Category: Technology

Categories
Internet

Comcast adding caps

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

According to DSLReports, Comcast is instituting a cap on its broadband customers. The cap will be 250GB a month, with one “freebie” month, where you can go over this amount without repercussion.

As caps go, this is one of the more reasonable. However, I expect to see other broadband companies following suit since one of the major players has now made a cap move. Eventually, this will most likely end up in front of the FCC, Congress, or court, as these companies will be forced to provide detailed operation information in order to assess whether they really have a congestion problem, or if their actions are anti-trust. This will also lead to questions about how much these companies reinvest profits back into infrastructure.

I also don’t see how caps are going to overcome problems with congestion, because people could use most of their bandwidth allotment during peak times. Wasn’t that the purpose of caps? To reduce congestion?

Categories
Technology Web

How to Install IE8 beta 2: First, find chicken to sacrifice, wait till midnight

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I have Windows XP SP3 installed on my Dell I was therefore more than a little taken back about the instructions to follow to install IE8 beta 2:

  • Uninstall Windows XP SP3
  • Uninstall IE8 Beta1
  • Re- install Windows XP SP3
  • Install IE8 Beta2

If you don’t follow this path, you’ll have permanently installed IE8 on the machine. You know, you can’t make up stuff like this.

Categories
Technology

The Banana Test

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From Chip’s Quips a test to see your programming language preference:

Here’s a quick and easy test to determine what programming language best suits your personality.

There’s a very tall palm tree, and four animals happen to pass by: a chimpanzee, a lion, a giraffe, and a squirrel.

They decide to have a competition to see who is the fastest one to get a banana off the tree.

Which one won? Think of your answer before you read on…

Actually, what you don’t see in the animal lineup that Sterling has provided, is a rhinoceros heading straight for the tree at full ramming speed. It skewers the lion with its horn, steps on and squishes the squirrel, pushes aside the giraffe, and knocks the chimp from the tree when it hits—the force of which also knocks the banana down.

Except that the rhino decided, right in the middle of its headlong run, that it really doesn’t like bananas. However, it had built up too much momentum to be able to stop in time to save the lion, the chimp, the squirrel, the giraffe, the banana, and the tree. Poor tree.

And that makes me JavaScript ECMAScript.

Categories
SVG

Planet SVG

I was asked for links to SVG resources, and my immediate thought was to look for a Planet SVG. Though I found a planetsvg.com, there’s no entry at the site, and I couldn’t find any elsewhere. I then decided to create a new Planet SVG, using Sam Ruby’s Venus adaption of the Planet software.

Of course, I use SVG in the background of the page, though I imagine most people would only be interested in the Atom-based syndication feed. I’ll play around with the design when I have more time, but for now, I just grabbed an old one that seemed to work.

I’ve populated the Planet with a few URLs, but I need more. Though there are quite a few people interested in SVG, I’m finding that most don’t seem to have a weblog. Or if they do, I can’t find it.

There is a weblog for the SVG Open conference next week, but the weblog doesn’t have any syndication feed I could find.

If you write about SVG, or have a weblogging category devoted to SVG, or vector graphics, or even the Canvas element, please email me your feed URL, or drop it into comments.

Categories
Graphics/CSS JavaScript SVG

Cross-browser JavaScript vector graphics library

Speaking of SVG, Lachlan Hardy pointed out the Raphaël JavaScript library to me, and I wanted to pass it along.

This library provides cross-browser dynamic vector graphics that generates VML for IE, and SVG for the rest of the world. Among the graphical elements you can create are paths, eclipses, rectangles, circles, and text, and be able to apply a number of transformations.

Included in the library web site is a playground where you can try the code out.