Derek Hatchard blogs on

I just had my first conversation about accommodating netbook screen resolutions for a RIA (Rich Internet Application) prototype.

Netbooks are those little laptops showing up in every electronics store on the planet (e.g., Lenovo IdeaPad, Asus Eee PC, Acer Aspire One, Dell Mini,  HP Mini).

According to The Channel Wire, the "netbook market grew by more than 160 percent quarter-on-quarter during Q3 of 2008" (5.6 million netbooks sold in Q3 2008). I expect low cost netbooks will be even more popular given the current economic slump, so it makes sense for web and RIA developers to be intentional in making their apps look good on those little screens. Netbooks commonly come with a resolution of either 1024×600 or 800×480.

800×480?

Yup, we’re goin’ old skool tonite, babeee!

That resolution shows up on the smallest netbooks like the 7-inch variants of the Eee PC and it’s not much screen to work with for a web app. Most web designers / developers I know have stopped worrying about the tiny handful of users still stuck at 800×600 (or, gasp, 640×480).  E.g.: I checked in with web purist @drewmack (http://divwhisperer.com/) and he insists that he only designs for two targets nowadays: 1024 pixels wide and mobile. But now we have a class of users buying new computers designed for accessing the Internet but running at resolutions that most of us have already abandoned.

I have decided to stick with 1024 pixels as a minimum resolution for the Silverlight prototype. Users on a netbook running below 1024px wide can always use the mobile version of the app (if/when one is built).  For the sake of comparison: the iPhone has a 480×320 pixel screen.

What do you think? Is it a fair strategy for consumer-oriented web / RIA sites to treat low resolution netbooks as mobile devices?

Every year we are bombarded with pilot episodes of new television shows.  Comedies, dramas, dramedies, game shows, and the cultural embarrassment we call reality TV.

I normally watch a lot less television than the average person ^[1], but I do have a handful of favorite shows. Near the top of the list is Scrubs, which I have really missed this year.

Lots of people watch Scrubs.  7 seasons worth. It’s in heavy rerun rotation. Plenty of people don’t "get" Scrubs but it’s clearly a successful show. And yet it wasn’t until ABC picked it up that Scrubs was guaranteed a final season ^[2].

Think about that for a moment:  a hit show put out to pasture without airing its farewell season despite all the pieces being in place.

The big television networks are hit-driven. And Scrubs is a hit in its twilight. By all reports, the show would be calling it a wrap after Season 8 (which was disrupted by the writers’ strike). For NBC (the original airing network), there was a strong desire to focus on pushing out new shows that could become bankable hits for years to come.

Every new TV show starts as an idea hoping to be a hit. Most ideas are too crappy to become hits. To be hit-driven, the television networks need to have really good crap filters.

Television networks filter out ideas in iterations.  Some pitches are rejected immediately. Some are discussed before being rejected. Some ideas become pilot episodes. Some pilot episodes go to air. Some shows get picked up for initial runs (e.g., the first 4 episodes of Seinfeld). And a very lucky show becomes a huge hit.

My Kind of Hit

If you are an idea person and plan to pursue one or more ideas, you probably want the idea to be a hit. Of course being a ‘hit’ can mean many things depending on context. If your goal is to earn some weekend beer money with a web site on arena football, making $15/day from advertising makes your idea a hit for you.

The risk with a glut of ideas is that pursuing unworthy ideas can cost you time, money, relationships, and opportunities.

Therefore you must learn to filter out the ideas worth pursuing. If television networks embraced every idea that walked through the front door, there would be no network television. Implementing every idea is a path to sure destruction. You do not have the resources to implement all your ideas (unless you are devoid of ideas, in which case come see me).

Filter Aggressively - Your Idea is Probably Crap, Infeasible, or Boring

Let’s consult Derek’s Super Simple Idea Filtering Process:

If you are an idea person, you must realize that not every idea you have is good. If you’re like me, most of them are probably mediocre at best. If you have any intention of pursuing your ideas, you need to develop a great crap filter. Without proper crap filters, you risk wasting nontrivial amounts of time and/or money.

1. Your personal crap filter: This requires a certain level of personal enlightenment. I’ve listened to plenty of people drone on about the crappiest of ideas and I’m dumbstruck that they don’t have an internal crap-o-meter ringing.
2. Your external crap filters: If you think your idea might have some merit, run it by some people you can trust. Trust is important here. You need to know that your external crap filters will be honest with you.

Once an idea is past the crap filters, it might be an idea worth pursuing but there’s still a huge question: Is it an idea that YOU should pursue?  For an idea to proceed in Derek’s SSIFP, it must pass two more filters:

1. Your passions: It is foolhardy to chase an idea that you are not passionate about. In the pursuit of an idea, you can get your butt kicked pretty good. You need to have the intestinal fortitude to push through. Passion fuels that courage. I have abandoned lots of ideas at this phase. Some ideas are better off left to someone else to implement. (Serial web entrepreneur Steve Poland spews ideas out on his blog.)
2. Your constraints: Let’s face it - you won’t have the time and/or money to pursue every idea. Plenty of ideas are prohibitively expensive or time-consuming. Be honest with yourself about what you can do and how much funding/seed money you can contribute or raise.

The benefit of limited resources is that it forces you to evaluate and prioritize ideas. NBC decided that it was a better bet to invest resources in new ideas than to squeeze the last bit of revenue out of Scrubs. So rejoice: you cannot implement all of your ideas. That will force you to choose only the best ideas!

Formalized Crap Filtering

Want to know a secret? Writing a "business plan" can be a great form of crap filtering! Writing even a simple business plan forces you to think through an idea and surround it with some facts and projections about costs, risks, and potential. You don’t have to call it a business plan if that makes you queasy. Call it a Tactics, Planning, and Strategy Report (see 1:07:20). Don’t download some overblown template - just type out the idea in a bit of detail and make some honest projections.

How About You?

How do you decide which ideas to pursue and which to walk away from? What ideas have you walked away from?

———-

[1] According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube:  http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html  (For the overly curious, I also watch Heroes, Fringe, Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, and The Office. I’m still mourning The West Wing and Studio 60.)

[2] In an unusual network switch, ABC has picked up Scrubs from NBC for season 8. Here are some sneak peaks from the new season of Scrubs starting Tuesday January 6:

(Brain image courtesy of Gaetan Lee. Television image courtesy of Lilie.)

Audiobooks from Audible are now supported on Microsoft Zune.

The Zune is now the best portable music player without a doubt.

http://www.zune.net/discover/audiobooks/

Don’t believe me?

Go read Jeff Blankenburg’s post on 10 Reasons the Zune Beats the iPod. Seriously. He’s spot on.

Some key Zune features for me: automatic firmware upgrades, subscription service with 10 purchases now included with monthly fee, wireless sync, awesome user interface on the device, and FM radio.

Did I mention wireless sync? The wireless sync is KILLER! The only problem I had was that it didn’t see my WPA2 wireless network but it works fine after I entered it manually. Wireless sync to my MP3 player was something I wanted since I first started listening to podcasts in early 2006.

The Zune software is also quite nice. I have always hated iTunes and Windows Media Player. The new Zune software has a MixView mode that lets you jump to related artists / albums. And with a Zune subscription you can browse suggested picks from the Zune library based on your listening habits or subscribe to channels that will be automatically refreshed with music based on the theme / genre of the channel.

Read Exploding Offer Season by Joel Spolsky. Some good tips for students seeking summer jobs / internships or even just inexperienced job seekers.

For your Friday afternoon entertainment:

I hope this is true. I really do.

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=665847

(Thanks to Robert Snell for retweeting Jay Gilmore.)

The Atlantic Canada blogger / podcaster meetup is being postponed due to winter storm warnings throughout the region.

With Christmas season activities starting to pick up now, I’ll have to reschedule it for early 2009. Stay tuned.

Holy crap, this is scary stuff. Researchers have successfully cut keys from digital photos. And to think people accuse me of being paranoid for having a security system at home.

Using a digital image of a key from almost any angle, Sneakey measures the depth of each cut, strings together this information and spits out a bitting code - typically a five or six digit number - that locksmiths use to make each cut on a blank key. The bitting code, along with the basic key information is enough to make a duplicate key.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sneakey_robbers_turn_to_the_so.php

Then again, let’s try to remember that old saying: Locks only keep honest people out.

You need to go look at this yourself:

http://fighttheugly.com/smokerman.php

(Via AdWeek)

Honestly…  In Canada of all places? I’m embarrassed.

The Ontario Highway Transportation Board rules that it is illegal to ride share in Ontario.

The only way you can ride with someone is if you meet ALL of the following extremely impractical set of specific criteria:

• You must travel from home to work only – (Not Home to School, or Home to the Hospital or the Airport)
• You cannot cross municipal boundaries – (Live outside the city and drive in – sorry you cannot share the ride with your neighbour)
• You must ride with the same driver each day – (Want to mix it up go with one person one day and another person another day – no sorry cannot do that – must be same person each day)
• You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly – (Neighbour drives you to work better not pay her right away just in case she drives you later on in the week)

http://save.pickuppal.com/2008/11/12/ohtb-takes-the-side-of-the-bus-company/

I do sympathize to a small degree with public transportation providers and I understand there’s a slippery slope from paying to carpool with strangers to unregulated taxi service, but I hate to see an environmentally minded effort undermined by legal hang ups.

(via StartupNorth)

OK, actually, I don’t know Brian Krebs and I believe my current feeling is better described as appreciation mixed with admiration.

Brian Krebs writes the Security Fix blog for the Washington Post.  On November 11, 2008 Brian’s post started like this:

A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network.

For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.

(Link: Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline)

The next post from Security Fix was titled "Spam Volumes Drop by Two-Thirds After Firm Goes Offline."

Whoa.

Reports from various sources show dramatically reduced spam levels after McColo was taken offline. Everyone expects spam levels to bounce back relatively soon, but it’s nice to see the bad guys hitting a speed bump.

My understanding is that the McColo servers were coordinating the spamming activity of zombies / botnets. [Computer savvy readers, please help your friends and family get their computers cleaned up and properly protected. And educate them about sources of malware.]

Check out these graphs from SpamCop showing spam levels in the week and month leading up to the McColo cutoff.  Dramatic stuff:

I hate spam. I wish ISPs did more to help customers with zombie computers.

Additional info: A Closer Look at McColo