Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I just discovered a neat little trick with VMWare on my MacBook Pro. I still need to QA against IE/Win, and I still love using Homesite+. Up until now, to use either of them I've launched VMWare, launched those programs, then switched to Unity mode. The next day, I would have to do the same thing all over again. But with less than 5 minutes of work, you can get your favorite old Windows apps to appear on and launch from the Dock. It works like this: if you switch your Windows VM to "Unity" mode so that the applications you have open appear each in their own window, their icons will appear on the right side of the Dock (note the Windows Remote Desktop and Firefox icons):

Now if you click-and-drag those icons from the right side of the Dock to the left side, they'll stay there permanently (note the Internet Explorer and Homesite+ icons):

And whenever you click on these icons, VMWare will start up and bring up the application for you-- in Unity mode! It's just like... no, it really is having your favorite Windows apps available to you just like any other MacOS app. Awesomeness, no extra charge.

I'm in a new position today, as Senior Web Developer at the leading secure single sign-on provider, PingIdentity. They've set me up with a sweet 30" Macintosh HD screen, plus a nice, light MacBook Pro. The fridge is even stocked with Cokes. I think I may just sleep here.

If you're in the Boston area and didn't make it to the ColdFusion User's Group meeting tonight on unit testing with MXUnit, you missed a good time. Marc Esher and Bill Shelton gave us an intro to unit testing, and a few of us went out afterwards to Dunn-Gaherin's to toss a few back with our visiting ColdFusion evangelist, Adam Lehman. Adam kindly said a few words about Adobe's current efforts with CF, and also raffled off a copy of ColdFusion Server.

Be sure to make it to the next meeting, when yours truly will be presenting on version-tracking your code with Subversion. I'll be raffling off a free copy of Subversion. ;)

P.S. So that no one misses the joke, then shows up expecting a chance at free software and gets angry at me: I'm kidding. Subversion is already a free download.

So asks David Pogue of the New York Times, who describes the benefits of Web 2.0 as offering "a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it."

Around my office we have discussions about just what "Web 2.0" means. I usually interpret it in a more technical, feature-oriented fashion, saying that it applies to sites that have near-real-time interactivity with a web site, using AJAX to make themselves appear to work more like a desktop application than a page-request-based website. My boss thinks of Web 2.0 as meaning that a site has a user community and user-contributed content. There probably isn't just one meaning to the term, anyway. But Pogue gets the point-- it's no use talking about what Web 2.0 means. You just want to concentrate on what benefits it has to your company:

"When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, ... it [will] gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You'll put a human face on your company. And you'll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn't have discovered any other way."

Completely true. And here are other ways that your web site reflects the character of your company:

• The design: does this company have enough money to afford a good designer?
  
  
• The copywriting and layout: is the company smart and detail-oriented?
  
  
• The server uptime: is this company reliable?
  
  
• Graceful degradation: does the company think about its customers and their needs?
  
  
• Snazzy, cool AJAX features: does the company willing to explore new ideas?
  
  
• Splash page: is this company so into its branding and so clueless about what users really want to know that it throws a useless splash page in their way?
  
  

Yesterday an issue came up at the office that I wanted to ask the rest of the community about: we had a person call in, identifying themselves as being from a large law firm, asking for the names of those people from her firm who were signed up for our services. My company offers web-based financial services by subscription, so it's not at all uncommon for us to have customers from financial and legal firms, and to get calls from them asking about their accounts. Sometimes we even have a relationship with one person at a company who doles out bulk-rate subscriptions for our services to their colleagues.

What was notable about this caller, however, was that we didn't have a prior relationship established with this person or company, and we really had no way of verifying that they were who they said they were. My colleague who was taking the call put this person on hold and asked me whether he should grant this person's request; my answer was to have him say that while he could tell the caller how many people from her company were signed up with us, we were not allowed to give her their names. We did offer to contact them on her behalf to ask them to get in touch with her.

These kinds of calls, while not frequent, are somewhat common. For instance, we get secretaries calling on behalf of busy lawyers, or the folks from the finance department who've noticed our company's name as a charge on the company credit card and want to know who placed it. I'm sure this happens to other web-based businesses as well. So my question to the rest of you is this: how do you handle requests for customer account information? Do you take any measures to verify that the caller's stated identity is authentic? If a third party calls and asks for information about other people, how do you handle it?

I'm starting to keep up with the blogs of more and more people these days, so I figure that it's time I get some help keeping track of all of them. I've put ColdFusionBloggers.org on my bookmarks toolbar, and while it's a great aggregator (props to Ray!) I keep wondering whether I've missed anything that's fallen off the short list it creates. I think maybe I ought to use a reader that will help me track a large number of blogs and mark whether or not I've read any given posting. What does everybody else prefer to use? Google Reader? FeedDemon? How exactly do you use them to keep up with the massive number of good posts out there?

People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design.

I think that for development positions, though, it's a little easier to really see how well they know their stuff: I just give them a test where they have to write code samples. And while I require them to write their own code from scratch, I don't expect people to come up with every solution themselves. During the test, I let people look up whatever they'd like from reference books or the web. After all, it's what I do all day. All I care about, in the end, is that they can create good code in good time-- it doesn't matter to me whether they think it up themselves or look it up somewhere else.