thisStrangeEngine.com

Well, it’s not that extreme, but a web firm in California has recently acquired a patent for rich-media over the Internet. That basically means anything from Flash to Java to AJAX that is put on the Internet that is accessed from any kind of client whatsoever. What’s interesting is the company doesn’t plan to enforce it. Instead, they plan on selling it to the highest bidder, which could involve some very big dogs.

Article Here

Hat tip to Jeffry Zeldman’s site, who tactfully and succinctly put in words what I’m sure a lot of people are thinking:

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it will involve lawyers.

It has been announced that owners of the Nintendo DS will be able leverage the built-in wireless capabilities to browse the web by purchasing a DS card that contains a version of the Opera browser for the DS. I just think that’s pretty neat that Opera is now on the DS. Even though it’s not very popular as a desktop browser, Opera is enjoying some much-deserved success on the mobile market. We have Opera to thank for a lot of browser innovations we now take for granted. They were the first to introduce tabs and mouse gestures, and they have been a shining example of web standard compliance since the beginning.

Also, the final specs and colors for the new DS Lite have been announced. I normally don’t get excited about console releases, especially since I don’t play video games like I used to; but I have a feeling that on the day these things come to the States, I will be making an effort to pick one up. They are just too sexy. Honestly, this may become a repeated ritual when the Revolution comes out. I’m not going to be camping out in any lines, though.

It was recently brought to my attention that IE 7 Beta 2 just came out. I don’t know if I plan to download it and try it out, but I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about it improving support and fixes a lot of the CSS bugs that plague IE 6. Along with that, they finally support and correctly render PNG images with alpha transparency - which has been a long time coming. Here’s a post from the IE Blog about the release and the implications it will have on the current state of IE-related CSS hackery.

Things are already looking good, and if IE users migrate to IE7 quickly, then we can finally have a much easier time developing cross-browser-friendly sites.

The webserver was making strange noises earlier this week, so I had shut it down. I thought maybe that the hard drives were finally giving out (one was from my system when I was a freshman, and the other was from the first system I bought…when I was 16!), but as it turns out, it’s my power supply making funny noises. This is probably the 3rd time or so that a power supply has died on my webserver, although the hard drives have turned out to be real troopers! This particular one I picked up from Goodwill Computerworks no more than maybe 4 months ago. I suppose that’s not surprising.

I actually had another system I was using to compile a new combination backup server/webserver (with FreeBSD 6, MySQL 5, jails, etc.) with the idea of moving everything over into the current web machine when I got everything done. So I decided to move the current setup into that machine so that I could eventually work on configuring the new setup on the machine it is intended for. So for now, this website will enjoy the luxury of running on a Pentium III.

Using a modified version of a new theme. It’s much cleaner and easier on the eyes than the last one, though not as fancy. I’m not a fancy guy, anyways, so this suits me better.