Honda is working on robotic technology to make a non-human office worker. The robot is named ASIMO. The thing does some neat things, but for the cost of it, is it really practical and efficient or a novelty? It certainly is generating some PR for Honda, but do you really want to be greated by a robot over even an ugly receptionist who will smile and figure out if you need anything?

The robot will escort you to a location based on information it reads from a card supplied to you, fetch drinks and carry a tray, push a cart in all four directions, run at speeds over three miles an hour and keep your wife happy if she wants to talk (I just made up that last one). You can see video and pictures over on the Honda Site.

We are often asked it is necessary or prudent to validate your pages according the the W3C standards. Some say yes, and some say no. I guess to my way of thinking good coding cannot be bad, but bad coding might, or might not, be good. Why take the chance? Your comments are welcome below.

I like Firefox a lot! I use only a few extensions these days, mainly web developer, bugMeNot and form spell checking called spellbound (installation of this one is a little tricky). I used to use a couple of the tab extensions. This article over at wired.com got me thinking I should try a couple more of them.

This article at C-Net talks about a move to increase the level of investigation required to obtain a valid secure socket layer certificate. The reason alleged is that people are too easily getting secure certificates, leading to phishing schemes that look authentic.

I suspect the real reason is that it will increase the cost of the certificates, resulting in significant extra profits for the issuing companies. I daily get phishing scam emails. Many look very real in HTML format email, but always (thus far) are clearly bogus in plain text format.

The actual sites, when you visit them are impressive. A domain we sometimes work on was hacked last week (only our second incident of successful hacking) and GoDaddy flagged the domain almost immediately and closed the site until the content was removed. That was pretty impressive. I really doubt that phishers are purchasing secure certificates with great regularity to make their sites look secure. More likely they are hacking onto someones already secure site.

The other item of note is that MicroSoft is still talking about releasing Internet Explorer 7. Until they do — and probably after they do — go get a copy of FireFox 1.5 at Mozilla.com.

One of my favorite reads is Mike Industries Blog. While scooting around that site today, I came accross a post about intellegent 404 pages — hidden on a page about naming/extensionless url addresses. That got me thinking, is that really a helpful feature? We already have a search function and we happen to think or structure of presentation is pretty clear (of course you may disagree). Thoughts? Leave us a comment.

This is interesting, Google to be discussed in roundtable format for a week. Google truly has many irons in the fire as the old saying goes. This should make for an intriguing follow.

An Anti-trust ruling from Korea again asserts that Microsoft has unfairly tied instant messenger and media player software to the Microsoft operating system. The last time this happened, Microsoft had to release a copy of it’s software sans the media player. That software known as XP – n, sold very poorly. We’ll see how this one plays out.