UPDATE (11 Feb., 2009): With the release of 3.0.6, I thought I'd revisit this post to see if anything had been changed.  While Firefox still has the same bug, at least the Mozilla support forums have been fixed -- you no longer get the obtuse "this forum is flat" error.

We've all had to do it: the client wants things a little lighter/darker/bolder/slimmer/whatever and I'm up late at night search-and-replacing RGB values or color hex values throughout my CSS and JavaScript.  Yuck!  If you're a good programmer, you at least used variables in your JavaScript for those times that you needed to do styling.  But there's nothing you can do about CSS.  Or is there?

The sun is shining in Seattle, literally and figurtively as I go through the election results from last night.  I don't usually comment on politics on this site, but I can't really help it right now!

Let's tally the results:

Oh, that title will piss off a lot of Mac fan-boys but even they have to agree that Apple's recent moves with its iPhone App Store are reminiscent of past Microsoft policies regarding Windows: the company knows best what is good for the consumer.  The sub-text is: will Google become the next Apple?

Just a quick note that this website will be in flux over this weekend.  I'm upgrading a whole bunch of stuff and, as usual, tweaking just about everything.

UPDATE: I'm not done yet, but I'm sick of looking at this entry at the top of my home page.  I still need to clean up the Gallery code, but that'll have to wait until later.  For now, I'll un-sticky this entry and hope to clean things up in the next few days.

While David Pogue was waxing rhapsodic about Nikon's new D90, details about Canon's update to it's popular EOS 5D were already flooding online photography discussion websites.  About four weeks later, it was official.  All of the features that Mr. Pogue was so excited about in the D90 were effectively trumped with 5D Mark II.  It looks like Canon couldn't be beat!

Except by themselves...

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

Dr. Strangelove

David Brooks writes his opinion column today from China where notes a distinct difference between Asian and Western views on the indiviual versus the collective.  But Mr. Brooks didn't need to go all the way to China to see that.  All he needed to do was spend some time with kids...  or engineers.

Breaking the ice with a digital camera

What makes a spectacular reportage photo?   Several things: capturing a moment, juxtapositional composition, pehaps a unique point-of-view.  Of those criteria, the last -- the POV -- is most crucial to reportage-style photography.  Often a great point of view shot is ruined by the subject looking straight into the camera.  Think about the shots you see on the front page of the New York Times.

In a perfect world, you want all your websites to rely on the same code base.  That way a fix for one site is reflected in all the sites you manage.  This holds doubly true when you use any sort of framework software, such as Drupal, as there's nothing worse than going through a dozen different installs and rolling out the same patch over and over again.  Fortunately it is very easy to configure Drupal to run many websites from the same install.