Last year my goals were very much focused on things that I wanted to buy. Strangely enough I have not really achieved any of the goals that I talked about and looking back now they seem strangely irrelevant. For example I just do not seem to care that I will be the last Web Designer on earth to own and iPhone. So quickly moving on…

Writing

Writing on this website pretty much dried up in mid 2009, partly though being pretty busy and partly through lack of inspiration. However, I have quite a few ideas ready for the beginning of this year and am having to restrain myself from doing nothing but write. So lets see if I can do at least one post a month for a whole year. But secretly, I am hoping to write one a week!
Also I have recently become interested in the technical and sociological aspects of IT security. So I am planning to write about my opinions on the problems and solutions in these areas.

Design

I have not had much design work come my way recently and I am starting to feel a little rusty! However, I want to push myself more to find time to work on small experimental projects exploring the latest in HTML5, CSS3 & AJAX. I plan to cut the time spent working on these by cutting a few corners. The idea is that these projects will be experimental and inspirational not that they will supported in IE6.

Inspiration

I need to keep a better design inspiration log. Most good designers have been keeping these for years and in a way I have too. But where as mine has been a list of bookmarks in Firefox, others keep flickr sets that include screenshots of websites and photos of every day things. The problem with my current list of bookmarks is that they quickly go out of date, websites often change and sometimes for the worse not better, occasionally I find a bookmarked site that no longer exists! Another problem I currently have is that that I am limited to recording only online design, by keeping a flickr set I hope to include more photographs.

Photography

Speaking of flickr, I began the new year by restarting my Project 365. For those that do not know this is a very popular project for photographers that has one basic requirement, you take a single photograph a day for a year. Some people choose to make these self-portraits which can provide an interesting record of one’s self. Since I really want to try to push my photography skills this year I have decided not to include that restriction, instead I will take my camera everywhere I go and take as many photos as I can, at the end choosing my favourite of the day. A couple of years ago I made a failed attempt at this kind of project, so I am well aware of how hard it is taking the time to complete it. But I also discovered how much it made me look at the world around me and encouraged me to explore parts of my neighbourhood I had never seen. This project will require me to buy a new bag of some sort, that will hold my camera a spare lens as well as the general rubbish I take everywhere with me. Oh dear, it looks like I will be getting a man-bag! How very 2008.

Programming

I have spent a lot of time programming in 2009 – mostly in Java and PHP. Quite a lot of these have either been projects that I cannot talk about or projects that have not yet seen the light of day. I hope to launch a web app later this year, regarding a problem that has been bugging me for ages and will require a lot of research and planning before I am able to begin any actual coding. This will of course remain a top-secret-need-to-know-basis project for the time being. Lets hope I have something to talk about later on in the year.

Listening to Music

I have been listening to a lot of music over the last few months and in reflection my music tastes have not changed much from previous years. In no particular order here are some of my favourites:

• Ben Harper & Relentless7 – White Lies for Dark Times
• Rodrigo Y Gabriela – Rodrigo Y Gabriela
• Eels – Hombre Lobo
• Radiohead – In Rainbows
• Killers – Day & Age
• Silversun Pickups – Swoon
• Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

One thing that has really bugged me though is the release of iTunes 9. I really liked version 8 and have not found the time to research any potential fixes.

Playing Music

Since my band has recently spread itself from one end of England to the other, we are taking a bit of a break for the moment. But I really want to find some time to record enough songs of my own to release something of note. I have some ideas already, I just need time.

GTD

The ultimate productivity solution for any disorganised person. Although I have been practicing Paul Allen’s Getting Things Done for a while now, I want to make a real commitment to keeping this up for a whole year. Seriously though, if you find work busy or hectic (that is most of us, right?) and have not heard of GTD, please do yourself a favour and check it out.

• Resizing of an image to fit within a box of x and y values, but keeping it’s proportions.
• Cropping of an image to fit a certain size.
• The ability to save the result to a folder and/or display the image.

Also, I would liked to have added functionality to enable the source file to be a url rather than a local file, but I was having problems with the settings on my shared server and it was more important that the function works on the wide and varied servers that my clients have. Besides it isn’t hard to add a wget or curl command prior to calling the function if available.

Anyway here is the code for the function:

function imageResize($src_file, $dst_file, $size_x, $size_y, $crop = false, $display = true) {

	if(!file_exists($src_file)) {
		echo "Error resizing image - Source file does not exist!";
		die();
	}

	$ext = end(explode('.', strtolower($src_file)));
	switch($ext) {
		case 'gif':
			$src_img = imagecreatefromgif($src_file);
			break;
		case 'jpeg':
			$src_img = imagecreatefromjpeg($src_file);
			break;
		case 'jpg':
			$src_img = imagecreatefromjpeg($src_file);
			break;
		case 'bmp':
			$src_img = imagecreatefromwbmp($src_file);
			break;
		case 'png':
			$src_img = imagecreatefrompng($src_file);
			break;
		default:
			echo "Error resizing image - This does not appear to be an image file, check extension!";
			die();
	}

	list($orig_x,$orig_y) = getimagesize($src_file);

	if($crop) {
		$new_y = round( ( $size_x / $orig_x ) * $orig_y );
		if($new_y > $size_y) {
			$new_x = $size_x;
		} else {
			$new_y = $size_y;
			$new_x = round( ( $size_y / $orig_y ) * $orig_x );
		}
		$crop_x = round(($new_x / 2) - ($size_x / 2));
		$crop_y = round(($new_y / 2) - ($size_y / 2));
	} else {
		$new_y = round( ( $size_x / $orig_x ) * $orig_y );
		if($new_y <= $size_y) {
			$new_x = $size_x;
		} else {
			$new_y = $size_y;
			$new_x = round( ( $size_y / $orig_y ) * $orig_x );
		}
		$crop_x = 0;
		$crop_y = 0;
	}

	$dst_img = imagecreatetruecolor($new_x - ($crop_x * 2), $new_y - ($crop_y * 2));
	imagecopyresampled($dst_img, $src_img, 0, 0, $crop_x, $crop_y, $new_x, $new_y, $orig_x, $orig_y);
	if(strtolower(stristr($dst_file,".jpg")) == ".jpg") {
		header("content-type: image/jpg");
		imagejpeg($dst_img,$dst_file,100);
		if($display) imagejpeg($dst_img,null,100);
	} else {
		header("content-type: image/jpg");
		if($display) imagejpeg($dst_img,null,100);
	}
	imagedestroy($src_img);
	imagedestroy($dst_img);
}

And here are a few examples:

// Takes source file and resizes it to fit within 300x200 (uncropped), the result is not displayed but is saved locally to dest.jpg.
imageResize('test.jpg','dest.jpg',300,200,false,false);

// Takes source file and resizes it to fit within 300x200 (cropped), the result is displayed but is not saved locally.
imageResize('test.jpg','',300,200,true,true);

I'm thinking about wrapping this all up in a class. It makes more sense, but at the same time I can perfom all the actions I require in one line, so maybe I'll leave it as it is.

Passwords are the keys to our online lives. We need good secure passwords to prevent unauthorized access to our bank, blog, twitter, google, yahoo, flickr, and that slightly dodgy looking service that we signed up for thinking it was something else, but it wasn’t. In practice the average user has one, or maybe two or even three passwords, not a separate one for each service.

So, here is the first way that all of your accounts can be hacked. I design websites with secure logins, for which users may sign up for and provide a password. Now since I have a conscience and good moral fibre I make sure that these passwords are encrypted and obscured even from me – but not all programmers do that. It only takes one rogue programmer that has access to an unencrypted password database to discover your password. If you have used the same password for your other accounts they could also log into these.

However, that still requires access to the servers in the first place and there are other hacks that can be made on poorly designed websites. It only takes one badly programmed website, that you have an account with, to reveal your password to an enterprising hacker. So again if you do not have separate passwords for each website, this hacker could try your username and password on other accounts, like your bank or email.

The thing is that even though both of these security vulnerabilities are the responsibility of the programmers of the flawed website, it is the user’s fault if subsequent accounts are hacked with the same password. I understand that in reality we have not seen many examples of non-celebs having multiple accounts that have been breached, but as we move more and more of our data online we, the average user, have a responsibility to provided better protection for the tempting silos of data for the online criminal.

I have my own personal password policy, but it is very technical and not necessarily practical for most people, so I am currently looking into a suitable alternative that could be used by anyone. I look forward to revealing my results here in the next few weeks.

• David Arias
• 72rivingtonstreet.com
• poccuo.com
• Mark Boulton
• visualboxsite.com
• Stefan Velthuys

One thing I’ve never really understood is why website designers build websites before they have received all of the content from the client? I think the process for this is wrong and ultimately hurts both the client and the designer.

Content, they say is king – and it really is, yet these days it does not seem to be the most important thing we consider when we approach a website design. Both designers and clients often get hung up on all sorts of other details such as accessibility, user experiences, graphic design or html & css validation – and whilst ignoring these sorts of things can detract from the success of a website I think we need to start putting a bigger emphasis on generating content.

I’ve worked on a broad range of different web projects as both a developer and designer, and in the overwhelming majority of cases I’ve had to build the website with little or no content. The most common reason for this is that the client just isn’t ready to provide that content yet, and often promises to work on it whilst we develop the design and CMS. However, I think that working together in this way can limit how good the end result will be, because the designers are going to have to create a design based upon the content that they have asked for rather than the content they actually receive.

So we, the internet generation, might have started out with GeoCities homepages, but we moved on to blogging and are now part of a multi-network community. Whilst being part of a community we have actively given all of our content away to other keymasters, such as Google, Twitter, Yahoo and especially Facebook. Facebook is an intersting point though, it is a personal homepage, but it remains behind a firewall allowing only friends to access private data. Then I got to thinking, just about everything else has an RSS feed and I would like to have a summary all in one place, yet something that is mine.

Right now I’ve started to put together a single homepage (link to my homepage – www.oliverlorton.co.uk) which brings in a selection of my RSS feeds into one place. It is nothing more than an online business card with an RSS reader built in, but I like it. I’m using PHP and MagpieRSS to make it all work and I hope to release it as an open source project soon. Anyone interested in helping me to get this off the ground should get in touch, you can do so here.

Update 24/07/2009: I have since started another more worthwhile project which demands more of my time. I would still be interested to hear from anyone who is interested in using this software though, so please get in touch.

Lomo LC-A

Lomography seems to me to be less about photography and closer to some sort of random art form. The desired results have less to do with any input or control from the user and relies heavily on the many quirks of the camera itself. Strange though it may be, I absolutely love it.

The Lomo LC-A, a Soviet Bloc era camera with a plastic lens, was discovered by a group of young Austrians in the early 90’s. They loved the photos that the camera produced and promptly contacted the Lomo company in St. Petersburg, Russia, in order to negotiate the distribution rights of the camera in the West. Somewhere along the line the future Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, got involved and the deal was done.

These entrepreneurial Austrians procceded lead an organization that comes close to a religion/cult and sold the LC-A along with a whole range of other “Toy Cameras”. I bought a couple of second hand models – the LC-A and a Semna Symbol, and have had some good results. There are thousands of lomographers all over the globe, good examples of their art can be found here.

However, all lomographic cameras are film based.

If you Google the terms ‘lomo’ and ‘digital’ you will probably find a gazillion pages of tutorials or plugins for Photoshop and other imaging software. I’ve tried quite a few of these, and whilst they provide interesting results they are inaccurate and, in my opinion, fail to come close to the random quirky art that the original camera produces. However, as time marches on, film and film developers have become less popular due to the mainstream explosion of digital photography.

So what now? I remember reading about an Epson R-D1 being hacked to handle the LC-A’s Minitar lens, but I’m not sure that I’m up to that sort of thing. So I now bring you back to that group of young Austrians who really do have to ask themselves how to future proof their company. Can they can develop a small digital camera that encapsulates the Lomographer’s philosophies on art with the modern age? The minitar lens is not a problem. The grainy quality of a paper print in digital form will be hard to precisely replicate, but an evolution could take place.

Is it possible? Yes! … Will it ever happen? Well, we will just have to wait and see. It’s up to them.

It seems to me that print designers have all the fun. They can have any choice of type for their projects and as such their choice of type actually defines their work, an obvious example is David Carson. On the other hand, website designers are usually limited to the fonts installed on the users computers. These fonts are dependent on many different aspects of each users set up, which operating system and which browser they use, even their version of office suite can affect this. So traditionally designers have limited themselves to a very small selection of fonts that almost all users are guaranteed to have installed. Recent chatter has encouraged designers to push the boundaries of the most common fonts by providing stacks with enhanced fonts for more up-to-date users. A great example of this is demonstrated by Nathan Ford of Unit Interactive.

However, I want to reverse this thinking a bit with respect to graded support. I think that we should be encouraging yet a more advanced thinking in our clients, if possible. Assuming that we can convince them to choose graded browser support then maybe we can get them to choose graded OS support too (with respect to type).

Graded browser support is an effort to move designers away from having to support IE6 as the most important browser in the world, thus allowing some of the newer CSS features included in more modern browsers – whilst still making sure that users of IE6 are presented with usable decent looking websites. So with respect to type, we should be looking at the latest fonts to be included in Windows & Macs and making these our preferential design choices, with suitable alternatives for older operating system setups.

The key thing ask your client is: “How long do you want your website to look good for?” Designing a website now, with type that looks good on the most popular OS and browser will probably mean that the design needs updating in twelve months time when it begins to look tired and the selected browser/OS combination becomes less popular. Online technology may move at a fast pace, but browser and OS popularity doesn’t. Yet we know what the future will look like because it is available now. Designing for now, means that rather than your website getting gradually older it gets progressively newer as more and more users upgrade their systems.

iPhone

It seems that no self-respecting geek should be without one of these, but when the original iPhone was released in June 07 I was only two months into an eighteen month contract on a Nokia N95 with Vodafone. This meant that when the 3G version was released a year later, I still had several months left on my contract. Not only that but I was hoping a couple of gripes (copy & paste and notes/to-do syncing) would be fixed.

However, there are some really good apps now available (notably ‘Things’) and so I’ve made the decision to get the next version regardless of what has or has not been fixed. I’ll be out of my existing contract and so long as Apple release an upgrade to the 3G model this year, then I’ll be found somewhere near the front of the queue.

Likelihood of actually getting: 90%

Netbook

These funky little laptops are all the rage these days and seem to be the natural extension of the computer platform. Despite owning far too many computers already, I think I can actually justify one of these. When I’ve got a project on the go design or coding I am pretty good at disconnecting myself from the net and actually getting on with the task in hand. The same cannot be said for writing, I often find myself looking something up on wikipedia or elsewhere and distracting myself. The rat-holes I go down can devastate what I am trying to achieve. I have a white MacBook that could easily perform this task, but I don’t actually feel comfortable taking it anywhere but the coffee house (like now). I imagine being more able to throw a netbook into a bag and take it off with me for a few hours writing in the park or in the woods. I appreciate that there is a romantic side to this that may be a little unrealistic but who cares!

What I really want is a modern version of a Psion, but they gave up years ago. I will probably end up with something like a Samsung NC10 with decent battery life.

Likelihood of actually getting: 30%

Expand CD Collection

As a (part-time) musician films like High Fidelity appeal to me for the absolute unashamed geeky music knowledge. I pride myself on knowing the music I like, but I envy the rows and rows of LPs in Rob Gordon’s vast collection. I really want a music collection that I can look back on in later life, and love. Please not that I am talking about a collection of physical media not mp3s, but CDs. I am pretty good at getting the latest albums I like, but I’m terrible at back dating my collection. Notable examples of CDs missing from my collection include: Broken Toybox by E, Joshua Tree by U2, and at least on more Faith No More album. My plan is to order at least three CDs from amazon each month.

Likelyhood of actually happening: 70%

Low Power Home Server

For personal and development purposes I run a linux server from home. This allows be to tinker with (and break) the latest web apps without the chance of damaging my main server. I also use it for backing up and sharing data with my family. However, this beast is my pre-Apple Pentium 4 which draws a minimum of 80 watts, and that just isn’t environmentally friendly enough for me. I currently only have it running during waking hours, and less if I can help it. If I have the determination to change all the lighting in our house to energy saving bulbs then I need to look at my server too. Since I really want an ‘always on’ solution it should be energy efficient (no more that 20W), be able to crunch data quickly (at least 1Ghz) and be cheap (less than £200). The best solution is probably the Asus Eee Desktop, but I will need to do a little more research before I commit.

Likelihood of actually getting: 20%

Quicken 2004 (again)

Update: I’ve now got this – it cost me £30 and Intuit a reputation.

About two years ago Intuit got out of the UK market with respect to Quicken, they also decided to close down their DRM server. So when I came to switching off my last Windows XP box to put a linux server on it, I bought VM Ware Fusion for my Mac on which I had hoped to continue running Quicken 2004. Lets get this out of the way, DRM sucks! It does not prevent people like The Pirate Bay or other P2P fans from cracking software and releasing a DRM free version, it does however screw over their own users who have paid for the product and have a legal right to use it. I have now vowed never to use software that relies on an external DRM server to use it.

Before I get too bitter and twisted I should say that before having to buy a second copy of Quicken 2004, I have tried just about every open source or nearly free money management program out there. None of them provided the ease of use, security or functionality that Quicken 2004 did. I called Intuit up, had a dull conversation with them, which resulted in being offered an unprotected version for about £80. Bearing in mind the original cost me less than £40 in 2005 I laughed, then got frustrated with the sales operator before turning to eBay.

The unprotected second release version occasionally pops up on eBay for about £30 so I will have to get that. This year more than any I need to have full control over my finances, and short of writing my own app this is the best way for me to go.

If I had any balls, I would buy it and upload it to a P2P network, but I don’t.