Monthly Archives: April 2005

Acid2 Test For Web Browsers

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The new Acid2 Browser Test is up over at the Web Standards Project (WaSP). I tried out the Acid2 test page in Safari, FireFox (OS X), IE, Opera (Win XP) and Firefox (Win XP), none of them looked like the reference redering, although some were definitely closer than others. The good news for Safari users is that Dave Hyatt is already working on fixing Acid2 problems in Safari. It would be nice to hear about active progress being made by the other browser vendors as well. Perhaps Scoble could get the IE Team to actually do something about this (crossing fingers).

What would we do if we didn’t have IE to kick around?

Scott Long Steps Down From The FreeBSD Core Team

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Scott Long announced today that he is stepping down from the FreeBSD Core Team. It sounds like he was just getting spread too thin, so by leaving the Core Team he can spend more time hacking on FreeBSD and dealing with release engineering. If this will make for a better FreeBSD and keep Scott happy then I think this is a wise decision.

While I’m here, thank you Scott for all your hard work on FreeBSD, I appreciate it.

Del.icio.us Gets Funding

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Om Malik notes that del.icio.us got funding for expansion and growth. This isn’t exactly news, the initial announcement last month mentioned that Joshua had taken on outside investment. What we didn’t know was who was doing the investing. Now we do:

Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members
are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein,
Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young.

We still don’t know how much the investment came to, but Om guesses between $2 and $3 million. My gut feeling is that it is unlikely to be any higher than that since Joshua still has the majority stake of del.icio.us. Then again, who knows :-)

I hope that we see positive results from this sooner rather than later. As much as I’d like to use del.icio.us there are still way too many unanswered/unresolved issues for me to commit all of my bookmarks to it. Until things get better my use of del.icio.us won’t be leaving the gee whiz level.

Bloglines Fixed, Sort Of

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The ongoing tale of my Bloglines problem has been fixed, sort of. It may be better described as a work around more than a fix. I simply deleted the feed that was having problems and then added it as a new feed. It has been working fine ever since. It seems strange that after two weeks they still can’t figure what the problem was. Even stranger still, why didn’t they suggest that I delete and re-add the feed?

Sony PSP, Can It Do VOIP?

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The latest gaming system from Sony, the PlayStation Portable (PSP) seems to be doing pretty well. I’ve seen a few reports about the sales not being as high as Sony hoped, but I still think it will do well, mostly because I see a lot of people talking about it. It will be interesting to see how it does during Christmas.

While I’ll probably never buy one, I did sit down and play with one for awhile. I was impressed with what I saw, being able to play music, movies and games is a nice combination. Then there is the built in WiFi and USB port, making the PSP a well rounded little device. I didn’t get a chance to try it out, but others have found a web browser for the PSP. In some ways I’m surprised that there isn’t an official, fully functional web browser for this thing, it’s got network access (WiFi). Once you get the thing on the web you’re pretty much set, email and such and just a web app away (how about Gmail having a “I’m on a PSP” button when logging in, or even automatically detecting that).

But I think this device can go even farther than that. After having it in my hands for five minutes and getting the feel of it an looking at all of the buttons and features, one thing came to mind: Voice Over IP (VOIP). It obviously had speakers, but after looking, it didn’t have a microphone. No problem, it has a USB port, go spend another $15 on a USB headset and that problem is solved (of course you’d have to get the PSP to support such a device, but that is a problem someone else will have to solve).

So VOIP on a PSP. Hmmmm, what would sort of software would you actually use to do such a thing? Then another idea came to mind, Skype. If you could port Skype to the PSP then you’d not only be able to VOIP with your PSP, you’d get all of the other things Skype can do. VOIP to VOIP calls, VOIP to POTS calls, conference calls, file transfers and chat. You’d be limited to where you could get WiFi access, but it’s a start. Or maybe Vonage could use the PSP to provide service to their phone network.

Then they’d just have to integrate PDA features (calendar, notes, addressbook, etc) and we’d be home free. Heck, if they did all that I’d buy one :-)

More Detail In Google Maps

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There is something strange about being able to see your house in a picture that was taken from a satellite. Now you can use satellite images in Google Maps. I like the way you can simply toggle between the two types of views.

I would like to request one more feature, a way to tell Google Maps that I’m riding a bike. This should do (at least) two things. One, it should eliminate any routes that would include the freeway. Two, it should include bike trails when determining a route between two places.

UPDATE 5 Apr 2005 @ 1:35pm: Forgot to mention that Google is putting faint copyright water marks in the satellite images, so don’t steal them and try to pass them off as your own :-)

WordPress Spam, PhotoMatt Responds

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Yesterday Matt wrote about discovering the backlash to the articles that were posted on wordpress.org. Today Matt responded to the noise about this issue. If you’ve been following this at all you need to go read his response.

After reading through his response I’m left with overall feeling that Matt meant well but is rather naive. It is entirely possible that this is an aspect of his age or experience and not his intelligence. It really is rather amazing though that someone who spent so much time and energy into supporting rel=”nofollow” could imagine that putting up all these articles would be acceptable. And the whole cloaked links thing, ug, at least he came out and said that was a bad thing.

I’m left feeling disappointed. Will I stop using WP because of it? No. Will I be a lot more skeptical of Matt’s ideas in the future, probably. Trust, it is not easy to gain and real pain when it is gone.

April Fools 2005

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Well, it’s another April Fools Day and this brings us a few odd balls:

Google Gulp: Google gets into the power drink business?

Gmail goes to 2gig of storage: This looks like it is for real, my Gmail account currently has more than 1400meg free. Don’t be surprised if Google tries to keep ahead of everyone else when it comes to storage.

And of course anything on Slashdot today is highly suspect :-)

Yahoo! Slacker: Using the power of Yahoo to make you even more lazy.