Rappy Crappy

Since I have started to post chats that stand solemn testament to the insanity of people who stay awake at night at ungodly hours, here is an excerpt from a recent one with Raptor. Raptor a.k.a. Ali Ibraheem Rashid, drama queen, king of absurdity and procrastination, an accomplished chussar and a phenomenon unto himself ...

13th September 2008

.....
.....
blitzkrieg says (01:35):
we'll send someone to pick u up
or wait is ur office in isloo or pindi?

. says (01:35):
yea it's in islamabad

blitzkrieg says (01:36):
kis sector mein?

. says (01:36):
g8

blitzkrieg says (01:36):
hmm and u work saturdays too?

. says (01:36):
nope
i donut

blitzkrieg says (01:37):
do u have a hole in ur tummy too? :P

. says (01:37):
:|
erm, the belly button? :/

blitzkrieg says (01:38):
lol no donut :P
like a thru and thru hole

. says (01:39):
oh, hmm, nai

blitzkrieg writes (01:41):


blitzkrieg says (01:41):
khekhekhe

. says (01:42):
:|

blitzkrieg says (01:44):
:D
this looks like a blueberry jelly donot

blitzkrieg says (01:45):
donut*

blitzkrieg says (01:58):
bleh?

. says (01:58):
blah?

.....
.....

. == raptor
blitzkrieg == me

Too much time, too little sleep, too late an hour, a sweet tooth and hard-wired-to-engineer mental circuits

This can potentially happen to you if you're up too late, sleep very less, chatting on googletalk with a friend who's essentially crazy and both of you have spent a big part of your life studying physics, mathematics and computer science ...

May 18th 2008

4:55 AM

I-T: hello

me: hio

I-T: what are you doing up at this godforsaken hour :)

me: trying to go to sleep

I-T: you're feeling sleepy
sleeeeeeeepy
look into the winding lollipop

me: my eyes feel itchy and gritty

4:56 AM

I-T: the red and white twirls inside the winding lollipop

me: hey u accept my request :D

I-T: the lollipop is rotating about a normal drawn out of the plane of the lollipop towards you

me: on facebook please please please please please :D

4:57 AM

I-T: The normal has something to do with the moment of centroid of the lollipop

4:58 AM

I-T: the electromagnetic field around the lollipop can be calculated by summing up the volumes of an infinte number of infinitesmal pie segments of the lollipop

me: okay shuttup :P

4:59 AM

I-T: you're sleepy arent you

me: i am

I-T: The inverted lollip law states that an inverted lollipop tied to a string can be used as a plumbline

5:00 AM

me: not if u have a very determined lolly pop lover attached to it
corollary one says: in that case hte lollipop can be used as a leash

5:01 AM

I-T: In that case by extension it becomes a heavier plumbline
:)

5:05 AM

I-T: If you embed two jellybear arcs on both the right and left sides of a lollipop and wind licorice tubing around the lollipop and pass molten chocolate through it, while the whole arrangement is enclosed within two Chocolate bricks of opposite polarity i.e. Dark and White, the reaction caused by the spinning of the lollipop actuator motor will cause rappie to appear, breakdance and go back to his room.

5:06 AM

me: wow!
there's an addendum to this one as well ....

5:07 AM

me: depending on the level of rappy's level of crankiness, the entire structure can disappear with him between breakdance and 'go back to his room'

5:08 AM

I-T: All the great Celestial bodies were once lollipops -- Arthur C. Clarke

me: hehe
what are u doing up this late waisay?

I-T: Until they had their sticks removed -- Albert Einstein
The milky way was once a chocolate factory -- Mr Higgins [Whats he doing here]

5:09 AM

me: lol

5:10 AM

I-T: Lollipops with sticks is an unnecessary wastage of resources, because in space nothing falls - - Stephen J. Hawking

me: how do sticks relate with falling
and where in lollipop-land are u finidng all tehse enlightening quotes?

5:11 AM

I-T: The answer seems to be simple, you lick the large celestial lollipops until they become smaller dwarf lollipops
"The best quotes here are the ones made up by me" -- The Narrator aka yours truly

5:12 AM

I-T: "I'm sacking you for your arrogance"-- The Narrators Manager
"But I love him" -- The Narrators Managers Daughter
"Thats it wheres my shotgun" -- The Narrators Manager
"Exit Stage left" -- The Narrator

5:13 AM

I-T: "But which way is relative in space" - Thomas Finnigan

me: "we want licorice" -- the stage bunnies

5:14 AM

I-T: "Sorry, A little typo there, hope you didnt publish my last quote, it was more like which way is left in space everything's relative" - Thomas Finnigan
"Bunnies are evil" -- Monty Python

me: "but they hold the secret of licorice" -- the dust bunny

5:15 AM

me: oh man i must sleep i got a headache

I-T: "No candy for you evil bunnies, you've had your share of mischief for one eon" -- Cheif Snuggums Official Bookkeeper of the Order of the Bunny Kickers

5:16 AM

I-T: "You better get to sleep little girl" - Nurse Freda [???]

me: "but knight googaham of the Order of the Bunny Kickers stole all the licorice and ate it in one night ... he had to be pulleyed out of his room afterwards, after removing the ceiling" -- Willikums, diplomat bunny

5:17 AM

I-T: "You lie, they all lie" -- Mongizumoid Head of Legal Affairs of the OBK

me: "and we dont' do mischief, some of our things just randomly explode, take this 5 legged chair for example ... *boom*" -- wonikins, technology bunny

5:18 AM

I-T: "For more information on evil acts commited by bunnies you shall have to watch Monty Python - The search for the Holy Grail" -- The Narrator

5:19 AM 

me: "I'm afraid wonikins will be unavailable till further notice, the explosion of the 5 legged chair has addled with his brain and he thinks he is a flying tortoise" -- winkadins, nurse bunny, gasping for breath while trying to restrain wonikins

addled his*

I-T: http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MID=367137231&MemberId=3951291356

me: time to sleep :) tomorrow is a long day!

5:20 AM

I-T: sure
take care
AH

me: you too
hehe what is this site?

I-T: dunno. It says that bunnies are evil
Anyways I'm off
ciao
AH

5:21 AM

me: sure
AH :)

I-T: Exception Caught : not geeky enough
Handler being INvoked
Send Ack

5:22 AM

I-T: Return Ack timer expired , trying resend Attempt 1 out of 3
Resend Ack

'Chrome-d'

Up till today, or rather yesterday, since I am, as usual, awake at an ungodly hour, chrome brought two things to my mind: fancy bathroom fittings or snazzy alloys that people invest into when they are trying to 'supe up' their cars (i hope that is the right spellings, i remember reading 'soup up' somewhere, but that really reminded me of a soup kitchen serving goulash) ... anyway, today we have a third definition for Chrome (and no i'm not referring to the Chromium alloy). Google has come up with its own web browser, to rival IE and FireFox, and they for some reason only known to them, have christened it Chrome.

I found out about it only today, rather yesterday. And my techie/nerd/geek sensibilities were temporarily bruised by the fact that I didn't find out about it earlier. But then the thought that I wouldn't have to wait for a million or so clicks for it to become available for download cheered me up a little. And i decided to while away the time by reading their pre-launch 'comic' gimmick here. This helped restore my faith in my own geeky prowess as I was able to get almost all of the concepts presented despite the fact that Object Oriented Programming and development is not really my forte and I haven't done any coding in over 2 years! even while at university I chose MATLAB over .NET as early as 4th semester so you can imagine. Anyway once done with the 30 page or so comic, I made my way to the Official Google Blog and resorted to clicking refresh once every 15 minutes for the announcement of Chrome becoming available for download. Which turned up sometime around 1 am our time. It can be downloaded from here. Time to give it a test drive:

1. Download & Install: The download was a surprisingly small 476KB. Turns out you have to be connected to the internet to install. Once you run the 'small' setup, it connects to the net to bring in the rest of the installation files ... hmmm something we're not very fond of. We prefer having the entire setup offline.


2. Interface: Okay I agree its clean and uncluttered and the browser itself doesn't compete for attention with the content it has been instructed to display. All the tabs are on top, which is good, they resize to all fit in the width of the window, which is not-so-good. If you have like 30 tabs open at one time, often several of the same site, you would want to know what EXACTLY each is displaying rather than going through each seperately. Take out the 'favicons' and you'll be left tab switching all day. Compare google tabs to firefox (my previous favourite browser) tabs (click image to enlarge):
   
   
   
   
   Would  be good if we get the *option* of either fitting all the tabs on a single screen or letting them disappear into the unknown space on the right of the window, calling any of em back, when needed, by a mere click of the tiny arrow you see in firefox.
   
    Also, no status bar at the bottom, and no option to display or un-display it. I always go for the display option for the status bar. Otherwise it feels like my web-pages are scrolling up into existance from an uncomfortably deep abyss!
   
   I also cannot remove the weird tool bar that says 'customize links', 'free hotmail', 'windows marketplace' yada yada. I don't like it! I never keep any toolbars in my browser, and I always keep the google toolbar! Time to see if we have a google toolbar set up available for Chrome! Would be funny if they don't *snorts with suppressed laughter*


3. Options: So expand the little arrow next to the blueish-greyish monkey wrench (see the image above) and you will find the option for 'options' (yea, yea I know i'm funny!). Rather amusingly named as 'basic', 'minor tweaks' and 'under the hood', the options sadly donot have that many of just that ... i.e. the options! Oh well can't complain, its pretty simple, i must admit ... but oh WAIT I still don't know how to purge the cache in this one! darn!


4. Functionality, Plugins and Add-Ons: The basic run of the mill stuff is well obviously what works, it won't be a browser otherwise. The URL bar is nice and big, with large text which you can easily see without squinting at it. The minimalistic blue-grey interface is pleasing to look at. I wish the tabs were more to the silver gray side rather than the boring winXP blue.
   
   The search within web-pages function is not as cool as the one in firefox. e.g. firefox also returns results from script windows and other paraphernalia embedded in your webpage, like looking for a word in this post i'm currently writing. Not the case with Chrome. It only searches the parent page and doesn't return results from the embedded content.
   
   I absolutely LOVE the home page that shows your most visited pages and recent bookmarks. Makes it all the more easier to open those 7 AstroEmpire pages (click to enlarge):
   
   
   
   I won't give them marks for the 'awesome bar' that goes through your recently visited pages, bookmarks and history to return results. Firefox came up with it already, but the fact that it takes you to the main page and not to some obscure sub-sub-sub-sub page is good.
   
   And I still don't know what is the status of adding stuff to the basic browser. I for one can't survive without greasemonkey and flashgot on Firefox. How will I run all of those snazzy scripts that let me supe up my AstroEmpires pages? :(


5. Memory Usage: So it claims to open each tab in a seperate process, which is true, and freaks you out a bit the first time you check your task manager:
   
   
   
   So just to test I decided to open my usual 30 or so pages both in firefox and Chrome. I do have trouble managing all the tabs in firefox because the thing gets miserably slow and often hangs or needs to crash and restart in safe mode. Oh and how many times in both IE and firefox you have to end task cuz of one runaway process and mourn the loss of all of your 30 or so painstakingly opened web pages! Chrome so far is working okay ... but I will have to let it run for 2-3 days without so much as a hibernate to see how it fares >:) Here's the memory usage:
   
   Firefox: CPU usage 50, Mem Usage 131,288 K
   Chrome: CPU usage 2, Mem Usage 252, 796 K (cumulative).
   
   I suppose many little processes are better than one mammoth process. And I can feel it, as the response rate of each tab is significantly faster. And now I must stop *@&!*$ my laptop and kill one of these browsers ... or at least 28/30 tabs in firefox ... Chrome still doesn't qualify to run my Astro Empires ... hummph!

Overall Chrome hasn't been disappointing. Coming from someone who bashes her head against the nearest wall some twenty times a day due to a slow system and also persistently refuses to restart it, I think it might do good to the overall health and longivity of my much used and abused laptop. With my prowess not being development and coding and more into requirements gathering and analysis, a skill honed in 2+ years of designing and launching business intelligence applications here at good old P&G, I can't really use its open-sourceness for my benefit without significant time and effort investment, but I hope someone thinks of including a few more 'tweaks' in the package.