Echo Binary

I thought hell is already freezing when I read this news. Internet Explorer 8 reached a very unexpected milestone — IE8 passed the Acid2 test!

In order to pass this test, the browser has to be compliant on standards of HTML and CSS rendering. Safari, Opera and beta version of Firefox 3.0 pass the Acid2 test. IE8 somehow surprised me because Microsoft used to be too arrogant in creating their own “standards”. I thought they didn’t care but now they are trying to be standard compliant… for real? I still can’t believe I’m blogging about this.

For related information here are some good articles:

IE8 goes on an Acid2 trip; beta due in first half of 2008

Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

There are times that I want to hang a wind chime outside the window of my bedroom to call for The Haitian, a fictional character on the NBC television series Heroes, who has the ability to manipulate memories and suppress power.

Don’t you want to forget your enemies, forget that you’ve done something terribly wrong, embarrassed, publicly humiliated, traumatized, or even heart-broken? I’m sure everyone has some kind of bitter memories that he or she wants to forget entirely.

There’s one episode in the series that dealt about this idea when Claire wanted to forget his father (I won’t spoil the details). I can connect and sympathize in Claire’s character in that episode (Truth & Consequences) because It’s really hard to lose someone you love dearly. Sometimes, the pain is so much to bear that you wish you have no memory of that person anymore.

Foolish thoughts…

Mozilla Labs released a prototype extension for Firefox that lets you use different background on top of your currently existing theme. At the moment, this prototype is compatible with the default theme of Firefox. I have tested other themes and they looked ugly at some parts so I want to see more customization option in the next release of this prototype extension to change more than just the background in Firefox.

“The Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources”.

I don’t know the security model for these theme resources so anyone paranoid enough may worry that some theme authors can put arbitrary code in their themes if there’s no special verification, digital signature or seal of approval from Mozilla. Even though it is really convenient for designers, I don’t like the idea that it downloads the graphics on demand just like that from the internet. I don’t even know if the graphics are coming from Mozilla Labs or any secure location. Maybe not?

There is an API currently being developed so there should be more changes on the way for this extension. It looks great on the default theme but someone will immediately notice that it simply adds background picture on Firefox toolbar with some transparency on tabs. Sometimes, I find it hard to read the tab texts when the background is too dark. There’s no transparency option so you cannot customize it anyhow. You can only choose from the existing lists of background designs at the moment. I really hope they add more option in this extension because Persona looks like a bland IE toolbar background changer. Some users may find this useful because it make their plain themes colorful; however, some advanced users maybe annoyed with this. To a certain extent, I find Persona too simple to fit my taste. I’ll uninstall it for now but I’ll try Persona one again when a new version arrives. For now, I’ll stick with the default theme of Firefox no matter how boring it is.

Link: Mozilla Labs: Persona for Firefox

My interest in science was rekindled by Absolute Zero, a documentary from BBC. Back in high school days, I really love Chemistry experiments. Physics is not my favorite Science but Physics experiments are very interactive so I liked it a lot, too. Physics deals a lot with the principle of matter and energy when you are dealing with elements and atoms so it influences Chemistry experiments, too.

The most interesting part of this two-part documentary is the race to reach absolute zero. In The Conquest of Cold (first part), the invention of refrigerator shows how the use of ice influenced the industry and world economy at large. In The Race for Absolute Zero (second part), the documentary reviewed the details on how great scientists raced in reaching the illusive zero Kelvin, and how they competed to create the first Bose-Einstein Condensate.

Scientists have not reached zero Kelvin yet but they are very darn close to achieving it and they are still experimenting on how to get there. The lowest so far is at 100 pK achieved at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. That might be outdated because there must be on-going experiments now that have achieved even lower temperature.

I am not a scientist but I always keep an inquiring mind about the mysteries of nature and the universe.

Absolute Zero BBC documentary is based on Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold book written by Tom Shachtman.

Link: BBC Four Documentaries: Absolute Zero

My first reaction was “w00t!” and I was really surprised that it was voted as the #1 word in Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007. I’ve been using that word since 1998 — and it has been made popular only this year? It is noteworthy that the word is spelled with two zeroes but not with O’s. Yes, numbers are now welcome in the middle of a word. Maybe we should have lolcats, h4×0r and l337 in the dictionary soon. D’oh!

The runner-ups are facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom, apathetic, Pecksniffian, hypocrite & charlatan.

Check out the details of Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007 here.