Why The 17-Year Flaw in Microsoft Windows Is Dead Serious
In case you didn’t catch the buzz going around, the story of how an ancient Windows flaw was found after 17 years is pretty-well explained at the Inquirer. The news was particularly shocking because it was a simple hole that has been in existence since Windows 3.1 all the way up to the latest Windows 7! That’s a serious bug.
Quite a few commenters on that site and others have down-played the vulnerability, saying things like “Meh, who uses 16-bit anyway?” Which goes to show that the home user doesn’t think like a hacker. Guess what? Most of the programs to exploit Windows security holes are 17 years old, too! In fact, if you were a hacker (we know, the correct word is “cracker,” but English is changing) downloading security-cracking software, you’d have more of a real problem getting updated software than you would getting legacy software.
Old software never dies in the hacker/cracker community. In fact, it goes back to the pre-Windows era, from BBS and IRC systems and Usenet archives. Back then it was covered under the blanket term ‘warez,’ and you could find vulnerability scanners, packet sniffers, rootkits, viruses, worms, and key loggers free for the download – complete with instructions! This stuff gets passed from generation to generation. There’s no doubt that a lot of it exploited DOS.
If you’re a corporate IT admin with Windows boxes under your charge, you should be taking this with top-priority seriousness.
Hmmmm, Good Advice For Being A Good Client…
We jumped when we saw the title of this post: How to be a good client, but then when we read the content, it wasn’t what we had in mind. Don’t get us wrong, it’s all good advice, but we’d really like to take this time to advise readers on how to get the most out of hiring an online freelance web designer:
1. Link to an example of what you want. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can talk to a designer all day, “I want an arty header and a side link bank, but it should move with the scrollwheel and have green and blue colors…” That can still be interpreted 100 different ways. Find a picture to start with, then detail how you want it different.
2. Take the designer’s / developer’s word for it. We don’t know how many clients out there have made their own lives miserable by saying “I want the whole site in Flash.” or “Can I get it with animated GIFs and use this big image as the background?” You hire an expert; if they say that something isn’t a good idea, listen to them. That’s what you’re paying them for is to know their stuff!
3. Be clear about your purpose. You need to detail what you’re going for in a business model. Something like “We sell lady’s dresses, so we want a site with a virtual wardrobe where they can try on different styles, a section with articles about fashion tips, and a social photo sharing section where customers can upload photos showing how hot they look in our outfits.” The virtual wardrobe helps buying decisions (sell lady’s dresses), the articles draw search traffic (bring ladies to buy dresses), the photo-sharing part encourages customers to come back (so they buy more dresses). Each part of the site should make some kind of business sense.
Things like that… readers, do you have any more ideas?
Wisdom From The Experience of a Microsoft Employee
Who would have thought that someone could get so much mileage out of being a small gear in such a huge machine? This post on Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft details the discoveries of one Sriram Krishnan, veteran of a mere five years at Redmond.
It is a long document – you’ll want to bookmark it and come back when you have time, because this article is worth all of your attention. In it, he shares tips on how to maneuver in a huge corporation, how to handle both underlings and overlings (is that even a word?) alike, tips on programming Zen, and some good ways to cultivate a mentality of personal growth. We’ve known 20-year senior managers who haven’t learned all of this.
Peter Brittain
Are You Ready To Babysit Kids On Your Website?
CNET picked up an interesting scoop about media usage in the youngster’s demographic. Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily. Now, pause and consider that: If you count 6 hours per day in school, this leaves 7 hours per night for sleep! We’ll assume this is averaged out from where the kids have weekends off from school, but still it’s a daunting figure.
What this means to the e-commerce world is that the next generation is the biggest potential customer. It only takes a few years between “junior is old enough for his own laptop” and “junior is now off to college, has his own bank account, and is ready to make purchases of his own.”
You should also think twice about making your website kid-friendly. Doubtless, having the occasional swear word in your text isn’t the first time a kid will encounter it, but there’s no sense in contributing to a bad image if you can’t help it. And on the other hand, doing everything you can to stick in the mind of a young teenager has the potential to influence their future online buying decisions. Are you ready for this?
How To Use Passion In Web Marketing
When we spotted the post In Praise of Passion over at Boing-Boing, it got us thinking. As Internet marketers, we all know that our digital strategy should include website design, search engine optimization, advertising, and so on. But how many of us think about whether we’re inspiring passion?
Some ideas for generating passion around your business:
If your service solves a problem, state how devoted to solving that problem you are. Talk about it a lot! Explain how it’s the central driving force for you being in business. If you run a graphic design agency, you can make your motto something like “Ending Ugly Web Design, One Graphic At A Time!”
Your business does good with a blog. A blog is a place where you can be looser and casual. You can be funny or you can whinge a little! Most of all, you can dump your soul into sharing your passion with the world. It’s not just a business, it’s a mission, and you’re the general inspiring the troops…
Your advertising, marketing, and email newsletter can be designed to convey just a touch more drama. Remember, your audience is exposed to more media content than it can digest every day; to stand out, you need to grab some attention!
Web Design – The Irresistible Draw of Mashups and APIs
It’s worth checking in over at Programmable Web once in awhile just to see what they’re up to, with their API discoveries. Google, Twitter, Flickr, and all, the defining mark of a popular Web 2.0 service is whether people do things with your API.
Notable developments from just one recent week:
- Comedy on Spotify – A directory of comedians and their albums, with video clips for sampling, mashed up out of Freebase and Last.fm. Just dive right in and look for the wit who tickles you the right way.
- Today’s Special – A Google Wave bot serving up quotes, words, horoscopes, sports scores, and whatnot.
- Tickets Suck – A Twitter and Twilio mashup that reminds you to move your car so you don’t get a ticket.
- Quote Relish – A real-time news ticker using the Freebase and Moreover APIs.
Mashups and APIs are an exciting tech trend that’s worth keeping track of, because new gizmos are getting invented every day. This is something we couldn’t do only a decade ago. But even more fascinating is the potential that mashups have; they represent evolution at a lightning pace. Ideas build on ideas, just the way innovation is supposed to work!
Peter Brittain
Five Web Design Trends That Are On Their Way Out
In 2010 and going forward, we start a new decade. It’s time to shake things up a little, so here’s a list of web design trends which got overused in the first decade of the 2000s, and so have become tired and cliched:
- Grunge – Splattered, sloppy, gritty, urban, and looking dirty. Grunge looked great for about six months because nobody else was doing it. Now that we’re drowning in the stuff, we would like to see our last paint splatter sometime in the immediate future.
- The wet floor effect – Where you have text “standing” on a reflective surface, so the mirror image of the text is seen faintly below. It looked impressive the first ten times we’d seen it, but now it’s “meh.”
- Computer stuff – Your business is on the web or about technology, so why not use photos of mice and keyboards in the header? Gee, I don’t know, how about “Because it shows you have all the imagination of a stone?”
- Cute vector mascots – Yes, those adorable, spunky beavers and chirpy birds gives your business a cuddly personality. Once in a while, they’re original and refreshing. But nobody is fooled. You’re in business to make money, no matter how many chunky, freckled kids with glasses you have in the upper left corner.
- THE GIANT RSS ICON – Alright! We get it! You want people to notice that you have an RSS feed. But it’s about time we all learned that there are people who know how to use RSS and there are people who do not. You will not reach that latter audience even if your RSS icon jumps out of the screen, blows up to the size of a house, and slams them on the head yelling “I have an RSS feed!”
Peter Brittain
Seven Unusual Creative Motifs For Your Next Web Design
Rather than the run-of-the-mill designs we normally see, what if your next design came from someplace… unexpected? A brilliantly contrary motif that makes sense in retrospect? Here are our picks for some themes you might not have thought of, but should:
- Hand drawn – Example It always looks brilliantly original, because it’s your own hand! Stick-figures and elementary-school drawings are getting really, really big this year. Try to look as untalented as possible!
- Factory – Example Industrial designs are great for developers, producers, and artists. It makes the customer anticipate that you’ll have a strong work ethic.
- Retro ’50s – Example Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe the classics work best, but we haven’t seen a single web page done in retro that goes wrong. If you readers can, please show us in the comments.
- Steampunk – Example For those who don’t know, “steampunk” is a school of art that takes its inspiration from the era of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Think steam engines, dirigibles, clockwork, wind-up robots, and lots of polished brass and tin.
- Psychedelic – Example Another retro trend. While it can quickly get tiresome, it’s an absolute knock-out for music and club themes.
- Isometric – Example There’s way too few isometric themed websites out there, and we’d like to know why. Visitors will never forget you!
- Two Tone – Example It’s the new monochrome! Still minimalist, while presenting a balanced look where one color doesn’t overwhelm you. Pick two colors that go great together and draw everything in that.
Peter Brittain
Web Design – You Can Never Have Too Much Minimalism
It seems that minimalism is never going to go out of style. Latest exhibit: Minimalist Web Design: When Less is More. A long tutorial on what exactly it is that makes a site design minimalist, and some excellent examples at the bottom.
One thing that we notice is that designers often spoil the effect of a minimalist design. They get the layout and whitespace right, then ruin it by cluttering it up with a lot of loud images and flashy elements. You wouldn’t make a delicate, creamy Alfredo pasta dish and then overwhelm it with a lot of Tobasco sauce, would you? Studying the examples on the article and thinking it over, here’s the best images to use with a minimalist design:
- Origami – Note the one example in the showcase that has a folded paper crane. Perfect! Minimalist art form goes with minimalist design.
- Big fonts – Large type accentuates the typography, making visitor focus on the words and not look for distractions.
- Black and white photography – Always should be simple subjects and light grays, unless you want to go for impact and drama, in which case, darker grays.
- Clean vector art – Simple, large drawings of gentle objects (butterflies, clouds, flowers) rest the mind when they’re drawn in delicate shades. making people feel good to be there is a key to getting a lower bounce rate.
- Geometry – Almost goes without saying.
Peter Brittain
Web Designers – Tablets Are Underrated
We cheer when we see posts championing underdog technology, like this one on Why Designers Should Ditch The Mouse And Use A Tablet. Now, true, tablets aren’t exactly “underdog,” but they could stand to gain more mind share than they have, particularly with designers who started out in the ’90s.
The difference with a tablet has to be experienced; you can’t describe it. With a tablet, you’ve forgotten about the interface in minutes, and then you’re drawing naturally just like you would with a pen.
A good one to recommend is the Wacom Bamboo. It retails for around $40 USD – fancier tablets really aren’t that much of an improvement, and in fact your hand will be more comfortable on a small surface. These can be programmed so that different functions will happen depending on which end of the pen you’re using – so you can draw with one end and smudge, erase, or whatever you want with the other. Added buttons and dials on the board itself make it a very customizable interface.