Did you know? - Watch this video; especially if you’re in any way involved in education. Please.
Thanks to Nathan for the link.
Well, after spending a day yesterday operating pretty much exclusively off of my phone/PDA, I’m ready to give my impressions of the Minimo browser from Mozilla, as well as the other options available (or at least that I have installed) on my device.
Minimo (currently at version 0.2) is a slimmed down version of the Firefox browser designed for use on mobile devices. It is pretty fully featured for such a small app, including good web standards support (probably the best in its class, of all the options I’ve seen) and javascript/AJAX support for those new fangled Web 2.0 apps. As far as features and standards compliance goes, it definitely beats out the other two browsers I have installed (Pocket IE and Opera Mini).
The downside is right now it’s noticeably slower than the other two choices as well, and as far as mobile browsers go, that is a deal breaker for me. Actually Opera Mini isn’t too quick either when compared to Internet Explorer, but that may vary depending on the JVM version it’s working off of, and I don’t really like the one I’ve got on there now. Internet Explorer is blazingly fast compared to the other two (perhaps because it doesn’t try to support as much stuff as the others, and/or because they have the development advantage of being made by the same company as the OS).
So, the bottom line is that I ended up still using IE for most things, just because it was faster. It handles most everything I need to use it for (primarily GMail, Google Reader, and various other sites / blogs), but I’ll keep the others installed in case I ever run across a site I need more substantial javascript support for. I’ll also try to keep up with the Minimo releases, since for various reasons I’d love to use it instead of IE, once it can match or beat it in speed.
Yesterday was her competition that she’s been training for for so long, and she did great.
After being immersed in it for a very long day yesterday, I have to say that the whole body building / figure competition culture is very strange to me, but I’m proud of her for putting that much hard work and discipline in towards achieving her goal. I don’t know of many other people who could stick to something that difficult for so long.
Good job babe!
And thanks Randy and Jacquie for watching the boys!
Well, the schedule is really getting packed so far for this summer. Luckily they’re all good things.
- Tomorrow: Martha’s competition
- Sunday: Friend’s wedding
- July 13-16: New York
- July 21-22: WordCamp @ San Francisco
- August 3-12: Oregon / Washington / Canada
Whew!
Well, in case anyone was wondering what I was talking about in my last post mentioning potential pitfalls, I was upgrading and consolidating my blogging software, something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time.
In case you were wondering, (which most of you probably weren’t) before last night the structure of my blog setup was a little weird. I have always run this blog on the standard version of WordPress, up until yesterday. Some time ago, (quite a while now) I also installed a very early (pre-1.0) version of WPMU. Martha’s blogs were in there, while mine remained in regular WordPress (after some tweaks to the WPMU code to allow for this configuration).
Now everything’s all together in one big happy installation. I also went from a way-too-old version of WPMU right up to the “bleeding edge”; I’m running straight out of SVN now.
I’ve still got most of the plugins to move over, and a major theme rehaul, but the bulk of the work is done and it’s quite a relief. This has been on the backburner of my GTD list forever, it seems.
You may notice some quirks here and there today.
Please let me know here if you see anything funny.
Carbon neutrality by end of 2007 - From the Google Blog
Climate change continues to be one of the biggest, most challenging problems our planet faces, and we know that a sustained global effort is needed if we’re going to have any hope of reversing its effects. In that spirit, today we’re announcing that Google will become carbon neutral by the end of 2007. This is an important step in our long-term pursuit of holistic environmental solutions.
Our plan to neutralize Google’s carbon footprint includes three basic strategies:
- reduce energy consumption by maximizing efficiency;
- invest in and use renewable energy sources; and
- purchase carbon offsets for the emissions that we can’t reduce directly.
To calculate our carbon footprint, we took into account emissions from purchased electricity, employee commuting, business travel, construction, and server manufacturing. In a partnership with the Environmental Resources Trust (ERT), we have independently verified this assessment, and will do so every year.
In order to meet our short-term goal of carbon neutrality, we have decided to purchase some carbon offsets. To be clear, we see carbon offsets not as a permanent solution but rather as a temporary tool which allows us to take full responsibility for our impact right away. By investing in projects elsewhere in the world that cut the overall amount of greenhouse gases, we can help reduce climate impact now while we develop more sustainable strategies for the future.
There’s certainly been a lot of coverage on Apple’s recent announcement of bringing Safari to Windows.
A lot of hype has been thrown around on both sides, but the most useful / interesting thing so far is the widespread discussion and analysis of the differences in font rendering between the Mac and Windows platforms.
I did just come across an interesting post from John Lilly of Mozilla, who (understandably) caught a particularly insidious detail that most people have overlooked so far in Steve’s presentation. Read the article in the link above, but here’s a short summary:
What’s wrong with the before / after pictures Steve presents?
If it was a simple mistake, it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t have been caught for such a high profile presentation, but obviously it’s even worse if that’s really how they’re hoping it goes.
Please don’t sell tickets for 12:01 AM on a listed date that are actually for 12:01 on the next day.
Thursday, June 14th, 2007 12:01am is not, in fact, “late Thu. night”, it’s early Thursday morning, directly following the late hours of Wednesday night.
Luckily, I caught that when I went to review the ticket just to double check. Going back and looking at it, it does give you a little warning before you make the purchase that says that they actually mean 12:01am on Friday, but it’s basically an all around stupid thing to do.
I can only imagine that they do it because apparently they think most of their customers are too dumb to realize what day 12:01am falls on, but rather than complicate matters by listing it as a different day than it actually is, why not put in big red letters “in case you don’t know how to tell time…”
Anyone up for a midnight show tonight?