From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 winning it the most downloads in 24 hours. What an amazing achievement, I’m glad I was able to be a part of it!
Check out the official release here and get your own personalized Download Day certificate.
I’ve been (not so) patiently waiting for FF3 for months, I remember reading with joyful glee about the ‘awesome bar’ and increased performance. I was right there when the Download Day was announced and I pledged to download Firefox 3 on all the computers I use on that day to assist in achieving a Guinness World Record.
And now, finally, the wait is over!
It was exciting to see people pledge in the millions but seeing that number multiplied several times over the 24 hours of Download Day was truly amazing! At the end of that 24 hours the download number ended up at over 8 million, it’ll be some time before we know for sure we made a record but I gotta say that seeing the world come together and make such a splash was awesome even if we don’t get it.
I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 both on my computer at work and at home and now, after a solid day of getting a feel for it, I’m ready to say that the wait was well worth it.
I think the additional security and performance alone would have been enough to make this a successful upgrade. Instead of firefox taking up 120,000 K with a few tabs open in Firefox 2, it now takes 70,000 K with Firefox 3. Believe me, I checked! After hearing from more than one source that performance was a big priority I wanted to be sure that’s what I was getting. Now, so far I haven’t noticed much of an increase in pageload speed but it’s only been a day and having a browser with almost half the footprint it used to is a great start.
I rely pretty heavily on all the plugins I have installed to get my work done. So needless to say having any of them unavailable would have been an inconvenience. My heart dropped when I upgraded and saw that the Firebug plugin I had installed was incompatible and disabled. Luckily the authors of all the plugins I used had released new, and some improved, versions of their plugins (including Firebug) compatible with Firefox 3.
I would like to thank all the people that work on the browser and all of the various plugins for their hard work and dedication. Sometimes I forget how lost I am without Firefox and my installed plugins and i’m positive i’m not the only one. I read that Firefox 3 has already broken past 4% in market share after just 24 hours, that’s truly a testament to their work and dedication. I’m hoping that the trend continues and Firefox becomes the leading web browser, it truly is at the top of the heap in every way.
After a long internal debate and a lot of work I’ve recoded this site from scratch to replace the WordPress engine I’ve been using since this blog started. There were three main reasons why I decided to do this, none of which were in any way related with dissatisfaction with WordPress. In fact, I’ve been thoroughly impressed at the quality of the WordPress system and it ends up being the first thing I recommend to people looking for a blog or an easy way to publish news on their site. "So what were the reasons?" you may ask, well allow me to explain!
Would you like some SPAM with that?The first big reason was the spam, oh dear God the spam! The comments table for this blog racked up over 32,000 comments and a grand total of 31 of those were actually legitimate. All I have to say is thank goodness Akismet is preinstalled, but even with that I still kept getting slammed with dozens of bogus comments a day. So I thought I’d add the reCAPTCHA captcha system to see if that’d help some. It did, but it was only successful at curbing the spam by half. Not great by any standards. So a custom solution was the best option, if no one knows what you’re running under the hood chances are they’re not going to (easily) know how to get around that system that’s in place.
I think I can, I think I can, I think I canI’m no stranger to large development projects, i’ve built a custom (albeit fairly simplified) CMS and even an eCommerce engine designed specifically for artwork prints, but I’ve never created a full blog system. So naturally I thought it’d be a cool side project to work on during my free time. I gotta say that as I was coding along I realized countless little things that I didn’t consider when I started but that’s how it usually goes isn’t it? All in all I think it turned out pretty well. Still a few things I need to work on but the majority of it is functional and (hopefully) rock solid.
One cog in the gearPerhaps the biggest reason I custom coded this is because I envision it eventually being a part of a bigger system of sites I have brewin in the ol’ noggin. Customization and reusability is a crucial aspect of my plans and what better way to go than to create the foundation myself from scratch. This way I know every digital inch of my site and will be able to integrate it infinitely better than I would a packaged solution.What sites you may ask? Well i’m not going to tell just yet, but rest assured it’s BIG!
So that’s it in a nutshell, just me tinkering away on my little corner of the web. Hopefully i’ll be able to get more and more added as time goes on, that’s the plan anyway.
I know it’s the ‘cool thing’ to do nowadays to rag on Microsoft and their new operating system Vista but is it really that bad? I recently bought a new computer that came with Vista Home Premium and although I have had a few issues here and there I’ve been pretty happy with it overall. I’m digging the Aero interface and added security and think it’s been running pretty smoothly. Sure it takes some extra ram to run but when I get a warning from my computer that it caught some spyware I think it’s well worth it.Maybe it’s the programmer in me that feels for them but it’s such an impossibly huge task to follow up the (i’m assuming) largest most used program ever with something even better. I don’t care how big the teams are that develop it, there’s bound to be mistakes, it’s how those mistakes are rectified that matters to me. So the next time you talk down Vista because it takes a few seconds longer to boot or something doesn’t run right, try to put yourself in their shoes and be a little more understanding, or switch back to XP or Linux. Either way quit blogging about it, I’m sick of reading about how disappointed/angry/frustrated people are with Vista when there’s no shortage of alternatives.
Have you ever seen something and thought "Wow, that’s going to change the future"? I can only remember feeling that way a couple times, one I can remember was when I heard about electric & hybrid cars. I was so amazed that I based a whole science project on it, ahhh those were the days.
Getting back on topic, I recently read an article about a relatively new company called 23 and Me. It’s a web based company that provides people with a way to map and understand their DNA. One of the most intriguing ways they do that is through what they call an Odds Calculator, it combines your genetic information, age and ethnicity to determine your risk for certain conditions such as diabetes and certain types of cancer. All in all it’s still a field in it’s infancy but I think this is a huge leap forward for individualized medicine. I can’t help but love their slogan ‘genetics just got personal.’ and their website is fantastic. It’s well organized and shares a lot of what you’ll get with their service in layman’s terms with some helpful graphics. But for $1000 a pop it’s a luxury that many can’t afford…yet.
This might be something very obvious to some people but I for one never took the time to look into it until I started working with Joomla 1.5. Their new system uses several .ini files for the language packs which is pretty cool if you ask me. It was because of this that I finally looked into editing different file types in Dreamweaver. It’s rather easy, go to Edit » Preferences (CTRL + U) and in the menu that pops up go to the ‘File Types / Editors‘ and add any file extensions to the end of the textbox ‘Open in code view:‘. So for example mine was…
.js .asa .css .cs .config .inc .txt .as .asc .asr .vb
and now it’s…
.js .asa .css .cs .config .inc .txt .as .asc .asr .vb .ini .htaccess
That’s it! You can add any other file types you want Dreamweaver to open from here too. No more notepad for htaccess edits!
Last week Microsoft placed a $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo and the reviews have obviously been mixed but one review, from Google nonetheless, is overwhelmingly negative. I can’t blame them though, I’m not feeling too great about it either, but to see such uncensored comments is both odd and somewhat refreshing. Unfortunately we’re all going to probably have to wait for a while to get a response from Yahoo, at least according to their press release on the subject.
I’ve been using the Joomla! Content Management System since before it was even called Joomla! back in the day when it was Mambo. It was the first and what ended up being the only Content Management System that I’ve used. So, it should go without saying that I was happy with it as a CMS solution. What I didn’t realize was that the Developer team had some high hopes and wild aspirations for a new release they call Joomla 1.5. The beta for this release has been around for months now while it was developed and bug-tested but I never used it because I usually need it for client websites and wanted the stability of a more mature release. So last week when I saw that it was finally released as a stable package I couldn’t wait to install and try it out.
I have to admit that I was amazed at how much it changed (all for the better trust me). I can totally tell that the whole thing was rewritten for ease of use and manageability, I’ve already coded 2 websites with the new version and it was a snap to get up and running. All the pages easily validate to XHTML standards. It’s a wonder to me why they’re calling it 1.5, with the wealth of changes and updates I would have called it at least 2.0. Gone are the days of two WYSIWYG editors per article, gone are the separate classifications of articles and static pages and best of all, gone are the days of needing endless add-ons and modifications to make it work the way you think it should. Two such modifications that come to mind, first is the Search Engine Friendly URLs, it’s completely built in now and better than any add-ons I’ve seen for the 1.0.x release. Second are the WYSIWYG editors I used to have to add, with the improved media manager there’s really no need for it anymore.
All in all I’d have to say that this has been a huge success for the Joomla! team, it’s an amazing achievement made even better. Joomla is definitely one of the best open source free applications I’ve had the pleasure of using. Go check it out if you haven’t already!
http://www.breakingbad.com/ - Awesome advertising website for the new AMC show Breaking Bad.
http://www.txeff.com/ - The best automated flash text effects I’ve ever seen.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ - A great site to test the speed of your webpages, gives graphs on what loads and how long it takes.
I wasn’t sure what to think about Sun acquiring MySQL but after reading this post by Kaj Arnö i’m feeling pretty good about the prospects. I didn’t know that Sun had a proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, that was a big part of what helped ease my mind. Java has been released under the GPL. So has the OpenSolaris operating system, Open Office / Star Office, the GlassFish application server and the NetBeans IDE tool. That’s a long impressive list of applications.
Finally, MySQL will still being managed by the same people, and their charter is still the same so there should be no anxiety about them changing directions with MySQL. I say good for them, it must feel great to get your hard work recognized like that. I’ve been using MySQL for years and it’s the only database system I use in daily development and I couldn’t be happier. I’m excited to see where this goes in the future, only time will tell.
A press release on the Sun website “Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL” explains the acquisition in more detail. 
It’s not too often that I find a good reason to make a site scroll exclusively horizontally rather than the easier and generally more accepted vertically but I’ve found myself in that situation recently and finding support on the subject was minimal at best so i felt it prudent to share what I’ve found to help those of you that need a horizontally scrolling site. Any searches I tried in Google were referencing how to get rid of the horizontal scroll, how to avoid the horizontal scrollbar and just how bad the horizontal scroller is in general.
That is until I found a website dedicated to it called The Horizontal Way. Not only is it a showcase of sites that have used the horizontal way of display, it’s also a fine example of a horizontal display in itself. Definitely worth a bookmark for that rare occasion when you want to go against the grain of web standards. 
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