We're scurrying around

Whew! Where did this summer go?? Although posts to this here URL have been as frequent as the ice age in recent months, we have been working hard on some new intitiatives @ siteSatellite. Most of these projects have been sucking up so much valuable time that making posts to this site have been very hard to do. One of the big things happening back here is a long planned server upgrade to all our network servers. We will be migrating all our boxes from OS 9 and LinuxPPC to an almost pure MacOS X solution.

We have been runing a test box in our lab since the OS was released with some customizations applied (PHP, mySQL, QTSS, etc) and have found it to be more reliable and stable than our current offerings. Does this mean we will be phasing out our OS 9/WebStar servers? Probably not. However, the power of the OSX solution makes it very hard for us to ignore.

Concert Fever

Last weekend I caught Depeche Mode in concert at the Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View. With the exception of Counting Crows concert at Konocti last month, this concert was probably the best one I've been to this year. The crowd and the band was totally into the music. We got our Depeche fix for the month.

Bone up on your usability techniques

As usability versus design arguments go I have long been right in the middle of the debate. Despite all the arguments from the web usability purists that websites without graphics have a higher degree of usability, I have yet to be fully convinced. There are so many things that cannot be conveyed very well soley by the written word. Effective design and graphics in a delicate balance with web usability techniques can create very effective sites.

Those of you that may be interested in learning more about this delicate balance should take a stroll to usable web. As a longtime reader of this site, I can vouch for the diverse opinions and high quality articles listed there. It is well worth the read.