The wonderful open source browser Firefox made by the Mozilla Foundation has reached a fantastic milestone of 50 Million downloads since version 1.0 was released.
Onwards and upwards I say!
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Submarines And Suits
Whilst getting ready for work on Thursday morning, there was an atricle on the morning news show Sunrise about dress suits being back in fashion for work clothes. At the time, I passed it off as just another morning news article and attributed the content of the article to changing fashions this year.
They had a fellow on there saying that “casual Friday’s” are on the down turn and that the “casual” nature of the clothing reflects in staff performance. He also went on to say that, paraphrasing here, “you don’t want people coming to work in thongs and a singlet”. Now, you would assume that he is referring to the typical plugger thongs and a jacki how singlet from yester-year. The reality is though, that on the Gold Coast, the majority of females do in fact wear strapped shoes of some sort, a denim skirt and a singlet of some form. Does he infer that they shoudln’t be allowed to come to work in that attire, when that is what they are happy to be seen wearing in public, knowing full well females are always critical of what they wear?
Back to the submarines.
Tonight, I thought I would check back to some of my ‘not as frequently visited sites’. One such site was Paul Graham’s, of which I make a point of reading his excellent essays. Pauls latest essay entitled The Submarine is, in short about the role that Public Relations companies play in main stream news.
Once you read through the essay, which is dated this month, you’ll notice that he also talks about the phrase “The Suit is Back”. Given that, we are in the same month and Sunrise even had an “expert” in toe, you have to wonder whether or not this is in fact the work of the wonderful PR machines. The one thing that I don’t recall hearing in the article, was the name of any particular company that they were pitching for; in Pauls case that was The Men’s Wearhouse.
I thought Paul made some great comments about picking up PR in the news, this one in particular:
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he’s writing about this subject at all.
The mind begins to wonder.
IE7, Beta 1
Quite some time ago, Microsoft announced renewed interest in updating their flagship browser, Internet Explorer. It is a widely known fact that Internet Explorer has some serious deficiencies in terms of compliance with the web standards. The deficiencies I talk of, are a major pain in the arse for most web developers who choose to develop sites according to the web standards.
On Friday just passed, the IE7 team annouced some new features which will definitely be included in the next release of IE. In case you don’t feel like clicking the link, the couple that have been confirmed are:
- support for per pixel alpha channel filtering in PNG images (this can be used for transparency)
- addressing major inconsistency problems in the CSS engine, including fixes for the peekabo & guillotine bugs.
I really did have some serious reservations about what the new IE7 would come to the table with. To be honest, I thought it was going to be more of a security release with very minor improvements to the rendering engine. If this release ends up fixing some/most of the major issues that web developers face battling IE and the standards, it will be a glorious day.
Go Microsoft, I mean, go Team IE!
Did I just say that aloud?
Apple OS X Tiger & Safari 1.3
Apple have recently announced that the new version of OS X is about to be released, code named Tiger. Among some of the 200+ cool features being added into the system this time, the most significant one I have anything to do with (since I don’t own a Mac, however I recently purchased an iPod Mini), is Safari.
Safari 1.3 boasts a huge feature set, improved performance, thousands of bug fixes; the list is long.
This really is making the gap between every other browser and Internet Explorer more and more evident. Essentially, the top 5 browsers out side of IE now have full support for the standards; to me this is just a wonderful thing. In the near future, maybe we’ll be without CSS hacks for the other quality browsers and maybe, just maybe, it’ll push Microsoft to join the game.
D. Keith Robinson
During the week D. Keith Robinson mentioned he was taking his personal site Asterisk, in a new direction accompanied with a new design. He was going to wait for the CSS Reboot, however just had to get it out of his system.
The downside at the moment is his older content, which there was just gallons of, is now temporarily gone; the new location will be advised shortly no doubt.
I must say the new design is a fresh change for Keith and I think he should feel happy and liberated that the repeated patterns are now gone. I wasn’t adverse to them, however after a while it grew a little tiresome.
In my opinion, it is a simple and elegant new design; great job Keith.