Articles by Steven


Steven has written 519 articles, Page 19.

RSS Pains

Coding and Web Design

You would think that using an standard would mean that your RSS feed would work just about everywhere. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to always be the case. All those RSS 2.0 fixes I did on my site seemed to have broke the feed to MyBlogLog. Not sure what it doesn’t like as other RSS 2.



I Want to Go Fast ... Speed Testing

Mind the Gap

I’ve been having a lot of stuttering and slowness of late on my Internet connection. I’m thinking it may be my router, but I decided to validate my Internet Speed (1.5MB DSL) and ran into a pretty good speed test site. My Internet looks pretty good (hit 1.2MB to Chicago), so I’m still not sure what is going on. Thought I’d share the one I tried.





Halo 3 Badge

Halo 3 Badge

I thought this was pretty cool, a number of flash or image badges from Battle Record that uses your Halo 3 service record. Check out one of the images below:


Disney Mix Stick Pain

Music

Well, the wife received a Pixie Power Disney mix-stick for Christmas this year. I know, it is marketed for kids, but it an interesting shuffle like MP3 player. Yeah, no screen, but with a 1GB of flash RAM, expandable with an SD card, it appeared to be a great little player. That is, if you can get the music on it to play!



Safari - 3.0.4

Mind the Gap

It appears that a new version of Safari is out: 3.0.4. It is still a public beta, but they did fix a few niggles from the last version. For one, tool tips now work. For another, the inline spell checking is now working. Looks like IE7 is still lagging in that area. Surprising since Microsoft Word started whole trend. However, Safari, not to be one upped by Firefox, has also seen fit to include a grammar checker. Although, it tends to error on mundane things, like titles and numbers with periods.



Tag Cloud

Coding and Web Design

I’ve been using the tag cloud concept on a lot of other sites and find it useful at times. The idea is pretty simple, supply keywords or tags to your content. Those tags are then counted and a tag cloud of links is displayed, with more frequent links larger then less frequent ones. Since my site was lacking in that capability, I decided to program it in.



Getting into that Web 2.0 Thing

Coding and Web Design

I’ve been hearing a lot about the Web 2.0, but not sure how much I’ve been participating. I signed up for a Digg account, but didn’t really get into it. I’m still not sure what is considered Web 2.0. If you check out Wiki's definition of Web 2.0, I’ve already been part of the whole Web 2.0 deal by blogging and using and creating RSS feeds. In many ways, my use of 360voice and its API probably qualify as well. After thinking about, maybe I do a lot more with Web 2.0 than I thought.



Memories of Daitarn 3

Mind the Gap

I grew up for some time in Naples in the early 80’s. Surprisingly enough, this was before any English TV was available to us. That didn’t stop me from watching TV, even if shows like Star Trek were dubbed in Italian. I would often spend time watching the cartoons, also in Italian, and a particular favorite of mine was Daitarn 3.


HD What? HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray Wars

Mind the Gap

Although, to date, I own neither of the latest HD disk formats—heck, I don’t even own an HD TV set yet—I find the whole format war rather interesting. Having lived through the Beta vs. VHS, but not really understanding it, I find it fascinating how two companies complete against each other.


Being Big Brother

Being Big Brother

I’ve been a fan of the Big Brother (US) series since season 2. This summer, like the last 7 ones, wasn’t an exception. I enjoyed my weekly dose of other people’s reality. Like some previous BB’s, this season included an interesting twist from the outside—a plane banner. It got me thinking, “how hard is it find the Big Brother house?” In particular, I was interested if I could find a satellite image of it.


Hanging Around at Marapets

Mind the Gap

Okay, it may seem silly, but my daughter had me try one of her favorite game sites called Marapets. Okay, okay. Before you go snickering, I actually found the site pretty interesting. For one, it isn’t just for kids—so don’t put it down yet. It is designed to be kid friendly, while catering to all ages. So, the candy sweet coating aside, it actually has some interesting concepts going on.



Viva Vista?

Mind the Gap

Well, I traded Viva Piñata this week for Windows Vista. I decided to bite the bullet and give Vista try on my laptop. So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.


Unicode and the like

Coding and Web Design

I’ve run into a bit of an issue. XML uses UTF-8 encoding. I wouldn’t think it would be a big issue, but my web pages render in ISO-8859-1. Since my ISP uses perl 5.6.1, I can’t easily encode/decode between the two Unicode formats. So, I thought I’d just render my pages in UTF-8. Ouch, bigger headache. Now older articles don’t look right and some of the WebAPP code converts things wrong. I’m still looking for a solution. For now, you may find some things display wrong here.


MS Home Server

Mind the Gap

Microsoft has released a public beta of their Microsoft Home Server software. I’ve had various “home servers,” usually older computers, running various version of Windows and Linux. My current one is running Media Center, but it is also a desktop for my daughter.


Apple vs. Microsoft: Typography

Mind the Gap

So, I’m still hacking around in Safari. If you read earlier article, you might remember my complaint about the fonts being a bit blurry. Well, in my wandering around the Apple discussion boards, someone was nice enough to post an interesting article on the philosophical differences between Apple and Microsoft.


Having fun on Safari

Mind the Gap

I was looking to try out Safari on Windows the other day, but all the links to get it were down. Now I know why! Apple released Safari for Windows today. Well, not one to wait around, I promptly downloaded it to give it a spin. In fact, I’m writing this article in it right now.