Sony just can't catch a break, can they? First, we hear reports about the Sony DRM installing a rootkit. Then comes news of said rootkit phoning home, as well as indications of a trojan exploiting this technology. And finally, there's news of a giant security hole in the rootkit removal software.

Although I've owned a few of their products, I've never been a fan of Sony. They try too hard to force their own proprietary 'standards' upon the industry, yet they always seem to fail in this endeavor. Sony certainly must have a substantial back catalog of failed technologies (as I'm sure many large companies do). Somehow, I don't feel sorry for them during this time of crisis. In these days of juggernauts like Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and McDonald's, it's nice to occasionally see one of them stumble and fall.

I'm a great fan of the late Jeremy Brett, who is the only Sherlock Holmes I will ever recognize. His portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective is as good as acting gets. In my humble opinion, no other actor has ever portrayed a character as accurately as Mr. Brett portrayed Holmes. He captures every nuance from the books, and matches exactly what I feel Conan Doyle was striving to create. I have only one collection of DVDs to go in completing my set: The Sherlock Holmes Feature Film collection. And I can't wait to get it!

I came across an interesting article written by Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Sun Microsystems. In it, he discusses the accessibility problems facing the open source world, specifically as it relates to OpenOffice. Recently, the Massachusetts government decided to move towards using an "open document format" (essentially switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice). Government agencies are required by federal law to support accessibility guidelines. Unfortunately (for the OpenOffice guys), it appears that Microsoft's office solution is far ahead in terms of application accessibility. This is an interesting tactic being used by Microsoft, but it illustrates a very real, very serious problem. If users with disabilities are ignored, open source software can never gain a foothold in the governmental sector (where accessibility is a requirement). Hopefully this particular problem will wake up the entire open source community, and result in improved programs for the disabled. It's certainly a problem that cannot be ignored.

I've been incredibly busy at work lately, and my programming drive is burned out at the end of the day. As such, I haven't made a great deal of progress on any of my previously mentioned goals. But I have been having a little fun (which is always a good thing).

Two expansion packs were released for the original Half-Life several years ago: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. I never purchased either, but recently decided that I would. While browsing Valve's 'Steam' content delivery system, I found out (by accident) that my original Half-Life CD key enabled me to access both expansion packs for free!

Opposing Force, being the first expansion released, was the one I played first. It was an interesting expansion (several of the new weapons were moderately interesting), but overall felt very empty. You only catch a glimpse of Gordon Freeman once, and the ending is somewhat of a let down (although it will be interesting to see what Valve does with the main character from this expansion).

Blue Shift is the real gem. Although it's incredibly short, there are a ton of "Oh, wow - that was so cool!" moments. Playing as Barney Calhoun, the player relives the Black Mesa incident from a different angle. You run into Gordon a number of times, bringing back a flood of memories from the original game. The connections between the two are incredible, making an already excellent game even better.

It's sad that it's taken me this long to play through these expansions. But they were very interesting and helped fill in some of the details of the Half-Life world in my mind. Hopefully the Aftermath expansion for Half-Life 2 will show up soon. I certainly can't wait to play it!

I have had a number of unrelated ideas lately, all of which I'll share:

• I'm thinking about upgrading my processor and motherboard. Some of the latest games (the Lost Coast demo for example) have really shown a bottleneck in that region. I have no idea what to upgrade to, however. Suggestions are welcome.
• I hope to get a new build of Googlebar Lite out soon.
• I also hope to put together a downloadable version of my toolbar tutorial. After that is done, I'll begin work on the next incarnation of said tutorial (which should be a big improvement).
• This weekend, I'm going to begin playing with Movable Type. My ultimate goal is to move the main Born Geek website away from hand-coding, which would be very convenient for me. I may provide some links to my testing, so that you can see what's going on.
• The Lost Coast demo for Half-Life 2 has inspired me to play through the game again. I'm approximately 2/3 of the way through, and am enjoying every minute of it.

As Asa indicates, Firefox release candidate 2 is now available (at least through the auto-update feature in Firefox).

Many websites use an image as the background of a page element (take the header of this website, for example). And all too often, those websites do not provide a corresponding background color to go along with that image. Take, for example, the games section of Slashdot. The purple background for each headline is an image. In order for the headline text to be readable on this background, the text color is set to white. The following rules are used in the corresponding CSS file (the image URL has been chopped for formatting reasons):

.generaltitle h3
{
    margin: 0;
    padding: .3em .8em .2em .8em;
    color: #fff;
}

#slashboxes h4, .article h3, .generaltitle h3
{
    background: url(<path>) repeat-x;
    padding: .3em 0;
}

Note that no background color has been specified for the h3 element. What is the effect of this omission? If images are disabled, we end up with white text on a white background, rendering the page illegible! "But who would turn images off?" you ask. People on dial-up may turn them off (to speed up download times). Some low-vision users may also turn them off, to prevent distracting backgrounds (and presumably improve text contrast). And keep in mind that the image file may be corrupted, or the server that actually serves up the images (if they are located separately from the site content) may go down, causing images to be inaccessible. Regardless, a specified background color would fix this problem. The image would override the color (when images are available and enabled), but the color would get used when images are disabled.

If you ever develop a website, and you use images to specify a certain region, make sure that you also specify a corresponding background color. Web users the world over will thank you for it.

Nearly 40 days ago, my family and I moved to a new house. And sadly, there are still boxes nearly everywhere you look. But we're definitely a long way from where we started. Most everything major has been repaired, and several exciting new features are coming this week: our backup generator and wood-pellet stove.

Just tonight, I actually got around to unpacking a couple of boxes in my room (something I've been horribly negligent about). I just counted, and was shocked to learn that I still have 13 boxes left to open! Fortunately, the majority of them are in my sister's room (which isn't being used). With any luck, I can make more progress on the unpacking front this week. Most of the remaining stuff will go through the following decision making process:

1. Is the item in question something I need to keep? Yes: keep it. No: proceed to 2.
2. Is the item valuable enough (and in good enough condition) to auction off on eBay? Yes: auction the item off. No: proceed to 3.
3. Can the item live somewhere else? Probably not, so proceed to 4.
4. Throw item away.

I recently downloaded the tech-demo level Lost Coast for Half-Life 2, and all I can say is ... wow! This level is a fantastic piece of work. The game play isn't anything new (you fight a few Combine soldiers, those ultra-freaky head-crabs, and a Combine gunship), but the technology behind the level is simply amazing. The high dynamic range (HDR) lighting is stunningly gorgeous; it makes the HDR technology in Serious Sam 2 look like something a child came up with. The effect is surprisingly effective, and it adds an incredible amount of realism to an already excellent game.

Half-Life 2 is one of only two games released in the past several years that really impressed me with its graphics capability (the other game being Far Cry). Half-Life 2 just feels real. And HDR only makes it more so. The wet sand on the beach in the Lost Coast level is truly dramatic, as is the lighting in the monastery. Also, the new character (the old fisherman) is so well done ... you just have to see it to believe it! Be warned that you need some serious horse-power to play the level in all its glory: an ATI x800 or NVIDIA 6800 (or better), 1GB of RAM, and a 2.9 P4 or AMD 3000+. My processor (at 2.8 GHz) is a little under-powered, but got the job done beautifully thanks to my 6800 GT.

The in-game commentary system is also an excellent addition. It was cool to hear the thoughts of the developers, why they chose to do some things and not others, as well as what technical challenges they faced. Hopefully they will include this feature in future games. All I can say is that I simply cannot wait for the Aftermath expansion; I've got to have more HDR!

For those who don't already know, the JavaScript console is one of the greatest tools built in to Firefox. It makes finding JavaScript errors a breeze, and can be a life-saver for extension developers. Unfortunately, the console has become rather bloated in Firefox 1.5. Not only do JavaScript errors appear, but now CSS errors (which are way more likely to appear on various websites) are also logged. This results in a terribly cluttered console, making it hard to find what you're looking for.

Thankfully, I was recently pointed to the Console² extension (which only works in Firefox 1.5). This extension makes it possible to filter out CSS errors, in addition to a number of other great features. It smartly renames JavaScript Console to Error Console (CSS != JavaScript), and is an excellent light-weight solution to the bloat added in 1.5.

In looking at my site statistics this morning, I noticed that my previous post on Google and OpenOffice actually made it to NewsForge. That was surprising to me (albeit a pleasant one), but I certainly didn't expect such a wide audience for my thoughts on the matter. Had I expected such a turnout, I would have put a little more thought into the post before actually publishing it. As such, I'd like to clarify a few of the points I made.

My ultimate point was that, in my opinion, the office application battleground is likely to see more cut-throat action in the short term than operating systems are. I certainly cannot support this claim with fact. But operating systems seem to me to be a much more difficult problem to solve, simply because they are bigger, more complex beasts. As a result, it seems like it would simply take longer to create an excellent OS than it would an excellent application.

I also believed I oversimplified my stance on the Linux community. The points made by Greg Raiz in his recent article on Linux are exactly how I feel. Linux is certainly poised to encroach on Microsoft's territory. But desktop users need to have a reason to want to switch. As Mr. Raiz pointed out, a unified environment, where there's One Way to do things, would appeal to many people (particularly "newbies"). Apple was heading down that very road before they made the switch to a UNIX base.

A unified environment, where the user interface paradigm is the exact same for every application would be awfully appealing. I would certainly consider switching to such a solution. I want Linux to succeed. The more developers can weaken Microsoft's iron grip on the market, the better the universe will be for everyone. But there's a long road to ride down before we reach that point. Let's get to work!

There's a story over at Slashdot that points to an article written by Greg Raiz, a former Microsoft employee and user-interface designer. In it, he discusses what's wrong with Linux, and how Linux can catch up (and perhaps surpass) Windows. His points not only hit the nail on the head, they drive the nail into the board.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, a number of Linux fanatics are doing nothing but whine in the article's comments. This only illustrates Greg's point even further. Operating systems are no more than religion. You have your beliefs; I have mine. And just like with actual religion, it turns out to be rather difficult to convert people to your point of view.

The first release candidate for Firefox 1.5 has just been released. Exciting times! I'm thinking about trashing my default profile (gasp!) and starting fresh for 1.5. Recreating my profile will take some time, but I think it will be worthwhile in the long run.

In semi-related news, I hope to have Googlebar Lite 3.1 available very soon (I'm only waiting on one more translation), so 1.5 RC 1 users can continue using GBL. CoLT should be upgraded soon as well.

So apparently, Google is hiring programmers to work on OpenOffice. Microsoft has to feel threatened at the online search giant's latest move in the office document arena. Google is the one company that Microsoft simply cannot figure out. And I couldn't be any happier to see the folks up in Redmond sweat just a little. For too long they've been the bully on the playground. But a new kid has come to town, and he's beginning to look a little bigger than ever.

I don't have any facts on the matter, but Office has to be one of Microsoft's largest revenue generators. To have someone announce that they will offer a competitive solution, for free, is quite an obstacle. And it's Google's way in to several markets which Microsoft has owned since what feels like the dawn of time. This will certainly be the first arena where Microsoft will face true pressure. Lots of people claim that Linux is a threat to Windows, but that's just not true (at least not yet). The Linux world is too fragmented. There are too many flavors, everyone has his favorite, and no one wants to try another one. Until the Linux community can get that particular act together (not to mention the ease of use factor), the office application arena will be the main battlefield. And I'm glad to see another player has finally joined the game.

The whole thing should be interesting to watch. I question whether Sun's involvement will doom the project (seeing as Sun has doomed virtually everything else they ever touched), but perhaps Google's brains can prevent such a catastrophe. I, for one, salute our (hopefully soon to be) office application overlords.

According to Asa, this Wednesday might be "ship day" for the first Firefox 1.5 release candidate. Once it's released, I think I'm going to replace 1.0.7 with RC1 as my primary browser. The beta releases weren't nearly as stable as I wish they had been (I unsuccessfully tried switching to them shortly after their release), but the latest nightly builds have seemed very stable. All of the new features and bug fixes in 1.5 make it awfully hard to pass up.

One of the greatest things about our new house is the lack of light pollution at night. I've seen more stars here at this house than anywhere else I've ever been. Our last house was located in the land of cul-de-sacs, and all of the lighting made it nearly impossible to see dim objects. We were, however, able to see a number of fairly bright objects including the International Space Station, the MIR space station (before it crashed into the Earth), and the Hubble Space Telescope. All of this was thanks to Heavens-Above, an awesome website that helps you figure out when and where to look for satellites (and other celestial events).

I stepped outside tonight for a few moments and saw a total of three meteors crashing into Earth's atmosphere. That's something I never would have seen at our other house. Sometimes, it's good to be in the dark.

There's a fair amount of software that I'd like to buy, but every single product has a ridiculously high price tag. First on my list is Adobe Photoshop CS2. Retail price tag: $599. I have Photoshop 5.5 (a truly ancient beast), and I don't think the upgrade (only $149) supports versions that old. My dad could buy it at the academic price (since he's a professor), but the license is listed as "basic"; what exactly does that mean?

Next up is SlickEdit: retail price of $284. There's no doubt this is a great editor (although a tad on the bloated side, one might say), but the price used to be $99! What's up with that? I'm not sure any programming editor (regardless of how great it is) is worth three Benjamin's.

Finally, there's Dreamweaver 8. The upgrade edition (which is the route I would take) is $199. Two hundred dollars for an upgrade? Proof positive that Adobe does in fact own Macromedia.

All of the aforementioned products are great, but are they hundreds of dollars great? That's an incredible hard call to make. It's going to take a lot of thought before I drop that much money on something that consists of nothing but 1's and 0's.

I recently stated that I was looking at adding site search capability to Born Geek. And I have indeed been looking, but the solutions I have been able to find are (at least on the surface) somewhat lacking. As such, I have been giving a great deal of thought to moving Born Geek to a more automated content management system.

This blog is powered by WordPress (a great piece of software by the way), which is geared more towards dynamic web content. Seeing as the majority of Born Geek's web content is static, I don't think WordPress is the best fit. I have spent some time looking at potential solutions, but it's so hard to decide what would best fit my needs. I definitely want something that produces well structured XHTML markup, using CSS for the presentation (web-standards are a must). Perhaps Movable Type is a decent solution, but it's not free (although a free-version is available). Does anyone have any suggestions?

I occasionally watch any number of items up for auction at eBay (most recently, they've all been auctions for Prince Valiant books). And, almost as frequently, I forget to actually bid on the items I'm watching. This happened just today as I was watching five separate auctions, all of which ended this evening. When I left work, I reminded myself to check the items once I got home. Several hours after I actually got home, and well after the items had closed, I remembered my reminder to myself.

I would eventually like to write some sort of Perl script that would do the bidding for me. But, unfortunately, this would involve HTML scraping (the eBay API doesn't support bidding, for obvious reasons). Such a script would involve a little more work than I'm willing to put into it at the moment, although it would be a neat project to work on. If you know of any (preferably free) services that automatically bid, let me know.

Nearly one year ago, after a substantial amount of research on the subject, I chose the nice folks at DreamHost to fulfill my web-hosting needs. Having never previously paid for web hosting service (my sites were always hosted for free at various places), I had no idea what to expect. Most everything I read was positive, and they had all the features I needed to bring Born Geek to life. Plus, their prices were (and still are) very reasonable - as low as $7.95 a month!

Now, nearly one year in, I can say with confidence that I am glad I chose to go with DreamHost. Since I signed up with them, they have increased the offerings on my hosting plan, at no cost to me. The changes include:

• A gigantic increase in disk quota (I started out with between 1 and 2 GB, and I now have 5.7 GB of available space)
• An increase in my monthly bandwidth allotment (it started at 40 GB/month and is now 162 GB/month)
• Nearly double the number of available user accounts and email accounts
• The number of sub-domains and domains I can host has become unlimited

To celebrate this (nearly) one year anniversary, I have created a promotional code which allows me to share my rewards with you. If you sign up with DreamHost, use the promotional code borngeek to get a discounted price. With it, you will save a total of $47.00 on whatever plan you choose, with the exception of the monthly L1, L2, and L3 plans (on which you will save $25.00, $30.00, and $40.00 respectively). A new promotional code has been activated as of January 11, 2006, allowing you to save even more! Be sure to check it out.

This little promotion is just one way I can say thank you to everyone who visits this site. If you are looking for a great web host, look no further than DreamHost. I have been incredibly impressed with their service, and I'm sure you will be as well.