As more and more people are using devices where Flash is not available, as a web developer you might be concerned about this trend (especially since Steve Jobs has waged a war against Flash). I found an awesome tool to help us solve this problem. It's a tool called Video for Everybody, which is basically some code you can use in your pages to display a video that will work in ANY device (as long as it can play videos, that is). You have to encode your videos in both MP4 and OGG format. Once you've done that, you use this code and it will do one of the following, depending on what the user's browser supports:

1. Display HTML5 video
2. Display Flash video
3. Display an image with download links for the two video formats

So this way you can support all of your user's video capabilities with very little pain. And for the standard's conscious among us, it tries to use HTML5 whenever it can.

So I had heard that the Barak Obama wikipedia entry had a lot of "edit warring" going on where people were rapidly adding and removing facts and information. So I went to investigate myself. Sure enough, if you look in the old revisions for the page, you can find this old revision that has a section labeled "Controversy". The only thing in this section is three links to men that have had some sort of controversial relationship with Obama in his past (the section is at the bottom of the article, above the Notes section). The three men mentioned are Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and Tony Rezko. However, if you look at The most current version of the article (I linked it's "oldid" revision because the page might change yet again by the time you read this), this "Controversy" section has been completely removed. In addition, the page has been locked for editing because of all the controversy.

Politics aside, I don't think anybody will dispute that these three men knew Obama and had some sort of relationship with him. And it's obvious that these relationships are controversial, by definition. You may have your own opinion about what these men mean to Obama, and what kind of man he is having dealt with them in the past. That is NOT what I am concerned about here. I just think it shows how innacurate Wikipedia can become when simple facts like the above (Obama's relationship with these men has been controversial) cannot stand in the article due to people's political beliefs and their ability to edit Wikipedia to match their political agenda.

You would think we developers would have learned our lesson after the Y2K debacle...but I guess not. We are now faced with a similar problem, but this time dealing with browser version numbers.

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I have written a few times before about my belief that ColdFusion should have a few version. So I am not going to rehash my arguments again, you can find them here and here. Instead, I want to highlight a recent blog entry by Marc Cuban, who discusses the importance of offering a free version of your product. Marc Cuban is a multi-billionaire that got rich before the dot com boom, got even more rich during the dot com boom, and then kept most of his money during and after the dot com bubble burst. So it's hard to argue with his businsess sense. Not to mention, in addition to his software business successes, he owns a little team called the Dallas Mavericks. ;)

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If you use Google tools for your websites, you may be interested in this free webinar that Google is offering. It will cover three of their tools for web heads:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Website Optimizer

The webinar is July 8th at 9 am Pacific time.

Now that all the major browsers have passed the Acid2 test, Ian Hickson has started work on the next challenge to the browser makers. Acid2 focused on HTML and CSS standards. Acid3, on the other hand, will focus on the DOM and ECMAScript.

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It's been 2 years and 9 months since the Web Standards Project issued the Acid2 challenge, and Microsoft just announced that Internet Explorer 8 correctly renders the Acid2 test. I think this is AWESOME news. Once IE8 is released and replaces IE 6/7 as the dominant browser on the 'Net (assuming that happens, of course), we web developers can FINALLY develop a standards compliant site, and it should run on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Yay!! :-)

I was curious about the origin of the name Conrad, a guy my wife and I know. So I googled, and found a site called Behind the Name, where you can type in any name and you will find the origin and original meaning, as well as famous historical people that had the name.

Interestingly, my wife's name Dyany is not in their database. Her Mom found the name in genealogy records from the 1600s. I already knew that Jacob is of Hebrew origins, but I didn't know that the Hebrew spelling is Ya'aqov. Very cool, makes me want to change my online handle from Yacoubean to this. :) Yacoubean is actually from the Tad Williams Otherland series, which had a bad guy named Yacobean (I misspelled it the first time I used it!).

If you follow the tech news, you've heard of this buzz word that has a lot of people up in arms. Basically, Net Neutrality is a concept that anybody should be allowed to put their content on the Internet (provided it's legal, of course), and anybody should have the right to access that content. This is a policy that most in the world take for granted today, but there have been a lot of people in the U.S. going nuts, for fear that we are going to lose this on our public networks. The reason? There is a telecommunications bill going through congress, and one of the provisions is to allow ISPs to charge a higher price for premium content, like IPTV. Because of that provision, a lot of people fear this will create a slippery slope; that ISPs will abuse this new law and charge exorbitant amounts for content they don't like, or block it altogether.

Well, I too was becoming afraid, so I wrote my congressmen, asking them to support any bill that would preserve net neutrality. I got responses from all of them, but I want to hi-light what Senator Larry Craig said. He informed me that the FCC already has a policy in place to preserve Net Neutrality. Here's a quote from his letter: "The FCC has adopted a policy statement...outlining four principles to be incorporated into its ongoing policy making activities that encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open, interconnected nature of public Internet". I won't bore you with the four principles, but I found this interesting considering all of the wild discussions online lately, wherein a lot of people swear up and down that the Internet, as we know it today, is soon to end. I know I feel a lot better after getting this letter from Mr. Craig.

This is not new, but a recent discussion on the CFEclipse mailing list brought it to my attention again.

Did you know that most people only pay attention to certain parts of your webpage (top, center and left)? There are tricks to change this (for example, using images at key locations to draw attention). But overall, scientific studies using eye tracking hardware, have pinpointed high visibility areas. I also found it interesting to study the scan path most people follow, shown below. You will notice that the right side if the page is largely ignored. I think a big reason for this is the fact that in western cultures we read from left to right. Also, traditionally most web pages flow from left to right. So you may want to reconsider that 'rebellious' right sided navigation in your site. :)