The Connected Circuit

So I finally got a chance to test out Google Chrome… initial verdict is that it is so so. For the most part, it works with a lot sites that I throw at it, some it doesn’t handle too well and it is missing many of the essential features that other browsers have in strides or maybe I just haven’t figured out how to use it.

Styling and Shortcuts:
So shortcuts are all generally the same as Firefox, which is a great thing, since I’m just about a shortcut freak. I’ve been known to stop using applications if they don’t have shortcuts. The clean fullscreen style look is really nice, it gives it this strange inverted fresh feel that has been lacking in many browsers.

Performance:
I thought this multi-process thing was a great paradigm when I first read about it, but I have some reservations about it. Right now I have about 15 tabs open in one window and bringing up the task manager I seek 10 “chrome.exe” processes running. I’m not sure where the other 5 are, but it takes up roughly 215 MB of ram. Opera with 17 tabs, takes up roughly 96 MB. Firefox with a whooping 32 tabs across two windows and 14 plugins installed eats up 457 MB. Granted, these aren’t true benchmarks, I’m just making a note of all this so do with it what you will. Chrome hasn’t really chugged along on my machine, but my thinkpad is handling it all (all browsers at the same time) pretty well.

I currently have version 0.2.149.27, so it has a ways to go. If Google keeps this thing on track, it has a wealth of possibilities. But my prediction now is that everyone and their mother is gonna create a competing browser now, which could be a disastrous thing.

--written by Peter To--

Today I attended one of the events for Internet Week here in New York City. Mashable’s Exhibit Hall, showing off some startups and new upcoming companies, more info here. I was pretty excited to see what was looming on the interwebs. Ir started out pretty well with me meeting some guys from edopter. A website where they, by aggregating ratings from their users and a variety of other sites, tries to predict the latest trends, breaking it further down by regions (right now it is limited to major cities, but I was told it would eventually spread out to more cities) and categories that range from things on the Internet to things outside of the world of the Internet and the mainstream, as well as age and gender. Though I never tested out the feature, you could even create your own trends and see how your prediction works out with their algorithm. Eventually they will add a geographical map to point out which locations are feeding into which trends the most. They said they had to pull the feature, but will work hard to work it in by Monday, which is when they plan to do the official launch. It was a pretty robust application and worked well from the brief time I spent with it. The team was made up of three guys, two of which were present and seemed to be very knowledgeable, which I can’t say for the next company I met with.

The Rubicon Project was a mess. I loved their idea, which was an ad optimization stats site. Depending on the content you have and the current ad networks, it figures out which ads work best on your differing pages, even breaking it down to individual pages and not just the entire website. It has many cool features and can be beneficial to anyone. The project itself impressed me, but the exhibitors were unprepared and seemed very disingenius and did not impress. Since the exhibition was being held in a bar, one of the exhibitors of the Rubicon Project decided to get a beer, he was slurring his words and were not able to answer most of my questions. I came away unimpressed and downright feeling awful that any company’s PR person would act so much like a drunken idiot presenting an idea that could actually compete with the big boys. I felt so disgusted I decided to leave the event.

I hope this weekend’s other Internet Week goes well. Tomorrow I’ll trying to make it over to the Chelsea Art Museum to check out the Design and Technology Thesis Exhibit of students from the New Schools. More info here. I will also make my way to the Come Out and Play Festival here in NYC and try out their Re: Activism political scavenger hunt. I’m number 27 and only 25 get to play, so I hope I get to play. Link here. The night will end at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to check out this Improve Music Show. It sounds pretty cool, they use audience members music and remix them or use them as inspiration for their acts that follow.

--written by Peter To--

Everyone has problems with technology even the most tech-savvy person has had a few problems which has driven him to the point of, either step on it until you can’t even recognize it anymore, or just buy a new one to replace it. The democratization of technology has given the everyday-man the ability to do something, such as creating a website, that a even a few years ago would have been out of reach for a plethora of individuals. But I see more and more everyday, people are taking this technology and never using it to its fullest extent, it just goes to waste. A few months back, I returned from my half year “finding myself” journey in Vietnam, to come to the realization that I need a cellphone again, since my plan was up (or so I thought, which is a story for another day) I began my search for the close to perfect, bestest cellphone with the cheapest price. I settled on dropping my current carrier Sprint in favor of selling my digital soul for two years to AT&T for the AT&T Tilt aka HTC Kaiser aka HTC TyTN II aka a whole bunch of other names. A month or so later, my roommate decided that he was in need of a phone upgrade, whilst trying to stick to his carrier of Sprint he decided that paying $400 for a brand spankin’ new phone, also from HTC (he opted to get the HTC Touch) was a good way to be on par with myself and my phone.

Months later I have hacked, read dozens of forums and reflashed my phone to slightly near-perfection and am loving it. But my roommate’s main uses for his device are as follows, texting (on a non-qwerty only touch screen device), phone calls and watching the broken web on Pocket IE. Calling it a waste in a great piece of technology is an understatement. For what he uses his phone for he should have stuck with his previous device the Moto Q, which has an awesome full-qwerty keyboard for texting and can make calls. As disappointed as I am right now, it was expected that he was never going to ever “use” the device.

I “work” in a computer lab, where students and faculty come in with work and occasionally (read: all the freaking time), have problems accomplishing tasks, you know things like printing color copies or copying and pasting a formula from one cell to another, so I usually get asked for assistance in these items. While helping I get the expected thank you’s and such, but I also get the “Why isn’t this working?” or “This should just work”

I guess my main point in this matter is that people are just becoming lazy and complacent and either think that technology should “just work” or just buy something to be chic and stylish. I think one way to solve this is to go back to doing things the hard way, then one can fully appreciate technology and its usefulness. Although there is a growing number of modders out there, their still a very niche population. By simply taking something apart, say a radio, one can learn so much about it. This is my call to bring back the past, bring back the times when things were “hard”, where messy html ruled the universe instead of discombobulated facebook and myspace pages. Go back to your computers and instead of asking your tech-savvy friend to figure it out for you, do it for yourself. Take out that screwdriver, open it up and just mess around with it until you have a mess of screws and wires laying around and just try to put it back together. If it doesn’t work, then take it apart again and redo what you did.

--written by Peter To--