...more recent posts
Rumors that IBM might buy Sun. I'm generally skeptical about huge deals like this. But I definitely want the cool Sun technology - especially ZFS - to stick around and mature. And if that means IBM needs to buy them then I'm good with that.
2009 web safe font survey. Not sure about the validity of this but it's interesting. Franklin Gothic Medium?
I have a new blog at jim.datamantic.com where I am going to be blogging about Geneva. Probably not of interest unless you are trying to use the software. If you are there is a fairly long first post that might be helpful, although honestly I haven't even proof read it yet.
Open source perceptual hash library: pHash. Would this be interesting to run over a music library? Could it identify duplicate songs with different encodings?
Whew, that was hard. But just finished the much more robust image gallery system for Geneva. And this is what I've been waiting for to move forward with some other projects that involve uploading binary media files (although not necessarily images.) Damn that took me so long to figure out. Not the technical programming parts, but the conceptual aspects of how to make the data structure.
Holy cow, WebKit just implemented, per the HTML 5 specification, multiple attribute on file inputs (i.e. <input type="file" multiple>)
The Safari 4 beta has it already supposedly. Hallelujah! I cannot understand why this took 10 freakin' years.
That'll teach me. I just wasted 3 hours trying to fix a website that had been working perfectly. Turned out I linked to some jquery files stored at jqueryui.com (in the /latest/ directory) and they updated while I wasn't looking. I had meant to download the files and link to them locally, but in the rush of development I forgot about that. When they updated their ui plugin libraries everything stopped working with my older code. Arggg! Took forever for me to figure it out.
Cache locally Jim, cache locally!
Well it's March 4th, and time to march forth. In that spirit I am announcing the launch of Geneva, my web publishing platform.
Geneva will be in a not very restricted closed beta as I iron out some kinks, but large parts of it are definitely usable. Drop me a line if you'd like to try it out.
I've actually started writing end user documentation for Geneva. I've never gotten this far before.
The war on IE 6 heats up:
Several large websites in Norway have launched an advocacy campaign urging Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade their outdated web browsers.God I hope this catches on. Without going into the details let's just say that IE 6 is a huge problem for web developers and the world would be a much better place without it. I've been doing some traffic analysis on this site lately and the results are as follows:
Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site which is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its webpage for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.
Dozens of other sites, including the influential tech news website Digi.no, have joined the campaign, but have widened the playing field by suggesting either upgrading to IE 7 or switching to an alternative like Firefox, Safari or, of course, Norway's own Opera browser.
The drive is spreading to other countries.
FireFox is 46.48% of the traffic here, with Safari at 39.31% and all flavors of IE at 9.91%. Then Mozilla Compatible which could be a ton of different things at 3.25%, and everything else below 1% all the way down to PlayStation 3 at 0.03% (WTF?). The roughly 10% of IE users breaks down as follows: IE 7: 60.93%, IE 6: 38.25%, IE 8: 0.55%, and IE 5.01: 0.27%.
So that's about 4% overall on IE 6 (I won't even mention whoever is using 5.01!?!?) Not too bad. I think internet wide it's a little higher though. Most designers already ignore IE 5 (you just have to because that is really the worst software ever written,) but IE 6 is a toss up. If you're really going for a wide audience you can't piss off 5% - 10% of your potential market. If you're just doing a more vanity-ish site than probably you don't care too much. If we can just get IE 6 usage down another couple points we can all safely forget it.