Wow, Safari 4 includes built-in functionality extremely similar to a Firefox extension I use almost daily — Firebug. It’s accessible through Safari’s Developer menu, which is hidden by default. I wonder if technology like this being built into browsers will become the norm. I seem to recall that Mozilla had decided to strip the console or DOM inspector out of future versions of Firefox, but a couple minutes on Google and Wikipedia leave me with no evidence of this.
The conclusion here is that competition is good for the consumer, and developers aren’t often thought of as consumers. It’s also interesting that Safari, which lacks Firefox’s robust extension architecture, now has built-in functionality similar to my favorite Firefox extension. This reminds me of the progression of Mac OS (and perhaps Windows) — imitate popular third party applications, and include them with the OS. Think of iTunes: MP3 player, CD ripper, podcast manager. Many popular (free) third party applications have faded into obscurity because people don’t need them anymore.
Published on
January 26, 2009 in
Internet.
Well, I got laid off on Tuesday. January 6. It’s made it to the Internet at least twice. I worked at SpringWidgets, which was part of part of MySpace, or part of Fox Interactive Media. MySpace is part of FIM, but our place on the big corporate family tree varied at times. Our entire office of 13 people was shut down.
Additionally, sometime in the near future all of our servers are set to be shut down. So, the things I worked on over the last 22 months will either disappear completely or break. I suppose for my resume as much as anything else, I’ve decided to post some photos of my last big project at SpringWidgets: The SpringWidgets RSS Reader application is, at the time of this writing, still available on MySpace. Here are the screenshots I uploaded to Flickr.
Published on
December 12, 2008 in
The Site.
So I’m in the process of moving everything back to 1&1. I just wasn’t impressed with BlueHost.
I suppose technically you might have peeked at the obscure URL I used to make sure everything was up and running before I changed the nameservers for danpremo.com.
I moved my hosting to BlueHost.com. I got a good deal — $4.95 per month. It’s not a hard deal to get. Just Google bluehost $4.95 promo — I found it on the first (non-ad) result. Why did I move my hosting? I needed more tools but I didn’t want to pay more. In the next few days I should get my hands dirty with PEAR and PECL. Once I have a grip on those, Image Magick should fall into place, and then maybe I’ll have no choice but to implement a real site redesign. Hell, at that point I might even change the blog’s URL.
World affairs expert and author Fareed Zakaria said he thinks it would be best for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, if Gov. Sarah Palin bowed out as his vice presidential running mate. Zakaria says McCain did not put the country first in making his V.P. choice, and he says Palin is not qualified to lead the United States.
Update: Read the column on Fareed Zakaria’s website.
read more | digg story
Over a year ago, I wrote about a feature on the New York Times website. The feature works as follows: the reader double-clicks on a word, and a new window opens with a dictionary lookup of that word. I called it a killer feature.
Today I find that the same feature, powered by the same company (Answers.com) is present on CBSNews.com. Not bad.
Wednesday night I went to the Nine Inch Nails concert in Duluth, GA. I took Cat with me. I had fun. It was a good show. I took about sixty pictures with my iPhone, and put them on Flickr.
This is neat: DVD playback on the Nintendo Wii. Of course, it comes by means of homebrew, which in the case of the Wii, is much easier than it should be.
One thing I’ve noticed in the case of both setting up the Wii Homebrew channel and, now, DVD playback: Available instructions suck.
What I never found anywhere regarding the Homebrew Channel is that if the first Zelda save game freezes your console, reboot, launch the game, and try the second savegame.
Instructions for DVD playback are even more nebulous. The MPlayer provided alongside the DVD playback installer is very similar but not identical to the MPlayer provided in the Wii Pack Generator. I assume that the DVD playback installer works only in conjunction with this particular version of the MPlayer. In any event, both versions of the MPlayer are installed in my Homebrew Channel.
For that matter, why did I have to download two files, then execute one before executing the other? How about one file, one program?
The DVD player functionality, while certainly interesting, froze while I was watching Braveheart. The amount of polish on some of the Wii Homebrew software tells me there’s enthusiasm here, and that leaves me optimistic that the DVD player will receive bugfixes over time. Still, the Wii hardware is capable of only 480p output. It won’t be taking over DVD duties from my 1080p-capable Xbox 360. Ever.
I’ve been getting a 502 error on my Gmail account for almost four hours now:
Temporary Error (502)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.
I just got an email from them (sent to my Yahoo! account, as I specified in an error report/support request):
Hello,
Thank you for your report.
We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Anyone else having problems?
[Update 2008.08.07 11:16AM] When my alarm went off this morning I had access to my email. I went to bed last night around 1AM and it was still unavailable. So I was without Gmail for somewhere between 12 and 18.5 hours.
In other news, script.aculo.us becomes PoopyUrl.com. WTF? Here’s to discarding the first and/or best use of the most clever URL technique I know. I’m glad I stopped using del.icio.us four years ago.