Category Archives: General

You know; general stuff.

Live and in Concert!

Are you an AFTRA member? Want to learn about this new-fangled web and social media thing? Then come down to the AFTRA offices next to the La Brea tar pits on Thursday, February 3rd at 7:00pm for the Technology for the 21st Century Social Media Panel in the Frank Maxwell Boardroom.  They’ll have a whole panel there to discuss things like “should I use the Twitters?” and “why does Danny Devito keep ‘poking’ me?”  Panelists include… ME!!! So come on down and say “hi!”  The fountain of knowledge that will be spewing forth will be astounding!

http://aftra.com/D8CB69C7E12544CF87BF5462C9D18191.htm

Dave’s not here, man!

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! A lot has happened since I last made a blog post, check it out here. I got laid off at my old job, but I found a much cooler job, and in record time! (Only out of work 2 months! Woot!!!) I now get to build sites for Atom.com, part of Viacom and MTV Networks. They even sent me to Comic-Con this year!  We’re doing lots of cool stuff, and starting to plan even cooler stuff for the coming year, so it should be a whole lot of fun!

Font Squirrel

I probably would have found this site ages ago if Google-ing for “free fonts” actually brought up sites with free fonts instead of bait-and-switch poser sites. But thanks to a recent post on Ajaxian, I know have an excellent source for open source fonts to use in whatever project I want: Font Squirrel!  I can embed it with sIFR or canvas-text, I can give them to everyone in my Thursday night typography circle, and I can create header images until the cows come home.  No more looking over my shoulder wondering if that assassin from the all-powerful font maker lobby has finally tracked me down.  (I think I lost him in Munich.)

http://www.fontsquirrel.com

Viva la open source!

I’ve Gone Mobile!

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I have joined the legions of iPhone users. This means that I can blog from anywhere! For example, I’m blogging from my iPhone right now as I’m sitting here… at my desk, in front of my computer. Okay, bad example. But this sure is a fun toy! And with projects out there like PhoneGap, there will very likely be a lot less free time in my future!

Albotross Flies Higher! — 0.5.1 RELEASED

New and improved!  Albatross Home Media Streaming Server 0.5.1 is released! New features include:

  • support for mfs_ftp (this method is more reliable if you need to kill the stream)
  • improved stream killing (it actually works in most cases now)
  • user interface tweaks and improvements
  • detailed program information in HMO mode
  • more awesomeness!
 Grab it from the Google Code page, or read more about it on the project page.

Browser Watch 2008 – June Roundup

Big things are happening in the browser world these days. We haven’t seen this much action in browser development since the Netscape 4 / IE4 browser wars of the dot.com bubble, and back then it was only two browsers! Today, we have (arguably) no less than 4 major browsers, each with increasingly good levels of standards compliance. Even Internet Explorer’s latest offering looks to be reasonably standards compliant, and may finally remove that painful thorn called “Internet Explorer Compatibility” from our collective sides. Let’s take a look at what’s coming down the pike: Continue reading

Will Developing For IE Ever Really Be Easy?

We all know just how much “fun” it can be to test for all the different versions of Internet Explorer.  Multiple-IE kind of works, but the best solution so far is still using Virtual Machines.  Developer Jean-Fabrice Rabaute, the author of DebugBar for IE, has developed a new solution which allows you to compare web sites in different versions of IE side by side.  The software is still in alpha, so there are still some issues.  Most notably, Flash does not work under IE6; that can be something of a show-stopper for most of our sites.  IE6 may still be the anchor that drags our cool applications down into the abyss of compatibility nightmares, but when this tool is ready for prime-time it could really help make IE testing slightly less painful.

link: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Original Ajaxian article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/testing-ie-versions-just-got-a-little-easier 

Firefox 3.0 and FireBug 1.2 – An Addict’s Confession

Hello.  My name is David, and I’m a FireBug addict.

Hi, David!

It all started innocently enough.  I was introduced to FireBug about a year and a half ago.  “Hey, try this Firefox plugin.  It’ll make your web development experience incredible!  And the download is free!”  Being a modern-day developer, I was willing to try new things.  I can always uninstall it later; I’m in control.  Or so  I thought. Continue reading