With only about 12 hours of year 2009 left to spend, I guess this would be a good time to wrap up. Since my latest trend was to change this blog’s focus from smaller, more often posts to larger posts made more seldom and random. Hopefully by next year I will find a balance between the two, as I get a lot of things I want to share but not that much time to do it.

2009 was a good year in terms of learning from our own successes and failures. A lot of things got tested, some of them got broke and we saw what needs work, what has to be done to improve ourselves and things around us. We got our priorities right, we got our work laid out in front of us and as the old Soviet saying goes: “Goals have been set, tasks have been determined – get to work, comrades!” So, we are at work to make 2010 better, improve on our success and make our failures affecting us less. 2009 clearly showed that our existing approach to work with clients is definitely a success, since even in these harsh economic times we got our old clients as well as new ones come to us with more work than ever before.

2009 was also a good year to assess our own strengths and abilities. Like any business doing their regular SWOT analysis, we did ours and realized there is a lot of potential, there is a lot more that we can offer our existing clients as well as new ones. So one of the goals we set for 2010 is to refresh our strategy and our competitive offering. More things coming through the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Have a happy New Year!

Suprisingly even to myself, starting Saturday I am yet another iPhone owner. So far I am neutral as to how the device behaves. Some things are definitely much more advanced, and some things take a lot of time to get used to.

I do like the abundance of apps and the convenience of having them in a single location. However, it beats me as to why certain things are free (like remote desktop client for Windows), but something as simple as ssh terminal is available in paid flavors only.

According to my own sources, the jailbreak will become available pretty soon and I was encouraged to proceed as much more software is available outside of AppStore. Having a knack for changing things on my phones, I guess I will be exploring that route pretty soon too.

BTW, this blog post was typed on the iPhone and I can’t say it was all that uncomfortable.

As I have just figured out after some of the upgrades the external link in the title hack was, indeed, broken. In fact, I am somewhat puzzled, as it worked on some of my installations and didn’t work on others.

It turns out that the method of obtaining the permalink for the post is returning the canonical URI no matter what permalink system has been set up (I use custom on this blog). For example, even if you have something SEO-friendly, the code

$perm  = $post_id->guid;

would still return http://www.istudioweb.com/?p=427 as a link to this post. The right way of doing it now (before WP 2.7 arrives) is change the above line to:

$perm  = get_permalink($post_id);

That’s it. Should work.

P.S. Updated the downloadable txt file. Click here to view.

After Halloween long gone and other holidays coming on, I went through Google Trends to see what the trends say. Turns out – Halloween is the most important costume and party holiday. As you can see from the picture above, there is a very strong spike on each Halloween for all three words: “halloween” (blue), “costume” (orange) and “party” (red). There’s no spike on Christmas, no spike on 4th of July, no other spikes as far as I can see.

Note to entrepreneurs – it’s a good idea to set up an emergency costume delivery, or even mobile costume stores. Shouldn’t be a big problem and the higher markup is well justified. Either deliver something ordered online or set up a mobile store so that the whole block could shop.

At least once a week I get an e-mail about the WP theme hack I posted in January. Most of the people ask how to make the hack work in WP 2.5 and 2.6.

Here’s the simple answer – if you didn’t touch your theme (I didn’t) and if you have just upgraded the WordPress installation itself – then the hack should still work. The original post with instructions is here.

The proof is this post – look at the title and take note that link in the title leads to the main blog page, not to the post itself.

If something actually did went wrong, check the following:

1. Your theme’s functions.php file or whatever the name of the file with theme’s functions is. It should still contain the code from the original post.
2. Your theme’s index.php file or whatever the main index template file name is. It should have the original hack as outlined in the original post.
3. Custom field – the new URL must be in the value field, whereas the custom field name should be url1 or whatever you made it to be.

Let me know if the damn thing is acting up again.

There’s a little incentive these days to own an iPod, let alone any other mp3 player. For those crazy about any product Apple releases there’s an iPhone that’s just as good as an iPod plus you can call your friends when you’re not listening to music. If you own any other smart phone device (or PDA phone) than their memory – whether built-in or expandable, like memory cards, is all yours to store your tunes. There’s little – if any – reason to own any mp3 player.

As always, Apple got there first, although many people have been using PDA phone as my ultimate media player couple of years before that. Video looked just as good and you didn’t have to pay for each and every ringtone. But you’d have to use Windows Mobile for that, which is, of course, unacceptable for Apple fans. Admittedly, devices didn’t look half as sexy as iPhone.

But even since early Sony’s attempts to introduce Sony Phone Walkman (I think I have one laying around somewhere given to me by some friend) the idea of merging multimedia device and phone was in the air. As we progress in faster cellular networks, faster mobile processors and better screens (i.e. better video quality) eventually we will see a single device that’s capable of playing stored media files (video, audio), streaming from various sources, like XM satellite radio, YouTube (and its clones), various streaming services like Last.fm and Pandora. The device will be capable of taking down your notes and synchronizing with almost any popular calendar and contact application out there (including online services, like Google Calendar, Yahoo and MSN). Apparently e-mail and web browsing capabilities already in place, they’ll just be more robust and less cumbersome. That includes sync with corporate e-mail services (Exchange, Domino) as well.

The way this future device (or rather a group of devices) will greatly vary depending on the target market. For example, for hip young crowd the device will probably look overly stylish, hyper sleek, uber sexy and totally overpriced. For corporate employees it’s going to be some sort of cross between Blackberry and something that looks nice. For geeks it’ll probably either look like a HTC Shift with a twist and a handle.

Overall, the idea that you will have a unified multimedia device with phone capabilities is upon the big corps like Nokia, HTC, Sony and others. Let’s just hope they finally hire some decent designers and the next wave of such devices won’t look like Blackberry on steroids.

Last week I started searching for a new LCD monitor. As strange as it may seem I am used to seeing web sites on laptops’ LCD screens. so I was looking for 4:3 ratio monitor with 1600×1200 pixels resolution. I was already aware that not a single laptop manufacturer sells laptops with 4:3 screen ratio less the ultra portables, like my X61s. Problem there is that they are limited to 1024×768 pixels resolution and that’s not nearly enough to see most of the stuff on the web as it is already reformatted to accommodate large wide-screen displays.

So the research showed that similar poor state exists in the LCD monitors market – I was able to find only two or three manufacturers that sell affordable monitors. LaCie and NEC are way over the top with their $800 20″ 1600×1200 screens. Samsung and Planar seem to be the only two players that offer several models that are close to what I was looking for. Unfortunately, almost every single model is severely crippled by some feature that render the use of the monitor pointless. Thanks to user’s feedback on NewEgg and Amazon, these things show up here and there.

Ultimately I was left with no choice except to consider purchasing a wide-screen monitor. The issue with wide-screens, however, is that personally I only see sense in buying 24″ monitor with 1920×1200 pixels resolution, so that I can put two web pages side by side. There are forum discussions here and there that go over the same question: “Why did they stop manufacturing 4:3 LCD panels?”. The answer is that it’s cheaper to produce 16:9 and 16:10 panels, than it is 4:3 (although I don’t quite understand why).

My only hope is that by the time I will be upgrading my trusty T60p it will no longer be the case. From my point of view, having a 1200×800 screen is very inconvenient.

There is this phrase that I use like it’s a word parasite – “generally speaking”. I use it quite often when I need to point to a big picture. Get on a same page. Explain something in general or layman terms. Simplify things.

Interesting enough, most clients don’t quite get that big picture. Like for example this guy who wanted a six-page web site to sell about 2000 items of merchandise. Not a biggie. Or another group of partners who calculated the industry’s average price per page, then rearranged the information on the site so it would fit into their budget. Then started calling web design studios (us included) to ask for a quote on few pages worth of web site. Turned out they were trying to get a system the size of a Amazon into those few pages.

If you look at any advertising – you can also see what I mean. For example, look at any shampoo ad. You can see a bottle of product, the hair (that most likely belongs to an attractive woman), the zoomed animation that shows how hair is restored by use of shampoo, and all the other stuff. But you are not being sold the bottle of shampoo. Ad doesn’t even try to sell you that bottle, rather it sells you the ability to be attractive, to get that sex appeal. In other words – it sells you happiness, achievable easier than ever by purchasing just that one bottle. If you buy two – there’s a discount available, so it comes with even more happiness. Generally speaking – by buying a bottle of shampoo you are buying happiness. There, now you have it.

Ability to be “generally speaking” is quite rare, as I have found out. Most of the times when I hear someone “generally speaking” I tend to get very quiet and listen. It’s about the big picture, so it must be important.

Update to the yesterday’s post – the auction is here.