When I read the new Google comic book on the development of the new browser on the block though, Google Chrome, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the ideas behind it. The background to this by the way is that for weeks now I’ve had a very badly behaved Firefox install on my laptop, and I’ve switched backwards and forwards between Firefox 2.0.16 and 3.01 so many times that my poor computer’s dizzy just trying to keep up with it all. Constant crashes, locking up, and refusing to close, even when forcibly ending the process in Task Manager have refused to get rid of the damned thing! Mind you, IE’s been just as bad, but then that’s nothing new.

None of this has been helped by the fact that I’ve also been suffering from a very temperamental internet connection that’s been requiring me to re-boot sometimes upwards of ten times a day to get it running again.

On a web design forum I frequent at times someone had posted a thread about Chrome, and a link to the comic. I was hooked by Page 2 where they started talking about browsers needing to be more stable (yeah, so I probably really do need to get out more!) – after my recent experiences with Firefox etc. I’d heartily agree with that! Despite the apparent increased memory usage Chrome’s reported to have (which I have to say, having used it for about three weeks now I’ve not noticed, but then I am used to the memory hog that’s Firefox), the multi-threading makes sense – that’s how a web server OS operates and copes with thousands of requests being thrown at it all at once without crashing (see, I did remember something from the server management course I did last year!), so Google’s memory bloat argument makes a hell of a lot of sense from an architecture point of view. I have to say though, I’ve not particularly noticed a memory problem with Chrome at all though. With just Chrome running in additional to all the background processes, mostly I’m setting around 20% CPU usage and around 40% RAM usage on an AMD Turion X2 Dual-core Mobile RM-70 processor with 3 gig of RAM. More often than not, I’ve got multiple apps open, as I like to keep them handy on the Task Bar without faffing around waiting for them to open them up, especially if it’s something I’m using on and off all day. No problems with it running whatsoever though.

The second big selling point is that unlike the incredibly memory-leaky Firefox, a tab crashing isn’t going to crash the whole browser…and a task manager for each tab – now that’s really cool! (So, yeah, I know, I need to get out more!) In three weeks of using it, I’ve only had to kill one tab in that whole time, and the others went right on working. I just opened up another tab and the same site again, and continued where I left off. Compared to the multiple re-starts needed with Firefox, it’s been an absolute joy to use a browser that just works. Yes, people might be worried about Google taking over the world (like 90% of the world’s remotely bothered by Microsoft having a strangle-hold on almost the entire global PC software market anyway), but like they say, they’re a huge organisation with the infrastructure to do massive scale testing and catch bugs early.

The idea of having threads for different processes, all with their own memory, so they’re not hanging around waiting for some other process to finish so they can do their stuff makes a great amount of sense. Similarly, having the javascript engine generate machine code makes a lot of sense; why have a javascript engine that generates code that has to be interpreted when you can generate machine code that can be run directly on the CPU that’s running the browser? And when they started talking about designing the UI, again, by designing it from the user’s point of view (rather than saying, “this is how it’s always been done, so this is what we’ll do”), again, it makes sense (and Opera with it’s ’speed dial’, which I love, is a lot like their new tab page), and the sandbox too is a good idea.

I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for around three weeks now. I love the simplicity of the UI. Much like the LOTR with one box to rule them all, combining the search box and address bar into what Google call the “omnibox” just makes sense. For my mother, who has difficulty figuring out where to type the address and where to put what she wants to search for, I can see it will have an enormous benefit (and to me too, as I won’t have to re-do “How to use a search engine 101″ with her on a weekly basis!), but the minimalism of the whole interface just works. Devoid of all the buttons and menus and places to type things you find in a traditional browser, you get what you need, without all the distractions. Even being able to bookmark sites straight from the omnibox is just so intuitive, and I now find myself when at work and forced to use IE struggling to figure out where I need to press when in Chrome it’s just so there.

Last week I had a problem with my laptop which I suspected may be malware connected (my firewall, ZoneAlarm, kept asking me to grant server permissions (permission to listen for requests from other computers on the internet) to all sorts of programs which hadn’t ever before needed server permissions), and after following loads of leads/dead-ends after googling, found myself on some malware clearing advice forum where they were recommending a program called Malwarebytes. I downloaded and installed it, and sure enough I found I’d got three trojans, which neither Windows Defender or my anti-virus software, NOD32, had found. Spybot Search & Destroy and Spyware Blaster, hadn’t made it onto my new laptop yet as I had problems with it using a hell of a lot of memory on my old laptop and was in two minds whether to install it again. Jaybee, fellow webdev though was helping out a client in a similar situation last week, and said neither Spybot S&D or Spyware Blaster had managed to remove the problem, though they’d found it. I’m still not sure whether Spybot S&D’s gonna make it back onto mine.

I’ve also discovered Comodo’s free firewall as well, which is much more paranoid while training it than my old ZoneAlarm one ever was (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), and warns you about apps trying to create new directories, dlls trying to do stuff and such like, and actually gives you useful information about what they do rather than just a rather useless “Do you want to allow this?” message. Much more configurable.

What’s so great about the Comodo firewall? Well it’s made by Comodo, the people who are a certification authority for secure sites – the ones with a little padlock in the address bar of your browser when you’re shopping and banking online that shows the link to the website is secure and that the website is what it says it is, and not a scammer masquerading as your bank trying to get it’s hands on all your money. It’s free because it’s in Comodo’s best interests that people feel secure when they’re online, so the more people feel comfortable being online and shopping online, the more businesses that will be created that will their services. It’s not just a cut-down version of a commercial package though; it’s got features in it that some of the paid-for firewall software doesn’t have. It’s a free lifetime license, and updates, that are essential to keep it up to date with the latest threats out there on the internet, are free too, and automatically downloaded daily so you don’t have to worry about it. It also scans your computer for any nasties during the installation process, so not only does it watch out for stuff trying to download itself onto your computer and wreak havoc, but checks to see if there’s anything nasty lurking there so you can be sure you’re clean before it starts doing it’s stuff.

Over the years I’ve used various different security software, and various firewalls, and the last two I used got ditched because they used far too much of my computer’s memory and processor capacity and slowed things down, but Comodo is perfectly well behaved, and using very little of my computer’s resources, which keeps my computer happy, which also keeps me happy.

While I was at it, I also installed WinPatrol, that allows you to look at what processes are running on your computer and what they’re up to in much more detail than the Windows Task Manager program does. The really handy thing about it though I’ve discovered is that it’s got a nifty “delayed start” feature, where as it’s name suggests you change delay the start-up of apps when Windows starts. On my old laptop I had a load of stuff that all started up when Windows started, and it really slowed the start-up up. With WinPatrol though, not only can you easily take stuff out of the startup folder and stop other apps that aren’t in the startup folder all jostling to be opened up first, without using “msconfig”, but you can delay them starting to speed up your startup time.

I have some programs that run in the background, for example the backup program for my forums that downloads a copy of their databases to my hard drive at scheduled times, but I don’t necessarily need it the moment that Windows starts, so I can delay it until it’s actually needed. Similarly with programs such as Skype, where I’m not gonna be phoning someone up the minute I log on, now it starts up five minutes after Windows has started, so my laptop’s starting up much quicker than it was last week.

All in all they’re all playing nice together, and I have to say that so far I’m especially impressed with the Comodo firewall. A very nice piece of kit.

A clean and speedy computer! Now that’s what I like!

It’s been a busy month (hence the lack of me or Bliss around here recently) and I’ve been off on my travels to Brokie meet-ups in London and Brussels, amongst other things.

I’ve had major disasters with hard drives, slight panics over backups when my brain ended up nearly as fried as my hard drive, and the usual crop of medical dramas and unexpected hassles to deal with, and what I could do with right now is a very long holiday.

I’m pleased to report though that I’m now back up and running with a shiny new laptop, albeit with a somewhat temperamental internet connection, and the jury’s still out on Vista. All I can say is that Microshite as usual couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery! For a week now I’ve been trying to sign in to post my tale of woe of my internet connectivity issues on the Vista community forums, but will their damned website accept my email address and password? No! Correct email address; correct password. Microshite thinks they’re wrong though. In desperation I tried re-setting my password. They sent me the email link to reset the password to the correct email address, which kind of proves two things 1) the email address I’d been entering was right all along, and 2) I am capable of typing my own email address.

Next comes re-setting the password. Enter your new password…. *Enters new password* Apparently I can’t have that one because it’s the same as the one I had before…this is the same password I’ve been typing to use all week…

‘Problems logging in?’ asks a helpful looking link, so I click that. Now in Opera (which I’m currently using to browse with as Firefox has recently thrown a major wobbler) the window that should open won’t open. So I switch to the dreaded Incompetent Explorer (you’d have though by version 7 they really would have got it right by now, and then we hear there’s an IE8 beta out – joy!), and guess what? This time the window opens, a “windows help” popup, but scrolling down the list of helpful possibilities for not been able to log in (like you’ve typed your email address wrong, or your password (I think we’ve covered that bit), then I come to one that looks like it might be useful and click on it. I can see from the message in the status bar that it’s a javascript pop-up, but does anything pop up? No! So I click the next one, and the next one (wait for it, you’ll like this one) won’t open because it’s been blocked becuase it’s not been signed by a valid security certificate. It helpfully suggests I should check out IE’s help facility (um, is this the one that I’ve already got open, but it won’t display because they’re blocking their own content because they’re not sure they trust it, and there’s no ‘back’ or ‘forward’ buttons on the help popup, so short of closing it and hitting F1 again I can’t do that?). And 90% of the world’s computer owning population trusts these muppets to produce something that makes their computers work?

*sigh*

Anyhow, as I said, August’s been a busy month so expect lots of updates soon…that’s providing my internet connection holds out, and the Microshite software that runs my computer decides to actually play nice…

On Swatch’sofficial website, right up at the top, next to the breadcrumb navigation, is a little line that reads “@[insert relevant number here] .beats” WTF?! you’re probably thinking. What’s a .beat? Well…

Swatch has reinvented time with INTERNET TIME. Today’s lifestyle which demands simultaneous communication with different parts of the world via phones, Internet, e-mail, video-conferencing, and a host of other tools requires a truly revolutionary way of looking at and managing time. Hence, a completely new global concept of time that eliminates time zones and geographical differences was created.

That’s so true. A while back the inhabitants of one of my forums decided to try and break the record for the number of forum members simultaneously online, and so an arrangement was made that at 9pm on Friday everyone would make sure they were online. Naturally this was met with a chorus of “Hold on…”s from the US contingent, and “Uh?” from the Australian brigade, followed by much scurrying about to try and work out what time that was in their local time. Here’s something that sounds like it could do with being arranged in “internet time”, but what is “internet time”?

INTERNET TIME, an innovative, new unit of time, measured in units called “.beats” was founded on the 23rd of October 1998. On that day, Biel Mean Time (BMT) was inaugurated in a ceremony marked by the presence of N.G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd. and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Lab at M.I.T.

Hmmmm….still a bit light on details isn’t it? Apart from Biel now appears to be the centre of the universe. So off to Wikipedia we go in search of further information on this strange new thing (except that it’s not that new) called “internet time”. Wikipedia is a little more
forthcoming on the details of what this “internet time” malarkey is all about. Apparently,

• instead of hours and minutes, the day is divided up into 1000 parts called “beats”
• each beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds
• there are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company’s headquarters in Biel, Switzerland (equivalent to Central European Time)
• in it’s notation; for example, “@248″ indicates a time 248 beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 4:57:07.2 UTC
• Swatch doesn’t specify units smaller than one beat, but others have extended the standard by adding “centibeats” or “sub-beats” as a decimal fraction, for extended precision: @248.00
• like UTC, Internet time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo

I have to admit that I like the idea of .beats. There’s something somehow kind of appealing about the idea of using something “underground” that the world outside the geeky confines of the internet doesn’t understand – hell, .beats even sounds kinda cool and geeky, and having one universal time rather than saying, “Well we’ll meet at 6pm…that’s 4pm in your time, and 2am in your time over there…” sound much better. “Meetcha @650 .beats” sounds infinitely more geeky and cool in comparison.

Now a debate on the T175 course forum a while back was on what was the most important ICT invention – ever? My contribution to the discussion? Well I was torn between the humble microchip and the internet. Now of course the basis of the internet and the HTTP protocol was already in place when the web went and got itself invented – wouldn’t have really worked without it, and fabulous though the HTTP protocol is, if you’re of a geeky bent, without the invention of the web to sit on top of it, and the hyperlink and other hypermedia, it would all be a bit dull. I’m guessing that when people said the greatest ICT invention was the internet, they probably meant the web, and of course in everyday usage the two terms tend to be used interchangeably.

The web has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate, turning the world into a global village, and changed how we interact with so many things from banking and shopping online, to finding information, finding friends, and of course boring the whole world to death with our mundane ramblings on many millions of blogs Of course with good, always comes evil, and into that category falls MySpace, link farms, and Bebo (just three random picks from my list of web annoyances). Of course I was arguing the case for the humble microchip on the grounds that without the microchip and reasonably priced and sized computing power, computers would still be the size of small houses and the play things of scientists and academics.

Now apart from MySpace, there are obviously other disadvantages, or things that aren’t so good about the web. There’s online fraud for a start (I too have started getting inundated with emails from banks I don’t even have accounts with warning me my account’s been locked until I click on this special link and hand over all my personal details and passwords to some Lithuanian con artist). Communicating with anyone, anywhere in the world is probably one of the greatest parts of the web, though putting yourself in ‘Skype Me’ mode is just asking for trouble, and you might as well change all your online avatars to a sign reading “Skype Me – I like talking to perverts from Brazil” or some such like!

Now this is just a wild shot in he dark here, but I guessing that with the invention of “internet time”, Swatch’s marketing people imagined all of those people making arrangements to chat with their new Brazilian friend who’s just taken up their invitation to “Skype them” would be falling over themselves to adopt this new “internet time”, and would of course need a watch capable of displaying said “internet time”, rush out and buy this terrific new invention, and in the process make another few squillion francs for those clever little Swiss. The fact is though that “internet time” never really took off in a big way, and have never really been adopted by geeks en masse.

Why? The answer though I suspect is far simpler than no-one being interested in an “internet time”, but as we discovered from the chorus of “Hold on…”s and “Uh?”s when a few of us tried to arrange a global meeting. The fact is that simply whether you call them .beats, .dots, .nets, or anything else with a ‘.’ in front of it, though you can arrange a meet-up with your new Brazilian friend @640 .beat, though it may be @640 .beat for everyone with a clever little Swiss watch, somewhere in the world @640 .beat is still going to be stupid o’clock. That’s the fundamental flaw of web communication.

Now if those clever little Swiss marketeers could come up with a time machine, then I suspect they’d be really onto something.

On the positive side, I did it! Got to the bottom of my inbox and replied to all those emails that have been lurking there for eons! Yay!

Only a couple of weeks now until my trip down to London with Pinkie (Lisa) for an open-air screening of Brokeback at Somerset House, and then the following weekend I’m off to Brussels for the EuroBrokie meet-up – yee haw!!

Tonight I really should have been doing some some work on a web project, on the grounds that clients generally don’t tend to pay you until you’ve finished doing the work. I kind of got distracted though while looking for statistics on obesity (as you do!) – for some research for a leaflet, when I came across a site that at first nearly sent me scurrying back to the Google search results. When you type in “weight graph”, you get all sorts of weird results, and I found myself on a homegrown website with a child’s hand print background pattern and my first reaction was to back out of there as quickly as I could.

There were some photographs of a small baby though, a small baby in a hospital – or a small (tiny) baby in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit to be more precise. It’s written through the eyes of the baby, Abigail, but Daddy is Abigail’s secretary, note-taker, photographer and technical guru. I started reading part way through the story, but quickly decided I needed to go back to the start and read the story from the beginning.

Abigail was born at 26 weeks after her mum developed potentially fatal Hemolysis Elevated Liver Enzymes Low Platelets (HELLP) Sydrome in August 2001. The website follows the trials and tribulations of Abi’s hospital stay and the setbacks she faced along the way.

I’ve seen programmes on TV before about premature babies and their treatment, but somehow this seems more personal, more real somehow. I’ve spent the last three hours reading about Abigail’s progress and at this point in my reading she’s now 66 days old. The website’s a fascinating glimpse into the world of neonatal care, to the agonies her parents went through with every concern and set-back, and no doubt at the time a way for family and friends to keep up to date with Abigail’s progress.

There’s a bit of a spoiler on the homepage of the site, because it says in a big red scrolling marquee across the page that after 172 days Abigail made it out of hospital and got to go home, but I don’t mind about the spoiler, it just saves me having to skip to the final page to see how the story ends (it’s just as easy to do that reading on the web as it is with a traditional book!).

Tomorrow I’ll carry on reading and see what happened to Abigail on her 67th day, and I’ll try and be good and get back into some sort of regular posting habit here. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Abigail’s story.

What did we do before eBay came along? I’m not just talking about buying complete tat, rubbish we don’t really need, because there are an abundance of “bricks and mortar” places where we can do that. Charity shops sell all sorts of junk. Then there’s your good old fashioned junk shop, or second hand shop, and those ubititous “pound shops” (those places where everything is priced at £1 = cheap imports that fall to pieces/break as soon as you get them home, and you’re so embarassed to admit you bought something from one of those places you daren’t take it back – quite apart from the fact the bus fare to get there costs more than the £1 you paid for the item).

Then of course eBay provides us with a place to sell all those embarrassing 80s records we don’t usually admit to owning, or those jeans we’ve outgrown from 1995, which we post advertised as “vintage denim” (sounds much better). No, where eBay really comes into it’s own is in the fact that you can buy practically anything on eBay. “And this is a good thing?” you’re wondering. Well yes.

Say, for the sake of argument (having just had a quick look on eBay at auctions ending in the next few minutes), you wanted to buy a “Job lot of 71 Marvel/QC/Cliffhanger etc. – must see comics!” or a “Dual Hosepipe Shut-off connector fits Hozelock” – where would you even start searching for something like those online? Okay, so presumably you’d head on over to Google and start searching, but is there a particular shop you know of that sells those sorts of things? Do they have an online presence? With eBay it’s all under one roof, so to speak, and you can compare similar items from a number of sellers, and pick up some stuff that’s either common tat, or something really rare and unique. Then of course there’s the thrill of beating off the competition to bag that bargain just a nano-second before the auction ends…

“BUT WTF HAS EBAY GOT TO DO WITH THE CREATIVE PROCESS?” you’re still wondering. Well my recent purchases on eBay include, amongst other things, a brass ashtray, an old road-map from the 60s, a hotel room key from the 60s, assorted postcards, an old car licence plate, and a model toy truck. Where else but on eBay could you find such an odd assortment of things? How would you even start searching for such things elsewhere?The sellers may have described them as “vintage”, and some might describe them as “rubbish”, but to me they’re something far more important. They’re inspiration.

To actually be able to hold something in my hands, to look up close at, and to study things that come from the era and the area I’m writing about brings part of that world into my world, and actually being able to see those things infront of me, rather than just trying to imagine in my mind’s eye what they would have looked like, makes them real. They’re more real now to me, and maybe, if I do it right, they might be more real to readers of my story as well.

Little did those eBay sellers know it, but when they posted those packages to me, sometimes from far away, that those “vintage” items they posted on eBay to clear out some room in an over-stuffed cupboard or attic, or on the off-chance that someone just might be interested in them, for whatever reason, they’d cease being just old bits and pieces that might possibly be of interest to someone who collects odd things, but now they’re momentos of a story.

So now their transformation begins in earnest, the transformation from inspiration into momentos, because as my story progresses they become more than inspiration, and actually become part of the story itself, because each of them, in their own way, plays a part in the story. Nowhere else on the web could you find the ‘props’ to make that happen.

This week’s been a week of “firsts” for me, infact the past few weeks have held a number of firsts, and I’ve spent a good couple of days this week over on LiveJournal reading fanfiction (another first), just spinning my wheels, which I think’s done me good the state my head’s in at the moment with my current workload.

I spend probably around 90% of my working life online/at the computer, and a good proportion of my “off duty” time online too. I wander around the web an awful lot, researching stuff for work, looking for inspiration for sites, chatting on forums, managing my own forums, and sometimes just wandering around the web for pleasure (though I have to say that StumbleUpon is the work of the devil). There’s some fascinating stuff on the web, there’s useful stuff, there’s downright weird stuff, and everything in between.

What’s the point of this post? Well eons and eons ago – okay then, back in the 80s – there was a line in an old Pet Shop Boys song (I think it may have been “Love Comes Quickly”)…

Just when you least expect it; just what you least expect…
−− “Pet Shop Boys: “Love Comes Quickly”

That’s the beauty of the web, the allure of the web. Out there are billions and billions of pages, and equally huge numbers of hyperlinks. Click on any one of them and you could find yourself somewhere magical. Okay, you could find yourself on the dullest place on the web, on some weird site you just need to back out of as quickly as you can, washing your hands before you touch the keyboard again because heaven alone knows what nasties you could have picked up there. You could find some fascinating site on some obscure Welsh sheep farming site, or some horrendous 90s-esque atrocity complete with animated gifs and more <blink> tags and marquees than you can shake a stick at…or you could find yourself somewhere totally unexpected and wonderful; a jewel amongst the detritus.

I was looking for a temporary avatar for one of my online personae and was using Google’s image search to search out suitable pics. I found myself on Flickr and a few clicks later, though it wasn’t what I’d gone there looking for, I found a photo with a caption and an explanation of what had inspired the photo. Intrigued, I clicked the hyperlink cited, and there I was. I found myself in a place where I could totally lose myself, forget about all of my real life worries, and just immerse myself in another world. For the first time in I can’t remember how long I allowed myself the time to just switch of and read something just for pleasure, something without code blocks in it, if/else loops or tags, and even more miraculous, I actually finished reading something!

That, is the wonder of the web; finding that rare jewel amongst the detritus. One click and you can be in another country, another time, in another place.