BarelyBlogging

How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?

Link (Slashdot)

“I don’t agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important,” [Ben English, Microsoft's security and management product manager] said. “It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.”

Incredible. This guy is either totally clueless or lying through his teeth. I vote for the latter.

By refusing to update IE and fix known bugs, Microsoft causes me to waste hours every month. In the entire web design industry I would not be surprised if Microsoft costs millions in lost revenue due to people having to work around bugs in IE.

Link (Cnet); Get FireFox

Tim Madden (Web Designer – Brisbane Australia) created some nice podcast logos:

• Podcast Logos

Instead adding an IMG every time I link to an MP3 file, I just created a CSS style like the following:

a.podcast {
 display:block;
 height:20px;
 padding-left: 80px;
 background-image: url(podcast-icon.gif);
 background-repeat:no-repeat;
}

Then use the following to link to the MP3 file:

<a class="podcast" href="file.mp3">file (MP3)</a>

Thanks to Drew for pointing me to the icons, and of course to Tim for creating them.

Here is an interesting technique I saw on the CBS News website:

Each thumbnail image has an outline with a little plus sign in the bottom right corner, to indicate that you can click the thumbnail to pop up a full-size image.

Rather than adding the icon to each thumbnail image, they created the outline and the icon as a transparent GIF. Then they specify the thumbnail image as a background which shows through the transparent parts.

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="131" width="175"><tbody><tr><td background="image653259l.jpg"><a href="javascript:launch('photo', 540, 400, 'main641817_popup0_2.shtml')"><img src="story_image_pop.gif" border="0" height="131" width="175"></a></td>
</tr></tbody></table>

The only disadvantage of this technique is that it assumes that each thumbnail image is the same size. You could probably do something similar using CSS to add the border and position the plus icon to the bottom right of the image.

Warning!
This is a technical beta release. Before you decide whether to install this software, it is important to understand that the technical beta release does not have the stability of released Microsoft software. You might encounter problems with this release of the software that could possibly result in a loss or destruction of data. This release is not for production use, and we suggest that you run the software in a test environment or back up your existing data, including music and video files, before you install and run the software on your computer.

How is this different from their other software?

Link

Entertaining forward to a book:

When I got out of the army, I headed off to college and got a degree in Computer Science. Now I really knew everything. I knew more than everything, because I had learned a bunch of computer-scientific junk about linear algebra and NP completeness and frigging lambda calculus which was obviously useless, so I thought they must have run out of useful things to teach us and were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Link