The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

I've just finished upgrading my image gallery to Gallery 2. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Today, Opera Software unleashed Opera Mini on the World. Unlike the Opera releases I usually talk about here, Opera Mini is for devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, or just about anything with Internet access and Java. Most device browsers have to be tailor made for each device. Opera Mini just works. In fact, it usually works better than the browsers tailor made for the device. And it's free!

Looking up phone numbers, addresses, movie times, or flight information is now just as easy as pulling your phone out of your pocket. Check your e-mail while you're in an elevator. Get the weather forecast from your toilet. Read the newspaper on the subway without needing the newspaper! It's all possible with Opera Mini. Get it now.

Apparently my site has been denying access to everyone since about 9:30pm Saturday night completely unbeknowst to me. I don't really know what happened, but this certainly wasn't on purpose. Sorry. Everything should be up and working again now. Please let me know if that isn't the case.

The most frequent criticism I've seen about the Acid2 test is the inclusion of SGML comments. Thankfully, the test author has taken the criticism to heart and removed the SGML comment requirement from the Acid2 test in favor of the Web Apps 1.0 comment spec.. If you take a look at the test source now, the old SGML comment test has been changed to:

<div class="parser"><!-- ->ERROR<!- --></div></div> <!-- two dashes is what delimits a comment, so the text "->ERROR<!-" earlier on this line is actually part of a comment -->

We were wary of fixing our SGML comment parsing problems in the first place, so this is a positive change in the test. It looks like we have just one more bug to fix before we pass the Acid2 test, though there's still one more update to do about changes already visible in Opera 9.0 Preview 1, so stay tuned for further updates.

Sometimes in the late evening, when I'm just not tired enough for sleep or awake enough to code or write, I'll browser around for news about Opera from fan sites. That may sound a bit silly, as surely an employee would know what's going on with Opera. Yes, I know what's going on internally, but I can't always keep track of what's going on externally. Sometimes it nice to know that some news is finally public or which rumors are spreading now. Reading rumors is probably one of my favorite pastimes. I thank y'all rumor spreaders for the entertainment.

My Opera news search usually takes me to three sites:

• Avencius, an Opera news and commentary site (with occasional relevant posts about competitors) running Drupal(!).
• Planet Opera, an aggregator feeding off 50+ newsfeeds from Opera fan sites. If there's Opera news, you'll read it there.
• Opera Watch, the one-stop shop for Opera rumors.

Where do you get your Opera news?

And since we're on the topic of Opera, Avencius highlighted the Why Opera blog, a great blog overflowing with Opera graphical goodness from suggestions for a new Opera icon to great wallpapers to graphics to stick on your site or in your forum signature. Get into the graphical goodness!

And let us not forget literarymoose.info (RIP), the CSS experiment and Opera customization site. If you haven't heard, Moose has moved his site to lofotenmoose.info and has started posting again. Don't walk, run there and get Moosified!