I've been using Open Office at home for a while instead of Word, and I have to say, it feels pretty good. Cheap thrill? Probably, but I don't think I've had to sacrifice anything to get it. Recently I grabbed the Open Office 2.0 Beta and it's become apparent that, not only am I not sacrificing anything, but I'm gaining quite a bit, inlcuding: additional format compatiblity, XForms support, more standardized XML support (using OASIS OpenDocument), and a fancy new interface. There are dozens of new and improved features that I haven't even had the time to explore, but this Beta build has been so stable that I'm sure I'll have time to find them.

I can't stress this enough: If you don't absolutely have to have the MS brand office suite (or don't want to pay for it), grab yourself a free copy of Open Office

Jet Blue Flight #291 is minutes away from making an emergency landing at LAX due to malfunctioning landing gear.

The plane took off at 3:17PM from Burbank en route to New York's JFK Int'l when the nose landing gear turned 90 degrees to the left. It was decided that an emergency landing would be necessary. he craft is unable to jettison fuel, so the pilot has been flying around at low altitude with high drag for over three hours, trying to burn off over 30000 lbs. of jet fuel, enough to fly to New York.

The risk to the passengers is minimal, so I don't feel too overly bad when I admit that I'm mostly worried about my commute to go pick up a friend at LAX tonight.

UPDATE: That was spectacular.

The plane landedsafely. The nose gear skidded and sparked, but never collapsed. Other than what must have been unimaginable noise and shaking, the landing must have seemed damn near typical from on board.

IE doesn't care about black people.

Well, maybe that's not fair. But it certianly doesn't care about semi-opaque people.

Among the massive oversights and rendering faux pas Internet Explorer has forced upon us lo these past years, it's inexplicable lack of support for PNG alpha transparency has proven itself among the most frustrating. Realizing their mistake, Microsoft took a very Microsoft approach to the problem and... worsened it. They added to their library of proprietary 'Visual Filters' a technique to replicate alpha transparency, which everyone else was supporting natively. Without going into great detail on why the visual filters scheme is Just Plain Wrong, I will admit that they work, however poorly.

The filter in question is actually a rendering routine or "Procedural Surface" called AlphaImageLoader. What does it do? It makes PNGs work the way they do in other browsers. It's sloppy to implement, but transparent (ha ha) to the user. I'm geussing that the main reason people are reluctant to use this filter is that they assume it will require JavaScript browser sniffing or alternate stylesheets. I believe the following block of CSS does it's own browser filtering and will give the desired effect without JavaScript or excess markup:

1. #myDiv {
2. background: url(bg.png);
3. _background: 0;
4. filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft. AlphaImageLoader(src='bg.png');
5. }

The first property sets the background to a PNG image. This will be read by all browsers and the PNG will show up correctly in browsers which supoprt it.

The second property is visible only to IE browsers, due to the underscore preceeding it. Non-IE browsers should ignore it. IE will read the property, and it will override the preceeding property, setting the background to none.

The third property is the filter property, which only IE4+ browsers will read. That big long path references code embedded in the IE rendering engine and runs the routine which re-evaluates how to display the image it's loading. The method can take several agruments, but for our purposes, we've only rovided it with a path to the image.

I haven't tested this fully with Safari , Opera, or any less typical browsers, but I imagine that if this doesn't work, it would be a relatively simple adjustment. Otherwise, this should provide you with a simple, relatively clean way to display PNGs with alpha transparency in all modern browsers and IE.

Or you could just redirect IE visitors here.

It was announced this week that eBay would be acquiring instant messaging and internet telephony company Skype in a deal valued at $4.1 billion. This comes hot on the heels of Microsoft's purchase of heretofor unknown internet telephony startup Teleo. Should I mention Google Talk? Is there any question that internet telephony and VOIP is the next competition space? What does this mean to consumers?

I'm having trouble finding articles tackling the concept at large, but there is no shortage of speculation on the wisdom of these individual acquisitions. $4.1 billion is an exhorbitant amount of money by any standard. Consider that Yahoo purchased Flickr for an undisclosed amount rumored to be around $35 million. I've been personally promoting both services to friends and family for over a year and have had a less than stellar adoption rate for Skype.

My assumption at this time last year was that VOIP would get the 'Bluetooth treatment." It's obviously a good idea and very useful and no one could find anything bad to say about it, but no one is using it either. Well, Bluetooth may finally be catching on, and VOIP may never go through that inexplicable stagnant period at all. The amount of money already poured into the concept is staggering. This may be the last nail in Ma Bell's casket.