Spero Consulting

Archive for November 10th, 2009

We are happy to announce that we have added a new web site exten­sion, Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.mobi, which pro­vides an “opti­mized” expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors view­ing our site on a (mobile) cell phone.

“Phone vis­i­tors” who enter the site via either the .com or .mobi exten­sion, are now auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to a scaled-​down, graphics-​free design theme. That speeds page load­ing and reduces data-​related costs and should be more leg­i­ble for those tiny screens.

Com­puter users on desk­tops, lap­tops, etc., can view the new mobi-​optimized theme using the “switch site” wid­get on the left, and phone vis­i­tors can use the gen­er­ated bar code to save the site in their phone.

If you are a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor, please let us know how it looks and runs on your cell phone, includ­ing whether the con­tact form loads and is usable.

P.S. As you can imag­ine, each cell phone will dis­play each theme dif­fer­ently. Visit ready​.mobi to see an cell phone emu­la­tor for four or five dif­fer­ent phones.

That issue of non-​standard appear­ance per­me­ates design deci­sions for reg­u­lar .com sites, too. Con­sider how all of the dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of desk­top and lap­top and net­book mon­i­tors, screen sizes, set­tings, graph­ics cards, browsers, and light­ing con­di­tions show each web page dif­fer­ently, and then appre­ci­ate that design­ers must pro­duce an optimal-​looking site (on the client’s machine), which must be robust across the rea­son­able com­bi­na­tions of those items. By “rea­son­able,” we mean that if a vis­i­tor is using a mono­chrome 600 x 400 screen mon­i­tor, then they are unlikely to pay our con­sult­ing or design rates; so, we’re not par­tic­u­larly wor­ried about their vis­i­tor experience.

P.P.S. This is def­i­nitely some­thing that we will offer to our web design and devel­op­ment clients.

Tonight, we saw an ABC news story and an arti­cle in The Wall Street Journal that reported that the FBI and the Army knew that Army Major Nidal Hasan, the accused shooter at Fort Hood, had many con­tacts with rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and recruiter, Anwar al-​Awlaki.

Noth­ing was done about it. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, “The com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the men appeared related to Maj. Hasan’s work at Wal­ter Reed Med­ical Cen­ter and his pur­suit of a master’s degree…”

So let’s try to under­stand this. It’s okay to be a U.S. Army offi­cer and con­tact a rad­i­cal cleric who tries to recruit for the jihad on his web site…if it’s for “edu­ca­tional” pur­poses. (We imag­ine that one “edu­ca­tional” pur­pose would be, say, “I want to learn more about the jihad and what I can do to help.”)

Geez, we recall when Pete Town­shend (and a few oth­ers) were caught with kiddie-​porn on their com­put­ers, and their defense was that they had it for “research” (read edu­ca­tional) pur­poses, only. Not very com­pelling there, either.

Think of the bil­lions of dol­lars and mil­lions (if not bil­lions of man-​hours) used to harass hon­est cit­i­zens at the nation’s air­ports. Folks for whom the prior prob­a­bil­ity that they are, in fact, ter­ror­ists is as close to zero as prac­ti­cally pos­si­ble. (We ask, how many zeros are to the right of that dec­i­mal point for you, dear reader?) Folks who have never con­tacted rad­i­cal cler­ics for “edu­ca­tional” rea­sons or any other rea­sons. In fact, folks who would pre­fer that the gov­ern­ment take actions to block or remove such sites – even if it means tak­ing down the power grid in Yemen. Folks like you and us and your grand­mother or your children’s grandmother.

As a cit­i­zen, Major Nidal has rights, but as an Army offi­cer, he doesn’t have the same free­doms as civil­ians, yet the FBI and Army are too emas­cu­lated and weak-​willed (and polit­i­cally cor­rect) to play the probabilities.

What’s the prob­a­bil­ity that some­one has ter­ror­is­tic or severe anti-​Western ten­den­cies GIVEN that they sought out and con­versed with a rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and jihad recruiter?

It seems to be quite a bit higher than the prob­a­bil­ity that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment can effec­tively man­age health care – by at least one order of magnitude.

While we’d like to close with the pre­vi­ous sen­tence – we think it’s kind of pithy – we must ask: how many other indi­vid­u­als like Major Nidal, have the agen­cies ignored, deemed harm­less, or not bother with? Won­der if any of them live near you, or us?

Who Uses MySQL?

You do every day and every time you visit this site or mil­lions of oth­ers on the web.

Not that it mat­ters and not that we fol­low such mat­ters very closely, but until today we have never agreed with any of the Euro­pean Union’s anti-​trust actions against U.S. firms. How­ever, today The Wall Street Jour­nal reports Deal to Buy Sun Meets Oppo­si­tion From EU.

While U.S. anti-​trust author­i­ties approved the merger, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion is con­cerned about the anti-​competitive effect of Oracle’s pro­posed takeover of Sun Microsys­tems because Sun owns MySQL data­base soft­ware, which is very pop­u­lar open-​source soft­ware and pow­ers many, many dynamic web sites. (We say my-​sequel while other pro­nounce it my-​es-​que-​ell. Whatever.)

Unlike html-​based sites, dynamic sites write pages “on-​the-​fly” by query­ing MySQL data­bases. (Actu­ally, there are hybrid sites, too, that cre­ate, cached, html ver­sions of the data­base calls and queries.) In fact, for many dynamic sites, the search engines don’t actu­ally visit pages, and some­times don’t query the MySQL data­base; instead robots are directed a copy of an XML ver­sion of the site’s content.

If you see the asp exten­sion on an inter­ac­tive form or page, then you know it is a MS-​based active server page. While there are a few other appli­ca­tions, if you see no exten­sion or a php exten­sion, then there is a very high prob­a­bil­ity that the page or form was gen­er­ated from data stored in MySQL, and if it is an inter­ac­tive form, then when you click “sub­mit” the form entries are being sent to a MySQL database.

Any­way, when the acqui­si­tion was announced we won­dered how it would affect the future avail­abil­ity of MySQL. Ora­cle claims that it is not an issue, but we also won­der about future improve­ment and devel­op­ment, too. Ora­cle and the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment have con­cluded that other open source soft­ware will take its place.

We’re not as sure because the open-​source and free nature of MySQL makes it the data­base on the web. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s large-​scale, and industrial-​strength. What’s not to like? (HTML based sites are sooo sec­ond mil­len­nium, and Flash-​based sites are like stereo-​typical blond beau­ties: pretty, but dumb, par­tic­u­larly with respect to search-​engine-​optimization.)

MySQL is the “M” in LAMP (Linux-​Apache-​MySQL-​PHP) servers/​web plat­forms. All four com­po­nents are open-​source and free and state-​of-​the-​art and per­mit web host­ing ser­vices to offer shared host­ing sites for only a few dol­lars per month. (LAMP and WAMP and XAMMP and var­i­ous other bun­dles can all be down­loaded for free and installed on home or com­pany servers, and all work flawlessly.)

We don’t have much expe­ri­ence with expen­sive, large-​scale data­bases like Ora­cle, but in our view, these var­i­ous AMP pack­ages are far supe­rior to their equiv­a­lent Microsoft prod­ucts (and, of course, far cheaper).

All of our web design and infor­ma­tion sys­tem design work uses MySQL com­bined with either free or very inex­pen­sive web appli­ca­tions and form gen­er­a­tors. The form gen­er­a­tors are very sophis­ti­cated and per­mit writ­ing and query­ing of the MySQL data­bases. It’s very easy for small and mid-​sized firms to leap-​frog large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions to obtain afford­able, cus­tomized, and state-​of-​the-​art web-​based sys­tems for both inter­nal and exter­nal users.

It’s a great time to be alive and to con­sult on these issues. Along with other open-​source soft­ware and appli­ca­tions, MySQL is a large part of the beauty of it all.