However, there’s a difference between a plug-in you’ve chosen to install, and one that just installs itself along with another piece of software. Worse still are those plug-ins that you just can’t uninstall. iTunes is particularly annoying in this regard, there’s no uninstall and deleting the plug-in files causes iTunes to reinstall itself (and the plug-in) on next run. Sure you can disable the plug-in in the browser, but I’d prefer it not to be there in the first place.

After looking into this further, there is a way to permanently block unwanted plug-ins without deleting the files (which just causes iTunes, the .NET Framework Firefox plug-in, and many others to reinstall themselves). The trick is to create another Administrator user account on your machine, and use that account set file permissions on the plug-in to block access from your normal user account. Without ‘read’ rights to the plug-in file, there’s no way it can load into your browser disabled or not.

Locating the plug-in files to block is pretty straight forward if you know where to look. In Internet Explorer it’s under: Tools > Internet Options > Programs > Manage Add-ons. Once in the ‘Manage Add-ons’ dialog you’ll see a ‘File’ column with the plug-in’s filename, right clicking on the column heading and checking ‘In Folder’ will also show you the paths to these files. In Firefox the plug-in list is displayed by typing “about:plugins” in the address bar. Unfortunately you’ll need to figure out the file paths yourself, as Firefox doesn’t tell you this.

Once blocked, your browser plugins list will be reduced to just those that you need and want, in doing so making your browser more stable and secure.

Of course one can sync between the two using iTunes, but this is tedious to say the least and not exactly practical if you use your Calendar and To Dos a lot.  The iPhone OS 3.0 introduced Exchange ActiveSync, allowing medium- to enterprise-sized businesses with an Exchange Server installation to do 2-way wireless sync.  For smaller enterprises this may not be an option, even if they have Exchange, due to the increased security concerns of making their mail server internet facing.

It is possible to have 2-way sync without Exchange, by using a Google Calendar as intermediate store and synching both the iPhone and Outlook against that.  Internally we use ‘Google Apps for Business’ for our e-mail, mainly due to the excellent spam filtering, and that also provides calendar accounts.  However any Google calendar account will do.

The process is as follows; as with anything, make sure you have a full backup before you start and that you have synched with iTunes first so both calendars are in sync:

1. Setup a Google Calendar Account
2. Use Google Calendar Sync to synchronize between Outlook 2003 (or newer) and your Google Calendar.†
3. Setup Exchange ActiveSync on your iPhone to sync between the iPhone/iPod Touch and Google calendar

† At the time of writing Google Calendar Sync doesn’t work with Outlook 2010 beta, however it is expected that this will be resolved by the time Office 2010 is released.

Google Calendar Sync

This can be downloaded from the URL below.  The configuration is very simple, just enter the username and password of the Google Calendar you wish to sync to and save.  The program is automatically added to your ‘Startup’ group and will run in the background, synching your calendar every 2 hours by default (this can be changed to any timeframe that suits).  The only caveat is it will only sync your primary calendar, so if you have multiple calendars in Outlook you may wish to consider consolidating those and using Category labels if possible.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955

Exchange ActiveSync for Calendar

Google’s servers now support Exchange ActiveSync communication, which unlike previous calDAV setups support data ‘Push’.  This means that, when Google Calendar Sync updates the Google Calendar online from Outlook, Google’s servers will push the updates down to your device immediately (even if it’s asleep) so reminders work straight away.

1. Open the Settings from the home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account…
4. Select Microsoft Exchange.

Account Info

• Email: your Google account address (usually somebody@gmail.com) or Google apps email address
• Domain: leave blank
• Username: same as the email field, your Google account address
• Password: your Google account password
• Server: m.google.com
• Choose Accept if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.

Sync

• Mail: no
• Contacts: no
• Calendars: yes

If you’re just synching calendars as described, the Mail sync options can be ignored and left as the defaults.

Once Exchange ActiveSync is set up your iPhone/iPod Touch and Outlook calendars should automatically stay in sync without intervention on your part.  And best of all, without having to use iTunes.

We were an early developer of mobile sites for WAP Phones, almost 10 years ago now, and it’s great to see how far the technology has come.  There are still limitations, but the scope of what you can do with HTML5 capable mobile browsers is amazing in comparison.  The flow on of web standards from desktop browsers has also been a great benefit.  Gone are the days of supporting possibly up to 100 different handset configurations.  The migration of mobile API’s (like geolocation and location services) to desktop browsers is easing the development burden even further.

Many of our sites, including this one, now incorporate a mobile style sheet and iPhone springboard icons to ensure good user experience on all devices. This an important consideration when developing a site, as the range of devices it’s likely to be viewed on has increased considerably. Visual design plays an important role here; will it work well in a single column format? is the text size big enough to read on a small screen? For a lot of sites these questions remain unanswered, because they were never considered.  And if you’re not considering your mobile audience, now is the time to start.

• No clunky implementations—easy to ensure if you’re the only person working on a project, less so when you’re on a team or working with developers from other companies. This year I’m really going to push overall code quality for every project I work on… my code or not.
• Focused project selection—one of the nice things to come out of revising one’s marketing plan is the new sense of focus it gives. This year we’re going to focus on building the portfolio of sport related sites, with a new social web app being the first in development.
• Build photography portfolio—an area I’ve been thinking about moving into for a while is the stock photo market. The higher end of the market is the aim, and I’ll be working towards building a strong portfolio to that end.

These images undoubtedly will contain far more than 256 colours, so some form of dithering would be required to make them more visually acceptable. The problem is images with mixed content.  Text looks best with ‘no dither’, photographic images almost always with ‘diffusion’ and in many cases gradients with a ‘pattern dither’.  Photoshop one allows you to choose one, so which area do you sacrifice?

I was thinking about this with a particularly problematic image during a client job.  The image in question was part of the voting widget on IKEA’s Easy to Assemble site.  There was a background gradient, a large amount of text that needed to be sharp and contestant photos that had to not look like a bad Warhol.

The solution was rather simple, once you selected the palette size, the palette colours don’t change with the dithering type.  Export the different dithering options, open them as layers in a new document, and add layer masks using the pencil tool—important as it does 1-bit transpancy unlike the brush tool.

Mask in the pattern dithered parts for the gradients, diffusion for the photographic elements and with the no dither version as your background layer. Export the resulting composite with the same number of colours and no dither, and you’re done.

Analytics tagging is adding a couple of additional parameters to your urls that are picked up by the GA tracking code.  These then show as additional sources/campaigns in Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.

These are most useful for email newsletter tracking to help gauge how effective your marketing has been.  Answering questions like did the copy in the newsletter engage people to click through, of those how many bought something or signed up for your service? Try putting different copy/design into some A/B testing to gain some insight into how well your layout or copywriting is working.

I also like to tag my RSS feeds so I can whether someone visited the site directly or from a feed reader—good to know how many regular readers you here. I believe you can also do something similar with feedburner, but adding the tags directly in your blog software guarantees everyone will be coming in via a tagged feed.

The tagging syntax is as follows:
(note that lines have been wrapped for readiblity and spaces in your tags should be replaced with the ‘+’ character)

http://www.example.com/?
 utm_source=Email+Newsletter&
 utm_medium=email&
 utm_campaign=Newsletter+December+2009

• utm_source
  This is the traffic source as you’d like it to appear in Google Analytics, examples are: ‘Email Newletter’, ‘Email Special Offers’, ‘RSS Feed’.
• utm_medium
  This is the medium type, examples are: ‘referral’, ‘email’, ‘feed’, ‘rss’.
• utm_campaign
  This is the name of the campaign, more useful for email tagging than it is for feeds, and would normally match the campaign’s name in your email marketing software.  For blogs I just use the name of the site’s blog feed, e.g. ‘Timeshifting Interactive Blog’.

For email campaigns you would just append the tagging query string to your urls.  Some software like Campaign Monitor can do this automatically, saving you monkeying around with the code. In the case of your blog’s RSS feed, there’s most likely an automatic solution as well. If you use WordPress, try the free RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics plugin—edit the source code to customise the source/medium tags that it appends.

One of the downsides of Google Analytics is its tracking is done with JavaScript.  In cases where JavaScript is disabled or not available, no tracking data or visits are recorded.  This is also a problem for the increasing number of websites using a native iPhone App for their mobile site.  Sure you could write some kind of custom analytics for your site’s mobile edition, but then your analytics data would be split between two apps.

Google has recently solved these issues with the introduction Mobile Tracking.  This SDK allows you to trigger tracking events server-side or from within native applications, removing the disjointed data issue and allowing you to profile all your visitors in one place.

The problem is the write performance, and it gets worse with time. Writing data to a SSD* first involves first clearing a whole block and then writing data to it, and this block clearing is slow. To compound the issue, the filler/more used the disk the less likely there will be an already clear block. To the end user this clear/write cycle is worst with small random writes (e.g. a web browser writing to its cache, or version control software updating meta data—yes Subversion I’m looking at you!), and causes the whole machine lock-up for as much as 10 seconds at a time.

Windows 7 having been designed with SSDs in mind, includes support for the ATA Trim command. This allows Windows to tell the disk ‘the data here isn’t needed anymore’ and the disk can clear the block during idle time, providing available clear blocks for write operations. The catch is the SSD must support Trim, and none of mine do. Annoyingly I have one of the first generation 50nm Intel SSDs, which they have [apparently] have no intention of supporting Trim on; the newer 34nm drives released about 9 months later do support Trim.

So what can you do if you don’t have Windows 7 and/or a drive that supports Trim? On the face of it nothing, however then I got thinking… if you erased the whole disk with a tool that cleared all the blocks (a secure erase) that would get the drive back to factory and full performance. You’d then need to reinstall Windows and your applications, buying you about 3 or 4 months before the performance nose dived again. And after a reinstall there’d still be logical fragmentation on the disk, sure SSDs have no seek time, but if Windows thinks the file is fragmented it’s still going to issue 2 or more read operations, wait for 2 or more responses and reassemble the file.

I was reading about the image based backup and restore in the business/ultimate editions of Vista and 7. This takes your existing Windows install, with apps, data and all, and backs it up as a disk image to an external hard drive or dvd(s). The premise being if your disk fails or data gets corrupted you can restore from this image to exactly where you were before. And that was the solution I’d been looking for, a why of maintaining the disk without the major hassle, and without trim or Windows 7.

The SSD Optimistion Process †

1. Delete unneeded temporary files and junk
2. Defragment your SSD to remove any logical fragmentation
3. Do a complete image based backup to an external usb drive (Control Panel > Backup and Restore Center > Windows Complete PC Backup)
4. Boot off a MS-DOS CD
5. Run a Secure Erase tool on the drive (like Secure HDDErase—v3.3 is required for Intel SSDs)
6. Restart with the external drive attached
7. Boot off your Vista or 7 Ultimate DVD
8. Select the restore image backup option

Obviously this isn’t an instant process, but every few months it’s relatively painless especially compared with how annoying the lock-ups are.

* For those that are interested I have both SLC and MLC drives, and the lock-up issue seems to occur with both. The performance did degrade faster with the MLC unit though.  And yes, I’ve done all the SSD related system and registry tweaks.

† Disclaimer: while this process worked fine for us, we take no responsibility for you trying it, and Timeshifting Interactive will not be held liable for any data loss or damaged drives resulting from your use of the above information. Always back up your data before trying something like this.

For sites with user accounts every page should be tested with logged in and logged out states, do parts of the UI change between the two? Does the layout look weird or broken with elements added or removed? Does an Internet Explorer rendering bug occur on interaction? Then let’s add Ajax into the mix. When you start to consider these cases, it’s easy to see why you need solid QA plan and that allowing 20% of the development budget isn’t unreasonable, especially on iterative designs.

So are you sure your site actually works in all cases?  If not it might be time to reassess your QA strategy.

Next weekend’s Karapiro Half Ironman will be a good opportunity to work on my technique and hopefully get a few good shots.  A Half Ironman race takes about 5 hours on average to complete, so this is a good amount of time to move between locations and work with a range of compositions.

For shorter races you really need to have everything scoped first and there’s little latitude to experiment, and with the training schedule for my own triathlon, pre-scoping the course isn’t on the agenda for this one.

Looking forward to a good day out at the lake.

Even on the personal side of things there’s been a shortage of posts from me, Facebook and Twitter updates seeming to take over from the long post.  Just as I love slow travel, I think it’s time for slow writing again—more than an sms’ worth of text and a bit more thought.