Google Street View Art

It's amazing how art and technology go hand in hand. Google brought us the nifty street view technology on Google maps. So naturally, people have been using it as a medium for art.

New Version Of Chrome

Wow, just as I was commenting that the new browser wars were resulting in some serious improvements in web browsing, Google released a new version of Chrome.

Latest Chrome version: Total: 837.4ms +/- 1.3%

This convincingly gives Chrome the Javascript performance lead in SunSpider.

Competition is awesome for the consumer because in the end we get a better product. =)

Google Chrome Vs Firefox 3.1 (Minefield)

The browser wars are pushing browser technology to progress much faster than before. For example, a lot of work has been put into boosting JavaScript performance. Under Google Chrome or Firefox 3.1 (Minefield), web pages load incredibly quickly. One of the industry standard JavaScript benchmarks is SunSpider. This is a side by side comparison of the two running on my computer:

Google Chrome: Total: 1138.8ms +/- 0.9%
Firefox 3.1 (Minefield): Total: 984.6ms +/- 1.4%

You can see that Firefox is overall just over 10% faster than Chrome on this particular benchmark. Both of these versions are beta status.

For reference:
Firefox 3.1 Minefield) (JIT off to simulate slightly older versions of Firefox): Total: 1899.6ms +/- 0.7%
Internet Explorer 7: Total: 23412.2ms +/- 2.4%

Both Chrome and Firefox 3.1 are over 20x faster than Internet Explorer 7 at JavaScript in this benchmark. That's a pretty big improvement over last generation browsers. ;)

Google Indexes A Trillion Websites

It's kind of mind boggling how much information Google handles nowadays. Their search apparently covers one trillion websites now.... As a programmer, I find their service to be all that much more amazing. A decade ago, indexing a trillion websites would have been completely unreasonable. Even today, that's quite an incredible computational feat and it's become pretty much a daily part of our lives (for most internet users, I'd imagine).

In other news, I'm now at my buddy's place and my setup is fairly livable. My move in yesterday was not too bad aside from me suffering from pretty strong allergies. I spent some time cleaning the room a bit, and my allergies have abated. I also ended up driving up to Santa Monica to test out the commute today and the results weren't too encouraging. The drive took roughly 50 minutes each way in moderate traffic (not peak commuter hours). I have a feeling I'm going to hate the commute.

Google Bombing John McCain

Google bombing is quite a powerful technique to subtly influence people and it's simple to do. There's currently an effort to google bomb John McCain with negative articles about him. All you have to do is spread around links such as these:

John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain

And you've contributed to the effort. When people search Google for John McCain, those articles will have a higher ranking due to the way google's link analysis works. =)

Google Docs Exporting Is Terrible

I tried exporting my Google Docs resume as a PDF because I figured that was pretty platform neutral. The resulting document looked nothing like the original. So I tried exporting it as a Microsoft Word Document. The resulting file crashes Microsoft WordPad. I then tried exporting it as a Rich Text Document and the resulting document again looked nothing like the original.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the export formatting problems have to do with the use of tables.

Anyways, I guess I can just export it as HTML since that works flawlessly. It damn well better since that's what it uses to display in the browser. Beware if you're planning on using Google Docs to work with any of the other formats and you plan on using tables.

Google Docs Is Not Quite Solid

Today, I tried importing my resume from Microsoft Word into Google Docs to update it (and to avoid having to install Microsoft Word). I was impressed by how well it worked. All the tables and formatting looked about right except for the position of one small table. My disappointment only began when I tried editing it.

I first tried to add a new entry in the work experience section for my most recent job at The Collective Studios. The editor continually had issues attempting to figure out what text belonged in which bulleted list and the spacing was totally unmanageable (perhaps for the same reason). I verified over and over that the spacing was all set to single space and the text was all the same size, but I had to end up re-entering text a few times to get the spacing to be consistent.

Then I tried to fix the little table. It was utterly impossible to move it. I ended up just remaking a new version of the same table so I had better control over it.

All in all, the Google Docs editor works amazingly well, but it still can't quite compete with good old fashioned word processors like Microsoft Word.