My Portal Project

Just some random statistics about volcanoes and how destructive they can be.

When Mount St Helens blew up in 1980, it exploded with the force of 500 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. The top 1300 feet of the mountain were blasted away, and when the side of the mountain collapsed, the dirt and rock traveled down the mountain at 150 miles per hour and was the largest landslide in recorded human history. The landslide moved enough dirt and rock to cover Manhattan Island to a depth of 400 feet, and 230 square miles of forest were leveled from the initial blast alone.

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File this into the cateogry of useless information that might come in handy some day. What is needed is a table with the latitude and longitude of every zip code. This information can be bought from numerous companies (google is your friend), but rumor has it that the census bureau, and/or the US Postal Service has this information for free, albeit a bit dated.

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The fundamentals of Portal usability seem to have gone unchanged in recent years, according to Jakob Nielson of the Nielson Norman Group. Back in 2002 NNg did an Intranet Portal usability study to pinpoint best practices and lessons learned in portal design. The report, which I HIGHLY recommend purchasing if you have anything to do with portal design, highlighted the best and worst of portal design and did an excellent job quantifying the effect of bad designs. Here is what Jakob says about the new findings, or lack of.

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…that most techies know the primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue, but artists know the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue? The reason why comes down to the differences of chemistry versus physiology.

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The uber-geekiness came through this weekend as I finally finished the two little geek projects that I have been trying to find time to do. First, the weather for Buffalo is now delivered to this page by my weather plugin, and second is the introduction of the Buffalo snow-meter. You may think it is a bit early for that, but in Buffalo, it is not uncommon for Halloween snow.

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Why would you want to do this? Why not? In my case, I just go tired of all the free services that provide this data going down for extended periods. That, and the uber-geeky desire to know how it was computed. I use this same code, translated to PHP, for my new Weather Plug-in that is a pure XML solution.

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…that there are 420,000 lines of code in the program that runs the space shuttle? This software never crashes, it never needs rebooting, and it is the closest thing to bug-free that humans could ever imagine.

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Fresh on the heals of his recent publishing of 2005’s top ten web design mistakes, Jakob Nielson has now put out the Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes. As usual, Jakob puts things into words better than I possibly could.

In a nutshell, the Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes are:

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My Netflix queue is now included on my sidebar for no apparent reason outside of the fact that I am a geek. I wish I could precede the word “geek” with other words like “1337″, or “uber” but I did not even write the code to grab the RSS feed. That was provided by Bill Rawlinson.

But I am rewriting the weather plugin since I do not like the one I have now. In addition, I am going to add some sort of auto-generated scale of how much snow Buffalo gets this winter. Since I am a transplant, I can say that these natives are just plain nuts living with 110 inches (2.75 meters) of snow every winter. We’ll see what we get this year. I hope the skiing is good.

…that one person holds the distinction for being the most destructive engineer of all time? He was not a weapons engineer, or a military man, but an engineer with a penchant for chemistry.

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