Visual Lizard

Blog

We work on the Internet and are constantly consuming information. There's a lot of it out there. We'd forget it if we didn't write it down someplace…

Visual Lizard's blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, from php to comic books to music, just about anything we find interesting

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

Hybrid Scooters!

We’ve put up a couple of posts about Hybrid cars coming to the public conscience and the fact that for those who can afford it, it would be a pretty impressive step toward putting a dent in our environmental footprint. Well now there may be a way for those of us who can’t afford a car might be able to do the same. Vespa it seems is putting out 2 new lines of Hybrid Scooters. The first having the standard Vespa look in a 50cc gas-electric hybrid called the Vespa LX 50. The second has a more impressive modern look with a 125cc gas-electric hybrid called the Piaggio X8 125.

Have a look at Retro Thing to see all the details.

Monday, April 17th, 2006

Google Calendar

Last week, Google launched the beta of Google Calendar, an online calendaring and scheduling application that interlinks with other Google services, like their customizable homepage and Gmail. This brings them one step forward on their (apparent) plan to completely conquer the internet. It’s very Microsoft-ish of them. :)

Having a Google account, I was happy to discover I could log into Google Calendar and play around. It’s very... calendar-ish, I suppose. I’ve used Sunbird before, and I’ve seen iCal, and there’s some obvious similarities. You have multiple calendar/month/week views. You can schedule events and if they repeat. In some views, you can drag events, stretch events, lots of fresh, fancy Web 2.0 functionality you’ve come to expect from Google applications.

They’ve added a couple other features that are nice. A reminder feature allows an email to be sent out to, um, remind you of an upcoming event. You can invite people to the event, allowing them to confirm. When adding details, the location is linked to Google’s mapping app (depending on your level of detail when describing the location). You can open the calendar to groups or to the public. And, for those with calendars already, you can import and/or share calendars.

Some of the interface is wonky, though. I felt I was stumbling around for a while finding what everything was. And I’m still confused as to what is shared and what is public and what is not. With some more experimentation, I’m sure it will all become obvious. Plus, everything still has that plain Google look. I now it make’s it load nice and fast, but would it kill Google to pretty it up a bit? Maybe an option that you could turn on in the Settings?

Another addition is the Google app links in light blue in the top left hand corner, a subtle reminder that you can organize and live your entire online life through Google. So, if you’re using Gmail, there’s a good chance that you’ll at least take a look at Google Calendar...

This application has been rumoured and speculated on for a while now. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the idea; they let rumours and gossip speculate on what the next online app from Google will be, and whatever gets the most buzz for the longest time is what they actually work on. Or buy outright.

The devious, genius bastards! :)

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

The Drug for What Doesn’t Ail You

For a long time now we have known that drug companies are primarily out for profit. They hold patents on all those little pills we take which drives up the cost of health care to an astronomical level. They extort money from you because you have a disease or medical condition. You can’t go elsewhere, because by having a patent on the treatment, they for all intents and purposes they have a patent on a disease.

Well now it seems that the drug companies aren’t satisfied with real diseases and medical conditions. Now they are inventing drugs which treat natural everyday / every life problems like Menopause.

Pharmaceutical firms are inventing diseases to sell more drugs, researchers have warned.
Disease-mongering promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild problems to boost profits, the Public Library of Science Medicine reported.

[Source: BBC News Health]

It is sickening to think that we as a society can’t get along with minor ailments that every human for the last several thousand years has been able to deal with. We are so willing to fill ourselves up with chemicals to treat the symptoms of these little twinges, but we don’t seem to be willing to get out of our easy chairs and go for a walk or eat a proper diet which would make us healthier and therefore less likely to get that little twinge in the first place. Now I am not the best example of health as I have let myself go over the years. I realize that filling my body with drugs may take care of any symptoms I may get from my lack of a healthy lifestyle, but it won’t fix the problems causing the symptoms.

My suggestion to the reader and the advice that I am now following, is to move. Walk to the corner to pick up the paper, or walk to the corner store. Walk to the next bus stop up from the closest stop. Every little bit helps. Don’t just do it for your own health, do it to help your bank account. The healthier your lifestyle, the less money you are going to be paying to the drug companies to get the same healthy feeling. And you won’t have to keep track of all sorts of drugs either. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get the drug companies working on curing diseases rather than curing symptoms? Think about it.

Monday, April 10th, 2006

More on the Hybrid Vehicle Front

In a follow up post to Ross' pervious hybrid vehicle post, there are some interesting hybrid vehicles coming down the pipe from various car manufacturers.

Toyota is set to release a new Prius, that reportedly gets 113 mpg.

Ford is rumored to be working on a revolutionary "hydraulic hybrid" which would make a huge difference in the current mileage of hybrid cars at 3x the current battery powered fuel efficiency. Wow!

If you want to do some comparisons on hybrid vehicles (or just look at the fuel economy of current makes of cars you might be thinking of) the US Government has put together a nice resource at http://www.fueleconomy.gov. If you want to directly compare the current crop of hybrid vehicles, you can do that too.

Monday, April 10th, 2006

How Not to Build a Viral Marketing System

Stopglobalwarming.com - go. Sign up. Follow the tips they provide and start to reduce your carbon footprint. Then encourage others to do the same. However, don't do it with their viral marketing form on the site. Why you ask?

Well, let's take a look at an email that comes from their site if you refer a friend to join up.

This was the headers of the email:

From: 485273

Subject: Join the Virtual March!

Then, in the body of the email, we have the following:

485273 has joined the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming and hopes you will, too!

Click here to Join Now!

485273 says: Join the Virtual March!

The Stop Global Warming Virtual March is a non-partisan online effort to bring all Americans together to acknowledge that global warming is here now... and it is time to take action to stop it. It is urgent that we get involved now.

It affects everyone. Young, old, rich, poor, urban, rural, right wing, left wing, those in the middle. Global warming is a national security problem, an economic problem, and a public health problem. And it's not going to get better unless we act now.

...[clipped out boring, long winded famous people quotes]...

Our mission is to use the strength of our numbers to urge:
1) Our government to join the rest of the world in solving global warming, and
2) American business to start a new industrial revolution and develop clean energy products that will reduce our dependence on oil and other pollutants that contribute to global warming.
www.stopglobalwarming.org

Alright, for you savvy web users out there, you can already see a problem here. I have signed up and joined the march. I have added my details to their system. My name is clearly there. So why does the email go out with my number - 485273 - splashed throughout?

Not only is this sure to get picked off and filtered out by almost everyones spam filter, the email itself it utterly meaningless to anyone. It provides no information about who sent this and it appears as if it is spam. Even the subject sucks, because unless you have heard of the Virtual March, you have no idea where this email is going. It could be a pharmaceutical ad for marching to bed with viagra.

If I could make a suggestion to the folks over at Stopglobalwarming.com, it would be the following:

  1. Use the senders name, not their registraiton number.
  2. Rewrite the subject to something like - "Join the Virtual March at stopglobalwarming.com" - which would be both empowering and informative, as the recipient could see the stop global warming elements right in the subject.
  3. Remove the overly wordy body copy of the email (again, name - not number in there as well) and rewrite it to be clear. Put a little fear into it. The stat on the web site about the last 15 years containing the world's 9 hottest average planetary temperatures in recorded history is scary. Use it. Quick information scare followed by the mission and link to sign up. Short and sweet.

The web site itself is a great resource. The concept is perfect for the Internet. Starting grassroots movements like this and spreading them with viral marketing (encouraged marketing if you like) is easy to do, costs very little, is easy on the environment (not printing 2,000,000 flyers and sending 5,000,000 emails instead) and it can make a difference. So please fix your email system.

If you are having trouble, I am sure there are 25,000+ web professionals already signed up to the march that would be more than willing to donate a few hours to fix your email system. Heck, we would be more than happy to help you. Call us.

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Parallels - virtualization in MAC OS X

In case you live in a cave, Apple has announced the release of software called Boot Camp. This software allows any Intel Chip based MAC to run Windows XP (and likely Vista whenever it comes out) as a secondary OS on the machine. You would install Boot Camp and then when you want to shift from OS to OS, you would reboot while holding the option key (alt key for windows people) and then choose the OS you wanted to initialize.

If you have been developing for the web on a MAC over the last 10 years, then you know you need to view all of your work in a Windows environment several times before it goes live. Virtual PC has long been the standard for single computer developers with a MAC up until a few years ago when the price of PCs came down to the point that it was better to own a cheap PC than slow your system down with Virtual PC.

Well, here is something that all MAC users have been dreaming of ever since the Intel chip switch - Parallels.

EDIT: As always, John Gruber of daringfireball.net sums up the Apple move on Boot Camp in much more eloquent and in-depth way than I can.

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

Google Search Operators

Google is a good search engine. Good search engines allow you to refine how you want to search for things. Here is a link directly to their Google Operators. Refine you search. Get better results. Use operators.

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

Google Talk Update

Not too big a change, but nice none the less. Google Talk has been updated, and now has a couple new features. The biggest are the support for user images (avatars, as some in the know might call them), and themes. I haven’t got into it yet, but I’m interested in finding out if the themes are customizable beyond the set they give you... like simple CSS-ing? That would be neat!

Another addition is that you can now get Google Talk for your Blackberry... useful when your carrying your PDA/cellphone and you want to contact someone... wait a minute...

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Apple Releases Boot Camp Beta

Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp for OSX 10.4, with the full intention of including it with 10.5 Leopard by default. What does this mean? It means that your shiny new Intel chip Macs can boot into either OSX or Windows XP!

I always wanted a Mac laptop, but I held off because I heard the Intel chip versions were around the corner. Not really that big a deal, other than the expected jump in speed, but what really got my wheels turning was the possibility of having both OSX and Windows on a single laptop. I can have the sleek wonderfulness that is Apple’s operating system, and the workhorse and support of Microsoft’s operating system on the same machine. Joy!

I skipped the first Macbook releases. Hard core Mac-ers I know warned me to never get the first release of any new hardware, as Apple usually needs a couple months to work out some kinks. Since I was waiting anyway, I decided to hold out for OSX 10.5. Might as well get the latest version with the machine, save myself the $150 or whatever upgrade.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

A neat little app for my Windows friends

Netjaxer is a neat little app that lets you load any web page and run it as a tray icon. Normally, this sounds like a bad idea, but for things like Gmail, Analytics, Mint, Backpack, Campfire and other applications you reference multiple times in a day, this could be a really nice time saver for you.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006

New Planner Section Launches

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Meeting & Convention and Sports & Special Event Planners section for Destination Winnipeg. The Planner system was built with Meeting and Event Planners in mind. These rebuilt sections of the site will give Planners more information on what they need in order to plan a Meeting, Convention or Event in our fair city.

We have been working with Lori and the crew over at Destination Winnpeg for the last five months in order to build a system that allows DW to show their well rounded information base to potential Event Planners. A system that showcases Winnipeg as the place for Conventions and Events.

This web application system is now working efficiently as per the requested specification. However we are always looking to improve our web apps, so please feel free to comment here on what you have seen. Also if you like what how the system functions, please send us a note. We hope you like it.