What to Look for in a (Web) Designer: Uncovering the Charlatans
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
Every 3rd rate designer, charlatan, scam artist, and wannabe is going to tote about W3C valid code, high usability, and SEO, yet few will probably deliver on their claims. After all, most of their clients probably won’t have any clue they’re getting everything they paid for. These smarmy “designers” will probably flaunt their online portfolio, chalk full of cherry picked work that exemplifies their phenomenal skills and abilities—some may be truly inspirational. In fact, a well put together site from these unscrupulous individuals may look downright appealing, almost too good to pass up. But is it all smoke and mirrors? Are they truly legit artists that are going to provide bang for your buck?
Find out with a little bit of investigating. Just 15 minutes of digging can save you loads of cash, time, and ultimately your sanity.
Modding CoverSutra Themes, The Sophiesticated Way
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
CoverSutra is an iTunes controller for Mac OS X. It’s been around a while now. Back in the days when iTunes controllers were all the rage. Yet it stood its ground and has become quite robust—becoming a lean, mean, controlling machine—and a solid edition to any modders desktop. Moreover, it provides users with three nicely designed themes. But sadly, it’s not very modder friendly, if, you know, you aren’t into the default themes. However, there are always ways around things, and modders are notorious for dissecting and deconstructing programs.
This guide will take a lot of the legwork out of modding CoverSutra. So let’s begin. First, open up the contents of the program (right click on the app in Finder) and navigate to the PlugIn folder, found inside of the Contents folder. There, you’ll see the three default themes. Choose the theme you find most disposable (I’ve chosen JewelBoxing—the modern CD box displayed on the left Album Cover dialog screen in the Preferences Pane).
Put the Kibosh on (Some) Telemarketers
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
I used to receive repeated calls from strange 800-numbers. When I picked up, nothing but silence, then a click, followed up the lovely dial tone. I eventually traced the call and discovered they were coming from my local cable company. Once a week they would come, like clockwork. After repeated attempts, I was finally greeted by a salesperson, trying to peddle the usual promotion. I asked her why I had picked up so many times, yet never spoke to someone with a pulse? She informed me that they have an auto-dialer that randomly dials a list of numbers… when one caller picks up, the others are disconnected. First come, first served.
I thought, “Great, it’s not bad enough they are bothering people, but now they are bothering swarms of people at the same time.” Technology sure can be used for great evil it seems. It was a joyous day when I purchased my first cellular phone. No more calls from the local ambulatory burn ward looking for donations. No more calls from marketing agencies and smarmy cable companies. But it seems like the dream has since ended.
Almost overnight, I’ve been plagued with calls from Mexican lottery agencies (I actually won $12 million in a lottery I never entered? Really? I’m more interested in how you got my cell number), my bank (it’s not enough I let you play with my money, making you rich?), my service provider, a slew of marketing agencies, and even my university. And they just don’t give up either. If they don’t talk to a living person, they incessantly call back. I guess if they gave up too quickly, people would be out of a job. I suppose everyone has to pay the mortgage. But enough is enough, seriously.
Prevent Hard Disk Spindown Using PMSET
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
Using PMSET on Mac OS X, you can prevent your external hardrive from going to sleep (or spinning down). If you rock a notebook, and rely on an external enclosure, you probably know how annoying it is when your drive goes to sleep on you and it takes a good 30 seconds for it to spin back up again. More annoying is when Finder becomes unresponsive until this happens. If your drive is set to spindown every 15 minutes, then this ends up being downright maddening, and seriously cripples your workflow.
Worst yet, most external enclosures are incredibly aggressive when it comes to their power saving features, and sadly, nearly all of them do not provide the option to change the frequency of which the drives power down. It may not be so bad if you could get the drive to spindown when you truly weren’t using it, but enclosures are dumb. They spindown regardless of your intended usage. If the system is not actively using the hardrive, then it goes to sleep. Well, I suppose that’s fine but system’s still consult your drives even if you don’t expressly do so (e.g., entering Front Row will talk to any drive connected to your system, and if a drive went to sleep, become unresponsive upon load until said drive wakes up).
I got real sick of this behaviour and decided to hit up google, hoping to find a workable solution. Sadly, all I found were ancient hacks, obscure cron jobs that wrote to the drive every n minutes, and over-priced programs that meant I had to run an additional process. I had hoped for a better way, and eventually I stumbled on one: PMSET.
301 Redirects Using .htaccess to Improve SEO
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
Skip to the break if you just came here to learn about 301 redirects. I frequently check my server logs, looking for problems with my site. But a constant worry are 404s. I belong to several bulletin boards and frequently upload content to a temporary storage repository found on my server. Themes, icons, graphical changes to popular programs and most of what I upload, I don’t often add to my website. Why? Because, quite frankly, I’m too lazy. I also don’t see much worth in packing my portfolio with titbits, or odds and ends. But every now and again, I do manage to put up content and not being one to leave duplicates on my server, pull it from the storage repository mentioned earlier. Sadly, this leaves the links on the boards orphaned. I do go in and try to modify the links, but I’d rather spend my time doing, you know, fun stuff. Yet my concern for my visitors (yes, I love you guys; group hug!) is always lurking, and I don’t want them to be greeted with the dreaded 404: Not Found. So I started to employ 301 permanent redirects.
