pelago

Wired reports on the shift in cycling toward the urban biker. It makes sense, considering the increases in gas prices, traffic, and the overall decline in health across america.

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2007/09/interbike_urbanbikers

From the article:

At Interbike 2007, the bicycle industry’s giant annual trade show, the shift toward the urban rider is loudly evident. Fancy road and mountain bikes are clearly no longer king of the roost — or road. It’s the scads of fixed-gear, town, single-speed and other urban bicycles that are drawing the crowds.

As a technical business we work with a lot of computer hardware, and we know that discarding our outdated equipment can wreak toxic havoc on the planet if we are not careful with how we do it. At Pelago, we try to find new homes for our hardware with local community organizations, but even then, we run into some small issues with software licensing and such. But nothing as troublesome as this guy in Berkeley, who is doing amazing things with his efforts to recycle discarded hardware and is having it thrown back in his face by the Department of Toxic Substance Control.

Living in California means living with increasing traffic congestion and diminishing air quality. As we grow and “progress”, these things just get worse. Paris has implemented a bike station program that has proven to be a success. Here are some ideas on how we can adopt a similar program and make our communities a better place for everyone.

For those of us fortunate enough to live on the left coast, bicycle commuting is an option for those wanting to do more for the planet and their own health. Here is a basic introduction to ditching two wheels and pedaling to work.

Surprisingly, for the first time today I needed to print to my local computer at home from a program at work over our VPN. After doing a little digging I found someone with the same problem at TechRepublic who recommended Printer Anywhere. I just installed it and it worked like a champ. In fact, you can print to any printer that has Printer Anywhere installed on both computers. A pretty cool little product.

Learn more or download Printer Anywhere here.

Just stumbled upon this CSS bugfix and thought I’d post my findings. I was trying to figure out why Firefox wouldn’t completely render page background-color on pages without scrollbars. For example:

Switching between different tabs would restore the background to its intended CSS value (#887D75), but nothing else seemed to work ( even tried <div class="clear"></div> at the bottom of the page ) until I tried this CSS:

body { position:absolute; top:0px; bottom:0px; left:0px; right:0px; }

We are utilizing S3 for a few of our customers here at Pelago and we are contemplating switching over to it for Intervals document support.

This mashable.com post covers a variety of uses and applications for S3. You really can do a lot of different things with it and more applications roll out every day. Utilizing 3rd party file storage helps level performance spikes and potential scaling problems if you happen to have a popular web application.

Here in Santa Barbara, a company named Right Scale is building a dashboard and tools to help manage the variety of Amazon Web Services that exist. This is definitely needed. When we used S3 for the first time the first question that our client asked was “where is the GUI so I can see my files”.

This video is a must see (no pun intended) for all who are interested in learning how to build 508 compliant code.

Yahoo! engineer Victor Tsaran introduces you to the fundamentals of the screen reader experience and to his own strategies for accessing web content via the screen-reader interface.

Victor Tsaran: An Introduction to Screen Readers

Today akamai, who some say serves up 17% of the net’s total traffic went down this afternoon (for us in the west coast at least).

Almost any website who uses its massive content serving network took forever to load… I made a few searches around and nothing came up. Google blogsearch only goes up to August 10th… and no major news agencies wrote on it so I’m guessing it may have been either regional or just a slight internet “hiccup”.

Today we issued this press release:

(CSRwire) SANTA BARBARA, CA- July 30, 2007- As of today, businesses across 37 countries have tracked a total of $10,574,054 worth of work performed in Intervals (www.myintervals.com), the popular web-based task and time management system built by Pelago (www.pelagodesign.com). This is the estimated value of the 97,490 hours that have been tracked to date by worldwide users, and is based on the actual hourly rates used by Intervals customers.

For companies that rely on hourly billing, the importance of properly keeping track of the time that a business spends on client work cannot be understated-simply put, tracked time translates into revenue, while time not tracked translates into potential financial loss. Intervals enables users not only to track time spent on client jobs, but also to measure the time spent on non-billable activities. Small businesses in particular tend to be overburdened and quickly max out their capacity; Intervals helps them make sure time and resources are being spent the right way, in real-time.

But time tracking is only the most visible and immediately measurable aspect of Intervals, which features web-based tools to help small businesses and creative services firms manage projects, track time, keep version histories of files and documents, run detailed reports, and prioritize ever growing task lists.

And for those wondering about the value of keeping track of their own time, the Intervals web site (www.myintervals.com) has a Lost Time Calculator that serves as an irrefutable reminder that time does equal money. You can punch in your own hourly rate and estimated hours lost per day per worker to see how much your lost time may be costing your business.

For more information about Intervals, please visit www.myintervals.com.

About Intervals
Created by Pelago, Intervals was originally designed to solve Pelago’s own struggles with tracking time, billing clients, and knowing where projects stood in real time. Targeted primarily to creative and communications services companies and small businesses, Intervals is a powerful tool for anyone who wishes to ease the daily stress of organizing and managing people, workflows, projects and time. Learn more about Intervals at www.myintervals.com.

About Pelago
Pelago is a Santa Barbara, California-based web design and web development firm founded in 2000. Pelago specializes in developing highly intuitive web sites and reliable web-based applications, and injecting them with solid business sense and functionality. Pelago clients include JD Power and Associates, Nexxus, Xplane, Network Hardware Resale, and TenetCare. Learn more about Pelago at www.pelagodesign.com.