First off, odin is still quite broken. I ended up buying a new motherboard (MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum), a new processor (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+), and a new graphics card (PowerColor X800XL 256MB). Over 700$ later, I received all my parts and got to disassembling and reassembling my computer. In the process of putting everything back together, I noticed that three of the pins on the ATX 20-pin power connector of the power supply looked quite burnt. Since I know this wasn’t present after my first motherboard blew out, I’m sure it’s a cause or effect of my more recent troubles. So I RMAed and shipped off my power supply back to PC Power & Cooling today; so, with any luck, I’ll get it back by the end of the week (fortunately, they’re located in Carlsbad). I’ll be quite upset if I need to cough up more money for a power supply, but I’m already perturbed by this latest development. For now, odin has been essentially gutted with parts all over my floor.
I ran into an interesting new feature for Firefox 2 today. They’re called microsummaries. They use regular expressions and XSLT to take data from a webpage and use it as the title of a bookmark. The data is constantly updated so you can quickly get stock prices, auction information, headlines, etc. dynamically without having to constantly reload a webpage. This sounds like a great way to keep up-to-date information at your fingertips. This provides an entirely new framework for many extensions such as email notifiers, weather services, and stock tickers that all require their own backend to pull data. This is a win for everyone. It will take less time for developers to code extensions, create less bloat when many such extensions are installed, and make for more stable extensions, all of which are only positives for Firefox.
In other news regarding the internet world, Dave Hyatt has written some blog posts regarding Hi DPI Web Sites. With the inevitable introduction of high-resolution monitors (they have to come around eventually), providing web developers the opportunity to give users a “high-definition” version of their website is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, many people fail to understand key concepts of the proposal. What Hyatt proposes isn’t redoing standards to force upon people high resolution. Rather, he’s proposing a system where users are given a choice how to view a website — at a higher resolution or at a smaller size on the screen. While I won’t dwell further on other misconceptions, let me just say that I think many don’t understand the difference between a CSS pixel, which is an abstract and relative concept, and a physical screen pixel, which is concrete but varies widely, even now, between monitors. To fully appreciate the difference, try looking at a web page at the same resolution on two different monitors. A good example would be to take a 20″ Apple Cinema Display and 15″ MacBook Pro and view websites at the native resolution of 1680×1050 on both.
However, what I think is more interesting is the issue of operating systems adapting to higher resolution displays. Vista will be able to adapt to different resoultions as will the next revision of Mac OS X (10.5; codename Leopard). This will involve making almost everything in the operating system vector-based so that widgets can be arbitrarly-sized and still look smooth. What I think people are missing is the accessibility factor. Being able to grow and shrink OS elements will allow people to optimize their computer for maximum visual comfort, whether you are a sharp-eyed developer or a less visually acute executive.
Currently, some laptop manufacturers are including EV-DO support on their machines to allow computers to access the web via Verizon’s cellular network. Soon, they will have the same thing for 3G networks, support UMTS/EDGE. I think that integrating cellular data access into laptops will be a boon since cellular networks have much better coverage than wireless hot spots. People already pay for data access via cell phones; it stands to reason that they’ll use their laptop to access the internet and make calls via their same plan. This cellular integration into laptops will only become more popular, that is, until free municipal wireless internet become ubiquitous across the country.
Oh, and finally, I am officially a year older. Yay birthday! I took it easy on Thursday night but ended up going out with a bunch of high school friends, some whom I haven’t seen in years, and celebrating two other birthdays. Old friends, lots of birthdays, and easily available alcohol made for a good time.