Sleep Loss and Business Brainstorms
Okay, let’s see. I’ve had some rather erratic sleep cycles once again, which is totally throwing me off kilter. I’ve spent much of my time on Orkut.com because of some extremely interesting discussion on the Web Design and Development community (which is only accessible to Orkut members). It’s really helped to bring a few topics to light and help me organize my thoughts on some important topics such as client relations, personal projects, and freelance business goals. I should probably record some of them here, but that’ll have to wait until more thoughts are less half-baked.
Douglas Bowman on Email Security
I also caught up on several interesting weblog posts. Douglas Bowman is talking about email security (a topic I have not been advocating loudly enough lately) and has written up an extremely helpful and user-friendly tutorial to securing one’s email on Mac OS X. His tutorial does require the use of a mail server which supports SSH, however, and I’m not so sure how many typical users have this option available to them.
A much simpler solution than using SSH tunnels would be to simply highlight that inviting “Use SSL” button in your mail client’s preference window. Unforunately, even huge ISPs still don’t offer POP3S or SMTPS support these days. (Remember my little discussion with Road Runner’s tech support? Bah!)
From the WaSP Desk
In other technical areas, the WaSP weblog had two pretty interesting topics of note which I caught myself up on today as well. The first was regarding IBM’s migration to Linux, which is evidently stalled thanks to Internet Explorer, of all things! That’s right boys and girls, the only company on the face of the Earth with the power to smack Microsoft around like a rag doll has fallen silent on its move to Linux because of IE-specific application code in many of their intranet applications.
The lesson? Never code for a single browser. You will regret it later.
Big Sites are Moving to Web Standards and CSS
Also from the WaSP weblog, two very big sites have finished their CSS makeovers. Both MSN.com and the Staples Rewards Center got big, hefty injections of CSS and (almost) valid markup. As our good, imprisoned friend Martha would say, “It’s a good thing.”
A Touch of Nostalgia
And of course, our moment of Zen: a video of Steve Jobs introducing the MacPlus in 1984. You’ll get goosebumps. I promise. (Here’s the slashdot posting.)
