Counting downloads is totally in now. All the world is in frenzy about how often something was downloaded. Spread Firefox was one of the sites to start this all. Firefox has reached 50,000,000 downloads today. And now after the release of Opera 8 the Opera guys are also counting.

Everyone knows that download counters aren’t a measure for how much people actually use something. I’m for example one of those more than 1,000,000 people who downloaded Opera 8. I have played with it for 1 hour and said to myself “No, I’ll stick with Firefox and Thunderbird” But it’s always better to have some people at least consider using one’s software.

So, I’m happy to announce that yesterday for the 10,000th time someone downloaded Squareness or OverlayDesktop from wincustomize.com.

Have you ever dwelt in the CSS Zen Garden staring amazed at all those nice designs and asked and asked yourself how the hell you could learn all those neat tricks that made the designs possible. Surely one of the options -- and till now the only -- is to simply read the CSS code for each design and try to distill the piece of code that makes this design special.

"The Zen Of CSS Design" is a guided tour 36 hand picked design. In this guide the authors Dave Shea -- the creator of the CSS Zen Garden -- and Molly Holzschlag tell you what you can learn from each design and also give useful background and further tips on the topics they talk about. The references to online and book resources are very useful for example.

This book is a full color book. There's no limitation on gray scale tones or a fixed number of say 4 colors. It's printed in true color. So it's also pretty nice to look into. I think this book wouldn't work in gray scale. It is about design and what effect it has on the people seeing it. Seeing the designs in gray scale would destroy the effect of many designs.

This morning - Well, it actually was still night at 0:15 - I watched Steamboy in its original Japanese version with English subtitles. To make it short: This movie wasn't worth staying up that late.

Steamboy is an anime by the Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira was a huge success when it was published in the late 80ies. It is a very nicely drawn and painted anime and the story isn't bad either. While I never was a fan of that anime, I'll admit that it's at least OK.

Katsuhiro Otomo and his team spent the last ten years on this project. It is at least as well drawn and painted as Akira -- maybe even better --, but the story is horrible. Even kids should be bored. The plot is very simple and very foreseeable.

The story mainly takes place in the London of the early 19th century. Steam engines power everything and inventors come up with new means to use them. There is a boy -- Ray Steam --, who's a bright inventor himself. And there is the invention his father and grandfather made -- the Steamball. Naturally there are some nasty guys, who want to possess the ball. And here the story leaves the ground of realism and becomes some kind of science fiction in the old world. Robots and all sorts of machines - all powered by steam engines - fight against one another and against Ray. On a side note London is demolished.

The film begins promising and becomes boring very fast. I took a nap once or twice - it takes two hours from start to end -, but it was quite easy to get back into the story, since there is nearly none.