As bad as I hate to say it, the Vacation is over!  My wife and I just got back from a fun filled week in Destin, Florida with about 20 of our closest friends.  We pretty much did everything you can imagine while we were there, including snorkeling, swimming, sunning, and of course eating.  On the last day of the trip Donna and I went on a fishing trip with my cousin Craig on his fishing boat about 3 miles off the shore.  We managed to take in some awesome scenery including at least 4 gigantic sea turtles.  I caught a Kingfish (photo below) and a Dolphin Fish that was actually larger than the Kingfish but it got off before we could get the gaff stuck into it to bring it in.  Donna also hooked a Kingfish and fought it to the boat.  It was a real treat and we had a blast!  Can’t wait until next year! 

Of course today when I walk into my office, the phone is ringing, I have approximately 119 emails in my inbox, and my Internet dies about the time I sit down in my chair.  My Internet connection, which is a Static IP Address from ConwayCorp wouldn’t get back online until around 9 tonight so if that tells me anything, it tells me that the Vacation is Over!!!!

Oh yeah, if you are interested, here are some pics from the vacation.  I will be posting some of the Wedding Photos once I have had a chance to go through and photoshop them a little bit more…

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FYI, I am getting ready to walk out the door with my wife and a few of our friends to head to Destin for the week.  I will check email a few times a day and will have my cell phone for any rare emergencies or life threatening situations that may pop-up, I am praying they won’t.  Have a great week and I will be back in the office the first part of next week!

Oh yeah, I will be snapping photos the whole time we are there and uploading them so keep an eye out for them on here in the photo galleries if you are interested!

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I have had a few of my friends from around the web ask me what I thought about HP building a new facility here in my hometown of Conway, Arkansas. 

Naturally I am excited, honestly I think that HP is a good fit for Conway, we have a very skilled workforce already here and more graduating each year from our 3 universities.  Another large tech-firm here in town, Acxiom, has done very well here over the years as well and is now branched out all over the world and publicly traded.

As a resident of Conway for almost 3 years now, I can tell you that we really enjoy living here.  It’s like a great big small town with a lot going on.  We now have just about every major restaurant chain and mom and pop establishment that you could ever want in town now, and I have probably eaten at every one of them!  Every time I pass through town I notice a few more new businesses that are opening up, it just a positive community in a lot of ways.

Another pretty big deal here in Conway is the construction of a new airport.  This is definitely something that has been in the works for a long time and is desperately needed to accommodate the needs of a company like HP. 

For those of you who might have missed the announcement a month or so ago about HP’s Conway Plant, here’s a link to KATV’s story: Hewlett-Packard Enticed With $43M to Build Conway Facility and here’s an excerpt:

Documents from the state show that Hewlett-Packard was offered more than $43 million in incentives from state and local officials to build a new customer and technical service center in Conway.

The documents were released today by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission released the documents to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information request. Details such as the number of jobs, average wages and the company’s investment were blacked out in the memorandum of understanding between the technology company and the state, as well as several attachments.

The June 17th memo, however, details the the $35.4 million in incentives that the state used to lure the Palo Alto, California-based company to Conway for its new facility. Officials announced last week that the company plans to open the center by the end of 2009 and have its full contingent working within four years.

Beebe has contributed $10 million from a fund he controls to help attract new businesses and help existing ones expand to go toward that infrastructure.

The document also details $8.3 million in incentives that local officials in Conway offered to HP to open the new center. The local incentives included $2.1 million for the project’s site work and nearly $3 million for transportation corridor improvements to the office park where the facility will be located.

The company has said it will hire 1,200 people for the new center.

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After beating the drum and getting all hopped up for the launch of Firefox 3 this week, I am just now getting around to downloading and installing it on my Dev2 machine.  I am going to test out my plugins and everything for a little while before I update all of my other machines, here’s a note about the recent Mozilla website outage…

An outage affected the Mozilla.com website on the day the organisation launched its Guinness World Record attempt for downloads of the new Firefox 3 browser. The mozilla.com site was unreachable from around the world, occasionally responding with the message, “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”.

Melissa Shapiro posted a statement on the Mozilla blog to say that their servers were feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. An earlier post stated that the record attempt would begin today at 5pm UTC, but Shapiro announced after this time that the 24 hour period in which the downloads will be counted will begin once the site goes live.

Netcraft was able to access the Firefox 3 download page again shortly after 7pm UTC, but the Service Unavailable message was still seen occasionally. For some period before this, the page was still offering version 2 downloads, yet a Mozilla press release confirmed that Firefox 3 had indeed already been released.

A follow-up post on the Mozilla blog officially announced that the 24 hour period had begun, with Guinness counting all complete downloads of Firefox 3 before 18:16 UTC tomorrow.

The outages also affected the www.spreadfirefox.com website. Realtime performance graphs of the Mozilla website are available here.

Source: Netcraft

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My absolute favorite Web Browser! Mozilla, is getting ready to release their new web browser this next week and they are getting ready for the “demand” for their popular browser.  The release is set to hit on the 17th (which is also my wife’s birthday!).  They are trying to set a Guinness World Record for Software Downloads.  To help promote the “download day” they are even having a free BBQ at the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, CA.  I was just curious who the previous record holder was for software downloads but according to WHIR there isn’t a “previous” record holder, so this should be a sure thing, just like Mozilla Firefox!  Be sure to stop what you are doing and set your Outlook Reminders now to update Firefox next Tuesday!

There is a little more information about the release on WHIR’s website, see source below.  Also, the download link for the software when it becomes available can be found on Mozilla’s website: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Source: Web Host Industry News | Mozilla Readies Download Day

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I spent a little time this afternoon reading about Firefox 3 for Developers so I could kind of get an idea of what lies ahead in the next browser release.  I found out some pretty interesting features that will be available for end users, see the list below.  If you are a developer, check out this link for more information that is of interest to developers. 

User experience

• Easier password management. An information bar at the top of the browser window now appears to allow you to save passwords after a successful login.
• Simplified add-on installation. You can now install extensions from third-party download sites in fewer clicks, thanks to the removal of the add-on download site whitelist.
• New Download Manager. The download manager makes it easier to locate your downloaded files.
• Resumable downloads. You can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
• Full page zoom. From the View menu and using keyboard shortcuts, you can now zoom in and out on the content of entire pages — this scales not just the text but the layout and images as well.
• Tab scrolling and quickmenu. Tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu features.
• Save what you were doing. Firefox 3 prompts you to see if you’d like to save your current tabs when you exit Firefox.
• Optimized Open in Tabs behavior. Opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs instead of replacing the existing ones.
• Easier to resize location and search bars. You can now easily resize the location and search bars using a simple resize handle between them.
• Text selection improvements. You can now select multiple ranges of text using the Control (Command on Macintosh) key. Double-clicking and dragging now selects in “word-by-word” mode. Triple-clicking selects an entire paragraph.
• Find toolbar. The Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
• Plugin management. Users can now disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
• Integration with Windows Vista. Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.
• Integration with Mac OS X. Firefox now uses the Mac OS X spell checker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.
• Star button. The new star button in the location bar lets you quickly add a new bookmark with a single click. A second click lets you file and tag your new bookmark.
• Tags. You can now associate keywords with your bookmarks to easily sort them by topic.
• Location bar and auto-complete. Type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history and bookmarks. Favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where the results are coming from.
• Smart Bookmarks folder. Firefox’s new Smart Bookmarks folder offers quick access to your recently bookmarked and tagged places, as well as pages you visit frequently.
• Bookmarks and History Organizer. The new unified bookmarks and history organizer lets you easily search your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders for saving your frequent searches.
• Web-based protocol handlers. Web applications, such as your favorite web mail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is provided for other protocols as well. (Note that web applications do have to register themselves with Firefox before this will work.)
• Easy to use Download Actions. A new Applications preferences pane provides an improved user interface for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.
• Improved look and feel. Graphics and font handling have been improved to make web sites look better on your screen, including sharper text rendering and better support for fonts with ligatures and complex scripts. In addition, Mac and Linux (Gnome) users will find that Firefox feels more like a native application for their platform than ever, with a new, native, look and feel.
• Color management support. By setting the gfx.color_management.enabled preference in [about:config], you can ask Firefox to use the color profiles embedded in images to adjust the colors to match your computer’s display.
• Offline support. Web applications can take advantage of new features to support being used even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Security and privacy

• One-click site information. Want to know more about the site you’re visiting? Click the site’s icon in the location bar to see who owns it. Identify information is prominently displayed and easier than ever to understand.
• Malware protection. Firefox 3 warns you if you arrive at a web site that is known to install viruses, spyware, trojans, or other dangerous software (known as malware). You can see what the warning looks like by clicking here.
• Web forgery protection enhanced. Now when you visit a page that’s suspected of being a forgery, you’re shown a special page instead of the contents of the page with a warning. Click here to see what it looks like.
• Easier to understand SSL errors. The errors presented when an invalid SSL certificate is encountered have been clarified to make it easier to understand what the problem is.
• Out-of-date add-on protection. Firefox 3 now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and disables older, insecure versions.
• Secure add-on updates. Add-on update security has been improved by disallowing add-ons that use an insecure update mechanism.
• Anti-virus integration. Firefox 3 now informs anti-virus software when executable files are downloaded.
• Windows Vista parental controls support. Firefox 3 supports the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Performance

• Reliability. Firefox 3 now stores bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences in a transactionally secure database format. This means your data is protected against loss even if your system crashes.
• Speed. Firefox 3 has gotten a performance boost by completely replacing the part of the software that handles drawing to your screen, as well as to how page layout work is handled.
• Memory use reduced. Firefox 3 is more memory efficient than ever, with over 300 memory “leak” bugs fixed and new features to help automatically locate and dispose of leaked memory blocks.

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If Mozilla can get together a product that is as effective as outlook and has the ability to sync with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and my Palm Treo Smartphone, I will completely migrate my 20 years worth of Business Data, 2500+ contacts, etc. to Thunderbird 3 when it is complete and out of Beta!  Microsoft, this will essentially severe our ties forever!

Mozilla Messaging Starts Up Operations

New open source organization kicks off development of Thunderbird 3

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - February 19, 2008 - Mozilla Messaging, the new mail focused subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, today announced that it has begun operations.

The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience. Thunderbird is a free, open source email application that is used by millions of people around the world and is built using the same open source development model as the award-winning Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

Mozilla Messaging has staffed a small product development team who will work as part of a community of contributors from around the world.

“We’re excited to renew the focus of