Jay Knight is writing that we might see Jabber in use inside the Gizmo VOIP client. I haven’t found the forum post he is referring to yet though… Has anyone else heard about Gizmo integration?
### Update @ 1429 ###
Here’s the direct link: http://forum.gizmoproject.com/viewtopic.php?t=211
Jay Knight - Jabber with Gizmo
(thx to Rytsarsky @ the Psi Forums for the tip)
(like me) See the slashdot story.
Ok, I’ve spent about 30 min driving IE7 beta 1 around. Did the Acid2 test and browsed through a whole lot of Quirksmode stuff. My conclusion?
It has tabs.
Woo hoo. As far as I can tell they haven’t fixed much with regards to standards compliance. It still fails the Complex Spiral demo for example. To be fair, it is fast. It has popup blocking.
But that’s not what I am interested in. I already have all that. I don’t need another browser, I’m happy with Firefox. What I do want is for the other 90% (and falling) of the world to not drive how the 10% of us idealistic designers create standards-based webpages.
On a related note, the Web Standards Project has an interesting article on the front page talking about their meetings with Microsoft.
Obligatory screenshot:
This is way off topic for me, but let’s consider this a public service announcement.
Please view exhibits A and B:
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Entirely by accident, I was able to enter Atlanta Airpoirt, the business airport in the world, with these two knives in my carry-on baggage. I walked through the security line, had my stuff X-rayed, took my shoes off like everyone else, then took my bag and got on the plane.
I did not even know they were in my bag until my return flight where the security people did do their job. They did the X-ray, then someone said, “I need a bag check”. A supervisor came over, checked the screen, and I was pulled aside. When the guard went through the bag by hand and found the knives I was all kinds of worried. For one, I didn’t want to get some strip search treatment, unless maybe the guard was kinda cute. But the main reason was that the Gerber Multi-tool was a Christmas present and I didn’t want to give it up!
It turned out the guard was cool though. He just walked me back out of the secured area back to the ticketing area. I was then able to check my bag with knives intact and everything was present and accounted for when I picked up my stuff at baggage claim. Big relief for several reasons since I don’t trust the baggage handlers. But that’s another story.
(For the record I use Exhibit B all the time, Exhibit A much less so.)
Alright. Got my new PC just gaaruuuuvin’ along here. I’ll detail that in another post. Been loading software on the Windows partition past few days and it came time to install or not to install MS Office. I get all Microsoft stuff for free/cheap from work, depending on the situation, so I’ve always had Office installed as a matter of course. I’m a long time user, abuser, tech supporter and trainer of Office, so its very natural for me to use that. However, since I am starting from scratch here, I thought I’d see what else is out there nowadays. And as my friends know, I am a right cheap bastard.
I’ve installed Openoffice 1.9 betasomethingorother. I’ve used it before and highly recommended it anyway, so this is a no brainer for me. I’m sure I’ll get along fine with that.
But one app not found in OoO is Personal Information Management. In other words, tasks and calendar events. I don’t even need an email client really, since I’m a gmailhead right now. Normally I would use Outlook for this.
I love Outlook. I have a quite unhealthy relationship going on with it actually. But in all fairness, it’s a bit slow to load when you toss in the plugins like I like to do. Plus if I’m gonna look past Word, Excel and the others, I might as well see what else passes for PIMs out there.
With that in mind, I am currently evaluating two open source programs: Sunbird, a Mozilla project, and Aethera
, a project from theKompany, the fine folks who have brought you many programs that contain the letter K.
Initial impressions: Sunbird, even at v0.2 is functional, snappy and seemingly bugfree. Some dialogs look awkward, but overall very nice. Its only a task list and a calendar, nothing else. Its written in in XUL just like Firefox and Thunderbird. Definitely some promise here.
Aethera is more complete. There are email, tasks, sticky notes, calendar and contacts features. It’s written in QT, which, like XUL is cross-platform and makes me happy. It also includes RSS reader and weather forecast plugins. It too is pretty snappy, but I don’t like the interface as much. However it has sticky notes of which I am a fan (like Outlook Notes). Another interesting bonus is that tK offers a commercial Jabber plugin for Aethera called tkJabberPro. I’m already a bit busy on the Jabber client space, but this is cool nonetheless and might be an important selling point for one of you guys.
Too early to tell, but I think Sunbird will win. Why? Because as an open source project with the positive mindshare and big marketing help from the Firefox project, I think it’ll soar and soon we’ll have tons of cool extensions like you have now with Firefox. What I will really want to see is some kind of Windows Mobile synchronization tool for use with my aforementioned iPAQ. I can dream anyway. I will add however that I believe that Aethera is scriptable and pluggable by the masses, which is A Good Thing ™.
You never know, another contender might come in to challenge the winner of this battle. Only time will tell who wins the war. Or–I might install Office. 
Got this comment from BartVB on this post:
I think that’s a really small IFRAME
Yeah, I know. When I first posted the entry, the styles on the <pre> tag caused the text to be really tiny, and it still bled off the right. I changed it so that the text would be larger, but of course now the browser window must be maximized to read everything which I hate. This is due in part because I almost never maximize a window and instead browse at about 900px wide. But another important reason is that I browse from my HP iPAQ h4150 PDA with a QVGA 320×240 screen.
So anyway, I decided to add scrolling to blockquotes. Instead of an IFRAME, I actually use a CSS2 property called overflow. My solution is obviously imperfect though. In this case, the preformatted block was taller than your typical browser window. This made horizontal scrolling extremely awkward since you would have to page down to reach the bar, then page up to see the end of the line, then repeat ad naseum. So I set a height on it. I played around with various values, settling on 5em or something like that. But this strategy is bad because well, its too short for a preformatted block and can be too tall for a short quote, like the one at the beginning of this entry. It clearly must be a different way.
That’s about the time when I lost interest in the problem. 
I just tried using max-height: 75%, but apparently Firefox doesn’t know that one yet. Wonder when they are going full CSS 2.1 compliant?
I am open to suggestions!
### update ###
Oh almost forgot! Kudos to the random reader whose name I have unfortunately forgotten for pointing out to me just how bad the original blockquote looked.
### update 2 ###
Sorry if you had some comments you submitted which went into limbo over the past few weeks. I accidentally had the ‘notify admin on comments that need moderation’ box unchecked. It’s fixed now.
In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor.
Google Moon - Lunar Landing Sites
Hehe, check out what happens if you zoom all the way in.
Check this out. Has a really pretty interface, and very useful too.
MediaMan Central: Product Overview
MediaMan let you create and organize your own media catalog for free. MediaMan is capable of managing all kinds of media in your collection, including books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, software and game titles.
thx Download Squad
Or, users versus developers. Here’s a long reply to an email thread on the flyspray-devel list where I explain my reasons for liking forums better. What do you think?
On 7/14/05, Mac Newbold wrote: > The model for mailing lists and forums are fundamentally different. A > mailing list is a push model, where someone sends something to the list > A forum, on the other hand is a pull model, where someone puts I think we have all come to a consensus on the topic, so I don't feel bad for going off topic.
Incidentally, the forum I have in mind when I cite these features is Unclassified Newsboard.