...more recent posts
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been in the works for some time now. And there has been quite a bit of debate over it. I've been following along, of course, but it's just been too tedious to report on. The basic gist was that IE 8 makes great strides toward standard compliance. Yay. But you were only going to get the standards compliant version of IE 8 if you specifically requested standard compliant rendering in your web page - otherwise IE 8 would just render your HTML in the same slightly screwy way that IE 7 did. WTF? It's like reverse quirks mode.
Microsoft's position was that if they suddenly made IE 8 standard compliant then all those web pages specifically authored to work in IE 7 (or worse, 6) would suddenly break when viewed in IE 8. And they didn't want to "break the web." I guess I see their point, but I just wish they'd do it right so that everyone could eventually move on and stop having web design be such a complete mess.
And low and behold, today Microsoft announced they are reversing themselves, and IE 8 will now render in standard compliant mode by default. You can optionally request IE 7 mode if you want, but if not you get the new rendering engine. This is going to break a lot of pages but it is a very good thing for the web in general. Way to go Microsoft. Truly a great day.
Looks like Ray Ozzie is having a good impact up in Redmond.
Wow. Beautiful fully loaded Sony Ericsson phone (Xperia X1.) Too bad about the OS, but S/E can definitely design consumer electronics that don't suck.
Two undersea fibre optic cables were cut in the Mediterranean causing a bandwidth crisis in India and the Middle East. The cause has not been revealed.
Of course I have no idea what happened, but it's sort of hard not to wonder if maybe someone was installing some additional hardware onto those cables. Or maybe it was just a ships anchor. Or swamp gas.
Geotate adds GPS tagging to digital cameras (and other devices.) Very clever. And useful. I want this.
Microsoft made a $44.6 billion dollar offer for Yahoo. Why? That just makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it be better to put the money towards, I don't know, maybe developing a good product? I mean, instead of buying a company with, um, no good products? What a colossal waste of money. How would you even integrate two things that large?
CSS Gradient Text Effect. Simple and very clever. Pure CSS (plus png alpha hack for IE 6.) Who knew?
Macworld San Francisco keynote by Jobs in a few hours. Will he announce my new laptop? (MacBook Air? WTF?) Everyone at World Headquarters is on the edge of their seats. Stay tuned...
I've been working fairly steadily on client jobs, but in terms of finishing my big software project (what I've called Geneva here before,) I have been totally stuck. Since about early December. Haven't moved more than a few inches. And it's been getting me down a bit (which then adds to the stuckness, which then gets me down a bit more, which then....)
But yesterday I made some progress and then today I had a pretty big breakthrough. Or I found a shortcut, which I guess amounts to the same thing. It's not quite as elegant as the piece I couldn't implement, but I need to prioritize. I really have to fight the desire to just keep working on this thing forever (it's really fun for me to be in the middle of it.) I have to finish up, yet I've never been good at finishing up.
So I'm going to start telling myself that I will launch this thing on April 1. It's software, but it runs on my server and the product is something you use in your browser over the web. Basically, it builds websites (what else?) My target market is people who want to build websites, and know a little bit about HTML, but not all the other stuff you need to actually build a modern website.
Geneva is nothing revolutionary or world changing, but at the same time I don't know of anything exactly like it. Possibly because there is no market for such a service. But it at least has a shot of turning into something. Not sure I can really finish by April 1st, but I guess I can get something out the door by then. Polish can always come if there is any interest.
We'll see.
Graph of New Egg hard drive cost/GB. Updated hourly.
ZFS for OS X is now available. Doesn't boot yet but everything else is a go. Wow. If this actually works as it's described it is so amazingly cool I can't believe it.
I'm really curious how this will turn out. Usually when someone says "I'm going to to really rethink this problem and just start from scratch" it is not a good idea. Especially if the complexity of the project is high. And building a filesystem is just stupendously complex. So you'd think these guys would have a very high chance at failing. And yet maybe they did it?
Inside Baseball Apple bit: I wonder if there is an internal tension between the ZFS people and the Time Machine team. I'm sure Time Machine is some impressive work (seeing as it works on HFS,) but you pretty much get it all for free with ZFS!
Still, it's a lot of risk to move to a new filesystem. Even if everything goes perfect I'd be surprised if Apple moved to it before 2009. And maybe it won't ever make it (or maybe only on OS X Server.) You really have to test and be 200% sure.