So I think my back is officially dead from shoveling so much snow. It has snowed 5 (or more) weeks straight! Or at least it feels that way. Today, it was a blizzard here in South Jordan. We actually made it to church this morning, only to have our bishopric send us home after sacrament meeting because they were worried nobody would be able to get home. Rightly so, the parking lot was a mess. Thank goodness I put new tires on our vehicles this year (call it men’s intuition.)

When we arrived home, our driveway looked like a this. I thought of attempting to push through it, but thankfully for me, I decided to wait until I plowed a little out of the 3′ snow drift that had covered it.

Mozilla ups unpatched Firefox flaw to ‘high severity’; Preps fix by ZDNet‘s Larry Dignan — Mozilla has given a proof of concept Firefox vulnerability a “high severity” rating because an attacker can collect session information such as cookies and history, according to Mozilla security chief Window Snyder. Snyder said the vulnerability will be patched with Firefox 2.0.0.12, which will be pushed out “shortly.” On Jan. 22, Snyder confirmed a proof of concept […]

I do not subscribe to Glenn Beck, nor do I claim to know a whole lot about him other than he is a conservative, LDS radio/TV talk show host. However, tonight I saw something from him via KSL/YouTube that was touching. His comments reflected some of my feelings of the passing of President Gordon B. Hinckley. I have been wanting to write something about it the past few days, but could not find the words to express myself properly. Thank you Mr. Beck for putting in to words what my lack of time and eloquence could hope to muster right now.

I ran across this presentation today and thought it was a great explanation for those people that have asked me (and there are a few of you), “what is a blog?”

It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished the final design, and now, after a day or so of coding and fussing with WordPress, it is finally done. Completely rebuilt with widgets (I’ll post my twitter and other such widgets later perhaps) and dynamic everything. Now time for bed.

Apparently, YouTube has a few undocumented parameters that can effect the display of certain elements of an embedded player. I ran across this post in their developer forums following a request by a work associate to figure out how to hide the options displayed at the end of a played movie. Here is the list of known parameters along with the URL to the actual post:

• rel = 0/1 -> value for showing related videos
• color1 = hexadecimal color code -> value for the base color
• color2 = hexadecimal color code -> value for the over color
• border = 0…x -> value for the border width
• autoplay 0/1 -> value for automatically starting the video to play
• eurl = http://www.yourwebsite.com -> I believe this is the referring URL. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
• iurl = Path to the thumbnail image (I believe)

Custom URL parameters for YouTube embedded players

While reading another Silverlight development articles, I ran across a new service/feature Microsoft is offering for Silverlight developers/practioners. They claim to offer 4GB streaming services for free. I’m not sure all the stipulations and/or limitations, but hey, it’s not YouTube!

• http://streaming.live.com/
• https://silverlight.live.com/

I ran across the new Microsoft downloads web site last night. Apparently, they have decided to program the entire site in Silverlight. First impression, nice work. Then came the questions: why did they do the entire page in Slight? Are they really expecting this sort of page load time for every Slight application? In spite of it’s snazzy new interface, I’m not sure I’m buying this move. It is reminiscent of the old Java applet days.