Fourth Wave Consulting

Moroccan home furnishings find their place in the long tail

David Norris — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:34:42 +0000

Expertise & specialization make their home in a niche

One of my favorite things about the Internet is the phenomenon of the long tail. Basically, the barriers are down and it’s led to an incredible explosion of content & commerce. Shelf space is no longer a consideration, so retailers can afford to either carry millions of SKUs (a la Amazon.com), able to stock nearly every book released or, like youtube.com, provide an endless expanse of content – something to satisfy every interest.

These are examples of the most commonly discussed side of the long tail, but there’s another one that’s just as interesting, and that’s specialization. I love going to New York because I can find some of the best Chinese, Italian, and Greek food within blocks of each other, each run by a family with a highly specialized skill set. The challenge to specialty businesses has always been mass market appeal, or their lack of it. That’s why big cities have specialties in so many things that little towns don’t – .01% of 11 million people who are into “insert specialty business here” translates to plenty of people, but not .01% of 10,000. The Internet has changed all that, at least for merchants who can convert to a e-business. I still can’t get a great NY street vendor hot dog out here in Oregon, but unperishables are just a click away.

So I came across Nine Seas Decor, just one of many examples of the Internet specialty shops that are springing up. Not only do the owners make regular trips to north Africa to find handmade art & other interesting finds, but they have the background & familiarity with the area & products, like Moroccan lamps & lanterns, wooden chests & mirror frames, and mosiac tile fountains.

As I get older I’ve found it’s time to start replacing the ‘furniture of convenience’ that typified my 20’s with a bunch of really interesting things that I’ve found along the way. Rather than be stuck picking the least boring lamp at the nearby chain store that sells thousands of the same thing, I can reach out across the information superhighway to find just the right velvet-lined treasure chest or whatever else fits my fancy.

Choice will be the best thing about shopping online and will only get more powerful. Of course there’s a dark side as well, as the dangers of information overload will soon encroach upon almost any conceivable online activity. It’s a technological arms race, as information processing tools like Google get smarter and better able to find those golden needles in the haystack that make the Internet so irreplaceable.

Failed Hard Drive: Anatomy of the Trobleshooting Process

David Norris — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:06:31 +0000

Troubleshooting: in computers, no one can go very long without being forced to do at least rudimentary attempts, but I’ve found few books or other resources that help teach the mental process. After almost two decades of working with computers, since my first IBM XT at the ripe age of 15, I’ve been dealing with problems of every type. Most of the computer jobs had a large helping of troubleshooting, which was great for me. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed. I thought I would take the opportunity of my girlfriend’s hard drive crashing to walk through one real-world example, and hopefully provide some insight into this sometimes archaic process.

The Symptoms

So the other day my girlfriend tells me her pc has been locking up at odd times. It’s one she built herself a couple years ago, and has been running well for that time. I asked her what kind of lock-ups they were; typically hardware failures cause things like an instant reboot or power off, or the entire screen locking up and being completely unresponsive. That’s a ‘hard lock’. Often people will say their machine locked when they really mean it was very slow to respond, or they could move the mouse but not much else. Those are typically software issues. Hers was a hard lock, and she could go hours without any problems.

Identifying the Problem

With hard locks, any piece of hardware can be the cause, even an external peripheral. There are two basic approaches to troubleshooting – ‘the usual suspects’ and deduction. The former involves trying things that worked for you frequently in the past, while the latter is an ordered process of eliminating things that could be the cause to narrow the list of suspects. I asked if she had run a scandisk lately, and she hadn’t. This was kind of a lucky hit and saved us some time. We set windows xp pro to do a thorough scandisk when it rebooted on both her boot drive and her data drive. Sure enough it started finding errors on the data drive and was fixing them, but could never complete the scan. The pc would always lock up, usually at the same point. This made me pretty sure there was something going on with the drive, and that it probably wasn’t easily remedied.

Drive triage: can it be nursed back to health?

In my experience, hard drives seem to fail several times more often than all other pc components put together. It’s not surprising considering it’s the only part in a computer that has moving parts (not counting fans). I’ve seen dozens of drives fail over the years, with motherboards coming in a distant second – I’ve seen 3-4 of those go. So it’s the least reliable piece of hardware, and at the same time the most crucial. When other parts fail, you can just swap ‘em out, but drives are a pain. First, I wanted to see if I could repair the damage on the disk, or at least complete a scan. Drive scanning utilities have the ability to mark bad sectors on a disk so they’ll never be accessed again, so only the worst hardware failures will condemn a drive.
I tried several more times to complete a full scan of the drive, but it always locked up. So I pulled out a boot diagnostic disk called ‘Techie’s Toolkit 2’. I can’t remember where I got it; I Googled it and found the ultimate boot CD, which looks similar. I ran a number of the disk repair utilities, all of which found and repaired some errors before locking up the pc. This is a very rare occurrence – typically either a drive has a hardware failure and is totally unreadable, or can be at least scanned without too much fuss.
After all the lockups, it was clear that the drive had some hardware issues that I wouldn’t be able to fix. Now it’s just time to get the data off and send it back on warranty.

The mad data grab

Luckily, this was the data disk, and the disk with Windows on it was fine. The problem was Windows would lock up, and I couldn’t even get it to load at that point. I later realized that the drive was hot (I always advocate turning off pcs at night, but this machine usually wasn’t) and that Windows was trying to access it when it was locking up. I popped out the drive and put it in another one, and was able to boot Windows on it fine.
I started up my favorite data recovery software, easy recovery professional. It’s got an easy to use interface, and can recover data from deleted/formatted/corrupted files. I set it to restoring all the useful data to the other drive in the pc, but after a while the machine would lock up. Windows is designed to handle errors – an amazing number of them. Unfortunately when hardware is acting up, it can cause data corruption and unexpected situations for Windows. It doesn’t know what to do when this happens, and will lock up rather than continue working and risk corrupting more data. This is partly why hard locks are a good clue for hardware problems.
After trying a number of other data recovery tools and getting more lock-ups, I finally reached down and felt the drive. It was quite warm, like a drive-through coffee held through one of those cardboard sleeves. I figured time to cool down would help.

The next morning

Knowing the drive was failing, I was under pressure to get the data off before it died completely. Since the lock-ups generally happened at a consistent point, I inferred that most likely one or a few big directories on the drive contained all the errors, and that a good part of the drive should be just fine. I booted up the fixin’ pc again, and restarted easy recovery. I set it to recover the 230 gigs we needed from the drive, checking on it from time to time. After 30 gigs or so, the pc locked up again. Ok, so a piece at a time. After rebooting I realized that the file system on the drive was still intact – it looked like a normal drive in Windows, so I didn’t necessarily have to use an advanced file recovery utility, I could just copy files off it. If you’re surprised that I could be surprised by something so simple, I’m with you. It drives me nuts, but still happens at times.
From there it was a simple matter of setting a bunch of files to copy, and watching to see if they worked. I would get some of the data transferred, then it would lock up. I would then skip the directory it was on when it locked up and went after the next set of directories. As I suspected, there were only a few folders that would lock up the machine when I tried to access them. Finally I got everything off the drive, erased it, and now it’s ready for a warranty return.

Get a backup solution today

I can’t stress enough how important data backups are. Everyone I know would be upset if they lost their hard drive, but those with backups aren’t too worried. There are so many easy options for backing up your data. You could buy an external hard drive, plug it into your USB port and use the backup software it came with, or even better a file synchronizer. Office 2007 has a feature called Groove that can do this, but my favorite is a small program called Save N Sync. It can be set to run when you shut down your computer for the night, and can synchronize all your files. You could also take advantage of the glut of online backup services that are out there. My favorite is Carbonite. You can read my complete review of Carbonite here. Only $50/year for unlimited data backed up from one pc makes it much cheaper than every other option I’ve found, and is perfect for home users. I personally have my important data synchronized on 2 computers, and I use Carbonite to back it up. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and the effort is nothing compared to the downside of losing my important stuff. What’s your stuff worth?

The best keyboard in the world

David Norris — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:27:03 +0000

Kinesis saves your wrists single-handedly with a goofy looking keyboard

Call it what you like – RSI (repetitive strain injury), carpal tunnel syndrome, or good ol’ “keyboarder’s bane”. Everyone who types much for very long should at least be thinking about it. While I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of crippling pain or numbness, surgery or lots of time off to recover, an amazingly small number of people do anything to prevent it. (Note: this, like all reviews I post, follow my review policy).

Prevention isn’t the best thing, it’s the only thing

Many people don’t know that the original QWERTY layout for keyboards was set up to slow down typists so keys wouldn’t stick together in the old standard typewriters. It’s a good example of a defacto standard that has long outlived its usefulness. Regardless, standard keyboards have no ergonomic thought put into them at all, and the deluge of RSI cases as numbers keyboard workers increase is an obvious proof.

I’ve never heard a good story of someone who let their wrist pain get so bad that they had to see a doctor. Basically, my advice is to never let it get to that stage, no matter what. When I started typing regularly, it was about 6 years ago. I, like everyone, used the standard crap-keyboard that’s flat and designed to be easy to build. After a couple years, my wrists would start to get a little numb in the afternoons (especially after I learned to touch-type). Even then people were talking about carpal tunnel, and I decided to do something about it. I did some research and paid what I thought was an ungodly sum for a keyboard, $300 for a

Kinesis Essiential. Not only did it teach me to type better and much faster, but within a month or so my wrist pain was totally gone. What’s even more amazing to me, is that after using it for 90% of my typing over the last 6 years, my wrists are still in awesome shape, and I type a ton. Hours per day. at 80+ wpm. Very impressive.

The keyboard that will save your wrists

So, it’s a bit funny looking. Like someone dropped a couple of billiard balls onto a normal keyboard. The dented shape of the keys mold perfectly to the relaxed hand, leaving all keys at an optimal distance from the resting position. Keystrikes are faster and more accurate, and the placement of the thumb buttons is awesome. Most people who aren’t great typists hit their backspace key a lot. I mean a lot. Or at least I did when I was learning. The thumb-activated backspace and space bar are just perfect, reducing mistakes and saving me from having to ‘reach’ for the backspace key with a weak finger like the pinky.

The only complaints I have are minor. The esc and function keys are a bit small and don’t have the best tactile feedback. There is no 10-key by default, but you can buy one separately if it’s a big deal to you. The finger assignments are slightly different, like f1-f8 are left hand now instead of just f1-f5. Once you get used to it you won’t even notice it, and I’ve never had trouble adjusting back to a normal keyboard. You can even buy a Kinesis with dvorak switching ability, so you can teach yourself a much better keyboard layout. I personally have been far too lazy to do so, but I hear it’s great.

Now lately I’ve been looking for a new mouse, and have been having a little strain on my mousing wrist. Thanks to an excellent suggestion from my girlfriend, I’ll be trying out the Perfit Mouse. I’ll post a review of it when I’ve run it through its paces (but probably less than 6 years).

NetSuite tip: Diagnose Slow Loading Pages

David Norris — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 18:31:24 +0000

Ways to ferret out the root cause

As with any web hosted environment, response time and performance are a major issue. I would say the entire SAAS industry (software as a service) will have to deal with this problem for the forseeable future. Only Google seems to have figured out how to provide consistently speedy web hosted applications, and they couldn’t do it without their hundreds of thousands of servers. For those mortal companies who have somewhat less than that, performance will always be a major issue.

Tip one: Troubleshooting NetSuite back-end performance

When logged in to the NetSuite ‘back end’, where all the actual work is done, sometimes things are slow. To find out some more information, simply double-click the NetSuite logo in the top left corner. You will get a pop-up like this:

This breaks down the time it took to load the page. The total is shown first, then the time spent generating the page on the server, next the time it took to transfer the page to the browser, and lastly how long the client’s browser took to render the page. If the server time is a big percentage of the total, you can be sure the problem is on NetSuite’s side, and has nothing to do with your Internet connection or local computer.

Tip two: Diagnosing web site slowness

To a lesser extent, the e-commerce web sites that are public facing and powered by the NetSuite application do sometimes have speed issues as well. To peek behind the curtain for a given page, simply load it in your browser and view the source code. The last few lines will look something like this:

The first number on the first line is how many milliseconds it took to build the page on the server side (I’m not sure what the other numbers on the first line are). The second line starts with the name of the specific server you are connected to in the cluster. This can be useful to watch if some people are seeing a specific problem on your web site but not others. Often it will be only those connected to one or a few of the servers running your site.

A note on clusters: NetSuite, Google and others employ a technology called clustering to provide enough computing power to run their applications. It’s basically a way to make an arbitrary number of servers appear to work like one server to the outside world. Typically a load-balancing server will direct traffic for a web site to one of a number of servers that can handle the request, and uses a cookie to direct the user back to the original one the next time.

Quite a few people have complained about NetSuite’s continuing performance issues since their last major release, 11.0. Hopefully armed with some of these tools, NetSuite users will be able to see a more dedicated response to this critical issue.

The Google PC - Oh It’s Coming

David Norris — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:57:02 +0000

Now i’m not the first to predict that soon we’ll be seeing pcs with an operating system made by Google, and there’s still quite a bit of debate on the topic. Officially Google denied it, but in such a vague way that it’s not even an answer. For those of us who don’t balk at speculation, let’s see what we can come up with:

First and foremost, Google’s profit comes from pay per click ads on their search pages & adsense content sites. Google has offered lots of free tools & applications, all with the only real benefit for them being market share/mind share/branding/popularity. It all serves to drive up their main revenue source. Imagine a Google-infused PC that takes advantage of all their services & offerings. You’d have a Googler for life.

Google has been building & maintaining the most complex distributed network operating system in the world for a number of years. The sheer computing power and storage ability make some massive projects quite feasible.

Google has shown a propensity for expanding into new and interesting areas that are outside their core business (Picasa, Analytics, and now Website Optimizer). All of these serve must serve strategic goals for Google to make it worth their while.

Microsoft has gone unchallenged in the o/s department for a very long time, and have become complacent and out of touch. Vista will cost $300-500, as much as an entire new pc. The backlash from pissed off Microsoft customers shouldn’t be underestimated.

Most people only need a pc for email, office applications, and internet type stuff. If Google produce an operating system that will do that for very cheap (maybe free?), that will have broad appeal.

Google can integrate some fantastic services with their operating system very easily – they will definitely have things like online backup & storage, along with all their current products like Google maps, video and the like. Imagine being able to log in to your account from any Google pc, and have instant access to gigs of your personal data, email, and documents. Of course you’d have to have an Internet connection for something like that, but broadband adoption continues unabated.

Gamers are a problem

The first big potential problem is games – right now 90% of games out there are made for Windows and that’s not likely to change unless a ton of people adopt the Google o/s, and tons of people aren’t likely to adopt it without game support. Maybe it’ll have windows virtualization or something, but if you still have to pay for a windows license that kills a lot of the benefit a Google pc would have in the first place. I can’t think of any good solutions for the gamers, but there probably is one. Maybe they won’t have to address those types at first; they can capture a lot of the market without worrying about them. Certainly businesses & large organizations are going to be listening closely to anyone who can halve their hardware/software costs. Many, many people are tired of the yoke that is Microsoft licensing and the hefty costs that go along with it.

Support is a pain

Support becomes another big issue – One of the ways Google has kept its overhead really low is to avoid having to invest in call centers. Most of their products are free and don’t offer support at all, while their advertising support is mostly via email. If they choose to enter business-critical application or o/s space, they will have to start providing it (or contract with someone to do so). It’s relatively easy & cheap for Google to produce say, Picasa – 90% of the costs go into development, then they put it out for free and don’t have to answer tech support calls from anyone who has trouble with it. If they offered an operating system with this same free/no support model, it will limit the appeal to tinkerers – no responsible IT department would commit to running their business on something that’s unsupported.

The road to domination is a tough one…

Yes, Google certainly faces some challenges if they want to start producing PCs to rival Microsoft. Given the damn near astounding way they have met their challenges so far, I wouldn’t put it past them. They could even start simply by offering their own version of Linux bundled together with all their stuff. Those of us who have had only one option in the operating system market are ready for another choice.

If nothing else, maybe it will spur Microsoft to start actually putting some effort into their offerings. As soon as MS beat out Netscape, they were bereft of competition. So what did they do? They let Internet Explorer sit on the shelf, not releasing another version for something like 6 years. That’s like achieving a domination so total in the car market that you don’t make a single change to your sedan for 40 years. Ridiculous. Microsoft has proven they will only work if pushed. So here’s hoping, Google.

Announcing the first NetSuite customization search engine

David Norris — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 09:56:39 +0000

A Google Co-op based engine that searches NetSuite resources

Last week Google annouced yet another great new feature: the ability to create you own customized search engines using Google Co-op. Of course the first thing that sprang to mind was to create a search engine for the NetSuite web developer. To gather all the sites I’ve found with guides, information and documentation on customizing NetSuite and make it easy to search them all. One of the problems I’ve always had when trying to learn some new feature or tweak was finding the information – there simply isn’t that much out there and it can be hard to find.

So I’ve added the 12 sites I’ve found with good information and put the search box in the header of my site. You can also use this search engine on its homepage. Please try it out and let me know what you think, especially if you have sites that aren’t in the list that I should add.

You can also try out some sample searches:

froogle

Google Analytics

csv import

Carbonite Online Backup Reviewed

David Norris — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 08:20:24 +0000

Offsite Disaster Recovery Made Cheap and Easy

Backing up important data has always been one of those things most people don’t think about until it’s needed and too late. Any good network admin will consider this an important area to address, but are often given insufficient funds. In the end, backups are like security – it’s a balance with cost on one side and benefits on the other. You can always be more secure and have a more robust backup strategy, but as with everything in business, there are limited resources and they need to be justified. Carbonite is a service I’ve found to score very well in the balance, providing a good service at a great price. Read my reviewing policy for more information about my methods.

Quickie Review: Carbonite online backup

Pros:

Unlimited data backed up from one machine for $50/year. Very inexpensive.

Easy to try, use, and buy.

Worry-free. It’s always running in the background, doing its job.

Stores your data securely offsite, so even a burned down building isn’t a total disaster.

Cons:

You have to sign up for a year at a time.

Each computer is a separate $50/year.

Restore operations for large amounts of data can take days.

You have to trust that your data is safe with them.

Currently no ability to schedule backups, or take snapshots. Not recommended for database backups.

You can’t backup your Windows folder, or restore your Windows installation

How it works

Simply sign up for a free account and download the trial. You can install it straight from the browser, and only takes a minute. Once you start using the program, you can double-click the icon in the system tray to access status and help information.

Selecting backup folders

This is very easy – just right click a folder and tell it to back it up. It will be added to the backup queue.

Restoring files

A ‘Carbonite secure backup’ icon will appear in ‘my computer’. Open it and right click a folder to restore it or take it off the backup list.

Disaster recovery vs. data backups

It’s important to recognize that different backup solutions provide for different types of eventualities. A traditional tape backup can provide everything the sysadmin needs to restore a computer to the state it was in when the backup last ran, even if the machine catches fire and has to be replaced. This is called disaster recovery. Basically, something really fries and has to be completely restored. This is just one possible problem that sysadmins must address with their backup strategy. Sometimes a user will need to restore an older version of a file from a week or month ago – this is more of a backup function than disaster recovery, and tapes can cover this as well. The two big drawbacks of traditional tape backups are:

Effort to maintain: Rotating tapes is a daily operation that must be done, and tapes must be managed, protected, and retired.

Offsite storage problems: It takes more effort to store recent tapes offsite to cover any really big disasters that might destroy on-site tapes.

Both of these problems are human nature problems to me. In my experience, most people with smallish networks aren’t able to keep up the effort day in and day out to manage a tape based backup system. Certainly in big organizations with real IT departments this isn’t an issue, but I mostly deal with networks that are smaller than 50 computers (and the vast majority of the LANs out there are small ones).

Human friendly backup plans

I’m just as lazy as anyone else. I don’t want to be dealing with tapes even an hour out of my week. To me the best backup solutions are fully automated and offsite for good measure. Unfortunately there have been few to no effective solutions for the small business in the past. This is why I like online backups so much. There are no physical tapes to mess with, the software can be checked remotely and alerts you with problems, and it’s even offsite should a meteorite hit your building. It even allows you to leverage your high-speed office Internet connection to work for you when you’re not using it. Heretofore online backup has been for the most part expensive, especially for anyone with significant data to back up. Enter Carbonite.

$50/year disaster recovery for all your data

In addition to being lazy, I’m cheap too. I have to admit that when looking around at the plethora of online backup solutions, the reason I tested Carbonite was the price. They say it’s $5/month, but in reality you have to buy a 1 or 2 year subscription, so really it’s $50/year. Very cheap compared to everything else I looked at. Their service is a disaster recovery more than a true backup plan, since it doesn’t take snapshots. Instead, it installs a client on your pc that allows you to select folders to back up (or select everything). It then encrypts and copies files to their server farm from your pc, at a rate of a few gigs per day (depending on your connection). Once the initial backup has been performed, it monitors the files in the backup plan and copies the changes to the server when it sees a change. I’ve found that it seems to wait a while after a file has been changed, but in general small changes are copied quite quickly.

It’s important to note that their service doesn’t take snapshots, so you can’t go back and restore last week’s spreadsheet. There is talk on their web site of adding this and other features soon, but there are no dates or specifics. It also won’t let you back up your Windows folder at all, so don’t expect to be able to restore Windows if it crashes. This is strictly a data backup, not a system state backup.

Ease of use

Since it’s targeted mostly to the home user, it’s quite easy to use. Simply right-click a folder to add it to the backup list, and there’s a system tray icon you can click for status or to start restores. I ran into some trouble when I tried to purchase the first time, getting a database error from their site. The next day I tried again and it worked fine. I did a test restore of about 15 gigs of data, and it took about 3 days. The data was a spot-on match, as expected.

The right tool for the right job

Just like any other piece of software, Carbonite is a good fit for certain situations, but not others. If you have a relational database like mysql, sql server or other databases that use multiple files, it’s best to use a database-friendly backup utility. This may be as simple as timed snapshots written to a directory that you can then backup with Carbonite. Since Carbonite is always synchronizing files, it would be very easy for the database files to not match when you needed to restore them. I wouldn’t recommend this if the prospect of a 3-day restore would be unacceptable, but it always comes down to cost vs benefits. A solution that could restore gigs of files in no time would be much more time and money intensive.

For the home user, I think it’s a home run (as long as you don’t need to backup/restore your Windows installation). For most small businesses, I think it’s a great part of a backup plan (but probably not all of it). As with any computer-related solution, each should be tailored to the specific needs of the company involved.

Why Google Won’t Be ‘Jumping the Shark’ Anytime Soon

David Norris — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:07:48 +0000

Search Dominance in Your Grandma’s Internet

For almost as long as I’ve been aware there was a Google, I’ve heard people foretelling its imminent demise. Historically this is a smart bet when it comes to search engines – Over the short lifetime of the World Wide Web, quite a few search engines have come and gone. A number of them – Webcrawler, Altavista, Lycos – were the kings of search in their heydey, only to end up losing market share, dwindling in search volume until someone bought them up. They now live out their technological lives on the sidelines, as ‘out to pasture’ as a company can be and still exist. So it’s not hard to see why man people think Google’s time has come. A many search for google jump shark returns almost a million pages – that’s a lot of tongue-wagging.

Well, I’ll just come out and say it. The naysayers are wrong. Google will be king of search for a long time to come, and here’s why:

Top 7 reasons Google will be king of search in 2016

The Internet isn’t dominated by nerds anymore.
Young, techie types who are enjoy new technology once filled the Internet like buffalos on a 1700’s Midwest prairie. Their influence is now diluted by the millions of users like my mother – less technical and more likely to to find what works and stick with it. These are users who will never try Firefox, or be very likely to change search engines. It used to be that as soon as a better search engine came along, all the nerds would switch en masse. Today if another engine came along that provided much more relevant results than Google, only nerds would quickly (or maybe ever) switch.

The best search results.
The bottom line is Google’s technology is at least a year or two ahead of MSN and Yahoo!. Their algorithms consistently deliver more relevant search results that are harder to spam (and to rank for). Their use of trustrank and other new concepts allow them more ways to spot dodgy techniques and to reward good, deserving sites.

Google is a media darling.
Journalists just love writing about Apple and Google, and rarely cast them in a negative light. Each company will continue to enjoy the effects for the foreseeable future, as long as they avoid the ‘evil’ reputation that Microsoft has gained.

The power of the grid.
Google’s massive server farm has unmatched capacity. It allows them to roll out services that no one else can, like free hosted web statistics and froogle, two services that site owners pay for with everyone else. In return, Google is gathering a vast storehouse of clickstream and user activity data, along with priceless branding. As more people are using Google’s services for email, maps, or digital picture management, it’s inevitable that they will at least try the search engine too.

Rapid adoption of new technology.
Google is quick to jump on new trends and to break new ground. They have already set up free wi-fi Internet service in their home town, and were quick to provide mobile phone search results. They invest in many projects and good ideas, many of which will be mediocre, but it only takes a few to be home runs for them all to pay off.

Employees’ 20% ‘personal projects’ time.
This is just a great idea for a technology company that employs so many smart folks. Simply giving them time to bounce ideas around and work on new and interesting projects can make for some amazingly good ideas. Even if the 20% plan never created a single money-making idea, just allowing smart people to pursue their own interests will go a long way for moral and employee retention.

Proper growth management.
Nothing is harder than for a company to go from a small to a medium sized business, then again to a large international corporate entity. Google has done both in a very small time frame, and done it very well. They have kept up their hiring standards and, from all outward appearances, been able to scale their company to nearly 7,000 employees in their short existence.

For me, the only way Google could lose its place would be for another search engine to beat them squarely in search relevance (something no other engine is even close to doing), and then somehow get the world to care enough to switch. Once most people are comfortable with something that works, especially with computers, they rarely re-evaluate it. This of course isn’t true for us nerdy types, which explains why Firefox usage grew so fast for a while until it plateau’d at 15-20%. I guess that’s the nerd population, and they are no longer the majority.

Customized Netsuite Site Launch: DNA Worldwide

David Norris — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 07:39:14 +0000

Details of a Netsuite Customization Project

One of the projects I’ve been working on lately has gone live, and I like to annouce these things when relevant. In particular, this project highlights a number of lesser-known Netsuite customizations and techniques that the do-it-yourselfer might find interesting.

DNA Worlwide: DNA and Paternity Testing

DNA Worldwide provides a number of DNA tests, including paternity and other forms of relation testing. They also offer a security register service, that will track your DNA and other personal information safely and provide a bracelet and ID card to facilitate fast communication in the event something bad happens to the wearer.

The Initial Project

As is true for many web sites, a number of people were involved each with their own responsibilities. Much of the branding, colors, overall design concepts and the like were already prepared when I was brought in. This can be good and bad, as it saves me work but can sometimes require reworking to fit within Netsuite’s framework (or other goals, like SEO and usability).

My responsibilities basically broke down to:

Helping them organize their content for optimal usability and SEO (information architecture)

Implementing the photoshop layouts provided by the designer

Setting up default items and information items to be used as templates

Finish implementation and improve the appearance of their custom kit registration process

Information Architecture

The first step we took was to build a site map in excel that would define how we built the site. Using the process I discuss in my guide to information architecture, we made a list of all the content that would be on the site (including near future content) and set about organizing it. Their particular situation was interesting, in that they have 3 brands and wanted to have 3 different domains under one umbrella. Unfortunately we can’t do that in Netsuite without web services, so we settled on a compromise. The extra domains would still exist, but would redirect to tabs on the new web site, which would all be under the one master domain. This way he could do offline advertising efforts geared towards these separate brands, but they would all end up in one place.

Implementing photoshop layouts

Working with the manager and graphics person, we took the initial layouts and made a few changes to better fit into the Netsuite framework. We settled on a look that would change slightly when a user was in different tabs, but would have enough consistency in the look that users wouldn’t be confused moving between sections. It’s actually really tough to build the HTML template to match an image, and then make sure it looks good in all major browsers. Once the first template was built, it was simple to modify it for the different colors and graphics in the various tabs.

Template setup & custom registration

Working within the Netsuite web themes system, I created example templates for items, articles and a site map that allowed them to quickly flesh out the site with data while maintaining a consistent look & feel. The custom kit registration process was initially set up by Netsuite’s services department, but it wasn’t quite ready to go. We picked up where they left off, and made it a workable system. Now with version 11 and Suitescript, I expect we will be able to customize it further and make it easier to use.

That’s about it for the initial project – now that the site’s live we’ll be focusing more on driving traffic and improving our SEO results, among other things.

Setting Up a Shortcut Icon in Netsuite - A Tutorial

David Norris — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:55:24 +0000

One of the more annoying features of Netsuite is the inability to get rid of their name & branding from a Netsuite-hosted e-commerce web site. The shortcut icon (that little graphic that shows up next to the site title when you create a bookmark)

Shortcut Icon

defaults to a Netsuite ‘N’ graphic. I’ll show you how to overwrite that with a custom icon. You will first need a 16×16 pixel graphic named favicon.ico. If you don’t know how to make one, here is a tutorial.

Two Ways to Skin a Cat

I’m not really sure why it’s important that there are so many options in the feline-skinning world, but I guess it’s nice to know. To create your custom icon, I recommend both (if possible).

By default, browsers will look for the shortcut icon in the root of a web site. So for my site, the favicon would be located here:

http://www.fourthwc.com/favicon.ico

If you have Netsuite 11, you can upload this image to the root of your file cabinet under web site hosting files > live. If not, just put it under web site hosting files > live > site.

Specifying the Favicon in a Meta Tag

If you uploaded your favicon to the root of your web site, it should show up most of the time. However, sometimes the user is on a Netsuite domain. Here is how to make sure your icon is always displayed. In the ‘additions to head’ field under setup web site > site templates, add the following line:

Note: Make sure to get the correct URL by editing the file in the file cabinet. It’s best to use the secure version as I have, so users won’t see a warning about insecure content when on secure pages.

That’s it! Pretty easy to do, and a nice touch to have (and less confusion for your users).