Arc Tangent

I’m off to Europe for a month!

After a gru­elling stint of con­tract­ing work, I’ve decided to take a bit of a hol­i­day and go visit my best mate in Prague. While I’m there, we’ll also visit Egypt, Ger­many and the Nether­lands. It’s going to be a non-​stop trip of awe­some and adventure!

I’m cur­rently in Syd­ney, stay­ing with some friends over the week­end. I fly out on Mon­day morn­ing (depress­ingly early at that). I vis­ited the Google­plex today — amaz­ing build­ing, very clev­erly engi­neered and a very com­fort­able look­ing place to work if ever I saw one.

Hope­fully I’ll get a chance to blog some more now. :)

(Pod­cast will be up on iTunes, or you can grab it here)

We bring you episode four, where we wel­come our third pan­el­list, Teresa Watts who shall be join­ing us in the future! After dis­cussing Teresa’s awe­some hand-​made IE voodoo doll we move onto a good chat about our busi­ness endeav­ours and employ­ment expe­ri­ences. We cover Andy’s busi­ness and his lessons learned since clos­ing it end 2008 (focus, cash-​flow and buffer sav­ings, the pros and cons of out­sourc­ing, ded­i­cated work­ing posi­tions) before mov­ing onto Teresa’s and Pascal’s expe­ri­ences in in-​house and free­lance posi­tions. Issues here include focus and struc­ture but restric­tive and lim­it­ing in man­ner, becom­ing bored by work­ing on the same thing long-​term, though how­ever how it was a good expe­ri­ence — we both learned what we did and didn’t like doing.

Finally we all shed our wis­dom on the lifestyle that is free­lanc­ing. Here we go over the abil­ity to vet clients (yay!), com­mu­ni­cat­ing with clients, the impor­tance of net­work­ing and being actively involved in your industry’s com­mu­nity (Twit­ter, LinkedIn, SIGs, con­fer­ences, speak­ing, …), pric­ing, sep­a­rat­ing work envi­ron­ment from the rest of your liv­ing space, and hav­ing an active web pres­ence. Oh, and as usual Pas­cal makes a fool of him­self, but nicely gets a stab back at Andy.

We’ve got inter­views con­firmed with Donna Ben­jamin on open edu­ca­tion and Ian Cairns of Devel­op­ment Seed on Open Atrium — stay tuned. On that note actu­ally, Pas­cal has set up Open Atrium on open​.klepas​.org and has a guest test­ing group set up. Email or @ him on Twit­ter to get an account and have a play.

Recorded post-​show, this week’s ‘fuck you of the week’ goes to Apple for it’s fail­ings in sav­ing and sync­ing voice record­ings via the Voice Memo app prop­erly and ‘the tip of the cap’ goes to Teresa for her IE voodoo doll — srsly, check it out!

1. Teresa’s web­site
2. Teresa’s IE voodoo doll tutorial
3. Teresa’s blog
4. WSG announce mail­ing list, to stay up-​to-​date with web-​related events
5. Nick Fink’s list of user expe­ri­ence events (world-​wide)
6. Open Source Devel­op­ers’ Con­fer­ence — Bris­bane 25–27 Nov.
7. UX Aus­tralia — Can­berra, 26–28 August (reg­is­tra­tions still open till the day!)
8. Aus­Ten­der gov’t website
9. Aus­tralian Web Indus­try Association
10. Port 80 — infor­mal meet­ing of web indus­try folk
11. Moo​.com — cus­tom busi­ness cards and stationery
12. bicu​bic​.com — whole­sale print service

The intro theme is the open­ing of track 26 of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts III. It’s licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons license and avail­able from the NIN web­site and in full on var­i­ous peer-​to-​peer net­works (legally of course given its license). The show oth­er­wise as usual is licensed under the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​Noncommercial-​Share Alike 2.5 Aus­tralia license—take, share and be merry.

That’s all this week — stay tuned!

(You can sub­scribe to the RSS feed for this pod­cast at http://​arcwhite​.org/​f​e​e​d​/​p​o​d​c​ast, and down­load the file directly from here)

Ep. 3! From this week forth we give a quick shout-​out of events nearby and around in the web-​field that we con­sider inter­est­ing and poten­tially worth attend­ing on top of the nor­mal bag of news. Oth­er­wise we have a quick chat about the Face­book acqui­si­tion of Friend­Feed, the new Google Search (beta!) and a brief men­tion of this week’s über ‘wankism’: a web­site ded­i­cated to chairs titled ‘chair whore’.

Pas­cal men­tions a short update: his site is live — check it out at klepas​.org — and notes he wants to write a howto/​review/​info arti­cle on using Jekyll from a designer’s perspective.

The main fea­ture this week con­cerns the recent lively topic of online news media, par­tic­u­larly revolv­ing around Aus­tralian media baron Rupert Murdoch’s deci­sion to alter his media conglomerate’s busi­ness online model from ad-​driven to a pay-​subscription model. We dis­cuss more in-​depth the prob­lems that print media and online media out­lets are run­ning into as of late, par­tic­u­lar in mon­etis­ing an online dis­sem­i­na­tion model some­how, and whether or not that will fly with today’s web-​tuned audiences.

This week’s ‘fuck you’ goes to Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald (who get no link from me! –Andy) for includ­ing adver­tise­ments that play music upon page load. Mean­while, our ‘tip-​of-​the-​cap’ to Mark Pesce, Pia Waugh and Sen­a­tor Kate Lundy who we are plan­ning an inter­view with to dis­cuss the awe­some work the two are doing in the open gov­ern­ment arena.

Other links in order of men­tion:
* as always mail us feed­back via arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org — we’d love to start a mail­bag.
* Casual WSG Syd­ney meet­ing on 18:30, 13. August, Pump­house, Dar­ling Har­bour, Syd­ney: http://​web​stan​dard​s​group​.org/​e​v​e​n​t​/​177.
* WSG Syd­ney meet­ing on 19. August http://​web​stan​dard​s​group​.org/​e​v​e​n​t​/​176 — 82 peeps already reg­is­tered (free).
* Vision Au. are run­ning two work­shops on web acces­si­bil­ity 19–20., August, Mel­bourne: http://​bit​.ly/​v​i​s​i​o​n​-​a​u​-​a​1​1​y-1 & http://​bit​.ly/​v​i​s​i​o​n​-​a​u​-​a​1​1​y-2.
* Web Direc­tions South ’09, Syd­ney: http://​south09​.web​di​rec​tions​.org/.
* Edge of the Web, Perth: http://​www​.edge​oftheweb​.org​.au/.
* Usabil­ity eval­u­a­tion and train­ing work­shop in Can­berra, 01–02., Decem­ber : http://​www​.peakus​abil​ity​.com​.au/​t​r​a​i​n​i​n​g​/​e​v​a​l​u​a​t​i​o​n​-​a​n​d​-​t​e​s​t​i​n​g​.​h​tml & http://​www​.peakus​abil​ity​.com​.au/​t​r​a​i​n​i​n​g​/​w​e​b​-​u​s​a​b​i​l​i​t​y​.​h​tml.
* For other web, design, and tech-​related events in Aus­tralasian region sub­scribe to the WSG Announce mail­ing list: http://​web​stan​dard​s​group​.org/​m​a​il/.
* Face­book acquires Friend­Feed: http://​www​.techcrunch​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​0​8​/​1​0​/​f​a​c​e​b​o​o​k​-​a​c​q​u​i​r​e​s​-​f​r​i​e​n​d​f​e​ed/.
* New Google Search: http://​www2​.sand​box​.google​.com.
* For your weekly dose of über wank: http://​chair​whore​.blogspot​.com.
* Pascal’s new site: http://​klepas​.org. [You’re such an atten­tion whore! –Andy]
* Again, Jekyll: http://​github​.com/​m​o​j​o​m​b​o​/​j​e​k​y​ll/.
* Jason Santa Maria’s beau­ti­ful web­site: http://​jason​san​ta​maria​.com.

This show is licensed as usual under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​Noncommercial-​ShareAlike 2.5 license.

OAO.

Episode 2! This show we cover some errata which turned into a mini-​feature sec­tion with updates on web­fonts, notably devel­op­ments at TypeCon2009 and thoughts con­cern­ing EOT — if the pro­pri­etary com­pres­sion tech­nol­ogy was not used and URL/​domain root bind­ing wasn’t in effect then could it be the web font we could all use and pick up tomor­row? Also: men­tioned: a neg­a­tive Microsoft stigma, shitty Safari @font-face web­font han­dling dur­ing the down­load of the font file, and a note on where to find good, freely licensed fonts for @font-face font link­ing (see the links below).

The sec­ond fea­ture focuses on secu­rity, with good­ness for all. We cover briefly impor­tant points for sys admins before address­ing secu­rity con­cerns for devel­op­ers. Next up Pas­cal pro­vides your weekly dose of wank with more secu­rity related [Sort of? –Andy] design and user expe­ri­ence mus­ings and finally both Andy and Pas­cal fin­ish the sec­tion with some advice for man­agers and the legal folk who deal with web content.

Andy closes the pod­cast with a big ‘fuck you’ to a cer­tain pop­u­lar com­pany named after a fruit who are doing awfully stu­pid things by deny­ing cer­tain appli­ca­tions from being sold in their stu­pidly con­trolled appli­ca­tion store (HINT: I’M TALKING ABOUT APPLE), and a joint ‘fuck you’ to buy​.com (et al.).

We should note the Open Atrium review is com­ing — we’ve both been busy or between doors too much in the past week.

In order of appearance:

• Can­berra Google Wave Hackathon — Sign up fast!
• TypeCon2009 Web Fonts Panel Recording
• ttf2eot con­verter utility
• HTTP Access Con­trol Mozilla Devel­oper Cen­ter article
• List­ings of TTF/​OTF freely embed­d­a­ble, licensed fonts: http://​www​.fontsquir​rel​.com and http://​tr​.im/​w​e​b​f​o​n​t​s​l​ist
• SQL Injec­tion Attacks (Wikipedia)
• Cross-​site script­ing attacks
• Secu­rity Now Episode 195 on SSL
• Bruce Schneier’s blog
• Inse­cure Pass­words in use by secu­rity pro­fes­sion­als (Dean Kamin­sky gets hacked, arti­cle c/​o Wired​.com)
• The buy​.com (and Orb­itz, et al.) credit card third-​party adver­tiser scandal

This show is licensed Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​Noncommercial-​Share Alike 2.5 Australia

If at first you don’t suc­ceed, try a big­ger explosive. :)