Yacoblog - Internet

Video for Everybody

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:31:00 -0600

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:

Display HTML5 video
Display Flash video
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.

Lost a lot of respect for Wikipedia

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:25:00 -0600

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.

Web Browser Y2K

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:18:00 -0600

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. [More]

Monetizing Free Products

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:16:00 -0600

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. ;) [More]

Free Google Webinar

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:52:00 -0600

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:

Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer

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

Acid3 test in the works

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:57:00 -0600

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. [More]

Big News: IE8 renders Acid2 correctly

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:49:00 -0600

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!! :-)

What does your name mean?

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:09:00 -0600

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!).

Net Neutrality

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 16:08:00 -0600

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.

Study Shows Important Locations on a Webpage

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:50:00 -0600

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. :)

I passed 8th grade math

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 20:24:00 -0600

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

cfQuickDocs linked by Japanese site

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 23:25:00 -0600

I was looking at my domain's stats, and I saw a bunch of traffic coming from this one site, so I went to check it out. Turns out, it's a ColdFusion blog Japanese (I did a Babel Fish translate to verify the language)! I starting checking out the links to find a link to my site, even though I couldn't read them. Sure enough, in a permanent pod on the right the author has a link to cfQuickDocs! This must be a popular site over there, because that site is my second highest referrer, with the number 1 being direct requests (bookmarks, or just typing it in).

JavaScript Operating System

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:01:00 -0600

Someone has built a Unix like operating system using JavaScript and a web browser. It uses a lot of Ajax like functionality I'm not sure how useful this would be to anybody, but here's the description: "It comprises a vir-tual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping." I logged to the terminal in and played around a bit. All of the standard commands I tried worked! I looked at man page, and there are 55 commands currently implemented. This is pretty wild, but it doesn't have access to your local filesystem. So it's not very useful. The author says it is demo software, and I think this is another case of someone having too much time on their hands. :)

View Rendered Source

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:30:00 -0600

Someone told me about a cool Firefox plugin today that I wanted to make note of here for future reference. It's called View Rendered Source Chart. Long name, but very cool nonetheless. A lot of web developers dynamically generate page content with JavaScript. Ajax is built on this concept. If you have ever used Google's Gmail, you will have noticed how fast it is. The reason it is so fast is because they are doing a LOT of work behind the scenes with JavaScript. But what if you wanted to see the source code for an application you are working on, in its current state. In other words, the source the way it would look after dynamic things have happened. Today's web browsers don't allow this, because they just display the source code the way it was first rendered. This Firefox extension will show you the source code even after dynamic things have fired on the page. For example, in my cfQuickDocs application, if you filter the ColdFusion function list to show every thing that starts with 'bit', this extension will show you the source code including the new content my application put on the page! Very handy! When I view source for cfQuickDocs in Firefox it just displays an empty div tag, which is the way I built the page (my JavaScript functions fill the div tag with content based on user input). By the way, this person's site says you need to pay for the latest version, but I find the free (older) version to be just fine. :)

Color Scheme Generator

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:57:00 -0600

I found this color tool for webmasters to help pick complementary colors in designs. But the coolest thing to me is that it lets you see colors from various types of color blindness (Wikipedia). In the bottom right you can select the type of vision you want to filter by, and it has eight different types. My Dad is color blind. I don't know what type he has, but its interesting to see that some of the diseases cause people to see almost no difference between otherwise disparate colors.
For example, with Protanopy (1% of men have it) there is very little difference between orange (60 degrees on the color wheel) and green (180 on the wheel). Yet there is a large difference between the two shades of green immediately next to it. Strange. This image shows the colors as normal people see them on the left and the protanopy colors on the right. If you look long enough, you can see that the bottom right is slightly darker than the top right.