Hallahan On Tech: Interactive resume, blog and portfolio by Christopher Hallahan

This semester in my Spring '09 Web Design and Programming I course, we were split into groups and had to design web sites for an organization of business of our choice.  Since many of my group members were current or former ResNet employees, we chose The Tech Spot (Kent State's new computer service center) as the web site we would design.  You can see more information, screenshots and the live site in my web site gallery.  Please note that this is a beta site and its content may not be accurate.

I acted as sort of the group leader/information architect in this project, which was a great experience.  Our talented programmers did the CGI/Form work and the VCD member of our group designed most of the templates.  It was great to look at a new site from an IA perspective and work with a talented group of programmers and designers to create a good user experience.  I am especially proud of the CSS-driven drop down menus, inspired by the Sons of Suckerfish CSS menu.

I'm proud to say the site uses fully compliant XHTML and CSS.  The original design was done in Photoshop.  Our group collaborated on content by using Dreamweaver CS4 and a WebDAV server so that we could check in and check out files without stepping on each other's toes.  The site also contains functions from the JQuery library and the CGI programs are written in Perl.  

As with any University site, we have to get marketing and departmental approval before the site can go live.  Unfortunately, less of our design may be used because it is going into the University's content management system.  Whether or not this site gets used, I think it's a great demonstration of my team's abilities and accomplishments.

I've been thinking a lot lately about security for the iPhone.  It's such an important part of my daily routine that it would be difficult to replace if it were lost or stolen.  Here are some tricks and utilities I've come across lately to give me greater peace of mind:

1. Create a wallpaper in Photoshop with your contact information placed on a layer.  I found this great Template (PSD) that has this already set up for you.  You can, of course, insert any wallpaper you'd like.  Thank you to whoever created this template.
2. Use the four-digit passcode.  You can find this under General --> Passcode Lock.  I've had this turned on for a while and set it to lock after 2 minutes.  There is also an option to completely wipe your iPhone after 10 invalid passcodes are entered.
3. Download Undercover for iPhone.  I've had this excellent program running on all of my Macs for years.  It will basically track your iPhone using the built-in GPS if it is stolen.  The downside--the program has to be opened for this to work and it cannot run in the background.  The folks at Orbicule say they are working with other application developers to improve this product.
4. Make a backup of your phone through iTunes at least every 2 weeks.  In case you do lose your phone, you can easily restore all of your information to another iPhone extremely easily.

There are lots of rumors out there that the iPhone 3.0 software (coming this summer) will include much better security, including remote wipe and built in GPS tracking via Mobile Me.  I'm looking forward to it, but this should hold me over until then.

Though I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner, USA Today reports that the popular DVR manufacturer TiVo will soon begin reporting anonymous viewing data.  The data will "offer stations, advertisers and program producers year-round, second-by-second information about the shows and commercials watched by people who have one of the company's DVRs."  Though this is a great use of the technology (Nielson has to use custom viewing meters in sampled households in order to track activity), I am certain it will be a wake up call to advertisers when they find hard data that their ads are simply being skipped most of the time.  This will result in decreased ad revenues for the networks, and begin a push for a radically different advertising structure (think lower-third ads during TV shows and more ad space directly in the TiVo software).  With some analysts expecting DVRs to penetrate around 37% of houses by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if our DVR "free ride" doesn't last much longer.

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