Archive for December, 2007

Yesterday during our weekly YUI team staff meeting we headed outside to snap a year-end picture of the team. Here it is!

From Left: Satyen Desai, Georgiann Puckett, Nate Koechley, Lucas Pettinati, Adam Moore, Douglas Crockford, Thomas Sha (behind the sign), Luke Smith, Matt Sweeney, Jenny Donnelly, and Dav Glass. Not Pictured: Todd Kloots and Eric Miraglia.

(Photo credit: Eric Miraglia. The YUI Team, December 20, 2007
Originally uploaded by superfluity.)

Big news this week:

Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.

“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

Keep reading:

1. NYTimes: Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost
2. SolveClimate.com: At $1 per Watt, the iTunes of Solar Energy Has Arrived

I don’t remember noticing this issue in the first several months of owning an iPhone, but lately it seems that the volume is way too low. Even when I max the volume many songs and podcasts are difficult to hear well. I suspected the ear buds were at fault, but lately I’ve been thinking that it might be software. I played around a bit and found that going into Settings > iPod on the iPhone and setting Sound Check to Off (and disabling Volume Limit for good measure) makes things louder.

I’m still not thrilled with the ear buds, and am shopping for new ones, but the software fix was a big help.

Earlier this week CNET began providing closed-captioning for the online video offerings. This is great for web accessibility, and needed with the rise of web video. As far as I know they’re the first large outfit to provide captioning. It’s about time, the need to “provide a text equivalent for every non-text element” is Section 1.1 of the W3C’sWCAG 1.0 specs (published in May of 1999) and retains that prominence in WCAG 2.0 (which issued its second Last Call Working Draft on 11 December 2007).

The day will come when all online video is captioned, and I’m proud of good ol’ CNET for leading the pack.