Summersault Weblog

We recently found ourselves with several dead computer backup batteries on our hands (they help keep things running smoothly during power outages), as well as some other computer equipment that we were ready to get rid of. This “e-waste” contains toxic chemicals that, if absorbed into our bodies can cause a number of serious problems like brain damage, so we wanted to make sure it was disposed of properly, even if it meant paying a fee. In our attempts to “buy local” even in waste disposal, some research led us to Rumpke and their “E-waste Recycling” program. (I’d like to provide a link to a web page with more information about this program, but Rumpke doesn’t have one now.)

The minimum cost for this service was $98, which covered a full service visit with two people coming into our business, and carrying out all the e-waste that we requested. Our contact at Rumpke was Brian Huffman. You can contact him at 1-888-242-0510 ext. 5294.

There are other options in Indiana, but finding information about them is also frustrating due the lack of accessible information. The Indiana Recycling Coalition publishes a directory of reuse and recycling options in Indiana, but it is not user-friendly. If you have an old computer to get rid of, do you think you would call a “Broker”, a “Processor”, a “Processor/Broker”, a “non-profit”, or one of the “Other Players in Indiana”? Your guess is as good as mine. Those are the category choices provided, and no detail at all is provided about the services provided by each organization. And since about half of these recyclers don’t have websites, finding the best option for your e-waste recycling needs, or any viable option is currently a daunting task in our area.

There are organizations like ours interested in recycling, and organizations in the e-waste recycling business, but there is currently a missing link between them— a failure to use the web effectively to provide information potential recyclers need to make purchasing decisions.

I hope this situation improves soon.

Microsoft Exchange is a common choice for organizations looking to share contacts and calendar events internally. It also works as a central mail server, allowing emails with large attachments to be sent around internally as well.

There are two major problems with Microsoft Exchange as a solution.
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As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half.

Here are five tips I use to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.

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Now that the dust has settled on Indiana’s switch to Daylight Savings Time on April 2nd, 2006. here are some notes on what worked for us at Summersault.

As a web hosting and development provider, we have been located in Richmond, Indiana since 1997. We have never had to update our time zone configuration or even change our clocks until now.

Although there already some good resources about coping with the change, my search turned up a number of additional resources I thought would be useful to share.

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As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

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I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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One of the most frequent uses of Perl in my job is to validate web-based forms. Here’s some explanation and sample code to how I do that efficiently and effectively.

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I was recently tasked with finding out how much each disk space each of our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases was taking up.

The job was considerably easier for PostgreSQL, which ships with tools in contrib/dbsize to do just this. After following the simple instructions there, all that was necessary for easy reporting was to create a simple view. Here’s the one I used:
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Today I downloaded and tried the view preview release of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox.

I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?

I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.

Flock has built a better bookmark.

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It wasn’t all that long ago that Mozilla released the first public offering of Sunbird, a calendering companion to the popular Firefox web browser that I already use and prefer.

I paid no mind to the announcement at the time, as I was happy enough with KOrganizer for this purpose. Recently one bug drove me over the edge to seek alternatives. I was being asked to repeatedly click on an error message which wasn’t helpful enough to allow me to solve the problem, which I couldn’t confirm was a problem anyway. Very frustrating.

In just a few days of use, Sunbird seems so much better– it’s hard to imagine going back anytime soon.

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