Infinite Web Design

(via Boing Boing)

Valour-IT is a non-profit that is providing wounded U.S. soldiers with laptops loaded with voice recognition software. These laptops help soldiers who are struggling to cope with new disabilities to communicate with family and friends and empowers them by providing a tool they can use even without the use of their hands. This is a great cause and well worth your support if you have even a few dollars to spare. You can donate online or by sending a check through the mail.

This is a great opportunity to bring up again the topic of accessibility and how important it is that the web sites and software we build be made as accessible as possible to help out those who can’t use a keyboard, mouse, and monitor effectively due to disabilities. Accessibility on web sites is often talked about only in terms of working with screen readers for visually impaired people, however there is a wide range of disabilities such as motor impairments as a result of injury that can keep someone from using a web site. While it’s not sexy or even very interesting to most customers, focusing on accessibility is good business because it opens doors to customers, and it is simply good, by helping out those who are already struggling to overcome a disability.

(Cartoon from Cox & Forkum, purveyors of fine political cartoons)

Russel Davies writes about how to be interesting (unrelated to the recent brouhaha surrounding the Flickr interestingness patent). This seems to be related to the phenomenon of homophily (the tendency to associate with people like yourself). By stepping outside of your comfort zone to learn and try new things you are breaking from the personal inertia that binds so many of us to our boring daily routines.
Continue reading Being Interesting

Pass a law that says if 75% of eligible voters don’t go to the polls, the election is invalid and will have to be held again in one month. This will mean another 30 days of condescending, mind-eroding, profoundly annoying campaign ads.

(from The Outfit)

Ah, the joy of the political season, when we listen to politicians spout nonsense and vitriol and get to choose between candidates that are jerks, morons, crooks, or worse. I’ve been enjoying the political ads here in Michigan where we have spirited Gubernatorial and Senate races. We have such inspiring candidates as our incumbent Governor Granholm, Dick DeVos (”intelligent design”, seriously?), Debbie Stabenow (obsessed with Canadian trash), and Mike Bouchard.
Continue reading Tis the Season

I downloaded Firefox 2.0 RC2 Portable and I’m really pleased with the experience. It’s everything I liked about Firefox 1.5 with some subtle improvements. The upgrade only took about 5 minutes and went smoothly.

A few things helped out with making things go smoothly including:
Continue reading Firefox 2.0 RC2 Portable

Congratulations to the Detroit Tigers who are headed to the World Series for the first time since their 1984 Championship (when I was just 4 years old). It’s great to see the team doing well again after near historic lows just a few years ago. It’s good for fans and it’s good for Metro Detroit. I’ll be rooting for them in the World Series.

(via Boing Boing)

That’s my Dad’s favorite saying, oft repeated after seeing a particular appalling example of human stupidity. Today I’d like to highlight a prime example of stupidity and weak minds at work that rears its head again and again – book banning. This time it came up in Houston, Texas when Alton Verm, of Conroe tried to get the school board to ban Farenheight 451, a novel by Ray Bradbury (story on the Courier website).

The great irony is that Mr. Verm proposed banning a book about book burning during the National Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Banning books is the act of intellectual cowardice. Those who fear the spread of knowledge are relying on a state of ignorance to hold their world together. Sometimes this comes in the form of government officials attempting to hold onto power by keeping the citizenry uninformed. This time it comes in the form of a parent, who has admittedly not even read the book in question, trying to keep a book with content that he is told he would object out of the hands of students. He wants ban the school from providing this book to its students. Apparently, his 15 year old daughter reading this book would undermine her fragile belief system.

No belief is sacred or should be safe from challenges in a free, open society. While respect for the beliefs of others is important, it is only through the free and open exchange of ideas and through exposure to many viewpoints that children can form a functional, reasonable world view. Trying to ban books is not the path to becoming a better person or society. It is simply a path to willful ignorance and dysfunction.

The school district in question should be applauded for the way they have handled Mr. Verm and his daughter. They have refused to remove the book from the curriculum, but they provided a book with similar themes but less “offensive” language for the young Ms. Verm to read instead. This respects her and her father’s right to refuse to learn or be exposed to new ideas without caving to their unreasonable demands that their self imposed ignorance be imposed on all students.

Brad and I have been working together for a while now running Infinite Web Design and we’ve learned a few things about how to and how not to run a small business. The life of an entrepreneur is not for everyone. Hopefully a few of the following tips will help out those of you who are getting started or considering running your own business.
Continue reading Small Business Tips

Let’s try a little word association…

Macromedia – pretty good software, responsive to customers, innovative web products, creative, good company, “gets” the web

Adobe – stiff corporate culture, used to be a good software company, used to be innovative, used to be creative, “gets” print but not the web, used to be…
Continue reading Macromedia and Adobe

Back in April I wrote about “Lock-In” and mentioned Microsoft as a company that locks customers in using proprietary data formats. Well, sure enough they go ahead and announce a major change in the data formats for the next generation of Office (due entirely to my comments I’m sure). They are promising to keep the XML formats open and publically available for anyone to use. This means that software makers will be able to easily access the documentation for the file formats and create applications that can easily read and extract information from Office documents created in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This also means it should be easy to write in files into those formats as well.

Using a simple XML format is great move for Microsoft and for consumers. It will make their format all that more ubiquitous since independent developers will be able to treat it as an open standard and use it for their applications. That will make things simple for developers. Consumers may then have fewer proprietary file formats to deal with, making their lives simpler. Microsoft will have a huge selling point and will generate good will with this move.

This is good news all around, unless you were banking on the next generation of Office software to really flop. I look forward to seeing this come to fruition in 2006.

Processes are so people who don’t know how to do anything can get something done… and they usually still screw it up.

UPDATE 4/25/05: There is a post over at Asterisk that follows this one rather nicely.

So why do we bother with processes? It’s something we talk about at Infinite Web Design, we analyze and improve business processes. This is generally a good thing. Refining how things are done can lead to increased productivity, less frustrated workers, and fewer errors and problems at the end of the day. However, the differences between an effective workflow and a mindless algorithm are often overlooked. This leads to frustration with large bureaucracies and stifling restrictions placed on competent workers.
Continue reading Processes are for…