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It’s been rumored for some time now that EMI would begin to offer DRM free music. It was announced today in London and it sounds like a win-win situation if you’re into downloading music from iTunes.

Songs will be encoded at 256kbps AAC (current is 128kbps) and sold at $1.29 per song, $0.30 more per song than the current price. These will be offered along side the existing lower quality, DRM tracks, and consumers can choose.

Entire album purchases will stay at the same price, but have the higher audio quality and will be DRM free.

I never liked iTunes download quality and the 256kbps will certainly solve that problem. The $1.29 per song is reasonable for per song purchases. The best part of the deal isn’t even highlighted. Entire album purchases will be the same price (usually $9.99), but will now be the higher quality (256kbps) DRM free versions.

I think iTunes and music downloads in general could look very different by the end of this year.

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Yet another reason to love Firefox, and one that I didn’t stumble across until recently.

If there are a few sites that you search regularly, you can add them right into Firefox and access them directly from the address bar.

For example, to search wikipedia, in the address bar, I’ll type w Spider-Man and Firefox will search wikipedia and pull up the results. Just right-click any search box on any site and select “Add a Keyword for this Search.” When the Add Bookmark window pops up, just enter in the Site Name and the Keyword you want to use to when searching.

You can download (right-click and “save as”) the 10-15 Quick Searches I have setup and import them into Firefox. You’ll be ready to go in no time. The ones I use the most, I have set to one or two letters. Simply type CTRL + L to access the address bar and enter your terms and off you go.

Here are the ones I use frequently:

allaboutduncan
Type “aad <search term >” to search allaboutduncan.com
Acronym Finder Quick Search
Type “acronym <acronym>” to look up what an acronym stands for in Acronym Finder.
Amazon
Type “am <product name>” to look up an item on Amazon.
Dictionary.com
Type “d <word>” in the addressbar to perform a dictionary look-up.
Drupal
Type “dru <search term>” to search Drupal.org
Ebay
Type “e <item>” to find something up for auction at Ebay.
Flickr Quick Search
Type “f <search term>” to search all the tags, titles and descriptions of images at photo-sharing site Flickr.
Froogle Quick Search
Type “froogle <product name>” to look up a product on shopping search engine Froogle.
Google Maps Quick Search
Type “map <address>” to get a Google map of a street address or location.
Google
Type “g <search term>” in the addressbar to perform a Google search.
Google Image
Type “gi <search term>” to find images that match using Google Image Search.
IMDB
Type “i <search term>” to search IMDB.com.
Ninja Search
Type “n <search term>” to search Ninja
Technorati Quick Search
Type “tech <search term>” to see what weblogs are posting about a topic.
Thesaurus Quick Search
Type “thes <word>” to find words with similar meanings in a thesaurus.
Wikipedia Quick Search
Type “w <search term>” to look it up in Wikipedia.
Youtube
Type “yt <search term>” to search YouTube

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I managed to stumble across two great examples of Form Field styling using CSS and JavaScript.

Ask the CSS Guy has a nice breakdown of how to recreate the Vox Registration form and it’s CSS Span hints. It’s pretty cool, but I think I’ll get rid of the <dd> and <dt> tags in the markup.

Also, Uni-Form is worth checking out as well. Using CSS, the form can easily be styled in one of two common ways. Great way to display a valid XHTML form in a variety of ways without changing your code.

Finally, Ill mention a Prototype Form validation set that I’ve been using for a while on work projects. I need to switch it over to jQuery,
but I’ve been lazy about it. I’ve created quite a few custom validators for it and the new release
makes it even easier to combine and change options on the form fields. I’ve not found something in jQuery that is as robust, yet.

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I like a good beer every now and then and I’m a “web developer.” Having said that, I still don’t get coastr.com. Actually, I get it. I just think it’s hilarious. They’re so web 2.0. They got the last vowel dropped from their name. They’re a “social” site where you can rate beers and places to drink beer.
However, there just isn’t a lot of info or content there. The beer info pages are terribly boring and of the two or three detail pages I checked out, one of them had SPAM comments. Perhaps they are still growing (although there is no Beta in the logo) and they’ll develop into something cool. So, check them out if you’re so inclined. If you’re really into the site (and beer), you can even let everyone know what you’re drinking with the handy Coastr WordPress widget.