Time seems to be in short supply this time of year, and I'm finding that especially so this season. I've been working later hours recently, and my drive to do anything computer related (after work) has been very small. After spending hours each day both digging through and writing code, I have little desire to work on any of my extra-curricular activities. In all honesty, I have yet to even begin working on the updated Firefox tutorial, and updates to Googlebar Lite have yet to be made (several bug fixes certainly need to be made). Fortunately, I'll be taking some time off soon, and I hope to make some progress on these fronts. As long as I can sleep in a little bit, I'll be happy. To quote a Beatles tune, I'm so tired.

Now that Firefox 1.5 has been released, we can begin awaiting the next incarnation of our favorite little browser: Firefox 2. One of the more exciting features that will hopefully make it into 2.0 is known as Firefox Places. This unified approach to bookmarks and history is particularly interesting because all of the modern browsers I can think of treat them as separate entities. Not only will merging these two elements improve findability, but I think it will greatly improve bookmark usage. As websites are found through the traditional search or navigation methods, it should become remarkably easier to mark said websites for future reference.

The Mozilla wiki entry for Firefox Places is still rather lacking in information, but what is there is particularly interesting (especially the user interface documents). I've been seeing several pieces of the Places puzzle fall into place in the nightly trunk builds, so that provides some hope for this feature making it in to Firefox 2. It should be interesting to watch how this idea develops, and how it transforms our browsing future.

It's an extremely rare day that I don't take a look at Slashdot, and recently it's been the same with Digg. And I've recently noticed an interesting trend between the two sites. For the past several days, a number of the stories that made the front page of Slashdot were previously reported on at Digg (in some cases, several days earlier). I find it interesting that the democratic approach of Digg results in faster story publishing than the moderated format of Slashdot. But this process comes at a price. A larger number of duplicate and "junk" stories appear at Digg than at Slashdot (although the latter isn't without its share of problems). And Slashdot seems to carry more technical articles than Digg (it is, afterall, a techy news site).

I have seen some discussion recently about whether or not Digg will replace Slashdot. Personally, I don't see that happening. Too much is broken at Digg. You can't set many personal options, duplicate and "junk" stories are too plentiful, and new content seems to take longer to rotate through the system. I enjoy both sites (although I read them with a grain of salt), and I think both will be around for a long time. Fortunately, they complement one another nicely, and that couldn't by any nicer for the geeky crowd.

I'm taking part in a Qt class this week at work, and the only web browser installed on each computer in the classroom is Internet Explorer. And the more I use IE, the more I realize why I switched to the best little browser in the world. While browsing through my web statistics before class, I clicked on a strange referral link (some sort of poker site), and was immediately drowned in a sea of pop-ups. I had forgotten that IE doesn't support pop-up blocking natively (although it may very well do so in Windows XP - we're running 2000 here in class). I had quite a difficult time getting out of the site without a million more pop-ups appearing. And the site didn't even have a link back to my website (so how did that referral string appear in my stats?).

And oh how I miss tabbed browsing! I must have tried to open a new tab at least a hundred times or more. Why anyone still uses the hunk of junk browser out of Redmond is a mystery to me. If you haven't switched to Firefox yet, please do so today. Won't you think of the children?

My collection of Prince Valiant comics is nearing its completion, as I have purchased the last of the books available at the Fantagraphics store. I have 13 remaining books to purchase, all of which (with the exception of volume 32) fetch incredibly high prices on eBay. Interestingly enough, volumes 38-40 are the more difficult books to find, and often sell for nearly $200 or $300 a piece! The earlier books (vols. 3-8) also command high prices, averaging anywhere from $60 to $200. So I expect that filling in these last few holes will cost me a pretty penny.

One of my more expensive purchases recently was a collection of 6 DVD's, containing scans of the Valiant strips from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (including the year 2000). These strips aren't available in print, so I was willing to shell out big money to obtain them. And the scans are absolutely marvelous! So far, I have read up through the end of 1987, enjoying every strip along the way. The story lines are gripping and the artwork is, as always, stunning.

I plan to eventually update my Valiant library page, including more information on each book in the series. There are so many characters, that it would be interesting to note in which books they get introduced to the story. And a general summary of each book couldn't hurt either.

Firefox 1.5 has been released! If you haven't updated already, get to it!

To help celebrate this most excellent occasion, I've released a new version of Googlebar Lite. Version 3.2 adds a new Catalan (ca-ES) translation, the ability to remove individual items from the search history, a few usability tweaks, and several bug fixes. Next stop, some updates to the toolbar tutorial!

So I did indeed pick up Quake 4, and at quite a bargain price ($30 at Target on Black Friday; there were shockingly fewer people out shopping than I had anticipated). So far, this game has been very enjoyable. The action is fast paced, the story is moderately interesting, and the levels aren't quite as dark as in Doom 3. In short, this is the game that Doom 3 should have been. One of the in-game sequences is incredibly painful to watch. Without giving too much away, let me say that you will most likely wince in pain as you watch what happens. I know I did.

Having run through all of my computer games, it's high time to get a new one. But I'm not quite sure what to get. Splinter Cell 3 looks nice, but the copy protection software Ubisoft used for the game sounds eerily reminiscent of spyware. F.E.A.R. looks cool as well, but the demo was a little sluggish and I hear the game is very short. The top runner for me is currently Quake 4, of which I've read good reviews. Any suggestions for a new game? All genres are welcome (although I'm clearly an action fan).

I gave Movable Type a brief try this weekend, and it doesn't look like it's what I need for Born Geek. MT is too "post driven" and doesn't seem to handle static pages very well. I think the main problem is that Born Geek isn't a blog, and MT was made especially for the blogging paradigm. As such, I am continuing my quest for a decent CMS.

After doing some brief research, I have found two solutions that might work well: Drupal and Typo3. Both are open source CMS's (which is appealing), and both have relatively nice looking interfaces. The Drupal website is a little cleaner than Typo3, and I found Drupal first, so I think I'll give it the initial try. I am somewhat tempted to just use WordPress (the system that powers this blog), although I dislike the fact that it builds pages on the fly (something I'd like to avoid with Born Geek's static content).

Do you know of an inexpensive, reliable, CMS system that would work well with a static, page-based website (i.e. Born Geek)? If so, your comments would be greatly appreciated!

Sony just can't catch a break, can they? First, we hear reports about the Sony DRM installing a rootkit. Then comes news of said rootkit phoning home, as well as indications of a trojan exploiting this technology. And finally, there's news of a giant security hole in the rootkit removal software.

Although I've owned a few of their products, I've never been a fan of Sony. They try too hard to force their own proprietary 'standards' upon the industry, yet they always seem to fail in this endeavor. Sony certainly must have a substantial back catalog of failed technologies (as I'm sure many large companies do). Somehow, I don't feel sorry for them during this time of crisis. In these days of juggernauts like Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and McDonald's, it's nice to occasionally see one of them stumble and fall.

I'm a great fan of the late Jeremy Brett, who is the only Sherlock Holmes I will ever recognize. His portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective is as good as acting gets. In my humble opinion, no other actor has ever portrayed a character as accurately as Mr. Brett portrayed Holmes. He captures every nuance from the books, and matches exactly what I feel Conan Doyle was striving to create. I have only one collection of DVDs to go in completing my set: The Sherlock Holmes Feature Film collection. And I can't wait to get it!

I came across an interesting article written by Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Sun Microsystems. In it, he discusses the accessibility problems facing the open source world, specifically as it relates to OpenOffice. Recently, the Massachusetts government decided to move towards using an "open document format" (essentially switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice). Government agencies are required by federal law to support accessibility guidelines. Unfortunately (for the OpenOffice guys), it appears that Microsoft's office solution is far ahead in terms of application accessibility. This is an interesting tactic being used by Microsoft, but it illustrates a very real, very serious problem. If users with disabilities are ignored, open source software can never gain a foothold in the governmental sector (where accessibility is a requirement). Hopefully this particular problem will wake up the entire open source community, and result in improved programs for the disabled. It's certainly a problem that cannot be ignored.

I've been incredibly busy at work lately, and my programming drive is burned out at the end of the day. As such, I haven't made a great deal of progress on any of my previously mentioned goals. But I have been having a little fun (which is always a good thing).

Two expansion packs were released for the original Half-Life several years ago: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. I never purchased either, but recently decided that I would. While browsing Valve's 'Steam' content delivery system, I found out (by accident) that my original Half-Life CD key enabled me to access both expansion packs for free!

Opposing Force, being the first expansion released, was the one I played first. It was an interesting expansion (several of the new weapons were moderately interesting), but overall felt very empty. You only catch a glimpse of Gordon Freeman once, and the ending is somewhat of a let down (although it will be interesting to see what Valve does with the main character from this expansion).

Blue Shift is the real gem. Although it's incredibly short, there are a ton of "Oh, wow - that was so cool!" moments. Playing as Barney Calhoun, the player relives the Black Mesa incident from a different angle. You run into Gordon a number of times, bringing back a flood of memories from the original game. The connections between the two are incredible, making an already excellent game even better.

It's sad that it's taken me this long to play through these expansions. But they were very interesting and helped fill in some of the details of the Half-Life world in my mind. Hopefully the Aftermath expansion for Half-Life 2 will show up soon. I certainly can't wait to play it!

I have had a number of unrelated ideas lately, all of which I'll share:

• I'm thinking about upgrading my processor and motherboard. Some of the latest games (the Lost Coast demo for example) have really shown a bottleneck in that region. I have no idea what to upgrade to, however. Suggestions are welcome.
• I hope to get a new build of Googlebar Lite out soon.
• I also hope to put together a downloadable version of my toolbar tutorial. After that is done, I'll begin work on the next incarnation of said tutorial (which should be a big improvement).
• This weekend, I'm going to begin playing with Movable Type. My ultimate goal is to move the main Born Geek website away from hand-coding, which would be very convenient for me. I may provide some links to my testing, so that you can see what's going on.
• The Lost Coast demo for Half-Life 2 has inspired me to play through the game again. I'm approximately 2/3 of the way through, and am enjoying every minute of it.

As Asa indicates, Firefox release candidate 2 is now available (at least through the auto-update feature in Firefox).

Many websites use an image as the background of a page element (take the header of this website, for example). And all too often, those websites do not provide a corresponding background color to go along with that image. Take, for example, the games section of Slashdot. The purple background for each headline is an image. In order for the headline text to be readable on this background, the text color is set to white. The following rules are used in the corresponding CSS file (the image URL has been chopped for formatting reasons):

.generaltitle h3
{
    margin: 0;
    padding: .3em .8em .2em .8em;
    color: #fff;
}

#slashboxes h4, .article h3, .generaltitle h3
{
    background: url(<path>) repeat-x;
    padding: .3em 0;
}

Note that no background color has been specified for the h3 element. What is the effect of this omission? If images are disabled, we end up with white text on a white background, rendering the page illegible! "But who would turn images off?" you ask. People on dial-up may turn them off (to speed up download times). Some low-vision users may also turn them off, to prevent distracting backgrounds (and presumably improve text contrast). And keep in mind that the image file may be corrupted, or the server that actually serves up the images (if they are located separately from the site content) may go down, causing images to be inaccessible. Regardless, a specified background color would fix this problem. The image would override the color (when images are available and enabled), but the color would get used when images are disabled.

If you ever develop a website, and you use images to specify a certain region, make sure that you also specify a corresponding background color. Web users the world over will thank you for it.

Nearly 40 days ago, my family and I moved to a new house. And sadly, there are still boxes nearly everywhere you look. But we're definitely a long way from where we started. Most everything major has been repaired, and several exciting new features are coming this week: our backup generator and wood-pellet stove.

Just tonight, I actually got around to unpacking a couple of boxes in my room (something I've been horribly negligent about). I just counted, and was shocked to learn that I still have 13 boxes left to open! Fortunately, the majority of them are in my sister's room (which isn't being used). With any luck, I can make more progress on the unpacking front this week. Most of the remaining stuff will go through the following decision making process:

1. Is the item in question something I need to keep? Yes: keep it. No: proceed to 2.
2. Is the item valuable enough (and in good enough condition) to auction off on eBay? Yes: auction the item off. No: proceed to 3.
3. Can the item live somewhere else? Probably not, so proceed to 4.
4. Throw item away.

I recently downloaded the tech-demo level Lost Coast for Half-Life 2, and all I can say is ... wow! This level is a fantastic piece of work. The game play isn't anything new (you fight a few Combine soldiers, those ultra-freaky head-crabs, and a Combine gunship), but the technology behind the level is simply amazing. The high dynamic range (HDR) lighting is stunningly gorgeous; it makes the HDR technology in Serious Sam 2 look like something a child came up with. The effect is surprisingly effective, and it adds an incredible amount of realism to an already excellent game.

Half-Life 2 is one of only two games released in the past several years that really impressed me with its graphics capability (the other game being Far Cry). Half-Life 2 just feels real. And HDR only makes it more so. The wet sand on the beach in the Lost Coast level is truly dramatic, as is the lighting in the monastery. Also, the new character (the old fisherman) is so well done ... you just have to see it to believe it! Be warned that you need some serious horse-power to play the level in all its glory: an ATI x800 or NVIDIA 6800 (or better), 1GB of RAM, and a 2.9 P4 or AMD 3000+. My processor (at 2.8 GHz) is a little under-powered, but got the job done beautifully thanks to my 6800 GT.

The in-game commentary system is also an excellent addition. It was cool to hear the thoughts of the developers, why they chose to do some things and not others, as well as what technical challenges they faced. Hopefully they will include this feature in future games. All I can say is that I simply cannot wait for the Aftermath expansion; I've got to have more HDR!

For those who don't already know, the JavaScript console is one of the greatest tools built in to Firefox. It makes finding JavaScript errors a breeze, and can be a life-saver for extension developers. Unfortunately, the console has become rather bloated in Firefox 1.5. Not only do JavaScript errors appear, but now CSS errors (which are way more likely to appear on various websites) are also logged. This results in a terribly cluttered console, making it hard to find what you're looking for.

Thankfully, I was recently pointed to the Console² extension (which only works in Firefox 1.5). This extension makes it possible to filter out CSS errors, in addition to a number of other great features. It smartly renames JavaScript Console to Error Console (CSS != JavaScript), and is an excellent light-weight solution to the bloat added in 1.5.

In looking at my site statistics this morning, I noticed that my previous post on Google and OpenOffice actually made it to NewsForge. That was surprising to me (albeit a pleasant one), but I certainly didn't expect such a wide audience for my thoughts on the matter. Had I expected such a turnout, I would have put a little more thought into the post before actually publishing it. As such, I'd like to clarify a few of the points I made.

My ultimate point was that, in my opinion, the office application battleground is likely to see more cut-throat action in the short term than operating systems are. I certainly cannot support this claim with fact. But operating systems seem to me to be a much more difficult problem to solve, simply because they are bigger, more complex beasts. As a result, it seems like it would simply take longer to create an excellent OS than it would an excellent application.

I also believed I oversimplified my stance on the Linux community. The points made by Greg Raiz in his recent article on Linux are exactly how I feel. Linux is certainly poised to encroach on Microsoft's territory. But desktop users need to have a reason to want to switch. As Mr. Raiz pointed out, a unified environment, where there's One Way to do things, would appeal to many people (particularly "newbies"). Apple was heading down that very road before they made the switch to a UNIX base.

A unified environment, where the user interface paradigm is the exact same for every application would be awfully appealing. I would certainly consider switching to such a solution. I want Linux to succeed. The more developers can weaken Microsoft's iron grip on the market, the better the universe will be for everyone. But there's a long road to ride down before we reach that point. Let's get to work!