Mammary Fluid

In a (possibly vain, given this blog’s readership – or lack thereof) attempt to improve the visibility of the site, I’m following Mia’s advice and linking to an excellent site about London’s Mayor. He’s the worst thing to happen to my city for years, and I’m really rather worried about the next four years. Mia puts it far better than I could.

And I’m posting from it now. All in all a VERY satisfying browser, and this just from impressions of the first few minutes. Four tabs open and the memory footprint is similar to Firefox, and it’s running much faster than even that browser out of the box and unencumbered by add-ons. The interface is very clean. I do miss Live Bookmarks – I’ll have to find an alternative of some sort. It handles google applications very well, predictably. Netvibes is a little worrying though; it seems to be chewing up memory at a rate of knots – 8-16kb per second adding to its stack, maxing at 64Mb.

What the comic said about being able to use the task manager to target poorly programmed web sites appears to be correct! As to whether the browser is as bad an idea as some may think, I doubt the most pessimistic of predictions. Its built in VM for Javascript is a very good idea and appears at first glance to have the desired effect. Isolation of tabs into processes is a significant improvement on previous single-threaded browsers, and though it may yet just turn into a vehicle for google services, ads, and information gathering, its challenge to the duopoly of IE and FF and its use of new techniques is a great leap forward.

The only down side I have is that it will make testing more laborious for any development once it emerges from beta (if that ever happens, given the perpetual beta of gmail and google calendar!)

Update: A security flaw (due to the software being based on an old version of WebKit) has already been discovered in Chrome. I guess there will be more… And some people have chosen to comment on the browser in the same comic form used to Press Release it.

Well I’ve updated the Wordpress version and in the process lost all my category names. So I hacked at the database a bit and got all the names reinstated. And then I converted all the categories to tags, and now all my posts are “uncategorised”. Cue gnashing of teeth.

I really like Wordpress. It’s slick and it just works. Until it doesn’t. And something about that upgrade didn’t. Now maybe it’s my fault for not rolling back upon seeing the fault. But ‘just barrel on and fix it’ is somehow inscribed on my brain. Thank goodness I had proper access to the database.

I’m also mulling over a bit of a refresh to the template I’m using. Just as soon as I can find some down-time in which to throw Jquery, some CSS and some PotatoChop at a wall and see what sticks.

Internal monologue ends.

Waxy.org have posted online all the episodes of this documentary, which I’d not seen before, but which is fascinating in a thoroughly geeky and pre-intertube way:

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains – Waxy.org

So far I’m just into episode II, dealing with ENIAC and the breakthrough of computing machines into business. Thankfully I’m not quite old enough to remember punch-cards.

Well I’ve belatedly discovered that Weebl was responsible for the animated Hexstatic video which gave this blog its name. The song was Chase Me (from Master View) and the animation is available for your viewing pleasure on Weebl’s site. I’m glad I squared that circle.

Oh and Hexstatic also appear to have posted a lovely new mix up on their site.

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Off the back of the presentation at OFFF Lisbon earlier this month, where Stuart, Ben and Stephen presented Rhythm of Lines, GT have launched their GT Labs website, where cool stuff will be dropping every month or so, to demonstrate things that we do and to open up some of our work to wider communities for use and re-use.

The R.o.L code released there last week is GPL’ed and doesn’t represent the entire code base for the project but does give enough away to demonstrate working end to end from Maya into Flash and Papervision.

Though the project work represented there took place before I joined GT, it represents something I’m happy to shout about; a successful technical project which is aesthetically beautiful. It encourages play and user-engagement, and has rightly won awards and accolades.

I look forward to adding to the GT Labs contributions some time in the near future.