My Mum has set off on her transatlantic crossing from Nova Scotia. Their progress should have been reported continuously via blog postings through their Iridium satellite phone, but they could not get the (serial!) modem working in time. For some reason text messages sent through the Iridium web site don’t seem to work either. I have a feeling that Motorola is involved with Iridium, which probably explains why it doesn’t seem to work properly…
Hot stuff
Just a little break from the techie stuff. I really like Tabasco Chipotle smoked jalapeño pepper sauce. I realised that I was getting near to the end of a bottle and it occurred to me that that meant that I’d got through SIX 148ml bottles in the last year! Definitely an addict. Maybe I should invest in one of these: 
unless someone feels like importing one for me one since they don’t seem to be available in the UK.
SunSpider benchmarks updated
I updated my previous post on Sunspider benchmarks to include Safari 3.1, FireFox 3b4 and IE 8b1.
Microsoft finally gets it
I somehow missed Microsoft’s announcement that (in a complete U-turn from previous announcements) IE8 will support web standards mode by default, and thus any broken sites will have to enable IE7 mode by a meta tag. So finally, IE will cease to be the albatross around the neck of the internet, and developers the world over will at last be able to write standards-compliant sites that work in all major browsers.
I had real trouble believing that MS had convinced so many prominent web standards advocates (here and here) that the previous option was in some way a good thing, when it essentially meant that MS expected 99% of the web to change in order to support the 1% (almost entirely intranets and thus of no public interest) that are so badly written that they couldn’t survive a browser update.
I’m very happy to see this change of heart, which was a really unexpected thing to see from MS. They don’t normally give a stuff about such things, so they fully deserve the adulation that their announcement is getting in the comments. It also vindicates the slagging I gave the authors of those articles promoting the evil meta tag!
So, Thank you Microsoft! I look forward to not having to do anything special for IE – you probably just doubled the world’s web development productivity rate! Who knows – one day IE might be as good as Firefox or Safari…