IE (vs) FireFox: A New Leader Emerges

For the past 7 years, W3Schools.com has been keeping track of what internet browsers are most commonly used, what screen resolution is at, what operating systems are being run, etc. I checked in on them this past week to find that Internet Explorer is no longer the most commonly used browser (as of Jan '09). After more than a decade of being the leader in internet browsing technology, IE has about 5% less users than Fire Fox. In fact, in looking through FireFox's history, it's done nothing but grown in popularity, except during the release of Google Chrome (which I've not heard great things about, but with a name like Google backing it, I'm sure it will come around soon enough).


There have been two guiding factors behind Internet Explorer's success:
1) It comes pre-installed on your computer.
2) Because it was the leading browser, all developers code for Internet Explorer.

Having it pre-installed on my computer and not having to go download yet another piece of software was what primarily attracted me to Internet Explorer, but I noticed on my new computer at work that it now came both equipped with both IE and FireFox. This could be related to FireFox's recent success in over taking the leading browser spot. It's also got the underdog spirit with it. You'll find a lot of people in the IT industry that claim FireFox is superior simply because it's not made by MicroSoft (whether or not FF > IE). When I meet an IT guy who starts bashing MicroSoft, it's always a turn off, but then again this is probably all better saved for another blog.

Despite having FireFox already installed on my new work computer, I've continued to use IE since it was the leading web browser. In my web development work, it's imperative to write sites for the end user, and while I want to make sure people using FireFox is covered, Internet Explorer was always the highest priority, as it had over 18% more users last year.

But now everything has been changed. With FireFox now being the most common used browser on the market, I'm now getting used to using it for everything. I've noticed that they have improved a lot since their former versions. It doesn't seem to have an issue with javascript anymore. It also tends to load a lot faster initially, but then when I attempt to go to the first site of my session, it takes a little longer than IE. And of course, I've been to several sites where the CSS doesn't quite work all the way; Internet Explorer and FireFox sometimes have different terms for style sheets and some developers don't check their sites with both browsers.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Google Chrome browser. They talked a big game while it was in production, but it's not had the successful launch it planned for. But, I've rarely come across a piece of Google technology, that in time didn't impress me.

Review of X-Men: Wolverine

I wanted to wait a while and let everything sink in before diving into a little review of the new X-Men movie Wolverine. To start off, I should say that this was my least favorite of the X-men series, but I still enjoyed it. It will be very difficult for any X-Men movie to ever top X2, and I knew that going into Wolverine. I should also mention that Wolverine has never been one of my favorite characters in the comics/cartoon. I think Hugh Jackman does a great job with him, but I just don't really care for the character himself.

When I first saw the preview, I was excited to finally see Gambit in the movies! Gambit has always been my favorite X-men character and it's good to see him get some screen time, after he was written out of X2. It's difficult to say they did him justice because he was only in the movie for maybe 5 minutes of running time, but those 5 minutes were fantastic. I could have used a little more cajun accent out of him, but I'll have to let it slide, because he did at one point use the poker cards as a weapon and I may have yelled "squeeee!" in the theatre at that point. (P.S. You can see poker superstar Daniel Negreanu playing poker with Gambit in one scene)

If you watched the trailer and thought to yourself, "Oh Snap! I finally get to see ______" (Insert any character you saw in the preview besides Wolverine and Sabertooth here), then you'll be mildly disappointed. Most characters don't show up on screen for long, but I guess this is a Wolverine movie, not an X-men movie. Bolt, Blob, Deadpool, Emma Frost, etc etc - None are on screen for a significant amount of time. One cool thing is that there is a lot of talk circulating a Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds. He was great in Wolverine and I really wish we could have seen him more.

The two characters I really could have used less of was John Wraith played by Will.I.Am and Stryker. Wow, I never expected Will.I.Am to be such an awful actor. I couldn't wait for him to get killed or fall down a hole or decide to move to the wilderness of Canada to be alone with himself and spare us all. Danny Huston had one of the most difficult jobs in this movie, playing up to Brian Cox's role in the 2003 movie X2. Brian Cox was incredible and Danny Huston just didn't have that same appeal. Since we're comparing anyways, there is a certain magic that Brian Singer brought to the first 2 X-Men movies, whereas somewhat new director Gavin Hood just didn't have the touch.

As far as the plot, as a whole, this just seemed like a bunch of action sequences thrown together with a shot or two of Hugh Jackman naked thrown in for the female audience. They make a small attempt at a story of love and loss with Wolverine, but it is pretty weak compared to the tragedy of Jean Gray and Cyclops in the previous movies. However, I guess its not fair to compare this movies to its predecessors. For an action movie, it did a great job of keeping me entertained. I never once thought, when is this movie going to be over and with the ADD I've been cultivating with YouTube videos lately, that's really saying something. I'm glad I got to see this one in theatres. May is going to be a really good month for Hollywood with Wolverine, Angels & Demons, Star Trek, and Terminator Salvation. I'd put my money on Star Trek to be the movie of the summer.

President Evil: The Web Series

Some of you may know that last November Adam, Jessica, Holden and I attempted to revive the President Evil concept that Jay and I made in college. We filmed three episodes and then Adam moved to Dubai, but he came back and we finally got episodes 2 and 3 off his computer.

President Evil is a web series about a zombie that becomes President and two men who find it their duty to kill the new leader of the free world, President Grogg.

The idea began in 2004 during the George Bush / John Kerry election season. "President Evil: The Beginning" was entered into the Mercer University Halloween Film Festival and won 1st place. Heroes Chip and Jim feel their patriotic duty to slay this surprisingly effective new President to save mankind from zombie...kind

Four years later, while Obama and McCain led campaigns, a new set of heroes found themselves fighting against the zombie executive branch after a re-election keeps President Grogg in office. After saving the economy, balancing the nation budget, mending foreign affairs, and saving the country, President Grogg is still just a zombie to Nick and Mack who are fed up with brains on their pizza in "President Evil: Re-Election Day".

Nick and Mack hit the road bound for Washington DC and with a little help from their friends, they aim to take down the zombie empire with guns blazing.

Episode 1: "Re-Election Day"

Episode 2: "Campaign Strategies"

Episode 3: "Right To Bear Arms"

And, in case you've never seen the original one that Jay and I made in 2004, here it is. As a fair warning, we only had one night to write, film, and edit it. Plus, it ran longer than expected, so we had to cut it short (film festival had a 6 minute limit)

Episode 0: "The Beginning"

The Pirate Bay takes on a Ship Load of Damage

If you have never been to The Pirate Bay website, it's essentially the Napster of the late '00s. Rather than download a program that lets you search for peers with mp3s, The Pirate Bay is a website that allows users to post links to bittorrent files. The bittorrent files are then used in a bittorrent client which uses the file to find users sharing the file you are trying to download.

After a legal battle, The Pirate Bay founders were each sentenced to one year in prison and an alltogether fine of $3.6 million (yowsers!). They were originally charged with "assisting copyright infringement" which was dropped; but were convicted on "assisting making available copyrighted material".

It sounds as if they made up that charge to fit exactly what they were doing. I do agree that they did break that law, if it is in fact a law. I always enjoy seeing the progress of internet law as the internet seems to move much faster than lawmakers can keep up with, but it seems like this time the law won. As we move farther and farther away from cds and dvds and more into pure software, I think we'll see more agressive action on the music, movie, and gaming industry's part to eliminate warez (pirating).

Blockbuster and Netflix both offer forms of watching movies directly over the internet and most television stations have now posted their show episodes online. It's only a short time before Blockbuster ends up having to shut it's stores down and netflix stops mailing you DVDs. I imagine within the next 5 years, we'll see the beginning of the collapse of cable and satellite television. Everything will be streamed via the internet to a small computer hooked up to your TV or straight to your hand held devices. And as history has shown us, the less hardware, the lower cost of pirating.

Obama Sends a Firm Message with New High Speed Rail Line

President Obama has been supporting this new high speed rail line, or so the headlines would leave me to believe. Despite the title of this post and the associated picture, I am actually quite excited about this. The sooner we can rely less on oil, and cars in general, the better. I am all for public mass transportation. I wish Atlanta had a better public transportation system. For those of you non-Atliens, we have Marta which makes a plus through Atlanta, one line going north and south, and one line going east and west. It's great if you want to go to somewhere on the plus, but otherwise, you're up shit creek (which is also 7 blocks away from Marta).

This new high speed rail line gives a lot of potential to lower travel costs, I imagine it will also bring down the cost of airline tickets. When I first read about the project, I got very excited at the possibility of having a high speed rail line straight from Atlanta to Vegas, or at least maybe Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I won't be making the cross country journey via train, as the tracks don't go anywhere near the mid west. It's great if I chose to take a trip up to Washington DC, but the map is set to for the most part keep me on this side of the mississippi. It's as if the people who designed MARTA were asked to make a train system that made it easier to travel around the country.

It really does nothing for the West coast. I suppose it lightens up traffic on I-5 a little. The entire Mid-West is omitted from the track, though I imagine - I hope - the plan is to eventually connect all of the lines. There are even plans to hit two canadian cities, yet none to bridge the East and West sides of America. This is why we have such strong tensions between gangs on opposing sides of the country.

I'm sure there were several considerations taken, but I would have foreseen something more along the lines of this (Ignore the circles and highlighted Oklahoma). This plan hits the biggest cities in America as well as sweep into several of the other high travel cities that are in path along the lines between the large cities. This also hits most of the major airline hub cities (which I'm sure is part of the reason Obama's map doesn't look like this).

Cities this map covers:

• Miami
• Atlanta
• Nashville
• Washington DC
• Houston
• New York
• Boston
• Detroit
• Chicago
• Kansas City
• Oklahoma City
• Dallas
• Denver
• Salt Lake City
• Seattle
• San Francisco
• Albaquerque
• Pheonix
• Los Angeles
• (After drawing the map, I realize I should have maybe included New Orleans btw Atlanta and Houston)

Some much to do! So little time!

Feels like I have so much I want to do with so little time. Here's a list of thing I hope to do within the next 2 months before I go to China. These are not necessarily in any particular order.

• Complete current big web development project (est. 2-3 more weeks)


• Learn how to program iPhone applications


• Get a band together for May 9th "Fame" party and learn 20-30 songs


• Finish putting together ADL Directory site and start marketing it.


• Finish filming Ting Ting's "Thats not My Name" music video and edit it.


• Bang out a solid script for President Evil series / movie.


• Come up with a new name for President Evil series / movie (the PE name is flooded on youtube)


• Finish at least half of the BNS2 novel.


• Finish planning Deuces Wild Vegas Trip

I might just cut out sleep for the next 2 months, that should help me get more of these things accomplished. I would estimate that within the next 60 days, I should be able to cap off at least half, if not 3/4 of these To-DO items.

Funny License Plates

Found a bunch of funny license plates online at various sites. I couldn't upload them to blogger for some reason, so they may take a while to load as they are all coming from their original hosting sites. For that same reason, some may not load at all if the original publisher changes the link or removes them.