I’ve recently acquired two new hosting packages; one at work and one for my hobby sites. Both packages offer me, the consumer, a great deal of control over the server. One of the things offered by both of my hosts is an SSH connection.

Now, I realize that a great deal of hosts offer SSH connections to their customers nowadays, but many will lock the client down so much within those SSH sessions, that there is no point in even logging in that way. For instance, at Netfirms, you have SSH permissions, but about the only thing you can do is log in and log back out again. You can’t list the contents of a directory, you can’t use rsync to copy files to and from remote locations, etc.

Anyway, onto the point of this article: With my newfound freedom through SSH, I needed to find a decent SSH client that I could use on my Windows machines. I did a quick search and came across PuTTY.

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I am happy to announce that I am finally back from the dead.  My Internet connection at home was restored sometime on Friday.

It has been hell this past month now being able to get on the Internet from home.  On the plus side, I have spent more time playing Wii over the last month than I probably have over the last year.  On the negative side, I haven’t really been able to blog very much, and I haven’t been able to do any Web development from home.  A few simple bugs in the private developers’ release of my CMS application went unresolved for an entire month because I wasn’t able to work on it.

The good news about that, however, is that I was able to get the bugs fixed, and add a few more features within a few hours of getting my connection back yesterday.

Toshiba announced today that they are pulling out of the race to win the HD format war. They will no longer be developing the HD-DVD format.

Toshiba’s president admitted that Warner Bros. decision to exclusively back the Blu-Ray format was basically the nail in the coffin for Toshiba.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that means that Sony’s Blu-Ray technology is the out-and-out winner in the format war. What will this mean for us as consumers? I really can’t say. There still seem to be rumors floating around that Sony is burdened by the cost of producing Blu-Ray compatible players and discs, even selling them at nearly 10 times the price of a standard DVD equipment. I’m hoping that the production costs will drop significantly now that they have no competition. Otherwise, it will most likely be a very long time before Blu-Ray overtakes the standard digital video disc.

At this point, will we begin to see more and more Blu-Ray drives being packaged with new computers? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

For those of you that keep your fingers on the pulse of television, this is probably extremely old news. For me, however, this is a new revelation.

NBC is working on producing a new made-for-TV movie based on the Knight Rider series. This time around, KITT will be inside the body of a brand new Mustang Shelby GT (this particular model is still apparently a concept, and has not been released to the general public, yet). David Hasselhoff will be reprising his role as Michael Knight.

Really, though, who cares whether “The Hoff” is going to be in the show or not? The real star of the show was William Daniels; the voice of KITT. For those of you that have not seen the show, you may also know him as the venerable Mr. Feeny from ABC’s hit “TGIF” show “Boy Meets World”.

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I would like to wish all of you a very happy new year. I hope that 2008 brings you great joy. I am looking forward to beginning yet another new year with my friends and my family. I wish you the very best.

Happy New Year!

I would like to wish you all happy holidays (for those of you that celebrated Hannukah, I would like to wish you a belated Happy Hannukah). Although today is Christmas, I didn’t really feel like making yet another post about Christmas or Christmas gifts, yet. So, this post is only tangentially connected to Christmas.

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…and all through the house, everything was going to hell in a handbasket. Our twelve-year-old son threw one of his trademark temper tantrums (for which we can’t really even begin to get him help until the middle of January, since, when we called at the beginning of November, that was the first appointment the psychiatrist had) because a new toy was released today and he’s mad that he won’t be getting it for Christmas. In the middle of his fit, my mother-in-law called to tell us that she’s canceling the traditional Christmas Eve celebration at her house. My parents just called and decided that we won’t be able to have dinner with them on Christmas day, because it’s too much stress on my dad, who has to work on Wednesday morning.

I completely understand where he’s coming from, and don’t fault my parents at all for their decision. They’ve spent the last week (with a little bit of help from us) moving my great aunt out of the house she’s lived in for 15 years and into a new house closer to us. She officially moved in yesterday, and my parents spent all day over there today helping her unpack a very small portion of the things that are in boxes. I’m sure my dad will probably be back over there again tomorrow, at least for a short while. Then, on Christmas day, my brother and his wife are flying in sometime around noon. Then, as I mentioned, my dad has to go back to work. For anyone that would be a lot of stress, and for my dad (and, to be quite honest, for myself) stress is usually multiplied exponentially by the fact that we do not cope well with things not going according to plan.

Anyway, just felt like venting for a minute. Any of those things by themselves wouldn’t be all that bad, but all together, it’s a terribly drastic change from Christmases past. My parents are still planning to come up and share breakfast with us on Christmas morning, but they’ll be heading back home before lunch. Then, we’ll probably have our “Christmas dinner” with them, and my brother and sister-in-law and my great aunt, on the day after Christmas.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I found an interesting article/slideshow on Wired.com the other day. Working in a small cube farm myself, I was curious to see what kinds of suggestions they had. While the majority of the suggestions in the article are a bit outlandish, the “takeaways” with each picture are generally rather inspiring. I’m curious, though, if anyone that works in a real office would be able to pull off any of these ideas. What do you think?

The power of images in making a sale has been well known in traditional marketing for a long time. This becomes even more important online when there’s no physical product for users to handle. The images on your website alone have to work even harder to convey the true look and feel of your product.

Although the following guidelines focus on ecommerce imagery, they can generally be applied to most websites.

1. Professional quality

The quality of photographs is one of the few clues available online for users to judge the quality of your products. The importance of quality shots can’t be stressed enough, especially for luxury goods. And it’s an investment worth making - conversions have been known to more than double through improved imagery.

Ensure images are professionally shot and of high resolution. Put as much care and thought into imagery as you would your window display. If you’re aiming at the luxury market, it’s important to create a feast for the eyes to draw your site visitors in.

2. Alternate & detailed views

Offering alternate views is crucial to convey the full sense of the product. An important alternate view is the detailed one. The range of alternate views available should aim to provide a viable alternative to viewing the product in a physical store. It’s a good idea to allow the full range of imagery to be explored by providing cues such as arrows in the gallery area.

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My Internet connection at home has been kind of screwy for the last few days. I was able to access some Web sites but could not access others. For a while, I was able to access Google with no trouble, but could not access Yahoo! Then, however, I can’t access Google or Yahoo! for some reason.

I looked into it and was finally able to resolve the problem by simply power-cycling the modem and my router. I don’t know what the problem was, but it sure was annoying.