A simple screenshot for now:

Taken on Liz this evening.

I despise NVidia. It just removed my 750 gig from my computer, and its taken over Windows' disk initialization. This means that even if my data is safe, I can't even get windows to acknowledge a drive is there until NVidia puts it into a raid, which tells Windows its blank, which means it won't access it till its formatted ....

ARGH!

So, Google Chrome is out, and I must say, its a very attractive browser.

It also doubles FF3's Sunspider javascript benchmark speed, nearly triples Opera 9.52's, and nearly quadruples IE8's. Very slim browser with an installation routine that is under 500 kb and the whole install takes well under a minute, and installs cleanly -- doesn't ask for admin privledges.



On a technical basis, it has uses a tweaked WebKit renderer (after Safari) but doesn't do Safari's horrible proprietary font-smoothing; copies IE8's tab process isolation (thus, if one tab crashes only that tab crashes, not the browser); has a startup page very similar to Opera's speed dial (but lacking Opera's wand feature and speed-dial shortcuts); largely matches Vista's UI conventions in Vista (big plus); renders SVGs like Opera (see if this will render in your browser, and see what happens when you zoom).



Gotta say, I really like it. We'll see if it becomes browser of choice over Opera for speed, or if Opera will end up winning with its extra keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

[	Tags	|	computers, internet	]
[	coordinates	|	Berkeley	]
[	thoughts	|	amused	]
[	audio signal	|	"Canon in D" -- Pachelbel	]

I took about 300 photos of my room and we got this:



(if the embed doesn't work, try going to here.

Whoo!

Apparently some spambot got ahold of my blog and spammed the same comment on all the entries.

Sigh, I'll remove it after I find a countermeasure. There's got to be a plug in for it ...

I kind of suspect Comcast skews their tests for known speedtest sites:

Woot! I have managed to fix most of the back end problems and cross-browser odditry (yes, I made that word up) on the evolution site. The better part of today was spent hacking CSS to get it to work across various browsers. Its a pity that Opera doesn't have a leading market share -- I had to remove two features because of Moz/IE buggy or nonexistent implementation of the :before and :after psueo-elements and the "content" and "counter" functions. I was also going to try to get the title to look nice by CSS, so I wouldn't have an image that scales badly. For example, look at



You can see that while the CSS that was quickly done looks as good as the image at standard resolutions, the zoom/nonstandard resolution favors the vector fonts. I was working on getting the placement debugged when I realized that only Opera (again) supports the CSS text-shadow property. *sigh*. I might just try to make it look good in CSS and better when it all works.


Other coding hiccups I ran into today included the fact that my server was running PHP4, which meant:

1) try{} and catch{} statements don't work.
2) include() and require() cannot pass variables by RETURN $FOO;
3) include() and require() will not access global-level functions if the file extension is *.php, and must be *.inc instead
4) import faliures return verbose warnings rather than TRUE or FALSE

Alas, I am hungry, but there are no spaghetti-o's, West Coasts, or Nude Sushis down here.

Tomorrow, send out LHS emails for critters we'll need for Adapt or Die, and more website work. Also need to fix the problem with IE7 rendering image colours differently than the hex value. Its a known issue, but I forget the work-around.




Thus ends a computer update.

Compression, particularly 7zip, is amazing:

Odd fact: I've been working in Emacs so much that recently I've been forgetting to C-c to copy, relying instead on the highlight-to-copy features of Emacs, *Nix, and Trillian. It makes me feel dorky when I paste something completly out of place into a conversation.

You know what? I've gotten every single herp down to family. That's right. And I got the thing to expand and collapse. All while keeping it XHTML strict!

Take that. Woot! Eventually links to articles will be living by the appropriate node/family. Pity that FF breaks it the worst. Damn cross-browser nonsense.

(Comments appreciated)

[	Tags	|	computers, internet	]
[	coordinates	|	Berkeley	]
[	thoughts	|	happy	]

Ahem.


I HAVE INTERNET!


That is all.

I think this might be my favorite Hawai'i pic:

Only with my dad, and only on a Sony camera, can you manage to pull off six viruses on two Memory Sticks on a bloody camera.

*Sigh*. I suppose that's why I keep an AV around, even though I've not been infected personally in four years ...

News post!

1) It is now completely unambiguous that Vista equals or performs XP in both synthetic and real world benchmarks. Now the peanut gallery can't say anything (here's looking at Rob and Alyssa, so far as readers of this are concerned). I'm afriad Adrian K-H misses the satire in Ed's post title, but there we have it (and a slightly contrary opinion for balance.)

2) What the fuck. People are dumb. And I think I really should just start calling myself a moderate.

A bit of levity after the previous post ... an Easter Egg in FF3b5:

Opera really does just rock. In addition to being faster than FF (even on Linux), it is less whiny about Flash all around, the dev builds of 9.5 are rock solid and have scads of great functionality (especially synchronization, which is really good, particularly when I move about computers so much, and do surfing on the phone), and their Lab build also gets a 100/100 on the Acid 3 test. It doesn't pass it yet -- it falls below 30 FPS on a few places -- but it does pass all the actual tests.

[	Tags	|	computers, linux	]
[	coordinates	|	Glendale	]
[	thoughts	|	annoyed	]
[	audio signal	|	"The Only One" -- Evanescence	]

I have a love-hate relationship with Linux.

On the one hand, it is pretty much infinitely configurable (not as much more-so over Windows as *nix freaks will have you believe, but still), and an amazing amount of command line tools.

It also can rip off the cool features from other OS's, has the easiest software finding method EVER (I wish Windows had a sofware source as convenient as the Synaptic repository!), and you can chnage your GUI to pretty much anything.

OK, its search is inferior to Vista, and its offloading to the GPU a bit backward, and the ocassional gimped up functionality and menuing, but its all free. The Office software is crippled and subpar compared to MS's offerings, but for scientific uses you can't beat the built-in packages. Emerald and Compiz are amazing.

You can make it look like Windows or like OSX if you want, and have none of the castration of functionality inherent to OSX.

But -- and a HUGE "but" it is -- THEY HAVE NOT FIGURED OUT FILESYSTEMS. WHAT THE HELL GUYS. It seems MS is the only one to figure it out. ITS ALL ABOUT JOURNALING. Its why, in the MS world, you don't really care too much if your computer gets a power outage. Oh, sad times, reboot. Its not the Win95/98 days where it could mean your computer might not reboot, or checkdisk would give you a bajillion errors. Windows figured it out with Win98SE.

Ten years later, OSX and Linux have yet to figure out journaling. So, of course, a hard-kill means you have to massage and coerce your computer into wanting to boot up for you. WHAT THE HELL.

WHAT. THE. HELL.
</rant>

Oh, also, Adobe: You suck. I thought you sucked before I used Linux, and now I realize while Flashplayer merely sucks in Windows (and still doesn't have x64 versions), it does explicit sexual acts to your CPU and makes it ignore everything else ever, if it works at all.

This is the state of the 1AM, computer-annoyed Philip's head.

Time to see if any of the apps I was running on the Flash CPU Computer Overheatingness of Doom were seriously corrupted ...

My excruciatingly long programming stint kinda finished. I can now, with one command, analyse interferometer data very poorly, and get a pretty bad (if analytical) fit after just waiting a minute or two. God damn thing is a function of the form:

f(x)=Asin(B(x-C))cos(Dx)[Esin(Fx)+Gcos(Hx)]+I

It really can get all the variables ... it just doesn't do the best job of it.

<begin public service announcement>
GOD DAMN YOU COMCAST YOU FTP, SSH, P2P THROTTLING PEICE OF SHIT. SOME OF US REQUIRE FTP AND SSH SERVICES TO, YOU KNOW, EARN A LIVING OR TO DO ACTUAL WORK. NO GET OFF YOUR LYING ASSES, APOLOGIZE, AND STOP YOUR FUCKING THROTTLING.

Because, you know, I'd like to be able to DO RESEARCH or DO MY LABS and not have your throttling asses cutting off my SSH connections.

Incidents *tonight*:

- Two NGST disconnects
- Three UGAstro disconnects
- A crippled FTP up
- A crippled, huge, SFTP down.

Ya know, I'd like to, what, type a COMMAND into IDL before I get booted from my session for latency issues. Cause that'd be cool and all. This is the ultimate case for Net Neutrality. Guys -- really, support it. If the FCC does another one of those open forums, post to it [ I already did]. Fucking comcast. Consider this an informal pronouncement in favor of Net Nuetrality. And getting god damn ISP's to sell what they can handle.
</begin public service announcement>

So while the phone debacle continues (my dad may actually try to replace it), yesterday Athena's watercooling came in.

( Cut to not offend Ms. Funk`s sensibilities of hugeness )

In other news, no reception, late notice, and wonky phone all worked together to mean I feel really bad about basically leaving Alyssa stranded outside the mansion last night. Sad times! Maybe I can go to SC in a few weeks.

This weekend? Astro lab, key for a Herp quiz (how does *that* work?), 112, and maybe some research.