One of the coolest things I've seen of late is a new compact projector. Here are just a few of the specs that make me ga-ga:

• Only 4.5 inches long, 2 inches wide, less than an inch thick.
• 5.6 ounces
• Resolution up to 1280 x 768 (nearly the same as my HD TV!)
• Runs up to an hour from its internal rechargeable battery
• Image size from 6" to 50"
• VGA or RCA video input
• No fan required (lamp runs cool)
• Initial street price of just $360

Last Tuesday saw yet another Apple product release, and once again the fervor of Apple's fan base worked against it. Apple released new hardware with some impressive new features, but because the rumor mill had raised the expectations even higher, the announcements have been greeted with a cool, and at times hostile, reception.

To be fair, some of the rumors were probably unrealistic to begin with. For example, the $800 price point that had been rumored. Apple has never been known to be aggressive with their pricing, and dropping their prices that low would be a major shift.

Usability's most famous (and infamous) guru posted an interesting article about how successful sites are in conveying core organizational information in the ubiquitous About Us page. A good reminder that no matter graphically compelling you make your site, if people can't quickly discern the most basic information about your company, you've lost sight of what your site is meant to do: communicate.

Webmasters by Design posted a roundup of the best developer cheat sheets around. Handy reference, but please think twice before killing trees.

OK, this one is just for fun. Leica ran a promotion where they built a 3D pixelated dog, and it just seemed too perfect.

So the big news this week for Canadian Apple fanboys like me was the announcement that the iPhone is coming to Canada July 11. I know, there are already lots of iPhones in Canada, but I'm hoping I can get my office to pick up the tab, something that's unlikely with a black market device.

Tonight the London Public Library won some bling at the 2008 IABC Virtuoso Awards for their new web site. Unknown to most in attendance at the ceremonies is that the site is built on Drupal. Good to see that there are others in London interested in Drupal. Maybe there's hope yet for a DUG-London!

Congrats to the web team at the Library!

Last Friday I gave a repeat presentation of my talk on Theming Fundamentals, first delivered at the 2008 Toronto DrupalCamp. Because it was intended for an audience with a disparate technical knowledge, I tried to keep it more focussed on the general principles than the technical details.

Last week was a short week here in Canada (we took the Monday off to drink beer - I mean, celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday), and the person at Surge from whom I get the most help with web development was off sick on Tuesday an Wednesday. Plus, I was off to DrupalCamp Friday and Saturday, which meant losing another work day, plus preparing two presentations.

Just read an interesting comparison of recent builds of the two most popular content management systems at AllDrupalThemes.com. It sounds like the results posted in part one are based on simple latency on a small setup. It will be interesting to see if there are any differences when they post the second part, which will focus on scalability, but so far the results looks very good for Drupal.