Data collected by the online analytics site StatCounter published this week highlights Firefox 3.5 and the most commonly used browser on the web today. The stats, based on aggregated browser usage data over the second half of the year, pinpoints the specific 3.5 version of the application as the reigning winner.
According to the site, “Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 5 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.”
Of course, the surprising news comes upon the heels of a massive Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8 migration, which has split the former browser king’s market share. Nonetheless, trends seem to favor Firefox in the long run, however, as its user base has steadily grown while IE’s has been in regular decline in the last few years, according to a Mashable report.
For the visually oriented: a graphical representation on axiis.org shows the current aggregate data charted in the shape of the distinctive Firefox logo explains it all.
This is a brilliant defense of Christianity as the thinking mans’ religion!
Finally, an iron-clad argument that Christianity is clearly the superior belief, that God’s plan is unassailable, and that science is really just more of your hokey religion bashing.
You! Lazy, good for nothing atheist sheep, bask in the fire of God’s literal, unicorn-powered, crucifixion crushing power!
Bioware’s new Dragon Age: Origins CRPG arrived in the mail on Wednesday. Confused marketing prior to the release had me wondering whether to buy it. I don’t understand why Bioware insists on using their concept art to market their titles. The art is always dark and murky, a little pulp, and never reflects the actual mood of the story. But anyway, my problem was neatly solved when my brother got it for me for my birthday. Thus far, I’m about 54% percent of the way through the game, and quite a bit below the 100 hours of game play promised — I’m only at about 30 hrs recorded thus far.
Unlike Mass Effect, the mechanics of the game UI seem to be geared more heavily for PC users rather than console play. Drilling down into the action menus is unintuitive and time consuming — on the Xbox, you have to hold down the left shoulder trigger religiously to get anywhere, and a slight slip of the finger in battle means that you’re suddenly exposed, or have to struggle to get back to the menu item again, costing you real time and taking up valuable play time.
The much-touted Eclipse engine seems dated and handicapped next to comparable contemporaries. It does allow for significant end-user development, but as I am not much of a modder, I haven’t heard about how well it works in this regard.) Having played other action adventure games like Lionhead’s Fable 2 and Bethesda’s Fallout 3, I have to say, the movement and action controls on Dragon Age: Origins are clunky and overloaded. Fighting is ridiculously difficult in real-time and the transparent overlapping menus have way too many options for battle. The in-game event notices — a huge banner with swirly blood that pops up every time some quest is updated — are badly proportioned and difficult to see on my 32″ flatscreen from any distance farther than 2 feet away. There are no multi-camera angle control (annoying!), no jumping, no swimming, no looting, and no at-will wanton killing. (To the last complaint I say, “so much for being the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate!”)
The Dragon Age: Origins name comes from the conceit that the game boasts six different customizable origin stories for the player, based on the variables of race and gender. In terms of game story customization, this is an interesting move towards greater replayability and player-character engagement, and I predict that we will see greater variety and development on this front in future games. Story-wise, however, I am not impressed. There have been no surprising twists (given the advertising, I expected more hard decisions and betrayals), and the characters lack the hook of previous Bioware fare. (How I missed Minsc and his miniature giant space hamster, Boo!) The game’s target audience is, admittedly, in the 17-22 year old range, so perhaps the absence of real emotional “hardness” isn’t surprising. Although the naivete and lack of dramatic pathos in the plotline seems to suggest even younger crowd; belying the “M” for mature audience rating.
Overall, I find this a step back from the game play and story development exhibited in Bioware’s previous release, Mass Effect. But for Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights nostalgia, it seems like a timely revisit to the sword and sorcery genre. As an avid gamer who grew up on the Final Fantasy franchise and the Bioware RPGs, it’s nonetheless a must-play for the True Believers. But after years of the same thing replayed again and again in different settings, Bioware, I am ready for more of a change.
This year, for the second time, ever, I stayed up waaay late into the early morning to attend the annual American consumer event known as Black Friday.
Now, Black Friday might sound a little ominous to readers outside the U.S., and it’s often puzzling to my non-Stateside friends. (Having never asked them if they have any equivalent event, I really don’t know what to compare it to.) The name originates from when accounting records were kept by hand in ledgers, using red ink to signify loss (“in the red”) and black ink to signify income at the end of the month (“in the black”). Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, is often an unofficial holiday for workers, and has thus become a prime date for exceptional deals and savings at stores. It’s now the traditional day to kick off major holiday shopping, and is the symbolic day of the year when store revenues goes from red to black.
This year, my friend Rags and I hatched the foolish plan of staying up to attend because we had Nothing Else Better to To. He ended up hauling my ass in the morning to get in on a $249, 32″ widescreen tv deal, and pick up a few other knick knacks along the way. I guess I should be more thankful Rags stayed up till 3am in the morning and guilt-tripped me into going shopping. Ironically, he wasn’t the one with a 32″ tv he needed to buy.
We arrived at 3:30am at the local Target, and found a small, very reasonable crowd already camped out before the doors. A few Target employees stood around keeping guard, and most everyone seemed very civil; and the line, really, was quite short. I was surprised. As the minutes worn on, a well-dressed lady started working her way down the lines passing out vouchers for the high-demand items from the Target holiday shopping list.
“Wow,” I said to Rags, “this is really organized.” It was not at all the insanity I expected.
“They’re probably all worried about what happened at Walmart last year,” he said, “When that person was trampled to death.”
As reasonable of a liability concern as that was, I was still impressed. In the hour before the store was about to open, employees even came down the line with special Target cloth bags for the eager shoppers. The whole atmosphere felt more professional than the ugly commercial sell-out affair I had come to build up in my head. (A couple years ago I was at the Black Friday shopping stampede at the Great Mall, and that was just consumer madness, which is probably where my impression comes from.)
“This is really so nicely run!” I said again and again to Rags, “It’s Just Like Comic Con!”
And well, really, it wasn’t. The crow control was much better, and it was by far not quite as “squee!” as waiting in line to get a Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog signature, but the comraderie of fellow line waiters was there, and plus, there was random free stuff just standing in line. I had such a good time, browsing around, blinking blearily, and just shooting the breeze with Rags, I am thinking about doing it again next year, and checking ahead for super deals. My final loot count this year was some $400-odd dollars, and included a very shiny flatscreen as well as new DVD player, small remote-control boatload of DVD shows, various Christmas presents, and a large bag full of towels.
It is the towels, actually, that I cherish the most. ($1.50 each, baby!)
I’m often curious about the online acronyms that get bantered around, mostly because I live and breathe my life of the internets, and after awhile, not knowing what is being discussed or going on gets tiresome. So today, an quick look into what I’ve learned about APIs!
APIs are a hot commodity in web developed services these days. But for the lay person just getting their feet wet on the web, what is it?
API stands for “application programming interface,” and despite the long, wordy name, APIs on the web are actually designed to do something, very, very simple: to allow programmers from outside web systems to access an existing website’s services.
Take, for example, Twitter. Twitter has an open API which allows web developers from all over the internet to create ways to post messages to the Twitter social network. Programmers and web developers of independent blogs, news sites, commerce sites, or whatever-you-will can use the Twitter API to develop just about anything you can think of for Twitter posting. Like sharing videos, sending photos, tracking retweets, and so on. These applications are able to do what they do because they connect back to Twitter through the Twitter API.
Other famous examples of APIs include Google Maps (embed it on your website and add your own customizations to is data), Facebook, Amazon.com, and eBay. Add a few in the right places, and you can add a LOT to your website in terms of its services and value.
But with all of this positive upside to APIs, is there any hidden catch? Well, sort-of. APIs are ultimately dependent upon the service they were built on. So, if Twitter or Facebook were to ever suddenly go out of business, for instance, you would be left high and dry with useless APIs that did nothing whatsoever. It seems highly likely that any of that would be happening soon, however, so happy programming, and go get yourself an API today!
I literally Stumbled (StumbleUpon, that is!) the Six Word Stories homepage tonight and found the brief stories impressive. I’ve heard of similar ideas on Twitter and other blogs and such, but the selections they’ve made for Six Word Stories really hit a literary gap I’ve left unfilled in my recent life.
So, inspired by the many contributors to the source, I present my own Six Word Stories:
A few of the best tutorial collections on Photoshop techniques I’ve come cross in the last couple of months. It feels redundant to make a list of lists, but the subjects and tutorials vary wildly from each other. Some of the lists deal with photo-manipulation while others show you how to create neat text and type lettering.
40 years ago today, the first ever inter-network message was sent between two computers: “lo”! And that became the internet.
This first message, between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute, fell a bit short of its original intent, however. Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA were actually trying to send “login” across the new ARPANET network, but the computer they were working on crashed after the just first two characters. Nonetheless, this first partial-success set the foundations for the de-centralized, global network of computer systems to come.
A few major advancements in technology and commercial ISP offerings later, fast forward to our era of Google, Facebook, Twitter, MMOs and the 24 hour wired IV-drip. Happy 40th, Internet! And don’t worry. In our botox-junkie era, 40 is really more like the new 25.
There comes a moment in every budding web developer’s life, I think, when you’re left staring incomprehensibly at the screen, cradling the slow realization that everything you’d worked on was totally and utterly wiped, and that you were pretty much French toasted for file backups.
Like many half tech-savy, gen Y kids who grew up on the internet, I am just smart enough to navigate my way around the first few cushy levels of website maintenance and deployment, but pretty much an idiot when it comes to fixing server issues and troubleshooting system problems. Yesterday, while vigorously trying to investigate Mambo for a new website setup, I got frustrated with the javascript errors on my new CMS toy and decided to just delete the whole thing and start over. Oh ho, not so fast, jefe!
I did all the right things: went to my CPanel admin page and asking Fantastico De Luxe limited (server admin for idiots) to uninstall the Mambo installation and deleted the MySQL database. But when I went back to my FTP connection, I found the old directory file still there. Why? How? Annoying! Delete! And yet, like a particularly annoying AI, the folder just kept respawning.
Aagh! Click click click DELETE oh crap what folder was that? Belatedly, I realized that in frustration I had hit the permanent “delete” button on my blog folder.
But look, the entries are still here! Yeah. I have now TOTALLY learned an invaluable lesson in making backups. Lucky me, the database file itself wasn’t deleted when I got mouse-click crazy, so I still had all my post information there… somewhere. I just had no programming clue for how to restore it, and no WordPress installation to deploy.
Copying the WordPress files back into the right directory weren’t too difficult, but the “Error establishing a database connection” message drove me mad. I tweaked and tweaked and tweaked the wp.config file for the right answer. I copied another WordPress blog config file I knew worked and tried to add in what I thought was the right information. No effect! What did I do wrong?
As it turns out, it was the database file password that was missing. There is no handy message telling you how to get to this in any of the WordPress troubleshooting docs I read, and my web hosting service’s CPanel documentation was inconveniently spare on description. What I eventually figured out was how to open up a MySQL database for which I did know the password in a text file, searched for its position, and using the text preceding it, went back to my original WordPress database and hunted for the password to that. Once I had the right components, then ta-da! Everything suddenly worked again.
Until I started messing around with the domain name redirections…