15th C Help Desk

I've been having a frustrating time helping people with the simplest of applications. This was the perfect comic relief.

DuckDuckGo

As long-time readers of this blog know, I'm a strong advocate of privacy rights. The problem is two-fold: first people don't understand how much privacy they've given up and second the available privacy technology is too difficult, too complicate for the average person to use.

It looks as if that may be changing. Another privacy based search engine has come on the market. It has a silly name, DuckDuckGo but if it provides good results it may become an important tool in one's "privacy arsenal."

EDIT 9/27/2010:

If you're looking at privacy minded search engines don't forget to look at  Start Page.

Underscores versus Dashes in URLs

I had a whole series of discussions with clients regarding this, especially in having them change company policy in constructing URLs. I found this video and, to paraphrase an old saying, a video is worth a thousand words.

The End of Google Wave

Google has decided to pull the plug on Google Wave. After great promise it dies an ignoble death.

Google in their August 4th update states that:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
Update on Google Wave

The failure was primarily due to the business decision to launch the product too soon. This was a robust application whose target audience included non-techies who will have nothing to do with a product that doesn't help them accomplish the tasks at hand. In many ways Google Wave was a time-sink, entertaining and a useful exercise for IAs, developers and other techies, but of little to no use for many business users. The end result we see now - after a rousing introduction - Google Wave is dead barely a year after being introduced to the public.

The Psychology of Users

One thing to factor in when coming up with a strategy with business owners is the psychology of users, both that of the site owners themselves and the site users. Site owners want to have what others have or they feel that they would be lacking in comparison to their competitors.

Then there is the psychology of site consumers who feel that the site is less professional without the gizmos that another site has.

I see this all the time in relation to social media. Some sites are better suited for social media than others. For some sites social media will never be more an unnecessary time sink and money pit.

Bad Day at the Office

This is for all of you who have ever let a typo or a photoshop error go live or to print:

Reliability
... always upholding the highest standards for every detal.

Martin Luther King Day Rally

This product has been x-rated at point of origin.

Oddee.com

Ever Wonder About Excel Dates?

I found a blog post that might answer most of your questions.

WAY BACK in 1991

... Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.

In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.

I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.

Huh?

I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer. ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html