Next Thursday there’s a bada developer day in Amsterdam, co-sponsored by Vodafone, at which I’ll speak. Entrance is free, although registration is required so that the organisers know how many people will be coming.

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Just like last year, Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end engineers, is organising a conference, and it looks quite good. For me personally the best part is that I don’t have to do a thing; contrary to the last two years I’m not involved in the organisation at all, and just have to show up and have a good time.

We’re especially pleased to be able to announce Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and technical architect for the Mozilla project.

Fronteers 2010 will take place on 7 and 8 October in Tuschinski in Amsterdam. Early-bird tickets are € 275; around the end of June the price will go up.

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Back in November I started complicated research into measuring the widths and heights of various interesting elements in mobile browsers. This research kept me occupied for months and months; and frankly I became a bit afraid of it because the subject is so complicated.

Besides, when I re-did some tests in March I pretty quickly figured out I’d made some nasty mistakes in my original tests. Back to the drawing board.

However, after a review round by some browser vendors and some rewriting it’s done now. Today I present A tale of two viewports — part one. I explain CSS vs. device pixels, the viewport, several interesting JavaScript properties, and the media queries width and device-width.

This piece is about the desktop browsers, because the mobile story is much easier to follow if you know exactly what happens on desktop. Later on I’ll publish part two, which is exclusively about mobile.

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A while ago I asked what HTML5 means to you. I got a lot of replies, but would like to gather more. That’s why I’m repeating the question today. What’s in your HTML5 spec? Please add your personal top three of cool new features to the comments.

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The acquisition battle has come and gone, and it’s HP that’s become Palm’s new owner. In general this news has been greeted with glad cries, despite (or maybe because) it was so unexpected. In general everybody assumes that the marriage of Palm software and HP hardware will be a good one, and that HP will also release a webOS-based tablet device.

However, there’s an interesting dissenting opinion on VisionMobile (a blog I highly recommend, by the way). Guest author Michael Valukenko sees few synergies between Palm and HP, and pinpoints three problems besetting the new hPalm combination:

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