K-Squared Ramblings

Hazards of Keyless Ignition and Office Chairs.

• Today I learned that keyless ignition makes it easy to accidentally leave your car running. Good thing it was only 5 minutes. #
• The fact that it idles silently (no need to run the motor unless it’s charging the battery) was probably a necessary factor too. #
• Amusing: Apple has released Safari 4.0.4. Seems appropriate for a web browser. #
• By Fox “The Cancelator” standards, waiting 4 episodes to cancel Dollhouse Season 2 is generous. #
• WTF? I just tweaked my *other* shoulder doing nothing more exciting than reaching for my mouse. Nowhere near as badly, at least! #
• Right shoulder seems OK. Left shoulder still recovering from whatever the heck I did to it yesterday. The dangers of…office chairs? #

Moz-something

A good tech support one-liner from (The customer is) Not Always Right: A Flock Of Explorers On A Safari Singing Opera.

Switching & Tropical Depression

• Hmm. The old switch2firefox.com [archive.org] campaign from 2004 now redirects to Spread Firefox. #
• A tropical depression is “not to be confused with the condition mid-latitude people get during a long, cold and grey winter wishing they could be closer to the equator.” #

About Those Robots…

I don’t know how I missed this easter egg before: In Firefox, type about:robots into the location bar. (via @Aeire & @IsobelWren) # If you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll get a kick out of it!

What’s Cool in Opera 10

After a long wait, Opera 10 is out! So what’s new in this first double-digit web browser?

Turbo

The biggest new feature is Opera Turbo, which can massively speed up web access on a slow network connection. Turbo takes the compression used for Opera Mini, which has to deal with slow cell phone networks, and brings it to the desktop. On fast connections you won’t need the proxy, but if you’re stuck on dial-up or sharing a busy network, it can help immensely.

I definitely could have used it on the painfully slow hotel wi-fi during Comic-Con!

Turbo can be turned on and off through the status bar, or set to auto-detect your network speed and switch on when it would help, and off when it’s not needed.

Speed

Even without Turbo, Opera 10 is a heck of a lot faster than Opera 9 was! The app itself is a lot snappier, it displays pages faster, and it responds quickly. Opera feels lighter than Firefox again, after the (comparatively) clunky 9.x series.

Web Fonts

Opera’s CEO CTO recommended embedding TrueType fonts with CSS in 2007, but Safari was the first web browser to support it in a non-beta release. Now Firefox, Safari and Opera can all download fonts as-needed. That means websites can use fonts that aren’t already installed on your computer.

Until now, if a designer wanted to use a font other than one of the standard fonts that come pre-installed with Windows or Mac OS, they had to save the text as an image. That’s fine for banners and the like, but a pain for anything that changes regularly…like headlines or content.

You can read more about web fonts at Mozilla Hacks, and see them in action at Speed Force (font write-up).

Site Compatibility & Features

Website compatibility has improved a lot, and Opera has continued to add support for newer technologies. It’s great to see Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all working toward the next generation of the web. (If only Internet Explorer were along for the ride – at least IE8 has finally caught up with the last generation.)

Spell-Check

Opera has had on-demand spell checking for a while, though on Windows you had to install a separate dictionary. Now it’s built-in, and it’ll underline misspelled words as you type. (Downside: it underlines inside HTML code. I don’t really want to add “href,” “li,” and so forth to my dictionary.)

Unite Postponed

One thing Opera 10 doesn’t have that was introduced in the betas preview snapshots is Opera Unite, which lets you set up a presence on your computer that other people can see for file sharing, social networking, etc. Apparently they decided it needed more work and didn’t want to hold up the release.

But Wait, There’s More!

Some other new features:

• Visual tabs: Stretch out the tab bar and see a thumbnail of each page you have open.
• New e-mail client, including the long-requested ability to compose with formatting.
• Automatic update.
• Customize Speed Dial.
• Web apps integration with web-based email and feed readers.
• Improved developer tools (Dragonfly).
• Opera Link: synchronize bookmarks, history, notes, etc. across multiple computers and phones. (Not new, but I think it syncs more types of data than it used to)

And a lot more.

As a reminder: Opera is free (as in beer). It has been for almost 4 years now, but it’s worth repeating because every once in a while you see someone who thinks it’s still pay or ad-based software.

Twitter Homepage Redesign

New Twitter home page: good move emphasizing conversation & search over “What are you doing?” & soup. #

Browser Sniffing Strikes Again!

As the first major web browser to reach a double-digit version, Opera has been testing out alpha releases of version 10 for months now. One of the early problems they encountered was bad browser detection scripts that only looked at the first digit of a version number and decided that Opera 10 was actually Opera 1, and therefore too old to handle modern web pages.

After extensive testing, they’ve concluded that the best way to work around this is to pretend to be Version 9.80. From now on, all versions of Opera will identify themselves as “Opera/9.80″ with the real version appearing later in the user-agent string.

For example:

Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00

This is similar to the way all Gecko-based browsers identify themselves as Mozilla/5.0, then list the real browser name and version number later on, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just stick with that increasingly irrelevant prefix — though I suppose any scripts looking specifically for Opera versions might have still picked up Opera/10 later on in the ID.

It’ll be some time before Firefox or Safari runs into this issue, but with Internet Explorer 8 in wide release, you have to wonder…what will Microsoft do when they get to IE 10?

15 years of the Opera Web Browser

Hard to believe Opera has been around for 15 years. It’s only 14 since its first release, but 15 years ago two programmers started the project that became the Opera web browser.

I’ve been using Opera off and on for about 10 years. I think it was 1999 when a classmate showed me Opera 3.6, and how fast and small it was. (This was back when the installer fit on a floppy disk — and back when that actually made a difference.) I’ve followed it as they expanded from Windows onto Mac and Linux, onto high-end cell phones with Opera Mobile, and finally onto every Java-capable phone with Opera Mini. I’ve watched as they went from trialware to ad-supported to freeware business models. And while the desktop browser is no longer the speed demon it used to be, it’s been a consistent innovator in terms of both browser features and web capabilities.

So I’d just like to say: Happy 15th birthday, Opera! Just think, in a year, you’ll be old enough to drive!*

*In California, anyway. I think in Norway the driving age is 18.

Color-Switchin’ Coraline Apocalypse

Neil Gaiman remarked on his blog that images his agent emails from Germany end up with the colors inverted, and posts an example of a Coraline poster:

“…ah yes, I thought. That’s the sequel, all right. CORALINE APOCALYPSE”

I used to run into this with TIFF images when building websites. (No big surprise, given that there are a million variations on the TIFF format.) I think it was around 2000 or so that I was working on a website for a law firm, and they sent me their logo. The logo, as I received it, was yellow on light blue, so I built a site with black text on a white background for the main areas, and yellow on light blue (matching their logo) for the title, navigation, and borders.

I sent them a link to the test site. They looked at it, and said it was very nice, but could I try to match the color scheme on their logo instead?

It turned out that red and blue had gotten switched around (and possibly more, because I can’t remember how the yellow ended up in there), but anyway it was supposed to be white on light brown. I switched the channels, redid all the graphics and styles for the site, and they stuck with it for several years.

Back on the subject of Coraline, Gaiman adds in his post that the film has become “the second highest grossing stop-motion film ever” after Chicken Run. So why does it seem to be forgotten already? Just two months ago, commentators were falling all over themselves to say Coraline was the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick. Now everyone’s talking about how Monsters vs. Aliens is the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick.

Does That Have a Hyphen?

Why is it that Firefox consistently truncates the title “Google Analytics” at the worst possible spot? #

Upgrading the Web: IE8 Released

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, for Windows XP and Vista. So if you’re still running IE6 it’s once again time to think about upgrading. (Assuming, of course, that you’re not locked in by corporate policy or another piece of software.)

IE6 is now two versions behind the current release.

IE6 is almost 8 years old (it was released in 2001).

IE6 is lacking in many capabilities that all other modern web browsers have, in web technology, in security, and in features you can use.

You can read a review at Wired, a write-up from the IE team, or a summary of technical changes from WaSP.

Of course, Internet Explorer isn’t the only option out there. There’s Firefox, Opera, Chrome and a host of other alternative browsers that are worth checking out.

If you’re still running Windows 2000 or some other old version of Windows that can’t run IE7 or IE8, I’d absolutely recommend Firefox or Opera. Either will be much better than IE6, both will run on Windows 2000, and Opera will even run on Windows Me and Windows 98 (but you really ought to move to something more current than Windows Me.)

The web is still round

G1 Web Browser Compression

WTF? Android’s web browser doesn’t support compression? Shouldn’t it squeeze all the bandwidth it can, especially if you end up on an EDGE network? #

Hmm, it looks like the G1 just turns compression off when on cell networks for proxying. The network itself may do compression (in theory). #

Please Check This Site on Your Phone!

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

• What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
• Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
• Does it look like..
  1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
  2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by Wordpress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
  3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
• Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
• Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @KelsonV.
• Email me at kelson - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

Installing IE8 RC1 — Or Trying

• Installed IE8 RC1. Installer crashed, and I ended up with IE7…even though I’d been running the IE8 beta before. #
• IE8 installer crashes system. New HW checks out. Bad RAM may have screwed something up before I replaced it. Time for System Restore. *grr* #
• Wow, System Restore is taking a lot longer this time. Maybe it’s actually working? (Or maybe safe mode just makes it slower?) #
• I can’t remember how many times I’ve rebooted this computer today. (And no, safe mode didn’t solve it) #
• Finally got IE8 RC1 installed by telling it not to install updates immediately. The Malicious Software Scan was crashing the system. WTF? #
• Now that I’ve FINALLY got IE8 RC1 running, a cursory check of websites I maintain shows no glaring problems. *whew!* #