I’m certain they have the best of intentions and will not attempt to break the format, patent it, or split it into multiple incompatible varieties to confuse and muddy the marketplace while promoting their own new and improved version. And I’m certain that their implementation will be perfect and won’t do something completely stupid like mangling transparent PNGs or anything.
First, the interesting news from the Browser Wars II front: Chrome overtakes Safari as the #3 browser after Internet Explorer and Firefox. Pretty impressive given that it only hit public beta in September 2008. Of course, they are both WebKit browsers, so it’s a net win for standards compliance and open standards, regardless of whether they are third or fourth ranked.
But speaking of standards compliance, there’s also this depressing news: IE6 is still the number one browser version. Yes, IE8 will probably pass it next month, and Firefox 3.5 has passed IE7 in December, but seriously, IE6 will still be the #2 browser version? It was released in August 2001 and never had anything but partial standards compliance. It’s been the bane of web designers for years and there are campaigns to boycott IE6. In my own case, I made certain that my site didn’t look absolutely retched in IE6 but neither did I put a lot of effort into workarounds for IE6 or IE7. They’re not worth the trouble.
For my new job, one of the things I’ve had to ramp up on is XPath. Once you bend your head around the syntax, it can be pretty darn powerful. But it’s a chore to test a given XPath when you have to write it into your Selenium test, run it to get your dynamic AJAX-y results, and hope that it finds the correct element. After struggling with an XPath involving ‘preceding-sibling::input[1]‘, I went looking for a better way to write/test these and found the XPath Checker plugin (via here). My day improved dramatically. Now, if I had only remembered to have saved my timesheet before I restarted Firefox…
Echo base, we found ‘em!
Yes, it’s the infamous Tauntaun Sleeping Bag available from ThinkGeek!
Yes, I am a tremendous dork.
No posts for a month? What’s the deal? Long story short, I am now gainfully employed writing and executing browser-based regression tests for a company in Pittsburgh. I spent two weeks there for training & orientation and am now back home, telecommuting full-time. This plus the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays have kept me pretty busy.
More excuses about the lack of updates will arrive by RSS in about 4-6 weeks!
As seen on Gawker this morning: Mailing label fail! To me, this sums up everything that’s currently happening in the magazine industry. Using gimmicks in a desperate attempt to stem the losses of subscribers and advertisers but then getting gummed up (sorry) by old-media elements like mailing labels.
First, NASA debunks 2012 end of the world theories with calm, reasoned arguments like:
“Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012.”
And now The Discovery Channel shoots holes (sorry) into the theory that the Large Hadron Collider will create miniature black holes that will consume the Earth.
What a bummer. The Earth won’t be destroyed in a particularly cinematic fashion worthy of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich. That is, of course, unless they are lying to us while they set up their Himalayan arks or colonies on Mars for the rich and elite…
Esquire is getting some good press for their augmented reality issue. Personally, “augmented reality” to me means something William Gibson’s Virtual Light
Gimmicks are what the print world is about this month – just look at the Marge Simpson Playboy cover. For some bizarre reason the big media players are desperate to sell print copies even at the cost of the digital initiatives. I know of several magazine publishers, both large and small, who have cancelled their digital projects because “they just can’t deal with it right now.” Can’t deal with the very thing that could save their business, based on how it saved some of their early adopting competitors.
I wonder how long before the RIAA sues Libox out of existence. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t already been sued for the music and movie sharing capabilities. Otherwise, it seems like just an FTP server that uses software to manage the sync setups and a third party server to facilitate connections to get around the dynamic IP addresses most people have. Better than using something like Gnutella that shares it with the entire world, I guess.
This afternoon I was out for a walk and listening via my BlackBerry to the All Tech Considered segment on recharging personal electronics by walking when, lo and behold, my phone’s battery reaches the critical point where it automatically shuts off the transceivers. If only I had one of those new-fangled rechargers I could have heard the rest of the segment about new-fangled rechargers!
