Today, Google release a beta of their new browser software, Chrome. Like Mozilla Firefox, it will be Open Source.

This comic strip explains the concepts behind it. The ideas look good, very solid.

There is the possibility of ‘Browser Wars’ re-erupting - but if they do, I don’t see it repeating MSIE/Netscape, as there new features were introduced ad-hoc. There is more emphasis today on being standards compliant - and this is a good thing. I don’t imagine that Google would want to promote non-standard html code, it’d make their core business more difficult - and so another standard compliant browser out there will be a kick to MSIE to get those remaining issues quashed (especially with CSS).

The bigger risk is google being too big, too powerful and breaking their ‘don’t be evil’ motto (some would say ‘too late’). Fingers in too many pies and all that. Whilst Chrome has the potential to squash all before it - I don’t get that vibe at the moment. Let’s see how things develop.

Links:

• Dotlife
• BlogScoped
• ZDNet
• Slashdot
• Blogscoped (Screenshots)
• TechCrunch
• Technologizer
• Rough Type
• Download Squad

My monitor failed this morning - so out I went and acquired a new one. It’s widescreen, so it takes some getting used to - but already I like the extra real estate.

I’m composing this in a full screen window (having pressed ‘f11′ in firefox) - it’s luxury!

I’ve been having CPU Load errors of late. I don’t know why this is - something to do with SQL requests, but it’s very frustrating.

I can only assume that something is over-zealous in the SQL calls. Therefore, I’ve removed any plugins that weren’t immediately needed, removed things like the calendar (which to my mind is just ‘cruft’ - who cares if a post went out on the 3rd August? Aren’t people more likely to use the search box?)

One thing I found was that the database backup script ran on both murky.org and the backup domain simultaneously - this was killed with extreme prejudice!

Plan for the future:

1. Continue to tag old posts.
2. Remove/Reduce categories so that I have a few main categories only
3. Work a new theme which I’ve done from scratch - I have my plans, but this isn’t a quick thing.
4. In the age of decent search engines, do I really need archives which are date based, category based etc? Should I not redirect data based links to some other archive, allowing for fewer cached pages?

It’s possible that one cause of CPU load is the tag editor I’m using behind the scenes - it accesses many posts at once - so it’s possible that the CPU load thing might sort itself out once this task is done - or when I limit the number of posts edited at once!

It could be that there’s something much more fundamental and the host itself is just not up to the task of running a low-traffic site which has WP SuperCache on it. In which case, I may have to change hosts. Up until the last few days, this hasn’t been a problem though, so hopefully removing a few database lookups, and tagging fewer old posts at once might make things play nice again.

Either way, Argh! Don’t just tell me that there is a high load, tell me which scripts are responsible!

Anything printer related causes the program to crash with the error:

“spooler subsystem app has encountered a problem and needs to close”

I so love Windows…

This looks fantastic, a 3d modelling system called ‘teddy’ allows 3d models to be built based upon freehand drawing:

According to slashdot this is old news, but it’s new to me…. I’ve had a bit of a play with it, and it’s not as easy as the video makes it look!