Yearly Archives: 2007

The Flash Companion

Posted on December 31, 2007 by Kelson

Cover: The Flash CompanionI just turned in final drafts for the last of three articles I’m contributing to TwoMorrows’ upcoming book, The Flash Companion by Keith Dallas.

The book covers the entire history of the Flash, from Jay Garrick through Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen. It’s full of articles, artwork, and interviews with writers, artists, with a cover by Don Kramer and Moose Baumann. My articles are part of the Rogues Gallery section.

The Flash Companion is due in June July* 2008, and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Also worth checking out: some interesting tidbits on a related Comic Bloc forum thread. [Edit] Sadly, these were lost when the board crashed in May 2008 and had to restore from a 7-month-old backup.

Now, off to celebrate. Happy new year, everyone!

*Update: (January 10) – I’ve just been informed that the release date has been pushed back to July.

Posted in Comics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Behind the Times

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Kelson

I’ve been meaning to post these photos for a while now, but with the discussion on Netscape’s impending doom, I should post them now.

Back in February, I was wandering the aisles at Micro Center and noticed a couple of odd software titles on the shelf:

  • Netscape Basics, a jewel-cased CD-ROM which contained Netscape Communicator 4.5 and boasted compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98.
  • Opera for Windows, a boxed copy of I forget-which-version, but judging by the “New! Voice Enabled!” badge, it’s probably 8.0.

Keep in mind that this was February 2007. So that was an 8-year old Netscape box, and a 2-year-old Opera box. Netscape had been free for 9 years, and Opera had been free for 1½ years.

Someone had sensibly marked the Netscape CD down repeatedly, ending with a price tag of $0.42. I was half-tempted to buy it just to prove that I’d found it, but decided taking a picture would be better, since it wouldn’t clutter up my desk. Incredibly, no one had thought to mark down the Opera box. They were still asking $39.99 for it.

Did I mention pictures?

Netscape Basics CD for $0.42 Opera for Windows for… $39.99

Posted in Browsers, Opera | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Farewell, Netscape!

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Kelson

NetscapeIt’s been a long time coming, but AOL has officially decided to shut down the Netscape web browser. The final security updates for Netscape 9 will go out in February, and then that’s it.

It’s been on life support for a while now, as AOL has tried repeatedly to revive it. After they dismantled the Netscape team in 2003 (just before spinning off the Mozilla Foundation), everyone expected that would be the end, but they came back with a surprise update, Netscape 7.2, the following year. Then they hired an outside company to reinvent it as a mash-up of Firefox and Internet Explorer, producing the Netscape 8 chimera. And just a few months ago, they went back to the well and released the Firefox-based Netscape 9, trying for the Flock model of integration with social networking sites…but only integrating with their own.

So what killed it? Netscape was arguably the pioneer, building on Mosaic’s success to create the first widely-used browser on the fledgling World Wide Web.

  • Internet Explorer being pre-installed on every Windows desktop
  • The commercial-to-freeware transition. Back in the 1990s, the only business model for giving away a free web browser was to subsidise it with revenue from other products. This led to selling the company to AOL, and opening the source code.
  • The missing Netscape 5. IE5 was considerably better than IE4, and arguably better than Netscape 4 in some areas. And Netscape didn’t have a new version to compete, because…
  • The transition to open-source took a lot longer than expected, leading to…
  • The disastrous Netscape 6. While there’s something to be said for meeting deadlines, Netscape 6 was a prime example of why not to release early. The program just wasn’t ready (Mozilla actually declared the code to be 0.6), and it turned off many users who might otherwise have stuck around a little longer for a stable release.
  • Fundamentally, though, AOL never seemed to know what to do with it. Is it a product? An exploitable brand name? A threat to brandish during contract negotiations with Microsoft?

Get Firefox!It’s interesting that, as I made this list, I realized that the transition to open source really didn’t help Netscape, the company. But it led to the formation of the Mozilla Foundation and the release of Firefox, one of the most visible open source success stories out there. The company and brand name withered, but the code itself flourished.

Like the demise of IE/Mac, it’s more of a symbolic end than one of substance. In my opinion, the true “heir” so to speak of the early Netscape has been Mozilla, and now Firefox, for quite some time.

Update: Asa Dotzler has a somewhat less nostalgic take on the matter, as well as a link to commentary at TechCrunch. I can’t believe I forgot to mention the crippling/crufting of Netscape 6-7 as compared to Mozilla.

Update 2: More comments at Slashdot. Gee, I wonder who submitted that story? ;)

Update 3: Some commentary from the Web Standards Project, with a somewhat familiar-looking title.

(via Opera Watch)

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Ballad of Barry Allen

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Kelson

I just discovered that They’re Everywhere, the album featuring the Flash-themed song, “The Ballad of Barry Allen,” is now available on Amazon’s MP3 store. The band, Jim’s Big Ego, is headed by the nephew of legendary Flash artist Carmine Infantino, who did the cover artwork on the album.

And yes, the song’s actually good!

It’s been available on iTunes (which is how I originally bought it) and CD before, but it’s worth mentioning since Amazon’s music downloads, like Slabster’s, are just plain MP3s. No DRM, no account activation, no need to authorize computers or stick with one company’s player—hardware or software.

There’s also a fan music video, “Seems so slow,” that uses clips from the Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons:

See also: Flash Music.

P.S. Would you believe this is the first time I’ve actually embedded a YouTube video in this blog? I’m so behind the times, I know…

Posted in Comics, Music | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Links: Safety Last

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Kelson

Forklift Driver Klaus (a.k.a. Staplerfahrer Klaus)- a parody of work safety films in which a forklift driver blunders through his first day on the job, maiming fellow employees left and right. German with English subtitles. (via TV Tropes: Scare Em Straight)

And, on a more serious note, the Internet Storm Center is reporting on people finding malware pre-installed on digital picture frames, memory cards, etc. Something to watch out for with portable devices that can connect to your computer.

Posted in Humor, Tech | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Santa’s other job

Posted on December 24, 2007 by Kelson

Spotted last summer. In case you were wondering…

Catering truck: Santa’s Catering.

…now you know what he does for the rest of the year!

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Tori Amos Comics & Concert

Posted on December 21, 2007 by Kelson

Now this is cool: Image Comics will be releasing a graphic novel anthology with stories based on Tori Amos songs next summer! And Colleen Doran is illustrating one of the stories! (Her blog is where I heard about it.)

We went to Tori’s concert on Saturday at the Grove of Anaheim. The standing-room show was good, though there were some snafus getting to it, made worse by the fact that they opened the doors about 45 minutes late. So late, in fact, that they gave up on security checks and just started letting people in. By the time it started moving, the line snaked all the way along the side of the theater and down at least one side of the (rather spacious) parking lot.

[Album cover: American Doll Posse]Her current album, American Doll Posse, is based around a fictional quintet of singer/songwriters, each based on a different facet of her personality, and she performed as three different personas: Pip, Santa (no relation), and Tori. Which should have been more fun, but there was just a bit too much self-parody in the performance.

She brought a band again, which I think helps keep her from the slow-everything-down tendency she showed on the Originial Sinsuality tour (Katie calls it “elf disease,” after the way the elves of Lothlorien speak in the Lord of the Rings movies). Except for an endless vamp at the end of “Waitress,” this concert moved much more than the last two we’d seen.

It was good to hear stuff from Choirgirl Hotel again. It’s been notably missing from the last few concerts we’ve been to. And there was a surprising amount of stuff from her first two albums as well. (Full set list at Undented.)

I’ve seen Tori in concert 6 times: Once in 1999 at Irvine Meadows, when she toured on a double bill with Alanis Morissette, twice on the Scarlet’s Walk tour from 2002-2003 (Universal Amphitheater & the Pond), twice on the Original Sinsuality tour in 2005 (Royce Hall & the Greek), and this show at the Grove. My favorite was the Scarlet’s Walk tour. I reviewed the Universal show during the first few months of this blog, though I don’t seem to have written anything about the one at the Pond.

Update: The Beat has more on the comic project, including a title, Comic Book Tattoo and additional contributors.

Posted in Comics, Music | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Comment fix

Posted on December 21, 2007 by Kelson

Oops… Looks like WP Super Cache was inadvertently preventing comments from actually posting for the past week or so.

Sorry about that…

Posted in Site Updates | Leave a comment

Linkage: On Fx and SFX

Posted on December 20, 2007 by Kelson

VXWorld: Crossing the Uncanny Valley – on the current state of the art of photorealistic computer animation, from Final Fantasy through Polar Express to Pirates of the Caribbean and Beowulf. As pointed out, one reason that Davy Jones worked so well is that he doesn’t look human. (via Neil Gaiman)

Firefox Floppy Disks – remember when software came on 3½-inch floppy disks? Or 5¼″? Just for fun, someone split the Firefox installer across 5 disks, complete with appropriate labels… and even took it a step farther

Posted in Computers/Internet, Mozilla, Sci-Fi/Fantasy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hey WaSP Webmaster: How to Fix Acid2

Posted on December 19, 2007 by Kelson

With internal builds of IE8 passing Acid2, a lot of people are looking at the Acid2 test with browsers that are supposed to comply… but don’t.

It looks like there’s a server error on www.webstandards.org, and I’m trying to report it—but emailing them is just kicking back “user unknown” errors, and the spam protection on their blog refuses to let me comment, claiming that my user-agent has changed since I read the post. Um, no, I may have looked at it with more than one browser, but the one that loaded it is the one that’s submitting it.

So, Web Standards People, you want to fix your test?

Fix your 404 page.

Rows 4-5 test nested <object> support. The intent of the spec is that if a remote object cannot be retrieved, the browser will instead display the content inside it, on the HTML page itself.

One of the objects is trying to load content from http://www.webstandards.org/404/. Normally this fails, and the browser displays the fallback content — the eyes on the happy face. Right now that page is returning an HTTP status code of “200 OK” instead of “404 Not Found” — so the browsers, including Opera 9, Safari 3, Konqueror 3 and Firefox 3 beta, are all dutifully showing the content of that page in a tiny rectangle with scrollbars.

Update: Thanks to several Slashdot posters for pointing out that the test author, Ian Hickson, has a second copy of the test that points to a different URL for the <object> fallback test, and currently works as expected.

Posted in Web Design | Tagged , | 1 Comment