All posts by Lachlan Hunt

CSS and JavaScript Workshop 2006

Personal, Script, Style

This past Monday and Tuesday, I went to the CSS and JavaScript Workshop 2006, which was just fantastic. Although I was one or the more knowledgeable attendees, I still found it a valuable experience. I even picked up a few techniques I hadn’t seen or used before, which I’ve already started putting into practice.

I got to meet both Russ Weakly and Cameron Adams, two wonderful people that were very easy to talk to, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with them again at the next WSG meeting in a few months. Russ even put a photo of me on Flickr. I also met a few other people, some of whom knew of me online but had never met me face-to-face. I even managed to get a few contacts for potential contract work in the future.

The most beneficial part of the workshop for me was the discussion of XMLHttpRequest(), which I had some understanding of but have never really put into much practice, and the form styling and validation techniques were rather interesting as well.

Firefox Flicks Winners

Marketing, Mozilla

The winners of the Firefox Flicks contest were announced a few days ago and I must say that, overall, I’m less than impressed with the quality of the submissions and not entirely thrilled about the selected winners.

I thought Daredevil was quite good, but it seems to be missing something. The music was very good and it was very well filmed, but the girl with very strong american accent may not have the clearest and easiest voice to understand, particularly for non-native English speakers.

It was one of the few submissions that didn’t just use scare tactics by focussing on viruses, spyware and pop-ups, and stayed well clear of the “use Firefox or your screwed” message that was so abundant among the others; but rather thought outside the box and focussed on a lifestyle metaphor.

One thing that it is lacking, however, is that it doesn’t create brand recognition as well as it needs to at this early stage. I feel it needed to say something at the end to help the user understand the metaphor and relate it, and the brand, to the web – we don’t want people thinking Firefox is just some kind of surfboard.

Wheee! was, by far, the most popular of the submissions—it’s funny, childish and creates brand recognition by associating the Firefox logo with something users are already familiar with: the IE logo, as well as Safari and Netscape.

However, the message that comes across, in not quite so many words, is that other browsers suck and I generally don’t agree with such marketing tactics. While that is arguably true of IE—in many respects, it does suck—I don’t believe that ridiculing your competitors is an honourable marketing strategy and should not be condoned.

As many people mentioned in the comments, it is catchy and a lot of people have been talking about it, which is actually one of the major aims of any advertisement. For this reason, I do feel it deserves an honourable mention, but because of the other reasons, I don’t believe it deserved second place.

As for Fox Fever, it just screams low budget crap! I have no idea how this managed to make the top 3, I didn’t even expect it to receive an honourable mention. Like so many others, it also suffers by focussing on viruses, spyware and pop-ups, which I don’t like because it surrounds Firefox with negativity. When people think of Firefox, they should think about the positive experience, not the negatives of using an alternative.

It also creates a false sense of security: Firefox is not flawless, it has its share of security holes and it certainly does not block all pop-ups. Even with all the preferences I’ve changed to prevent as many pop-ups as possible, a few still make it through and it’s still quite annoying.

This is Hot is one that really does deserve an honourable mention, though I really did expect it to be in the top 3. Overall, this ad was fantastic. The concept, the animation, the positive message it conveys: just brilliant!

Last, but not least, Give Me the Soap was cute. Like Daredevil, it too thought outside the box and came up with a beautiful concept. But the ad itself is not suitable for Firefox, it really does create the wrong impression about what Firefox does and I feel this submission would be more suitable for a program like Ad-aware, Spy-bot or perhaps even some AntiVirus software. Firefox does not clean your computer like those programs do, but that is the message conveyed to the viewer by the soap analogy. I feel this one does deserve its honourable mention and, rightfully so, did not deserve to win.

Status

Personal

Last Friday evening (2006-03-24), as some of you may have noticed, disaster struck! This site went down and the WHOIS registry for my domain name said Status: PENDINGDELETE. That means the domain name’s lease had technically expired. However, this was not supposed to happen, it’s not due for renewal until February 2007.

After several phone calls and e-mails to my domain registrar, I finally managed to get the domain re-activated, and I can only hope this never happens again. However, the site being down was not the only problem. This domain is also used for my primary e-mail account and I was without regular e-mail since Friday. So if you had tried to contact me then you may have received a failure notice; in which case, just e-mail me again now that it’s all back to normal.

As some of you may have also noticed, this blog is currently undergoing a redesign to match the template used on the rest of the site. It’s been a long time coming and I finally got so sick of the awful default WordPress template; I just had to do something about it. It’s taking a little while to finish for several reasons, primarily because I’m so extremely busy at the moment. I’ve got so many companies wanting my fabulous services to build and/or fix web sites for them and so little time to do it.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m actually back at HotHouse as a contractor (after leaving my full time position last October) and have been building 4 sites for them since January. Edentiti is also requesting me to do some more work for them and I’ll be doing a couple of days per week in between all the HotHouse work. Beyond that, there are a few other smaller projects for me to take a look at and give quotes for.

In other news, I’m switching my internet connection from Telstra Bigpond Cable (up to around 6Mbps/128kbps (download/upload), shaped to 64kbps after 10GB per month) to iiNet’s ADSL2+ with VoIP phone (up to 24Mbps/1Mbps (download/upload) shaped after approx. 20GB/20GB per month (peak/offpeak time)). The shaping sucks, but there’s not much choice in Australia, without paying excessive download charges. During the transfer process, I’ll be without internet connection for a few days. My cable will be cut this Friday morning and the ADSL2+ will be connected some time next week.

Finally, another of my hard drives died yesterday. It’s a Western Digital 200GB IDE drive. Actually, this is the 2nd replacement disk, after the original arrived dead and had to be replaced immediately back in June 2005. The first replacement disk had a serious disk error after a few months and Scan Disk ended up wiping the whole directory structure, thus losing all of the data. This final one was received in January and now the same kind of disk error occurred. Only this time, instead of letting scan disk wipe all the data, I cancelled it. I was able to copy the few files from it that weren’t already backed up, but couldn’t modify it at all. The disk is now completely unusable, I can’t even format it. I’m never buying another Western Digital drive again, so I just hope they’ll let me switch it for another brand.