Usability

This afternoon I attended a workshop on usability given by Michael Sauers. It was a good presentation and helped give some "hands on" experience of the information I have been reading about for a while.

It's too bad the workshop was only three hours; there's so much that can be done and discussed about it that would take much longer than three hours to cover. If nothing else, today's workshop gave me a small taste of what I will experience at the User Interface 11 Conference. I am looking forward to it.

Usage of Flash in Websites

I can understand the usage of Flash on various websites - they can add some nice features. At the same time, Flash should not be used just for the sake of using Flash, and at the very least there should be an HTML version of a website, especially for those people not on a broadband connection.

But an HTML version of a website should also be available for those of us who are not on the most recent version of Flash. There has been a disturbing trend of websites requiring Flash player 8. Some of these sites required it for the ENTIRE site while others required it only for a particular page or feature.

I wonder how many sites are losing visits because of this requirement. Sure, one could just download the most recent version of Flash player. Some people are lazy, though. In other cases, the latest version of Flash player is version 7. This is the case for Linux. While there is talk of version 9 for Linux, it won't be out until early 2007 at the very least.

Banging my Head Against the Wall

I've emerged apache2 and php in Gentoo Linux. Apache is running just fine, but appears to not be loading the PHP module at all. I have the -D PHP5 in /etc/conf.d/apache2 and /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and the php conf file in /etc/apache2/modules.d look fine. I've searched the Gentoo forums but did not find anything that helped me. I've restarted Apache. I've rebooted the computer. I can run PHP from the command line just fine. I'm trying to recompile PHP now but do not have much hope in it fixing the problem. Does anyone out there have any idea what else to look for?

Eagle Falls

Near Emerald Bay and the place known as Vikingsholm is Eagle Falls, of which there are two parts - the upper and lower sections. The lower section of Eagle Falls actually has two parts. Then there is the upper section where this photograph was taken. This is actually taken behind the falls and past the bridge that is there. I really enjoyed it here and would like to come back here and take more pictures.

Taken with the Canon Powershot G6 at ISO 50, 28.8mm, 1/80 sec., f/8.

An Attempt at Still Life

This photo was taken for a still life project for my photography class. The bottle and goblets were given to me by my parents. I do not know much aboout the bottle, but the goblets are actually made of carnival glass. The glass actually has rainbow coloring to it when you look at it closely.

Taken with the Canon Powershot G6, 17.6mm, 1/250 sec., f/2.5.