Larry O’Brien clued me into the fact that the new DevHawk theme didn’t render correctly in FireFox. When I redid my theme, I tried to be good and use all div and span tags, but apparently building a three column layout with a dynamically sized middle column that works on IE and FireFox is beyond my CSS skills. So I went back to using tables. Maybe the folks at CSS Zen Garden would freak out, but the table works just fine.

Larry also pointed me to ActiveSWF, a server side COM component for generating dynamic flash movies. You munge up an XML file describing the movie, hand it to ActiveSWF and it does the rest. Sweet. Only thing missing is a .NET version (I realize I can interop to COM, but that’s a pain to deploy).

Thanks Larry!

I guess there’s no real good story for vector graphics in the browser. I know IE supports VML natively, but no other browser does. SVG is the standard, but you need a plugin to make that work in IE and FireFox. Adobe makes an SVG plugin, but who has that installed? Everyone has Flash installed, but that seems like overkill to render a few vector graphics. Avalon would be perfect, except that it isn’t shipping yet.

Does that mean that if I want to build a wide reach website that creates relatively simple data driven graphics (bsaically filled boxes) that I still have to use images?

I just got my hands on a Nomad Zen Micro. That makes four Nomad’s so far – I also have a IIc, Zen Xtra, and a MuVo NX. While I like my other Nomads, the Micro blows them all away.

First off, it’s tiny. It may only be 5GB compared to the Zen Xtra’s 40GB, but it’s also around a third the size. The touch pad is a little funky to get used to, but it sure looks nice. And unlike the Xtra, it pulls power from the USB connector. It doesn’t even have a separate power connector – the AC adapter that it comes with actually plugs into the mini USB slot. Cool

Haven’t had it long enough to talk about battery life or the interface, though the interface at first blush seems much better than the Zen Xtra. For example, if you’re listening to a song you can jump to that artist in the library. I’ve wished for that feature many times with the Zen Xtra.

Of course, the first thing I did was flash the device to the new 2.1 firmware. The 2.x firmware adds support for Plays for Sure subscription services like Napster To Go. And I signed up for my 14 day trial on Napster about 10 seconds after I updated the firmware. I’ve downloaded about 1GB of music from Napster – I figure that’s a good start.

(Note to Creative – the fact that I got a Zen Micro does not let you off the hook for updating the firmware of the Zen Xtra. I expect to be able to use that with Napster To Go as soon as possible.)

This is way off topic, but did you ever notice that the characters on Sesame Street that date back to the 70′s – Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, The Count, etc. – are all adults while the more recent additions like Elmo, Rosita, Zoe and Baby Bear are all kids. I’m not sure what it means, but it made me think: Did the makers of the show decide they needed characters that kids could identify with better? Or did the original characters somehow grow up? That’s a sorta wacky thought.

In case you’re wondering, Patrick watches Sesame Steet every morning and I have to sit in with him to make sure he doesn’t climb out of his high chair.

I think TechEd 2005 is shaping up to be awesome again this year. They just posted the list of sessions (well, most of the sessions anyway). I can’t link directly to the architecture sessions, but you can filter the list to show just one track at a time if you want to. We haven’t got speakers or abstracts posted yet, but I can tell you that we’ve got some good speakers lined up like Scott, Ted, Roger, Rocky, and Steve.

Of the ARC track sessions, I think I’m most looking forward to “Building and Using a Software Factory”. I jokingly call this session “Here’s the Beef, Chris Sells”. Chris blogged that he wanted a concrete example of a software factory. It turns out that we’ve been working on a concrete example since before OOPSLA. In the TechEd session, we’ll see how far Michael, Jack and Keith have gotten since October.