Brian Fitzgerald

The sony bean player has been discontinued after only having been out for six months. I don't know if it just wasn't selling or if it's about to be replaced with something better. I really thought that the bean was a great looking player (it'd be better if sony wasn't locked on to their stupid music format). Many are going to point to this as another product that the iPod has killed (and I'm sure that's a factor) but Sony has long had a reputation for just throwing anything they can dream up out there and seeing what sells. When you do that, you're bound to have products that don't move. Sony also seems to be in the process of evaluating it's product lines to simplify them and create some cohesion between them. As in the case of any corporate merger/restructure, the bean may have been a fine "employee" that simply didn't have a place in the new lineup.

Either way, if you are looking for a MP3 player and it doesn't need to be an iPod, you should be able to find plenty have right-priced options on your local electronic store's clearance shelves. 

Here’s a tool called TypeTester that allows you to specify a font and the CSS properties of it to quickly try some looks out before you incorporate it into your style sheets.

I’ve seen quite a few color schemers, but I think this is the best web-based one that I’ve seen so far.

Based on the meeting notes posted from yesterday’s Firefox team meeting, we can see what will be in the first alpha of Firefox 2 (release postponed two weeks to near end of February) and future versions of it. Here’s some of the things I’m looking forward to:

• Close buttons on each tab (like safari and camino)
• Providing a method of tag-overflow rather than having a huge number of unlabeled tabs
• Visual refresh is planned but they are looking to do this via a contest
• Inline spell check
• Ability to save your session so that all of your pages/tabs come right back to the way they were before you quit Firefox
• Better RSS integration with a possible RSS previewer. Apparently Apple has patented some of the things that they are doing with RSS in Safari and they don't want to encounter problems with that.
• Anti-Phishing (similar I suppose to what is in IE 7)

Ben Goodger (Firefox lead engineer) offers his perspective on the history of Firefox.

Here’s a page that will create a CSS layout for you. It is a bit more intimidating to look at than some of the others that are out there, but it has a LOT of options and would probably produce code that needs much less customization once you have it.

Word from Adobe is that Fireworks is an important piece of their web development product suite moving forward and that it will continue to be developed. WooHoo!!

Opera Labs has a new technology preview available for Opera 9. If you haven’t used Opera before, you should really give it a shot. I think it’s a little too slow to use for day-to-day browsing (at least on my powerbook) but it has a lot of features that make it worth keeping in your web development toolbox.

I tend to post a lot about browsers, so I have created a page that lists many of the browsers that are available for those that wish to try out a few. With the exception of Internet Explorer (Win) and those that are cross-platform like Firefox, they are Macintosh browsers. As I have time to try and assess some Windows-only browsers I will add them to the list.

Dell has discontinued their DJ MP3 Player. I’m not happy to see iPod competitors go, but this was just another case of a hardware vendor quickly throwing together me-too product that added nothing new to the space. Create something great and people will buy it. iRiver and Creative aren’t selling the numbers of players that Apple is, but I get the impression that they are doing pretty well. They make very nice players with unique features.

Technorati has released some statistics regarding the Blogs that they track. The most interesting to me is that 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they have created their blog. That’s just a little better than half. That’s pretty good in my experience. Here’s a summary of the rest of the stats.

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Since I haven’t been able to post for the last month-plus, here are some things I’ve wanted to get up here.

Regarding Browsers

• The public alpha of Firefox 2.0 (codename: bon echo) is scheduled to be released on Feb 10. What's in store? While I'm sure that they will always continue to work on improving the rendering, the focus of bon echo is the experience. Two things expected in the new version are a improved interface with more operating system ties and inline spell checking.
• Flock .6 is scheduled to be released around Feb 15. I'm not sure what to expect from this, but I have really liked what I've seen from Flock so far.
• Internet Explorer 7 beta is now available from Microsoft and so far it seems that it does not suck. There are parts of the interface that I don't care for, but the rendering seems to be very solid.
• Camino 1.0 b2 was just released and OmniWeb 5.5 is on the way.

Apple Goodies

• Garageband 3's new podcasting features are great. When you create a podcast it gives you a time-based timeline (instead of measure/tempo-based one). You can easily create chapters and export to iTunes. I've done a one-hour board of education podcast using it and am curious to see if it will handle closer to two hours when the board has a busy night.
• Apple's new web site tool "iWeb" is a fantastic tool for putting together a simple site. You can easily create online homes for photos, podcasts, movies and whatever else you might have to publish. So far I have not found good options in it for customizing the look of your site, but I don't expect that most people interested in a tool like this will care.
• iPhoto 6 is a great improvement to iPhoto. It seems considerably faster than it predecessor with nice new additions such as a full-screen editor and the ability to order greeting cards and calendars.
• I had the chance to use the new MacBook Pro and its really a fantastic machine. It is slim and I love the built-in iSight and included FrontRow/Remote.

Other stuff...

• Adobe just announced that they are working on universal binary versions of their applications but that they would be released as the next versions of their applications and NOT to expect a univeral binary update to current applications. I hope and assume that this applies to the products previously owned by Macromedia, although with 8 having just come out in October, that could be a long wait.

Well, I’ve been here, but my blog has not. An OS X update nuked my blog and I haven’t had the time or will to try to fix it. The problem? A config issue in my php.ini file. Why didn’t I think of that?! Ha. Just for my own future reference (because I know I will have to do this again), I had to add /tmp/mysql.sock to the mysql.default_socket parameter.

Told you this was totally obvious. Anyway, the great thing is that it gave me an opportunity to upgrade to MySQL 5 and WordPress 2.0.1.

2005 is over and 2006 is here. I haven’t posted for a while and I have a decent excuse. My wife Amanda and I had our first child on December 15. His name is Liam and he is doing very well and we have all enjoyed our time together these past couple of weeks. I’m starting back to work on Tuesday while Amanda has the rest of the month off. Babies have a way of attracting lots of family and friends and it’s been real nice seeing everybody.

My web goals for the coming year? 1) Continue working on site construction methods using semantic-xhtml and CSS. 2) Find some time to start learning Ruby on Rails. The language itself may be a bit of a fad (I don’t know) but the concepts that have everybody excited about it will be helpful in lots of ways. 3) Finally acquire some respectable skills with Javascript. 4) Re-acquaint myself with Adobe’s software given their acquisition of Macromedia.

• Nuvvo Learning Management System A hosted, AJAX-based learning management system that offers free accounts.

Adobe is expected to announce tomorrow the completed acquisition of Macromedia.

• Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox
• A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. The list is broken into two sections. The first section contains the most popular applications divided by type. The second section lists many more, less popular applications. The quality of

Word on the net is that Firefox 1.5 final will be released today.

• Blind Access Journal The Blind Access Journal is a blog centered around the goal of making the web and the content delivered over it accessibile to everyone.
• InterLinc: City of Lincoln: 5 CITY-TV Program guide for Lincoln's Educational Channel 21
• Steadman A fantastic british band that provides free downloads to their music

Google has a few new things out.

• First, in my right column, you see a link to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Clicking on this link AND installing the software earns me a dollar. Yep! Google is paying a buck to those that get people to switch to Firefox. Want to earn money? Sign up.
• How do you sign up? That's the second thing. You can click on the image right under the Firefox image to sign up for Google AdSense. Once registered, you will receive the HTML needed to place the Firefox and other ads on your own blog.
• Third, as another blog tool, Google now offers a free statistics site. Sign up for the service, place the code on your pages and get great reports about who is visiting your site.
• Finally, something for everybody (including non-bloggers), is Google Base. A free online database service where you can create a online storage area for recipies, inventories or anything else. I'm sure that Google has some grand scheme here, but I'm not sure what it is.
  

Today was my birthday and my wife got us tickets to see harry potter tonight. We thought that the line would be sick, so got there early and we were almost the first ones -- felt kinda dorky (but got great seats!!). Line was much worse for the movie after ours -- it reminded me of the star wars opening weekend. Anyway. If you like potter, see it. It's good. It's dark, but I think they toned parts of it down. My memories of the book are a little more evil. The movie makes assumptions that everyone pretty much knows all of the characters, so I imagine that somebody new to the series would be pretty confused. For a book that really featured more quidditch (sp?) than any of the others, this movie had not a single game -- only a short scene at the beginning of people gathering for the world cup. Even with dropping the games and glossing over parts of the book and the characters, the movie weighs in at around 2 hours and 15 minutes while focusing primarily on the events surrounding the tri-wizard tournament and Harry's, Ron's and Hermione's adolescent spats.

After last Sunday's incident in Pennsylvania, where both students were found to have "blogs"?which didn't seem to forecast anything about what happened?schools and parents seem to be giving blogs much more attention. I hope that this provides opportunity for parents, teachers, administrators and anybody working with youth to start visiting these sites and to become familiar with them. It is futile to try blocking these sites for the purposes of keeping children away from them (I'm all for blocking when it comes to instructional management -- keeping students on task). Internet access and computer availability is simply too easy to come by to control it. Student must be taught, early, the dangers of having their lives exposed online. Schools and school district could perhaps slow some of this by providing opportunities for students to blog in a more productive, monitored and safe enviornment.

Here's a good article that recently appeared on news.com about blogging and schools' responses to it.

I was talking with my friend Dan this morning and he’s giving a presentation tonight regarding Internet Safety based on the government’s iSafe program. He asked what I thought about sites like Xanga and MySpace.

The real questions seem to be, “should these sites be blocked by schools and parents” and “should students be allowed to use these?”.

The broader question that gets asked is “are blogs bad?"

First of all, blogs are not bad. In fact, I believe that students should be encouraged to blog. Blogging encourages students to express themselves in passionate ways about things that they care about. Through features such as comments and trackbacks, blogs allow for an interaction and linking of thoughts, ideas and commentary that can not be matched in other ways. Students can be forced to really examine their own opinions on matters and join others in a participatory online forum.

Second, for the most part, Xanga and MySpace are NOT blogs. This is not to say that they could not be used as a blog or that they are invalid ways to share content online. If used in a monitored and guided way, they can be used as effectively as any blogging tool. The majority of posts to these sites are purely social, attention-grabbing text nuggets that equate to public instant-messaging. Users of these services are rewarded for the number of other like-sites that link to them and this encourages users to find ways to attract other people in what teens mistakingly see as a pretty anonymous and harmless world. The truth is that it would be great place for those that prey on the innocent to find a target and learn their name, what they look like, where they attend school, who their friends are and what they like along with daily habits and routines. What could be more dangerous?

Here are a number of articles that I have found that discuss this. A couple of these make the mistake (in my opinion) of saying that bad things can happen and this looks like blogging, so blogging is bad. Other articles explore the good and bad aspects of this issue. I would encourage anybody, before they say that teens shouldn’t blog, to google for K-12 blogging OR go to Will Richardson’s site (weblogg-ed) and see the great things that are being done with blogging.

• Dallas Morning News: Predators Reading Blogs Too
• Standard Democrat: Local Authorities are Becoming Concerned Over Blogging
• New York Times: The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries
• Christian Science Monitor: Kids and the Internet: It's a Good Thing

Microsoft, yesterday, announced a new Web 2.0ish portal that they call live. It seems to be Microsoft's attempt to say, "Hey. We can do this stuff too." You can get a local weather forecast and aggregate numerous news feeds -- all in an interface that does not fully support Firefox yet. (Microsoft is probably still looking for some slimy way to hook Firefox into the OS since they can't seem to do anything without leveraging Windows in some way.)

Still to come, Microsoft says, is an email client and a next generation MSN messenger, along with bookmarks. If this provides a home away from home, this could be a very cool thing for Windows users.

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This is the first release candidate of mozilla's next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to their developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

Mozilla Firefox Project (Development Information)