So I took the plunge today and got my website to pass CSS and XHTML validation tests. This ensures that my site renders correctly in most browsers and on mobile devices. Check out UITest.com for links to several validation tools.

The hardest thing to get validated are embedded YouTube videos. The <embed> tag they use is depreciated in XHTML 1.0. As soon as you embed a video, your site will fail validation. I found several code samples for fixing this, but only one of them actually worked. I just had to tweak the size so the output matched that from the YouTube script.

Here’s the HTML:

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/sM_WEohK3bo&hl=en” width=”425″ height=”355″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/sM_WEohK3bo&hl=en” />
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerMode=embedded” />
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” />
</object>

The original script came from HERE.

The only problem I’ve had is with the visual editor in Wordpress auto-replacing this code with the original YouTube code.

InfoQ has a great article up from Randy Shoup, a senior architect at eBay. He discusses the philosophies and practices employed by eBay to ensure their software scales to the demands of the site. I like articles like this because the techniques used by large systems (eBay, Google, Amazon, etc) tend to also apply to smaller systems. These larger systems help flush out the problems that a smaller system may not run into until it is too late.

From the article:

At eBay, one of the primary architectural forces we contend with every day is scalability. It colors and drives every architectural and design decision we make. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, over two billion page views a day, and petabytes of data in our systems, this is not a choice - it is a necessity.

Click HERE to watch the video presentation and corresponding slides.

GL over at ‘What Would Dad Say‘ has a good post to help Gen-X and Y’ers understand the 8 things that shaped the Baby Boomer generation. I know I’m routinely baffled by the way my parents look at the world… as I’m sure they feel that same about me. I don’t agree with everything he says about my generation, but I’m open to other opinions.

From the post:

We are doing our best to understand you. We read book after book, and try to understand how you ended up this way. We raised you, yet we can’t figure you out.

As a group, boomers are self-conscious, reflective and judgmental. We are the ‘me’ generation. You are the “why?” generations.

Your grandparents and you come at things from opposite directions but meet up in the middle. You are more selfish, they are selfless; you demand, they accept; you are smarter, but they can do math in their head. The sad truth: We raised you, but you are more like them than us. That well may be our defining sentence about our relationship with YOU.

Read the rest of the post HERE.

Due to several factors (hardware failures, time, etc), I’ve decided to use a 3rd party hosting service and rebuild this site.

Financial Sense has a great editorial on oil futures and the current price bubble driven by “paper oil”… oil futures that work beyond the realm of supply-and-demand. The irony about the current situation is that the higher prices are driving MORE supply… something counter-intuitive to a more traditional economic way of thinking. Current oil prices could be overpriced in excess of 60% simply because of futures speculation. From the article:

By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for oil companies to buy even more oil and place it in storage. A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher.

As a result, over the past two years crude oil inventories have been steadily growing, resulting in US crude oil inventories that are now higher than at any time in the previous eight years. The large influx of speculative investment into oil futures has led to a situation where we have both high supplies of crude oil and high crude oil prices.

In the most recent sustained run-up in energy prices, large financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds, and other investors have been pouring billions of dollars into the energy commodities markets to try to take advantage of price changes or hedge against them. Most of this additional investment has not come from producers or consumers of these commodities, but from speculators seeking to take advantage of these price changes.

The large purchases of crude oil futures contracts by speculators have, in effect, created an additional demand for oil, driving up the price of oil for future delivery in the same manner that additional demand for contracts for the delivery of a physical barrel today drives up the price for oil on the spot market. As far as the market is concerned, the demand for a barrel of oil that results from the purchase of a futures contract by a speculator is just as real as the demand for a barrel that results from the purchase of a futures contract by a refiner or other user of petroleum.

Read the full article HERE.

We got our first set of ultrasounds today… pretty exciting! The fetus is 1.13cm long, with an expected due date of Dec-30th 2008. The red arrow is pointing to the head, and the green arrow is the yolk sac. The baby’s heart is the white lump at its center… we could see it beating… what a trip!

This next image shows the heart beat… a healthy 143 beats-per-minute.

This last image is a stock photo showing what the baby looks like at this point. This is a side-view picture, while our ultrasound shows the baby from the front (or back… it’s hard to tell).