I'm one of those weird people who respect copyright.  I think a person should have ability to create a work and decide, for a reasonably short time, how that work is distributed.  I'm all for remixing and the fair use rules around excerpt and parody and critique and so forth, but I don't think copying a song or movie verbatim falls under this.  I think verbatim copies will ultimately cause less and lower quality content to be created (and only the recording and movie industries can save themselves by coming to the party with sane options to get hold of content that we can play anywhere we want to).  So I just don't do sharing of movies or music or software.

I often get asked how I do it - how I live in a world where 99% of the people I deal with receive these verbatim copies against the rights granted by the copyright and "profit" from it (ie, don't pay, while I do).  How can I not get sucked into the world of constantly and easily available access to a myriad different forms of content?  Quite simply, I just don't let myself get interested in it.  I don't buy into the hype of every band and every movie out there.  I'm fairly certain that I won't die or live a less fulfilling life if I don't follow suit.

It's easy to resist a temptation that isn't all that tempting.  (It's also easy to resist temptation when the alternatives out there are as good or better than that being hyped - open source and open content through things like Creative Commons makes respecting copyright very easy...)

Which is why I've barely watched Apollo and Silverlight drift by with all their hype.  Flex too.  Until all aspects of their technology are codified in a standard and there is at least one open source implementation that is easily available, it's really just not worth my time to be interested in them.  There've been tons of other proprietary systems out there.  None of them has interested me particularly.  There'll be tons more, I'm sure.  Somehow, I haven't been tempted before.  Somehow, there's always been a way to avoid subjecting myself and other people to proprietary systems or standards in my personal life and my work life.  I don't think that's going to change.  Not only is open standards and open source a good thing in the abstract, but it is about the only way to build something that lasts.

Mark Pilgrim provides a slightly more spicy take on the Silly season (and, well, a nice title, which I'll remix and not copy verbatim...)

Maybe I've been living in the dark for ages and everyone else knew about it and didn't tell me, but Firebug is hella cool.  Firebug is a Firefox extension that makes web development life worth not committing suicide over - and version 1.0 has just been released.  It's like Web Developer Extension on steroids, although it's still useful to keep Web Developer around.

It has a Javascript debugger, which not only shows JS errors as you run, but allows you to pause execution with a breakpoint (optionally with conditions), and allows you to introspect values by hovering your mouse pointer over variables in the source code display.  You can also execute arbitrary Javascript in a Javascript console.  Oh, and watch your XMLHttpRequests as they occur.

In terms of HTML, it allows you to drill down to elements via the DOM or by using an inspector to choose the element you want by moving your mouse to the element.  It lists the full element path to the element, and all the styles that apply to the element, and allows you to edit those styles - even if in multiple different files all over the Internet.  You can also view and manipulate the style via the stylesheets without reference to a particular HTML element.

Oh, and you can graphically see exactly what files were requested for this page, when the requests started, and how long that request took to be fulfilled.  And the headers sent in the request, and the headers returned.  And the content.  Useful for your XMLHttpRequests...

Colour me impressed.