Archive for February 2006
I’ve just read on Google Blogscoped about Online TV Recorder. It is an online PVR (Tivo) with the option to record and download programs for free. I don’t know about the legality of it. It seems to be half German half English with some nasty ads, but its a neat idea and does seem to be free. No personal experience yet.
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See also: My roundup of the funniest extensions
Yesterday I decided to undertake an experiment. My favourite browser, Firefox, allows its users to add extensions. Currently 1102 extensions are available at Mozilla update. I decided to install 100 of the most popular extensions at the same time, trying to avoid those that duplicated others functionality. Cruelly, the hundredth was the XPI delay remover.
This scrollable screenshot below shows the result. (View in own page)
It was really extraordinarily stable. The work of hundreds of programmers who had no idea their code would be used together, coexisting happily in the browser.
Here is what I got when I right-clicked:
Overall I was very impressed. The browser was a little slow on my machine (which doesn’t have impressive specs) but there were no crashes except when installing the extensions. The main problem I had was that the statusbar became so wide that on some websites I had to expand the browser window onto my second monitor! I discovered a number of extensions that I would not otherwise have known about and strongly recommend a trawl through at least the first hundred.
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Update: (28 Feb) Statistics
It takes around seven seconds to start up.
It freezes for at least one second between pages (I guess a lot is hanging on the onLoad.)
It has not yet crashed, half hour or so I’ve browsed with it, since all the extensions have been installed (for some reason it did crash immediately after installing them, before restarting.)
See also: My roundup of the funniest extensions
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Lol, the biggest error message you’ll ever see
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I was having a look through the logs of phpFunctions and noticed a couple of oddities.
The figures are blurred for phpFunctions intentionally.
Now phpFunctions, being an AJAX application only has one page (index.php), the other 2 pages were a mystery to me. I consulted the Hostnames section:
Most peculiar. I had problems accessing 192.168.1.12 (which looks to me like an IP inside a network), but Excite indeed has a Japanese page at http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/body/ . Has anyone else had experience with weird statistics showing up like this?
I really can’t work it out. At first I guessed it was someone using a typo in their Google Analytics code, but that can’t be it because Excite wouldn’t use Google for their statistics. Any ideas?
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As so many people don’t seem to know how to reduce Firefox RAM usage I thought I’d post it here.
- Go to about:config (in URL bar)
- Find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
- Change the value from -1 to something more like 1,2 or 3
Info from Ben Goodger
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There is something about this clip I find hilarious..
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I’ve just come across a great website lists stupid official Microsoft knowledge-base pages.
Just a few examples:
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This facial distortion tool is impressive but certainly not flattering.
Here’s me as an ape (no obvious jokes, please!):
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UPDATE: I’ve totally changed my view in the light of what David said in the comments and having re-read Mr. Kottke’s post, the following is simply an archive of my idiocy, scroll down for current views.
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Jason Kottke made a recent blog post about a plane which is going on a conveyor belt designed to keep it stationary in relation to the ground. He claims that the aeroplane will take off as usual.
In my opinion a better way to think of the problem is to simplify it by removing the conveyor belt. Imagine a plane which has a (frictionless) vertical metal pole going up through it. This means that it can move up and down but not forwards and backwards.
A plane generates lift, by the Bernoulli Principle(and Coanda Effect, see update), by air moving over its wings: the only factor affecting whether the plane takes off is therefore the movement of the air over the wings. The propellor/turbine of the plane is not designed to directly ’suck’ air over the wings. Instead its purpose is to make the plane move through the air indeed with some forms of propulsion no air would be sucked over the wings.
The propellor is designed to push against air to accelerate the plane in relation the air. The result of this is that air rushes over the wings faster. However if there is a large metal spike going through the plane it will not accelerate in relation to the air. The confusion arises because people think that accelerating the plane in relation to the air is the same as accelerating the air in relation to the plane. Propellors and turbines are designed to do the former and not the other.
The only air moving over the wings will be possibly a little generated by the propellor, and the wind. So without ridiculously powerful propellors mounted in front of the wings the plane will not take off. Obviously the bits of wing without a propellor on them will generate no wind at all.
In any practical circumstance the plane would not take off.
Update:
I have seen the error of my ways. My ’simplification’ of the problem was incorrect because it is not the situation that actually occurs. I can justify it in my own mind best by imagining the converyor belt made of ice, very slippery, and the wheels as skids or something else with very little friction.
Now imagine the converyor belt going backwards (the plane is not running an engine), if it was made of tarmac the plane would move backwards fairly fast, pulled along by the tarmac. If it was ice the plane would move backwards less fast because their would be less friction between the skis and the ice. If the surface was totally frictionless the plane would not move backwards at all. It could then start its engines and take off as usual, pushing against the air which would be still.
Many thanks to David for pointing out my errors in the comments.
Update:
Someone in the comments points to this from Jef Raskin which explains the Coanda Effect in addition to the Bernoulli Principle.
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The Financial Times reports on a disturbing development. The BBC has started a new self censoring website for China at BBCChina.com.cn. This will run alongside BBCChinese.com which has apparently long been censored.
Compare this on the new site:
to this on the uncensored version, which relates to press censorship in China:
While this is not as bad as Google’s censorship because the BBC was already blocked and because the BBC is not a gateway to the rest of the web I am still personally worried by this trend.
[Via Google Blogoscoped]
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I’ve moved the blog over to Wordpress, Drupal was a bit over complicated for this small web blog (it is better suited to major CMS affairs like Spread Firefox.)
Wordpress seems great at the moment and I must confess that I’m using the WYSIWYG interface (oh the shame!)
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