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Your goal may be to display a simple Website that introduces your company and products or services. Or you might be thinking about developing a fully functional ecommerce site. There are plenty of design options to meet your desires and needs. Here are 4 tips that will help you design a Website that meets your goals.

Sega’s recent announcement that it will be incorporating mind-reading technology from NeuroSky into some games prompts the question: Is the age of brain control upon us? Not quite — the tech needs work, but many companies plan to incorporate it into games and gadgets.

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Self-improvement site How to Wake Up Early has this tip that just might help. Set an alarm to tell you when to go to bed.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at the Google Blog
Here's a suggestion for everyone to save energy over the holidays (and at other times!): turn off your computer and monitor or put them into "sleep" mode when you're not using them.

Why? The typical desktop PC uses 100-200 watts even when it's idle. That's the equivalent of 1-2 bright incandescent (read: inefficient) light bulbs. (Note: new PCs that comply with the latest Energy Star specifications consume less than 50-60 watts when idle.)

You wouldn't leave your car running for hours when it's just sitting there. Most of us wouldn't leave a bright light bulb burning for hours when no one is nearby to need the light. So why leave your computer on?

If you're leaving your office for the holidays, turn off your PC. If it consumes 100 watts, that will save 2.4 kWh/day, or over 25 kWh for the next 11 days through January 1st. In California, that will stop about 40 kg of CO2 from being put into the air, and save about $2.50. For every 1 million people who do this, that will stop 40,000 tonnes (metric tons) of CO2 from being emitted, and save $2.5 million. In many areas, it will reduce emissions even further, and save even more money.

The same issue applies at home: turn off your computer or put it to sleep when you're not using it. The automatic power management settings on most computers will put them to sleep automatically after a specified idle period.

If you use a screensaver, set it to "blank" the screen and put the monitor in sleep mode after a few minutes. Screensavers don't have any benefit (other than being nice to look at) on modern displays, and they consume as much or more energy as just about anything else you could ask your computer to do.

You might be thinking, "why now?" This isn't just an issue for the holidays, but this is a good time to remind people. In general, when you're not using your computer, turn it off or put it to sleep. Most computers can go to sleep quickly, and then wake up with all your work exactly as it was when you put it to sleep -- so there's no downside.

If you want to do even more to save energy with your computers and to help the entire IT industry move to higher energy efficiency, check out the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which we co-founded last June to create a positive "virtuous circle" between the supply of and demand for energy-efficient computers. More than 140 companies, universities, governments, and nonprofits, along with thousands of individuals, have pledged to buy energy-efficient computers and to use automatic power management tools to save energy. As more people make the same commitments, the volume of energy-efficient computers sold will increase, and the very modest price premium they demand today should drop.

Have a great holiday season!

Dusting off the old camcorder to record this year’s edition of holiday bliss? Before you torture friends and family with another two-hour epic, let the MindBites production team offer 8 simple tips on How to Make a Rockin’ Holiday Video. [tags]educational,videography,video[/tags]

Fans of the excellent Python based web application framework Django will be happy to find out that Christmas has come early this year. Apress has just published The Django Book. Every good framework needs excellent documentation in order to break through. It’s a sign that the software has come into it’s own. Django is no exception.

The Django Book was published by Apress in December 2007. It covers the most current version of Django (as of this writing). It is available in hard copy from your favorite book seller on you can read it free online at the Django Book website. I’ve used this book in BETA form for the last four months. The final version exceeds the beta in quality and depth.

Technorati Tags: python, framework, django, documentation

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I just purchased a Mitsubishi DLP TV. I love the picture, but even more than the picture I love the warm blue glow of the power indicator that washes my room in high tech lighty goodness. Given that our power is not free, I got to wondering how much power my DLP screen consumes even when it isn’t on.

The good folks over at Good Magazine have created an excellent chart showing power consumption of vampire appliances. Appliances are considered vampires if they consume power even while off. According to a researcher at Cornell, vampire appliances costs US consumers $3 billion dollars a year or on average $200 per household.

Technorati Tags: environment, vampire, electronics

Interested in cutting down on your driving time? It’s easy. Avoid left turns. At least that’s what UPS is doing.

according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

Technorati Tags: economics, environment, software development

The Google Toolbar team has release a new version of the toolbar for Internet Explorer. This blog posting higlights some of the great new features.

[W]ith the latest version of Toolbar, you can save your settings online, and then get all of your bookmarks, custom buttons and AutoFill information from your different computers -- like when you're at home, or at work, or if you get a new computer for the holidays. It's kind of like carrying your Toolbar with you, but without the hassle of cardboard and string, and a lot more useful.

And, yes, there are some new reasons for you to carry your Toolbar with you, too.

You can accessorize with Google Gadgets: We first released custom buttons with search and feed functionality, and now we've added support for many Google Gadgets. In Toolbar, gadgets can even interact with the pages you're on, like with the Google Product Search gadget, you can just highlight the name of something you'd like to buy on any page and do a quick price comparison right there.

Google Notebook is built in: We realized that saving links as bookmarks to come back to is great, but not quite enough. So now you can collect text and images, too and put them into notebooks right from the Toolbar.

You'll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar "Did you mean" with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.

We still have the original Toolbar features, like automatic form filling, pop-up blocking and spelling correction, too, so give it a try and let us know what you think at http://toolbar.google.com/T5.

Django, the hot Python web application framework, provides an excellent administration user interface out of the box. Django originated in the newsroom and it’s reflected throughout the code. The idea behind including an admin interface is that reporters can work on easily submitting their content while the code jockeys work on the fun stuff - namely presenting that content to their readers.

The admin interface provides a great experience out of the box but is also extensible so you can add features not present in the original interface.

I was working on a Model that was meant to be manipulated inside the admin interface. I wanted to provide constraints on some Integers Fields in that that model in order to limit the range of possible entered values.

The first way I tried to solve this was to add a choices parameter for my IntegerFields. While this technique worked, it caused my admin interface to add a drop down box displaying my choices. This was not what I was looking for.

The final way I solved it came from a suggestion on the Django IRC channel. Use validators. It took some digging through the documentation but I figured out how to do what I want. I will explain by way of an example.

from django.core import validators
from django.db import models

range_validator = validators.NumberIsInRange(0,4)

class Test (models.Model):
    valid_int = models.IntegerField(null=True, blank=True, validator_list=[range_validator])

The validation framework is defined in the validators module. Import that if you need to perform any validation on your data.

Django includes a number of built-in validators. I lucked out and they had a validator that suited my purposes. The first step creates a validator instance of NumberIsInRange with the appropriate range. This returns a callable that I use later.

Model fields take a parameter of type validator_list which is a “list of extra validators to apply to the field. Each should be a callable that takes the parameters field_data, all_data and raises django.core.validators.ValidationError for errors. (See the validator docs.)”

A quick test in the admin interface and the code works.

The Django documentation contains everything you need to get the job done. Some careful searching and a great support community has helped make Django one of the best web frameworks available.

Technorati Tags: django, framework, tutorial