DanDev.comDaniel's Dev Blog..ish

We’ve been pretty lucky so far this hurricane season. We’ve only had one direct hit, and one or two near misses. Hanna veered further out to sea and made landfall around New York, while Gustav curved into the Gulf and hit Lousiana, and Ike had a similar track but hit Texas head on. I’ll attach a picture I came across on the internets of some minor storm damage(certainly not the worst) from Ike.

Hurricane Hanna’s current projected track takes it right up the eastern seaboard, which means it will sideswipe us here in Florida. The current speed is rather slow, like Fay, so we can expect some decent rain. The ground is still soggy from Fay, a week and a half ago. Creeks will flood, bridges will close, people will lose power. Many will worry far more than is necessary. Welcome to Florida! =]

Also, something that people tend to forget is that meteorology is anything but an exact science. We(as a race) can say with some level of certainty that a storm will head NW until it hits the US(then NE usually), but the smallest change in course amounts to a huge difference of where/when/if it hits us. So just keep that in mind, you worry-warts.

Attached is an image of the current track courtesy of StormPulse.com:

Soon(roughly 8AM Wednesday in the image) it will strengthen to a Category 2 hurricane. When it gets back into open water it will probably speed up a little, too.

Six months ago Microsoft issued this statement:

As you may have heard by now, Internet Explorer 8 will ship with three layout modes – Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. The saying goes: “put your best face forward” and, true to this, Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default when encountering standards content.

Now, with the release of IE8 beta 2, it seems that statement is less than true; for intranet sites at least. Even when a site is completely standards compliant, if it’s on an intranet, IE8 will render it in compatibility mode by default. According to the article(see link below) roughly 60% of computers sold go to corporations with the remaining 40% going to home users. So, when you load the corporate homepage from your desk at work(internal) you will see it differently than a user loading it from the internet(external). EVEN IF the page is completly standards compliant with DOCTYPEs and everything.

Apparently, it’s not exactly easy to fix either. It’s just a checkbox, but it’s in an odd place and has a confusing description for the average user. To make matters worse, your page will have an icon next to the address bar that shows a broken page, just to.. you know.. cause more confusion:

[Original Article] [Microsoft IE8 Blog Post]

I’m kinda regretting the switch to WP. I’ve used it before, but I don’t remember it being this bloated. It has a lot of nice features, but it’s also incredibly slow. And one of the plugins caused the XHTML validation to fail with something like 89 errors.. I realize that it’s not part of the core, but features that I consider essential aren’t included, so I had to install some extra plugins.

In other news: I am overly critical of other people’s work. Even when it’s free I expect it to be of a very high standard. =P

So, I switched to WP instead of my custom code I used before. This is mostly because I just don’t have the time/desire to keep up with the codebase right now. This should be easier to update(maybe I’ll post more than once every 8 months).

BOSTON (Reuters) – “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said “w00t” — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging. It’s like saying “yay,” the dictionary said. “It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,” Merriam-Webster said. Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers. … One Web site, www.thinkgeek.com, already sells T-shirts with the word “w00t” printed on the front. “w00t belongs to gamers the world over. It seems to have been derived from the obsolete ‘whoot’ which essentially is another way to say ‘hoot’ which itself is a shout or derisive laugh,” Think Geek said on its Web site. “But others maintain that w00t is the sound several players make while jumping like bunnies in Quake III,” it added, referring to a popular video game. Online gamers often replace numbers and symbols with letters to form what Merriam-Webster calls an “esoteric computer hacker language” known as “l33t speak.” This translates into “leet,” which is short for “elite.” [full story] (dead link removed)