Obsession with Optimization

If not an obsession, then I have a passion or fixation for optimization. To get something as small or as fast as possible. I hate to see any kind of resource be squandered; money, water, space or even CPU cycles and it brings a smile to my face to see that someone has solved a particular problem efficiently.

To that effect I almost gagged when I got an email which had a 30k signature image of the companies logo in a bit of colour. The width and height of this image is indicated below.



As a comparison, the standard Google logo is only just over 7k and over three times the area.

This same wastefulness can be seen in web pages. The worst page that I have seen in a while is that of South African cellular services provider MTN. Their landing page weighs in at over 80k and has barely over one screens worth of content. I have listed a few pages and their respective sizes below.

• MTN 80k


• Microsoft 20.7k


• Cell-C 14.3k


• Squid Cache 8k


• Vodacom 5.3k


• Google 3.2k

Now granted you should also take the images and other media into account when comparing the relative sizes of web pages, I have only looked at the HTML here. Also these pages vary in terms of their content and indeed their function, but the point I am trying to make is that when designing anything for mass consumption there are a lot of things that need careful consideration, not least of which the size of your content.

Why do I care about these things? Maybe it is because I come from a bandwidth starved country, maybe I am a little bit crazy, but to me it is like seeing bits drip out of a digital tap. Surely you would want to make sure you are not wasteful. Make sure all your designs work as efficiently as they possibly can while keeping in mind that a good solution today is often better than a perfect solution tomorrow.

This might be why I find some of the TED videos so inspiring, go and have a look here.

Me, a Domain Squatter?

Squatting in South Africa has always been a bit of a problem (still is) and you obviously also get squatters in the digital domain. People who buy domain names in the hopes of selling them to the big corporates for a pretty penny. Most times there are panels that you can approach to resolve the dispute over a domain name, but in some cases "first-come first-serve" rule is applied and you can only hope that you are the first.
Only two weeks into owning the blum.co.za domain I have been approached to sell it. I do not know to whom, but a hosting company in Munich has offered me $1 500 for the domain name. I suppose it is for hinge giant www.blum.com. In any event I have told them that I do not wish to sell it(for any less than $15 000) and I believe I have a legitimate claim on the domain since it is my name :)

Update: It has been a week since my ridiculous offer and no response. I must say I am glad to keep my domain, but I was warming to idea of making some quick cash :)

Community Overload

As you might have noticed I have recently started blogging and looking at all the other services people use to stay in touch. These are the community sites and services I currently have accounts for;

• FaceBook - massively popular community site, I am here
• Flickr - photography site, check my pics out here
• Twitter - micro blogging site, follow me here
• Blogger(of course) - you guessed it, you are already here:)
• Gmail - the best free email solution :)
• Skype - chat application that can make landline calls and send SMS messages, phone me here
• Zyb - site that allows you to back up your phone contacts and attempts to create a community based on that information, find me here
• Remember The Milk - site to manage todo lists and your calendar, looks to have a nice iPhone app as well
• TripIt - I am still playing around with this, apparently this site will manage your travel itinerary, I am here
• Digg - site to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, I am here
• delicious - social bookmarking service, I am here
• FriendFeed - site that aims to bring together all others to consolidate and sumarize them, find me here
• XBox.com - official XBox-360 site, find me here
• www.xbox-360.co.za - South African XBox-360 community site, their leaderboad can be found here
• www.xbox360achievements.org - site listing helpful hints for XBox 360 achievements
• iTunes - Apple's application to overcharge for music
• Mozy - site that allows you to back up your data to the web
• not to mention all the retail sites Amazon, eBay, Kalahari, Take2, ...

I hope they all have rock solid privacy policies :)

The Big Trip: Getting Ready

As some of you might know I am planning to go on a 6 to 9 month trip around the world. My lovely sister got me a great book for Christmas to get started. It is called "The Big Trip" and gives quite a few handy hints on what to look out for when planning a longer journey. Among the growing list of things I still need to plan are;

• VISAS
• Forex
• Vacinations
• Luggage
• Insurance
• First Aid Course + Kit
• Some Tickets
• Some Accomodation
• Basic Timelines
• ...last but not least where I want to go :)

To blog or not to blog....

I would never have guessed that blogging is so much work. Well it is not like I have gotten around to do any actual posting yet, but I am talking about the setup.

1. How do I make it looks good? What template do I choose? Do I have to make my own?
   Unfortunately I do not posess the greatest artistic ability, in fact my drawings have been likened to those made by those done by baby chimpanzees, the only difference being that you can identify what they have been drawing. So templates seemed like the best option. btemplates.com has one of the most comprehensive set I was able to find and some of them look truely astounding. I was looking for a template that looked clean and elegant and above all did not take 5 hours to load. I liked;
   
   
   • Grungy
   • Black Splat
   • Nitelife
   • and many more...
   
   But with all of them either images did not display properly or they took to long to load or they did not render properly and even with the template there was still a lot of manual setup work to get it going...so in the end I decided to go for a default template which I could replace when and where I found the time(most likely not for a while). Taking the engineering view of function above form.


2. Content, where does it all come from?
   There are tons of tools that will help you publish your content onto blogger and other similar sites. Most notible or clean looking is Windows Live Writer, but there are tons of applications for every platform. A list of a few can be found here. But as with all things there is still real work to be done.


3. Statistics and Services
   I have signed up with Google Analytics which is a free tool that can supply you with some pretty detailed statistics. And finally I added this blog to feedburner here.

That is about all I could manage, I still need to add some widgest, put up reading lists and blogs I enjoy so check in every now and again as things grow...

P.S. If I am missing anything vital/interesting in the setup of the blog, drop me a line or leave a comment. Thanks.

Setting up Email Domain Hosting

Call me crazy but I have always wanted to set up an name@surname.com email account for myself. So i checked the co.za to see if the correct domain name was available and had my good friend Greg register it for me.

What now? Who do I pay? How much? I just want to receive my emails. So I was looking for a host, and the big names that immediately popped up were Windows Live Domains and Google Hosted Services. I already had a GMail address and liked how Google ran things. Also I still had a bad taste in my mouth from using Hotmail way back in 1995 when it was not very user friendly. So I admit being biased towards using the Google system and the rest of this post will describe my experience setting up my email hosting there.

So, where were we? Oh yes, browsing around the Google Hosting site it looked like I would have to pay $50 a year per email account I was going to run on the domain for the Premier service. Then I found a link that compared it to the Standard service which met all the requirements I had for free, so I signed up.

The first thing you have to do is verify that you own the domain you are trying to receive mail on. This is done by registering a long name that looks something like google73981273.yourdomain.com to point to google.com. Google will verify this and tell you to point your domain MX records to the ones they supply and hey presto you are ready to receive mail.

I was amazed at how quickly the whole thing was up and running. Another great feature is that you can set up an easier address to access your webmail, something like mail.yourdomain.com which is very convenient for your users.

Apparently you can also retrieve your email vio POP using the following settings;

POP3 : pop.gmail.com / pop.googlemail.com
Username : your-username@your-domain
SMTP : smtp.gmail.com
Username : your-username@your-domain
Port : 587
Connection Type : TLS

...but I have not confired that yet. [Update: Yes it does work and instructions can be found here.]

I must thank Google for making their mail hosting solution so easy to set up, not to free :)

Its a Start

Seeing how easy blogging really is. Do I want to be doing this? Is this my diary?