A new build of Firefox is now available, so make sure you update. There are tons of fixes and improvements in this release; watered down release notes are also available.

I just recently picked up the Knights of the Nine downloadable content collection for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. In fact, it has sucked me back into the Oblivion world, so most of my free time is now spent questing with a brand new character (a Breton I named Tristram). Included in the collection is the brand new Knights of the Nine quest line, which supposedly adds an additional 9 to 10 hours of game play. Also included are a number of add-ons that were previously only available for purchase online: the Wizard's Tower, Vile Lair, Thieves Den, Mehrunes' Razor, Horse Armor pack, The Orrery, and a collection of spell tomes (my favorite add-on so far). I was lucky enough to pick it up for only $9.95 at Circuit City (the same day I wrecked my car), but it normally retails at $19.95. If you're a fan of Oblivion (and who's not?), I highly recommend the collection. So far, it's been a blast.

No programming tips here tonight. Just a few great stories I've recently found:

First Look at Firefox 3.0

Lots of love coming in 3.0. I simply cannot wait.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Beta 1

Firefox's little brother is moving forward.

Clinton in Action

This man is super great.

DS Buttons

A very cool marketing idea. I heart my DS too.

Amazon Sales From Recommendations: 35%

Can you believe that 35% of sales come from the recommender? I'm shocked.

If the list above looks a little funny, do a browser refresh; I've updated the site style sheet to make this type of list a little nicer to look at.

I had the great fortune of being rear-ended tonight while coming home from work. What a wonderful Christmas present, delivered early for my enjoyment! I wanted more than anything to spend the next several days dealing with insurance, collision shops, and going without a car. Whee!

I recently stumbled upon what might be the greatest Firefox extension of all time: Firebug. This extension is aimed squarely at web developers and includes a number of mind-blowing features. And I mean mind blowing. Before reading any further, take a look at this short screencast of Firebug in action. Just make sure that you hold on to your socks.

How did I survive this long without this tool? And why haven't we had something like this all along? Firebug single-handedly obsoletes the DOM Inspector extension that ships with Firefox, and nearly obsoletes the mighty fine Web Developer extension that I have relied on for so long. I can now view exactly what my CSS is doing. I can peruse through my page's DOM without opening up the DOM Inspector and switching between windows. I can even edit the CSS and HTML for a page in real time; no reloading necessary! Want to watch your AJAX code in action? Firebug makes it easy.

This tool feels so incredibly polished, and the user interface is so streamlined, that I barely even notice that I have it installed. And it weighs in at an extraordinarily small 288 KB (as of this writing). I cannot say enough good things about this extension; just download it and give it a try. You will not be disappointed.

It looks as if Yahoo! will be undergoing a reorganization effort in the future. Both Matt Cutts and Greg Linden provide some interesting commentary, and there's plenty of other news on the subject.

I am not an expert on the search industry, but it seems to me that this was the only way for Yahoo to stay alive. If their recent TV listings overhaul is any sign of their current state of affairs, then I am ready to declare the company in shambles. The old TV listings page was light weight and usable; the new one is bloated, confusing, and very ugly. Although their primary competition (Google) doesn't have a TV listing service, I can assure you that if they did, it would be light weight and responsive. Google knows what users want; Yahoo appears to only know what they want for their users. That kind of direction can only lead to collapse. Hopefully Yahoo can turn things around. As much as I love Google, we need some semblance of competition.

Dan Cederholm has rebranded SimpleBits, and the results are very nice. If I had 1% of this man's creative genius, I would be quite pleased with myself.

I'm going to go ahead and call this one: Ctrl+Alt+Del has jumped the shark. What used to be a mildly amusing online comic has devolved into something so far out in left field, so detached from reality, that I'm not going to bother reading it anymore. The current story line is just a joke. Each character is a mindless, empty shell of what they used to be. It's sad to see the comic take this turn, but I can't say I'm surprised. In some way, I sort of saw this coming.

In a recent interview, Scott Miller of 3D Realms stated his apparent dislikes over the Steam content delivery system (owned by rival company Valve). And within 24 hours, the 3D Realms game Prey was announced as going on sale over the Steam network. How's that for a hypocritical statement? Interestingly enough, the game is being sold for a whopping $49.95; a full $30 more than it's being offered for over at Amazon.com.

It seems to me that Scott's main problem with Steam is that he simply isn't the one making money. Valve clearly had a good idea in Steam, and now they are the ones profiting off of it. Some of his points are valid (having a competitor know your revenue totals does seem a tad creepy), but I think he's mostly whining. 3D Realms hasn't had a truly successful release in quite some time, last I checked. Could that fact, coupled with Valve's success, be what's making Scott so fussy?

Surprisingly, the occasional downtime from computers and the internet is a good thing. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent time down in Georgia at my grandmother's house, apart from the world wide web. I came back refreshed. More importantly, I had a new perspective on some of my ongoing projects. Not that I spent any time thinking about said projects; not thinking about them is what helped me the most.

I've nearly flip-flopped again on my decision to use WordPress for my planned overhaul of Born Geek. Two particular articles have nearly persuaded me to give Movable Type another chance. Site performance is still a large concern for me (though I'm not entirely certain it should be), and this is where Movable Type really delivers.

The next release of Googlebar Lite will also have a little more tender loving care than I previously had imagined. Much better localized search results are in the works, thanks to my decision to drop all the awkward top-level domain options currently used. In place of all of that will come a simple drop-down menu, allowing the user to select the Google site they wish to use across all search types (just like the official Google Toolbar). I think this will be a real improvement over the current scheme. Hopefully, users will agree.

For my birthday this year, I got a Nintendo DS Lite. Now that I've had some time to play with it, I'd like to give you my thoughts on the system, along with the various games that I have picked up so far. I've given each a letter grade, for whatever that's worth.

The DS Lite System (A+) What first wowed me with the DS Lite was the screen brightness. Having never seen an original DS, I can't make a comparison between the two generations. However, I can say that my Gameboy Advance SP doesn't touch the DS Lite brightness levels. It's literally like night and day. However, the brighter you run the screen, the faster the battery drains. I use brightness level 2 (out of 4, if I remember correctly, where 4 is the brightest). I have been very pleased with the battery life at this level; I charge the system after several hours of play (I haven't timed it, but I'm guessing somewhere between 6 to 10 hours between charges). And the sound in the DS Lite is incredible. I don't know how they packed such awesome speakers into a tiny package, but they are really crisp. The added bonus that there are two speakers, and that they utilize stereo to great effect, is even better!

The touch screen is a novel idea and works well, though I find it a little hard to use the stylus in a game that also uses the buttons. And while I'm on that topic, let me say that I am glad that Nintendo included the X and Y buttons. The lack of X and Y on the Gameboy Advance SP really hurt the SNES game ports. Hopefully the DS will help fill that gap. It's also nice that Gameboy Advance games can be played in the DS (though the X and Y buttons still aren't useful for those older games). It's nice to only carry one system around but have support for games from multiple platforms.

Since I'm the only one I know with a DS Lite, I haven't tried the multiplayer stuff (with built-in wireless). I hear it works pretty well, but I can't comment since I haven't used that aspect of it.

There isn't much negative to say about the DS Lite. Each time you start it up, you get a weird "Health and Safety Warning" that requires a tap of the touch screen to bypass. I find this odd, and a minor annoyance, but I guess Nintendo is trying to get people to be mindful of what they do. Also, the shiny casing is nice, but it shows fingerprints very easily (at least on my black model).

Overall, I nothing but good things to say. I highly recommend the DS Lite as a gaming platform.

The New Super Mario Bros. (B) This being my first game, I was highly excited about it initially. It evokes classic gaming memories from the NES days, and the game's action is as fun as ever. But, sadly, Mario's adventure is a little short. The levels are surprisingly small, and are rather easy (to say the least). New power-ups help ease that pain a little; the giant mushroom and tiny mushrooms are a blast to use. I dislike how worlds 4 and 7 are completely optional (and a little difficult to access; they are only available through secret boss-level exits). The included mini-games are cute, but they don't draw me back to them again and again. Final verdict? This is a fun game, and a must have for Mario fans, even if it is indeed a short endeavor.

Tetris DS (B) Six game types are available in Tetris DS, and most of them are decent enough. The only two game types that don't really excite me are the catch mode and mission mode. The other four (touch, push, puzzle, and standard) are really fun, and I would imagine are a blast with multiple players.

Kirby Canvas Curse (A) I've never played a Kirby game before this one, but I must say that this one is highly entertaining. It uses the touch screen and stylus entirely; you never make use of the game pad buttons. By drawing "rainbow bridges" for Kirby to roll on, you must defeat an evil witch who has turned the world into a painting. Artwork in the game is phenomenal, and the action is pretty intense in some places. The stylus is used to great effect, and was a great twist on gaming. I highly recommend this title.

Yoshi's Island DS (???) I haven't assigned this game a grade yet, because I only yesterday received it from Amazon. The original Yoshi's Island for the Super Nintendo was a blast, and this one looks like it will follow in its predecessor's footsteps. It uses both screens to show the game world, which is mildly annoying; there is a physical gap between the screens on the DS Lite, and so there's a "gap" in what the game shows you at any one time. Hopefully this "feature" won't be too much of a burden as I go forward. Time will tell.

It appears that I have written a lot on the subject, but hopefully you'll find this information to be of use. I'll be taking time off from my posting duties over the holiday weekend so until then, Happy Thanksgiving!

For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of web design is the actual design step. Coding a given design? Easy. Making that design standards compliant? No problem. Actually coming up with the design concept itself? Mind-numbingly difficult. I occasionally check the Color Schemer Galleries for decent schemes, and there are a number of nice ones there, but determining how to use each color is a task I struggle to succeed at.

Does anyone have any strategies they use? Any pointers to decent resources? I already know about the Color Harmonies site and the Visibone Webmaster's Color Lab. Can anyone do this, or must one be an 'artist' to excel?

There are a number of things I've got planned for the next several months:

Googlebar Lite 4.6: Better context menu customization support, a stand-alone toolbar button to show and hide the Googlebar Lite toolbar, and allowing the user to customize the keyboard shortcut for setting search box focus are the items currently slated for this next release.

Born Geek Overhaul: I am slowly getting the pieces into place for moving Born Geek to the WordPress platform. I'm really excited about this, but it will definitely take some time to complete.

CoLT 2.3: A new release of CoLT would be nice, improving the "Copy Link Text and Location as" capabilities.

Advanced Toolbar Tutorial: I've wanted to complete this project for a long, long time now, but I have yet to even start it. Perhaps after I overhaul the Born Geek website, I can get this going.

Last year at this time, I was thinking about various content management systems for user over at Born Geek (sister site to this blog). I never made a decision, mostly because so many of the available options seemed weak to me. One year later, very little has changed and I'm still looking to migrate the site from the hand-built system I use today to a database driven solution.

Currently, I'm leaning towards using WordPress, the same package I use here at this blog. I like the interface that it offers, its documentation is top notch, and I'm already quite familiar with it. The only real downside I can see with the package is that pages are built on the fly. Every month, Born Geek averages 1.56 GB of data transferred, 542,818 hits, and 17,955 unique users. With this much activity on the site, I'm a little concerned about database accesses and the subsequent processor time needed to generate each page. A caching plug-in is available for WordPress, and I hear decent things about it. But will it be enough?

I'm seriously thinking about giving it a try later this winter (converting the site will take some time). So keep your eyes peeled. In the mean time, if you have suggestions for CMS-like systems that might fit the bill, let me know. I'm certainly open to suggestions.

The Concerned web comic, which is based on and set in the Half-Life 2 game world, recently ended for good. It's a shame that it had to end so soon, but the goal all along has been stated in the comic's description ("The Life and Death of Gordon Frohman"). If you haven't read the comic, I highly recommend it (note that you should start reading from the beginning to best appreciate it). The writing was top notch, the visuals were great, and I will sorely miss the updates that I used to look forward to.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that I was once heavily involved in the Duke Nukem 3D gaming scene. During that time, I had the good fortune of taking over and maintaining the map editing FAQ, which eventually made it on to the official game CD (which was quite an honor). At the time, the game was revolutionary and incredibly fun. How excited, then, must we all have been when Duke Nukem Forever was announced?

That announcement date was almost 10 years ago (April 27, 1997), and we still have no game to play. DNF has single-handedly become the laughing stock of the gaming community, having been torn down and reconstructed multiple times. I can't help but think that the game will fail miserably when (or if) it launches. The fan base from the original game has grown up. I fondly recall my days with the Duke, but I have a hard time envisioning myself getting as interested in that gaming line today as I would have years ago. What went wrong? Here's my theory:

DNF is announced with much fanfare, and development work begins. The Unreal gaming engine shows promise, so the development team switches, adding delay. New, innovative games begin appearing using this and other engines (Half-Life, for example), and the DNF developers think "wow, our game isn't near that good ... let's start all over." Development begins anew, adding more delay. As work nears completion, more innovative games are released, and the weaknesses in DNF become apparent all over again. Rinse. Repeat. It's an unfortunate snowball effect. Just as soon as the developers are ready to release, another product beats them to the punch, outshining their efforts. This is a battle that is very difficult to win.

If DNF ever does see the light of day, I'll probably at least give it a look. But my feelings for that brand just aren't the same. Time has moved on, and I've grown to appreciate more mature material. But here's hoping that the Duke will shine again. Those days of old were certainly fun.

I've recently had the fortune of playing with Windows Vista release candidates at work. Though I haven't spent much time with them, I can tell you one thing for certain: it doesn't feel any different to me than XP. Sure the windows are translucent and shiny, but shouldn't there be more to this? Come on Microsoft; what have you been doing for the past decade (or however long it's taken you to get this thing out)? The new start menu is horrible. Something that basic should have been left alone at the very least; not made worse.

Anyways, now that Vista has a release date, I'd like to make some predictions for the OS. Due to the headaches that will be coming down the pipeline based on all the new security stuff, I'm betting that few people will adopt the new operating system at first. Those that do adopt will essentially be "beta testers" for Microsoft, helping to work out all the last minute bugs. Things will go rough for several months, MS will reduce the price a time or two to help boost sluggish sales, and people will slowly turn on to it. I'm guessing that it will be another year (or maybe two) before the ball really starts rolling and substantial numbers of people start converting. Corporations will easily take that long before they begin rolling it out. So much has changed in this release that I doubt any large company will be willing to risk converting immediately.

Microsoft isn't helping things by offering seven different versions of the OS. Which version am I supposed to choose? And why should I go with that choice over the other six? Two versions seems complicated enough in XP (the Home and Pro editions). Why must we make things harder here?

To me, it all comes back to the way it feels. If I don't feel substantial change, why should I switch? What I've seen so far doesn't impress me, and I don't plan on switching for several years.

I don't fully understand why people get so upset about the supposed "memory leaks" in Firefox. While I don't disagree that an application as large as Firefox could have memory management issues, I severely question the reports out there that indicate that Firefox eats up hundreds of megabytes of memory without ever releasing it. I use Firefox every single day for many hours, and I have never run into such a problem. In fact, what most people are complaining about is actually a feature.

That aside, let's assume that Firefox does indeed leak small amounts of memory here or there. What would it matter? Sure it might be sloppy programming practice. It's certainly not fair to eat shared resources that you'll never return. But under what circumstances might you be hindered from doing work on your computer because Firefox is "consuming" one or two hundred megabytes of RAM? What memory intensive operations are people constantly doing that causes them fume over this perceived problem? I can think of no single instance of computing that would both consume the entire system's memory, and be common enough that everyone encounters it on a daily basis. Granted, gaming might be one exception, but not everyone does that.

So my question is this: why care? Who cares that Firefox might use up to 200 megabytes of memory? Memory is cheap. If you're that concerned about the memory usage of your applications, you clearly don't have enough in your system. Just 1 gigabyte is more than enough for today's environment, and NewEgg has 1 GB modules for as little as $80. If you're complaining, just go for the upgrade; you'll be glad you did.

Does anyone else besides me love The Office? A coworker of mine (thanks Dustin!) got me into the show, and I'm currently working through season 2 (so no spoilers, please). Season 1 was surprisingly short, and I wish it had been longer. The one thing that I enjoy most about the show is that all of the characters are incredibly believable. I mean, I feel like I could work with any of these people. None of them are overly beautiful, like most television shows where the actors are all Barbie and Ken cookie cutters. Steve Carell does an excellent job as the manager, and John Krasinski is great as Jim. Dwight is a riot, and Ryan the temp plays a good part as well.

Don't even get me started on Pam; words simply fail me.

Update: I've finished season 2. All I can say is wow.

October is "People with Disabilities" awareness month at IBM, and I attended a panel discussion on the topic today, which was quite insightful. One of my coworkers, who has cerebral palsy and speaks with an augmented communications device, was one of the panelists. I learned a number of interesting things about the opportunities IBM offers employees with disabilities, along with a number of other interesting things.

All of this got me thinking about the lawsuit facing Target, which I commented on quite a while back. A recent update to the story indicates that the trial is still moving forward. Target recently argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act only covered physical store space, not electronic store fronts. But a California judge ruled last month that this was not the case, and has allowed the case to proceed. This fact brings up an interesting point: if the law were to apply to physical locations only, how would businesses like Amazon.com, who have no physical locations, be allowed to operate?

It only makes sense (even business sense) that the ADA applies to electronic store fronts. If it didn't, think of the number of customers that would be turned away. According to the Wikipedia entry on blindness (so take this figure with a grain of salt), the World Health Organization estimated that 161 million people in the world were visually impaired, with 37 million of those being blind. Would you, as a business owner, turn away 37 million prospective customers? I know I certainly wouldn't.

I can only hope that the National Federation of the Blind wins this important court case. Regardless, it will hopefully wake up online retailers to the fact that web accessibility is important. Not only for blind users, but for search engine robots; all of which are blind. When the biggest internet user (the Google bot) is blind, I might begin to be concerned about the accessibility of my site.