SN joins the on-line advertisement club. They will soon enable pay-per-click ads to be embedded in Web pages. According to ZDNet, MSN has already launched an advertising application, which upon closer inspection, leads to an appalling invasion of privacy. The Seattle Times (free registration needed for reading) reports that:

AdCenter uses information from customers who registered for services such as Hotmail or who tailored the MSN home page to their interests. It supplements that with data purchased from the Experian credit bureau.

This was predicted long ago in one of Joel’s most popular essays. Joel Spolsky used to work in Microsoft and he foresaw the exploitation of cookies and information swap:

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…

A shrunk-down screenshot of CrossOver-themed Thunderbird

OZILLA Thunderbird has been my primary mail client for several months, having made it the permanent replacement for KMail. I thought I ought to share a recommendation for a theme. I personally find Apple’s Aqua theme and brushed metal elements in Jaguar/Tiger highly appealing. I even went as far as tailoring my own in Firefox (see below). I have also come to discover that CrossOver, the Aqua-inspired theme for Thunderbird, is by far the most popular theme at the moment with approximately 18,000 downloads in the past week alone.

Related items:

• Firefox Mac OS X Theme – my personal Firefox theme (see picture below)
• My Firefox Theme

Mac OS X theme for Firefox

Before and after Hurricane Katrina hit

HE devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina have been caught by Google Earth’s eye. Constant footage of the ground is made possible owing to many recently-acquired overlays. The devastation is very clear as reflected by before/after snapshots, which can be viewed interactively in Google Earth.

Internet Explorer remains aside for the time being

or quite some time I have been kind to Internet Explorer (IE) despite its obnoxious limitations. Those who follow this blog may have noticed that its layout is IE-friendly. It comes with a cost though, in terms of flexibility in particular.

One of the prominent IE deficiencies, which constantly puts me aback, is its lack of support for high-depth colour blending — something for which I have great affinity. Earlier this week I decided to give up on Internet Explorer visual compatibility as far as my Ph.D. progress reports are concerned. I did likewise when assembling the talk that I prepare for an audience of surgeons at the Royal Eye Hospital. I went along with what should work in any modern browser like Mozilla, Opera, Firefox and Safari, to name just the major ones. I incorporated 32-bit PNG transparencies in Web pages — or put differently — I have included 32-bit alpha blending effects in my reports. I used to reluctantly stick to JPEG‘s, but I wanted some nicer effects that resemble shadows.

If you are curious, the result is in my latest progress report ¹. See the slides which contain figures to get an example of blending with the background ². I am assuming that they will appear with white background in Internet Explorer, which is not aesthetic and seems like a complete misfit. All I can say is that Internet Explorer 7 will render this properly, having surveyed some and reviews on the topic. Either way, my supervisor and I use Firefox. I even urge him to use it more often and sometimes set it as his default browser (it will be our little secret).

To those anticipating the arrival of Internet Explorer 7, it is worth mentioning that, on the face of it, it will still be adverse to Web standards. As an intersting statistical side note, Firefox and IE usage is more or less in state of equality on this domain as a whole.

¹ The report is yet to be delivered at 11 this morning

² There is a nice story behind the background image. It depicts the Maths Tower which is being demolished the moment. The reports might commemorate its existence.

The Web Developer extension in action (click to enlarge)

T is upsetting to discover that a decent proportion of all Web designers still test and debug pages using Internet Explorer. Mozilla Firefox has an entire range of extensions that are so broad as to justify the name “Web design suites“. I have become aware of a page which contains some of the top Firefox extensions for Web developers. There are good explanations and some features show-down therein.

The Web Developer extension shown as a Firefox toolbar (click to enlarge, see tutorial)

If the above does not provide a sufficiently compelling reason to design under Firefox, IE in fact conflicts with Web standards. Also, you might wish to have a look at the American Copyright Office Web site. It includes IE-only features due to designers who are narrow-minded, which illustrates the dangers of sticking to a browser which is vendor-centric. You can file a complaint about this governmental site’s inter-compatibility issues using their on-line feedback form.

An example of my desktop when I come to work in the morning. In each text file, changes are contained for pages that I keep track of, which do not provide feeds. No changes — no file. This provides a good overview of which sites have new content for me to browse to.

efore I discovered I used to have a ‘browsing cycle’ which was contained in my portal (see prototype). Later on, having been inspired by feeds, I set up a bunch of cron jobs so that I can syndicate static HTML pages and only see changes (once they happen) in my Desktop. The full and detailed instructions are still on this site in case anyone seeks to do the same. if you use Windows, you might need to run everything on top of Cygwin.

Related items:

• Syndicating Static Pages
• Browsers versus Feeds

RANT STARTS HERE

CSS-Discuss is probably the most prolific mailing list when it comes to Web design and cascading style sheets (CSS) in particular. It is a broad group with high traffic of messages circulation. I subscribed to it earlier this year due to admiration for Eric Meyer — possibly the man behind this mailing list and the man to provide us with a Web-based presentation tool better known as S5.

[CSSD] avoids off -topic discussions like general (X)HTML, accessibility and particular Web-related applications. However, I am put back by the dull, useless, non-reusable discussions in that group. Much of the conversation traffic gets ‘wasted’ on cross-platform site checks and dealing with known browser bugs (rather than CSS as a standard). Almost every single day one would see entire threads about rendering of pages in different browsers — something along the lines of this fictitious paragraph:

In IE, the border is drawn one pixel above that which I see in FF so if I look closely enough I can see some small speckles in my menu. Having said that, it only becomes visible if I use this particular arcane browser.

To sum up, my final advice is to avoid this mailing list unless it resides on a separate E-mail account. It might be relevant if you wish to discuss bugs attributed to browser developers or if you want to wind up opening various Web sites in different computers and occasionally giving a nod to the OP, which acknowledges acceptable page rendering.

RANT ENDS HERE