Wizard’s Blog

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As promised, the beta of Google Chrome was released today.  With great anticipation I downloaded and installed it.

The installer went away for a while, using 100% (of one) CPU, but I think that was because of the sheer size of my browsing history being imported from Firefox.  Need a progress bar there, I think.

When it finally installed, I started it up and…

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I get that message every time I try to load any page.

That makes me a saaaad panda

EDIT: The problem seems to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Security (specifically the Application & Device Control component).  Hopefully Symantec will release an update that fixes this soon.  In the meantime you can uninstall Application & Device Control without completely uninstalling Symantec Endpoint Security.

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Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project - Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser - I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security.  Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won’t slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down.  Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they’ve included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3’s Awesomebar and IE8’s Smartbar.  They’ve also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about.  Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8.  It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index - they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers.  So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them - I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I’ll definitely check Chrome out when it’s released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they’re releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

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Image via Wikipedia

DICE have announced that we can vote on what Battlefield: Bad Company single player map will be converted to a Conquest map for the (free) map pack coming this fall.  The map pack will contain the two maps that get the most votes as well as two selected by DICE.

The maps up for vote are:

• Acta Non Verba - Nestled with small villages around streams, rivers, and heavy forest could make for a perfect covert style infantry map.
• Crash and Grab - This level with spread-out villages and industries in the lower mountains could lead to great light armor and infantry battles.
• Par for the course - With a golf course in the middle of this map, this map could offer a great mix of golf carts, tanks, and gunships!
• Ghost Town - Dense villages, dried up rivers and high bridges could lead to intense Heavy Armor and infantry fights that scar this once peaceful desert!
• Crossing over - Dipping hills and patches of open fields mixed into the eastern European woodlands could make for an intense Gunship and Heavy Armor all out warfare.
• Welcome to Bad Company - With open fields and small pockets of forest, this foothill map could make for a mix of Medium Armor and Jeep battles.

Voting is only open until September 2, so don’t delay - vote today!

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Jaiku are back from migrating to a Google datacenter, and they’ve opened up invitations, so if you want one just leave a comment.

I’ve only just started taking a look at Jaiku, and it seems to be having some teething problems (probably because they opening up the invites).  So far it seems like a cross between FriendFeed (because you can import feeds from other services) and Twitter.

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As an example of how quick it is to create commands for Ubiquity, Zemanta have already made a command that takes the selected text from a web page and comes up with related tags, articles, pictures and links (the same thing the Zemanta plugin does).

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Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released yesterday.

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for years, and nowadays I only use IE when I have to (i.e. when someone’s web site only works in IE), but I still keep track of what they’re doing and of course I’m into anything with “beta” written on it.

Beta 1 was a bit of a disappointment because it was a lot slower than IE7 and had a lot of rendering problems on sites I use regularly.

Beta 2 is faster and has less rendering problems than beta 1, but it’s still not release quality.

What I really like about beta 2 are the features they’ve added to keep pace with Firefox:

• Smart Address Bar - so far it seems basically the same as Firefox 3’s smart bar (and there’s nothing wrong with that)
• Favorites Bar -seems a bit smarter than any of Firefox’s bars, not sure how much I’d use the cleverness though
• New Tab Page -Mozilla are only at the Labs stage with coming up with this type of feature
• Tab Grouping -I think there’s a Firefox extension that does this - meh
• Find on Page -as of Firefox v1…

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Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

A couple days ago, Mozilla Labs released a preview of a Firefox extension called Ubiquity. The blog post and video do a very good job of explaining what and why it is, but basically it lets you easily combine information from different web pages and services.

For example you can select an address on a web page, look up a map for it and put that into an email in one step.

It works like Quicksilver (Mac) or SkyLight (Windows) - you press a hotkey (default ctrl+space, which is reminiscent of SkyLight’s alt+space) and then type a few letters.  It shows you matching commands, and you keep typing until you find the one you want (e.g. just pressing “g” is enough to select “google search”).  Then you either type some data for the command to use (in “natural” language) or type “this” to insert the current selection and hit enter.

Additional commands for Ubiquity are easily written, so it can be extended very simply.

The preview is obviously not release quality yet - the UI is pretty basic and if you put the wrong input in you get a floating error message that you can’t get rid of.  Nevertheless it is extremely impressive, and I can’t wait for the final version.

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Image via Wikipedia

Years ago, Microsoft released previews of a technology called Photosynth that takes photos of a place and builds a pseudo-3D model of it.  You can navigate around in 3D and view the photos from that angle.

One of the problems with the technology are things that aren’t the same in all pictures.  For example if you took 100 pictures of a monument from all different angles, that would be an ideal subject for Photosynth, but if there were tourists in the photos that would confuse it because they’re in some photos but not others, and they move around between photos.

Photosynth looked really interesting and I was very excited to try it out, but apart from periodically updating the previews, nothing was released.

And then out of the blue, a few days ago they released it!

I’m eager to try it out, but I don’t have a lot of photos of one subject to use.  If I ever get around to it I’ll post the results here.

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I was a bit worried about how long it takes some of the pages on here to load, so I’ve added the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin.

It’s a bit of a pain to install because you need to get .htaccess and permissions all right, but once it’s up and running it takes care of everything else.

I was a bit worried that the static cached versions of the pages might have some problems with dynamic content, but so far I haven’t noticed anything breaking.

I haven’t had it long enough to be able to measure what difference it makes.  It’s not like I have a lot of traffic, but the last thing I want to do is scare people off with a slow site.

One of the things I was concerned about was that if my site loads slowly it could negatively affect how I’m crawled by the Googlebot.  Again, I won’t know how much of an improvement the caching has made for a while.

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In the past I have complained that when you pre-order a game from Amazon not only do you not get it on the release date but a lot of the time you don’t get it on the estimated delivery date either.

But (apparently) no longer, as Amazon are introducing a release day delivery service.  It costs $5.98, which would really piss me off except that it’s free for Amazon Prime members, of which I am one.

The first games affected are supposed to be Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Fable 2, and Gears of War 2.  I’m definitely buying Fable 2, but I think Star Wars: The Force Unleashed comes out first and I might be buying that, so I guess we’ll see how good their release day delivery is in a month or two.

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