As I've mentioned before, I'm not one who really likes getting into politics too much, too many times I seem to just get disgusted with how the government is run sometimes, but I just wanted to mention something I've been thinking about.

As many know the US Presidential Elections are coming up this November and many, rightfully so, are very much getting involved in the primaries. Everyone seems to be focusing on the presidential elections, somehow believing that by Bush leaving office and a new president, even a Democrat, that the state of the nation is going to do a 180 degree turn and go back to the way it should be. Now don't get me wrong, a new president, particularly Obama in my opinion, could very much help America change its status in the world for the better, but a new president can only do so much.

Too many times, I hear of people complaining about some of the lousy laws that are getting passed in this country. Two come to mind, the first being the telecom bill (not yet passed) that grants retroactive immunity to the telecom companies, and the other being the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (PDF). The latter one will apparently cut off university funding unless universities enact strict anti-piracy strategies...in other words, unless the universities do the RIAA and MPAA's dirty work, then they'll lose funding. In my opinion, these bills aren't what I want to see getting passed through congress. People complain about these and a lot of times, I hear people blaming Bush for them. Now granted, the telecom immunity bill, he probably pressured for, but in the end that's not the point.

The President of the United States does not make the laws. As a quick refresher, there are 3 branches of government, the executive, legislative, and judicial. The legislative branch makes/writes the laws. The executive branch only approves them. If people are constantly seeing laws that they don't like, the president, in this case, Bush, is not the one to blame. Blame your congressmen, push for your representatives to vote against the bills that you feel are wrong, and push for them to vote for the bills you feel are right.

People are constantly complaining about this, yet for some reason, the same representatives seem to keep getting voted into office. The presidential elections are important, but so are the House of Representatives and Senate elections as well. I can't say I've never been guilty of this oversight, but at the same time, I'm not going to overlook this fact next time around.

Get involved in the elections, read up on the candidates, both presidential and for your representatives. And vote. Democracy, as jaded as I might sound, can only begin to happen when the people get involved. Vote for who you feel is the best candidate. If you don't vote, that is of course your right, but don't complain later when you feel the wrong candidate was elected.

Tags: election2008, rant, politics

Anyone who has ever really gotten into web design I'm sure knows all the fun that comes from making their website cross-browser compatible. This meaning, your website looks the same in both IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and any other browser. For the most part, Safari, Opera, and Firefox all work about the same so there isn't always the need to change things to make it render the same in those browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the other hand brings about a challenge sometimes.

Microsoft is known for pushing for it's own standards, the biggest one now being OOXML (Office Open XML) but that's a different story. W3C created the HTML, CSS standards so that web developers and designers would have a good guide and of course a good standard for building sites. With few exceptions all the browsers follow these, even Microsoft to an extent. What mostly annoys me about IE is how Microsoft incorporates a few differences in the way IE renders compared to lets say Firefox. The biggest one I've run into is say the width of a box. In Firefox and the W3C standards, padding is added on to the width, in IE it's incorporated into the width of the box. So lets say you want a box with a total width of 500 pixels and a padding of 5 pixels. In Firefox, you would want to set the width to 490 pixels and then set the padding to 5 pixels (490 + 5 + 5 = 500). In Internet Explorer, all you would need to do is set the width to 500 pixels and the padding to 5 pixels. Here is what I mean:

Now I will say that I kind of like IE's way of doing it better, at least in a case like this, but I would much rather have ONE standard than have to worry about tweaking things for the different browsers.

There are work-arounds to avoid this issue, but the annoyance of having to do so is still a pain. I'm hoping the reports that IE8 passes the ACID2 test are true because that would indicate a change for the better in my opinion, but I guess only time will tell.

I'm still not as experienced a web developer as many others out there so I'd be curious as to how they handle the problems caused by the slight differences in how IE handles things as compared to the other browsers, or what other differences even exist. I'm not trying to hate on Microsoft with this post, I just think having a set standard that ALL browsers follow would make the job of a web developer so much easier rather than having to test things out and tweak things just so they render properly across all the browsers.

This definitely shows us why standards are good to have.

So web developer gurus, what other bugs have you found that exist between browsers?

Tags: webdevelopment, ie, firefox, browsers, html, css

Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down safely at 9:07am EST this morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis' landing marks the successful completion of STS-122 which saw the first new laboratory added to the station in 7 years. Columbus, Europe's contribution to the International Space Station was attached during the mission's 3 spacewalks.

What's interesting to note is the Destiny laboratory, and until this mission, the ISS' only laboratory, was launched February 7, 2001 aboard Atlantis, 7 years to the day before Columbus launched also aboard Atlantis.

Tags: nasa, spaceshuttle, science, astronomy, news

Of late, Linux and open source applications have started to rise in popularity. The most noteworthy have been Ubuntu and of course Mozilla Firefox. Both are superb products that many people, even those not entirely familiar with open source have taken up using. Firefox even more since those glued to Windows can still use it in lieu of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. There are many advantages to using open source software and here are a few examples of individual apps and/or OS' that add to that.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox has started to really cut into Internet Explorer's market share over the past year or two, particularly in Europe. While IE still is the highest used browser, Firefox's market share has been steadily increasing. According to marketshare.hitslink.com, Firefox accounted for 16.98% of the market share, with IE accounting for approximately 75.47% of hits in January 2008. While this does show that Firefox is still WELL behind IE, going back to January 2007, Firefox only accounted for less than 14% of browser market share.

Firefox brings a lot to the table. Despite some memory issues, Firefox has on average a lower memory footprint than IE. Right now, for me, with 6 tabs open, Firefox is using ~35MB of memory compared to ~65MB with one tab open in IE. Firefox also tends to be more secure than IE as well. Yes, Firefox still has its vulnerabilities, but Mozilla tends to be much better and faster at getting fixes out than does Microsoft. Firefox also has what seems like an endless supply of add-ons as well. Themes and extensions allow users to customize their browser as they want including appearance, improved RSS readers, UI additions, performance improvements, even a nice plugin to block those annoying ads that are seen on so many pages.

Ubuntu (and Linux in general)

Ubuntu is a popular distribution of Linux today that offers ease of installation and use that was relatively unheard of say 5-10 years ago for Linux. I have to credit Ubuntu for helping make open source more of a possibility for more people than before. It's installation program as well as what it offers and the general use of it make it relatively easy to use after using Windows for so long. But as I've said before, Linux is not Ubuntu, there are many other distributions out there that are great alternatives to Windows as well (Slackware, SUSE, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, to name a few).

Despite what Microsoft wants to say, I still believe that Ubuntu works more "out of the box" than Windows. Take my desktop for example. When I installed Windows, almost every component needed drivers to be installed. With Ubuntu, all that needed to be done was to install nVidia's official drivers, but in all reality, the VESA drivers that are enabled by default would work just fine for the general user. While Linux does have some disadvantages with GUIs to configure settings compared to Windows, saying that it doesn't just work out of the box is an outright lie.

Linux in my opinion is more poweful than Windows for an experienced user, and even for someone with basic skills. The terminal, while very basic and not as pretty as say some user interfaces is the heart of a Linux system. You can do so much with the terminal that you wouldn't even need a user interface to begin with. In fact, a lot of Linux servers don't even have a graphical system installed, they're run purely from the terminal.

Linux is also much more customizeable than is Windows. You can make the user interface look however you want. You want to emulate the OS X desktop look, go ahead, Windows XP look? Yup, its got that too. For an experienced user, you can even customize the kernel to best run on your hardware setup, so it goes much deeper than just the user interface.

Another bonus is that of course, Linux is free. That's right, it doesn't cost a penny to download. Compared to the outrageous prices Microsoft is asking for Vista, this has got to be an added bonus. Oh yeah, and all features are available on one version of Linux, not the 10,000 different versions Microsoft has with Windows Vista.

With the exception of gaming, I have not found anything I can do in Windows that I can't do in Linux.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a full fledged office suite very similar to Microsoft Office. It can read and write in .doc files and in the upcoming OpenOffice 3.0 release, should be able to open and save .docx (Office 2007) files too. Instead of paying who knows how much for Microsoft Office, you can download OpenOffice for free. It has most of the features Office 2003 has and is available on Linux, Windows, and OS X (although with the current version, it runs through X11 and not natively).

Pidgin (GAIM)

Pidgin is an open source alternative to AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo IM, and many more, all from one client, meaning fewer system resources being needed, as well as fewer programs needing to be open. Pidgin allows you to set up multiple accounts easily under one program, so you can talk to buddies on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, whichever they and you use. The only limitation seems to be that if you need/want to use video or audio, you're pretty much out of luck, as of now anyway. Pidgin is available on Linux and Windows. On OS X, you can use Adium which utilizes the same library that Pidgin uses.

GIMP

GIMP is an open source image manipulation program similar to Adobe Photoshop. While arguably not quite as powerful, GIMP does provide many of the same functionality that Photoshop provides and at oh, I don't know, 100% off the price of Photoshop (aka Free). Despite it not being quite as powerful as Photoshop, it is quite powerful in its own right allowing you to do most of the same work you'd do in photoshop. It is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X.

While these only touch on a very small fraction of the advantages Linux and Open Source provide, it goes to show that in all reality, using Linux and open source applications can give you many alternatives, and advantages that Windows and other software just can't provide. Anyone have any other big examples of advantages of using open source and Linux?

Additional Thoughts: Someone on digg pointed out to me that while open-source software might be free, free software can be the proper term to use as it refers to much more than the price, but also the freedom to use, run, modify, and distribute the software as you so choose, and he made a very good point. Proprietary software can't give you that freedom by any stretch of the imagination, and definitely not legally as free software can.

Tags: linux, opensource, thoughts, ubuntu, firefox, gimp, openoffice, pidgin

So I think pretty soon I'm gonna get started on the next redesign of Darker Nemesis. After looking into a lot of things, I have a list of items I want to add to the site. Not all of them I know how to do, but that's where the fun lies, learning new ways of doing things and getting them all to work together. Photoshop is probably going to be somewhat involved in this as I want to give the site less of a blocky feel and thats not so easy to do with just CSS. I also have a list of other things to add and modify.

I started last night trying to see if I could set up bugzilla on my server to try to create a list of things that I want to do for the new version. Might be a little overkill but it would help me track what I wanted to do as well as bug reports for the current version.

I also now have visual studio and Microsoft SQL Server set up to start preparing to build my media datatbase site. I'll be using ASP.NET and SQL Server for that one instead of PHP/MySQL.

On a completely different note, it has now been 2 weeks since I've had a working XBOX 360, hope Microsoft gets me mine back soon before Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes out.

Tags: website, thoughts