One of the unsung heroes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone was occasional OStatic contributor, Aaron Huslage. Aaron drove from Portland to New Orleans, carting a truckful of telephony equipment, a big heart and a can-do attitude that, in less than a week, brought a rudimentary, improvised telephony network to twelve thousand displaced residents of the city. Six volunteers assembled a makeshift infrastructure, atop cell towers, water towers, powerhouses and other tall structures, using a Wimax backhaul and a 900Mhz Trango wireless link to connect civilian shelters – stretching wirelessly from Gulfport to affected areas over a range of around fifteen miles (Gulfport-Mississippi Power Tower-Waveland-Stennis-Port Bienville).
Aaron later shared his experiences with the audience of O’Reilly’s inaugural Emerging Telephony conference in early 2006; appealing to industry experts to contribute knowledge, technology and readiness for future disasters (download Aaron’s Katrina Network Relief Case Study here).
It seems that T-Mobile has heeded the nature of Aaron’s call, and as Hurricane Gustav bears down on the city in the coming hours – a potential redux of the 2006 disasater – has opened its wifi networks for all to use, helping residents stay connected in a time of emergency.
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If you’re the sort of web worker who doesn’t take vacations, you may not even have noticed that this is a long weekend in the US (hint: we’re celebrating “a day off for working citizens” on Monday). If you’re not heading out for a break, that makes this the perfect time to catch up on some of your backlog.
Why not take advantage of the lull to tune up your routine? If you’re like many of us, your productivity systems and organization start to show a little wear and tear after a while, as the things that you don’t feel like dealing with get shuffled around to dark corners. Here are five things you can do to give yourself a productivity boost when the rest of the world comes back to work on Tuesday.
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Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, but with a usage number rarely cracking 1% in any survey, it’s tough to justify spending time on Opera-specific testing).
Even within those broad categories, though, the market is more fragmented than ever before: Firefox 2 and 3 are both in substantial use, as are IE6 and IE7. It’s worse in some markets; I have one customer who requires IE5.5 compatibility due to restrictions on browser version at a government agency. Some people want to address this by campaigning against IE6, but that still seems quixotic to me. With no end in sight to new versions, and intense competition in the browser market, it seems like this problem will only keep getting worse.
If you create web pages, what’s your testing strategy? What browsers do you consider important enough to check?
I’ve written before about TweakGuides.com, and the truly extensive guides for customizing both Windows XP and Windows Vista offered for free there. Recently, I’ve been diving into the free TweakGuide for Firefox that the site offers. It’s not as extensive as the Windows TweakGuides, but if you spend a little time with it you can definitely make Firefox more efficient for you.
One of the great strengths of Firefox, of course, is that it is so extensible. Many people are hip to really useful extensions, but Firefox is also very customizable under its own hood. That’s what’s good about the Firefox TweakGuide.
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Comcast has come clean about their plans to cap usage on its broadband service. Starting in October, if you use more than 250GB of bandwidth in a month, you’ll get a talking-to. Cross that threshold twice in six months and they’ll kick you off the service, for a year. They’ve issues new Acceptable Use Policy and FAQ documents to try to sugar-coat this as a limit that most people will never hit.
The last time we covered this story, readers were mildly outraged. Now that we’re starting to see specific numbers associated with specific services, it’s easier to get a sense of whether you’ll be affected. Does 250GB per month worry you? If it does, leave us a note – and hop over to our parent blog GigaOM, which is challenging people to come up with plausible ways to cross the threshold.
OK, so you work on the web. That’s a given. But what are you doing when you work on the web? Most likely, interacting with some application on your computer. Now drill down one more level: are you using the mouse (or other pointing device) or the keyboard for most of that interaction? There’s the question that has the potential to bring users to blows.
I was reminded of this debate by a blog entry from Hank Williams, who was reacting to the recent launch of Ubiquity (which our sister blog OStatic covered). Ubiquity provides a very keyboard-oriented interface, though it includes some mouse affordances as well. After pointing out that keyboardists and mousers are different, he goes on to admit
Now don’t get me wrong, I am a fairly fast typist. But my problem is I can’t remember commands. Putting a keyboard command in my head is like putting sand in a sieve. The reason I love graphical interfaces is because I can’t remember shit.
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As if working with others wasn’t hard enough, working with your spouse sometimes proves to be harder. You live together, work together, and do almost everything else together – it’s the perfect recipe for a heated argument. Is there a way to live and work together without letting your relationship, and your careers, come crashing down?
Before you start building expectations of your partner, yourself, and your relationship, it’s important to focus on what you know about each other first. Sometimes, men expect to perform the more technical tasks, but what if the wife is better at fixing or installing new hardware? Conversely, some women might assume that they’ll take on more nurturing roles, but what if it’s the husband who’s good at helping irate clients to calm down?
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
