Summersault Weblog

Today’s edition of the Palladium-Item has an article about the unveiling of the new website for the City of Richmond. The article has an error about the version of the website that was replaced with this exciting new launch - it does not replace a site created in 2001.

In 2003, Summersault was hired to create the new City of Richmond website and in October 2003, the new site was launched. The Palladium-Item published a story about this on October 9, 2003, with the headline “New city Web site offers cleaner look.”

In 2005, the City replaced the Summersault-built site with a completely different version created internally, and that is the version referenced in the article as not meeting the information technology needs of the City or the design and functionality expectations of users.

Given that it was fairly widespread knowledge that Summersault had created a previous version of the City website, we have asked the Palladium-Item for a correction clarifying that it was not our earlier work that was so much in need of replacement as a part of the recent effort.

Congratulations to the City on the launch of the new site, and congratulations to Programming and Micros for a job well done.

We received a bit of mail today from the organization “StoresOnline.com”, which is hosting two marketing events in Richmond, Indiana on December 11th at the Holiday Inn. Their pitch is that if you attend their 90-minute “conference” presentation about how to make money on the Internet, you’ll get a free meal, a free personal organizer, and priceless knowledge. It seems that the reality behind the free offers is a bait and switch scheme, which has been documented extensively on sites like TheRipOffReport.com. The reports include some heart-wrenching stories from people who invested quite a bit in StoresOnline.com (Aka Imergent Inc Aka Inetseminars.com) thinking they were going into a legitimate business, only to find that the promises made to them were empty ones, and that when they asked for a refund, they were referred to lawyers or not even called back at all. Yikes!

In general, even though the popular narrative about the Internet boom is that lots of people are making money overnight, remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so on. Never hand over your money to anyone promising you big bucks through Internet commerce just because they’ve got a flashy presentation and give you free food. Using the technologies of the Internet to build your business takes good planning, solid partnerships, and technical expertise - there’s no substitute, and especially not in the form of a 90-minute sales pitch.

Today’s local paper has a story about a software glitch at the Meijer big-box grocery stores that caused them to ring up all store purchases at half price. From the article:
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Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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Congratulations to Charlie Peck and his student group from Earlham College, who just had their LittleFe project featured in the UK information technology journal, the Register: Educators boost US tech fortunes with cheap cluster. There are some good quotes from Charlie, who has served as a colleague and mentor to several Summersault staff:

“There’s something very visceral about it,” said Charlie Peck, a professor at Earlham College and one of the project’s leads, in an interview here at the Supercomputing conference. “If I can make learning this stuff accessible and interesting enough, then the students may be willing to put down their Gameboys.”

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster used for teaching key concepts in parallel computing such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing.

I did an interview this morning with Chris Nolte on 1490 WKBV AM about the “dangers of unsecured home wireless networks.” I thought I would post a few follow up notes about that issue here:

The general problem is that a lot of vendors that make home networking products want their items to be as easy to use “out of the box” as possible, and so they make the default mode of a wireless access point to be one where anyone can join the wireless network created by that device. For the average home user, this means that as soon as they plug in their wireless router to get their own laptop connected wirelessly, they’re also providing a free ride to anyone within a radius of that signal.
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When Summersault was first starting up and were sharing office space with the folks at Infocom, a local ISP now defunct, I remember the talk at the time about creating a wide-reaching local area network in the Richmond area that would allow network traffic flowing from one local organization to another to be routed directly, instead of taking the default circuitous route through the organization’s ISP, the national level point of presence, and then back down through the destination’s ISP. It seemed like such a good idea, and though Infocom did some peering with Earlham and RP&L, the local power company, things never really moved beyond that as far as I knew.
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In our ongoing effort to make technology more accessible and less intimidating to the average citizen, we’re teaming up with the Uptown Innovation Center to present TechTalk, a monthly forum where members of the Richmond/Wayne County Community can come to learn about practical uses of technology. Bring your questions — no item is too small or too novice! We want to help you get the most that you can out of the technologies that you use.

This month’s TechTalk forum is a “Free For All”! That means we’ll have a panel of experts in various areas of technology, talking casually and answering questions about everything from hardware to desktop software to using the Internet and more. Come ask any question you want and we’ll do our best to help you out and point you in the right direction. Or, just come join in our discussion about practical uses of technology in our community.

We are currently offering two sessions this Thursday, March 24th, for your convenience, at the Uptown Innovation Center (814 East Main St):

12 PM - 1 PM (bring your lunch if you want)
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

If you have technology questions, I hope you’ll join us!