This is incredibly annoying. I haven't seen anyone mention this in blogs or news media, but YouTube has begun showing ads within the video player.

I noticed this on YouTube tonight. What happens is, as you begin to watch your video, the bottom portion of the video is obscured by animated advertisements. That's right, these ads play in the flash video player as your video is playing! So far I've seen ads for the movie AVPR (what is that, a sequel to Alien vs. Predator, widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever?), one for the much better movie Juno, and one for a cellphone company or something along those lines.

I just wanted to say that, as of December 2007, I am beginning in earnest the process of giving this site the rehaul it so badly needs. The content here is only a part of what I offer online, and soon, my homepage will provide access to much more.

I know most of you visitors come here from Googling specific problems, which is great, but I'd also like to easily answer your question, “Who are you? What does your site have for me?” To do that, I am going to have a clean and simple home page which categorizes all my content so you can quickly and easily see what may interest you, and I will add a navigation ribbon at the very top of all my content providing quick access to those categories.

The majority of important updates to AlanHogan.com should arrive by January 8, 2008.

When I finish the important site restructuring, I will get back to work on that sexy little project I call Darkboom – work which is also very much overdue. But hey, I’ve been hard at work in school.

For those of you Mac OS X programmers trying to use the Boost C++ library who are confused with all this #include and #include-path nonsense and can't get your program to compile, I have finally figured it out.

Most Mac users seem to know and love Quicksilver, that wonderful little application launcher from Blacktree (and much more, as LifeHacker often points out).

Those of you stuck in the Windows world (or at least sometimes) may finally have an alternative: Enso. The makers of Enso put a lot of thought into their product (and say it's not just a rip-off of Quicksilver). However, Enso, unlike Quicksilver, is not free; it will run you $19.95 after your 30-day trial. You can download Enso here.

Good news for web developers!

Microsoft is now pushing IE7 to all Windows XP users as a high-priority, automatically-delivered (if Automatic Update in Windows XP is on) update. Strangely, they say, "Distribution of Internet Explorer 7 by Automatic Updates will take several months to complete." I am not quite sure what that even means.

More information is available from Microsoft. Previously, you needed to go through the often-rocky Windows Validation program, or whatever, to upgrade to IE7. (Microsoft's site says that "all Windows users" can now upgrade, but in fact they only mean Windows XP SP2 and Server 2003 users. XP SP1, 98, 2000, and Me are still left out in the cold.)

This is important to me because if this move cuts deep enough into MSIE 6's market share (50% currently), we will not have to design our websites for IE 6, the lowest common denominator (and dominator) in the browser world. Hello, real CSS and PNG! (The timing is odd because just last weekend, I wrote a project to turn PNGs into transparency-dithered GIFs using only server-side code. No JavaScript, and it works for CSS backgrounds.)

I just thought I'd share that Qwest internet (DSL) is a lot slower than advertised. 1.5Mbps down? No, I don't think so. More like 56k each way is what it feels like (but is more like three times that).

I’m in love with Opera.

Not the art form, but the web browser. I use Opera instead of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Why? Here are eleven quick reasons.

[updated] If you were wondering, you can easily create aliases in OS X by clicking and dragging while holding Option and Command (the Apple button). The " alias" suffix will still be appended.