Browser Benchmarking

In the interest of, well, nothing, I decided to benchmark several of my own browsers at Peacekeeper. The two machines I used:

1. MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5.7

• 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo CPU
• 4 GB RAM
• GMA X3100 integrated graphics

2. Home-made box running Windows XP SP3

• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU
• 3.25 GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 graphics card (x2, no SLI)

The Results

These should, of course, be taken with several grains of salt:

OS X 10.5.7

That should read “(Netscape Navigator 9),” by the way. I was going to test 6, but I couldn’t get it to load even google.com without crashing.

Windows XP SP3

What surprises me more than anything is Chrome’s ability on OS X. Until I did these benchmarks I hadn’t used Chrome since an early, buggy alpha. It still crashes every 10 minutes, but it renders like a motherfucker (compared to everything but Safari, of course).

I also love that the Windows version of Safari is so good. Apple may have all the kudos they want.

WolframAlpha: Second Impressions

After I took out some of my aggression on WolframAlpha a couple weeks ago (and managed to misspell “Stephen Wolfram” and not even notice until now), I’ve decided to somewhat revise my statements.

While WolframAlpha is still nothing special, I’ve been using it pretty much every day. It’s sort of a replacement for my calculator, much in the way Google was. I used to do, for example, physics problem sets and type basic equations into Google, like . WolframAlpha has filled this role because it can do things like take and find roots.

It can even somtimes surprise you with its abilities:

Not bad

So the moral of the story is that WolframAlpha isn’t all bad; we sciency-types can still find it somewhat useful.

In other news, wasn’t Google Squared supposed to be out by now?

WolframAlpha: First Impressions

I’m writing this on launch day, so I’m not sure how well the following statements apply to the WolframAlpha we will know when this launch business is over. Also, I stopped watching the webcast several hours ago because, frankly, I’ve heard enough of Stephen Wolfram telling us how cool he is.

No one fucking cares

I have to say that I find WolframAlpha, in its current incarnation, rather disappointing. Certainly it has some cool capabilities; I can find out how long it would take me to drive to jupiter with the query:

• (distance from earth to planet jupiter) / 60mph

What’s disappointing is that the following queries do not work:

• (distance from earth to jupiter) / 60mph
• time it would take to travel from earth to jupiter at 60mph

etc. In fact, my first-ever WolframAlpha query, average quantity of beer consumed by a US male in 1985, left me empty-handed, so to speak. Now given WolframAlpha’s design, it’s not surprising that this information was lacking. Why in fuck would anyone ever bother to enter that sort of data into Wolfram’s database?

But that’s just it! That’s exactly the sort of weird fucking information that a search engine like Google can find, and presumably will be found by Google squared. In the end, Wolfram’s own little 10TB database can never compete with the massive amount of information available on the web.

That’s where semantic parsing comes in, and is another area where WolframAlpha underperforms. It can handle a simple question like

• What is the GDP of France?

because it recognizes that “what”, “is”, “the”, and “of” are all unnecessary words. But, similar to my previous example,

• time it would take to traverse the milky way at 100mph

produces no results. Why is this? All the data is there: diameter of the milky way, 100mph, and division. The only thing that’s failing is the engine’s ability to parse the question I wrote. The answer is ~1 trillion years, by the way.

But maybe I’m being unfair. How about something simpler? GDP of US, Europe works fine, but GDP of US compared to Europe does not (and for the grammar-inclined, GDP of US compared to that of Europe also fails).

In fact, the only really impressive capabilities I’ve seen are those relating to mathematics, and those are far inferior to Wolfram’s already-existing Mathematica.

iTunes DJ

In case you’ve missed the hubbub about iTunes 8.1: Apple has released the new ‘iTunes DJ’ feature for iTunes. What is it? It’s sorta like the old party shuffle, where you queue songs for your party and groove to the rhythm (or whatever), but with a couple things added:

• Sync with Genius (la-de-freakin’-da)
• Request songs with your iPhone/iPod touch

The latter feature is, of course, more impressive, and also completely useless. Like “Woohoo! Let’s make sure our DJ uses iTunes because wouldn’t it be cooler to request a song with my PHONE rather than speak to the guy in person? Alright!”

But it is my opinion that this is simply a marketing ploy by Apple — and a good one to boot. This article, for example, suggests you should only party with people who use Apple products:

Invite your friends over (though only if they have an iPhone or touch, naturally) and let the guests choose the songs.

Clearly you’re not cool unless you have an iPhone. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Whether

The only use I have for Dashboard in Mac OS X is the weather widget. But the Weather widget is very impersonal: it prints highs, lows, current temperature… lots of numbers! I wanted a widget that would describe the weather in a more qualitative way, so I made an ugly hack of the default weather widget. I call it “Whether.” You can get it here.

It's accurate as fuck!

For reference:

• >70ºF -> “Comfy”
• 51 to 70 -> “Fine”
• 41 to 50 -> “Chilleh”
• 33 to 40 -> “Wear a sweater”
• 26 to 32 -> “Cold”
• 21 to 25 – > “Damn cold”
• 16 to 20 -> “Cold as shit”
• 11 to 15 -> “Fucking cold”
• 6 to 10 -> “Goddamn cold as fuck”
• 1 to 5 -> “Mother-goddamn-fucking cold”
• -9 to 0 -> “OMFGDON’TGOOUTSIDE”
• -19 to -10 -> “SWEETMOTHERMARYMOTHEROFJESUSIT’SCOLD”
• <-19 -> “WTFHOLYFUCKINGMOTHERFUCKINGSHITIT’SGODDAMNFUCKING-JESUSFUCKINGCOLD” (line wrapping issues)

Clearly this is not the widget for you if you’re easily offended.

iFrogz Fallout – A Review

Due to some magical mystery force that pervades the universe, my headphones always seem to have a life of 6-12 months. No matter how cheap or expensive, no matter what brand, they always start to decay and eventually stop working.

The latest casualty, a pair that lived for almost an entire year, will remain nameless because I can’t find any brand logos or text on the headphones. I’m pretty sad to see them go. They provided solid sound quality, a comfortable design, and even a microphone for voice-chat stuff. I noticed they were starting to go a couple days ago when the audio on the left channel would sporadically die out then come back on (albeit with some crackles). I immediately began searching for a replacement.

A friend recommended iFrogz to me. iFrogz is somewhat peculiar in that they allow you an unbelievable amount of customization for most of their products. I went over to the headphone section and began coming up with schemes for their Fallout headphones (because I like over-the-ear sorts of headphones).

Customization

I highly recommend clicking the above link and trying it out for yourself. It’s incredible. Some quick combinatorics reveal that there are 32,208 different Fallout headphones that can be designed. Of course, not all 32,208 designs look good, but it’s a wonderful way to create a unique pair of headphones that you can be comfortable with.

I went for a somewhat conservative black and yellow scheme. Here’s the preview from the site:

A couple days later, I received them in the mail, they look like this:

Taken with a Macbook built-in webcam

In case you can’t tell because of the crappy quality of my photo, the headphones look perfect! They look almost exactly like the preview. Not bad for $28! (with a 20% discount — they’re normally $34.99)

Audio Quality

Since I’m a bit of an audiophile, visual aesthetics wasn’t the only test these headphones had to pass — they have to provide decent quality audio too.

The first thing I noticed was the bass. Or really that should be in bold: bass. I’ve quite honestly never owned headphones that can pump out the low frequency ranges like these BAMFs. The mid- and high-ranges aren’t nearly as impressive as the bass, but they’re more than passable and far better than you’d expect for a $35 pair of headphones.

The only real drawback, as far as I’m concerned, is the cord length. The site advertises the length as 1.2 meters, which is true, but I didn’t really understand how short that is. It’s like the length of the standard iPod earbuds cord.

In short, if you haven’t managed to understand my review so far, I highly recommend the iFrogz Fallout headphones. If I were to rank them on a scale from 1 to 5, I’d give them a 4.5. If I were to rank them on a scale from 1 to Awesome, they’d probably be a Samuel L. Jackson.

uTorrent Mac

Finally.

Mac users have been stuck using Azureus/Vuze for the past God-knows-how-long. Sure, there are alternatives to Vuze, but none of them offer the same features. Windows users, on the other hand, have been blessed by the bittorrent gods with uTorrent. It has all the useful features of Vuze with none of the bloat and useless crap. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you uTorrent for making a mac version.

Ubuntu 8.10 – Ibex

I’ve finally upgraded my Linux box to Intrepid Ibex.  I say finally because Ibex has been out for a solid two-ish weeks now but it took me this long to upgrade. Of course the hardcore Ubuntu fans out there are all, “how could you possibly wait that long to upgrade? Don’t you want all the fancy new features?”

Of course I like new features, but there weren’t really any that leapt out at me. Ubuntu.com has a “techinical overview” with the official list of such features. Most of them, admittedly, would be pretty exciting if you spent your free time doing stuff like recompiling your kernel for fun. I, on the other hand, don’t.

The one feature that I actually appreciate — and I’m not even sure if it’s an official feature or just a fluke in my Hardy install that got fixed during the update — is that my computer seems to understand how to stay connected to a wi-fi network for more than 10 seconds.

On the downside, I have noticed that my computer is having trouble booting up as fast as it used to. Maybe I should recompile my kernel.

My Desktop with Moomex theme

Congratulations!

You’ve been selected to receive a free Nintendo Wii! All you have to do is click on the Nintendo Wii and then easy [sic] register on the next page. So what are you waiting for? Claim your free Nintendo Wii now. And once again, congratulations.

“Nintendo Wii” is easily replaced, of course, by “Walmart Giftcard” or “Apple iPhone.” If you’ve ever heard (yes, I mean heard, not seen) one of these web ads, then you and I probably agree that a marketing executive somewhere has to die.

Seriously, whose idea was it to make an audible web advertisement? What’s more, who decided to have it spoken by some pubescent teenager with a scratchy voice instead of by someone whose voice is actually tolerable?

I can understand the naïve logic that answers my first question: some asshole marketing guy thinks that since people can usually ignore bright, flashy ads, a good way of getting people to pay attention is through sound. This asshole marketing guy is right, of course. He’s wrong, though, if he thinks that I’ll want to fucking click on the fucking ad after hearing it talk to me.

Besides, who in the world hears an ad like that and is like “OMG! I’m gonna get a free iPhone!”?

Really, though, my major problem with these ads is that they make me less likely to visit the sites that have them. And when I do go to those sites, I feel like finding the guy responsible for the ad and killing him in a hideously violent manner.

Google Chrome

As of quite recently, word of Google’s new browser, Google Chrome, has made its rounds of the internet, inspiring both hype and hatred. What’s so special about Chrome? Well, see for yourself. Don’t bother wondering if Chrome is a good browser; it is. Don’t even bother asking if it’s better than Firefox, because, well, it’s really hard to say, and it’s not even an important question. The real question is whether Google Chrome is going to be successful. How much of the browser market will Google control by the end of this year? 1%? 10%? 50%? Right now it’s hard to say.

On the surface, Chrome doesn’t feel much different from our beloved Firefox 3. Sure, it looks a little funny (and very blue), but it handles much the way any normal browser does. It has a phishing/malware blacklist, just like Firefox, a download manager, tabbed browsing, and a “smart” address bar that does everything under the sun.

Chrome does sport a couple features that set it ahead of Firefox: multiprocessing for tabs, a super-quick Javascript virtual machine, and a task manager. So are people going to be leaping out of their chairs to download Google Chrome? Or will it sputter and die because Firefox is “good enough” for most people? I managed to convert my mother from IE7 to Firefox 3 not by telling her how much better Firefox is, but by telling her that you don’t have to put up with any crap in Firefox. That is, she was converted not because Firefox is so good, but because it doesn’t suck.

So I feel like much of Google’s potential market for Chrome is already taken and unwilling to make a change. Why should someone want to change from one perfectly good browser to another that they’ve never used before? Multiprocessing might seem neat to us techies, but to average Joe it’s not that important.

In light of this, we have to wonder how much effort Google will spend advertising their browser. Harry McCracken asks a good question:

Just how hard will Google push Chrome on the Google homepage? Like no other company on earth, Google has an opportunity to get hundreds of millions of people using its browser in a relatively short amount of time. You gotta think that it’ll use the Google homepage to drum up interest. But will it check to see if you’re using IE, Firefox, or another browser and attempt to convince you to switch?

Currently, the Google homepage displays nothing at all related to Chrome (Edit: Nevermind, it’s up there now – 9/03). Of course, hype has done a significant amount of advertising for them (sounds hypocritical, but I’m a Google fanboy, so I don’t mind).

I’d love to report on Chrome’s performance in the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, but they’re either down or operating very slowly right now, perhaps because everyone thinks like I do. Edit: Chrome seems to pass Acid2 and scores a 79/100 on Acid3.

Chrome Acid2 Screenshot

Chrome Acid3 Screenshot