Paul O’flaherty wants to run web apps from his desktop without having to launch the browser:

I’ll give a big hug to the first person to come up with a lightweight stand alone application that I can use to broadcast on services like UStream without having to fire up a resource hogging browser.

 

Paul, I’d suggest giving the open source Mozilla Labs project Prism (Windows) a try:

Prism … the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Using Prism is as easy as launching the program and typing in the URL to the application, giving it a name (see picture at top of post) and then double clicking the icon on your desktop like any other application.

To answer Paul’s second concern: memory consumption. Check out the windows task manager with Ustream.tv running through Prism vs. Firefox 2.0.0.12 with two windows and 17 open tabs.

 

For Mac users reading, check out a similar app called Fluid.

The Zecco UI and account screens continue to be unclear. I didn’t see anywhere in the trade section where these $4.50 trade commissions are being applied which prompted this post. In the account activity area it shows “principal amount” and then the “net amount” shows $4.50 less, so this must be where we are supposed to see the commission fees reflected (?). If you know of a better place to track the commissions than this, please reply in the comments.

How to locate the commission fees in Zecco
STEP 1. inside the Trading area choose “Account Records” along the left column.
STEP 2. choose “all activity” beneath the section.
STEP 3. select the “From Date” and “To Date” and click on “go” button in the account table cell.
STEP 4. you should see something like the snipped screenshot pictured above.

Why not just have a commission column that shows the amount charged for each buy/sell? Maybe Zecco will add that going forward. That would make more sense.

Recognizing a stock loss
As you can also see above, I just took my first stock loss trade at Zecco by selling Zarlink (ZL) which I bought 60 shares back on July 20 at $1.69 and sold today at a dismal $0.64/share. To add insult to injury, I paid my first $4.50 commission for the trade bringing the grand total of the loss to $66.90. Like buying a video game that is played once and shelved. Like filling up somebody else’s tank of gas.

I lost money.

Why did I take this loss instead of waiting for it (hopefully) to bounce back? I’d waited nearly six months already for ZL to do something besides go down and there is a looming threat of them being delisted. I’d rather suck up the loss and move onto something else. I turned right around and bought 6 shares of Shortel (SHOR) paying a second Zecco $4.50 commission. I already own SHOR shares through Sharebuilder (and paid $15.95 commission there, ouch!), so this adds to my holdings, only at a different online broker.

The impact of commissions in 2008 versus 2007
We’ve known the Zecco free ride on trades for those with balances under $2,500 was going to end in 2008 so this doesn’t come as a surprise.

I added a “fees” section to our stock competition Google Finance shared spreadsheet to reflect these $4.50 commissions per trade throughout the year. Even with the ZL loss and $9 in commissions, overall my stock competition portfolio is still +2.96%. I sold seven stocks in 2007 at a profit (GMO, BQI, ATAR, RSTO, MCZ, SIRI and SAPE) and 0 stocks at a loss, but I could (and time will tell if I should) have taken the ZL loss in 2007.

Of those stocks sold, 2 of 7 are currently showing higher than the amount sold: GMO which is at $11.50 and was sold at $8.05 and BQI which is at $4.19 and was sold at $3.67. On a percentage basis (5 of 7 = 71.4%), I’m happy to have sold when I did. This is a real world example of the uncertainty in the market that everybody is trying to time; buy low, sell high.

The last six months on the market have been rocky, so I’m not disappointed with the performance. If $4.50 commissions would have to have been paid on all of the 2007 trades, I’d be looking at an overall portfolio loss, so this will continue adding an additional wrinkle in 2008.

I covered some of this in my 2007 stock competition recap post, but at the time hadn’t done the following:

1. paid any commissions to Zecco
2. taken any losses on trades

Now I can clear both those off the table. Let’s hope #2 doesn’t happen very often in 2008. As I’m about to publish this, SHOR has lost 27 cents from what I paid for it already (dropping from $6.17 to $5.90). Argh, isn’t the stock market fun?

For the better part of 21 years I’ve been in either ownership or management. Something big I’ve learned along the way s when you have a problem or issue, it’s better to address the issue by asking questions versus making statements.

For example, let’s say you have a problem with dishes being broken on an evening shift and you’ve narrowed the list of possibilities down to one or two people that always work the evening shift in the dishroom.

Fear one on one
You could call the employees in the office one at a time and rant about how you don’t want any more dishes broken and how most of them are happening on their shift. For a first meeting on the subject this is ill-advised and seldom works. As the boss you become the bad guy and on the outside chance you are fingering the wrong person, you could demotivate a good worker.

Group shame
Holding a dishwasher meeting and telling every dishwasher that there are too many dishes being broken on the evening shift won’t matter to employees who work in the morning or afternoon. This strategy is too random. You’re hoping that the person(s) breaking too many dishes will hear the message, while being negative to the rest of the group. Don’t do this.

Group participation
If you hold a general meeting and want to bring up the subject of broken dishes then show the dishwashers numbers. Here is how many dishes we bought last quarter in the business, any guesses how much this cost? Then offer a prize of some sort for the answer closest. Make this is a regular theme at these meetings so that the dishwashers begin to understand the cost of each dish. I’ve had some success gluing each dish to a board in the dishroom above where the dishes come out and writing in green marker the cost of each dish.

Follow the leader
In every group of employees I’ve ever managed there is at least one leader, even if not designated with an official title. And sometimes the leader with the title isn’t the real leader. You could approach the leader of the evening dish crew and ask for their help: “we are noticing an increase in the amount of dishes being broken and would like your help in finding ways we can reduce the number of dishes broken. We’d like to pass along some of this savings to you. Would you be interested in this arrangement?”

What if the leader is the one breaking the dishes? S/he will be less likely to want to break into their bonus and the dish breakage in the evening will be less likely to happen. If the amount of dishes broken increases, you can return to the leader and have a different conversation that focuses on how the employee thinks the dish breakage should impact the dishroom: “since getting your help in this issue, even more dishes appear to be broken, what do you recommend we do to put this back on a positive track?”

The rat out
The situation you want to work toward is having the employees, peers, managing each other. When a dish breaks, you want the other dishwashers to put pressure on their co-workers, not you. But what if the leader(s) come back to you and finger specific dishwashers which are breaking dishes? Time to have a meeting with the leader and the employee and encourage the leader to ask questions. Let’s say the employee’s name is John: “Hi John, thanks for meeting with us. We’re having a problem with an unusual amount of dishes being broken in the dishroom. Do you have any ideas how we could improve the situation?”

As the manager, you’re there for support of the dishroom leader, encouraging, mentoring for how to deal positively with the problem. I’ve seen this situation turn negative where the leader fingers the one breaking the dishes and that allows you as the manager to step in and correct the leader, that it’s better to ask questions instead of use accusing statements (periods). It’s important that in advance you talk to the leader privately that you want the issue to be brought up using questions and not statements so if you do have to jump in, the leader isn’t demoralized.

Sometimes the person responsible will admit to you that they have some sort of problem breaking dishes. That’s when you’ve struck gold and can begin to work with them on improving the situation. You want the employee to admit they’ve made a mistake and seek guidance for how they can fix the problem. You can’t mold stone, but can work with putty.

Varying management styles based on individuals
Some employees won’t like or respond to the question approach. They’d rather have you call them into the office and lay the facts on the line. You can still do this in a way that asks questions: “You appear to be one of the people breaking more dishes than others, can you shed any light on how we can either change this perception or reality?”

People are different and to manage everybody with one style is flawed. Some people you can’t raise your voice at ever, other people won’t think you’re serious unless you raise your voice. One rule of thumb in effective management that doesn’t change is we all appreciate questions more than statements. So the next time you have to work through a problem with one or more employees remember to try and frame the initial process as a series of questions rather than statements.

Punitive actions, maybe
Eventually, and there should be a timeline in mind, you might have to move to a progressive punitive phase (write-up, termination), but first start with a discussion and try to fix things by Q&A and getting participation in the solution. Human beings respond better to being part of fixing things than being the subject of an inquisition or interrogation.

Applying this to your business
This doesn’t only work with dishwashers in a restaurant, it’s applicable to managing people in other industries. Let’s say you are the leader in a group of bloggers. I’m in one of them now. See if you can apply the leader among peers suggestions above to your group.

The tech space is boring me a bit lately, including CES which didn’t come out with anything that exciting from what I’ve seen so far, so I’m going to share some other tips. If you have some good tips to share about working with and managing other people, please leave them in the comments below and let’s discuss.

Been trying for the last couple days a few times unsuccessfully to get the most recent Wii system update and have been receiving error code 32002, as pictured below:

Testing connection inside the Wii options was successful but the system process would hang with only a small part of the progress bar. I kept telling myself to check this out on the web and finally got around to it today. Seems like changing the router’s wireless channel from the default of 1 to 11 was all that was necessary to fix the issue. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? Consult your wireless router admin area under basic wireless settings or similar for this setting.

Also been having a lot of trouble with Xbox Live over the holiday. Talk about crappy timing. Hope your holiday is going well, we’ll be ringing in a new year soon.

There are a few different ways to explore new music and artists.

You could listen to traditional radio, free, but ruined by too many commercials. Sirius and XM offer commercial free stations in many different genres but you’ll need a player and a monthly subscription ($$$). In the last few years there has been an explosion of online music sites like Pandora and last.fm which are good free options.

What if you already have a favorite artist and would simply like a list of related artists? Try entering in the artist into the Music Artist Cloud and a page will be returned with a tag cloud of similar artists and links to YouTube videos. Along the right you can see what a search for Quiet Riot returns.

There is the less technical way of talking to friends and family members. Yesterday was my sister in law’s 21st birthday and she wanted a CD by a group I hadn’t heard before called Living Syndication. We played it in the car as we spent the day taking her to all those got to be 21 sin places.

Today, I bought Living Syndication Aneurythm (affiliate) at Amazon MP3 for $8.99 which contains one of my new favorite songs: “Love Your Disease.”

Way down, you gotta live to breathe,
way down, you gotta love your disease

There is a short clip of them playing the song live below at YouTube.

Nice cowboy hat! My sis-in-law told me Living Syndication sounds a lot like the band Perfect Circle but the Music Artist Cloud oddly doesn’t recommend Perfect Circle. Sometimes it’s still best to go offline for related artist recommendations. I’m going to have to check out Perfect Circle too.

Do you eat enough fruit? I don’t. One of my favorite snack foods are those dehydrated granny smith apple chips. You can find them in the grocery store in bags like potato chips, but more healthy.

I decided it would be fun to make some myself. To do that, I learned that you need the following items:

- a Dehydrator (affiliate)

Nesco offers several different dehydrator wattages. The higher the wattage, the shorter the drying time. Wal-mart sells them too if you don’t want to go through somebody online like Amazon. Wal-mart is where we bought the one pictured in this post.

- knife
- some granny smith apples
- some oranges
- a can of pineapple juice (for pre-treating apples)
- zip lock bags or saran wrap
- (optional) sugar

The Nesco dehydrator we bought didn’t require any assembly. Simply open the box and remove the instruction manual and jerky spice bags. I’m not going to cover making jerky in this post, but that’s another common use for a dehydrator.

There are four trays that stack upon each other with the blower inserted at the top and down through a hole in the middle. Whatever you’re dehydrating — fruits, vegetables, flowers — is placed on these trays.

How to pre-treat apples
According to the instructions that came with the dehydrator, most fruits do not require pre-treatment, but ones that oxidize more should be pre-treated. Oxidation is what happens when sliced fruit turns brown.

Apples, pears, peaches and apricots have a longer shelf-life, are more appetizing and higher nutritional value when pre-treated. To pre-treat apples, once sliced immediately put in a holding solution of pineapple juice. Do not keep the apples in the solution longer than an hour. Slice the apples in half and then into 1/4″ or less slices, place them in the solution, wait a few minutes, and then lay out on the trays.

You can also squeeze a few orange or apples and use that juice for a pre-treatment solution. Tip: drink the juice when done pre-treating, it’s good for you.

Oranges
You can optionally peel the orange. Cut the ends off the orange to where there is a small amount of peel and mostly orange on the inside. Then cut the orange in half down the center and cut into 1/4″ or less thick slices and place them in a circular pattern around they trays.

If they are touching they will stick together when dried, so try to leave a tiny bit of space between them. You can mix the orange and apples on the trays.

Notice how the apples appear a bit brownish in the picture below? These were not pre-treated. I wanted to run a test batch that wasn’t pre-treated to see the difference in taste. There is a loss of flavor and vitamins A and C if not pre-treated.

As mentioned above, the dehydration process varies based on the wattage of the dehydrator as well as how full the load is on the trays. The instruction manual provides a range of 6-12 hours for apples and oranges to dehydrate. The first batch I tried took about 8 hours to fully dehydrate three of the four trays.

Optional: you can shake sugar over the fruit before drying. This will make them a bit sweeter. You can also add sugar afterwards. If you’ve ever had the apple chips in a bag, you’ll notice they are sugary. The oranges have enough flavor as is. I prefer the granny smith apples dehydrated to the oranges.

Once done remove the trays and either put on a plate and wrap with saran wrap to keep the air out or put in ziplock bags to store. You can also use tupperware. If any condensation appears on the lid then you didn’t dehydrate the fruit long enough.

Beyond dehydrated snack chips
You can do a lot more with a dehydrator besides fruit snacks like make your own leathery fruit roll-ups, beef jerky and vegetables. If you’re like me and don’t eat enough fruit and enjoy snack foods like potato chips, pretzels, consider dehydrating your own fruit and vegetable chips instead. A healthy alternative.

Got any other dehydrated foods you enjoy that we should try out?

Let’s embellish on some Quiet Riot: Bang your head. Web sites that will drive you mad!

Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.

The list scene is hot right now. Some days I think maybe that’s all we should do is just sit around and make lists. Would probably increase the traffic to this site tenfold. One interesting list I came across today was from PC World.

Noticeably missing from their 10 Biggest Web Annoyance list is something very annoying:

Unnecessarily spanning pages for articles — almost always to artificially increase page views — that could easily fit on one one page. It’s inconvenient and insults reader’s intelligence. Note that PC World’s list spans four pages instead of one. Shame on them. Why didn’t this make the top 10 aggravation list? Are there people out there who actually like having to click multiple times to read one article?

PC World’s list of 10 aggravations
With that said, let’s check out what is on their list and suggest some possible tips for how to combat aggravating site visitors and readers.

1. Dubious Privacy Policies. Aggravation factor: 69 percent. Privacy concerns continue to abound on the web. Do we need any more evidence that people visiting your site want to know what you’re doing with their information? If your site collects anything from people, what is the site doing with this information? Can they get it back out through an export function or non-crippled API?

How to avoid aggravating tip: Spend some time reading and going through and stripping the legalese in your privacy policy. Shorter is better. We need to do that with our privacy policy at Hmm. Short and straightforward privacy policies are better than long and convoluted.

2. Difficult Online Forms. Aggravation factor: 65 percent. I wonder how much we should thank spammers for this? The need to incorporate CAPTCHA or other less and more complicated techniques to trick the bots has added complexity to online forms. Also, with a growing desire to collect more information at some sites (see #1).

Tip: forms gotchas to avoid:

• illegible CAPTCHA. Offer quick refresh option like we have in the comments below using reCAPTCHA.
• forms with too short timeout. Ticketmaster, anyone? Not everybody is a speed typist.
• should allow entering in secure passwords. Why have a password field if one can’t enter in a secure password? This means allowing for password lengths as much as 12-24 characters, allowing symbols, upper and lowercase as well as digits. If your password doesn’t allow all of these or forces passwords smaller than 12 characters it is insecure.
• let us enter in valid emails with a + in them. A frequent gripe. It’s a handy Gmail filtering technique, although I picked up another one recently using a period in the email address (e.g h.m.m at gmail same as hmm at gmail).
• too many items on a single form. Unlike page spanning articles, I’d rather see page spanning for large forms. Let me go through the process in stages rather than show me a bunch of different things that are wrong.

3. Overcommercialization of the Web. Aggravation factor: 62 percent. I think with popup blockers in the mainstream we’re past that, but publishers and advertisers still have plenty of other annoyances to throw at us. I’m not a fan of those hover over text ads. They always seem to get in the way. The Flash overlays that run across the article you’re trying to read suck. And let’s not forget interstitials — those “skip to next page” full page ads.

Nice bit of honesty from PC World:

At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid.

Tip: Laser focus about where to put ads and instead of adding more advertising, add more content. Keep the content to ad ratio no less than 70% content to 30% advertising on each page. Shoot for 90% content to 10% ad or better. Your visitors will love you and bookmark. So will the search engines.

4. Need for Standards. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. From the publisher side, trying to design sites that look good in all the major browsers isn’t quite rocket science, but feels like that with all the competing formats. We experienced this recently trying to get the search box CSS in the header in Internet Explorer (thanks again to web designer reader, Mikull).

Tip: Use tools like browsershots.org to see how your website looks in different browsers and work with designers — or do it yourself — to get your site looking good on the most popular browsers. And don’t forget about mobile users.

5. Trolls in Forums. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. Free for all forums aren’t about Free Speech, they are about free abuse. I’m in the crowd that strongly believes in at least some moderation of public areas. I’ve yet to see any completely unmoderated area that hasn’t devolved into a spam, flame and troll infested swamp. Yes, some of the comments from the “anonymous cowards” are funny, but too much and they turn people off.

Tip: moderate public areas and employ policies that keep some level of civility.

6. Buying Event Tickets. Aggravation factor: 54 percent. A whole annoyance devoted to Ticketmaster ticket fee gouging? Guess I don’t buy enough event tickets through Ticketmaster to get upset by this one. I’m thinking there are bigger annoyances than this, although it’s interesting that Pearl Jam thinks TM has a monopoly.

Tip: I don’t have any tips for this one, do you? Use the comment section below to suggest how to get a better deal buying event tickets online.

7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn’t Help. Aggravation factor: 49 percent. This could have been classified better as ‘Unhelpful help.’ I’m not sure who started the whole knowledge base scene, but I cringe when I’m being sent to one of those for help. The more technology employed, the higher the level of possible compatibility problems, I get that, but our browsers and OS can stay caught up.

Tip: don’t send people to a knowledge base or customer support form for support. Try using live help, provide Skype or other IM options. Don’t staff those live support options with people who follow moronic scripts.

8. The Expense of E-Books. Aggravation factor: 41 percent. I wonder if the expense of eBooks (or is it E-books?) have hurt the medium as much as the fact that people don’t want to read books on a computer screen? There is a distraction factor associated with computers. Some people associate — perhaps rightfully so — that the computer is for work, not for pleasure. I’d argue against this perception that the computer can be used for work and pleasure. Work hard, play hard, but I understand those like my wife who would rather relax with an old-fashioned paperback book over an eBook any day of the week.

Tip: If you release an eBook version, make it half the cost of the paperback version, at least.

9. Disappointing Web Video - Aggravation factor: 38 percent. No, they’re not talking about Scoble’s seemingly endless raw footage … or are they? It’s criticism of not enough top shelf tier content. Projects like NBC’s Hulu might help which bring more of the shows we see on TV to the computer screen. The subpar resolution and bandwidth constraints are a real issue. I’d like to see more HD quality video being released over the web. People are shooting HD video but then compressing the hell out of it so that it looks like pixelated crap when shown on a larger monitor or TV screen.

Tip: Shoot and share more high quality video using sites like blip.tv (better quality videos than YouTube). Use the medium (edit, edit, edit!). Don’t waste people’s time.

10. Boring Virtual Worlds. Aggravation factor: 9 percent. Since being active in virtual worlds since December 2005, I’m convinced those who label virtual worlds “boring” just aren’t trying hard enough. Go spend some time and really, really try to have a good time in virtual worlds. There are tons of things happening covering thousands of different interests. To say virtual worlds are “boring” is a statement about one’s own ability and effort, not about virtual worlds. The 9% aggravated need to be more creative.

Tip: the group blog I’m part of, VTOReality, is having a Halloween Avatar Contest tonight at 6:36pm PST. Dress up as your favorite avatar, create one from scratch, buy one from one of the virtual stores, and stop on by. Maybe we’ll judge yours as the best and you’ll win some L$.

Parting thought on the importance of listening
Stop a minute and ask yourself how good a listener you really are? Lately I’ve been trying to increase my listening skills by getting much more involved with a few third party sites/services that focus on social networks. I hope if you enjoyed or disliked this post you’ll take a second and either rate it above and/or leave a comment. Give me something to listen to, good, bad or indifferent.

One of the complaints about Zune v1.0 was the lack of built-in podcasting support. That’s all going to change when v2.0 comes out next month. Head’s up podcasters, Rob Greenlee in his new position as Zune Podcast Programming Manager, just dropped this podcasting link nugget in my Skype: how to add 1-click podcasting subscription. Just use the format for your links:

zune://subscribe/?PodcastTitle=PodcastRSSFeedURL

Our Hmmcast Feedburner feed is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

So the Zune format link would be:
zune://subscribe/?Hmmcast=http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

I’ll be getting this added to the Hmmcast category page as soon as the Zune rollout begins. Thank you, Rob!

A person’s name isn’t something, it’s everything. Machines have a hard time understanding the emotional nuances of identity, human beings shouldn’t.

If you’re out there personally marketing a blog with your latest, greatest post, always be certain to get your contact’s name right. Double check, triple, quadruple if necessary. This extends to leaving comments on blogs and all other communication online. Step #1 to becoming an online “Rock Star” Ich.

Today’s early morning lesson in the Twilight Moan.

The site ClassicVanHalen.com shows how to save and print the classic Van Halen CD Covers which include: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down and 1984.

If you need the covers for the Van Hagar era, try albumart.org, or as I’m finding with my exhilarating and exhausting quest to get our entire CD collection ripped into MP3 with cover art, Google images and Amazon work well too.