Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there’s a new Internet Browser on the block!
Google Chrome be it’s name and – arrrr – she be a fine, quick browser to boot*. Still in Beta, meaning there’s still a lot of work to do before it’s suitable to release to the general public, but what’s already there is impressive.
The thing is FAST. Having considered Opera 9.5 the current pinnacle of browser speed (with Firefox 3 nipping very closely at its heels) I was blown away by how much faster and more responsive Chrome feels, particularly on JavaScript-heavy pages; it actually makes Opera look like a sluggish, last-gen product...
Another feature I particularly like is the separate processes-per-tab. No longer do we have to suffer browsers that completely lock-up when just one tab misbehaves! Further, these separate process are ‘sandboxed’: a technical term describing how the browser segregates each progress from the wider OS it’s running on. Malware and other nasty little web-buggers should now have no access to vital systems, now that they are securely confined to their particular browser tab, keeping you safer online.
There’s a 30-page comic presentation that goes into depth about the design process and new features which isn’t as dull as you might think. Having read it, I find myself greatly excited by Chrome for already managing to find several key improvements in a crowded and fiercely contested browser market. Ok, lots of what it does has been ‘taken’ from Opera (inspired, homaged or ripped-off, depending on how generous you feel) - the Speed-dial, the tabs above the address bar, the ‘Omnibar’ search functionality – but in all cases they’ve made small but genuine improvements. Google Chrome, Yesterday I have a great feeling about this piece of software, this beautiful hodge-podge mongrel of ideas and tech drawn from Opera, Firefox and Safari. It’s Open Source, too, meaning that once the source code has been released into the wild anyone can integrate their favourite features/extensions/plugins/themes...which should manage the neat trick of keeping nearly everyone happy. Not only that, but any feature that Chrome has can be freely adopted by any of its competitors.
Thus with one dramatic and seemingly effortless gesture, Google manages to re-energise the so-called 'browser war', and shows us a little bit of the future, too. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on this one from now on...
[UPDATE] One thing Chrome doesn't do very well is render this blog! I'm missing my funky custom header image! CSS problems, perhaps?
- - - *No, there was no reason for the pirate-speak there, that's just the way it sounded in my head as I was writing it.
I have the loveliest girlfriend in the history of girlfriends (sorry ladies, but you've ALL been outclassed), who has spent the last week giving me the space I wanted to indulge my inner Sci-Fi geek by watching an entire year of Stargate: Atlantis in one go.
But I wonder how she'd cope if I bought this...10 years worth of Atlantis' parent series, SG1 (and their first direct-to-DVD movie).
"Honeybunch? Sweetie-face? Snuggly-wuggly-buttocks? Can I have the next two and a half months to myself to watch some more TV?" Yeah, she'd love that.
Heh. I'd probably have to space them out much wider anyway, to avoid driving myself mad in front of the TV.
In honour of the Coldstream Civic Week I’m not attending, next week - 4th to 10th August - shall be a special week devoted to feeding my inner Sci-Fi nut all the Sci-Fi it can handle. After a few weeks of markedly increased social activity, next week will see me disconnecting telephones, locking the front door and posting vicious, discouraging notices on my front gate and door along the lines of:
“F*** Off, World: My neglected soul and I are cheerfully pretending you don’t exist.” I won't be taking any time off work but I won't be meeting anyone afterwards either.
The other and possibly only legitimate reason for this celebration is the imminent arrival of two pieces of SF media, one of which has been several years in the making:
1) The Hidden Empire series – book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, by Kevin J Anderson.
The keener-eyed among you will have noticed the shiny numeral in that title and yes, just as with those dreadfully written but massively popular books about some spotty wizard and his chums, this number seven is also the last in the series.
Across the six previous novels, one per year, I’ve been through an epic space opera set on a variety of worlds, populated by a diverse cast of interesting characters all threatened by a slightly-clichéd-but-still-fairly-cool collection of aliens, monsters, evil politicians and killer robots. By the end of book six, we’d begun to see the forces of goodness finally standing tall and booting evil squarely in the rump. There are, however, a few loose ends running about - some large, some small - who’s rumps are, as yet, un-booted...
This is MY Harry Potter moment, so I intend to have the tear-eyed fun you all had last year before you found out that Snape kills Dumbledore. (Is it too late to ruin the plot for anyone? Oh, shame...). I won’t be queuing from midnight outside Waterstones – I’m doing what the smarter Potter-ites did and ordering through Amazon – but I will be giggling and squealing like a girl when I tear open the package.
Also en route from Amazon is
2) Stargate Atlantis: Complete Season 4
The second best sci-fi series that I currently collect (BSG = 1, Doctor Who is in 3rd) reaches Season 4 on DVD. I don’t watch it on TV for the simple reason I’m of the firm opinion TV is a dying medium and just isn’t worth shelling out whatever exorbitant price per month Sky are charging these days for another hundred or so channels of moronic garbage that I’ll flick through constantly until I throw the remote away in disgust before finding the few priceless twinkling programming gems I would actually watch. (SKY TV killed British telly, you know, leaving only the shambling corpse-like remnant to stagger along chewing people’s brains away with endless reality shows, shows about making money through whatever medium (houses, entrepeneurial enterprise) and a plethora of aggravating celebrity cooks)
*deepbreath/popsquicktablet*
Yes, so, season three ended - as most series do - on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Ancient city of Atlantis lost in space having narrowly escaped a deadly energy beam death ray fired at them by a super-powerful colony of humaniform robotic intelligences known as Replicators, who the Atlantis team met and managed to royally irritate several episodes earlier. Proactively bombing their homeworld in the finale (in the name of protection) didn’t do much to help ease tensions either, he says wagging a stern finger at the US military, although that 90-second long shot of the cluster-nuke falling through the atmosphere was sheer CGI sex.
Season four has apparently suffered a little in terms of quality, what with all that Writer’s Strike business that happened in the US (something about them not getting paid for stuff they do on the internet which is identical to the stuff they do for telly but without the cheery wage packet at the end) but I’m looking forward to it anyway, although replacing Dr Weir – the lovely, very capable and very moral civilian leader of Atlantis since the show’s beginning - with Col. Samantha Carter, a refugee from the whoops-just-finished Stargate SG1 is bound to piss me off as much as it did when I first heard about it two years ago.
Her hair is apparently shit for the whole year, too (Ha! Take that, Amanda Tapping!). But I hear they got rid of her as well, now, in Season five for the crime of being dreadfully dull so at least I can take heart from her being a temporary fixture. Oh, but wait! Now that they've killed the Atlantis Doctor with the laughable scottish accent they're replacing him with actress Jewel Staite, known and revered among SF geeks for her portrayal of Kaylee in Joss Whedon's legendary and cruelly cancelled series, Firefly - hurrah!
Anyhoo, it should be great, and even bad SG:A can’t be any worse than the depths of fantastical willy-waving Doctor Who has been mining recently. (Don’t ask – I might tell you...)
Run Rabbit Junk, an awesome piece of background music from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This next piece is the sublime title theme from the show, entitled Inner Universe. I've rarely heard such beautiful choral female melodies...made even better, IMHO, by fact she's singing in Japanese and I can't understand a word! Enjoy!
Like many little boys in the 80's I dreamed of being an astronaut. Star Wars fever no doubt played a huge part in this (Fun fact: my brothers and I had one or more of every SW toy and figure that Kenner released - apart from one very rare bounty hunter, I think...) but television back in those days was very much about promoting futurism; I would sit in front of Tomorrow's World wide eyed with wonder: Newsround, the popular BBC news programme aimed at children, and Blue Peter (back when it still listened to children's opinions) both regularly ran features on real life astronauts and shuttle launches. As a consequence, 'NASA' was a word more holy to me than 'Jesus', as I'm sure my Sunday school teachers learned the hard way, listening to me rabbit on about space battles and lightsabers and how many moons jupiter and saturn possessed and how many light years it took to get to the nearest star after Sol...
I'm happy to report that I grew out of those silly fantasies aged 10...when I became an atheist (ba-doom-ching!).
I even got to stay up late one fabulous night to watch (on TV) the Space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. At one point I think I could actually describe, in detail, the precise manoeuvres each orbiter would make during take-off and re-entry, the fearsome extremes of temperature they would encounter and the precise angles of descent that meant the difference between a safe return and a multi-million dollar fireball. I knew the names of each orbiter as well as I knew my own: Columbia, Discovery, Enterprise (yes, named after that one), Atlantis...and Challenger:
Everything was different after Challenger. The explosion, which I remember today as clearly as if it were yesterday, wasn't just the horrible death of a beautiful ship and her intrepid crew, it was the death knell of that whole crazy optimism we all felt about space, the future and our expanding human frontier. A sobering realisation that the party wasn’t just over, maybe it had never existed in the first place. The Western World was never to be the same again, and my dreams took one giant step...backwards, confronted with the brutal reality of a space programme sold as the grandest of human achievements, but sadly, desperately, under-funded and managed, it seems, by a lesser species of monkey than the ones they used to test in their simulators. The collapse of the USSR brought us down the rest of the way.
NASA still exists today, of course, still focused on the enormous universe beyond our planetary boundaries (Man on Mars next - woohoo!). But now there are a plethora of other organisations out there, eager to stretch out their hands and take us out into our solar back yard. We even have the ISS, a gigantic space-station in orbit on a grander scale than either Skylab or Salyut were.
So why the dew-eyed reminiscence? Check out this gift Suzanne brought back for me from her recent trip to the US (she knows me so well!):
Looks like a little lump of moon cheese, doesn't it? Apologies for the blurry camera-work. The DigiCam and I need to have a little chat...
It’s a block of freeze-dried mint choc chip ice-cream, of the type shuttle pilots would tuck into on their missions (and possibly throw at each other during moments of weightless boredom): Space Food!
I’ve been warned that it’s not the nicest thing I’ll ever put in my mouth (insert own joke here) but rather than take it home and give it pride of place next to the deeds to the acre of moon that I own (Yeah, if America and/or China even think of building on MY land they’ve got a shock coming!), I think I’m going to have it today for lunch. If nothing else I’ll get to pretend for those special few moments that I have finally become the thing I ached to be in my youth.
UPDATE: Well, I ate it. While recognisably my favourite ice-cream flavour it had a very weird texture, requiring lots of saliva to turn it into anything approaching real ice-cream. Still, I enjoyed every bite. Go, Space Food!
I've just posted a new article on Blue Chamber's Geeky twin-sister, The This Room.
Yes, I really do get excited by how bits of code are coming together. Not something you see me admitting here every day. But from another perspective, the last five articles I've written there have all had pictures and I'm very pleased with how bright and colourful it now looks.
it’s suitable to release to the general public, but what’s already there is impressive.
10 years worth of Atlantis' parent series, SG1 (and their first direct-to-DVD movie).
How about you?
WIDGETIZE