Microsoft still fights for Yahoo

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In the recent news one thing that should be noted, is that Microsoft after announcing that they do not want to buy Yahoo anymore, and that does not correspond their interest at all have announced that they are looking into forming an alliance with Yahoo. Is it me or does anyone here the world famous microsoft “3E tactics” — embrace, extend and extinguish ?

My point of view is that we do not need less sharks (big enterprises), but much more of them — more big fishes in the business, means more real concurrence and better products and prices. If someone wants less options, than more merges is your area. I hope that they will fail, as well as the Google will fail to do any kind of merge with Yahoo – i may like or dislike them, being a client of Yahoo for more then 10 years, but i want them to continue to be an important player on the scene. This way the internet will only get better.

Randy Pausch

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Randy Pausch is a well known professor at Carnegie Melon University, working on 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. This project is called Alice, and EA has already announced that they are helping with the creation of the third version of this project by giving the characters from their game “The Sims”.

Randy Pausch has pancreatic cancer and was given just a couple of months to live, and thats where he has shown a character by giving his “Last Lecture” to his students. In his last lecture he is talking about different subjects, but mostly about the time which is quite finite for all of us. I urge everyone to take a look at the videos on his page, they are quite emotional and inspiring, his “time management” lecture is an instant classic. You might disagree with some of the things that he is presenting, but it is quite a way of managing the time.

There has been a lot of things written about him, a number of television stations have made interviews and specials. He is quite an impressive person, he is doing all this public things at the moment as a way of leaving a message for his 3 kids. I feel that he is a very special person capable of inspiring those who are around him, and watching his videos leaves me quite an inspired for doing better things in this live

I have learned about him some time ago, and by now i have seen all the videos that i could find on the internet and i am waiting for his book, which should arrive next week.

Thanks to VOD webdesign learning team

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To all the people from the VOD human resources and reporting departments — thank you so much for your efforts and patience — you were the greatest students i have ever had. I hope, that in the passed weeks you have learned something useful, that will improve your webdesign skills and will bring some speed enhancements into your work efforts.
I am grateful to you, that i had the opportunity to spread the word about the web standards beyond the Dreamweaver means, and that i feel that i didn’t waste my or your time.
Thank you once again.

Safari 3.1

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This week, Apple has released much awaited and anticipated new version of their Safari web browser – 3.1, which brings quite a number of improvements to this already quite competitive browser.

Through the system of automatic upgrades for OS X Tiger and OS X Leopard, as well as through the Apple Update for Windows, everyone on those platforms can have their own copy of Safari 3.1. Interesting is that Apple actually distributing new Safari version through the ITunes for Windows – for OS X there is no need, because it is already pre-installed. It is quite unusual and may be even considered disturbing, but there is no doubt, that Apple is going to test and to push the limits of their money cow – ITunes.

Lets get back to the browser itself. Besides speed, and all the usual small stuff, there is a number of very delicious improvements, which are putting Safari in front of the other browsers are: HTML5 Client-site database storage(creating basically a real database at the client side with SQL commands), Downloadable fonts (think of supplying your special font to the site visitor – here is an article at “A List Apart” on this topic), CSS transforms and CSS animations (scale,rotate,translate,skew etc – from this one there can be some interesting animations, though one should be always careful with this one, otherwise we will end all blinking, scaling and flipping our heads), HTML 5 video and audio tags (no other descriptions are needed, i believe), SVG graphics inside IMG tags.

Not to forget, the most anticipated and awaited feature of Safari for web developers – “Web Inspector”. To enable it goto Safari Preferences, select “Advanced” tab and there enable “Show develop menu in menu bar” – and voilá, your have this feature enabled. It should remind you of Web Developer toolbar for firefox and its microsoft IE6/IE7 copy, though i might add an advice of exploring “Web Inspector”, there are some small delicious things, which will make your work easier. So – play the trumpets, we finally have a tool to work and develop websites on Safari – my deepest bow to its developers, cause it was right on time (being the late one, does not take away the sensation of happiness of web developers who can see their job getting a bit easier.)

Ah one more thing – the native “getElementsByClassName” javascript function just rocks!

I like the idea of putting to test new HTML and CSS standards, because all the standards in the world are dead, as long as they are not supported. One could only hope, that other browsers will follow with more complete support of the new HTML and CSS features. No words just thumbs up for “Web Inspector”.

1.0 released – be aware

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I am not quite an “early adapter”, according to the scheme of Seth Godin – i belong to the “early majority” (guys who get not state of the art technology, but when it is already being used by some innovators).

Looking at the first versions of anything i see so many troubles because software/product was not being properly tested and was rushed out in order to comply with the promised release dates/dead lines. My idea of any product is that 1.01 or 1.02 are the best place to start. I won’t install Vista SP1 until i see that it is really compatible with existing software/drivers and there are no more data losses, as well as only now i am considering upgrading to Leopard, after 2 patches have been released.

I think it was at User Friendly that i have seen quite funny cartoon some 5 years ago, about star trek ship not being able to shoot because of the beta software installed. Pity can’t find it in archives. =O(

Using the first release makes you a beta tester, and if i need something to work properly without troubles – i have no luxury of using a beta product. When i have time( time, what is it ?), i may take a look at a beta version (i check out new versions of GIMP and Inkscape on regular basis, because i can easily fall back to the final release/stable one). Being excited about a product that can easy your daily life can take you into beta testing (1.0 included).

p.s. take a look at one of Seth Godin books, for example Purple Cow to understand what i am talking about.

p.p.s. Joomla has recently launched Joomla 1.5, after many month of testing and developing, and a couple of days later appeared 1.5.1, the same situation happened with Drupal 6.0 (6.1 was in 2 weeks here) which once again prove, that first version is always a beta version.

IE8 beta

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A couple of days ago, Microsoft has launched open beta version of the Internet Explorer 8, also known as IE8. This should be quite an important release, which actually should have been IE7, because of the complete CSS 2.1 implementation, for which all webdesigners around the world have asked, screamed and cried for quite a number of years.

The final release of the IE8 be passing the ACID 2 test, which depending on the release time, may be even ahead of the Firefox. (Opera and Safari are already passing it for some time). Besides ACID 2 being just a synthetic test of the CSS 2.1 standard, it is quite an important mark as well – it at least tests some of the important functionalities of the Cascading Sheets and represents the dreams and wishes of a lot of webdesigners for years. I hope, that there will be an ACID 2.5 test, including some of the most complicated situations in CSS standard, especially those where the major browsers are still having problems. Such test would always be a motivation for browser developers to improve their respective products and for the rest of us mortals a simple comparison tool to see which one is making bigger effort in providing a higher quality product.

The most interesting thing about IE8 web standards compliance is that it won’t support standard compliance mode like IE7 by default. One will have to use much talked and contested “X-UA-Compatible” header. I do not like this idea at all – but i have no illusions that no scream of web developers community will make Redmond change its mind.

2 interesting technologies included in IE8 are those to combat Google: Activities (think embedded Google Maps,) and WebSlices( selecting a part of the web page for saving for later viewing – for years there are quite a number of plugins for Firefox allowing this functionality).

Activities will allow to check out the address on the webpage by selecting it and then viewing it on the maps (microsoft maps, of course), and also social services links like digg it, facebook share links, etc. There must be a number of plugins in the future to include your preferred social services. I hope it will eliminate all those useless social links on the pages in the nearest future. =O)

I am still testing IE8 beta and still not sure if i keep it for more time. What i am concerned at the moment is whether we will have a possibility to have 2 browsers at the same time on the same computer – we are about to have IE6, IE7 and IE8 active – i don’t remember seeing 3 Microsoft browsers being in statistics for quite a number of years… With the recent death of the Netscape browser it brings a lot of nostalgia to me. I do not think about having IE6 on Vista – it is impossible, but for argument’s sake i need to have IE7 and IE8 on Vista, cause i won’t buy another license for a virtual machine just to get 3 browsers working at the same time.

p.s. A lot of sites are broken, quite broken if i might add – some of mine are included. Also there are a lot of cases when text adjustment does weird things, and IE7 emulation is far from perfect – many cases text justification sometimes is quite weird, but i do understand that it is just a first beta.

Project in progress

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Besides launching today a page for a friend of mine, who gives explications of geography, i am working on a big project, which will be hopefully launched in March. It is a quite a big site for environmental community, written completely in Drupal with a big number of modules.

At the moment we are close to start beta testing and there are just several functionalities that are not quite optimized, that i am refining. Besides normal modules, there are some areas where online payment is going to be used, so it will be probably one of the biggest project based on Drupal that i have done untill now, so i am very excited about finishing this one. =O)