My daily readings 05/29/2007

10 Cool Things You Can Do With (the New) Google Analytics

LineBuzz.com – Inline Blog Comments

Coding Horror: Beyond JPEG  Annotated

It’s surprising that the venerable JPEG image compression standard, which dates back to 1986, is still the best we can do for photographic image compression. I can’t remember when I encountered my first JPEG image, but JPEG didn’t appear to enter practical use until the early 90’s.

Microsoft, as Microsoft is wont to do, offers a closed-source alternative to JPEG 2000 known as HD Photo or Windows Media Photo. As of late 2006, Microsoft made the format 100% royalty free, and support for HD Photo is included in Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0. According to this Russian study, Files in Microsoft’s HD Photo format (.hdp, .wdp) are comparable to– but not better than— JPEG 2000. The study PDF has lots of comparison images, so you can decide for yourself.

Until a commonly used web browser supports JPEG 2000 or HD Photo, there’s no traction. I hope the next browser releases can move us beyond the ancient JPEG image compression format.

Mark Finkle’s Weblog » Firefox 3 – Bookmarks on Places Lands  Annotated

In addtion to the new features and UI this will allow in Firefox 3, it also gives extension developers a more powerful API for use in extensions. Places uses sqlite and the mozStorage to store bookmark and history data. Besides history and bookmark APIs, annonations, favicon and livemark service APIs are also available.

Dan Mill’s Mozillazine post has information about the upgrade and is a place where users can provide feedback.