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I know, I know, I've been lost for a looooooooooooong while now, yes. It's a little bit more than seven months since my last post. What prompted me to write here again? Mainly I re-visited the whole site after the new version came out, just a couple of days ago. (And now that we're at it, I still do not know what the new features are).

It's not that I've been so busy that I was unable to post. I did have some time to post every now and then, although I've been busy. I've been working on interesing personal development projects, full of bleeding-edge technologies like AJAX. I've also been enjoying my new computing environment sooooo much you just can't imagine.

I am still on Ubuntu Linux Dapper 6.06 full-time, and I can't feel better at it. It is stable, friendly and enjoyable to the point that I have a hard time whenever I have to use that other OS that almost everybody use. I am developing web applications on Linux using jEdit as my main IDE. Aptana, of which I talked about in my last post coincidentally, turned out to be too resource-hungry, even though I have a modern PC with 512Mb RAM and 3.0GHz CPU speed. I've been using Firefox as my testing and debugging platform (Sorry Opera, but Firebug has no equal when it comes to test and debug a web application using JavaScript and AJAX heavily).

Thunderbird is still also my choice when it comes to email. Opera still does not have WYSIWYG email editor and other minor but handy features that I need. Opera continues to be my day-to-day browser for my web surfing needs, and OpenOffice, Gimp, ImageMagick, Beagle, Liferea, Gaim, Gnome, Vim/Cream, MPlayer and MPD do the rest. I've been also using Ruby's and Python's scripting power to automate some tasks in my working environment.

I've also been vey busy following the socio-political events that have happened in Cuba, my country, in the recent months, almost all related in some way to the illness of the president Fidel Castro and the temporary transfer of power, and how this has impacted our society. I know some people get more interested in this blog because of my nationality than for my interests and the topics I write about. Feel free to ask.

Anyway, I'll see if I can make the time to talk here again every now and then, mainly about the technologies I am using and how they make my life easier.

We still don't have that linkblog feature here at the community that would be so useful for those of us who need it, and it won't bother those who don't. And since I've found a few articles and pages worth commenting about, I will post them with brief comments in a single article, because I have no time to do a single blog post for each one.

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A tempest in a Wikipedia (The Inquirer)
I have written before about Wikipedia and all the controversy around its inaccuracies and open nature. Here is a good article with more on the subject and favourable to the successful online encyclopedia.

Bring on the tables (456 Berea st.)
Excellent tutorial about the correct use of HTML tables to present tabular data (not layout), and how to take advantage of the not-so-known accessibility and semantic features they offer.

Keeping up with Internet trends (Site Reference)
An end-of-the-year kind of article, highlighting the best of 2005 as a very active year for the web (it was active indeed), and some predictions/analysis/speculation on how these trends are going to behave in the year that just started.

Googleopoly: The motivation behind gmail (Site Reference)
Interesting insights about the role of gmail in Google's vision.

Web 2.0 - Fad or the future? (Site Reference)
Sometimes I found myself talking about the Web 2.0, because it's like a fashion nowadays to talk about it. Is cool. But if I question myself what Web 2.0 really is, I might at most have an idea about what to say. This article not just explains the Web 2.0 in a very simple yet clear way, but also talks about what to expect out of it and what the future trends might be.

Google OS = Mody Dick (Read/Write Web)
More on Google and the rumors that they're developing an operating system. I still like the Read/Write Web blog by Richard MacManus. It's always fresh and deep.

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Some of these are new stuff, some is not so new, but I found them recently, I haven't seen them before and I think they're cool, and so I talk about it here. So please don't be like those diggers that are always complaining in the comments about duplicates and/or old stuff. If you spend 24/7 around the web, it's not my fault. I spend just an hour a day at most.

Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the creators of the World Wide Web, is now blogging. It seems that his original intentions are just beginning to be fulfilled, after more than fifteen years (too much time for this ever-changing world of IT). Anyway, happy blogging and welcome to the blogosphere!

I won't comment much more here so go and read for your self. This will surely be a blog worth of adding into my aggregator. I must also acknowledge my original source. I first heard about Tim's blog in another blog, Read/Write Web, a name that, according to its author, is related to Tim's original goals.

I feel like there has been an explosion of cool, AJAX-ed, web2.0-ish services in the last few months. Everyone seems to be eager to show up their skills in this new innovative web field, not just from a technological standpoint, but also with new and improved layouts, organization schemes and usability of richer user interfaces, as well as on generating ideas of new original and useful services, or better implementations of existing ones. These web-based rich-client applications are meant to be the word of order in the web of today, like the dot-com's were a few years ago.

Services are of different well-defined categories, like wikis, file sharing, pictures and video sharing, news-feeds aggregators, social bookmarking, personalized homepages serving as a web entry-point, users communities, robotized news and blog crawlers that select the best from the web and present it summarized for you in a homepage, user-centered news sources like digg, emulators of window managers and desktop interfaces, pod-casting and vloging tools, and a few more I guess, including combinations of all these, and combined with other more traditional services like web-mail, calendaring, on-line dating, IM, etc.

I recently talked about some of these categories mentioned above, but I decided to expand a little bit the spectrum because almost everyday, when I sit down at my aggregator in the morning and fetch from all my feeds of choice, I find out about at least one new service I never previously knew about. And I repeat, at least one, because occasionally two or more appear in a single morning!

To better justify these claims I could go on and enumerate here a few examples, like flickr, songbird, netvibes, riya, glide, boltfolio or 23. And not even the big ones are escaping from the phenomenon. Google perhaps was the starter, with Gmail prompting an interest of web developers on Ajax techniques. They now have Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps and their personalized homepage.

Yahoo! was prompted by Google's success, and they improved their services to keep up with the competition. They now have Instant Search and they're also redesigning the web-mail interface (see previous post). And last but not least, Microsoft, the giant of software is also being pushed into it. Windows Live is a live example of what I mean.

As you can see, there are both big ones and small ones. The big ones are trying to maintain/strenghten their dominance, and the small ones are fighting to stand up in between the mainstream providers, or trying to be noticed and be acquired by one of the giants.

If you want to be regularly updated about new services, improvements on old ones, alliances or any other related stuff, be sure to add TechCrunch's feed or some other web2.0 workgroup blog to your aggregator. For instance, directly from TechCrunch's about,

TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies.

Seriously, I don't know how this Mike Arrington is able to keep himself informed, but is great to have him informing the rest of us. Thanks!

This is what you get when you screw it up. Microsoft has spend years making the worst browser available, breaking web standards, trying to destroy any competing browser. I even thought they were the sole authority dictating web practices, and that the w3c were a bunch of impostors.

I've been tired that people always blame web developers and designers when a web site appears broken in IE, and on the other hand, they blame browser vendors (other than IE itself) when a web site appears broken in such browser.

Now they seem to be willing to adhere (at least a bit) to standards, but they'll be paying (at least a bit) for their arrogance. They are unleashing IE7, which will support many (previously unsupported) CSS2 features, but the problem is that web designers all over the world hacked their CSS based on unsupported features, to (attempt to) give the same visual appearance across browsers. Now web sites hacked for previous IE versions will look broken in this flashy new release.

And guess what. They are asking web developers to remove the hacks, to re-code everything again, after they were such a pain over there (you know where). But the best part of this is not the post in itself, but the comments that follow it. I particularly liked this one.

Yes, the following suggestion might be blasphemy for Microsoft, but I had to try.

Why not use the Firefox rendering engine, called gecko? It is Open Source, so Microsoft is allowed to use it (and don't even have to pay for it, as it is available for free (as in free bear)).

Every Webdesigner would be happy if the IE 7 renders pages the same way Firefox does it.

Ok, Microsoft would have to open source IE 7 but as it is included in WinXP / Vista Microsoft doesn't make any money directly with IE. I don't think many uses will upgrade vom Windows 2000 (or whatever) only to get a new version of the Internet Explorer. So no earnings will be lost and I don't think that the business competitors won't have much advantages of an open sourced IE.

Also the developers of IE can concentrate on other features like improved phising protection or something like that.

In the end it sounds (well, at least to me) like a good solution. Less work for Microsoft, less work for Webdesigners.

As a web developer my self, I couldn't find a better answer than this one, taken also from the comments section, and very well said.

So... you're only going to fix some CSS bugs, and I have to then go around and fix the hacks on my site now? No deal. I'd rather let them break, and wonder what's wrong with IE.

Make your CSS full compliant, and then we'll talk. Last post I checked, you weren't going to be anywhere near Gecko or Safari. This isn't productive, having to mop up your mess only half way.

And last but not least, my personal favorite. This is an excerpt from a larger comment.

First you're building cars with triangular tires, and people had to build roads with holes on it, and now you're complaining your new car with round tires can not drive on these roads.