Arantius.com

The Birds Are Fed

2009-06-27 10:52 - General

A few weeks back, I bought a bird feeder, in an attempt to entertain my cats. I hung it out the window and had poor luck for a while. If it gets wet, the seed turns into a solid nasty brick, with stuff like moss growing in it. Once I managed to keep it drier, the birds came. They're skittish though! It took me until this morning to snag a shot of it in use:

Normally they'd notice me moving into view to aim the camera and fly away. This pair did, too, but came back very quick. And the cats like it!

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On Bing and Google

2009-06-17 22:00 - Web

So surely by now you've heard, Microsoft has released a new search engine called Bing. They're even running commercials on TV. The blogosphere has been alight. But does it matter even one iota?

This is data for arantius.com, from Google Analytics. Notice the logarithmic scale! I had to do this, or else everything but Google was mashed into the same six pixels at the bottom of the graph. So Google referrals hover over 10k per day. The next highest value per day is 250. Most hover in the 100-200 per day range, with the three separate bits of Microsoft reaching nearly down to single digits.

Microsoft is showing distinct growth since the release of Bing, going overall from 62/day to 249/day, or about four-fold growth. But this (linear) rate of growth would need to be sustained for two years to begin to match where Google is today.

So what's the fuss?

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Maemo Browsers Comparison: MicroB, Fennec, Midori, Tear

2009-06-13 11:33 - Tech

I've been on vacation this week, visiting my Dad. Shortly before I left, I discovered the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. I decided it would be a great way to read the eBooks I was thinking about bringing, and decided to get one. It runs Maemo, a customized (Debian-based) version of Linux designed to run on these tiny tablets. I've been enjoying the device quite a bit.

Being an "internet tablet", one of the things it should do well is web browsing. It comes with a very functional browser, but as I was discovering all the programs that I can install, I found others. In fact, I now have four different web browsers installed on my NIT. Which is best? Which should I use? I quickly found strengths and weaknesses of each browser, but no clear winner. What follows is the best of both my objective and subjective judgements on the topic. First a quick key:

	Feature not provided
	Feature partially provided
	Feature completely provided

Where "partial" means either not as completely as the other browsers, or somehow lacking (in my opinion). Completely provided means it satisfies me. First, I'll present the table of data. Following that will be a section for each browser, pointing out my observations, and details that don't fit into the table.

	MicroB	Fennec	Midori	Tear
Links	Home WP	Home WP	Home WP FAQ	Home (?)
Tested Version	1.0.1	1.0b1	0.1.4	0.3.1
Rendering Engine	Gecko	Gecko	WebKit	WebKit
Extensions
Bookmarklets
User Scripts	*		*
User Styles			*
In-page Anchors
Stylus-drag Scrolling
Hardware Cancel as Back
Hardware D-pad	Anchor selection	Anchor selection		Scrolling
Session Restore / Crash Handling	? *		*	*
Tabs
Cookie/Privacy Clear
.install file handling
Search In Page		*
Select Text
"Right Click" (long tap)				*
HTTP Authentication
SSL Self-signed Cert			*	*
Flash: YouTube
Flash: Game
Linked Media (w/ mplayer-plugin)
Embedded Media (w/ mplayer-plugin)
Speed: Launch	8.888 s	10.738 s	6.016 s	8.008 s
Speed: Load Google Maps	82.489 s	54.628 s	33.908 s	34.692 s
Speed: maemo.org	11.080 s	13.586 s	13.674 s	9.627 s
Speed: yahoo.com	13.598 s	18.232 s	9.848 s	10.072f s

Notes

• All speed timings were the average of at least three runs. There were no other running programs. Outliers were manually eliminated.

MicroB

• Bookmarklets run, but it then thinks that it's loading a page, which it is not. It will say "Connecting ..." in the progress bar forever.
• Can do user styles with ~/.mozilla/microb/chrome/userContent.css mostly a'la Firefox. Not quite documented, but mentioned at least at the Maemo wiki. The chrome directory doesn't exist though, so you have to know about this.
• Limited extensions/plugins, no integration: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/downloads_os2008.html
• Gets full "user scripts" because Greasemonkey is one of the available extensions. (Although not the latest version.)
• Couldn't appropriately test what happens with a crash yet. I could kill -9 the others easily, but MicroB seems too tightly integrated with Maemo for this to work.
• Seems to be the only browser with detection for, and thus display of, the feed icon. Only launches the built-in RSS reader, though.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in just over 15 seconds. The page is usually still loading at this point, so video playback is a bit jerky until it finishes, but then very good.

Fennec

• There's no registered icon; the task navigator shows the default four boxes. Annoying
• User styles work if you put a chrome/userContent.css file in your profile, a'la Firefox. The chrome directory doesn't exist though, so you have to know about this.
• The link you tapped is visible for a moment, as the next page loads. A nice, subtle way of providing feedback that makes it feel faster, though it certainly isn't, technically.
• No scroll bars to tap, you must drag-to-scroll.
• Clicking a .install will give you the open/save dialog, which makes it possible (but annoying) to use these files.
• Search in page is very buggy right now. Display isn't quite right, and if the found term isn't on the screen, it's not scrolled to make it on the screen.
• It's impossible to select any text, even that in a form input.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in just over 30 seconds. I can't interact with the player, Fennec seems to get confused and treat the player like a text input (clicking it brings up the completion/shift bar), and none of my taps have any effect. The video plays very slowly, so much so that it can't keep up with the audio.
• Same problem with flash games, making them impossible to use.

Unique features:

• It combines the Firefox Awesomebar and Opera Speed Dial into a very usable feature. Tap the address bar, and you get "speed dial". Start typing and it searches like an awesomebar. It's a great feature which doesn't combine with the pop-up full-screen keyboard on the N180.
• Full screen keeps the UI, but scrolling down moves it off screen (as does normal view). It's nice to so easily get full screen view on a small screen, but still have easy access to the UI.
• Double-tap for a quick toggle between zoomed-in and normal view.

Midori

• Claims extensions written in C. I'm not sure if there are any available that work on Maemo.
• User scripts and styles are claimed as features, but I couldn't make them work.
• Tapping in the address bar does NOT select the text, so typing a new URL takes an extra step.
• Gives a "crash detected" box, with the option to change some settings, but no session recovery.
• The only progress indicator is that the reload button turns into the stop button (and sometimes the location bar fills as a progress bar, depending on what you're waiting for). I've wondered a bit too often "Did I miss tapping that link?"
• You can drag-to-select, but double and triple tap do nothing.
• Got a half for self-signed cert, because such a site just loads, with no dialog or confirmation. Not necessarily bad, but unusual.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in two or three minutes. After that significant delay, it's watchable.

Unique features:

• Dragging the stylus selects text instead of scrolling, like the other three do.
• Search in page is by far the best: works as you intend, does search-as-you-type like Firefox (optionally) does, highlights all terms (current in a different color).

Tear

• The hardest to install, until you find the right Qole's repository.
• You can select one word or one paragraph (double/triple tap), but dragging after that scrolls the page, you can't select more.
• Long-tap for right click works, but it's easy to then accidentally drag-to-scroll which closes the context menu.
• Got a half for self-signed cert, because such a site just loads, but has no dialog or confirmation. Not necessarily bad, but unusual.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in two or three minutes. After that significant delay, it's watchable.

Unique features:

• The only browser with "kinetic" drag scrolling; the reason it got full and the others got half. (I've yet to make the subjective judgement over whether I like this, though.)
• Its default home page is a "dashboard" very much like Opera Speed Dial. Quick access to history and bookmarks, plus Google Search. Unfortunately, this is mashed into about:blank, making it hard to really get a blank page if that's what you prefer.
• The only browser of these four to do session recovery after a crash.
• Like above; The Close menu has a "close and save all" feature, so you can come back where you were after quitting.

Conclusion

I'm having a very difficult time picking a winner. Every browser has at least one thing missing/slowest. Every browser has at one thing best/fastest. The two webkit based browsers seem to be faster overall. But they both crashed a bit in my maemo.org speed tests — and that's not a super complicated page. They're both significantly faster on the JS-heavy Google Maps page, but still barely within the realm of usability -- and Flash support is much worse (YouTube is nigh unusable).

Fennec has a lot of really nice things going on. The double-tap-zoom feature is very nice, the UI is featureful, and easily gets out of the way on the small screen. There's the promise of being able to write extensions for it just like I do for Firefox. But it's also clearly the slowest. I hold out hope that it will get better once out of beta, but I can't quite choose it yet.

For now, I think I'll use MicroB and/or Midori primarily. I know there's a newer version of Midori out there, but not yet ported to Maemo completely. It might be worth investigating. The Midori ChangeLog indicates a few very interesting new features, plus 0.1.7 is supposed to be the "stable" version.

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Scroll To Images

2009-06-09 20:20 - Bookmarklets

It's been a long time since I've posted a new bookmarklet! I've finally come up with an itch that needed scratching, though. Every once in a while, you'll come across a "gallery" of images, simply posted one-after-the-other in a giant column on one page. They're hard to browse, because they're never the same height as your browser window, so you end up seeing them by halves, or flicking the scroll wheel endlessly. This little script will find all the images (over 100x100 pixels in size, to skip things like bullets and headers) and scroll to each one in order, each time you click it. Much better viewing!

Scroll To Images

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Stop Using Internet Explorer 6!

2009-06-04 11:03 - Opinion

I'm a web developer by occupation, and for as long as I have been, Internet Explorer 6 has been a thorn in my side. You don't have to look hard to find complaints about it. It is riddled with bugs and "custom" behavior that makes it especially difficult to develop working pages against. As an attempt to help clean up this mess (users can upgrade to both IE7 and IE8 now, not to mention far superior alternatives like Firefox), I included the IE6 Update script. A little HTML bit included conditionally, that looks like a normal IE "information bar". The idea would hopefully be that people are used to seeing something like this, will click on it, and upgrade away from the mess that is IE6.

I included this on my site on April 21st. During the month of April before the change, Google Analytics says my IE visitors were broken down, by visits, into these versions:

Here's the same grouping for April after this change through the month of May:

Very inconclusive. Certainly not anything that could be taken as a positive result. Since the bar is rather annoying for IE users (it comes up on every page, even after it is manually dismissed), I think I'll be removing it from my site. Asa Dotzler has recently pointed out some long term trends for all browsers and versions of IE. These numbers clearly fit, the tiny decrease in IE6 probably just represents the overall slow decline. A recent SlashDot post titled Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die expresses, in the comments, the seemingly valid idea that pre-XP installations hanging around, and pirated XP, represents a group of people who cannot upgrade to IE7 (or 8), and probably make up the group still holding IE6.

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Buy or Rent? Video Games, Revisited

2009-05-25 12:29 - Opinion

Back around Christmas time, I got myself a PlayStation 3, as I've mentioned now and again. I also wondered, around that time, do video game rentals make sense? Economically, at least.

I had very little to make the decision on, but $15/mo for one game at a time didn't seem like a good deal. I've got enough time and experience, plus hard data, now behind me that I think I can start to answer that question for real. Let's start with the data here, and I'll explain it below:

First, the grey/incomlete rows: I got Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4 along with the (used) console I bought. I don't have any fair "bought" price for them, and didn't sell MGS4 yet. So they're not quite included. I did play the first six games in the table, in about that order. Conveniently, over almost exactly six months, which makes the math much easier. This is real "calendar time" — it represents the time I took to play them, with the rest of my life in the middle. Finally, I didn't yet sell (because they're still unplayed!) the bottom three games in the table. But I have real "bought" prices, so I could factor those in. You'll see below.

The "Spent" column is the total I spent to acquire that game. For these four, the bid + shipping price, off of eBay. The "Fees" column is the overhead I spent to sell them, both eBay and PayPal fees, and also the amount I actually spent on shipping and packaging. Finally the "Made" column is how much I made from selling the item, the total bid + shipping price from eBay again. (Side rant: What a racket eBay + forced PayPal is! Without shipping on either side, that's still a 15% overhead for a very cheap service on their end.)

For the four that I bought, played, then sold (the bottom row labeled "4 Average"), I can do comletely thorough calculations. So I see that for these four games, on average, I spent a total of $6.39 to buy, play, and later sell them. Almost exactly the eBay/shipping overhead. If I include all the partial data in each column (the bottom row labeled "Full Average"), the averages come to $7.29. (You'll note that the values for GTA4 are lower -- that went for combined shipping, so I didn't charge nor spend any, both are thus lower by about $3.) This line is probably not as accurate, as I have higher buy-prices than the others on these extra lines, without (probably?) higher sell-prices to balance them out.

What's the result? It costs a bit under $7 to buy and then resell a PS3 game. Taking the average of one month spent playing, that comes out to half as much as the average rental service. So renting is a bad idea unless you're extremely lazy (there is some extra effort involved in both finding the games for purchase, and selling them again).

There's a wrinkle, however. Some of those games I really played over the course of about a calendar month. Oblivion, nearly two. Call of Duty 4 I played over one weekend: started on Friday night, finished by Sunday night. I also started Prince of Persia about when I started this (listing the items for sale), and finished that in about a week. If I could perfectly predict which games I am both interested in, and will finish quickly, they would be good rental candidates. If I played 3 or 4 games in one month for $15, that would be a very economical situation indeed. But can I make such predictions? It's hard to say. So I'll have to stick with the relaxed pace of ownership. No worrying about how much it costs me to hang on to the game for another week or two or three.

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Serial Fantasy

2009-05-15 15:39 - General

Back in late August of 2007, I bought a Nintendo DS Lite. We held some mini Tetris tournaments at work, thanks to the wireless multi-player gaming the DS supports. It wasn't long after that I started playing it during my commute. I had no idea that it was so far back as 2007 that this might have started, until I just looked up the date, in order to write it above.

It's been quite a while, but I finally got back to reading. It was even before the DS, at the very beginning of 2007, that I grabbed a lot of 25 Stephen King books off of eBay. (Lots of used books on eBay are so cheap! That lot of 25 worked out to $1.60 each, including shipping.) I had read one or two that I had lying around, and liked it. I never finished all 25 of those books. And I had set the two (volume one and three) books in the Dark Tower Series aside. Partially because I didn't have the whole set, and partially because the two didn't match in the otherwise chronologically-sorted group.

I finally picked up volumes two and four and thus started reading through them. (Getting the rest through the library, later.) I'm not quite sure when, but I'll say mid last month. I'm now about halfway through the 6th book, and quite happy to be reading again. It was while I was working through this series that I serendipitously caught a reference to the term "Serial Fantasy" to describe it.

I've read the Wheel of Time series (12 books, averaging around 800 pages each) and enjoyed it. I also got, mostly through bulk lots on eBay, a lot of Piers Anthony books, including Xanth (32 books, I think I've read 28 of them), Apprentice Adept (7 books), Bio of a Space Tyrant (6 books), ChroMagic (5 books), Cluster (5 books), Geodyssey (5 books), Incarnations of Immortality (7 books), Mode (4 books), and a handful of other 3-book "series". Then there's the granddaddy, in my opinion, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (5 books). Plus of course The Lord of the Rings.

In my opinion, Fantasy and Science Fiction are but two aspects of the same thing: fiction, set in an impossible world. One has magical things, one has super-high-technology things, but it amounts to the same: a bunch of people who have abilities that we don't. And it's really these serial stories that get me. I like diving into a rich world, and staying there for a long time. Believe it or not, I've never read Harry Potter .. but I plan on rectifying that soon!

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Caring for Your Introvert

2009-04-16 12:09 - Links

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

A well written article, which I identify with rather readily. Especially that bit I quoted just above. I've often felt that introverts are downtrodden. The reason is simply that all the extroverts see each other all the time, while they're gallivanting around in their extroverted way. They don't see the introverts, therefore assume that their way is "normal" and good, and introversion is "unusual" and bad.

Also a very choice quote: "The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself."

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Legit Free Music From thesixtyone

2009-04-15 13:54 - Links

I just found a site called thesixtyone (via). They appear to be a real business, but I don't see the model. What I do see is a very slick interface to a bunch of streaming (indie) music. Though my tastes are far from mainstream, it only took a few moments to find something I never heard before, but enjoyed. It's been long enough since I last managed to accomplish that, to make it quite refreshing. (Even so, quite a lot of the stuff in their "dance" category doesn't qualify, by my book.)

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