Berkeley

So James, Jeff, Yvonne and I biked to Berkeley yesterday. From Palo Alto, it's 64km.

We had a rather adventurous journey. First my rear tire blew out, so I had to come home and grab another bike. Then we got lost a few times. But we eventually made it.

Entrance gates to the Berkeley campus

I think I like the Berkeley campus better than Stanford's. It has its gorgeous buildings just like Stanford, but the campus has more trees and is built on a hill, so it's a bit more interesting. Plus Berkeley feels much more student-y. Walking around Stanford, you don't get the feeling that the place is teeming with lots of students, but both times I've been to Berkeley, it's been packed with students, even on weekends.

The Berkeley library

Both campuses are far prettier than Waterloo, which of course isn't saying much. But it does make me wish I didn't have to go spend a gloomy winter in Waterloo after this term. Sigh. At least there's only one more to go.

Serenity

It kicked ass. Best movie I've seen in a long time. Go see it.

October 04, 2005 (link)

On Napping

sfllaw: you must teach me this incredible "working while napping" ability you possess. If I could get a few hours work done in the morning while I'm sleeping, say from 6am to 10am, that'd really boost my productivity.

October 09, 2005 (link)

Meebo

This thing is pretty bloody cool. AIM, ICQ, MSN and Jabber all in a (non-sucky!) web client, for free. These guys even implemented a window manager in HTML. Best part: no annoying GAIM popups! Yay! Anyway, give it a try; you'll be amazed how good it actually is for a web-based IM client.

October 10, 2005 (link)

Jar Jar Binks

So when drheld, mag and I lived here last term, we were dismayed to discover a Jar Jar Binks dancing toy on the porch of the house. We had no idea whose it is, but it worked; if you pushed a button on it Jar Jar would without fail do a little dance for you.

It's still here this term, and what's more, its batteries still haven't died. To allow the rest of the world to enjoy this wonder of technology, we uploaded a video of it to Google Video. (Flash required, unfortunately.)

October 12, 2005 (link)

Terminal "speed"

behdad writes about optimising gnome-terminal. He won't get any complaints from me, but I don't think the comparison with xterm is all that useful:

• A bitmap font is used in xterm, while a TrueType (and likely anti-aliased) font is used in gnome-terminal. Clearly the anti-aliasing impacts performance.
• There is no treatment of how often each terminal is updating. I can make gnome-terminal appear to be screaming fast compared to xterm in this test simply by having it update the screen far less often. This is partially a usability question; when you can't keep up, how often do you update? There's no clear answer, unfortunately.
• I don't think people care particularly how fast their terminal is while minimised (at the very least, it's secondary when it comes to optimising).
• There was no treatment of memory usage per terminal window, which is important when you want to have lots of terminals open. For a while (GNOME 2.2 days) gnome-terminal ate up a good few MB for every open terminal, which is not exactly friendly. I don't know how it is these days.

October 19, 2005 (link)

Pure Pwnage

The latest episode is out, featuring my hometown of Calgary. These just keep getting better. Go download it now.

October 20, 2005 (link)

Madness

So my recent insane thought began with looking at meebo and being impressed with how well they've essentially implemented a window manager and various widgets in DHTML and JavaScript.

Then, in recent days, I came across all kinds of crap like this where people are constantly tweaking various widgets in JavaScript to make the onchange handler less annoying in IE or make select drop-downs nicer in FireFox or what-have-you.

So what you have is some very impressive, rich applications on the Web that all behave wildly inconsistenly because one dude likes the IE select behaviour so he tweaked it to work that way in FireFox and another guy likes his checkboxes inverted so he tweaked the onchange handler, etc.

So then my thought was "we need a toolkit for JavaScript." Yeah, big whoop, everybody and their dog has said that and claimed it to be some kind of sweeping revelation. But what if we made things a little more interesting and implemented an existing toolkit in JavaScript? Like, say, GTK? I am going to step down to the level of various technology pundits (*cough* Dvorak *cough*) and make a bold declaration:

It's time we stop playing around with web pages and start developing software for the web.

If that didn't make you gag, I don't know what will.

October 23, 2005 (link)

Pure Genius

So I get some email from mrwise, and what ads does Gmail decide to show me? Why, ads for fart machines of course! Classic.

October 29, 2005 (link)

Stupid Country

So normally, even though I am in a rather stupid country led by a rather stupid leader, things aren't too bad since northern California is one of the most liberal areas of the country, and Googlers tend to be pretty forward-thinking too (sorta comes with the territory).

However, every once in a while something happens to remind me that this country really is incredibly fucked up. This evening, I'm biking home from work, like I always do. I happen to have laundry with me, because we do that at Google. All of a sudden I get stopped by a cop.

He explains to me that there's been a burglary near by and he just wants to ask me a few questions. Fine; I show him my driver's license, my work badge, explain that all that's in my backpack is laundry and let him look through it. Then he calls another cop, who arrives and asks me the same questions again. Then, out of the blue, they become very interested in my shoes. Then a third cop comes to examine said shoes. At this point I'm doing everything I can to contain my laughter. Here are 3 cops, looking at my fucking shoes at 1am, while the actual robber (if indeed there was one) is long gone.

But what's even worse is that cops around here actually do crap like this. This is the third time I've been stopped because there has been a "robbery near by." It just seems so bizarre to me that the cops have nothing better to do than drive around the office parks of Mountain View, CA protecting random companies from buglaries. I mean, isn't that what people buy insurance and install security systems for? Meanwhile, across the bay there are probably people shooting each other in Oakland. Like I say, fucked up country.

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