Curvy Corners in IE

Have been fighting with the lack of CSS3 compatibility in IE8 ... and not sure what will be there in IE9. Just like 'pure' curved DIV corners rather than faking it with background images.

Opera, Firefox, and the delightful Epiphany all do them natively, but IE, grrrrrr ...

Several options tried, and my results are:

• curvycorners (js) : initially promising but event redraw costly and occasional errors popping up
• border-radius : uses .htc/vml but only handles one configuration for each corner, and seems to not handle re-draws properly
• DD-roundies : similar but more complete version of above [not tried]
• PIE/CSS3 : again, an htc/vml solution and appears to work beautifully, adding most all of CSS3's commonly used features to IE

So, my conclusion is to go for PIE. It lets the other browsers get on with it, whilst supporting CSS3 natively from within your CSS - so less intrusive than most other options. I now have Firefox and IE displaying almost identically without any fudged HTML or CSS. Yay.

Final tip for XP Firefox users - switch on ClearType if you have an LCD display. Enables the sub-pixel smoothing across Windows that IE uses. Be rid of those spindly letters!

Why Cloud Computing isn't

There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of years regarding 'The Cloud' - people advocating the use of it either within the realms of business or personal computing, as a means of reducing costs and enabling anyone to have their own virtual data centre.

However, that utopia isn't really the case, is it? Cloud computing by that standard is still some way off, and might never really arrive. The idea of The Cloud marketed to us is one of your computer, your data, being somehow "out there" in some floating opportunity, scalable and configurable at a whim. The reality is that the majority of 'Cloud' suppliers are the same people who have been selling server-space and virtual servers for the past 5 years. All we're doing is buying a re-branded offering from them. There's no amorphous 'cloud'; you buy cloud-space and you can go look at the servers you are running on - touch them, feel them, and - most importantly - have them turned off. Have your cloud dissolved. Just ask Wikileaks ... how did their Amazon cloud work out for them? Turns out that rather than being "out there" it was on a collection of Amazon owned servers. Not a worldwide entity, but very firmly based on US soil, and able to be switched off.

In a true 'Cloud' the data and processors would be truly distributed, and replicated across multiple nodes not located in any single country. It would be no more in one place than in any other. A bit like an internet on top of our current one. And if you tried to switch off a server here another would take its place there. Imagine - not just the internet everywhere, but all the web pages everywhere too. A web of collected nodes all providing data and processing services, owned and controlled by no-one. TBL's vision, just extended beyond the communications level.

Real Cloud Computing.