We just started adding a new feature to a client's internal web application: mobile support. The application--described in our case studies--displays near real time sensor data for managing industrial food waste.

Right now the application is powered by Sharepoint 2003, and shows pages of graph data in web parts. Tank X had 60,000 gallons out of 100,000 available at 3pm, 61,000 at 4pm, etc. They let the users see when they need to send trucks to empty the tanks. It alerts users of crises via text message. This was great technology in 2003, but times have changed.

Right now, we are working out an iphone interface and the comments of the Brent Simmons ring true: this stuff is hard. It isn't anything to do with the actual technology: html is html, but rather with the ui choices. With a tiny screen to work with, we don't have the luxury of throwing a lot of data at the user.

At the same time, the lack of good animation...

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Microsoft and the Cloud Lately, The Beast From Redmond has been talking about their move into online services. Widely dismissed as a me-too response to Google apps I'm starting to think that their plan has some merit.

Instead of being about 100% web applications ala apps, zoho, or such, it is going to be a combination between desktop and cloud—a mesh in Ray Ozzie's concept.

Their MO is going to be to combine desktop applications with a cloud component for sharing data. Obviously, they want to do this for business reasons: if the app is 100% in the cloud, nobody would buy Windows. At the same time, there is a real practical reason why "desktop plus cloud" or "software plus services" makes a lot of sense. ...

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We have a client who runs a nightclub that caters to bachelorette parties, among others. He is interested in getting more people to go to the shows that his club puts on. [Incidentially, I can no longer say I develop "boring database applications" with clients like that.]

Since we are already doing a bunch of data work, building mailing lists, giving him tools to sell discounted tickets for last minute sales, etc., we wanted to offer him some really targeted advertising. So our first choice was Facebook, that website to which we grant information on our politics, our relationship, our friends, and our favorite music and movies.

Targeted advertising is what we need I figured what we wanted would be to advertise to women in the Chicago area who had recently flipped their relationship status to engaged. Or rather, we would want female friends of theirs. So Alice gets engaged, we want Buffy who lives in Evanston and Cathy who lives in Lincolnwood to see...

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A staffer from our neighbors dropped by and explained that their server was having some network problems and asked if I knew anyone who could look at it. Since I wasn't doing much, I offered to take a look.

The symptoms: the file server worked fine until yesterday. Today, nobody can access the files on the server. When we logged into the server itself, we couldn't contact any outside host. We couldn't ping the router. DHCP failed. All router and switch lights were good, so we knew the physical network was OK. No one reported any changes to the setup. The event log was clean, except for numerous failures from network-dependent applications.

We tested the router itself—fine. It gave out DHCP leases just fine. It routed traffic for all other machines just fine. Windows firewall was disabled, so it couldn't be blocking that, and what kind of idiot pc firewall prevents the machine from getting a DHCP lease?

Why Trend Micro Internet Security, what's what...

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We were shopping for a piece of groupware to manage our software projects. Right now, we have five staffers and four projects under development. Another five projects are waiting in the wings. [Meaning people are waiting for funding, clarifying needs, or otherwise just talking about projects.]

Software projects consist of a pile of to-dos: must haves, nice to haves and some that aren't likely to make it, discussion items, documents, images, and support tickets. Active projects have lots of activity, but even potential projects need some place to dump notes and ideas.

Not only do we have to actually manage the project, but we wanted a way to facilitate communications with our clients.

Agile Communication To run an Agile software shop, we need to keep our customers in the loop. Giant planning documents get out of date faster than they can get written, so we often find that project goals evolve as the project is developed. Without a good way to track all communications related to a project, projects can go from agile to incoherent in a flash....

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More inc linkage. this is a pretty good guide to putting together a web team. I wish every customer read and internalized this.

Particularly important is the role of a web copywriter. Writing for the web is nothing like writing books or articles. Translating between the two usually means a "wall of text" that users hate. Michael Agger's piece at Slate is a good primer on how to write for the web.

Not heeding this advice can lead to a website that users just ignore. We did a website project that featured "how to" sections with 1000 word explanations instead of a web-friendly list of links and bullet points. We set up a user experience test where we asked people recruited off craigslist to try out the how to sections of the website. We captured screen movement and video.

We found users would spend about thirty seconds on their first how to, ten seconds on...

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We have long felt that certification exams were a racket designed less to ensure competency than to ensure revenue for testing companies. There's an old joke that MCSE stands not for “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer” but rather “Must Call Someone Experienced.” Having worked with some MCSEs, I can attest to the latter being the most accurate translation of MCSE.

Today, we are trying to renew our Microsoft partnership membership and are expected to move from mere “registered Partner” status to Certified Partner status. The part we don’t like is the “certification” part. We are required to put two of our staff through at least part of the MCSE grind.

So I sat down to take a pretest for the exam 73-300 Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures. Since I have been analyzing requirements and defining Microsoft .NET solutions since the .net beta I felt confident.

One of the pre-test examples included a example of a student database system and a record like this:Bob...

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I know I’m supposed to be all high tech and interested only in web 2.0 buzzwords, but I still find I have more in common with people who run, say, a bakery than the Facebook guys. I mean sure, I rarely get dirty at work, but I find most of my pressing issues aren’t about any of the web 2.0 issues around “monetizing a tag cloud stream,” but more prosaic nuts and bolts stuff.

I used to say I usually felt more Inc than Wired. And again, Inc. proves me right with a spot-on discussion of how Wall St.'s latest woes affect Main St. small businesses.

Generally speaking, their panel says that Wall St.’s woes aren’t affecting their businesses except for their ability to borrow money.

We share this impression. We are busier than we have ever been. Either we are good, lucky, or some combination...

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Source code is to a finished application binary as the recipe is to a cake. While an expert baker might be able to reverse engineer a cake from the finished product (hmm…1/2.. no 3/4 cup of butter), having the recipe makes recreating the cake a lot easier.

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I was talking to a family friend the other day about their company's web needs. They didn't yet have a website and were sure they needed one, but didn't know why. So in the spirit of recasting my every conversation as a blog post, here's what to think about before you build your website.

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