Bookshelf: Web Design on a Shoestring

author Carrie Bickner
ISBN 0-7357-1328-6
It has been years since I looked at a web design book, having pretty much given up on the graphical aspect of web design, and confined myself mostly to back-end database types of things. This book is refreshing, but not comprehensive. It deals with a couple of compelling topic areas:

Content Management Systems
The book is copyright 2004, so it came out really during the blossoming of the blogging movement. Some would argue that blogging software is a content management system, however, the authors dive into the concept of content managment, including the use of dedicated (and not-inexpensive) software to manage web-site content.

Web Standards
This really means a very nice discussion of the use of Cascading Style Sheets; something which seems like a very good idea, and something which is complex enough to not understand on the first reading.

Web Hosting
This is the least satisfying part of the book. It appears to address problems that would normally have come up for the web site neophyte, while the other sections definitely are addressed toward people with considerable experience. The point being, that you get pretty much what you pay for, and you shouldn't expect a $12.00/month web hosting service to provide much in the way of performance or technical support. Some famous names here are called on the carpet, and there is certainly no correlation between ad budget and performance. (Yes, I'm wondering about the eight page spread in the most recent PC Magazine from 1and1.com. These guys started advertising massively a year or so ago.)

Upshot
Useful. Especially for experienced web site builders, and especially at the price of $16.00 or under. Suggested by Non-Profit Online News.

VoIP Resource Guide updated

I have recently updated the VoIP Resource Guide. This is a starting point for anyone who wants to find out more about voice over IP, otherwise known as placing telephone calls over the internet. The guide is my own current working reference for VoIP.

There is also an RSS feed.

$100 Dollar Laptop and Google Stock over $400

Questions of the week:

1. Is it just a coincidence that this week there was a formal introduction of the MIT 100 dollar laptop and Google stock broke $400 per share?


2. Does this mean that eventually we will get a check along with our computer when we order one from Dell? This isn't entirely far-fetched, American car companies have been giving cash rebates to buyers for years. Something I never understood...why don't they just lower the cost in the first place? Instead they try to maintain the fiction that a Buick Lacrosse, with a list price of $28,990 is actually going to be sold for $28,990.

Now these cautionary questions reinforce my conviction that it has always been better to be in the software business than the hardware business. Which, of course, leads to more questions:

1. Why didn't I buy Google when it was at $85?
   
2. at $315?
   
3. Should I buy now at $405?
   
4. Will the stock split?
   
5. Why am I doing hardware development?
   
6. Am I doomed?
   

Back from the SBIR

I just returned from a three-day conference for the Small Business Innovation and Research community. These are held roughly twice each year, on opposite sides of the country. You might ask yourself, apart from the many university scientists who participate in the conference what the relevance is to the non-profit/NGO world. In short, these people get grants, lots of grants. How much? Phase I grants are usually $100,000 for a six month project. Phase II grants are $750,000, awarded usually for two years.

SBIR is a sort of "set-aside" of 2.5% of all US federal grants that are awarded to outside contractors and researchers. This 2.5%, which this year includes more than two billion US dollars, has to be spent with "small businesses". Awards are made by 11 U.S. federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, DOD (including Army, Navy, Air Force, DARPA), Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Science Foundation, etc. (By the way, the money being awarded is your money, federal taxpayer's money.) So, you too, can be like Halliburton and Lockheed Martin, and receive federal largesse!

Actually, maybe you can't. This program is for businesses, not non-profits. However, you can use a small business as a partner for a grant. This is exactly what happened in my case; I was a approached by a university researcher (the non-profit) to apply for an SBIR Phase I grant which we then jointly used for our telemedicine/videoconferencing project.

Not only are the grant applicants at the conference...and you might imagine how useful it is to compare notes with, say, a hundred other people like yourself who are applying for similar grants...but the grant givers present most of the conference sessions. So, in effect, the grant makers are telling you how to get their money. There are lots of discussion about what is required for a successful grant application. There are also lots of discussions of what didn't work. Among the tips:

• Have a "portfolio" of grants with different start and end dates to level the fluctuations of revenue, and spread out the work of application, record-keeping, and compliance.


• Structure your grant as a project with outcomes.


• Do pre and post testing of the project subjects and be able to state outcomes with data.


• Follow the grant submission instructions, including font size and style, page lengths, specifications for attachements and so on. (This seems patently obvious...but apparently it is a real problem, even with the SBIR crowd.)


• Use graphics in the presentation to encapsulate the essence of a project in an understandable form.


• Put yourself in the reviewer's shoes. Make the grant application easy to read. Several grant reviewers stated unequivocally that because of the volume of submissions, they look for any excuse to reject an application without having to read it, and formatting problems are an easy way to be able to quickly reject something.


• Get to know the personnel at the grant agency or foundation. Schmooze! Find out who the relevant people are at the foundation or agency and talk to them as you are working on the application.


• Keep in touch with the program officer at your granting foundation during the term of the grant. Appraise them in any change of scope of work. Avoid surprises.


• Grant budgets include direct expenses; money that is spent on items and services directly related to fufilling the grant objectives, and indirect expenses; money that is spent as the cost of doing business, such as office expenses, heat, utilities, etc. Grantor agencies may or may not allow you to charge indirect expenses to the grant...but you do have to be able to account for those expenses. Enlightened grant-givers will allow you to charge a portion of your indirect to the grant and they will acknowledge these expenses. They will be suspicious if you don't account for the indirect expenses.
  
  
• You can't be naive about accounting. QuickBooks by itself may not be the best solution for grant accounting. You need to be able to report all the financials by grant, as well as your consolicated financials.
  Accounting for management information purposes, may or may not be the same kind of accounting for financial purposes, and your system(s) need to be able to do both.

Related to the indirect expense issue, granting agencies and foundations are interested in your success as an organization. Your application should reflect your past successes, and your ability to keep your organization healthy. You need to demonstrate capability to follow through and execute the work plan. Such evidence can include things like:

• Letters from third parties, collaborators and clients


• Matching funds in-kind or in cash


• Letters demonstrating community support


• Experienced staff managing the project


• Contributions to journals, conferences, and associations

So, it is a bit of a sales job. You have to demonstrate credibility and capability.
Anyway, if you have the opportunity to attend an event like this I recommend it. I was even able to get a grant for the conference expenses. :-)

Study- IM threats zooming up

Study- IM threats zooming up:

Study: IM threats zooming up. Messaging security company says its data shows a 1,500 percent increase in worms, viruses and other pests targeting IM networks.

Removing the WinIk Trojan

This trojan appears to be installed by a system driver winik.sys which loads on boot-up. In the course of running it creates a random directory in the Program Files folder, and then starts a randomly named exe file multiple times, until, basically, the machine locks up.

I tried several of the suggestions found in several threads.What finally worked was:

1. Boot computer with floppy disk from Windows 98.
2. Delete C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\Drivers\winik.sys
3. Delete c:\Program Files\XXXXXXXX where XXXXX is the folder containing
AAAAAAA.dll
AAAAAAA.exe
BBBBBBB.exe
profile.???

(substitute the names of the actual directories/files)

4. Reboot machine
5. Clean registry with CCleaner.
Repeat step 5 until it shows that all the bad keys have been deleted. I had several thousand.
6. Rescan using Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot
All three showed different problems (!)

Notes:

1. By booting with Win98 I was able to access the files on the C: drive on the Windows 2000 Professional drive FAT32.
If it had been NTFS, I might have stayed further in the soup, but it appears that Win98 successfully ignored any file attribute settings or any settings based on Windows security.

2. Before doing any of this, I would give serious consideraton to reformatting the hard drive, and reinstalling everything.