shwango! blog
life, love and some other stuff…

Archive for the 'web' Category

Microsoft playing catch up again?

In my previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t really get where Microsoft went with some of the aspects of ASP.NET. Google is making huge waves with all the cool stuff they are doing exploiting the ideas MS had back with IE 4.0 and MSXML’s introduction. IE 5.0 and 6.0 didn’t break new ground, but matured MSXML, yet, as far as I can tell, didn’t use it to it’s full potential.

CNET has posted recently some interesting articles about Google and Microsoft - looks like MS is playing catch up again, just like they did with the Internet some 10 years ago - even to some of Gates’ own ideas. And I won’t mention some of the comparisions to Google and MS’s Hailstorm and the Google toolbar and MS’s Smart Tags . (Another interesting link.) Maybe we trust Google more than Microsoft? (I personally don’t use any browser toolbars - should I start?)

And while I think Java is pretty cool, Sun missed something by not realizing their own slogan - “The Network is the Computer”.

Sorry if this seems jumbled… just wanted to blog it since I usually spend too much time thinking about how to say it right and then I never get around to it!

Firefox

I have to say Firefox is really great. I’ve been trying to use it for most of my browsing and it’s doing a great job. So far only a few sites have had problems. I got Jen using it a while ago when something wasn’t working right with IE and she hasn’t had too many problems either - maybe something with PDF’s, but I haven’t looked into it yet.

I really love that they’ve incorporated the base functionality of MSXML. That’s a great thing! Currently our web app at work is only for IE, but maybe we’ll see that change. We are using MSXML a lot, but think we can do the same stuff in Firefox - maybe Safari too. I’d like to get us back to working on the Mac platform at some stage and didn’t like the thought of a fully installed client.

The theme-ability is cool - not a pain like IE. And there are some cool extensions out there, but I haven’t played around with them much yet.

I still need to get some of my CSS code working in Firefox, but for the most part, it works like a charm!

Anyway… sorry for not posting more. Between work, life, Christmas… ok, just excuses, but oh well…

Bloglines plumber?

Corporate blogging…

Looks like more and more companies are looking at blogs to help build out communities for their employees, partners and developers. I like the fact that it’s not always company specific stuff.

I have previously posted about the “mesh on mx” blog by Mike Chambers, the Macromedia Product Manager for Developer Relations. Macromedia has a bunch of other blogs available.

Now Sun and Microsoft are getting into things… You can check out the MSDN blogs, as well as Planet Sun.

Successful micropayments?

Maybe micropayments can be successful. BitPass seems to have at least a decent collection of merchants.

I posted about Peppercoin a while ago, but they haven’t seem to have gotten too far - still in beta and only a handfull of merchants.

We shall see… Here’s the thread at slashdot.

Hey Aaron, BitPass’s motto is “Your Two Cents”!

Blog for ransom?

On a tip from meish.org, I had to check out crazy shwango! Quite ate up! Do it yourself!

Screen shot for posterity…

screen shot

too busy?

hmmm… just tried to update my xp box and look what microsoft served up… (good thing i’m behind a firewall. sounds like this latest worm - via windows rpc hole - is reaking havoc!)

soma fm…

it’s been a while since i had to shutdown shwango! radio to the public and since then haven’t paid too much attention to what’s been going on in the internet radio world - aside from listening to 97x.

soma fm was another casualty of the dmca carp ruling. well soma is back on the air… er, well, internet… they settled things up with the riaa and the music publishing companies. they’ve got a number of “stations” to choose from - i’m enjoying “secret agent” right now. if you’ve got some extra cash, please donate.

where anything is possible…

visit zombo.com! you can do anything! the only limit is yourself!

waste of time?

ok, i know everyone and their mother has posted about homestarrunner, but i had to post as well.

i’m addicted to strong bad’s emails. “dragon” is the funniest thing i’ve seen - i was rolling on the floor, lol! trogdor! i spent the other afternoon watching all 50-some emails!

strongbad_trogdor.jpg
strong bad & trogdor, respectively

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