C Hees . info

I finally decided on a job so I’m gonna work on fancy webstuff at Q42! I’ll start in September so that leaves me some time to find an apartment in Den Haag, finish my MSc thesis, go to Poland with Ania, go to Hacking at Random and defend my thesis at the university. Hopefully it all fits in these 3 months =)Oh and talking about fancy webstuff: check out Google Wave. A couple of people from Q42 went to the Google IO conference where they saw this new system. They were very enthusiastic about it so maybe this could be part of my work at Q42.Anyway, it’s gonna be interesting :)

At Sogyo the internet connection is really bad and often it just doesn’t work. Today Gmail didn’t work so I naturally assumed it was the Sogyo network again. But, after a while it turned out that the problem was really Gmail. I found a site that seems to check if a site is still working or not: downforeveryoneorjustme.com, but according to that site gmail was still up. I got kinda frustrated and started to doubt the Sogyo network again, but then I found a post of somebody who explained the power of Twitter. Just search for gmail down and you instantly know that you’re not the only one with the problem. Finally something useful that you can do with Twitter :P

I’ve been searching for companies and ideas for my thesis and I ran into cloud computing again. It caught my attention before so it would be cool if I could do something with it for my graduation project. While I was reading up on the subject I couldn’t resist to check out the new browser by Google which is supposed to be good for applications running completely online (as in.. it’s sortof related to cloud computing :P).

I wanted to know if it was just a Mozilla ripoff or that it is actually something new. If I’m to believe the Google Chrome comic/book they really used a lot of new interesting technologies. One of them being another rendering engine (WebKit which is also used in Safari and which came from KHTML which is used in Konqueror which I really loved). I wonder if websites in Chrome look the same as in Safari. Either way, Chrome seems to be really fast. It starts up fast, shows pages quickly and executes Javascript quickly (see some benchmarks at scriptNode). What I also love is that one slow site doesn’t hang your whole browser. For example if you run this raytracer in one tab, your other tabs will get very slow in Firefox while in Chrome you don’t even notice the difference. I think this should also work for slow or hanging plugins like Flash which would be great.

So far Chrome seems to be nice, except for one bug I noticed:

When you hover over the title bar while it’s not maximized, the tooltips for the close, maximize and minimize buttons show up in the wrong places. It’s of course a very minor bug but it reminds me that it’s just a first release and probably still contains many other bugs. I guess I’ll see in the coming days if I actually like Chrome or not.