Posted in Technology

Well, don't you?

New HP ad, with the corner of a computer monitor in the background, and the phrase 'You blog, don't you?'

Spotted in the Montgomery BART station last week, I finally snapped a photo of this ad on the way into the office today. It’s part of a large HP campaign that has ads plastered all over the walls and floors of the Muni/BART stations, promoting their computing products. This one obviously stood out from the others. Somewhat presumptuous, wouldn’t you say? It shares that same haughty feeling that Wired was known for throughout the mid ’90s. In fact, I think all the other current HP ads are declarative like this one: “You travel light…”, “You do this…”, “You do that…”

Update: I’ve added shots of a few more HP ads in the same BART station, to provide some context for this one.

SwitchBack

Remember that confession I wrote a while ago? A sobering story of a designer who grew up on Apples and Macs, but gave into the dark side, jumped ship, and began using Windows. Well, it’s coming up on a year since I wrote that piece. Some of my friends were beginning to wonder if I was serious about shaking the Windows addiction. continued

Firestarter

News.com staff writer Paul Festa draws more public attention to Internet Explorer’s lack of full CSS support in Developers gripe about IE standards inaction. Paul uses Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Jakob Nielsen as sources for quotes about Adobe’s move to partner with Opera to improve CSS support in GoLive. In doing so, he nails the issues, shedding a brighter light on the lingering problems with Microsoft’s overly-popular browsing application. IE is a decent browser, but its shortcomings make it a dead-weight which is holding back forward-thinking web design and development. continued

A year in Cornwall

Frank Leahy is a friend and former-colleague from Wired. He was responsible for creating one of the primary Content Management Systems used at Lycos, and made significant contributions to the engineering effort when we redesigned Wired News last year. Frank left Wired a couple months ago, and he and his family of four recently picked up their lives and moved to England, settling temporarily in what looks like an amazing location: Cornwall. Understandably, Frank immediately has more time, and so much to write about that he’s started his own weblog, titled “A Year in Cornwall“. continued

VeriBadSign

Yesterday, VeriSign resorted to more anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics. They’ve placed a wildcard in global DNS records for .com and .net top-level domains, essentially hijacking all unregistered domains, and those with invalid DNS entries. In place of the traditional error page most browsers used to display, any user who enters an unregistered domain ending in .com or .net (including misspellings) now gets redirected to VeriSign’s Site Finder service, which displays a page entirely controlled by VeriSign, supposedly providing links to the possible intended destination. continued

Merging lines

[Thumbnail image of Sony's new UX50 handheld computer, which starts to look a lot like a miniature laptop.] The gap between PDAs and laptop computers continues to diminish. I just noted Sony’s upcoming release of the UX50 CLIÉ handheld. With built-in wireless 802.11b, Bluetooth, a low-end digital camera, MP3 player, video recording, and a larger “keyboard” than the typical thumbpads of today’s PDAs and smart phones, devices like this take a another step closer to their larger notebook cousins. continued

New ink for Inc.com

Congratulations to Dan Cederholm and team on launching a brand new Inc.com. The site sports a clean design, valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup, and a nice dosage of the CSS background-image property to pull in decorative icons and bullets, keeping most of them out of the markup. It also uses Dan’s mini-tab effect for main navigation, which he and I must have independently devised around the same time, since Adaptive Path uses something very similar. continued

Rebuilding a portfolio

There’s a wholelotta recent buzz around using Movable Type for more than just weblogs. In addition to the comments and tips Jay Allen has been providing here on Adaptive Path’s MT use, Matt Haughey gives us some great insight into how he takes advantage of MT’s flexibility in Beyond the Blog. Just before reading Matt’s piece, I followed Jay’s pointer to Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT. Both of these are interesting reads given my recent foray into the use of MT to power portions of this site. continued

Adaptive Path's MT setup

As I was starting a follow-up entry on the Adaptive Path redesign, Jay Allen posted a comment under Wednesday’s entry in response to another reader’s question. In an earlier comment, Leonya wrote:

It would also be great to see some technical details about the programming side — MT plugins used, tricks, etc. I’m doing development with MT, so such details can be very helpful.

continued