Run IE6, 7 and 8 on the same machine

Note to self:

http://blog.case.edu/jeremy.smith/2008/03/07/ie_6_7_and_8_running_on_same_machine

Presumably it will still work with the final version of IE8 when it gets released.

(As as aside, I've been using Tredosoft's MultipleIEs for a couple of years now and it works pretty much flawlessly. Extremely handy for testing purposes.)

Taming the information overflow

News feeds and activity streams are becoming ever more popular as the amount of online information we share and consume grows.

I am starting to wonder, however, where all this is going. The amount of information is only going to keep increasing, and at some stage it is going to become too much.

Do I really want - or need - to know exactly what every person I've ever met is doing or thinking right now? Sure, to a certain extent it can be useful and/or interesting, but there must come a point at which it is actually more of a distraction.

There is only so much information we can take in. Filtering of content is a partial solution, but only partial.

It will be interesting to see what happens!

Google to drop Notebook

Along with several other less-well-known-about Google services, its been announced that development of Google Notebook is to stop.

This is a great shame as I really like this little tool, especially in conjunction with the Google Notebook extension for Firefox.

Although Google Notebook will remain active (at least for the time being), I think I'll have to start searching for an alternative.

The all-in-one social network?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/diso_dashboard.php

This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I've been waiting for, although the details are obviously still pretty vague. One of the growing frustrations of internet use these days is the barriers that exist between different services and applications. I want to be able to link things, move things around, and generally customize my web experience (and web presence) the way I want it without having to be bound by the limitations imposed by each service.

There are a few inroads being made already - Facebook allows you to set up data imports from Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Wordpress etc. (but the amount of customisation is limited); Twitterfeed lets you automatically post to Twitter every time you update your blog (or anything with an RSS feed); Digsby does a very good job of combining all your email and IM accounts as well as Twitter, Facebook etc. into a single desktop app; Flock (the web browser based on Firefox) does an admirable job of pulling together a lot of different web services into one place - although the level of customization is fairly limited and you're stuck with a few pre-defined apps.

Make scaled images render nicely in IE

A colleague just noted this blog post in his RSS feed and I thought it was worth sharing on here (and for my own future reference).

If you force an image to a certain size via its width and height attributes in HTML or CSS, most browsers will handle this ok and display the scaled image reasonably nicely, but in IE the edges often look pixelated and jagged.

To fix this, just add the following to your CSS:

img { -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; }

I shall be adding this to my reset stylesheet ASAP.