Chrome Canary - Wonderful but flawed - Just like me

(click on pic for larger image)

"He's dead, Jim!".  That's what Chrome Canary tells me every time I try to play a youtube video. Chrome Canary and Windows 7 doesn't let youtube work. You always get the purple screen of death saying that Chrome ran out of memory.

When you download Chrome ( from here: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/canary.html ), the splash page warns you.  It says" Get the Bleeding Edge of the Web".  It says that this browser is not for the faint-hearted and it crashes regularly.

The splash page also says: "Google Chrome Canary has the newest of the new Chrome features.
Be forewarned: it's designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely."

So why did I get it? I am a developer among other things. When I develop Android, and I have an app with a web widget, often things like javascript breaks down.  These kind of web errors are often not reported in the Software Development Kit.  Only Java errors that throw exceptions are regularly recorded.  So when your app goes Islamic Terrorist Irrational on you, you can connect the USB cord to the Android device, type in chrome://inspect and click on devices, and you can get an idea of why you app has gone ape-crap or bat-crap crazy. A javascript console can be a very helpful thing.

Other features is that Chrome Canary is blazing fast.  In fact the only negative so far, is that it craps out with youtube and win7.  I am willing to bet though, that it doesn't crap out in a Chromebook.

Typepad Major Outage this Weekend

This weekend, I went to read one of my favorite blogs, and I got a 404 not found error.  Since this blog is slightly political, and somewhat critical of the government in a banana republic, I was concerned because the owner is also a friend of mine.  This is the government that arrested a prosecuted an activist who posted the picture of a person who died while suffering injuries in police custody.  Yes, the Bahamas is that country, and corruption and political interference in basic freedoms (speech, sexual orientation, equality of women) is a fact of life there.

As it turns out, Typepad was down with a major outage for the weekend.  They did have Twitter reports as to their status.  I feel better about my software bugs when major sites screw up.

I had to laugh at Typepad though.  They had this disclaimer:

This page (http://www.typepad.com/) is currently offline. However, because the site uses CloudFlare's Always Online™ technology you can continue to surf a snapshot of the site. We will keep checking in the background and, as soon as the site comes back, you will automatically be served the live version. Always Online™ is powered by CloudFlare | Hide this Alert

The CloudFlare thing didn't work. So much for CloudFlare. Here is a worse one for you though.  Since I was worried about my friend who is the author of the blog, I went to a website to check if TypePad was up or down.  The website is www.downrightnow.com.  I queried it about TypePad.  They said that TypePad was up -- possibly because the server was able to deliver a 404 HTTP error.  That was useless.

Joomla Review

I am a regular visitor to a site built with Joomla.  As the site grows, it is one of the most frustrating sites to visit.  The content consists of photos and entries, and it is s.........l.............o..........w, sssssssssslllllllllllloooooooooowww, how slow can you go to load.

Not only that, but every once in awhile you get a very long wait, and then a message saying that it cannot connect to the database.  If you wait awhile, reload and then wait some more, it eventually works.

I was consulting about 5 years ago when Joomla first broke out, and one of my colleagues was singing its praises to its simplicity for creating content management.  I wasn't about to put something brand new into an enterprise system and I am glad that I didn't.  It may be good for amateur and small jobs, but Joomla gets two thumbs down from me when it comes to doing heavy lifting -- or even moderate lifting.

How To Resize and Rename Photos

I had a problem.  I had to send a kajillion pictures to a person.  They were taken with a high resolution setting on the camera.  All of the photos were too large to be sent by email.

Usually when I have just a few, I open them in GIMP and resize the image.  This was a whole folder full of photos.

I searched the web for a free resizer and PhotoResize400.exe came up.  I gave it the college try.  I downloaded it from here:  http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize  and to my surprise, it wasn't zipped or anything.  The binary executable loaded directly onto the desktop.

I then separated out the pics that I wanted into a new folder on the desktop.  Then I closed the folder, grabbed it by selecting it, and drag and dropped it on the PhotoResize400.exe icon.  As quick as you could say "Gee I wonder if this works|, it was done.  I took a peek inside the folder, and sure enough it was done.

It preserved the original pics, and next to it, made a newer smaller version labeled -400.jpg.  (If the original pic was name 100234.jpg, it renamed it to 100234-400.jpg).  So now, it was a pain in the rear to separate them.  I decided to use DOS to do it.

I opened a RUN command shell and changed directory (cd command) to my desktop.  Then I did a directory listing (dir).  All of the photos were name September12-00x.jpg and the smaller ones were named September12-00x-400.jpg.

To separate them out so that the listing would group the smaller ones together, I had to do a DOS rename. It was easy as pie.  I typed in rename September12*-400.jpg  resized*.jpg in the cmd window.

What this did was rename the September12-00x-400.jpg to resized-00x-400.jpg.  The 00x was an incremental number (01, 02,03) so the numbering was preserved, it just took out the September12 prefix, because even the big ones (unresized) started with that prefix and they were a pain to separate.  Now all of the unresized ones started with September12 and all of the small ones started with resized.  When you did a directory listing or explored the folder, they were all neatly grouped into large and small by name.

As a product review, I fully recommend PhotoResize400.exe.  The photos are a little small for my liking, but it let me send a whole pile through the email.

Free Isoburner ~ Software Product Review

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I downloaded an iso image. It was an emergency universal boot disk for my failing laptop. I needed a quick little iso image burner. I came across Free ISO Burner at http://www.freeisoburner.com/ . Man, this is a tiny little binary that could! Best little iso image burner with a small footprint. No muss. No fuss. No bells or whistles. Gets the job done. The best basic iso image burner that I have found. 5 Stars.

Toshiba Satellite Lap Product Review

I just purchased a new Toshiba laptop because the old HP dual core just died. Actually it is in the process of dying. It is having mini-strokes. When I boot it, it doesn't boot. It doesn't POST. It just sits there and the HDD disk light flashes orange. This usually flashes orange when the accelerometer detects that the laptop is moving and parks the disk heads. After a while, the thing boots up, runs for awhile and then dies again. It is a crapshoot as to whether it boots and how long it takes.

So onto the Toshiba. It has a dual Core i3 genuine Intel processor and the hard disk is half a terrabyte. It should scream, but it comes with Windows 7 so it just marches. Nothing like an old XP for speed. (Did I mention that Microsoft sucks?).

Well, I am generally pleased with the laptop except that for human factors engineering, it is a FAIL. The keyboard is all wrong. When I am typing without looking and want to hit the shift, I hit the control. The shift on the left is way too small, and way too high. The return key is small below but enlarges into the row above, where the little pinkie on the right hand can't reach it. It is a pain to type on.

Other ergonomic things bug me. It takes me forever to find the little button to eject a DVD or CD. The delete button isn't handy. The track pad is over too far left. It is not centered like on any other normal computer.

The other thing that is slightly ticking me off, is that it regularly makes weird noises like a chirping for a few seconds then quits for a couple of minutes. I have to debug this one.

So while the computer seems okay, it is a bit of a pain to operate it. I have to learn to live with it, because Future Shop, where I bought the thing, had the wrong price on it, and they honored the tag that said it was $120 less that it should have been.

Update: The keyboard is huge pain, but I love the way that it runs cool compared to the HP.

And it really boots up fast and shuts down fast unlike the HP. I used the like the HP, but this

one is growing on me. The keyboard is still HUGELY frustrating though. But there are no more cooked skin marks on my thighs from an overly hot laptop.

Update 2: The speakers on the Toshiba sound tinny compared to the HP laptop. Still having difficulty with the keyboard, and now the sound sucks. But I really like how cool it runs. The HP actually left burn marks on my lap when I took the computer outside to program on the balcony overlooking the water.

Sony eReader Product Review

This isn't about software -- well in a sense it is. It is a product review about the Sony eReader. We are taking a long plane ride and my better half's birthday is on the day that we are taking the trip. She is an avid reader, and I decided to get her an eReader.

According to the online reviews, Kindle is the best, but I am an open source type of guy, and I wanted not to be tied to Amazon. The Kobo eReader has reliability issues according to online reviews, and the Sony one seemed to be the ticket.

I first evaluated the eReader tablet by Sony, where one could check email, and it was slower than molasses in January. I needed WiFi and the Sony eReader with WiFi, Handwriting recognition, a web browser and such seemed to be the ticket.

It is performing as expected however it ain't no Apple when it comes to design. My particular pet peeve is the stylus. My better half loves using the stylus (doesn't get the screen all fingerprinty), however there is a huge design flaw. There is no damn place to store the stylus. The thingie on it that is like the clip of a pen, is too wide to make it stick to the accessory cover that I bought for it. There is no where to clip it to the body of the reader. To me it is sloppy design. The innards work fine.

This makes me appreciate all the more, the beauty in the design of Apple products. They would never let sloppy design like this go by.

Update: I wish that I had bought a Kindle.