There was a controversy storming over the way Microsoft proposed to handle standards compliance in their upcoming Internet Explorer 8. At first, MS released a screenshot that showed IE 8 rendering the Acid Test (a web standards compliance test). Everyone in the web development community was ecstatic. Finally, IE wouldn’t “break” the Internet! Then, it was revealed that a special trick was needed to render standards-compliant web pages correctly: a <meta> tag instructing IE 8 to follow standards. The community was in an uproar and most everyone (including me) agreed that it was wrong to have to specially code web sites to force IE 8 to do what it should be doing right in the first place. MS’s argument was that having IE 8 follow standards correctly would mean that dozens of corporate intranet web apps written specifically for IE 6+7’s quirky behavior would break, leaving their poor customers helpless. It seemed like business as usual at Microsoft. Today, however, the IE team announced that they are reversing their decision and that IE 8 will render sites following standards by default and that developers of IE 6-specific intranet applications can stick the <meta> tag in their apps to give IE 8 the proper handicap to render their apps correctly. Phew! Now, we just have to wait 10 years for IE 8 to be adopted on a wide scale and we can dump all of our IE6+7 hacks!

It’s official!  This last Saturday, I hopped over to Grand Rapids, got to the Apple Store as it opened, and made use of my MSU ID (good as gold!) to purchase a brand new MacBook Air.

I’ve moved on from a job cowboy coding (read: shoot from the hip, work alone) ASP.NET websites to a job working at an anti-spam software company using Ruby on Rails, Perl, and sendmail under an agile/eXtreme Programming methodology. It’s heavenly bliss! Definitely worth the hour drive to Ann Arbor each day.

It’s not very often that I get to seriously consider what my next Mac will be.  My 4.5 year old PowerBook is on its last leg with a broken display and dwindling performance.

One of the cool things with OS X’s address book is that with my old Sony Ericson phone, I could manage calls.  I would pair the phone with my Mac using address book (by pushing a little bluetooth icon).  Whenever someone called, their vcard and picture would pop up on my screen and I could choose to answer or ignore it.  Of course, I couldn’t talk through the Mac’s microphone/speakers, but it was nice when using headphones - I could still catch calls while the music was blasting.   It’s also interesting to note that under the bluetooth utility, it states the iPhone supports no bluetooth services whatsoever - no file syncing or address book syncing.  So, it’s really only for bluetooth headsets.  That’s pretty lame!

Last year I set up my old Athlon 850 as a MythTV (both front and back-end) box. With a PVR-150 and a PVR-250 installed, it was a passable DVR running Mythdora. During our transition to Michigan, it fell out of use. One day I tried to upgrade to MythTV .20 but the Mythdora installation that supported it did not allow me to use the older NVidia drivers and so it would freeze up when XOrg launched. When DataDirect started charging for channel listings. I gave up on the project completely. I put my PC into permanent retirement.