...more recent posts
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.
List of common passwords that the Conficker worm tries as one method of spreading itself. Not sure these are scientifically the "most used" passwords, but it must be fairly representative since the Conficker worm does pretty well. If you have a password like these you need a new system. I recommend using the first letter of every word in a phrase you know well (like maybe a song lyric.) Take Me Home Country Roads would yield 'tmhcrttpib'. Not perfect (would be much better to have some letters and punctuation in there,) but very easy to remember and won't fall to a dictionary attack or something like the Conficker list.
What would you call something that was sort of like a blog, except the order of posts was author defined instead of being reverse chronological?
This comes up because I've made a little plug-in for my new software that lets you keep a FAQ. Each entry is a question and an answer, and the order of entries on the page can be rearranged by the author. But now it strikes me that a FAQ is just one particular use of this plug-in since I think there are probably lots of situations where this would be useful (in the sense that it's like a re-orderable blog where each entry has a title and the body of the post instead of the FAQ specific 'question' and 'answer' nomenclature.)
But what would the whole thing be called? Not terribly important, but I can't think of what to name it.
Xargs tutorial I need to look at some day.
(I make no claims that this blog is interesting to anyone else, as this post and almost all others show!)
The Golden Grid is another CSS framework (like the popular Blueprint and 960 grid.) I've yet to use one of these for anything, but I keep watching with hope. At this point my intuition is that these projects can save you a lot of time and headache, until you need to do something that a particular framework can't handle. And there's always some demand that breaks the grid. But I guess that's why I have a job so I shouldn't complain. Still, if I ever have time to update one of my personal project pages (like this one from the dark ages of the web) maybe I'll play around with one of these.
Some insane people have developed a text editor that runs in the browser. It uses javascript to draw everything into a canvas tag.
Bespin builds on this API to recreate a text editor from scratch. That’s right; rather than use the native facilities of every modern operating system that give you word processing features for free, Bespin rolls them from scratch, including such basic constructs as a blinking cursor and text selection.I mean, seriously, that's insane. But if they could make it work well it would be really cool. It's a text editor, but the goal is to focus on code editing and to deliver not just a usable product, but something you might choose over your current desktop code editor. It's like javascript's coming of age party in the sense that programmers are somehow magically drawn to writing code editors in whatever their language of choice is - but no one has had that urge until now with javascript.
Runs in FireFox as well as WebKit and Chrome nightlies. Project home page.