Shawn Parr

Yesterday an overly early released comic book hit the net. This was no normal comic book though as it detailed a new web browser soon to be released by Google, Google Chrome.

I looked over the comic with mild interest in what might be going on, and discovered myself getting more and more interested with each page. Chrome may or may not be a hit, but anyone who uses the web should really be hoping that the ideas behind Chrome make they way into more browsers.

I want to highlight what I think are some of the major things about the browser that should interest the common man.

A top down approach

One of the first changes seems to a purely visual one, however it really shows how Google decided to change the though process behind how the browser works in the background, i.e. the part the end user doesn't actually see, but is affected by. This is the whole 'tabs on top' thing. It is also so far the most debated part of the new browser from what I have seen thus far.

But as described in the comic, not only did they do that to make some of the browser controls more consistent with how they work, but it showcases how the browser handles its performance.

In a recent attempt to have better control over the chemicals that go into my body, as well as reducing sugar input, I've been interested in making my own soda.

This really started back in 2005 or so when I decided to cut caffeine out of my diet. Since then I've been a root beer and Sprite sort of guy. I had started working on brewing my own root beer, however I have had little success, and it can be a time consuming and messy process.

Not long ago Food Network aired an episode of Good Eats which had a recipe for Blueberry Soda.

This seemed like a good way to try things out. The recipe was easy, the ingredients were easily available, and it tastes pretty good too. As a plus blueberries are supposed to be pretty good for you. While we are talking about soda, and yes it has sugar in it, it at least will be way less bad for me than store bought sodas.

But then disaster struck. One needed ingredient was soda water, that is plain water that has been carbonated (Tonic Water and Club Soda both have other added ingredients). Apparently the distributer for all the local grocery shops stopped carrying soda water, so what was I to do? (Later I discovered they repackaged soda water as 'Sodium Free Club Soda')

Soda Club Soda Jet

Recently I upgraded my main router from an Apple Airport Express to an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station.

The Express was very convenient for its simplicity, yet as I'm looking to the future, it is a bit limiting. The Extreme not only allows for more wired connections, but also allows you to connect disks to your network to share files on. It turns out there are some rather troublesome bugs associated with this feature. If you go and check out the Apple Discussions Forum for the Airport Extreme Base Station you will see lots of complaints about it not allowing logins after you disconnect, crashing, and speed issues.

Update: 9/3/07 See the last page for an update on our power supply issue. Short story: iRobot replaced it. Read more. . .

It was a few years ago that I first saw discussion of the Roomba, a new little robot by iRobot that was meant to be the first real robot that could do real work for you in your home. The pictures made it look kind of like a big frisbee that would vacuum your house. What an excellent idea. I wanted one.

Here is the perl script I used to import my MT entries:

use XML::SAX::Base;
use XML::SAX::ParserFactory;

package Node;

my $teaser_length = 600;
my $node_id = 12;

package ConversionFilter;

@ISA = qw(XML::SAX::Base);

my $type = 'blog';

sub characters {
my ($self,$data) = @_;
$self->{_characters} .= $data->{Data};
}

sub start_element {
my ($self, $element) = @_;
my $tagname = $element->{LocalName};
my $handle = "start_$tagname";
if ($self->can($handle)) {
$self->$handle($element);
}
$self->SUPER::start_element($element);
}

sub end_element {
my ($self, $element) = @_;

Today, I saw a posting of an article by Paul Thurrott, a Microsoft shill, claiming that Apple has stolen from Microsoft as much as Microsoft has stolen from Apple. Unfortunately his assumptions used to come to these conclusions are based not in reality, but in some sort of universe where the past is rather different.

Read on for a point by point rebuttal.

This week Apple held their WWDC (World Wide Developer's Conference), and showed off some new pro level machines and gave us a peek at what is going to be included in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard.

There are a lot of cool things demoed there, but based upon what I have seen and read, I think a few things have been overlooked.

This is an update to my previous article about my cracked iPod Nano. I had some issues come up, and I wasn't immediately able to take care of things.

I finally contacted Apple last week. On Thursday I received a box from Apple. Inside was a foam cube with space already cut for the Nano, a plastic bag to seal the Nano in, and packing tape strips that were set up much like post-it notes. The label on the box was removable and underneath was the label to ship to Apple's repair center.