signal the fact that these guys are claiming credit for their work, as they might not have noticed the traffic coming from this URL yet.

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16.09.06

Fonts for Web Designers

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 4:59 pm by Liv

This one goes to the web designers out there (definitely not me then lol): I found this nice collection of fonts that can be used freely on web pages. Check out www.goodfonts.org — nice! Also, here is a good article on how to embed fonts in web pages. Hopefully the both of them will help you give your pages a nicer look.

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Advertising, the Internet and Usability

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 4:29 pm by Liv

If you are concerned with the usability of your site, you probably keep an eye like everyone else on Dr. Jakob Nielsen‘s site useit.com. While I agree with (most of) his views, there is one aspect that I do not agree with entirely: advertising. If you read his article “advertising Doesn’t Work on the Web“, you will be told that with very few exceptions, web-based advertising doesn’t work. Well, I beg to differ!

I do work for an oline media company, and I can safely say that there is a lot of money in this industry — and a lot of money are made by not just the advertisers, but the publishers and the media company as well. (Incidently the company’s Christmas party was in Bermuda and all employees were flown there and stayed in a 5-star hotel for 3 days — pictures here. Even that alone in itself is a proof for the fact that web-based advertising works, I would venture to say!)

While I appreciate that the article was written in 1997 (when advertising was mostly based on banners), there doesn’t seem to be a recent addendum to it, so I gather that Dr. Nielsen’s opinions regarding this subject are still the same. And there have been a lot of changes in the web-advertising arena lately — most importantly the contextual advertising!
I am pretty sure that even Dr. Nielsen himself will agree that on his pages where he mentions ideas that were discussed at the most recent User Experience Conference, a link/banner/ad taking the reader to a page where she or he can make a booking for this conference would actually be quite beneficial! As it is in fact in context with the contents of his article. Because of that, the user will not see it as a “forced intrusion” in his/her web experience, on the contrary, the user will actually be quite likely to click on the ad and make a booking for the above-mentioned event, as it is in fact quite likely something that presents interest to him/her. So from a user perspective, the actual ad would prove to be beneficial. From the advertiser’s perspective, the ad is targeted and delivered to the right audience — readers who are interested in usability issues and who are very likely to be interested in attending such event. Therefore the conversion ratio for the clicks on this ad will be quite high, in other words, users who click on the ad will make a booking in most cases — so no money is wasted (as Dr. Nielsen’s article claims it). Last but not least, from a publisher (site) point of view, a certain revenue will be driven from this advertising, due to the clicks made on this ad. So the 3 parties involved in this scenario do actually benefit from the presence of the advert on the page! And the scenario can be taken even further such that for instance a link to a book discussing issues that Dr. Nielsen lays out in his article can be presented on the page too — with (very likely) the same rate of success. Or maybe a link to downloading a piece of software that validates a site layout. Or a link to an audio-book. And the list can go on…
I agree though that an advert inviting users to buy tickets to the latest Shakira concert would be nothing short of annoying in the context of his usability site. And in fact, in such cases the advertiser would not be happy at all by the fact that his advertising campaign has been targeted to the wrong auditory — and quite likely not be prepared to pay (or pay very little) for trafficking his campaign on such pages! And I also agree that a site overloaded with ads (have you seen the “site” http://www.shopping.net ?) is of very little use to an user which will be struggling to separate the real contents from the advertising.

However, I would like to find out what Jakob’s opinion nowadays is regarding the contextual advertising which is so widely spread nowadays (and you only have to look at Vibrant Media‘s IntelliTXT, Google’s AdSense, Yahoo Sponsored Links and so on).

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13.09.06

J2ME and GPRS Connections

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:43 pm by Liv

I liked from the beginning the idea of mobile and embedded programming so I spent a lot of time on mobile and embedded programming (see the mobile section on my website). More specifically, I spent a lot of time doing J2ME stuff.

Recently, as a lot of you might know, there is a new API released by JCP for J2ME webservices. I was looking at this and it occured to me that with the cost of GPRS connections falling down so much lately it’s quite likely that in the near future we might be able to discard some of the J2ME packages as I envisage slowly but surely a lot of mobile applications moving onto a web-based mobile app approach. If the GPRS connection speed goes up, who would stop us from having virtual devices (e.g. virtual hard drives) mounted via some webservices-enabled protocol where you can store anything that might be produced by a mobile app? And that would eliminate the possibility of having your mobile stolen while some sensitive data is written on it.

For instance, how many people write nowadays single desktop applications? There is a limited niche for those kinds from what I’ve seen as most of the (serious) apps nowadays use (at least) a client-server approach. So who would consider in 2 years time for example writing stand-alone mobile apps? (I guess we will have to rule out the gaming companies )

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