the life and times of a code monkey
This is one feature that I’ve been wanting for ages!
Hello, you’ve reached Chad’s mailbox. Thanks for your email about the latest Labs feature: Canned Responses, or email for the truly lazy. I’m on paternity leave so I won’t be able to respond personally. Instead, I hope you’ll enjoy this automated message.
via CNET - Announcement
Yesterday was a big day for advanced mobile phones - Android went fully open source.
I really like the iPhone (it will be my next phone) - it’s the most complete device out there, but I would love to see a truly open platform like Android have a great handset underneath it and really take off - it’s the only thing I can see that stands a chance of really taking on the iPhone. (Future unreleased editions of Windows mobile etc. don’t count - we’re looking at the here and now, these platforms won’t stand still while others try to catch up…)
Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community. All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.
You’ll be hearing a lot about Android devices. We’ve all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. But one device is just the beginning.
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
The Macalope bitch slapping some poor journalism - great reading.
Finally…
“As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated ‘98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,’ it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future.”
Ballmer goes on the defensive a shows just how ignorant he is… a great read! 
…you’ll see us be much more vigorous about stating the case for the PC. The truth of the matter is, this is ironic. The PC outsells the Mac 33 to 1—32 to 1. And despite the fact that we don’t sell PCs, we only sell Windows to people who make PCs. And the attack is actually on the PCs, interestingly enough. You’ll see us defend the PC. We’re going to talk about why — look, PCs are better than Macs. That is not something that can be debated. [TMO emphasis] 32 out of every 33 times, somebody buys a PC instead of a Mac. I’m not saying that there are not some things that people like about Macs, apparently there are. But have you ever seen a cheap Mac? No.
This one’s a great one too - has this guy even seen a mac in the last 10 years…
I’m very sensitive to exactly what mouse I have on my laptop. Can you find a range of choices? [for the Mac] Of course you can’t find a range of choices.
I’ve been working on a theme for wordpress over the last few weeks (on and off), it turns out to be really quite simple, you just need to find out where to get started…
Here’s some pages that I found most useful (linking for future reference):
I’ve just spent the last week on a Javascript and Ajax course (thanks to work for footing the bill)! As such I come armed with some newfound javascript knowledge! 
Here’s the first fruits of my labour - a very simple jQuery plugin that enables you to unobtrusively make an element on a webpage collapsable, and have the showing/hiding controlled by another element.
Like I said, this is very basic stuff and there is probably about a million other (most likely more feature-full and better) plugins that do the same thing already on the web, but it’s all I really need for it to be useful for my stuff and I had fun learning how to do this - never know someone else may find it useful!
If you want to have a play, here’s where to go:
