Category: Technology

My Google Chrome experiment is partly over. I like the cleanness of Chrome but I ultimately missed my Firefox add-ins. The one that tipped the scales? The stupid weather add-in for the status bar. I didn’t realize how much I really paid attention to it. During my Chrome phase I had no idea what the weather was going to be. Totally silly. It’s not like there aren’t a million other ways to check the weather, but with Firefox it was always there.

I still have a couple of Google Chrome “applications” on my desktop, so I’m a hybrid browser user.

I also installed IE8 beta 2 for a brief time. It seemed fine except for Marsh MeetingPlace, which would create about 10 java exception errors when you closed a meeting. So I’m back to IE7 for that.

I was trying to decide if this is no big deal or a really big deal. I’m leaning towards the latter. A private, for-profit (someday) business launched a rocket that truly went into space and achieved orbit. That is a first for a private company.

The company was founded by one of the co-founders of PayPal. This isn’t a touchy feely, “we need to explore space” idea. They want to make space transportation cheaper and more reliable. They want to make money sending satellites up.

The thought that going into space could be a good business model is pretty fascinating.

Here’s the Wired article. And here’s the company’s web site.

I wrote the one post containing geeky humor on the LHC, but really the whole thing deserves a real post. This is a big @#$-ing deal. Here is a good and amusing article about it. It has some great quotes, which I will steal, starting from the very first sentence:

It is the biggest machine ever built.

That isn’t hyperbole. This project is grander than anything ever done. This is a 17 mile tunnel super-cooled to temperatures below deep space to send particles flying at almost the speed of light. It would be science fiction stuff if it weren’t actually happening.

Wednesday, they fired this sucker up

The article talks about how they hope to find particles that have never been detected before.

Oh, and they might find some extra dimensions. But this is the delicious part. They. Don’t. Exactly. Know.

The article gets into some of the details. Including some facts about the magnets surrounding the tunnel.

The magnets are superconducting because they are supercooled by superfluid helium, which is superstrange.

There is a great line about what happens if you ask one of the engineers a question:

They may go to a blackboard and begin with the math. You do not want them to do this.

This thing is sending trillions of protons screaming around the underground track at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. They get around the 17 mile track 11,245 times a second. At that speed you get to Neptune and back in 10 hours.

This is all mind-boggling stuff. And very, very cool.

I downloaded Google Chrome today. While only a beta (though Google seems to leave things in beta mode forever) it seems to achieve it’s goal. It is a simple, fast and pretty stable browser.

I like to check out browsers. I currently have IE, Firefox, Opera and now Chrome installed. I had Safari for a while but it didn’t do anything for me.

Why switch if you use something else? Probably no great reason if you like your current browser. I’m a Firefox fan. Chrome seems a bit faster. I do like the “each tab in its own process” concept so that one stuck tab won’t crash the whole browser.

There’s even a Chrome version of Task Manager showing all the tabs (and damn, Flash takes a lot of memory).

Today, Chrome supports no extensions. That may be a big killer for lots of power users. But I like to experiment, so Chrome will be my default browser for the next week or so. We’ll see if it lasts longer…

I’ve pointed out the Kloonigames site for its amusing games before. He is currently hyping the game Braid which he says is so amazing that he went out and bought an Xbox just to play this game.

What amuses me is the blog post title, which is only funny to a C programmer…