Thankfully, after years of waiting there is finally a viable solution to this problem, enter BrowsersStack.com. BrowserStack is a tool that lets you load up a browser complete with debugging tools running natively on a computer somewhere in the cloud. Unlike some of the screenshot services that have been around for awhile, BrowserStack allows you to actually interact with the website through the browser providing full Javascript testing abilities. You can do all of this directly from your Mac or PC development computer through a web-based interface.

I have been waiting for a tool like this for quite some time. I have been using BrowserStack for a couple weeks and have been very satisfied. The service is still currently in beta but you can request to be included in the beta here: http://www.browserstack.com/. The Service costs $19.99 a month and is well worth the money for me.

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Sorry the pictures are not better. The sun was rising behind him and I was shooting through my back window so the pictures are less than stellar but hopefully they’re enough to make all you hunters jealous. Of course, when Halloween comes around and I have nothing to carve I probably won’t be too happy but he was fun to watch.

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Although, Steve Jobs feels Flash is not good enough for the iPhone, I must disagree. Flash is widely used on the web for presenting content, games, and most importantly video. The inability for iPhone customers to utilize Flash content is a huge disability and will be a real sales disadvantage when the other major mobile operating systems integrate Flash later this year.

I have been watching the debate about Flash on the iPhone for quite some time. Many experts like Robert Scoble feel the real reason that Flash Player hasn’t been implemented on the iPhone is not because of technical difficulties but instead because of Apple’s reluctance to use Adobe’s PDF renderer. Whatever the problem, Apple better figure out a viable solution soon. The developer version of Flash Player 10 mobile is expected to be available in October of this year. It is only a matter of time before innovative new applications are available, not to mention Android users will be able to watch Jon Stewart on Hulu.

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The unfortunate reality is that IE6 is still important. Although, its market share is slowly dwindling there are still a large number of important business users on IE6. .net Magazine has started a new campaign called “Bring Down IE6.” You can check it out here: http://www.bringdownie6.com/ which is trying to help combat this problem and they’re looking for web developer support.

Obviously, I support this campaign, hence this article. I don’t think this is enough. I think as web developers we should put a header on every site that only shows to IE6 users…. using hacks of course. This bar would basically inform the user their using a grossly outdated browser and give them links to download Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera. Many of these users have no idea just how outdated their software is. They may have disabled their automatic Windows updates back in 2002 and didn’t realize that browsing technology has changed drastically since that time. We can have all the campaigns we want but if the people with the problem don’t know that they have IE6 and that it’s outdated then the problem is not going to get solved.

I look at it kind of like having cancer. If you don’t know you have it often you can live with it undetected but as soon as you find you have cancer you’ll get it treated. At any rate a campaign is a step in the right direction. It is amazing to me how many of our IE6 customers have no idea they are outdated or even what browser they use. Many of them don’t even know there are competing products to Internet Explorer. They just assume that is how everyone views the Internet.

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In his previous shareholder letters there has been a wealth of information. For example, in 2006 he made a prediction of a housing melt-down. This same melt down is largely responsible for our current economic state. Warren has a lifetime of experience and his company Berkshire Hathaway owns over 70 companies in widely varying industries. His knowledge and diversification give him a unique ability to see business trends. Below are some experts from the letter that I thought were interesting:

“Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.”

“The present housing debacle should teach home buyers, lenders, brokers and government some simple lessons that will ensure stability in the future. Home purchases should involve an honest-to-God down payment of at least 10 percent and monthly payments that can be comfortably handled by the borrower’s income. That income should be carefully verified.”

Give it a read. Perhaps you can soak up some wisdom. While there you may check out some of the older letters as well. They are all filled with good, timeless information. Click here to download Warren Buffett’s 2008 letter to shareholders and click here to read previous letters to shareholders.

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Kayla and I had a great year. It was certainly the best I have ever had. In the past year we have had a ton of awesome adventures. We had some fun trips, we visited Seattle, Mt. Rainer, the Washington Coast twice, Mt. St. Helens, and we went on a variety of other local trips and adventures. We also ate 29 meals at Luigi’s on the South Hill, made 3 trips to Greenbluff, and went to almost every Spokane Shock home game. We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family and we also happened to get engaged!

Below is a gallery that shows some of our adventures from the past year starting with me cooking Valentine’s Day dinner last year. I hope next year is just as fun! I know we’re already planning a trip to Las Vegas and a return trip to Mt. Rainer so that should help. Enjoy:

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jQuery

URL: http://www.jquery.com/
Hosted at Google: Yes
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Prototype

URL: http://www.prototypejs.org/
Hosted at Google: Yes
Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. It features a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

MooTools

URL: http://www.mootools.net/
Hosted at Google: Yes
MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API.

Dojo

URL: http://dojotoolkit.org/
Hosted at Google: Yes
The Dojo Toolkit is an open-source JavaScript toolkit for building great web applications. It shortens the time between idea and implementation by providing a well conceived API and set of tools for assisting and fixing the issues experienced in everyday web development. It is lightning fast, extremely robust, and supplies a solid set of tools for DOM manipulation, Animations, Ajax, Event and keyboard normalization, Internationalization (i18n) and Accessibility (a11y).

script.aculo.us

URL: http://script.aculo.us/
Hosted at Google: Yes
script.aculo.us is a set of JavaScript libraries to enhance the user interface of web sites. It provides an visual effects engine, a drag and drop library (including sortable lists), a couple of controls (Ajax-based autocompletion, in-place editing, sliders) and more.

Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

URL: http://www.mochikit.com/
Hosted at Google: Yes
The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. The YUI project includes the YUI Library and two build-time tools: YUI Compressor (minification) and YUI Doc (documentation engine for JavaScript code).

Spry Framework

URL: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/
Hosted at Google: No
The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library that provides easy-to-use yet powerful Ajax functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to take the complexity out of Ajax and allow designers to easily create Web 2.0 pages.

MochiKit

URL: http://www.mochikit.com/
Hosted at Google: No
MochiKit is a powerful set of JavaScript tools. It offers tools to assist with event handling, AJAX, and DOM Manipulation. It is very well documented and generally well designed.

Railto

URL: http://rialto.improve-technologies.com/
Hosted at Google: No
Railto is a toolkit which focuses on aiding the development of AJAX based cross browser JavaScript in corporate environments. It is deisgned for use on corporate web applications and not general internet websites.

ASP.NET Ajax Framework

URL: http://asp.net/ajax/
Hosted at Google: No
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers.

Clean Ajax Framework

URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/clean-ajax/
Hosted at Google: No
Easy to use AJAX framework that provides message queue, XSLT, XPath, encryption (SHA1, MD5), web service access (SOAP, XMLRPC), JSON-RPC, cross browser AJAX, AJAX history and cache control.

SWFObject

URL: http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/
Hosted at Google: Yes
SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

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Yesterday, Caleb White posted about a presentation at the University of Washington regarding the effects of having a digital president. It is really an interesting presentation. I wish I could’ve been there in person but it is just as good on video. Unfortunately, UW didn’t make the videos embeddable which is odd considering it is a presentation on social media. I was tempted to rip them and post them here myself but I decided I have real work I could do so if you want to watch this cool presentation you can do it at: http://www.washington.edu/insight/digitalpresident/

Below is an synopsis of the presentation from the UW website:

Facebook. Twitter. Mybarackobama.com. Text messaging. The president- elect used all of these digital tools to devastating effect in the 2008 election. How did he do it? What strategic lessons can we learn from Barack Obama’s high-tech campaign? How might he deploy this online army of millions to govern? And does President Obama’s historic rise to the White House also propel social networking into the mainstream?

The answers to these important questions have a profound impact on the very near future of our democracy, as well as how we organize, communicate and even do business in the digital age. On the eve of the Obama inauguration, join us for a dynamic, engaging UW Insight conversation that seeks to put this digital revolution in perspective.

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While we were home, we got a report form my aunt that there was fantastic weather out her way. Excited, we all hopped in the car and took a trip to Westport Washington to enjoy some of the unusually warm and sunny weather we don’t expect during January in Washington. It was a welcome change from the fog and freezing temperatures at my house here in Spokane.

Here are a few pictures from our adventure:

For those of you who don’t care what I have been up to here are a couple of interesting links to tide you over until I make a real post:

- 12 Useful Techniques for Good User Interface Design
- Obama’s Wasteland
- Convert Your TV to Digital (Funny Video)

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ASP is dead. I think that all developers currently developing in classic ASP should move to ASP.NET or another language like PHP or JSP. If that isn’t an option, then they should give up web development. Like Internet Explorer 6, classic ASP was once a great tool for online development. Unfortunately, it has stayed on the shelf long past the expiration date.

I believe developers still developing in classic ASP are doing their customers a serious injustice. Don’t get me wrong, ASP provides a powerful set of tools that are very capable of creating successful websites. I cannot argue with the success ASP has had over the years. The injustice comes from the fact that Microsoft discontinued development of the framework shortly after the introduction of .NET several years ago. In addition to the lack of support and updates from the creator of the language itself, most universities training new programmers discontinued educating students on classic ASP several years ago. This means the pool of ASP familiar programmers is consistently diminishing.

It is already much, much harder to find skilled classic ASP programmers now than it was 2 or 3 years ago and this division will continue to grow quickly. The last major update to classic ASP was version 3.0 distributed with IIS 5.0 in November of 2000. To put this in prospective, this means that ASP hasn’t had a major update since before the September 11th attacks. With a technology product this is obscene. How could something nearly 10 years old still be relevant? The short answer is it cannot. It has been replaced with a much better and more powerful technology, ASP.NET.

I often come across developers still working with classic ASP and it makes me shudder. Unfortunately, customers working with these developers don’t realize how outdated the language or the server software running it often are. These customers also don’t realize they may soon be stuck with this developer because they will be unable to find other companies interested in supporting their outdated website. If you’re an ASP developer I encourage you to think about your customers and the value you are providing them. Please learn ASP.NET, it is not that different from classic ASP in many ways. I am sure you wouldn’t suggest your customer build a website that only supports Internet Explorer 6 so why program it with a comparable technology. Selling a customer a new website programmed in classic ASP is like selling them milk that expired when Britney Spears was a teen sensation and Bill Clinton was President.

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