Haven’t blogged for a long time, finally some­thing I feel proud of and feel like I’m at least +5 on un-deprived.

If you are in Min­nesota, or prob­a­bly heard about the annual Overnight Web Chal­lenge hosted by a group of  local gen­er­ous web agency: The Nerdery. Which was an event to redesign web­sites for local non-profits. I have to say at first I was very ner­vous about it, but I had a blast and learned a lot of things. So here are the details.

The goal

The goal of the chal­lenge is each team can have up to 10 peo­ple (strangers or friends), and each team will pair up with a non-profit cho­sen by The Nerdery. In 24 hours time we are to redesign and build a new web­site for our des­ig­nated local non-profit client.

Out­come

In my case, my team was Team Ven­ture – we were a mixed of for­mer and cur­rent co-workers. Not every­one knows every­one, but we bonded quickly. Our client was Some­place Safe. Even though we couldn’t fin­ish 100%, so we are still con­tin­u­ously work­ing on it and pro­vide sup­port in the next 6 months.

Before

After

Rules

Any­thing goes… PHP, Word­Press, Ruby, what­ever. We could even pre­pare codes ahead (in which I hope we can pre­pare bet­ter next year).

What we did and lessons learned

We chose Word­Press as our plat­form, the lessons I learned from it were:

1. Don’t build any­thing from scratch if not nec­es­sary, frame­works, frame­works, and frameworks.
2. Pre-installed plu­g­ins  – take them out if not needed. It’s eas­ier to remove than add
3. List of jQuery com­po­nents, snip­pets to gen­er­ate Word­Press page con­tents (side­bars etc…)

I am totally going to do the chal­lenge again next year and because the win­ning team: TST Media pulled off some very amaz­ing stuff in one night, they’ve inspired me to push a lot harder than just using a Word­Press plat­form. So hope­fully I’ll start post­ing more updates on what this “push­ing harder” in the next few months.

Other than that, I encour­age all web nerds in MN to try this chal­lenge at least once. It’s thrilling, learn to work faster, and put our web nerdi­ness skills to use in a very mean­ing­ful way. Besides that, you get to meet maybe a Sen­a­tor such as Al Franken, and the Tronguy. Foods in every 3 hours, mas­sage, Yoga, live action Angry Birds and a whole lot more nerdy fun stuff.

I’m one of those peo­ple as long as I get my works done, I don’t care if I’m even run­ning on Win ME, and occa­sion­ally some peo­ple made fun of me as a “designer” I don’t use a Mac.  Well, actu­ally, I’m now offi­cially a front-end devel­oper and ex-designer, I can now say I can use what­ever to get my stuff done. Front-end devel­op­ers are “effi­cient” that way if you know what I mean :)  I was pok­ing around Xubuntu to revive my 6–7 years old VAIO, it’s still slow as hell after installed Kubuntu and I really want to learn to use a “nerdy” branded OS, so I now offi­cially announced my Vista HP Acer lap­top is now oper­at­ing under Ubuntu 10.10.

With all the hypes that how easy and fast Ubuntu is, I wasn’t really impress to be hon­est espe­cially the first thing didn’t work was the wire­less. Took me hours to fig­ure it out. Turned out that most peo­ple who have newer lap­tops and with a Broad­com brand wire­less card will have sim­i­lar issue due to the dri­ver wasn’t “install” or what­ever you call it prop­erly.  I finally fig­ured it out and these are the steps I took and worked both times after I installed a “test drive”, wiped, then full install:

Fire up the Ter­mi­nal (Ctrl + Alt + T), let’s do a lit­tle diag­no­sis first to see if you’re hav­ing the same issues and wire­less prob­lem I did.

sudo lshw -C Network

I’m a newb in as men­tioned, but I guess the above com­mand split out your net­work cards brands, set­tings and what not. Your wire­less should be the last group says some­thing like:

*-network DISABLED<br /> description: Wireless interface<br /> product: BMC4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY<br /> vendor: Broadcom Corporation<br /> ... then blah blah blah ...

So now you found out what’s your wire­less model is, write that down some­where. Then do a:

dmesg

Look for some­thing like:

[ 13.938268] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17<br /> [ 13.938276] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: setting latency timer to 64<br /> [ 13.963989] brcm80211: fail to load firmware brcm/bcm43xx-0.fw<br /> [ 13.963993] brcm80211: Failed to find firmware usually in /lib/firmware/brcm<br /> [ 13.964046] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A disabled<br /> [ 13.964060] brcm80211: wl_pci_probe: wl_attach failed!

Well there you go, that’s the prob­lem. The silly firmware/driver could not load. This is where I will send you to a page with all the good­ies that pretty much got me through. But before that, a few notes:

You will need a tool called b43-fwcutter. Jump to a com­puter with inter­net access and USB thumb drive and down­load the lat­est ver­sion (judg­ing by date on the right hand side), oh, since I’m just as newb, don’t ask me which blah_i36.deb or blah_amd64.deb to down­load. Just grab both. Both installs I did it pre­ferred one over and other, then vice versa *shrug*

Don’t unplug the USB thumb drive yet, now go to my ulti­mate wire­less prob­lem solv­ing page. Since we got the b43-fwcutter taken care of, you can go straight to step 2 and there should be a few files that you need to download.

I fol­lowed the instruc­tions up to step 3, step 4 didn’t work for me. So at that point I did just a good old sudo reboot, wait a few sec­onds, then lap­top now found my wire­less networks.

We’re not alone, there were TONS of peo­ple have wire­less prob­lems with Ubuntu – even one of my co-workers did not aware of this until his cousin told him and me, too. So if the above solu­tion didn’t work for you, here’s the rest of the wire­less doc­u­men­ta­tions for Ubuntu:

Ubuntu Wifi­Docs

I can only assume as long as you found out which dri­ver is miss­ing, and using dmesg to find out whether it’s loaded or not, the above should work the same. Good luck!

Haven’t wrote any­thing for a while, but here’s some food for ran­dom thoughts. With all the newest and great­est hit­ting web namely CSS3 and HTML5, how about giv­ing some love and thoughts to Multi-touch as the next big thing on the web, and prob­a­bly will be Web 3.0? Now you would say some­thing like, “Well, you know Mac­books have that awe­some fea­ture and peo­ple ARE using it on web­sites.” Well, can YOUR web­sites sup­port flip­ping objects around with 2 fin­gers? An inter­face to crop and edit pho­tos using your 2 fingers/hands on your web­site / web app? iPhone / Android phones can, but on web­sites? Nope.

First of all, I am one of those peo­ple who refused to support/buy any­thing with an “i” in front of it, it’s not that one day I wake up and decided to dis­like Macs. I owned an iPod before and I found myself almost throw­ing it against the wall. I have used Macs, and I can’t find myself lik­ing it as much as a PC. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, but I just pre­fer PC’s… that being said, the best thing Apple “invented” and poured so much thoughts into my brain is the lat­est and great­est the Multi-touch technology.

Where did I get the idea Multi-touch will be Web 3.0? Well, Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools, Pro­to­type etc… changed the way peo­ple inter­act with web, and how it deliv­ered inter­ac­tiv­ity and infor­ma­tion to the users. Designers/developers don’t need to depend on Flash/Silverlight to have ani­ma­tions / effects, things load faster in the back­ground or don’t even have to reload a page thanks to AJAX. No longer the user has to open a new win­dow to see a pic­ture, instead, they can see them using a Light­box or sim­i­lar tool. I per­son­ally feel those are the most impor­tant ele­ments that dif­fer­en­ti­ate the good old web from Web 2.0. Some might argue Web 2.0 is all about the shiny graph­ics, but I beg to be dif­fered. Not only that, Multi-touch is already in smart phones and Apple already started it with their Mac­books / Magic Mouse, and Win­dows 7 with their own multi-touch inter­face. It’s only a mat­ter of time when all the web­sites don’t require a mouse to browse and adding more inter­ac­tiv­i­ties, because I don’t have to use a mouse to browse when I use my G1, why should a desk­top com­puter? The tools are already existed to get us there, the ques­tion is how soon. My guess? I’d say in a year.

To prove it, some cra­zies already made one of the world’s first Multi-touch web­site tak­ing advan­tage of Win­dows 7 multi-touch sup­port – of course it still works if you don’t have a fancy multi-touch screen or a Wac­com Bam­boo Touch (cost only $69 and works on both Macs and PCs – yes, even Win XP SP2).  Or a fancy Mac­book / Magic Mouse.

Although, I don’t think I’ll trade my CSS/HTML skills for multi-touch mak­ing web­sites in Sil­verlight. That being said, I think I was look­ing at the future of the web and prob­a­bly some­thing that will “encour­age” CSS3.x / and HTML4.x to sup­port multi-touch sooner, max­i­mize and push the web even fur­ther? Can I already say Multi-Touch Web 3.0, anyone?

A slight prob­lem of course Multi-touch is quite new, not many peo­ple have the tools to inter­act, or the neces­sity for it for the web at least. Never mind that, not a lot of peo­ple get the use of it. Multi-touch took me a few sec­onds to fig­ure out how to use it, now that I know, “wowser” is the word I’m using to describe it. To me, the web is all about two words: infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ence. As designers/developers are con­stantly find­ing bet­ter and cooler way to cre­ate web­sites and deliver infor­ma­tion, Mutli-touch is def­i­nitely the next big thing on the web.

I don’t know about you, but I’m jump­ing on the band­wagon to look for a way to “fake” a Web 2.5 for now and make Web 2.0 sounds so 2008 while peo­ple still dig­ging the glossy/shiny but­tons, and debate the best way to clear floats.

This was one of the old posts that got cor­rupted when I did a rein­stall of WP 2.8.1.  Since this script is pretty handy, so I’m re-posting it.

This scripts worked in Acro­bat 8 & 9 Pro. Instead of of man­u­ally extract­ing all the pages, and then man­u­ally opti­mize them, this script can ease the process. To access the Batch Pro­cess­ing menu: Advanced -> Doc­u­ment Pro­cess­ing -> Batch Pro­cess­ing. The screen shot below shows where and how to add the script:

Then add the fol­low­ing script into the “Javascript Editor”:

var filename = this.documentFileName.replace(".pdf","");
try{ for(var i = 0; i

Saves a lot of time if you have a lot of files to extract and need to optimized the files using custom settings.
				

…and con­trols to pause and play the time line.

I’ve been using this script quite a bit, and I think it’s time to jog it down some­where. A few things to keep in mind when using this script: (more…)

Inspi­ra­tions come in all places, some of mine seems to come from dreams…

A few days ago, I told myself that I need to reject the idea that I can’t draw.  So I started to look at tuto­ri­als how to draw and learn how to “think”.  One of the meth­ods is to think each objects in line and shapes how that object is made up instead of let the brain telling me what that object is.  Using that method, I tried vec­tor­iz­ing an image.  I feel that helps me to learn how to put the shapes together as much as draw­ing – and the prod­uct was my USB icons.   The result was quite good, and that was a very good exer­cise appar­ently… (more…)

I ran into an inter­est­ing error this morn­ing when I tried to open an Illus­tra­tor file from home to work.  When I opened it up, I got this error:

If that hap­pens, use Task Man­ager to “End Task” for Illus­tra­tor – then hit the “Can­cel” but­ton on the error popup.  Did 2 min­utes of google, this arti­cle came up.  Even though it was for Flex, it seems to apply here.  (more…)

I got this idea of this arti­cle after me and Java­Junky talk­ing and given a tuto­r­ial of how Twit­ter works to a cou­ple of our friends at my birth­day party.  When they went home, 3 peo­ple were on Twit­ter.  I guess me and Java­Junky did a good job on the sales pitch. (more…)

Well, all of my old posts are now offi­cially gone *cries a river*  oh well… here’s my first post… again… the tweets don’t count :P

My boss has a thing about revamp­ing the site once a year… his logic is that the cus­tomers need to relearn the nav­i­ga­tion so that they might dis­cover new things… I guess he really doesn’t like the idea of “Don’t make me think”.  Any­ways, that made me pon­der how long should a home­page be revamped?  Once a year seems a bit exces­sive to me, and I have noticed that sites like Intel / AMD had not updated their web­site for at least 2–3 years.  Now, there are many rea­sons why a web­site stays the way it is for a few year, I think these are the factors:

1. Con­fu­sions – new look dri­ves lots of habit based cur­rent readers/customers/clients absolutely nuts.  Every year after the revamp­ing, we got lots of emails and calls regard­ing the web­site that the cus­tomers claimed that they can’t find their things any­more.  Actu­ally, the cus­tomers mostly freaked out at the home­page, but the rest of the page, the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem is pretty much the same with minor changes.  Yet, “he” per­sisted that we change every year, actu­ally, the new look only hit the 6 months mark… luck­ily, I ‘m not the one who answer those emails and calls
2. Resources - it takes time to come up with a good design and resources to build it.  Did I men­tion I’m a one per­son graphic / web depart­ment?  I don’t know how big is Intel & AMD’s web team, but pretty sure more than 1 per­son.  I am imag­in­ing that they study back and forth of all the nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out make sure that they don’t freak their cus­tomers out when they whip out the new look.  That, I am judg­ing by their nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out.  Intel has the most sig­nif­i­cant change on the home­page since last year, but after the home­page Intel keeps the nav­i­ga­tion pretty much the same.  AMD also keeps the same nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem and every­thing pretty much the same but with an updated look.

I mean, my boss has a point fresh­en­ing the nav­i­ga­tion, although, with the “Don’t make me think” prin­ci­ple… Well, let me know what you think?

Some 2009 updated cor­po­rate web­sites, I do a lot of cor­po­rate designs, so here’s a ref­er­ence for myself and any­one else find use­ful.  Some­one posted 35 2008 pro­fes­sional cor­po­rate web­sites, I’m updat­ing the list, added and sub­tract a few and keep on col­lect­ing: Orig­i­nal article

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