Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • Tools of the Trade

    These are the Windows tools I use to make web sites, which in turn makes me money online.

    Notepad++ – If you’ve used Windows anytime in the last 25 years you know about Notepad, but don’t let the name fool you, Notepad++ is a notable improvement over Notepad, specifically for programmers. Now you might not think of yourself as a programmer, but if you’re editing HTML, CSS, or PHP you’ll find Notepad++’s code-identifying text color changes useful as well as the ability to have multiple tabs open at once (with split screen ability), and “just how you want it to act” tab spacing. It auto-indents code and can indent rows of code at once in highlighted sections. Another neat feature is the ability to search within files or folders for text, which I have used many times.
    Filezilla – The defacto standard for open-source FTP programs, Filezilla is what I use to upload files to my host. It’s not as secure as SSH secure shell, but it gets the job done for free. Filezilla’s site manager tool can save connection information, making it easy for you to manage different FTP accounts, but I tend to just use the quickconnect bar, which saves a history of your recently visited FTP sites. Individual view windows can be turned on or off in the view file menu and more customization is available in the settings menu.
    Firebug – A browser plug-in for developers that works best in Firebug, but has versions for Chrome and Internet Explorer too that don’t work as well. This program lets you highlight items inside the browsers view screen to find out information or to make temporary changes. These temporary changes allow you to preview the affects before you make the changes permanent. This is an excellent tool and a must-have for web site developers.
    Chrome – Contained within Chrome’s tools is a feature called “Chrome developer tools,” which works much like Firebug, but is built into Chrome. It allows you to browse elements on the page or make temporary changes. One nice feature is the Audit tab which lets you review things like network utilization and web page performance. A quick run of the audit tool will yield you advice (if you need it) on CSS, Javascript, cookies, and cache usage.
    Paint.Net – For advanced photo editing with layers, Paint.Net delivers as the strongest free comparison to Adobe Photoshop. It features several advanced adjustment tools including “Black and White,” “Curves,” and “Sepia.” There are also built-in effect tools ranging from artistic, to blurs, to distortion, which rival those of Photoshop. For a comparison with Paint.Net, try GIMP. Paint.Net, GIMP, and Photoshop all are made to edit raster graphics, which are like photographs and cannot scale up without losing resolution. Vector images, on the other hand, are like those used in animation and logos and use math to create lines. This allows them to scale up and down without losing resolution since its just a recalculation of the math. Vector images can only be edited with special programs like Inkscape, which is free, or Adobe Illustrator.
    Picasa – While its biggest feature is probably its photo management and gallery functions, the reason I’ve included it in this list is as a subsidy to Paint.Net and even Photoshop for specific picture editing. There are two views, “Library” and “Edit”. Inside the edit view there are three tabs, “Basic Tuning”, “Fixes,” and “Effects”. In Basic Tuning or Fixes I use the fill light command the most as I feel it does a better job than just adding brightness using Paint.Net or Photoshop. In Effects I use “Glow”, “Soft Focus”, and “Sepia” the most. Paint.Net also has a sepia effect. Use these or the “Collage” tool in the Library view to create neat pictures for your web site.
    Inkscape – A free alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is a fully baked open-source scalable vector image editing program. It takes some getting used to if you’re used to working with raster images in layers, but once you get the hang of manipulating objects and lines and knowing when to left-click and when to right-click, you’ll be able to make some decent iconography that might save you some money over buying stock images for your web sites. And just because it is open-sourced doesn’t mean it’s not supported. There is lots of documentation, tutorials, and online forums in a community willing to share and collaborate. If you already own Adobe Illustrator this is a fine tool and also comes highly recommended.

    If I’ve missed a Windows tool that you use, please mention it in the comments and for Apple and Linux users, feel free to add your comments as well to share with all.

  • 80′s Toy The Original Roller Racer Flying Turtle

    I have been searching for the name of this triangle-shaped, red seated toy that has a handlebar underneath that you move back and forth to go forward with, but because it existed prior to the Internet, I haven’t been able to find it – until now*.

    I was searching for things like, “80s racer red sit toy handbars”, “red sit scooter”, and “red triangle scooter”, but I couldn’t find anything. I knew it was red and sort of a triangular shape. It had handlebars that were attached to the front but curved around to the sides and you put your feet up on the front part of the handlebars while holding the grips that were off to the side. To make it go, you just had to wiggle the handlebar back and forth. I never owned one, but remember seeing the commercials on TV growing up. I later found out they were made by the Mason Corporation and named Roller Racers or Flying Turtles. I’ve also heard them referred to as The Rabbit.

    The Original Roller Racer

    It’s called a “Roller Racer” and Amazon defines it as a scooter. I suppose it is, but it’s not like any other stand-up scooter. You sit very close to the ground and instead of using your feet to push you forward, you have to move the handle bars back and forth, kind of like a snake.

    One Amazon commenter said it was good for preschool children with disabilities because even, “Kids with splints or whose legs are too short can ride with their feet on the T-bar connecting the handlebars and, again, enjoy a great ride.”

    According to Wikipedia, the Roller Racer was originally sold by WHAM-O brand name, but is now sold by the Mason Corporation and is available on Amazon.

    EDIT: I’ve recently setup a whole new website for these ride-on toy scooters with one post dedicated to Roller Racers and Flying Turtles.

    (more…)

  • Goals as a Function of Success

    As we head into the new year I have been thinking a lot about goals lately.  I was reminded of an old function I created once for the achievement of a goal.  If you are wanting to make money online, you are wanting to start a business (whether you think of it as a business or not).

    Think of the act of creating a business as a pre-defined function:

    goal + team + defined product + defined market + advertising = achievement of goal

    So, the goal is the beginning of the function and the achievement of that goal is the result. Without a goal, there is no function. The function is the business. Therefore, without a goal, there is no business.

    How to Define a Goal

    Dave Ramsey, a financial author and motivational speaker has five rules for goals:

    1. They must be specific
    2. They must be written down
    3. They must be measurable
    4. They must be time-sensitive
    5. They must be yours

    The first three are self-explanatory, but “time-sensitive” means setting an end-date. Diana Scharf Hunt, a motivational writer, is famous for saying, “Goals are dreams with deadlines,” but what does Dave mean by “yours”. I think it means that it has to be something you care about, something you are passionate about. Passion is key to the goal, which also means it is key to your business, according to the function.

    What are you passionate about? It’s okay to be passionate about making money. That is an okay reason to start a business. Even not-for-profits need to make money to survive. Those who are successful in business realize that they are not making money for money’s sake. They are tithing, providing other people with jobs, helping their local communities, providing for their family, all the things that come from making money.

    Lets say our goal is to make money and we want to go down the list, applying the rules:

    1. Be specific. How much money do we want to make? Money without time constraints is irrelevant so lets use the unit of a year. Lets say we want to make an additional $40,000 a year – on top of what we make now.

    2. Write it down. I’ve wrote it down in this post, but you should write it down on a piece of paper, in an email, or in an online collaborative space like Google Docs or Google Sites.

    3. Must be measurable. Track how much we make using Quickbooks Online or online through Google Docs spreadsheets. Income – Expenses = Profit or Assets – Liabilities = Owners Equity.

    4. Must be time-sensitive. Lets say the goal is to make an additional $40,000 by May 30.

    5. Must be yours. I came up with it, but you must make it your own.

    How to Build a Team

    This one is harder, but nothing easy is worthwhile so lets get at it. Any and all team members must buy into the goal. If they don’t then they shouldn’t be a team member. Because the function doesn’t work without the goal, we have to have team members focused on the goal. When the focus is on the goal, the team can work on the next part of the function, which is defining a product. Notice how the product was not thought of before the team was created. This is important and on purpose. Jim Collins in his book, “Good to Great,” tells the story of Hewlett and Packard, having their first meeting, “Agenda: Decide what products we are going to sell.” They had the right people with the same goal, to make a successful business. They ironed out the who before ever worrying about the what and how.

    How to Define a Product

    This one is harder still, but now you have a team to help. First, state the problem you are trying to solve. This is critical. What is wrong that you are trying to fix? What can you do better than anyone else? How can you differentiate your product or service from another company’s? Before you look under any rocks and start wasting your time Googling the universe for problems, look within yourself. What frustrates you? What needs changed? What have you complained about in the last week? What, if anything would you like help with? What would you like to know more about? I for one would like to know what people are searching for when they want to find things. That way, I’ll know what keywords to use in order to attract those searchers to my websites. It’s simple, understandable, and a definite problem for not just me, but every person who has a website. So for now, lets go with that. Our product (for this conversation) will be in offering information on what people are searching for in order to find their products. This seems like a product that might be able to help us achieve our goal and will give your business a reason for being.

    How to Define a Market

    A market is more than a geographical area or demographic of people, its also a category of product or service. Regardless, its the marketplace in which you think you’ll have the best opportunity to make a sale, which helps you with your primary goal, the goal without which your business would fail to function. Focus on the outcome, the goal. Realize how many sales at your products range of prices you’d have to make in order to reach your goal. For micro-niche and blog sites, use Google’s External Keyword Tool to see how much traffic a given set of keywords within a market is getting.  Use search volumes as well as existing competition (if someone is selling it, someone is making money on it) to determine whether or not the market is viable.  If you have a brick and mortar business, try a Craigslist or eBay auction of the product or service first as a prototype to test.

    How to Advertise

    Define what makes you different and/or better than your competition and hammer it home. Focus on your market and be an expert on your product. Don’t spend any money on advertising until you have exhausted all the free ways you can promote yourself online and through social interaction. If you feel you have exhausted all of your free advertising and you still have no sales, go back to “How to Define a Product” and think of a new product. This new product may then need to define a new market and then advertise again. Repeat until you reach your goal. As Winston Churchill said, Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

    If you liked this article, you might also like reading The Confidence-Success Loop.

  • Review of Wired 19.01

    Wired 19.01 (January 2011) has an article entitled “Y2K + 11: Will Asian Computers Freeze on January 1?” where Patrick Di Justo reveals how both China (including Taiwan) and North Korea may have Y2K11 problems due to both cultures resetting their calendars in 1912 to Year 1. 2011 is thereby the first three-digit year (100) and both countries use flavors of Linux that only allow two digits for the year. With the current tinderbox that exists between North and South Korea, you would think this would get more play in the media, but this is the first I had heard of it. Well done, WIRED.

    In the middle of the magazine is a section on aliens. There is an article by Mike Ryan called “Space Race” that talks about the three alien movies coming out in 2011. The first one is Battle: Los Angeles, the second is Paul, and the third is Cowboys & Aliens (check out all the trailers on our Facebook page). I see this as more preparedness for the upcoming disclosures about the ongoing UFO wars that the world has been engaged in for the last 80 years. Paul features a gray, which is the top-right one in the Ken Grimes picture on the “Alien Entities Who Have Been Seen Visiting Our Planet” picture in the section below.

    Rachel Somerstein wrote an article about Ken Grimes’ art being featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Outsider Art Fair, and New York’s Ricco/Maresca Gallery. Grimes uses art to display his ideas about extraterrestrial life and from what I can see, he’s done a pretty good job of identifying alien space ships and entities.  The picture on the left, just below “Cheshire Eng Jodrell Bank Lovell”, which refers to the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, which is ran by Lovell, features icons of alien space craft.  It covers the six standard crafts, some of which I mentioned on October 1, 2010.  The top hats (third from the left) have been seen in the northwest United States with the cigar-shaped craft (second from the right) being seen over Indiana.  The saucers (far right) were seen over Washington DC.  I wasn’t able to find much information out about Ken Grimes other than this article by Charles Russell.

  • An Introduction to Staffing Models

    Staffing Models is initially a two-step process of identifying the organizational mission, what metrics to track, and what processes there are. The next step is to find out how long it takes to do each task, how much volume they typically have, and then provide the tools to both track and report that information.

    Utilization Reports

    Utilization is a measure of how much work was accomplished with the hours spent. Tasks are determined to take an average amount of time, which is multiplied by task volume and divided by billed hours. The utilization report displays that information to evaluate and track the effectiveness of a department. Utilization is reflected in percent and optimal performance is considered to be between 90% and 100%.

    Excess Capacity

    Excess Capacity is the difference in time between what it should have taken to complete production and what we actually used to complete production. The white bar represents the time needed to complete the reported volume for each day and the red bar represents the excess capacity for that day in hours. Excess Capacity is a complementary metric to use in conjunction with Utilization to help management make staffing decisions in the future.

    Dashboard Views

    Executive dashboards provide an up-to-date snapshot of ongoing performance and trends. Dashboards should deliver clear, visual displays of a large set of data where performance is measured against expectations, goals, and deadlines. Production data is entered into the another tab within Excel for the appropriate date. The result is presented in final form on the “Report” tab, which is seen here to the left. This particular report uses micro-charts called sparklines and is designed to contain a rolling quarter year. This means the report will always have the previous two months data and the current months will be entered real-time at the bottom. Each rolling quarter is then archived for historical reporting at the end of each month.

    Wedding Clocks

    “Wedding Clocks” are a newly developed method for visually representing deadlines using special in-cell charts. In this example, the chart indicates the expectation for branches to have all batches transmitted by 6:30 PM, which is straight up and down on a clock. This chart points straight down (50% filled) at that goal and any result that varies from that (greater or lesser than 50% filled) is a reflection of meeting or exceeding that goal. Wedding Clocks are called this because Erich Stauffer noted that it is good luck to start a wedding at the bottom of the hour to catch the upswing of the second-hand. The range on both sides of 6:30 in this example is 3 hours (from 3:30 to 8:30).

  • Business Analyst Glossary of Terms

    Business Process Management (BPM)

    A field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of customers (internal or external). It is a gestalt view of management that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously.

    Business Requirement Specifications (BRS)

    A document that contains the basic requirements of customer that are to be developed as software project cost schedule target dates.

    Component

    Applications in the R/3 System are combinations of components. The components are held in a hierarchy, which can be displayed in the R/3 Reference Model, that describes the functional scope of the applications in a top-down fashion. The number of components and the number of levels an application has in the hierarchical structure depend on its functional scope.

    Enterprise Area

    Part of a business area. An enterprise area is a grouping of organization units that have closely linked work and contribute to discrete business processes. The Enterprise Area is the first level of the
    Process Flow View within the Business Navigator. Examples are Procurement, Logistics, Organization and Human Resources, and External Accounting. Also called Enterprise process area.

    Event-controlled process chain (EPC)

    A graphical display form used in the R/3 Reference Model to describe in detail the logical sequence of business functions and events carried out by the R/3 System. The EPC is the fourth level of the model and
    may be accessed by drilldown from the scenarios and processes.

    QDAR

    An acronym for “Question, Data set, Analysis, and Report / Revision”, which are the four primary steps to any business analysis.

    Requirements Analysis

    A document that determines the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users.

    Software Requirement Specification (SRS)

    A document detailing the functionality, interfaces, performance, attributes, and design constraints of a project.

    STAIR

    An acronym for a problem-solving strategy that “States the problem, Defines the Tools, Algorithm (procedure), Implement, and Revise,” which was developed by Andy Harris at IUPUI’s Computer Science department. These are are general steps that can be used to theoretically solve any problem.

    Structured Analysis (SA) / Structured Design (SD)

    Methods for analyzing and converting business requirements into specifications and ultimately, computer programs, hardware configurations and related manual procedures.

    Zero One or Infinity (ZOI)

    A rule is a rule of thumb in software code suggesting that arbitrary limits on the number of instances of a particular entity should not be allowed. Specifically, that an entity should either be forbidden entirely (zero), should be allowed once (one), or any number (infinity) should be allowed. Here are some examples of the zero or infinity rule.

  • The Zero One or Infinity (ZOI) Rule

    I learned something yesterday that I wanted to share really quick: there is no two in programming, but this can apply to troubleshooting and database design too.

    What this means is that there are units that either aren’t allowed to exist, are allowed (or supposed) to exist only once, and those that are allowed to have no limit – but there is no other kind, no other in between those types.

    For example, in Excel there can only be one name for a cell or range, but a near infinite amount of cells.  In Access there can only be one primary key, but a near infinite amount of entries.  In HTML there can only be one H1 tag, but many H2 tags.  In CSS, div id names must be only used once, but div classes can be used more than once (infinite).

    It’s called The Zero One or Infinity (ZOI) Rule.

  • Change Management

    Change control within is a formal process used to ensure that changes to a product or system are introduced in a controlled and coordinated manner. It reduces the possibility that unnecessary changes will be introduced to a system without forethought, introducing faults into the system or undoing changes made by other users of software. The goals of a change control procedure usually include minimal disruption to services, reduction in back-out activities, and cost-effective utilization of resources involved in implementing change. Change control is a major aspect of the broader discipline of change management.

    The following is an example of a change control process:

    Minimize Disruption

    • Work during off or down time.
    • Test changes first (if possible) and/or roll out to limited group first.
    • Notify users who will be affected and/or front-line staff.

    Reduce Any “Back-out” Time Activities

    • Create/save back-ups of any files changed.
    • Record what files are being changed any configuration changes to settings or within files.

    Efficient Utilization of Employees

    • Empower affected users and/or front-line staff to give feedback on any issues and/or improvements.
    • Have the most experienced person with the system make the changes.

    Review Process

    Before

    • Why is the change being made?
    • Is the change approved? By who?

    After

    • What was the effect? Was it the desired outcome or something different?
    • Do we need to roll back the changes?

    Report Process

    • What metrics to report?
    • Report to who?
    • How often to report?
    • Suggest or ask for needed or wanted changes.

  • Business Process Management

    Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously.

    A business process is “a collection of related, structured activities that produce a service or product that meet the needs of a client.” These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach, BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change.

    BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors – creating competitive advantage. Erich Stauffer practices business process management.