toshism

Yes the web is awash with news of Internet Explorer 8.  We’re like lemmings that way, it seems like every blog I read (116 says Google Reader) has some news of IE 8. Given the mad dash to the finish line for South by Southwest, I haven’t bothered to download or play yet, but I guess I’ll have to.

For me, the big news is that Internet Explorer 8 will have Firebug.  Well, not technically firebug, but pretty much an exact clone.  If you visit Microsoft Developer Tools and download their PDF, you’ll see that IE 8 will ship with a near exact clone of Firebug – which is great news if you’re trying to really push IE.  I’m also happy that its being produced by the IE team, and not by a third party developer.  The reason I’m happy is not because a third party dev couldn’t do an outstanding job (again, hat tip to Firebug), but because so much of the internals of IE is undocumented and secret, that I think the only people who could successfully implement this is the IE team.

If you look carefully, they actually got some really, really nice things in IE 8.  For example, window.location.hash.  This allows you to use javascript to redirect the user, but the page gets added to the cache and history.  This allows the back button to work normally with “Ajax-ed” paged.  Nice!  There’s also a series of DOM-compliance bugs in there, and while it’ll mean little to me as jQuery shields me from the day to day trivia of that, it’ll mean a huge deal to jQuery itself (and other javascript libraries) and I bet we can expect a nice bump in speed due to native support for things that normally needed to be reconstructed (I’m looking at you CSS selectors and getAttribute/setAttribute).

The good folks over at Digital Web Magazine have more news in IE8 Beta 1 released!, including links to Jonathan Snook‘s smoketests.  I’d like to extend my gratitude to the IE development team for its frank and open communication, particularly via the IE blog.  While I’ve not dealt with them directly, all accounts are that they’re listening to the geeks.

straight stolen from DerekAllard.com

Mike Linksvayer, the CTO of Creative Commons, runs the numbers of Nine Inch Nails’s Creative Commons download experiment and discovers that it only took the band two days to exceed the typical net from a massive-selling traditional CD release. The band sold $750,000 worth of “limited edition deluxe sets,” plus an unknowable further sum from sales of the regular CDs and merch.

The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.

Link

(Thanks, Brian!)

See also:

HOWTO Earn an artist’s living in the 21st century: 1000 True Fans

Nine Inch Nails goes Creative Commons remix-friendly with new album

straight stolen from Boing Boing

“It should be pretty simple,” David M naïvely stated, “just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?”

“Uhhh,” David's coworker, James, replied in a slightly condescending tone, “no.” David was starting to get used to such responses. Nothing in his new job was “pretty simple” to simple to do.

“Okaaay… so how exactly can we tell if a particular Agent is allowed to a given Product Line”

James groaned. “Well as you know, the original database developer, wasn't really a fan of normalization, the relational model, or just plain simple common sense. In this case, he did not want to 'waste space' by creating a table just to store the Agent-Product Line relation.”

David sighed. He knew exactly what was coming up: some stupid comma, tilde, asterisk delimited string on the Agency table.

“Oh it gets worse,” James replied, “see, take a look at this column, the NVARCHAR(2000) one called strProductLines?”

David took a look. He was confronted with something far worse than a delimited string…

012-3100000100110000001000000103000001001100000-1011010101—0010011000000100000001000001001—00000500000010600010011000000100000001000001001100000010

“What the–”

“Here,” James said, cutting him off, “let me show you how it works.” He grabbed a pen and a pad of paper, and started to draw a little table …

ID	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	…
Value	0	1	1	-	3	1	0	0	…

“Wait,” David said, “you're telling me, the index of each character corresponds to the product line? And a one means that they can sell a product line?”

“Yes,” James replied, “but it's a bit more than that. '0' means they can't sell, '1' means they can, '-' means there is no such product with that ID, and '2', '3', '4' – all through '9', all mean different things. Like, '3' means that the agent has received training on the product line, but has not been approved to sell, and so on.”

David buried his face in his hands for a brief moment. “So how exactly can can I build this 'Find Agency by Product Line' feature?”

“Well,” James winked, “it should be pretty simple.”

straight stolen from The Daily WTF

Designer Stephane de Sousa’s produced a prototype “minimalist bedside table” with “a waterproof surface, bookshelf, and a simple way to remember where you left off on last night’s reading.” It’s the last one that really gets me here.

Link

straight stolen from Boing Boing

YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320×240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448×336 resolution and I'm guessing it's using the VP6 codec (can anyone confirm?). &fmt=18 gives you the iPhone-style MP4 stream.

What videos will actually look better in the higher res format is completely dependent on the material that was uploaded to YouTube, obeying the rules of garbage in garbage out. I’ve looked at a number of videos where you can’t really tell the difference between the low and high-res versions, presumably because the uploaded video was already heavily compressed or pre-scaled to 320×240. There are a few, however, that are strikingly better, such as the skateboarding dog above.

A greasemonkey script is available which will cause Firefox to automatically load the fmt=18 version, if available. A quick install and you can be wasting time at twice the bitrate.

Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos – [via] Link

YouTube HD Greasmonkey Script – Link

straight stolen from Hackszine.com

• Ninjapenguin – Kohana setup screencast
  (tags: kohana framework php web)

Amazon’s launched a Linux-based downloader for its DRM-free MP3 music store — fantastic news! Now if they’d only change the terms-of-service for the store to something sensible like “Don’t do anything illegal with this music.”

Link
(Thanks, Pete!)

straight stolen from Boing Boing

A pilot tries to land this Airbus A320 in 150mph crosswind while the passengers puke and pray.

straight stolen from YesButNoButYes

• Captcha for Django Version 1.1
  (tags: development django python web captcha)

• Changeset 3811 – Django Code – Trac
  manage.py setting to server admin media
  (tags: django python webdev programming)