I'm in the midst of exploring redesigns to all my personal sites for a number of reasons, chiefly that it's been quite a while since the last one and that the current design has one or two "show stopper" problems that I simply didn't consider when creating the design. What I'm hoping to do is to keep the aspects of the design that I think work, discard the ones that don't, simplify everything a great deal and... drop support for Internet Explorer 6. It isn't an exaggeration to state that I loathe IE6. It is a 7-year-old browser and it shows. Its...

I must admit I'm a little bit jealous of all my friends being suddenly pregnant. I know at least four lady womens who have buns in the oven, and they are all about the "it feels like this!" and "I can't wait until it's out there!" and "I pee a lot!" Well, I've been living the life of the dude who watches the mommy going through the birth pains thing on my own, sort of, and can now proudly announce the birth of a 319Kb bouncing baby application saddled with the mouth-twisting name of Magnetosphere. What is it? It's an iTunes visualizer...

My boyfriend, Robert, is very smart and very creative (and, you know, sexy) and makes very beautiful stuff out of pixels and sound. He uses Processing to program up these amazing interactive screen toys that respond to anything they hear, and you can use your keyboard to change the way they interact with those sounds, too. Lately, he's been building very complicated and extremely processor-intensive media toys that the average -- or even the above-average -- computer has a hard time dealing with in real time, so he sets them up to render overnight and then he creates a Quicktime movie...

Google is such a great search engine that it's turning up information that probably no one wants to be found. Stuff like leads to unsecured sites, entry into routers and printer networks, passwords to PBX phone systems and, naturally, unsecured access to web sites themselves. Once a hacker has gained access to a system, it's a lot easier for admins to lock them out. Only thing is, hackers usually spend a lot of time within a system trying to pull out the very information that Google can provide without system intrusion -- meaning they spend less time looking for things to...

What's a poor Nigerian scam artist to do when everyone's hip to his Spam scam? Start online dating, instead. You sort of have to hand it to them -- instead of cashing in on greed (offering you a cut of millions in stuck international funds), they're using loneliness instead. In one case, a scammer strung along a woman for four months, even sending her chocolates and a Teddy Bear with mash notes, before springing the old "I only have these money orders and I'm doing business in a foreign country, won't you help me out, my love?" She did, and she...

Mozilla's open source Web browser, Firefox, has logged 75 million downloads, its small devices browser, Minimo, saw pre-release 007 debut Monday, it's quadrupled it's staff in six months and their email reader, Thunderbird, is approaching its 10 millionth download. 75 million browser downloads doesn't exactly mean that 75 million people are using the browser, of course, but that I and 14 other people have downloaded it 5,000,000 times each because we love it that much. ...

Here's a fun little lawsuit to think about, even if it is ultimately doomed (unless there's a really dumb judge out there who doesn't understand some Web indexing fundamentals). First, one company sues another company for trademark infringement. So, the second company hires a lawfirm to go out and find historical data over use of the trademarked phrase, so the lawfirm visits the Wayback Machine, a standard action in such cases, to pull up old web pages and see how far back the use extends. Here's the catch: The first company complains that they had a robots.txt file in place to...

If you think you've seen everything, think again, and also take comfort in your ideas about that stupid hobby of yours that someone said might make a good business because, well, it can't be as silly as nameadog.com, where, for $30 and a picture of your pooch, site owner Jenny send you just the exact perfect name for your dog, so you don't have to go to all that trouble! Jenny will send you three names, and if you find you don't actually like them she'll return your money, satisfaction guaranteed! So if you're still sitting on your fat ass wishing you...

Flickr founder Fake says that the next big online challenge will be engendering trust, or Reputation Management in AJAX-speak. Speaking at Supernova this week, Caterina Fake says that with everyone blogging, photoblogging, podcasting and invading your so-called privacy on an hourly basis, "trust (will be) the thing that makes the Internet possible." And you thought it was all about wires, servers, hubs and computers! Ha! Moron. But how does one build trust online? Obviously not by hiding behind some fake names and posting shit about whatever cranks your 'nads. Except here. Because we're more special than that and you trust us because...