The website for Smidig 2008 went live last night. It’s not without its bugs, but I’m proud of the design job I did.

Check out this interesting comparison of product packaging photos vs. the appearance of the actual products.

I just updated Romerike Helsebygg’s site with a bunch of new images Bjørn sent me. These new images are incredibly inspiring, although not as inspiring as getting to see the construction progress every time I take the train into Lillestrøm! I’m also happy to see that my site design has held up well these past five years.

A while back someone asked me to design a site with all sorts of gradients and crap. I think that a “Web 2.0″-look was even specifically requested. The request gave me indigestion, and here’s why:

| View | Upload your own

Johannes and I bought a Samsung CLP-510N color laser printer for our company a couple of months back. This model can run as a network printer, but you have to buy a special replacement network card for the printer if you want the printer to be able to access the network wirelessly. Fine, but the network card for the printer costs about two-thirds what the printer itself costs. Ridiculous!

Wires are annoying, though, so I thought a good solution would be to install a wireless ethernet adapter for the printer. The wireless adapter cost a third of what the network card would have cost. The ethernet adapter I bought, the Belkin Wireless G Gaming Adapter, had several reviews talking about how easy it is to set up. I went ahead and bought it.

Today I went to set up the adapter. I started following the directions on the quick-start guide in the box. I connected the adapter to the wireless router and started the software, and was greeted with the following image:

“Shit”, I thought. The “next” button was greyed out: the adapter configuration software wasn’t detecting the gaming adapter on the LAN. Not good—since we have a secured WLAN, I needed to connect the wireless network adapter to the LAN first to configure it to access the WLAN. I tried everything I could think of to get the LAN to see the gaming adapter, but to no avail. After about 10 minutes of useless futzing around, I happened to mouse-over the “next” button on the configuration software.

*headdesk*

The buttons were grey, but they weren’t “greyed out” as per Windows UI conventions. Annoyed at having wasted so much time because the UI designer for this software was an idiot, I clicked on the “next” button and had the adapter installed and working in about 10 seconds.

Lesson learned: Making buttons with mouse-overs greyed-out when they’re active but not being hovered over is a very bad idea. Some UI conventions cannot be flouted.

Johannes is making his idea happen: Smidig 2007 is going to be held on November 26th and 27th at DogA here in Oslo. For those who don’t read Norwegian, he has written a little about the conference on his blog.

The night before his JavaZone presentation, Johannes and I had fun making diagrams for some of the slides in his presentation. He had prepared some basic sketches of the concepts he wanted to get across, and asked me to help him transform those sketches into comprehensible drawings done in an informal style. So I whipped out my tablet and went to work.

This was the original deployment sketch:

And this is what I turned it into:

That one was by far the easiest and most straightforward diagram to make.

Here is the original lifecycle sketch:

I turned it into this:

That one took a little more adjustment.

Here is a copy of the original dependency sketch:

Considering the fact that I’m not a programmer and know nothing about this particular subject matter, trying to understand these rather technical concepts, let alone creating a diagram to communicate them, was a complete and total nightmare. Some of the relationships described by the sketch represent processes, and some represent content hierarchies, e.g. the application module contains the WAR file, which contains the business logic; the .zip file is dependent on the assembly plugin, which is in turn packages on the WAR file (into the ZIP file). Some of the items in the diagram are files, some are plugins, and some are modules. Johannes was patient in explaining all this stuff to me. We went through innumerable iterations of “Is this right?”…”No, this arrow needs to point this way.”…”OK, how about this?”… The final diagram ended up like this:

The slides have gotten a lot of positive comments. I’m happy with the results, and I really enjoyed this whole process. I’m glad I got to put to use some of the skills I intend to use if I ever become an information architect, and it’s nice have a better idea of what Johannes is working with in his job.

“The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.” (Possibly NSFW)

I’ve got a N91, not an E70. The N91 is customized to be an mp3 player, so it doesn’t have the fold-out keyboard, but it can do everything else the E70 can. And I’ve had it for a year and a half. I think it’s so funny to read the articles coming out in the US about the iPhone: “Oooh, it has Wi-Fi! And a web browser! And custom ringtones you make from iTunes songs…for 99 cents in addition to the price of the song!” I’m so sure! You can’t even use your own mp3’s to make ringtones? What century is this?

ETA “One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t:” (Probably NSFW) Johannes’s computer is on the fritz (his computers are always on the fritz) and he’s started whining about wanting a mac. That’ll be lovely—then when that computer goes on the fritz, we won’t be able to fix it. Or does the 23.990 NOK purchase price—that’s 4,261.70 in USD—include service?

With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it’s a piece of something else.

From A List Apart: Articles: Exploring Footers.

I hate it.

So I’ve been working on a new design for this thing since I converted to WordPress. I came up with a new design, but I didn’t like it. So I decided to go back to the old design. Which I have to recreate, since when MT crapped out on me I lost all the templates and HTML pages. So I’m recreating it, and I get it to work, then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, despite the fact that I didn’t change anything. Also the pages where I got the basic layout (footer bottom, even when the main text is shorter than the viewport), pages that used to work, no longer work. In Mozilla or r IE. Or an online example page will work, but when I copy it exactly to a page on my computer, it won’t work.

Why have web standards not progressed since, like, 1999? XHTML, which is really not any kind of an improvement, was 1999. CSS2 was frickin’ 1997. That’s almost 10 years ago. And we still have to use hacks like this:

#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
height: 100%;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
height: auto;
}

html>body #container {
height: auto;
}

to get things to work. I mean, WTF? This is the frickin’ web, people. How can the building blocks of the web have stagnated so much? I mean, we don’t use wattle and daub for making houses any more. Why do we still have to resort to crap like tables for layout in order to get decent cross-browser compatibility?

People are actually reading this blog now. I feel like I’m having visitors over and there’s dog hair and dirty dishes all over everywhere.