While Firefox may be an excellent browser for a large number of reasons, in time I have started using Safari more and more. The excellent support for standards, fast rendering capability and complete Mac OS X integration make it my first choice on Apple’s platform. However, I still like to have a bit more control over browsing than either vanilla Firefox or plain Safari offer, so here’s what’s extra on my machine¹. Mac OS X only.

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1. DISCLAIMER: Safari does not have an official plugin mechanism, the way Firefox does. While all the things I am recommending here have served me flawlessly over time, you should be aware that they may stop working after browser updates — albeit if only for a short period of time [↩]

To continue on my rant about “points of failure” on the Internet, it seems that http://urlTea.com isn’t responding anymore. OpenDNS hints that the domain is not registered with DreamHost anymore.

As a commenter mentioned on my old post on the topic, DreamHost has allegedly shut down url(x), though I do not believe they have something against URL services in particular. Most likely, as Alex King pointed out a while back, some of these services do not have a revenue model, and with arguably lots of traffic, they become hard to maintain.

RandomKitty via Alex King

I have recently attended a talk given by Michael Geist on the subject of “E-Publishing and the Law” through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Here are some of the things that Dr. Geist spoke about, as well as some of my observations.

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Inside scoop: News later on today will reveal that the CRTC has been asked to intervene in the affair of Bell’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic. It will be interesting to see if they do it, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Thanks to Dr. Geist for the scoop yesterday¹. I have not posted it when originally heard² as per his request, though I don’t know who else respected that.

UPDATE: Michael Geist’s story on the topic is here.

1. Directed at the about 100 people attending the event I was at [↩]
2. Check the time-stamp on the post [↩]

A few interesting titbits from today’s news - Apple, GPL, JP Morgan controversies, beer is the secret to success.

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Joel Spolsky (the famous Joel writing “on software”) had a lengthy comment today yesterday on the impending war between the supporters of IE 8’s standards mode versus the rest of the world (as he argues it, that means the majority of web developers out there) that will have their websites broken in IE 8. (Mark Pilgrim hosts a translation of the article which pretty much captures the essence of the thing.) While he makes a compelling argument as to why he believes IE 8 will eventually revert to the old way of rendering, I take issue with some of the finer points of the matter. Specifically, I believe, for once, that Microsoft is not the only one to blame for the current state of the web and they should not backtrack because it might be a cause of inconvenience to some people in the short term.

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I enjoy podcasts. I seek the more technologically-oriented ones because, hey, I have some idea about what they’re talking, but there’s always room for improvement. I was sad when Binary Revolution Radio stopped broadcasting, but I focused on other things. I have listened/watched to TWiT & Co., CommandN, Digital Underground, Hak5, SECTHIS. Some of these I still follow. Others, not so much. Even if nobody is perfect, it’s hard to ignore some of the pretty big errors in reporting I came across while listening to some of these.

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Dictionary redefined: theBigWordProject.com sells words for $1 a letter. You make that word’s definition be a link to your site. Great advertising technique, methinks, but definitely a better way to spend your money than others I have heard of.

Yes, I got myself one :)

People throw around a whole bunch of buzzwords regarding the impending web 3.0. It’s always fun to speculate, isn’t it? In my limited experience of web things¹ I came up with my own speculation.
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1. I am not against web 2 though I never got into the big social networks like Facebook or MySpace. Some say blogging is web 2 as well, and I’ve been doing this since before we had a buzzword for it [↩]

Considering that recent¹ news keep hinting at how the MAFIAA and company want to push responsibility for file sharing onto ISPs, let’s muse over a few possible outcomes.

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1. Well, they were far more recent when I drafted this entry [↩]