Archive for December, 2007

Happy Christmas all

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/12/2007
in Personal
. 4 Comments

I’m starting to wind down for Christmas and spending some quality time with the family.

A very Happy Christmas to everyone who reads this blog. See you all on the other side of the holidays.

Will 2008 be the year of the standards compliant browser?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/12/2007
in Browsers and Web Standards
. 9 Comments

Microsoft announced yesterday on the Internet Explorer blog that the next version of Internet Explorer (IE8) will correctly render the Acid2 test page. See the excellent Channel 9 video for more.

The Acid2 test is a test of a browser’s ability to properly render CSS and HTML. From the Acid2 Wikipedia page:

The Acid2 test should render correctly on any browser that follows the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications. Any browser which does not correctly and completely support all of the features which Acid2 uses will not render the page correctly.

Apple’s Safari passed the Acid2 test in October 2005!

Firefox 3 is expected to pass the Acid2 test as well when it is released (beta 2 already does). Internet Explorer 8 is due to ship in the first half of 2008, as is Firefox 3 so it looks as if 2008 will be the year of the standards compliant browser!

Ironically the official Acid2 web page is broken today (!) but it is mirrored on one of the developers sites so you can test your current browser there.

CIX on Intruders.tv

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/12/2007
in IT@Cork, cix, data centre, energy and hosting
. 3 Comments

We held our Open Day in CIX a couple of weeks back. We invited local businesses to come in and have a look at the data centre infrastructure before we closed up all the ducts and hazardous areas.

We also invited Intruders.tv to come along and film the event. They did and they published the interview they did with Adam and I the other day.

The Open day was the day after the it@cork conference so I was quite tired. Watching the video now I realise I messed up on some of the figures! Typical data centres operate at 30% energy efficiency (not 70% like I said in the video) and CIX is rated to operate at 80% energy efficiency due to the innovative technologies we outlined in this interview.

Firefox 3.0b2 released

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/12/2007
in Browsers
. 7 Comments

I started using Firefox 3.0b1 a few weeks back as my primary browser (in general it is not advisable to use beta software on a production machine). In that time it has been incredibly stable and not at all resource hungry.

This morning I noticed that Firefox 3.0b2 was released yesterday. I took a quick look over the release notes, then I went to the download page, grabbed a copy and installed it.

It is running really smoothly and apart from the lack of add-ons, I’m loving it. The Proto Theme does work and makes Firefox 3 look even better.

Why blogs are important

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/12/2007
in Blogging and blogs
. 10 Comments

Commoncraft have another one of their great videos up - this time explaining why blogs are so important. If you have three minutes to spare, watch this short video:

CO2 emissions vs income

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/12/2007
in climate change
. 6 Comments

CO2 vs GNP 1975-2002

I generated this graph on Prof Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org site.

The data shows, somewhat surprisingly that the increase in carbon emissions in countries like Ireland and the US from 1975 to 2002 are not in any way mirrored by any increases in China or India.

In the recent Bali talks (and the Kyoto talks before that) the US held up the developing countries as major polluters and refused to sign Kyoto (and created all kinds of fuss at Bali) because of the amounts of pollution being emitted by developing countries.

This is obviously delaying tactics for Bush’s friends in the oil business in Texas and Saudi. The US Ambassador to Ireland conceded that China may exceed the US’s total emissions in 2008. Compare the income per capita between the US and China again and even if Chinese total emissions do exceed the US in 2008, they are still far less polluting per capita than the US.

And the Chinese were looking for a stronger agreement at Bali than the US.

The sooner Bush and his oil cronies are out of office, the sooner we can move on with trying to clean up the planet.

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