Options are good.

After installing OpenOffice and pinning a few of the apps to the top of the start menu I noticed there is an arrow next to each of the applications which shows recent documents opened by the program.

But after creating many documents, only one or two of these documents were shown.  While they were available in the recent documents of the file menu of the program itself, these documents were not showing in the Start Menu.  Irritating enough for me to look into it a bit more.

To get them showing up in the list you have to open the document through the file system, meaning you have to open it through Windows Explorer in order for the documents to appear in the start menu list.  Creating a new document and saving it from the application just doesn’t work to get it displayed here.

  A legend for the following table.

Free Options: Whether or not at least some of the conference calling features are free to use.
Max Conference size: From five active callers to a thousand.  What are your needs like?
Too free cost per minute, per attendee:  The providers that allow you the option of having a dedicated Toll Free 800 number will charge you a per minute fee for each caller.
Toll Free + PC Screen Sharing:  Some providers tack on additional prices per minute.  Some add flat rates per month or don’t charge at all.

Company	Free options?	Max Conf. Size	Toll free cost per minute, per attendee	Toll free + PC Screen sharing
FreeConference	Yes	150	$.10/min	+$9.00/month
AccuConference	No	Unlim. If over 50, pls call	$.079/min	$.099/min
FreeConferenceCall.com	Yes	96-1000	$.06/min	N/A
AT&T Conference Calls	No	N/A	$.085/min	$.12/min
Skype Conference Calls	Yes	5	N/A	N/A (screen sharing works only with other Skype users).
WebEx	Free trial period	25	$.33/min or $49/mo.	$.33/min or $49/mo.

Note: free conference calling by some services are paid for using traffic pumping (see wikipedia).

How do you know if a domain name is really available?

When you want to reserve a domain name, just typing it into the browser isn’t a good enough check to see if it is available.  Someone might have registered but didn’t set up any DNS or hosting for the domain.

To find out for sure if a domain name has been registered or not, you’ll need to visit a domain name registrar and do a search either through their registration process or through a whois lookup.

This is what returns for Niftygeek.com at Godaddy after doing a whois lookup.  I prefer to use the network solutions whois lookup but I used the godaddy whois lookup just for the heck of it.

I have to preface with a note that I registered this domain quite some time ago.  They send me notices every so often that the contact information has to be correct for the domain.  I didn’t do it correctly and I haven’t yet updated it.  I’ll should make that a priority to fix. [Note, I've since updated it to the correct contact information]

That said, here is the results from the whois query for niftygeek.com:

You don’t have to use the whois tool.  You can check if a domain is available simply by starting the domain purchasing process available on the home page of either Network Solutions or Godaddy.

As a side note, for more choices in price or different types of top level domains there is the complete list of Accredited Domain Name Registrars.  This is useful to have on hand when someone needs to register a .tel, .info, or .aero instead of a .com.  This will show you not only the list of registrars but when ones are allowed to let you register which top level domains (a top level domain means .com or .net or .org, etc…).

If you are registering a domain and you are not entirely sure what to choose, you could give domain tasting a shot.  Domain registrars are required to offer a five day grace period during which time you can get a full refund for the domain.  This is good to use for instance if you have ten options for your domain, but you would like to see if any traffic will naturally be going to one over the others.  The benefit should be clear there.  Free traffic!  Unfortunately, people abuse this to register thousands of sites at once to determine advertising viability to create useless websites.

An overview of DNS (short for Domain Name System) is a system for giving you different types of information on request about a domain name.

A request made to a DNS server about a domain name is called a DNS Query.  These requests happen any time someone sends an email or tries to load a web page.

As professor Sanford used to say (one of my B.C.C. College professors), people like names and computer like numbers.  People find names easier to remember.  Computers like numbers.  They’re easier to distinguish.

Any time you type a domain name into your web browser, this translation between a name to a number happens.  Your computer browser takes the domain name that has been entered and asks a DNS server where that web site is located.  DNS responds with a number.  A specific kind of number.  An ip address.

DNS does more than the name to number translation, but that’s a great starting point.

I type in yahoo.com and hit enter in my web browser –> Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari asks this computer’s DNS server for the IP address of that server –> The web browser makes a request to that IP address.

If all goes well, the web server is contacted by it’s IP address and responds with the page that I’ve requested.

Here is a typical browser request in a series of steps.

• You type in a domain name and press enter in your browser.
• Your computer checks a local hosts file to see if there is an IP address set for that domain name
• If not, it checks the DNS servers that your computer was assigned when it connected to the Internet.
• The DNS server checks its locally cached records to checks the DNS servers that are authoritative for that domain.
• An IP address is given back to your local computer.
• Your web browser sends the IP address, domain name, file requested, any post data, what browser you are using and a slew of other information at that IP address.
• If all goes well, the correct web page is returned to you by the web server at that IP address.

How many computers are involved in one web request?  Well, there’s your computer, the server with the web site on it, your ISP’s DNS server, the authoritative DNS server of the website.  If you take into account the number of servers it takes to keep all the records up to date for DNS, there are more, though I’m not sure how many.

Here is a youtube video describing and overview of a successful DNS request.  I think I could do better.  I’ll give that a try at some point.  Here it is for now.

The 960 Grid System

I started using the 960 Grid System a few months back and it really is a fun framework. There are only a couple of tricks to learning the format.

• Be sure you keep a link handy to the 960 grid demo (and using firebug to check out the classes of each of the entries isn’t a bad idea either when learning it).
• Understand that if you have a row of grids within a grid you need to specify the first and last of each row with classes of “alpha” and “omega”.  I had to generate some rows from a database and forgot this small piece of information.  The results weren’t pretty.  Neither was trying to add a border.
• Make sure you never specify a border for any of these grids – unless trying to stack free-standing basketballs sounds like a something you might enjoy.  Adding borders breaks the design.  I’m trying to be clever here if you didn’t notice.

Yahoo UI 2: Grid CSS

What an amazing piece of work. If you want to get a real feel for the power you have over the user interface with this framework check out the video located on the YUI2 grid css home page.

The video alone was enough to convince me that I will probably be using this grid framework for themes that I create for wordpress in the coming months.  A friend of mine also uses this framework as often as he can and swears by it.

I can’t wait to apply it to a project.

Which one is better?

If you’re planning on using open source blogs and CMSs, both are probably good to learn.

There are many themes for open source platforms available that already use the 960 grid system. Both drupal and wordpress have themes based off of 960 and the Yahoo UI seems like the best option for granular control when building themes from the ground up.

Of course, if you haven’t got a solid feel for CSS yet and your goal is to be a web expert it would benefit you greatly to check out the CSS basics first and mess about in firebug with other people’s CSS files to your heart’s delight.

I’ve made the switch.  Unfortunately due to a possible configuration issue with the server (or with blogger) I’m not able to automatically import the old posts.  This means the old comments will be gone as well.  I’m not that bummed about it, but my apologies to anyone who posted a comment that won’t be appearing in this new blog.