yonkeltron

Even after Google agreed to continue funding the overwhelming majority of Mozilla’s operating budget for another three years, they decided to be absolutely crazy and release their own browser.  It’s called Chrome and it’s actually really cool. The official announcement on the Google Blog is a little bit scarce on details but it does have a link to a 38-page cartoon (drawn by Scott McCloud) introducing the browser and it’s key features and concepts. Among the more notable cool points are sandboxed tabs (so when one page goes awry, the whole browser doesn’t crash), a super vast JavaScript interpretter (called V8) and ultra-tight integration with Google Gears along with other Google services. TechCrunch has details and alleged screenshots while Ars has a characteristically thoughtful writeup of the initial announcement. Chrome has some very cool ideas and the comic should be entertaining to almost anyone.

I do still wonder about certain things, even in spite of my curiosity and excitement. For example, although the browser is supposed to be Open Source, how liberal will the license be and what will it mean for Firefox?

As is being covered on sites and blogs across the webbernet, Mozilla labs released their first semi-usable beta of their new browser interface called Ubiquity. Unlike Goosh (the unofficial command shell for Google), Ubiquity is a command line interface which uses natural language to execute intelligent behaviors. The screenshots look absolutely fabulous and the concept is brilliant. There are some simple commands already implemented such as the map command which allows you to automagically pull up a Google map of a location and get directions. Some other commands of note let you retrieve information from Wikipedia, search using your engine of choice and get weather. The video shows some very impressive functionality and gives a taste of the natural language functionality that they seem to have in mind. The review over at Ars Technica has an excellent overview of what’s going on and makes the excellent point that the usefulness of this tool will increase dramatically if it can support pipes in the style of Unix and Linux shells (bash is my fav).

While I don’t like that every single article touts the newfound potential of “making your own mashup” with that characteristic fanboy enthusiasm, I think this is an exceptional innovation with some great promise. If we’re lucky, the average user will learn to love the efficiency, realizing that command-line interfaces are actually superior to graphical interfaces in many ways and not just some antiquated technology. Maybe I won’t get such strange looks whenever I pull up a shell…

Also of note, the Ubiquity 0.1 Author Tutorial gives a whole slew of wonderful examples for people wishing to develop their own commands using plain old JavaScript. Also, it would seem that Ubiquity bundles jQuery as a JS toolkit! How cool is that?

Erick Schonfeld wrote a positively brilliant piece over at TechCrunch which took one of the best shots so far at detailing some of the major issues. I get This isn’t the first time that the idea of a Digital Bill of Rights has been discussed but it’s good to see another step forward. Also, see the text over at DigitalConsumer.

In a bit of really exciting news, I caught on to some news from the Mozilla world that future versions of Firefox will bring huge speedups for JavaScript execution. Ars Technica has a fantastic writeup on it and Reuven Lerner wrote a nice summary of things over at OStatic. Also, one of the Mozillazine blogs has some very telling data plots. This is very exciting because the speed of JavaScript code in the browser has been a major barrier holding back much development of true applications that live in the browser. Personally, I know that I’ve certainly experienced moments of irritation when waiting for some webapp to quit making my browser hang while waiting for some UI update or large sort to finish. Apparently, all of those little instructions add up!

With all of the beneftis bestowed upon us by modern email systems such as Gmail, I get really annoyed by people who have inboxes overflowing with email messages. So, in protest, I play this little game with myself where I try to keep my inbox as empty as possible by dealing with messages as soon as I can and filing away those messages which I’ll need for later. Seeing an empty Gmail inbox advising me to check the news on Google Reader makes me feel very good.

Just the other day, I found this productivity theory called Inbox Zero created by Merlin Mann who is a major-leage GTD fanboy. The whole premise is that if there are emails remainging in your inbox, it represents that which you haven’t dealt with yet. I watched the Google Tech Talk video which was seriously excellent and the presentation available on slideshare is useful as well.

I just got a clue-in by way of Engadget about a huge article at MaximumPC which details the future USB 3.0. Features to expect: huge data-transfer capacity (think 600 MB/second), backwards-compatibility with USB 2.0 to ease the initial transition, improved power functionality to charge devices faster and be more energy-efficient. I wonder how soon we can expect wireless connectors now that the more general controller spec is open…

Great article from IBM Developerworks on how to design a good XML-based dataformat with maintainability in mind. Covers usage of namespaces, XSD and working with modules, extensions and format revisions. This is an interesting article because of how it treats the subject and the technologies so read it if you have even a peripheral involvement with XML.

Well, it would seem that my tiny-little-private dream is not just a fantasy! It looks like Nokia is helping to port Firefox to Qt instead of GTK+, which I personally believe to be butt-ugly in most instances. This is most likely because I’m a proud KDE user…

IMHO, Qt is a better technical platform but I wonder if this is just a port of Firefox or whether it’s a complete Qt version of XUL and such. A complete port of XUL would actually be amazing and would have some serious potential! Even if it’s just an Firefox thing, I’d like to have my favorite browser fit in with my desktop a little better!

While I have been aware of this particular program for some time, only recently have I had another use for it. Metapixel is a program for generating photomosaics which produces spectacular results. Basically, it (the metapixel-prepare utility) recurses through a directory filled with photos and processes them into a special collection of prepared images with a very large index file. Then, you can specify an input image to be made into a photomosaic according to a multitude of parameters.

This is the original shot

Here is the show as a photomosaic!

The examples page does a pretty good job of showcasing Metapixel’s configurability and the results produced by several sample configurations. It’s also rather fast, I made 16 large photomosaics from a db of around 7300 photos and they were done in under 10 minutes on my 1.83Ghz Core Duo.

Even those people vaguely familiar with the social side effects of Israeli political debate will recognize the ubiquitous “העם” stickers which proudly proclaim the people’s allegiance to the Golan, Gush Katif or any number of other causes. Given the large numbers of these stickers currently in existence and circulation, it seems like making my own stickers is a completely appropriate way to show my support for both Radio Ramah and Free/Open Source Software.

The people are with Radio Ramah - העם עם רדיו רמה (Source SVG)

The people are with Free/Open Source Software and I encourage the wide dispersal and reproduction of this one:

The people are with Open Code - העם עם קוד פתוח (Source SVG)

All are Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0