My wife works for a bank, and she forwarded me a phishing scam for Washington Mutual bank. Besides misspelling the word “customer” as “costomer”, it was pretty convincing for those who don’t know any better. When she sent it to me, I took a look at the page, and this is what Firefox+Google toolbar presented me with: Everybody needs this! Even those of us who have spent lots and lots of time around the web, this is a good thing.

When we launched SimplePie Beta 2 last week, we launched with a couple of plugins. The first is a SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress, the ever-popular blogging tool from the fine folks at automattic. This plugin adds a single function to your Wordpress function ensemble that makes it simple to add SimplePie to your Wordpress templates. The other was the SimplePie Plugin for MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers the popular Wikipedia, by adding support for the <feed> tag in your wiki pages.

After several months of toiling over this release, and the past few weekends pouring over the documentation, we are now very proud to release SimplePie Beta 2! Nearly every major feature has been enhanced, as well as the addition of several new ones. Be sure to read the upgrade docs if you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or the Preview Release. People who were using trunk builds should be able to just drop this file in as a replacement for any previous simplepie.

I’ve had a head cold for the last 3 days (which is why some of you haven’t seen me online), and in that time I’ve gone through 5 rolls of toilet paper due to blowing my nose. I’ve tried various medicines, and although Sudafed was able to slow the drip, I’ve been blowing my nose almost constantly. For those who are concerned about efficiency in all things (as I am), I believe I’ve found the most efficient way to get the snot as far away from your sinuses as possible.

After nearly 7 years in Bugzilla, it appears that the CSS2 text-shadow property will finally make it into Firefox 2. According to Bugzilla, the patch has already been added to the trunk (although it’s not quite complete yet), and seeing as how its status has been set to blocking 1.8.1 (which according to this roadmap is Firefox 2 timeframe), I’m hoping that this will finally get implemented. Yay!

With all of the recent hoopla about Sony dropping the UMD format (here and here), it’s little wonder why. The reason? This Think Secret posting gives all the explanation we need: Cinemanow bills itself as “the #1 legal movie download store” and sells movies a-la-carte, but for the same price, if not higher, in some cases, than actual DVDs, killing part of the incentive for purchasing a digital download. Why would anyone want to spend more on a movie in a format that is significantly less flexible than a DVD?

RSS and Atom feeds that aren’t either UTF–8 or ISO–8859–1 have proven difficult to find, so I’m calling out to all of you. If you read or publish feeds that are in a character set other than these two, please post them here in the comments. We’ve just finished adding iconv support to SimplePie, and want to test that support (it’s in the trunk build as of this moment). Any help along these lines would be appreciated.

WARNING: This Post Contains Too Much Information! Vasectomy. That’s right, no more kids for me. I decided a long, long time ago that I only ever wanted two kids. I have them, I love them, and I’m done. My wife said that she was kinda bummed out about it, but understood my decision. And it’s not like it came as a surprise either — I’ve been saying the same thing since we met in high school, long before she was ever my girlfriend.

For those who hadn’t yet heard, there is an updated version of Internet Explorer 7 available. If you want to run it in standalone mode, Jon Galloway’s IE7 Launcher will do the trick nicely. Lots of information can be found about IE7, specifically improved CSS compliance (hasn’t yet been updated with the current build information, but will). This build is supposed to be rendering engine complete, meaning that this build will render webpages the same way that the final release will.

I had a problem with TinyMCE initializing on a new page today. After about 10 seconds of Googling, I had my answer: If you’re using both libraries, TinyMCE needs to be loaded before Scriptaculous. Thought I’d pass this little nugget along from one front-end developer to another. In completely unrelated news, I really need to fix up skyzyx.com don’t I? Yeah, it’s in bad shape. *Adds it to the list.* I finally have a strategy for it… I just need to execute that strategy.