I feel that it it my duty as a developer/instructor/mentor/script kiddie to let you all know about the coming of the new version of Firefox! FF3 is supposed to be ready in June!!

To promote this, Mozilla is creating a marketing campaign to have the “World record for downloads”. You can sign up and pledge that you will download it on the day it is released. Once you sign up, you will get notified as soon as it is available.

Lets help them out!

For those of you in my Dreamweaver classes, I have now posted the solutions online for you guys. (I know…finally) Remember, the ones on the CD will not match the exercise manual. Here are the Holiday Parks files you will need.

Well, so much for the IPO. Now that mySQL is being acquired by Sun, I no longer have another cool tech IPO to look forward to like I did for VMWare.

No real word yet on what this will all mean for we lowly, open source using web developers. Hopefully, Sun will keep its commitment to open source technologies.

Well guys, the W3C has released the public working draft of the HMTL 5 specification.

I am taking my first long look at it this week, so I’ll try and put some coherent thoughts together for you.

Most of my students end up asking me one or several related type questions, “What does that mean to me? Will my existing web pages break? Will I have to learn a whole new language?”

Let’s address a couple of those issues, shall we?

What does it mean to me?

It means that yes, there will be ANOTHER set of tags and attributes to learn and remember. AND there will be existing tags and attributes that you will have to forget. As of this draft, HTML 5 is dropping support for HTML formatting attributes and tags in deference to CSS. For example, here is a list of some things that WILL NOT be in HTML 5:

• align attribute on caption, iframe, img, input, object, legend, table, hr, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, col, colgroup, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr and body.
• alink, link, text and vlink attributes on body.
• background attribute on body.
• bgcolor attribute on table, tr, td, th and body.
• border attribute on table, img and object.
• cellpadding and cellspacing attributes on table.
• clear attribute on br.
• frame attribute on table.
• frameborder attribute on iframe.
• height attribute on iframe, td and th.
• hspace and vspace attributes on img and object.
• marginheight and marginwidth attributes on iframe.
• noshade attribute on hr.
• nowrap attribute on td and th.
• rules attribute on table.
• scrolling attribute on iframe.
• size attribute on hr, input and select.
• style attribute on all elements with the exception of font.
• type attribute on li, ol and ul.
• valign attribute on col, colgroup, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead and tr.
• width attribute on hr, table, td, th, col, colgroup, iframe and pre.

So, will it be painful? Probaby at first. Especially for those of us who have gotten used to things the way they are. More painful still will be those who have never really gotten into CSS the way they should have. This is going to be they day they have been dreading. HTML 5 is going to force you to use Style Sheets. Forget using any older WYSIWYG (especially Frontpage).

Feels good this time of year. Especially when it is cold and snowy up at home. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to post this year. It has been a very busy end of the year and beginning of this year.

Vegas was great. Everything I expected it to be! And I didn’t lose a single penny in the casinos! Lots of glitz, lights, noise, and fun. I was working in the Panasonic booth, right beside the new 150″ Plasma TV. Yes. It is HUGE! And it looked spectacular.

I also got a new headset for my phone. Jawbone had a booth where they were giving away free headsets if you turned in your old one! OLED monitors and keyboards were on display, so I look forward to getting one of those soon…

I’m here in Miami this week, working at the ISET show. This show is similar to what I was doing in Vegas and the TCT show I do during October. I am supporting the presentations that the doctors give. Ever been to a concert, tradeshow, or even watched the awards show on TV and seen the titles that go up on the screen for the presenter? Yeah, that’s me. Someone has to develop and program those names onto the computer and get them up to that screen when the time comes. So there is a lot of up front work programming the names, slides, and animations that will be called for during the presentations, but once we are on site and the show begins it is a fairly easy gig.

When I started doing this about 7 years ago, I never realized the work that goes on in the background to support something as simple as a keynote presentation. It takes about 3 days of setup and rehearsal to get it up and running smoothly.

Some shows are more interesting than others. TCT and ISET are interventional cardiologist seminars, so I get to see lots of open heart and other types of surgery. Yeah…that is what I felt the first year. I have learned to not watch the screen so much anymore. Obviously, CES was a dream come true for me. I have also done shows for Home Depot, CheckFree, and a handful of others that range from boring to….well, more boring. I guess unless you really have a vested interest in the topic, Annual reports, bank ledgers, and corporate sales policies tend not to pique your interest.

I do actually enjoy doing the shows though. I get to see cities I don’t normally see when I teach since we don’t have classrooms in Vegas, Miami, or many others.

As many of my students have seen in class. One of my favorite ‘hobbies’ is to create custom Google maps for my projects. If you haven’t seen that before or don’t know how to create your own custom maps, I’ll do a post on that some time. For those that know what I’m talking about, Google has now expanded the universe, literally, of custom mapping.

The Google map API has been opened up to allow you to create custom maps of the moon and Mars! 

Why?

That is the question I get from some people when I tell them about this.  Thinking about it, there is no real PRACTICAL reason to do so that I can think of right now. Maybe education? Mapping Moon landings? Tracking the Mars rovers?

But my reason why is simply this: Because its fun! I CAN do it, so now I WANT to do it! Kinds of like driving fast or jumping out of a plane. There are no real reasons to do those things (unless you are in those careers), but I WANT to so them because I can.

So will a real practical reason for doing these Martian maps develop? Perhaps. I often think of other things that were created for no good practical reason and through sheer human genius and creativity have become important innovations and integral parts of our society. Like Britney Spears.

I still wonder if I am dreaming. I am currently in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This is THE place for all new gadgetry, video games, TV’s, GPS, and anything else electronic. It is the showcase for the next year of tech gadgets from every company you can think of. Not only am I HERE, I am getting PAID to be here! How cool is that?

I’m actually working in the Panasonic booth, programing and running the computers for one of their display demos they have here. Nice gig. I get to see all the new stuff they have (and it is cool), and walk around the CES to see what other cool things there are. Nothing new to report yet, but as soon as I see something cool, I’ll post it.

I have seen the new Panasonic tech coming, but can’t post any of it until they do their public announcements…I’d hate to get in trouble for posting something out of turn. That is BAD - m’kay. And I know this because I found out a couple weeks ago people ACTUALLY read this blog…and then call me up to tell me to TAKE THAT STUFF DOWN because I was not supposed to tell anyone about it.

It’s sometimes nice when they tell you these things BEFORE you see them, saves yelling, screaming, cursing, and general malaise.

Web Worker Daily 

Pretty good site from the parts that I have been reading. There are articles on web design, tips and tricks, tax advice, freelance advice, and even a job board! Check it out.

I have just added a new site named CSS Elite to the blogroll. As most of my students know, I am a big proponent of developing your sites is style sheets, using clean standard compliant code, and using tables for what they were meant to do, show tabular data, not layout an entire page.

This site is dedicated to great looking designs developed entirely with CSS. Its a great gallery showing lots of great looking sites. It also has a nice news section with links to web development related topics. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.

I got an invitation last week to be part of a pre-screening of Super Bowl Commercials! A few weeks ago I signed up with a research firm to be part of a political debate audience. While filling out the form, I also checked that little box that said ‘check here if you would like to be included in one of our other research projects.’ Hoping of course they wouldn’t involve needles, wires, or electric shock. Luckily this one doesn’t.

So basically, next week, I will get to spend 3 hours reviewing and critiquing this year’s Super Bowl Commercials almost 2 months before they air! Sounds fun to me! I doubt I will be able to post anything I see, or even describe it. I’m sure there will be a 50 page NDA I’ll have to sign with all kinds of bodily harm clauses. HOWEVER, if there is not, I’ll give you my take on a few of the best.

Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with myself during the game.