CivicActions

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I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun.

Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

I just got this email from Mozilla about the soon release of Firefox 3 release candidate, asking addon developers to get their extensions updated and released for FF3 RCs. If you have an extension released on addons.mozilla.org you would have received this email too. I have two variations of FF2's default Mac theme that enable favicons in the bookmarks toolbar: Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL.

I had a great meeting this morning with a couple of my partners and Guy Sengstock. During the meeting, one of the things that we discussed was taking 100% responsibility for how a message (or communication) is received.

I've been thinking about it all day. As I was looking around for quotes on the subject tonight (which I'm still searching for), I ran across this great webpage on communication styles from the Pegasus NLP Newsletter. Here's a great excerpt:

It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8:

"John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode.

"John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ .

A List Apart's Issue 253 continues discussing and debating the controversial IE version targeting that ALA announced a month ago. CivicActions blogged about this topic then too.

Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman provide very realistic and down-to-earth points of view and arguments both for and against version targeting. Although they each reach different conclusions, neither tries to persuade the reader one way or the other. Rather they leave you more enlightened so that you can make your own decision.

'They Shoot Browsers' by Jeremy Keith was better written in my opinion and has more convincing arguments, including this gem;

"The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches."

I'm still not 100% decided, but I'm pretty heavily swaying to the side against version targeting. Having said that, I can understand how and why Microsoft, even with mostly good intentions, came to this solution. I can see and appreciate the short term benefits, however I don't believe that Microsoft can pull this off in the long term. As web developers, we have no reason to believe that Microsoft is capable or even intends to follow through with it's promises

Just a reminder that the deadline of the GoPHP5 campaign is upon us. There are less than 19 hours to go (at time of writing): http://gophp5.org/

If you listed your website, project, host or service on GoPHP5.org, then you should have finished migrating by now.

Go PHP 5!

From The Huffington Post:

Now, close your eyes and imagine what we could to with a year out of Iraq.

From Jeff Whatcott's post 6 days ago:

"Michael Cote over at Redmonk just posted a writeup and analysis of our conversation about Acquia this afternoon.

"I always enjoy talking to the Redmonk guys. They listen actively and push back in real time if needed. I always leave the conversation with more than I brought into it and I always know where they stand (no surprises). If only all analyst conversations followed that same pattern…"