vCard is a specification for representing contact information. It’s used to move information between address books in a non-proprietary format, and to download or even upload contact information from web sites.

Apple’s Macintosh Address Book supports vCard as an export and import format as does Microsoft Outlook.

A vCard can contain things like addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even photographs.

I’m working on a web site which stores contact information for businesses and I want to be able to make that information available to my users in vCard format. So… I’m coding in Perl. There are two Perl packages that look helpful – Net::vCard and Text::vCard. It turns out that Text::vCard is a more recent version of the same codebase as Net::vCard.

Text::vCard provides methods for creating a vCard and setting the data it contains. You can then create an address book using Text::vCard::Addressbook and use its export function to get the actual vCard text.
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We’re all Mac in-house but when you’re working in the world of software, if you’re doing anything web or World of Warcraft-related, you definitely need to test against Windows occasionally.

On the web side of things, Internet Explorer, while having the largest market share of any web browser, is also the most eccentric of web browsers when it comes to its interpretation of standards. And unfortunately, even the fact that you’re programming in LUA under World of Warcraft doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter problems related to the underlying OS.

For example, Mike has an add-on for World of Warcraft that supports his web site Epic Mount, for WoW guilds. The add-on is working fine under MacOS X but as of this week’s 2.1 update to WoW, is crashing randomly on Windows machines. Not having a Windows machine handy to test it with is a problem.

I used to use Windows all the time, until my Thinkpad caught on fire and Mike’s gentle pestering of “get a mac!” finally won out. I haven’t regretted the switch at all; I have a much better user experience using my Mac, and I have Unix under the hood for the software work I want to do, so no more fidgety hassles trying to get Perl or MySQL to work under Windows. As time goes by, though, my Windows-fu becomes weaker.

We do run Windows under MacOS X on our Intel Macs, via a nifty piece of software called “Parallels Desktop”. Parallels uses the Intel CPU’s native “virtualization” support to trick Windows into thinking it has the machine to itself. There’s very little performance penalty for most operations, but rather than talk directly to the hardware, hardware access has to be emulated. That means that rather than talk to the ethernet card directly, Windows talks to Parallels, which pretends (in software) to be the ethernet card, and makes shared access to the actual ethernet card work. This adds a lot of overhead to hardware accesses. Perhaps the worst issue here is video display card access… Parallels has to pretend (in software again) to be a video card. World of Warcraft has relatively stringent video card requirements; it requires hefty 3D acceleration support to run in even the most minimal mode. Parallels doesn’t yet offer that level of support. Which means, unfortunately, that while the Parallels solution is fine for testing against Internet Explorer under Windows, it won’t help us with testing with World of Warcraft.

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Wordpress 2.2 has been released.

The new update includes support for “Wordpress Widgets” (hey everyone’s doing widgets, Wordpress might as well too) in the Wordpress core as opposed to being in a plugin; full support for Atom, protection from plugins and file changes breaking Wordpress, and speed improvements. Plus lots and lots of bug fixes.

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I’ve finally updated the Wordpress themes on all three of my blogs. I rolled out the new theme to this blog and Shiny Things a while back; I’ve just moved the Apocalypse Blog over to it, too.

I had several motivations in doing these new themes. I did them from scratch. One motivation was to improve my CSS skills and learn more about cross-browser issues (man do they suck!).

I also wanted to improve the way that the blogs are monetized (that phrase really rolls of the tongue…). The new theme has three elements that help monetize the blogs. The first is the memory finder in the header. The second is the Google ads. The third is the Amazon box in the right hand column (this is only present on the Apocalypse blog at the moment as I haven’t picked out Amazon items for the other blogs yet).

The memory finder feels to me like it fits in well with Shiny Things and isn’t too far off base here (after all, what developer couldn’t use more RAM?), but it doesn’t really fit in at all on the Apocalypse Blog. Then again nobody’s bought memory through it yet so perhaps it’s just pointless.
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Internet Explorer is often the bain of the web developer’s existence. Read the standards, see how it’s supposed to be done, and then try to figure out how to coerce Internet Explorer into doing it while still getting other browsers to work correctly.

Microsoft fumbled the ball after Internet Explorer 6 – they rested on their market share as it slowly eroded. They’re now planning to release Internet Explorer 8 only a couple of years after 7 was released, according to an article at The Register. Apparently they still haven’t decided that standards are really important.

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