Back in the Saddle Again

I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with coffee. For about 9 months in 2008 I was nearly completely caffeine-free and it was a liberating experience having zero chemical dependencies. With the colder weather and the busy work schedule, I've started to slowly succumb to the Brown Horse again, though I've been pretty successful at keeping it at the 'decaf' level with the occasional Coke slipped in. I still don't get the whole three-to-five dollar drink thing that everybody else around me seems to love to do.

What's your favorite warm beverage in the winter?

§513 · December 12, 2008 · Life · 7 comments · Tags: , , ,

Ok, Now that that’s over…

... let the real work begin. Congratulations to President-Elect Barack Obama.

§507 · November 5, 2008 · Life · 5 comments · Tags: , , ,

More About Chrome

Things I Learned:

  • They borrowed some UI concepts from Opera and IE (controls and address bar inside the tabs, speed dial, paste-and-go) but I think they've done some things better. For instance: the default home page requires zero user interaction, the status bar is only present when you hover over a link, tab cycling makes sense and requires zero thought.
  • They really didn't want to introduce another rendering engine for developers - so Google is simply using WebKit, it won't be a fork
  • No tie-ins to Google Services installed by default
  • They've been working on it for two years
  • V8 will eventually make its way into Android
  • They haven't made very many contributions to Webkit, but are fully committed to doing so. Their plan is to build Chrome off the WebKit tip
  • Extensibility - though they obviously support traditional browser plugins and they have plans for a richer extension API - it won't be in the Beta.
  • UA String is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13" =>Google, please work to shorten the UA string, not lengthen it (is there really any valid reason for "Safari/..." to be there?)
  • The browser is fast. Transition is seemless. I like that the default home page requires no user interaction to generate. Ctrl+L, Ctrl+K, Alt+D, Ctrl+T all work as I expected.
  • They are using an older version of WebKit (older than Safari 3.1 it looks like) as there are two SVG-related rendering problems with my site that I thought were long gone
  • They have a sense of humour (open up the Chrome Task manager and see the link at the bottom)

Further Exploration:

  1. I'm curious how browsers like IE and Chrome are ensuring that access to the browser cache is shared efficiently across all processes?
  2. I'd like to learn more about the 'cross-platform' graphics library that they are using, does it support hardware acceleration?
  3. Are other browser vendors worried that the editor of the HTML5 spec is now an employee of a browser vendor?
  4. What are Google Chrome's plans for feeds? At the moment, there isn't even any auto-discovery
§494 · September 2, 2008 · Life · Comments Off on More About Chrome · Tags: , ,

Taking Notes

How do you take notes? Here's my list of techniques in order of preference using a heuristic which is some function of efficiency, persistence, and privacy:

  • Full-finger-typing on a regular-size keyboard
  • Writing with a pen/pencil on paper
  • Thumb-typing on a small QWERTY keyboard
  • Stylus recognition on a touchscreen
  • Voice notes
  • Scoring the flesh of my forearm in Morse Code with a rusty Bowie knife
  • Typing with one thumb on my phone's number keypad

Which one do you use? Guess which one I use...

§491 · August 21, 2008 · Life, Questions · 6 comments · Tags:

Tumbleweeds, Crickets Chirping

Rob is heading to the Chicago 'burbs this weekend. Since we are not often released from captivity, this is a good chance for us to head downtown for some beverages and food. If anyone else is interested in an impromptu web-geek meet-up in the Chicago area, let me know. I'm thinking of Elephant & Castle, Saturday night around 6pm for dinner. Not sure where we'll go from there yet. Suggestions?

§487 · August 6, 2008 · Life · 3 comments ·

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