'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.

Go Knock Yourself Out!

Many of us have tried doing quick funky graphics designing at one time or the other. Anything worth its salt requires time, effort and preferably loads of processing power. While stumbling around the internet today, I ran into Glogster. A site that claims you can 'poster yourself', and that too in 5 seconds. Essentially it is a flash based site with loads of background and artwork available, which you can throw together to create anything that comes to your mind. You can even upload your own photos/artwork and even video/audio. It is *pretty* cool. At least you can spice up your websites in no time!

The catch is it is only web-based. Trying to come up with a hack to download it as .jpeg or something. Maybe croft might have some clue. Anyway signing up is for free, and here is my first attempt for the purpose of this blog. Just random stuff put in a bag and jumbled. I swear the cat thinking about the fish climbed onto the scooter on its own! Pretty cool no? :D



*let the glogging begin!*


Addendum (after a few hours of experimenting):
Okay so the best solution I've figured so far for saving to your computer:

1. Use AFPL Ghostscript (also called Aladdin GhostScript. Make sure you get AFPL and not GPL as that doesn't have support for color printing). The current stable version is 8.54, available for download here . Also download and install GhostScript View GUI from here. The current version is 4.9.
2. Now right click on your glog and select print. Make sure you have a color printer installed. Select that, and check print to file. Save to disk by using .prn as the extension.
3. Now open the .prn file using GSView. Select file -> convert and save in any file type. for regular desktop printing .bmp with 72 pixel resolution would work. It also has 600 pixel resolution available which I suppose can be used for commercial printing. Though I won't vouch for the results.
4. The saved file will have a glogster tab on the top. Using trial and error, work your graphics below it and then u can edit out that area using image cropping.

Here is what my .jpg looks like (without the cropping, click to enlarge):


Thats all for now.

*Over and Out*

About Thor and Laptops

What does Thor, the Norse god of lightning, have in common with laptops? Or Zeus, or Jupiter or Leir for that matter, who are his Greek, Roman and Celtic counterparts respectively. To answer the question, nothing, at least not apparently, until I delve into the story of my laptop and how it can be related to any of the above mythological deities.

As a manager at P&G, I, on joining the company, was given a brand new standard issue HP laptop. The laptop with bare minimum specs is good enough for reading and sending emails and running Microsoft Office, which is what you mostly do as a manager but given my rather geeky disposition, and my technical job descroption, was no way capable of simultaneously handling at least 20 windows for at least 20 hours a day on an everyday basis (Yes, yes, I admit, I sleep with my laptop, and that too switched on). Needless to say the poor thing started to give up in this already losing battle some 14 months into its operational life. And that's when i decided to get it sup-ed up. Major changes: hard disk from 40GB to 80 GB and RAM from 512 MB to 1.5GB. It feels awesome ^_^

However I was not satisfied with just 'back end' changes, and bothered by the fact that my laptop looked EXACTLY like at least 50 other laptops in the office (people who know me will understand my utter need to personalise EVERYTHING that i own), I wondered if I could do something about its rather drab exterior. Since the laptop is legally still a property of P&G, and under warranty from HP, which goes void if I mess with the paint job itself, I settled for a 'sticker job', i.e. drawn and painted on paper, cut out, then glued to the laptop lid, which can easily be peeled off later when the time comes to part my ways with it. This obviously brought me to the question of what exactly to put on it. Buoy-ed up that I was with the very perceptible increase in my laptop's performance, I settled for two lightening bolts, slanting inwards at the tip, in silver to go with the matte gray original color of the machine. Thus further excited, I discussed the idea with a few of my good friends, namely Saady, I-T and Basimio (their blogs are listed under More Blabbers). Got an excited thumbs up from all of them. I-T went on to Christian the 're-born' laptop "Thor's Laptop" or "Zeus' Laptop". And there you have it.

Bringing the idea to execution took another 2-3 weeks since I was traveling as well as very busy with work. Also a minor tragedy dampened the euphoria a little. I finally managed to put the lightning bolts in place on a Sunday, and the next day I had to turn my laptop in and move to a temporary laptop because I was for a few days having serious heating problems which had started to affect the hard disk. However not to be mowed down, I managed on getting the hard disk, RAM and keyboard of my old machine inserted into the replacement machine. The DVD drive and battery were already from my old machine as this one didn't have em. That took care of the interior, and left the sticker-work on the lid of the machine i was giving away. I therefore pestered our local support person till he called the vendor and I got the entire screen switched between the two laptops ... hehe. So now I'm a rather happy camper, with a machine that performs at least 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, and had a custom paint job too!

Obviously this post would be incomplete without the pictures, which I've naturally added. No comments on the dirty room!

my laptop proudly sitting at its rightful place on my bed. Usually its turned around
but here it's posing for the picture ;)

Shimmery silver thanks to fabric paint on paper. Glows in bright light.

Easter Eggs for the Deviant Mind!

No i'm not talking about this:



Recently while googling and wiki-ing (which happen to be my favourite pastimes), I stumbled upon the wiki site for easter eggs, the virtual one that is. To define it for the sake of my less aware audience:

"A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program or video game. The term draws a parallel with the custom of the easter egg hunt observed in many western nations. In computer programming, the underlying motivation is often to put an individual, almost artistic touch on an intellectual product which is by its nature standardised and functional"

The site goes on to give examples of many famous easter eggs, such as the flight simulator in MS excel 97 and pinball in MS Word 97. Apparently Microsoft ends up with more than its fair share of smart ass developers. Easter eggs are apparently found in hardware as well such as entire circuits etched on the circuit board that only serve to fulfill the designer's sense of personalization. My favourites are:

• Debian GNU/Linux package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on "apt-get moo" are typed into the shell.

• In The Mathwork's MATLAB the why command provides succinct random answers to almost any question.

 % why
 % because the not very smart system engineer insisted on it

(something I'll definitely try if I manage to move my lazy ass and turn on my desktop which has two different versions of MATLAB installed on it)

• Perhaps the most famous example of a hardware Easter egg is in the HP ScanJet 5P, where the device will play the Ode to Joy or Fur Elise by varying the stepper motor speed if users power the device up with the scan button depressed. (I mean el oh el! some funky techie man, making your stepper motors literally SING! I remember when i spent some three weeks in my 5th semester trying to make two stupid stone age stepper motors turn so i could run a robotic mouse!)

Obviously many of us remember playing with the mIRC "about" icon that smiled and said 'what?' when you right clicked on it and the *pichkoui* sound when you clicked on Khaled Merdem Bey's nose in the about box and oh of course the stuffed alligator picture that appeared in place of Merdem Bey's when you typed 'arnobie' while the about box was open .... BUT armed with the knowledge above, I absolutely had to embark on a search for easter eggs in modern software. Microsoft apparently has removed almost all easter eggs in its software as it is not a very encouraged practice anymore. Anyway after going through quite a number of sites these are my top picks:

Head Banging Llama's in Winamp 5+ (modern skin only):

"Winamp really whips the llama's ass" .... it makes them head bang too! This is how to do it:

Run Winamp 5 or higher in modern skin and then expand the main window till you see the beat visualizer.

Keeping Shift+Alt+Ctrl pressed click over the dot in the dead center of the beat visualizer. See the red dot in the image below:

And there you go you have your llama's ... headbanging with the beat! Brilliant!



Tetris in uTorrent

All you leechers out there, here's something to do while you sit and stare at your torrents download:

Go to help -> about uTorrent. This is what an 'innocent' help box looks like:

*pssst* clicking on the uTorrent logo in the about box plays the snazzy THX sound.

Now press Ctrl+T to transform this useless appendage to one of the most addictive games ever invented. Play on! (press P to pause). Oh and it even remembers your highest score!




Obviously all proprietary material mentioned in this post is copyright of its respective owners. (I think thats the appropriate disclaimer).

Here's the link to the wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(virtual)

Happy easter egg hunting y'all! Drop me a comment/leave a message on GoogleTalk if you come across something interesting! :)

Some things you play till you go screwey in the head ....

ahhhhhhh ..... came back home after a long day, it was Friday, last day of the work week, skipped dinner (as usual), got into bed, turned off the the lights, started playing around 11:30 pm .... the next day was Saturday i.e. the weekend so kept playing till I suddenly realized that it was 4:30 am .... since i sleep with my laptop (got DSL with the modem lying pn my bed so I'm always connected with my laptop less than a foot away from me even when I'm asleep) I decided to rest a bit before resuming, woke up at 9 am, sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes .... and started playing again ... and kept at it till 1:45 pm when a friend called to tell that she was picking me up in 15 mins. What am I talking about? Desktop tower defence! <<< click there!


You have a square playing area, two entries and exits, a selection of guns, a few gizmos, 20 lives, 80 pieces of gold and creepies that try to run across to the other side and say 'yippeee!' ... make sure you play with your speakers on ... the sounds are just too good. Your objective ... to make a maze using the guns for the creepies to pass through ... you gain points and gold everytime a creepie dies, the gold allows you to buy more guns to complicate your maze and upgrade existings ones to enhance range and damage. As you progress through the standard 50 levels the creepies refuse to be even scratched by a mere non - up graded gun. Must play! and like a friend said "us gikians are everywhere" there is a group scoreboard 'giki-cafe' (this is the main) and also 'giki' where you can post your scores ... will run into a lot of familiar 'nicks' here hehe. It is just one of those simple games that you run across, start playing and keep playing till you play yourself sick! literally! I gave up for 3 days after I played non stop for 5, ended up giving myself headache and nausea. Just started playing again! hehe


Another one is plasmapong <<< again click there... the guy who made it has an obvious obsession with fluid mechanics, essentially its your standard computer ping pong, but in a viscous world of its own! Your can mess with your ball and deflect it in the liquid by sending viscous explosive surges, merely by holding down your mouse key! Oh and you get to mess with all kinda parameters like 'fluid viscosity' for example. And the music can put quite a few soundtracks to shame! Must play!

..... aaaaaaaaah some things you play till you go screwy in the head!

An Ode to Google II

Another amazing and unthought-of-before thing that Google does is playing with its own logo. Here are some examples:


National Whacking Day
















Some more:

















And a few more:


















And a LOTTT more:

According to this site they have so far come up with some 244 logos. Maybe more since i don't know when was the last time this site was updated. It lists all 244 of em. A must see! (too bad its in german though)

http://www.bj-design.de/index.php?page=goriginale&p=1

P.S: images brought to you by Google Images :D

An Ode to Google

If anyone deserves a solid thumping on the back, three cheers, 'good job old boy' and such its those people at Google who bring us loads of amazing stuff and that too for free. Thank you all you guys at Google :)

Must visit this link to see the entire range of tools and services Google provides:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/