I can’t let the entire month go by without posting something. Sadly, facebook has taken over as my online outlet. Mainly because I can just post stupid shit there without having to actually think about anything. So, in case I’m not on your friend list yet, here’s my message to you:

Friend me! I’m at: http://www.facebook.com/don.gookin

That is all.

This is probably one of those things that’s already been around the blogosphere and I’m just late to the game in finding it, but it’s cool nonetheless.

Bohemian Rhapsody played on old-school computer equipment:

I just launched my new website last night. www.mastrlist.com. Note the cool spelling with a vowel missing like they do at Flickr and those other trendy sites.

It’s basically a to-do list site. About a year ago I tried out a few of the existing list sites in an attempt to get myself organized, but I didn’t really like any of them. Some of them were really project-management type sites and were more complicated than I needed. Others just had things I found irritating. So I decided to see if I could build one that was simple to use, but had enough features to still be useful. I started building it last spring but after I hit a snag or two I put it aside and forgot about it until December. Then I started working on it again and now it’s ready.

Even if nobody else uses it, I think it will be really useful for me. Hopefully it will help other organizationally-challenged people too.

So do me a favor and go try it out. Leave feedback on it, tell your friends and family, and even link to it from your blog. It’s free to use, doesn’t require any personal information other than an email address, and doesn’t even have ads. You can’t get a much better deal than that.

Update: apparently my webhost doesn’t know how to protect directories correctly and the site was giving a password box when people tried to login the first time. It should be better in the next 30 minutes or so.

I finally broke down and joined Facebook. Christine did too, a few days before me. I’ve been resistant to it just because…well, just because that’s the way I am. I hate joining in something just because it’s the popular thing to do. Of course by now Facebook is probably passe, so I don’t run much risk of looking like a bandwagon-jumper-onner. I don’t see myself spending a lot of time on it, but I’m there now for what it’s worth or whatever. Yeah.

I placed an order for a Christmas present through RedOrbit. Yesterday I got an email from them.

Christine,

Unfortunately, the item your ordered is no longer available through our distributor. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Your order has been canceled and the release of authorization from your credit card has been issued.
Have a great day.

Thanks,
Joel
RedOrbit - E-Commerce

Fuckers.

Their website said (and I quote):

Quantity 98 item(s) available

So if you’re considering ordering from them, beware. They may not have what you want and apparently can’t figure out how to have their website reflect an out of stock product. Mine still shows up as “available” today.

So, Joel, if you’re reading this, take the damn item off your website, because if they continue their crappy service, you’ll be out of a job. And have a great fucking day. Thanks for ruining mine.

Now, from the “things you can find on the internet while searching for something completely different” category:

Check out this awesome stop-motion animation somebody made with just a white board and some markers. Very cool.

UPDATE: OK, sometimes it’s showing up here and sometimes it’s not. If you don’t see it, go here to watch: http://www.break.com/usercontent/2006/12/White-Board-Stop-Motion-190180.html

Just cruising through Google News when I came across this lovely graphic associated with a story on uncooked chicken. I thought it was funny, so I took a screenshot:

I’m looking for a new wireless card for my laptop. The one installed by the manufacturer doesn’t have Linux-compatible drivers (and I’ve tried the alternate madwifi drivers and NDISwrapper to no avail). I can’t seem to find an easy way to find out for sure what other cards would be compatible. The Toshiba website is no good - their official parts supplier doesn’t list any replacement cards - and their documentation only gives specs for the card that I already have.

So I thought I would just go to some laptop parts sites and search by model, but I can’t find a single site that will give you a model-specific list of parts. Have you ever bought auto parts online at Autozone or Oreilly? You go to the site, put in your car’s year, make, and model, and the site saves your car info. Then every term you search on or category you select only shows results pertinent to your car. Shouldn’t a site selling computer parts work like that? I can’t find one. All I get are lists of every damn wireless card in their inventory, or you already have to know the part number or manufacturer to find anything specific. If anybody knows somewhere where I can buy a damn wi-fi card and be sure it’s compatible with my computer, please let me know.

After playing around with Google’s new browser for a few days, there are a couple things that bug me.

First, there is no “home” button on the menu bar. If I want to go to my home page, I should just be able to click a button. I guess this might be kind of a silly complaint, since I could just make it a bookmark and click that, but I’m used to having a home button.

Second and more importantly, Chrome has some issues with the stock charts on Google Finance. When mousing over a chart, the page will occasionally freeze up and the cursor will disappear. After a few seconds it will snap out of it, but then after awhile it will happen again. Since this is happening on Google’s own site, I would think that this would be something they would want to fix (whether it would fixing the browser or the code to display the chart).

If you haven’t heard about this, then you must not be as big a geek as me. Google released their own web browser, called Chrome, today.

News of the new browser hit the internet yesterday when someone at Google supposedly accidentally leaked the announcement (in comic book form) a day early.

Normally I use Firefox, which is far superior to Internet Explorer, which I gave up on several years ago. (Except I have to use IE at work because they don’t let us install anything that isn’t officially blessed by the IT gods, who really don’t know crap about the internet because they’re all old Cobol programmers who started working there back in the days when IT was known as DP.)

So I downloaded Chrome tonight and took it for a spin. The download and install were both fast and painless. It allows you to automatically import your bookmarks, settings, and saved passwords from your default browser. I surfed a few pages that I go to frequently and they all seemed to load very fast. I didn’t see any problems with rendering css or html so I would assume it is standards-compliant (though I haven’t checked to be sure).

It has a very nice look and feel. Clean and uncluttered. And each tab has it’s own address bar and controls (back, forward, refresh). Chrome will also keep track of your most visited sites and when you open a new empty tab, give a list of them along with your bookmarks. You can also search from the address bar. I always hated searching from the address bar in IE and Firefox because the way they try to autocomplete your text is annoying. Google actually makes this work well in Chrome by dropping the suggested terms to a separate box below the text-entry box. There is also a feature for private browsing called an “incognito window” (Click the “Control the current page” button -> New Incognito Window). This lets you browse without saving any history or cookies on your computer. This is only for anonymous browsing though; it won’t protect you from malware.

One of the underlying differences from other browsers is that Chrome has separate processes running for each tab. So say you have multiple tabs open and you are opening a large .pdf file in one tab, and it crashes. With other browsers, you’d have to quit the entire program and the relaunch it (when this happens, Firefox asks you if you want to restore your tabs). In Chrome, the crash will only take down the tab you were loading the offending file to, and the other tabs will continue unaffected. I tried to test this out, but I couldn’t seem to get any tabs to crash.

Also, because each tab has it’s own processes running, there is a Windows-style task manager built in (Control the current page -> Developer -> Task Manager). This allows you to see a summary of each page that’s open with CPU and Memory usage for each. You can click on any page and then hit the “end process” button to quit that page. In the task manager, there is a link at the bottom that reads “Stats for nerds”. Clicking that will open a tab that shows the memory stats for each page open. If you have more than one browser open, it will show you the memory usage for all of them. I opened Firefox and IE and loaded the same pages in all three browsers. Consistently, IE used the most memory, with Chrome next, and Firefox using the least.

The other major feature is that Chrome comes with Google Gears included. Gears lets you use certain web services (such as Google Documents) offline. This allows you to work seamlessly with documents and spreadsheets from Google Docs and save them offline. Whenever you go to Google Docs online, it will synch the version stored on your computer to the one stored online. This enables you to use Google Docs for your office software even when you don’t have internet access. And Gears will work with other Gears-enabled websites too (like any site using Wordpress 2.6 or above). This is clearly part of Google’s attempt to gain market share from completely bludgeon Microsoft. Microsoft’s bread and butter has always been Windows and Office. The combination of Google Chrome and Google Documents allow you to have virtually the same functionality for free, with near-seamless integration between what you do online and offline.

Google is releasing Chrome as an open-source project too. So developers out there can add on to it as they see fit, or even use the code base to build their own custom browser.

Overall, I’d have to say I like it every bit as much as Firefox. I’m not sure I’ll switch over permanently though since Firefox is sort of the little guy in the browser wars and they’ve done so well thus far that I feel kind of loyal to them. I will keep trying Chrome for awhile though, to see if my first impressions are accurate.

This brought tears to my eyes.
Language warning. As if you couldn’t tell from the name of the song.

Watch “Everyday Normal Guy Rap” while you’re at it.

O’l Georgey didn’t waste any time getting his Get Out of Jail Free card signed into law. One possible bright spot is that the ACLU has already filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law in regard to the surveillance powers it gives the president, and the EFF is planning to challenge the retroactive telecom immunity portion. One interesting possibility is that the federal court judges, or possibly even Supreme Court Justices who will hear these cases, may end up being appointees of the new president. You would expect Obama appointees to be more liberal than McCain appointees, but than again, Obama has been full of surprises lately.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t trust that the government will refrain from spying on you regardless of what the law says. Well, there’s some promising news on that front too. The guys behind the Pirate Bay have plans to encrypt the internet. The idea is to use encryption at a network level rather than at an application level. If this were to be used by enough people/webhosts/ISPs, virtually all of your internet traffic would be encrypted. Where do I sign up?

…and testing a post.

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 using the Automatic Upgrade Plugin which seemed to be more of a pain in the butt than anything since it didn’t actually backup my files or database. I’m not sure if it actually put any new files on the server either, but the dashboard says I have 2.5.1 now so I guess I do.

So the big test is to see if the image uploading works correctly…

Nope. Still does the same thing. I’m sick of Wordpress. Time to start testing out some other blogging platforms.

In looking at our stats just now, I noticed visitors coming from Wikipedia today. It seems that for some 12-odd hours today, there was a link from the Wikipedia page on Perceptions of Religious Imagery in Natural Phenomena to my post about the Flying Spaghetti Monster pancake that miraculously appeared to us last year.

But alas, someone (rightly) edited the page to remove it. I guess it’s true what they say: fame is fleeting.

Late last summer I started working on my first web design project where someone was actually paying me to build something for them. Working lunch hours and evenings, I built a website for a local company which was actually more like a custom content management system. That is to say, all the content of the site can be controlled by them through custom admin pages. (Kind of like a blog, but without the RSS feed). I would give you a link to the site by they haven’t added any content yet, so they still have the “coming soon” page up. Anyway, early on I had designed a cool looking homepage for the site and it looked great in Firefox. It also worked in IE 7.0, but not in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. I discovered that the problem was with Microsoft’s seeming lack of ability to make a standards-compliant browser. It’s very frustrating as a web designer/developer to write good code only to have it break when viewed in a certain browser. I realized that I could have hacked my code to detect different browser versions and served up a different stylesheet/homepage combination for each one, but that seemed like a royal pain in the butt. Not to mention that it would need to be updated whenever new browser versions were released. So instead, I changed the design to something that I liked less, but nonetheless worked in older versions of IE as well as Firefox. Which kind of sucks, but the reality is that many users of the site will be using a browser where the page would appear broken, and you can’t just ignore them.

Anyway I bring all this up because Joel Spolsky has a good article up on the whole issue of standards compliance for web browsers. If you are interested in web design and development, you’ve probably read his blog thingy, Joel on Software. If not, you should.