Henry is nerdy

Just installed Service Pack 2 for Vista x64 bit on my main work machine. Took about 20 minutes to install through Windows Update. I normally avoid upgrading the service packs on Windows installs because through experience they are many times very unstable but this time I didn't really feel like reformatting and installing a slipstreamed copy of Vista again. Still this time the experience was very quick and all I had to do was replace my uxtheme.dll files after I finished installing the service pack to get my themes back up.

Earth day

Since it's Earth day I decided to collect some of the best shots of our planet from around the world so let's go around the planet, shall we...

Started as a comment reply to this blog post by Ben Heine.

Artician's job is to provide creative individuals a way to present their work. It is not to police the Internet. We only remove content in any form for being spam, illegal in the USA (hey, our servers are here), or for Copyright Infringement.

We take the approach that we are more of a host rather then a police of content so we will not remove anything for simply being offense to a single person. If you have multiple Admins who can be the judge, jury, and executioner of kicks/bans you will see a situation in which the various volunteers (and/or paid staff) of a website begin to develop their own moral compass on whether or not something must be removed or not.

I believe that if there's simply a solid, rigid rule that no content is removed except for complete, defined, reasons (like above) then you will see less of this type of thing happening.

Then again, why should you believe what I say?
The answer is simple: because I am a student of history. I know what Free Speech is. I know what Censorship is. I know the exact definitions of capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, and I definitely know what a police state is. I also would like to think that I have a pretty decent grasp of how human nature works. With that being said, as long as I am part of the development team: I will continue to promote an atmosphere of intelligent debate, equal rights, and the freedom to say what you want without retribution on the part of the staff.

On top of this my world view is shaped not only by my knowledge of history but also from my background. I was born in Ukraine in 1987 under the former Soviet Union. Today, I'm an American citizen with extended family members in Germany and Israel as well as the United States. Even today though, despite having all my education in the US (school to college), I still speak to my grandparents in Russian. I can honestly say that because I know history, despite having been only 4 years old when the USSR collapsed, I am eternally grateful for that fact. And because I know all of this, I am tolerant of views that are contrary to my own, even if I disagree.

Having said all of this, it might be a good time to end this blog entry but there's still something I need to point out.
Artician has areas that are considered "public" and there's also that which is considered "private". For this reason while we may not delete an artwork submitted, we might decide to unlist it from Browse, Explore, or any other public listing. Likewise we might remove a forum post or thread if it offends specific people. This is because these areas are public and also because in public we need to show some restraint in provoking random visitors. On your own subdomain, however, you represent yourself and as such should be responsible for the content. So as long as it's not Spam, Illegal, or Copyright Infringing we will continue to tolerate it even if we disagree with it's content. Because removing your digital voice is like denying you to your digital habeas corpus.

I decided to start using Digsby instead of a very old school version of AIM with DeadAIM. With it's ability to track multiple social network accounts it became very useful for me to be able to track Artician's official twitter and since I didn't have a personal one I made one for myself as well.

So if you want follow me at http://twitter.com/digitalaku

I'll be mainly talking about Artician and probably complaining about class quite a bit. :-D

I'm constantly on the look out for new ways in which I can debug web design better. These days it's getting harder and harder to do that since the browser war and the operating system war has started to expand. Today it looks like we will never again see the days of the single browser dominating the Internet. Artician in particular sees one fifth of it's traffic come from the OS X platform, 2% from Linux, and the rest from various flavors of Windows. When we look at browsers the stats get even more colorful. Firefox dominates with 64% of the Artician market share. Internet Explorer comes in at a shrinking 16% and Safari continues to expand it's growing 9%.

When we combine the OS and the Browser into pairs all of a sudden all majorities are lost. Firefox on Windows come in at just under 50% followed by IE on Windows with 16% and then Firefox and Safari split the OS X share at 13% and 8%.



So having to be able to support OS X when the buy in for the operating system includes the hardware is a deal breaker for us since we are a startup. Luckily the VMWare community comes through with a way to run OS X in VMWare.

So here it is, Artician on OS X 10.5.5. :)

So Mozilla has released an alpha of their new Mobile Firefox dubbed "Fennec".



You can download it for OSX, Linux, and Windows.

What do you guys think?

The software war is definitely on for the phone platform! We're gonna start seeing a convergence of phone hardware since both operating systems are Unix based so that will hopefully drive down prices. The fun part is that now we get to see Google and Apple duke it out. This should be interesting. Especially considering the stakes are who will control the Phone OS market for the next 20 years like Microsoft has owned the past 20.

The challenge is now out for web developers to step up and capitalize.

I don't really like to take sides in the browser wars. As a developer I like to build sites that work on all browsers and if I find a bug in any given browser I do go and attempt to track it down and fix it. Having said that I believe that at the moment Firefox 3 is both a superior browser to IE7 and Firefox 2 on the Windows platform for anyone who has more then 1GB of memory. If you have less then 1GB IE7 is probably still superior because it has a higher CPU usage while taking up less RAM.

Since Firefox 3 went into public beta I've been using it as my main browser and I've been anxiously awaiting Firefox 3 to be finished. I've been using it as my main cause I got fed up with Firefox 2 hitting 200MB of memory followed by ridiculous CPU usage which tended to require me to restart the browser every 2 hours because of how much of a heavy browser I am. So for the past couple months I've been dealing with Firefox 3 beta as my main browser with all it's glorious crashes, bugs, and other annoyances and yet for some reason I still felt it was better then using Firefox 2. Since it's been a month since the previous release I went digging into the development of it and since the Mozilla foundation is such a transparent organization (Open Source) I found out a lot.

Mozilla has a wiki which has a Firefox 3 page. The Mozilla development team has a weekly status meeting on Tuesdays which helps summarize the progress being made and the dev team puts out a daily build of the current code base of the browser which lets anyone try it out. You can also view the current status of bugs. The dev team refers to bugs as "blockers" because they block release. As of today there are only 12 blockers left to fix, only one of which is a critical bug and none of the ones left cause anything serious like a crash. This is a huge contrast to Beta 5 which when released on April 2nd had 140 blockers remaining (as of April 1st status meeting). This essentially means that in the month of time since then the development team has fixed probably more then 200 bugs (because other bugs creep up as old ones are fixed). I'm happy to say that I'm writing this blog on the daily build of Firefox as of April 2nd and I highly recommend you guys try it out. Beta 5 used to crash on me quite a bit but I'm happy to say that the current nightly build hasn't crashed on me at all so far and it looks very solid.

<a rel="lightbox[firefox]" href="http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/4163/minefield_may2.png"><img src="http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/4163/tn_minefield_may2.png"></a>;

If you wanna try the nightly build go to,
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

You can either run the install like normal or you can download the zip and copy the Firefox directory inside the zip to any folder on your hard drive. The nightly builds are called "Minefield" so don't be surprised when you open it up and you get a different icon from the familiar orange Firefox logo. This is done on purpose so you can tell the difference between an official release and an internal beta build.

It will automatically detect and attempt to use the profile you already have setup on your computer for Firefox so you might wanna make a backup of your profile by going into,
C:\Documents and Settings\{Your username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

Make a backup of the profile with the .default suffix.

You can also choose to make a copy of the profile and create a shortcut like so,
firefox.exe -profile "E:\path\to\my\profile\"
which will allow you to run multiple instances of the Firefox browser. Something that might come in handy for the developers.