Hi,

Once and a while I mention things that fall outside the realms of web design and web programming; I only do so when I feel it is something important to point out.

The Giant Housing Scam

This time around, it is the giant fraud put forth by the US financial players … this whole housing bubble was a giant ponzi scheme and a new giant ponzi scheme is being engineered now. Check out this Rolling Stone article – it sums up what happened and what is gearing up to happen over the next several years.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Though Americans are going to get hosed the most (as they are now) the rest of the world will feel the pain of the scam as well .. as we are all now.

Stefan

Hi,

This is part 2 of my video tutorial on how to use Youtube to deploy videos in web pages. You can may want to also watch part 1 of my Youtube video embed tutorial.

Some final notes:

Video Processing Notes:

Dimensions: 1280 x 720
h.264 (MP4)
5000 kbits/sec

Dimensions: 640 x 480 / 640 x 360
h.264 (MP4)
3000 kbits/sec

Nerd’s Choice: I find 640 x 360 works well for live action videos.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi Guys,

This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:

Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:

- It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.

- Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.

And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.

Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.

You can read the full article here:

Apple 11 million downloads …

You can check out Safari’s 150 features here:

Safari’s cool features.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

This is just a quick warning that the trial download of Premiere CS4 is buggy .. at best.

Install Process Craps Out

I tried to install it on my Mac several times and I kept getting an error message that did not help. In the end, after rebooting several times and following all trouble shooting instructions that Adobe provides .. it would not install.

… Talk about lousy software!

Seriously, when a company can’t even make their install process work … you have to wonder! I should also point out that (after some digging with Google) that I am not the only one who has had this problem. That said, the trial worked fine on Windows XP.

Premiere’s Trial Version is Crippled!

The not so nice thing (due to licensing issues,) is that the trial version cannot work with several common video file types like h.264! That meant that I could not test how well Premiere would handle editing the file types I deal with daily. Sucks.

Oh well, I guess I will have to take a look at Final Cut.

Stefan Mischook

Hi,

I recently put out a few new videos on Javascript event handlers:

Javascript Event Handlers Part 1

Javascript Event Handlers Part 2

Javascript Event Handlers Part 3

These are part of my new growing collection of Javascript video tutorials that aim to teach total beginners how to read and write practical Javascript.

I would like to point out that I’ve invested in making the sound for these videos as clear as possible … so let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com