ipconfig /flushdns in Windows

lookupd -flushcache on a MAC

After some research it had been determined that their FTP credentials had been compromised, and that a hacker in Russia had placed malware on their site for distribution. Sucks, but it happens and it needs to be fixed right away.

The first step is to close the door on the bad guys by changing all passwords for the site. FTP, control panel, CMS admin, etc.

Next, you have clean up the Malware. All of the site’s files need to be reviewed for anything out of the ordinary. Access the site via FTP or your webhost control panel’s file manager – with your NEW password of course – to review the “last modified” date and concentrate on anything changed recently or even after your last publish. In our case, there were a handful of HTML and PHP files that had embedded javascript pointing back to a .RU domain, and a couple of strangely-named new files that didn’t belong – all dated very recently. It was easy to strip the scripts back out and delete the bad files files.

Next, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and verify ownership of the site. (What – you don’t have a Google Webmaster Tools account? Well, get one – it’s free and provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google). There’s a couple of different ways to verify, but the easiest is to install the Webmaster Tools Verification plugin for WordPress and use the META tag method of verification. Other verification methods may fail for a WordPress site since WP takes any pages, code or tags you give it and wraps content from the theme you’ve selected around it.

Once verified, you can request a malware review under the diagnostics link. That’s just so Google can verify that the site is now clean. Within a couple of hours, you should be back in business.

Once you’ve given enough feedback you’ll start getting suggestions. But I have to ask – where’s the mobile app?

http://beerchooser.com/

You want to enable password prompting, but have no idea how it became disabled (let alone how to enable it)?

While Firefox password management can be found in one location, Internet Explorer is a little more obscure and is actually part of the AutoComplete feature.

The most likely cause of this being disabled is checking the box “Don’t offer to remember any more passwords”. Once checked, even if you answered Yes or No, IE will no longer prompt you to save passwords.

The other method of disabling, is actually where we’ll enable password prompting – by clicking Tools/Internet Options and selecting the Content tab then the Settings button next to AutoComplete.

To fix – just check “Ask me before saving passwords” and click OK. Next time you visit a web site that you need to login, you should see the prompt to save passwords.

(portions courtesy Watching The Net)

According to TriCities.com, Brian McCrary was a touch peeved when he got a speeding ticket in Bluff City, Tenn.

Such is the human need for self-righteousness that we often react in a wronged manner, even when we know that we were, in fact, speeding. Silently or not, we wonder why the cop couldn’t have pulled over an ugly car? You know, Subaru drivers.

McCrary was allegedly caught going 56 mph in a 45 zone–which, in the vast scheme of speed, is not exactly at Nascar levels. He was caught by one of Bluff City’s helpful speed cameras–one that happened to have issued 1,662 tickets in its first six weeks of standing guard over the populace.

McCrary happened to have some questions (other than, I think, “Why me?”), so he went to the police department’s Web site. Perhaps because he is a network designer, or perhaps because at least one of his eyes was fully functional, McCray noticed a notice. It was from those helpful customer service people at GoDaddy.com. It explained that the domain had expired and that it would be sold or deleted in a mere 42 days.

So McCrary was forced to weigh his civic-minded nature against his speed camera irritation. In an act of astounding patience and fortitude, McCrary made like a camera himself, watched and waited the 42 days, and then calmly put down $10 less than his fine in order to be the proud owner of bluffcitypd.com.

I know that you will wish to hurtle at excessive speed in order to see what the site looks like now. Well, McCrary decided to be truly civic-minded when he took hold of the site. He turned it into a fine repository of information about the Bluff City speed traps.

Beneath the cutest illustration of a police badgeman holding a wad of readies, McCrary wrote these impassioned words: “This site was originally set up to expose the speed trap in Bluff City, Tenn., where the speed limit, for no reason, changes from 55 to 45 on a four-lane divided highway. Only 200 yards away, a speed camera is waiting, sucking over a quarter million dollars a month out of the local economy.”

Go Daddy told Tri-Cities.com that it did try to contact the police department 5 and 12 days after the domain expired. This was after an unrequited correspondence of five e-mails before the expiration date. Perhaps the police were too busy working out where to put another speed camera–though the official version, given to TriCities.com by Bluff City Police Chief David Nelson, was, “it just slipped my mind.”

He added, with unhandcuffed honesty: “If you open up a Web site and let it go down, somebody can buy it–I did not know that.”

Strangely, the long arm of the law has not decided to go down for a second time upon McCrary–at least not yet. Nelson says the police department has taken its domain business elsewhere.

Perhaps, on its new site, the police department might have a live feed from the speed cameras. That might make for arresting viewing.

(courtesy AP, CNET)

Design guru Marissa Mayer confirmed that Google was ending the experiment early due to what she called a “bug,” which erased a link underneath the search bar on google.com that explained why Google’s famously spartan home page had taken on a colorful look. Apparently many searchers on Google.com Thursday morning missed the company’s blog post Wednesday night, and were confused and annoyed at the change, turning “remove google background” into the seventh-most-popular search on Google Thursday.

Last week Google announced that it would begin providing its users with the option of setting their own background image behind the home page, but last night it forced an image to appear for all users signed into a Google account to highlight the feature. That didn’t sit well with many grown used to Google’s clean white design, especially when Google’s explanation of why it was forcing this look vanished from the home page.

It also gave fans of Microsoft’s Bing search engine a chance to crow, given that one of Bing’s most noticeable features is a striking background image behind Bing.com that contains links to searches about the image.

(courtesy Cnet)

And you have the many social networking profiles to prove it.

Which brings us to My Name Is E, a new way to help corral and share your various online identities in one convenient place—namely, your phone.

Think of this as a Rolodex for your online self. You’ll log in to the site to register every place you currently have an account: Twitter, Facebook and even that old MySpace page you have floating around. Then you’ll organize them into “cards,” some of which will be for business associates, others for your more personal associates. (You don’t want to give a potential new client access to Facebook pictures of your Memorial Day barbecue, no matter how creative you were with the sauce.)

Then, when you’re out at a trade show, bar or bar trade show and someone asks for the best way to get in touch, you won’t have to rattle off a litany of identities, phone numbers and email addresses. Just break out your phone, log in to the My Name Is E site, select the appropriate card, and then the name of the person you want to share it with—and you’ll be automatically added to each other’s networks. If they’re not a member, you’ll just send them a quick email invite. Check it out at http://www.mynameise.com/.

(courtesy Urban Daddy Chicago)

Sometimes, you just want someone to hold you.

And while we’re not drawing any conclusions, it’s usually right after you’ve spent a good portion of your day on hold dealing with customer service.

But sometimes you’d settle for someone to hold for you.

Meet LucyPhone, who doesn’t mind handling the phone while you wait for a real-live, flesh-and-blood, oxygen-breathing human being to pick up. And apparently her thirst for elevator music is unquenchable.

Here’s how it works: before dialing your favorite 1-800- number directly from the phone, you’ll swing by Lucy’s website. You’ll enter the number, or find it on an exhaustive list of customer service numbers. (Basically, a little black book for masochists.)

Seconds later, you’ll get a call from Lucy, who has the company on the line. Type in whatever prompts get you to the hold music the fastest, but once it comes to the waiting part, you’ll just enter “**” and hang up. You can monitor the situation on your computer screen, or just go about your daily business. As soon as a customer service agent picks up, your phone will ring.

Go ahead, put them on hold. lucyphone.com

(courtesy UrbanDaddy.com)

Maybe it wasn’t Greece after all.

Thursday’s massive stock plunge was originally blamed on the fragile Greek economy — but a Chicago-based computer glitch may be the true culprit. Because machines now perform the task of transferring stocks — instead of floor traders matching buyers and sellers – the rate of exchange has increased the flow of buy and sell orders.

While speed and efficiency produces more commerce and activity, it may not always be such a good thing.

As the New York Times reports, it “also sometimes facilitates the kind of unexplained volatility that roiled markets Thursday.”

Simply put, there’s less time for human oversight and monitoring — if something bad happens.

“We have a market that responds in milliseconds, but the humans monitoring respond in minutes, and unfortunately billions of dollars of damage can occur in the meantime,” said James Angel, a professor of finance at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

The Times continues: “In recent years, what is known as high-frequency trading — rapid automated buying and selling — has taken off and now accounts for 50 to 75 percent of daily trading volume. At the same time, new electronic exchanges have taken over much of the volume that used to be handled by the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, more than 60 percent of trading in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange takes place on separate computerized exchanges.

“One official said they identified ‘a huge, anomalous, unexplained surge in selling, it looks like in Chicago,’ about 2:45 p.m. The source remained unknown, but that jolt apparently set off trading based on computer algorithms, which in turn rippled across indexes and spiraled out of control.”

Considering the technology is here to stay, the big question that lingers: Can such a massive plunge be prevented in the future?

While there are Stock Enchange safe guards in place that shut down trading if large drops occur, those measures rely on human observation. It would seem that we have to rely on technology even more — so those observations can be made within milliseconds, not minutes.

Can the SEC and Wall Street implement an even faster safe-guard mechanism to pounce on such glitches?

(courtesy Opposing Views)

Summary:

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

“It looks like a giant iPhone,” is the first thing users say when asked to test an iPad. (Their second comment? “Wow, it’s heavy.“)

But from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI.

Indeed, one finding from our study is that the tab bar at the bottom of the screen works much worse on iPad than on iPhone. On the small phone, users are likely to notice the muted icons at the bottom of the screen, even if their attention is on content in the middle of the screen. But the iPad’s much bigger screen means that users are typically directing their gaze far from the tab bar and they ignore (and forget) those buttons.

Another big difference between iPad and iPhone is that regular websites work reasonably well on the big tablet. In our iPhone usability studies, users strongly prefer using apps to going on the Web. It’s simply too painful to use most websites on the small screen. (Mobile-optimized sites alleviate this issue, but even they usually have worse usability than apps.)

The iPad’s bigger screen offers reasonable usability for regular Web pages. Of course, there’s still the “fat finger” problem common to all touch screens, which makes it hard for users to reliably hit small targets. The iPad has a read–tap asymmetry, where text big enough to be read is too small to touch. Thus, we definitely recommend large touch zones on any Web page hoping to attract many iPad users.

Also, most Web pages offer a rich and overstuffed experience compared to the iPad’s sparse and regulated environment; when an iPad app suddenly launches users onto the Web, the transition can be jarring.

For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contract, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.” The change to a more soothing user experience is certainly welcome, especially for a device that may turn out to be more of a leisure computer than a business computer. Still, beauty shouldn’t come at the cost of being able to actually use the apps to derive real benefits from their features and content.

First Studies

We conducted our initial usability studies of iPad apps and content a few weeks after Apple launched the device. We tested 7 users — all with at least 3 months’ iPhone experience — but only one was an “experienced” iPad user.
(This user had only a week’s experience — far less than the minimum of one year’s experience that we usually request of usability study participants.)

Obviously, the findings from this research are only preliminary. However, we’re releasing them anyway because the iPad platform is so different and is expected to attract considerable application development during the coming months. It would be a shame for all these apps to be designed without the benefit of the usability insights that do exist, despite the gaps in our current knowledge.

We tested the following applications and websites:

• ABC player
• Alice in Wonderland Lite
• AP News
• Art Authority
• BBC News
• Bloomberg
• craigsphone (Craigslist)
• eBay (both app and website)
• The Elements (physics courseware)
• Endless.com
• Epicurious
• ESPN Score Center
• ESPN.com
• Gap
• Gilt
• GQ magazine
• GWR Lite (Guinness World Records)
• iBook
• IMDb (Internet Movie Database)
• iverse Comics
• Kayak (kayak.com)
• Marvel Comics
• MLB.com (Major League Baseball)
• Nike.com
• Now Playing
• NPR (National Public Radio)
• The New York Times Editors’ Choice
• Popular Science
• Time Magazine
• USA Today
• virginamerica.com
• whitehouse.gov
• Wolfram Alpha
• Yahoo! Entertainment
• Whacky Interfaces

The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

Worse, there are often no perceived affordances for how various screen elements respond when touched. The prevailing aesthetic is very much that of flat images that fill the screen as if they were etched. There’s no lighting model or pseudo-dimensionality to indicate raised or lowered visual elements that call out to be activated.

In contrast, long-standing GUI design guidelines for desktop user designs dictate that buttons look raised (and thus pressable) and that scrollbars and other interactive elements are visually distinct from the content.

The traditional GUI separation between “church and state” — that is, between content and features or commands — has carried over to modern Web design. Those 1993-style image maps are long gone from any site that hopes to do business on the Internet.

The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven’t seen since the mid-1990s: Users don’t know where they can click.

For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don’t know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don’t even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we’re back to this square one.

Inconsistent Interaction Design

To exacerbate the problem, once they do figure out how something works, users can’t transfer their skills from one app to the next. Each application has a completely different UI for similar features.
In different apps, touching a picture could produce any of the following 5 results:

• Nothing happens
• Enlarging the picture
• Hyperlinking to a more detailed page about that item
• Flipping the image to reveal additional pictures in the same place (metaphorically, these new pictures are “on the back side” of the original picture)
• Popping up a set of navigation choices

The latter design was used by USA Today: Touching the newspaper’s logo brought up a navigation menu listing the various sections. This was probably the most unexpected interaction we tested, and not one user discovered it. Similarly, to continue reading once you hit the bottom of the screen might require any of 3 different gestures:

Scrolling down within a text field, while staying within the same page

For this gesture to work, you have to touch within the text field. However, text fields aren’t demarcated on the screen, so you have to guess what text is scrollable.

Swiping left (which can sometimes take you to the next article instead of showing more of the current article)

This gesture doesn’t work, however, if you happen to swipe within an area covered by an advertisement in The New York Times app

Swiping up

iPad UIs suffer under a triple threat that causes significant user confusion:

Low discoverability: The UI is mostly hidden within the etched-glass aesthetic without perceived affordances.
Low memorability: Gestures are inherently ephemeral and difficult to learn when they’re not employed consistently across apps; wider reliance on generic commands would help.
Accidental activation: This occurs when users touch things by mistake or make a gesture that unexpectedly initiates a feature.

When you combine these three usability problems, the resulting user experience is frequently one of not knowing what happened or how to replicate a certain action to achieve the same result again. Worse yet, people don’t know how to revert to the previous state because there’s no consistent undo feature to provide an escape hatch like the Web’s Back button.

Crushing Print Metaphor

Swiping for the next article is derived from a strong print metaphor in many content apps. In fact, this metaphor is so strong that you can’t even tap a headline on the “cover” page to jump to the corresponding article. The iPad offers no homepages, even though users strongly desired homepage-like features in our testing. (They also often wanted search, which was typically not provided.)
In electronic media, the linear concept of “next article” makes little sense. People would rather choose for themselves where to go, selecting from a menu of related offerings.

A strategic issue for iPad user experience design is whether to emphasize user empowerment or author authority. Early designs err on the side of being too restrictive. Using the Web has given people an appreciation for freedom and control, and they’re unlikely to happily revert to a linear experience.

Publishers hope that users will perceive content as more valuable if each publication is a stand-alone environment. Similarly, they hope for higher value-add if users spend more time with fewer publications rather than flit among a huge range of sites like they do on the Web.

Using the desktop Web, a user can easily visit 100 sites in a week, viewing only 1–3 pages on most of them. (For example, for one task in which B2B users visited 15 sites, they spent an average of 29 seconds per pageview.) Most sites are visited once-only, because users dredge them up in a search or stumble upon links from other sites or social media postings. Without real customer relationships, content sites have no value and 90% of the money created by users spending time online accrues to search engines.

The current design strategy of iPad apps definitely aims to create more immersive experiences, in the hope of inspiring deeper attachments to individual information sources. This cuts against the lesson of the Web, where diversity is strength and no site can hope to capture users’ sole attention. Frequent user movements among websites has driven the imperative to conform with interface conventions and to create designs that people can use without any learning (or even much looking around). The iPad could be different if people end up getting just get a few apps and sticking with them.

Card Sharks vs. Holy Scrollers

UI pioneer Jef Raskin once used the terms card sharks vs. holy scrollers to distinguish between two fundamentally different hypertext models:

Cards have a fixed-size presentation canvas. You can position your information within this two-dimensional space to your heart’s content (allowing for beautiful layouts), but you can’t make it any bigger. Users have to jump to a new card to get more info than will fit on a single card. HyperCard was the most famous example of this model.

Scrolls provide room for as much information as you want because the canvas can extend as far down as you please. Users have to jump less, but at the cost of less-fancy layout because the designer can’t control what users are seeing at any given time.

The Web is firmly in holy-scroller camp, particularly these days: users scroll a fair amount and sometimes view information far down long pages. Even mobile-phone apps often rely on scrolling to present more than will fit on their tiny screens.

In contrast, card sharks dominate the early iPad designs. There’s a bit of scrolling here and there, but most apps try to create a fixed layout for the pretty screen.

There’s no real reason we can’t have both design models: cards on the iPad and scrolls on the desktop (and phones somewhere in the middle). But it’s also possible that we’ll see more convergence and that the Web’s interaction style will prove so powerful that users will demand it on the iPad as well.

Toward a Better iPad User Experience

Even our limited initial user studies provide directions for making iPad designs more usable:
Add dimensionality and better define individual interactive areas to increase discoverability through perceived affordances of what users can do where.

To achieve these interactive benefits, loosen up the etched-glass aesthetic. Going beyond the flatland of iPad’s first-generation apps might create slightly less attractive screens, but designers can retain most of the good looks by making the GUI cues more subtle than the heavy-handed visuals used in the Macintosh-to-Windows-7 progression of GUI styles.

Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness. Better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on your content instead of wondering how to get it.
Support standard navigation, including a Back feature, search, clickable headlines, and a homepage for most apps.

Although our full report offers additional detailed advice, we obviously haven’t yet developed a full list of design guidelines.

One big question will remain unanswered for a year or so until we see how daily use of the iPad evolves: Will people use the iPad mainly for more immersive experiences than the desktop and mobile Webs? In other words, will people primarily settle on a few sources and dig into them intensively, rather than move rapidly between many sources and give each cursory attention?

Maybe people will begin to use the desktop Web for more goal-driven activities, such as researching new issues or performing directed tasks like shopping and managing their investments. And they might use the iPad for more leisurely activities, such as keeping up with the news (whether “real” news or social network updates) and consuming entertainment-oriented content. We don’t know yet. The answer to this question will determine how far iPad UIs have to move from their current wacky style.

(courtesy useit.com)