The Blog of G

Just as well I’m not paranoid after watching this any one could be forgiven for being a touch on the paranoid side.

Maybe the DRI should take a look as well.

Thanks to Maryam Scoble for posting about this, I only started reading her blog yesterday (’cause Bobby boy linked to it ) so I’m still only getting to know you I guess but I gotta say I was surprised to find that I was only a mid-rank nerd I was always getting called a nerd when I was in school, I guess that shows how much teenagers know

Last weekend, I woke early on Sunday morning a bit like a Kid on Christmas day, excited full of anticipation for what the day would bring. As we know at this point It wasn’t the best day for Ferrari in Suzuka. Michael’s championship hopes all but gone, he even said him self he didn’t want to win it like that, meaning Alonso not finishing in the last race. The constructors championship doesn’t look good for them either 9 point’s adrift but as we head into the last race of the season, the last race of an era even, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a memorable climax of a phenomenal championship and career.

Anyway back to Suzuka, The pre-race coverage on ITV contained something very rare. They managed to grab an interview on race day, no less, with one of the most formidable men in F1, the evil genius behind the Ferrari conspiracy, Mr. Jean Todt. You can read it here.

I thought this was particularly interesting in reference to Felippe Masa. I can’t remember the last time I heard any team principle be so up front about there “second driver” and my hat goes off to him for not only standing up for his driver but also the way he slapped down the implied Ferrari conspiracy that Ted Kravitz was looking for confirmation on.

Congratulations Jean, I hope Felippe always has this much support from you

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, what’s new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spell-check as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with reasonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completely taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.