Tech Stuff

Today Bill Gates announced that they are going to have a beta version of IE7 available by the summer. As an end-user, I could care less. IE sucks and probably will always suck from a security standpoint.

What I *do* like about this, is *maybe*, just MAYBE they will bring it into the realm of a modern browser so people can stop doing stupid/unnecessary things to make sites work with Internet Explorer.

If they add “real” CSS support and proper PNG support (they don’t support transparent PNG images), I’ll be happy. It will give webmasters more flexibility.

Personally, I’m so sick of Internet Explorer’s stupidity, my sites will start leaving IE users in the dust if Firefox keeps gaining market share. “Sorry, this site does not support Internet Explorer. Click here to upgrade to Firefox.”

Okay, I take back my one complaint about the RAZR from this post. The contact manager does not require an entry for every phone number, it just works like that by default. You can change the settings to display by Primary Contact instead.

I also noticed something else cool… when I’m using the phone as an Internet gateway (also see other post), you can still send/receive voice calls just fine, and it doesn’t stop/pause your Internet connectivity. That’s neat.

While sitting in the airport yesterday, I wanted to transfer a 800MB file from my laptop (a Titanium Powerbook) to my girlfriend’s iBook. Her computer is newer than mine, so she was running 54Mbit wireless, while mine was 11Mbit. So I setup a private computer-to-computer network (no biggie).

But here’s the part I thought was cool… it was going to take like 15 minutes to transfer the file because we were limited to the 11Mbit and I didn’t want to wait that long. I had an ethernet cable with me, so I plugged it into both computers just to see if Macs could automatically switch a normal Ethernet cable to a cross-over cable (I figured it was a long shot).

Low and behold, not only did the laptop internally switch it to a crossover cable, but the file copy that was going on automatically switched to the Ethernet cable the second it was plugged in. By the time I could check to see if the computers could see each other via Ethernet, the original file copy that was going on via Airport was all of a sudden done. Either way, pretty slick that it switched a file copy to a different (faster) port automatically mid-copy.

Since I’m going to be on an 18 hour trip (3 flights) to Moscow next week, I checked to see if there was an off chance that the airline had power plugs in their seats (most airlines do in first class, but I’m not flying first class). And guess what? They DO! And as far as I could find, the airline (US Airways) is the only airline that does have power outlets in the coach cabin. All you need is a normal Empower 15V plug (which I already have). So that will be nice to actually kill time playing a video game, watching 8 movies or whatever else. Yay for US Air!

Now I just need to get an adapter so I can plug the AC power cord into the european sockets, and I’ll be set.

The image functions aren’t really anything new for me, I’ve done some things (like graphing functions) with the PHP image functions, but I mucked around with some advanced functions (alpha blending of multiple layers and scaling the output). And all I have to say is the PHP imaging functions are awesome (of course most of the credit is because of the GD lib).

But as an example, I made something that can render what any 2005 Hummer would look like (colors, options, etc.) dynamically. It also can dynamically generate thumbnails which ended up being a lot smoother than I thought it would. It’s like modern day paper dolls.

BTW, this is what mine looks like:

I did a little research about Europe’s ability for vehicles to see traffic and accident conditions in their car automatically (for example overlaid on a GPS map), and I’m a little more educated about it now. It’s called TMC (Traffic Message Channel), and most European countries support it now. It transmits info to receivers via FM transmission towers.

To make a long story short, we are going to be getting it in the United States very soon and will go live hopefully sometime in 2005 via existing FM transmitters. Not only that, but NAVTEQ is coming out with a system called XM NavTraffic, which will let vehicles get traffic data via XM satellite feeds if they are out of range of an existing FM transmitter.

All I can say is, cool. Almost makes me want to wait to buy a car, although I’m sure there will be lots of after-market systems to support it in existing cars.

While it would be for no real reason, other than just to see if it could be done, I think I ruled out putting an Xbox in a Hummer 2. There just isn’t enough room to put it anywhere without loosing functional space.

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess it could serve some useful purposes:

• Something to do when I’m waiting in the car for something (parked of course).
  
• Mod the Xbox so you can put a bigger hard drive in it, and put a few hundred DVDs I own on the hard drive so people could watch a movie in the car without actually needing to physically bring the DVD.
  

Still the problem of no room though. Might be able to gut it and build a ultra-low profile case with just the motherboard and hard drive (drop the case, the power supply and the DVD-ROM), and pop in a smaller DC native power supply (really no point in getting an inverter to convert 12V DC -> 120V AC just so the power supply can turn it back into DC.

Hmmm… {thinking}