Usability.

I’ve always been somewhat interested in usability. I took a couple of courses at the university and I’ve read a few books on the subject. Even my graduation paper touched usability issues. The paper was not my proudest moment, though. Interesting fact in life: Other things than my grades have landed me jobs.

But I digress, let’s get back on track. What is usability anyway? Google has a lot of suggestions, but in the context of web sites and the interweb I like this one:

The degree to which a software application or a website is easy to use with no specific training.

Short and sweet. My web site designs have always been plain and minimalistic and I like to think that it’s because of the little I know of usability that makes me embrace KISS. No, not the band, rather Keep It Simple, Stupid. Another possible reason is that I know nothing of web design whatsoever. Lately I’ve been working on somewhat subtle changes to the way links are displayed on this site. For instance, I’ve never before cared about make visited links stand out, or rather fade away. But when you think about it, they are not that important anymore because you’ve already visited whatever site they link to. If there’s a lot of links on a page, it would be interesting to be able to visually remove the links that you’ve already visited. So now, visited links will be greyed out and there will also be a little “check”-sign appended to the link if you’ve got a browser with good CSS support. Come on, click a link and give it a try. But please come back soon, because there’s more to read below. Continue reading "Usability."

The E-mail Trick.

So, you have your own domain address, but are unable to send e-mail through your own SMTP server because your stupid ISP is blocking it? This is a very normal problem; many ISPs prevent their customers from sending e-mails through any SMTP server except the ones configured by the ISP. The reasoning for this is quite sound as it can prevent people from setting up SPAM servers and SPAM zombies to work as they should.

As an added bonus, it also means that as you change ISPs when moving around with your laptop, you usually have to change the SMTP server used. But most ISPs allow you to send mail through the company everybody loves: Google.

That’s great. If you create a Gmail account you can use the Gmail SMTP server to send your mail and you’re mostly home free, not matter what ISP you’re no. The only problem is that all your e-mail will appear to come from your Gmail account since you have to log on the SMTP server with your Gmail account. If you use Gmail, it’s not a big deal, but in my case I wanted the mail to come from my vegard.net address.

Enter Google Apps. With a Google Apps account, you can log on to the Gmail SMTP server with your Google Apps account and that account can be pretty much anything as long as your able to validate your own domain.

So there you go, transparent e-mail sending on any ISP from your own domain.

No Music For You!

If you have the faintest interest in music, the music industry or maybe even economy you probably know that the crazy Brits in Radiohead released their seventh album, “In Rainbows” yesterday.

Even though the fans have been waiting for over four years since “Hail to the Thief”, what’s really special about this album is that the download version is available at whatever price you as a punter feel it’s worth. Personally I think that you should be able to decide what the album is worth after you have listened to it, though.

Anyway, it’s a great idea, and lately we’re seeing more and more artists leaving their respective record companies to start distributing their music independently. But all the artists you hear about that do this are big names in the industry - they’ve got all the money they’ll ever need anyway. How will new bands and solo artists do without the record companies and their huge marketing budgets? Continue reading "No Music For You!"

Victory!

After having fought with my Linksys router and wireless access point for three weekends I can finally declare victory. I’ve got the wireless repeater bridge working with WPA encryption! Not thanks to Linksys, but thanks to dd-wrt.

There is one challenge left, though: Because of the fuse box right next to the router, quite a lot of network capacity is lost because of interference. In the living room the download speed ranges from 3 to 5 megabits per second - it doesn’t matter if I connect to the wireless repeater in the living room or the router in the hallway - right next to the router in the hallway the download speed is between 10 and 13 megabits per second.

Right now I consider it a small annoyance because what matters is that I have a wireless repeater bridge that works. It might be possible to move the router so that the fuse box is not interfering that much with the signal and it might even be some tweaks I can activate in the dd-wrt firmware that will help.

Since I struggled for so long to get it to work, the remainder of this post will contain a guide of sorts on how you can set up a wireless repeater bridge yourself. Yes, it’s going to be technical. Continue reading "Victory!"

Next Stage.

Rain, wind and flying leafs blocking your vision. Three signs that the autumn is here again. At least it’s still hot outside, not summer-hot of course, but it’s not unpleasant to ride my bike back and forth to work yet.

Today I called my new ISP to ask if I would ever get the static IP information. They told me that my router should get the information through DHCP, which is a bit strange since the Linksys WRT54GL never got any information when it was plugged in. The old 3COM router, on the other hand, worked. When I told the guy I talked to about this, something mysteriously happened with the call, it was impossible to hear what the guy said.

I hung up and called back up, was number three in line. When I finally got through I asked the same questions, but was transferred to “technical support”. I thought I had called technical support already. After some more waiting, it turned out I had been transferred to their billing department. Then they transferred me again, but after yet another few minutes of waiting in line, I gave up getting an answer.

I find the whole experience a little bit weird. Perhaps the Linksys router will get the information by DHCP with dd-wrt installed. We’ll see.