Ramblings

SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company’s motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury’s verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case. […]

One more step towards stopping the madness. It’s about time.

No, today isn’t Tuesday, but it was when I got this message on the white board in my office. It was left by my boss’s children on Monday. Just thought I’d take a picture to share before I cleared it off to make room for other stuff.

But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. […]

This article couldn’t have been timed much better. I was just looking into what it would take to create a basic site theme that could handle the mobile browsers without browser sniffing and server-side nonsense. I strongly believe in progressive enhancement on the Web and approaches like this where the system can adapt on the fly to your device’s capabilities.

I took Spot and Mocha to the vet (Animal Clinic of La Porte) today. Neither were happy to go, of course. It only took five minutes to get Spot in the carrier this time. It has been harder before.

I was a little concerned about Mocha’s behavior at the vet. He has been so much trouble in the past that they have occasionally been forced to partially sedate him. That was not the story today. Other than not wanting to come out of the carrier once we were there, he sat quietly and rather passively while the vet did what needed to be done. Mocha got away without having any shots. Spot was not so lucky.

Spot has some sort of skin irritation that makes him scratch all the time. A lot. No, really, a lot. He’s been treated for it in the past, but it is a temporary solution each time. He’s been scratching enough lately to actually pull some fur off his stomach, and that had me a little worried. So, today he got two shots: one in the back leg and another up near his front shoulders. No whine, no whimper, no growl, hiss, or spat. He was great about it. Getting him back into the cage was much easier this time. All I had to do was open it and he made a hasty retreat into the back corner.

Neither cat wasted much time climbing out once we got home. I figure they’ll forgive me some day. Maybe.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites have reportedly been passing very granular user data to advertisers without informing users about it, in violation of their own privacy policies.[…]

Color me surprised. Just glad I made the decision to leave. This could still have affected me to some degree, but it cannot any more.

I’m not big into typography and I don’t usually use more than a baseline sans-serif font for my sites as a result. However, there’s been a big push in the last few months to get “real” fonts out on the web and usable by websites. Typekit and a few others have been offering services for a while now that allow you to use licensed fonts on your website. Google has now jumped into fray with a collection of completely free fonts and their own distribution method. It looks pretty simple to use. Very simple, actually. Go check it out if that’s your thing.

(Typekit is on board with it and sounds somewhat excited to see Google join in.)

Google’s long-awaited open-sourcing of the VP8 video codec has finally happened and both Mozilla and Opera are on board with it. The new codec and container combine decent quality with open source licensing and royalty freedom. Might this be enough to topple H.264 as the Web video codec of choice? […]

Glad to see Google, et. al., making strong moves to ensure that the preferred video format for the Web is open and free. It was refreshing to see Adobe even signed on and will support the codec inside Flash.

(We’re on the right track for it to take the next 100 years to migrate over to IPv6)