Month: August 2004

Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Summary:
Simple, unobtrusive designs that support users are successful because they abide by the Web’s nature — and they make people feel good.

A couple of days ago I had to look up some information on a website that will remain nameless but it violated some of my pet peeves of web design. It had a splash page, an unusual navigation bar, html idiosyncracies, and no search page. Their real mistake was to ask what the public thought of their “new” web page design. Since I was in a ornery mood I fired off a flame about my pet peeves while apologizing at the same time. I dislike flames but this site was so retro. So here I am a week later reading Jakob Nielsen’s article on why simple, unobtrusive designs are successful and wondering why those folks did not read his recommendations before redesigning their site. Jakob has been recommending these design principles for at least six years. Although I do not feel obligated to rigidly follow all of his recommendations I find most of his ideas to be useful, practical and easy to implement. It is the web designers who combine Jakob’s recommendations with a pleasing and interesting visual design who I respect the most.

Fixing QuickBooks CoCreateInstance error 80040154

Yesterday I removed a few programs I was not using and ran Spybot to check and clean my PC. Somehow I broke QB 2004 in the process. When I tried to open it I got this message:

an unrecoverable error has occoured exception MSXML could not CoCreateInstance HRESULT=80040154 thrown with error code-2147221164

Function: ADR::Repository DoInitialLoad
File: ..srcRepository.cpp
Line: 81

After some investigation I found out that I was getting a non-serious error with IE about “cannot read properties at this time” and the Windows Update service was failing with a 0x800A01AD. After some research and some failed guesses I fixed the problem by re-registering msxml3.dll with the following command, "regsvr32 msxml3.dll". This must have been inadvertently been un-registered when I uninstalled Salesforce.com’s sync software.

RE: 19.1% of site visitors use search functionality

DoubleClick found that 19.1% of Web site visitors in Q2 2004 used the search function, up from 15.1% a year ago. Search now drives 8.4% of online sales, with most shoppers still browsing online menus. Software company Endeca said its 120 clients who adopted advanced search tools saw an average of 20% increase in order size and 30% increase in conversion rates for customers using search, who as a group have a higher conversion rate than visitors who don’t use the tool. Conversion rate for…

[Via AlwaysOn Network]
I posted this link because I have always been a fan of search and occasionally have had a hard time convincing some people of its value. I may want to return to this article at some future time for more background material.

Creating a partition for Temp files

Well, I finally succumbed to the urge and created a partition just for temp files on my workstation. I have been mildly annoyed that I have not been able to defrag my disk completely. Defrag would complete but the next time I ran defrag, it would still recommend that I defrag my disk. I was not sure if the number of Temporary Internet files had anything to do with the problem but I thought I would give it a try. The process of moving my Temporary Internet Files over to the new partition took some time since there are over 18000 files. I ran the defrag but defrag did not completely defrag the disk. So I rebooted into safemode(command line) and ran the chkdsk and defrag. Chkdsk found something it did not like in the MFT but otherwise was okay. Defrag ran for what seemed forever. I wasn’t sure it was running so I bailed out. After booting normally I checked the disk and it was almost completely defragged. Finally!

After running a few days with swap space on a second drive I believe both the server and the workstation have been more responsive. I cannot say for sure but I think the periods 100% cpu utilization are shorter. I am guessing that I had a mild bottleneck accessing the swap space.

Fixing problem with DHCP not updating DNS

The symptom I was getting on the SBS2K3 server was that the DNS was not dynamically being updated with A and PTR records despite the setting in DHCP saying it would. At the workstation I would get a daily error in system events about being unable to update the host information in the DNS. Otherwise, this error was transparent to me. I finally traced this error back to an improper setting in the network identification at the workstation. It had the correct host name but it did not show the full network name which includes the primary domain suffix. To add the primary domain suffix, go to Control Panel-System Properties-Computer Name. Click on the button to change the computer name and then click on the “More” button on the next screen. The next screen will allow you to change the primary domain suffix. In my case I needed to add the primary domain suffix. After clicking Ok and rebooting, the A and PTR records appeared correctly in the DNS.

Fixing a Mailwasher Pro configuration issue

This is not really a bug but it definitely is a gotcha. Mailwasher Pro has a spam learning feature which was working okay until several weeks ago when it started to indicate obvious spam as needing to be designated as legitimate mail or spam. This is not critical since I use several methods of identifying spam but I do like the databases to vote the same way so I have a backup. I was mucking around the Mailwasher configuration today where I found a configuration parameter that limited the database size to 4 MB but the note attached to it recommended setting this parameter to 8 MB. I quickly checked my database size. Yes, I had already maxed out. I went back into Mailwasher and set it to 8 MB. Since then it has done a better job of identifying spam.

I finally found a use for TweakUI

I have avoided learning to much about TweakUI since tweaking frequently can lead to instability. This is a throwback to my Win98/Win95 days. I finally succumbed to tweaking my Local Places since the default locations were not much help. I left in Desktop, My Documents, and My Computer but I added Favorites and Downloads. Downloads is a network directory I use to store all my downloads. I could get to it via Favorites but since I use Downloads a lot I opted to save a click.

PAUD – Parted And Utilities Disk

PAUD – Parted And Utilities Disk

Today I used a PAUD boot diskette to resize two of my windows partitions. It worked. It is best used by those people who are semi-comfortable with running Linux from the command line. PartitionMagic is easier but more expensive.

I am still playing with separate partitions for the swap and temp space. I had originally planned to use Knoppix to resize my partitions but my PC had problems booting from the CD-ROM. I had booted from it on a different PC so I am confused.

How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP

How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP

The optimal solution is to create one paging file that is stored on the boot partition, and then create one paging file on another partition that is less frequently accessed on a different physical hard disk if a different physical hard disk is available. Additionally, it is optimal to create the second paging file so that it exists on its own partition, with no data or operating-system-specific files. By design, Windows uses the paging file on the less frequently accessed partition over the paging file on the more heavily accessed boot partition. An internal algorithm is used to determine which paging file to use for virtual memory management.

I have been playing with pagefiles recently and came across this recomendation. W2K3 complained when I tried to remove the pagefile from the boot disk so it was nice to see this explanation. Windows XP did not complain so I probably will go back to create a minimal pagefile on the boot disk. Since the W2K3 Operating system exists exists on a RAID drive, creating a new pagefile on the old IDE drive will probably significantly help out the server. It makes more use of the pagefile than most SBS 2K3 installs since I did not install enough physical memory for the processes it runs.

phpWebSite 0.9.3-4 Stable Released

phpWebSite

The development team at Appalachian State University has released version 0.9.3-4 of phpWebsite.

Version 0.9.3-4 contains mostly bug fixes which were found in the 0.9.3-3 release, but there are some new features/enhancements.

Form Generator

  • ability to send emails as text/plain instead of text/html
  • ability to view, delete exports and archives

Notes

  • send notes to groups of users or to all users on the site

Control Panel

  • modules now list by label in alphabetical order

Other:

  • improved output all around for XML/XHTML compliance
  • spell checker added to the wysiwyg for those with the pspell extentsion loaded
  • files written to the system in most modules have better permissions set for easier access

Download the full version.

Download the core-only version.

Remember to read the docs and go to /setup/ when upgrading your installation.

Enjoy!