Lomcevak

Locked in the Rack

Screen Detail

I found these pictures in my phone when I was getting ready for a firmware update. I meant to write about ‘em earlier but I guess I never got around to it.

This hung scanner was stuck in the rack (kind of looks like it’s stuck in a little toilet) and none of the buttons produced any response. I remember getting some funny looks as I knelt to grab the images.

I still like the system because it saves me time, even if I’m only in the store for a few items. I’ve been audited a few times. The audits, at least in my limited experiences, are more of a wave-of-the-hand than anything.

Other stuff about my encounters with Scan-It are here and here.

This morning brought a little bit of snow. Last night it was said that it was supposed to be a huge honkin’ storm but it turned out to be not much snow at all, just a dusting. Pam went outside to get the newspaper, as she usually does on Saturday morning, but came back inside empty-handed. “There’s no fuckin’ paper,” she muttered disgustedly, partially to me and partially to the Universe.

A little while later I was checking the weather maps to see what had happened to our storm and collecting the morning email. Here was something from the paper:

Good Morning from the Home News Tribune!

We’re experiencing possible delays throughout our delivery area today, December 19, 2009 due to the current weather conditions. We apologize for the inconvenience; however you can access our e-edition immediately by visiting [...]

A couple of years back the paper took the decision to outsource delivery to some faceless fulfillment company. And years earlier than that they stopped the practice of using neighborhood kids on the street. Each change has brought a corresponding drop in service levels.

Anyway, those kids earned their tips. (I wrote about newspapers and delivery gratuities last year, too.) Weather? It just didn’t matter; the newspaper was delivered and that was that. I think our parents called it “responsibility”.

Our e-edition is an exact replica of the printed version that will be delivered to you later today.

And it is, I guess, but the navigation is clunky and you can’t fold it up on the dining room table while you enjoy breakfast and coffee. Also implied is that they intend an eventual delivery, but they’re already four or five hours late.

If you like the Home News Tribune e-edition, you may subscribe by visiting [...]

Extra, or a substitute for pulp delivery? Not sure, as I write.

It happens that I just paid the bill for our subscription. Delivery performance has incremented downward and the paper itself has shrunk – actually become considerably narrower – over the past year. Yet rates had risen again. We already know they’ve outsourced delivery. Apparently they’ve also outsourced billing because my check went to a PO box in Louisville, KY. It used to go to an address down the shore.

Newspapers all over are wringing their hands over their reduced market share. The Internet is kicking their collective asses! Is it any wonder? Maybe they deserve it.

About a month and a half ago my main personal computer, an (ancient) HP zd8000 laptop, began dropping keystrokes. I traced the problem back to the battery. No longer taking a charge, the interrupts generated as the charging circuitry tried, failed and tried again were interfering with the keyboard interrupt. My typing is bad enough; I pulled the offending battery, scanned the ‘net and ordered a new battery from overstock.com based on – what else? – price.

That was September 3rd, and the replacement battery arrived some days later. Unfortunately it was the wrong one! The order showed the correct number as did the packing list, but the thing that sat on my desk clearly showed a different number. The plastic bag it came in was already open (uh oh, could mean trouble) so I took the opportunity to stick it into the laptop, thinking perhaps it was a substitute. Nope, the computer refused it.

I used the online chat on Overstock’s Web site and explained the situation. The rep thought it best to escalate to a tech person so she told me to expect their call, which came some hours later. I hadn’t expected his call so quick. The tech generated the RMA and return shipping label and said he’d overnight another replacement.

Meanwhile I did a little checking. HP has an excellent online parts lookup tool, and I used it to check the two part numbers in question. They were markedly different. I looked them both up on the Overstock site and found the descriptions to be remarkably similar. Maybe this was the problem?

As it turned out, the next few weeks proved frustrating – for both me and Overstock – as we shipped the same incorrect battery back an forth across the country three times. In the end they said that they didn’t have the correct item. They’d process my refund and I was free to keep the incorrect battery. I sent it back anyway; there’s no sense in recycling a perfectly good battery I couldn’t use.

But that’s not the end of the story. Last Friday evening I took a call from Thomas at Overstock. He explained that my case had made it up to the executive level and that they had spent some time analyzing what went wrong. There were a few things, including a mis-SKUed warehouse bin (aha!) and lapses in communication. The analysis had resulted in some process improvements and Thomas called to tell me about them. We talked for a while about things like quality and customer service. Full disclosure: Thomas offered – and I accepted – compensation for my frustration and understanding: a correct battery and some store credit. He left his email and direct phone number.

(The correct battery arrived this afternoon, shipped overnight from Overstock’s supplier. The number fits several applications; the plastic cover trim isn’t right for my particular laptop, but I have spares from previous replacements so it’s no big deal. Overstock, if you’re reading this, don’t panic – I’m good, and I appreciate all you’ve done. You might want to follow-up with the warehouse, though.)

In my experience, the larger a company becomes the less likely is becomes that a minor customer problem actually results in action. Sure, refunds and credits are common enough, but not the continuous improvement part. To do that, and more importantly, to take the additional step of reaching out to the customer after the transaction is complete is exceptional. More should follow Overstock’s example. I’ll use them again.

I’ve done some traveling this summer and the netbook I wrote about some time back has proved to be a worthy companion. The portability and battery life have more than offset the lower performance and cramped screen real estate. And the HP Mini 1000 has proven to be as reliable as a brick!

When I configured the box I chose the SSD over traditional hard drive. HDs tend not to last very long when transported via Milwaukee Vibrators. Sure, SSDs are considerably more expensive and offer less capacity, but I was looking for reliability and it’s certainly delivered that. Read speeds are fantastic, making for fast boot times even on the slow Atom processor. But small writes – the kind that Windows is famous for doing constantly – really suck.

I wanted to mention FlashFire, an SSD accelerator. According to their site, it’s “especially useful for the system using low-end SSDs.” It works. I haven’t bothered to upgrade the slow stock SSD mainly because FlashFire makes it tolerable.

Before you ask, yes, additional buffering can leave you with an increased risk of data loss if a crash occurs before the flush is complete. But the dirty little secret is that the higher-performance SSDs already use on-board DRAM buffers to boost performance, so is it really all that much different? I guess it depends on your needs. For me, the tradeoff – performance for a little more risk – is worth it.

If you’re grumbling and second-guessing your SSD decision, go give FlashFire a try.

I’ll be doing some traveling this year. Usually I lug my laptop, a several-year-old desktop replacement that serves as my workaday box. With the battery and power brick it’s only, oh, around 15 pounds. That’s fine for moving around the house or even to drive to a client site, but it’s a bit much for more than that. Netbooks are growing in popularity, becoming more functional while getting better with battery life. The solid-state storage modules are durable, too – I could even carry it on the motorcycle!

I checked out a few of ‘em before settling on the Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000. The clincher was the keyboard which at some 92% normal size is actually quite usable. So here’s the configuration: Atom processor N270 (1.6 GHz); 1 GB DDR2 RAM; 32 GB SSD; Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950; 10.1 inch SD LED BrightView Infinity display (1024×576) with built-in microphone and webcam; Wireless G / Bluetooth; 6-cell lithium-polymer battery; mini-sleeve for carrying/storage.

I ordered directly from HP and delivery was fast, as usual. The shipping box was well-packed. It took but a couple of minutes to unpack, install the battery, plug in the charger and begin setup. The first thing I noticed was that SSDs are damned slow. Could it have been a mistake to choose a low-capacity SSD over a traditional hard drive? (I’ll come back to that later.) But getting Widows XP setup, activated and updated took hours. Thankfully it required no attention while it went about its business. I left it to its own, came back later and it was done.

Over the next few days my disappointment with performance continued. It looked nice, it was light enough, the keyboard was great, battery life was excellent at around 6 hours, but what good is all that if you can’t get useful work out of the thing?

As it turns out there are many things you can do to speed things up. Memory always helps Windows. The first order of business was to swap a 2 GB stick into the single slot, which took literally 30 seconds. I attacked the Registry, making the myriad tweaks I customarily make. The filesystem adjustments, like disabling 8.3 filenames, proved particularly useful, as did things like moving the kernel into RAM.

I found a process, StacSV.exe, that was consuming CPU and doing lots of I/O. I learned that the purpose of this was to monitor the audio jack to detect if you plug in or remove headphones. This is controlled by the Audio Service so I stopped it, setting it to Manual start. There are three associated registry keys, which do not exist, that were constantly being hit (and not found), so stopping the service quieted that noise down nicely. Here are those three keys:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnService
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnGroup
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnTag

I updated the BIOS from F.10 to F.11 F.

There wasn’t much shovel-ware preinstalled on the box, but it still needed cleanup. (When will they learn?) Anyway, removing Roxio Back On Track was very straightforward. Thanks, but I’ve already got backup strategies in place.

The next was not as easy. MigoMobile Desktop 4 was apparently missing its MSI file and wouldn’t uninstall. However, they ship an installable copy of the software buried in the Program Files directory tree and it was easy to extract the missing MSI file on another machine, copy it back and perform the uninstall without resorting to mucking about with the installer database. I did still need to manually empty out the Program Files folder, delete the Start menu stuff and so on.

Oh, and then there was Microsoft’s dumbed-down productivity stuff. Is that still called Works? Didn’t matter, I removed it, too, without paying much attention.

And now, with an idle process count around 30 (about half what it shipped with!) performance is quite acceptable indeed.

One thing still troubles me, though, to this day. There’s this process called HPQToaster.exe and there’s just no quality information about it anywhere. According to my probes it is active. Because references to it are all over the Registry it looks like a bear to remove. I’ve tried killing the process and preventing it from starting and neither action seems to have any noticeable effect. But WTF is HPQToaster.exe? Does anyone have a definitive answer?

Shifting gears a little, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding SSDs. This might seem obvious, but there’s no need to defragment an SSD. In fact, it even hurts! The flash memory in an SSD has a finite lifetime, and the controller manages wear by spreading use across the array. So even though files may appear (or not) to be contiguous to the OS, there’s really no connection to exactly where in the memory array a file’s parts are stored at any given time. (I’m not sure how this contiguous or not stuff will come into play when resizing a swap file or building a new hiberfil.sys.) There are some security implications, too, as you can’t really erase a file securely by overwriting – the ‘overwrites’ will be done by the controller to different memory locations to manage wear. If you’re concerned about file security – deleted or otherwise – I suppose you must look to encrypting the filesystem in its entirety. Performance-wise, reads are very fast, large writes are pokey by modern hard-drive standards, and the kind of I/O done by application installs and things like Windows Update are abysmally slow. I recommend taking all of that kind of work off automatic and do them manually, when you can manage the time. Seriously, it’s that slow. An Office install and subsequent updates took, for example, a few hours to complete. Thankfully, you can usually start these things and walk away, come back when it’s done. One notable exception is Google’s Chrome browser, whose automatic updates you really can’t conveniently control.

I ran across an excellent article that will teach you an awful lot about the nature of SSDs, their performance and problems, and so on. Get your geek in gear, you’ll need it. About 16,000 words.

For a little more about the performance aspects of netbooks in general, when compared to more capable notebooks, give this post a quick read.

It took about four years for the seat pan of my Aeron to fail. The threads that make up the mesh of the upholstery of the thing must be engineered for strength that’s just so because once one failed, the rest quickly followed.

Seat Pan Failure

Hunting down the dealer I bought it from wasn’t easy. In the four years they’ve  been sold and re-formed and even changed location. But I found ‘em and got the process of warranty service started.

And today, fully five weeks after my initial contact, my Aeron’s got a brandy-new seat pan and all’s well with the world. If my ass could smile, it would. My back would join in.

Kudos to HermanMiller for standing behind their products with a twelve-year warranty. Not only did they make good with my worn-out seat pan, they (well, their authorized dealer) also send a person out to my home office to repair it and cart away the packaging material. My cost? Not a nickel.

Which leads me to a question. As great as the Aeron is, the successor is supposed to be even better. The Embody is pricey: around $1,500 to start. I haven’t had the opportunity to try one. Have you? What do you think of it?

So I’ve used the Scan-It system several times since my initial encounter. By-and-large it is a time saver. I haven’t been audited… yet. But the system is not without its share of problems either.

• Crashing the POS Terminal I was most of the way through the usual ‘finish and pay’ cycle, at the point where one waits for credit card authorization. “Please wait – system processing…” The next thing I should have heard was the audio prompt for my signature. I looked away to set the handbasket aside and parked my motorcycle helmet upside-down next to the scanner/scale plate. It may have touched the plate as it rolled around. At that very instant the screen threw up an error dialogue complaining of an inputoverlaperror – yeah, one word – with a cryptic error code and a single OK button. I summoned the attendant who had never seen that error before. She scanned her ID card and dismissed the dialogue. The POS screen threw at least three error dialogues in rapid succession before clearing to display what appeared to be a ‘ready for the next customer’ display. Hmm, would I mind not having a receipt? Yes, I would mind, actually. So she scanned her ID again and accessed a supervisory function to retrieve my order. It appeared to not have been paid for. While we talked about what to do next – pay again or walk away, the screen suddenly cleared to text mode. It reported it had suffered some kind of fatal error and announced it was shutting down. And it did. The slack-jawed attendant summoned someone from upstairs, a kid in a collar and tie. I described the events that had passed; he had never hear of an ‘inputoverlaperror’ either. So he got on his knees, opened a panel beneath the conveyor (on the customer aisle side), fumbled out a wired keyboard and reached in again to restart… a PC. Running Windows. Win2K. I couldn’t resist making jokes about an unsupported OS as we waited for the boot, him sitting crosslegged in the aisle at my feet, keyboard in his lap. He was unable to retrieve my order. With no receipt and no order to refer to, there was really no choice but to let me take my bag of stuff and leave. (My credit card vendor later confirmed the charge went through, so there were no free groceries that day.) Not sure whether this was the POS or the Scan-It system or the combination of the two. But I’ve used the self-service checkouts countless times over the years and never saw one go tits-up quite like that.
• Free Bread There was a new kind of rye bread on the shelf that day. We picked up a loaf and I scanned it. “Beep!” I glanced at the tiny screen and it looked like it said the price was $0.00. I pulled out my glasses. Yup, there it was, right there at the top of the item list, $0.00. We finished collecting more stuff (which posted their prices correctly) and checked out. Later we inspected the paper receipt which was missing the bread altogether. I think I’ll be buying more of that bread!
• Bad Printing The deli counter apparently had problems with one of its printers, it was printing labels that the scanner ignored. When I moved from meat to cheese a different printer was used, so the cheese scanned fine. At the checkout, that scanner wouldn’t see the bad labels either, so I called to some nearby suits who apparently had nothing better to do. One of them summoned an attendant who scanned their ID and keyed the labels in directly, using a screen that regular customers don’t see. He told the suits – all three had come over to share in the fun – that the last 20 or so deli orders had been that way. No wonder I didn’t see him around: he was busy with someone else’s override.

I’m not complaining. Even with the problems I’d say I’m still pretty far ahead, time-wise (plus one loaf of rye bread). But I’d be interested in seeing the ’shrinkage’ numbers before and after installing the system.

I hate grocery shopping. I’ll try just about anything to minimize the time I waste in grocery stores. So I was delighted when I recently encountered Stop & Shop’s new Easy Shop system. (ed. 13-Mar-2009: The system is called Scan It!, not Easy Shop, in our area.)

All you need to do is swipe your customer card at a kiosk, pick up a hand scanner (ergonomically designed, high contrast color screen, made by Motorola), collect a few empty bags (paper or plastic or, for you greenies, use your own reusable bags) and go hit the aisles. Scan your items as you shop and load your bags the way you want them loaded. Along the way, the scanner periodically spams you with relevant special deals that might interest you. And when you’re finished, the scanner quickly uploads its list to the register. A quick credit card transaction and you’re out the door!

Naturally I was interested in what others had to say about the new system, and I wasn’t surprised to find that many (most?) don’t like it. After all, out here on the Web we love to complain! (Google “Stop & Shop” and “Easy Shop” and see for yourself.) One of the big complaints seems to be that it would put cashiers out of work. Do you really presume to think that by assuming a tiny bit of inconvenience you can preserve someone’s position? Besides, I love to talk to anyone and everyone and I have not met a single cashier yet that actually likes their job. Other users don’t care for the random audits, feeling like they’ve been singled out. I don’t know what triggers an audit and I’ve only used the system once (no audit), but I don’t know how else they could detect shrinkage or ensure customer honesty.

There is an RFID-based system being developed – I think it’s being tested in Germany – whereby you simply load up your cart and push it out the door. No hand scanning is necessary and your entire order is tallied en masse as you exit, billed automatically to your credit card. It sounds intriguing but I think we’re safe for a while.

Oh and before you ask, yes, I have tried Peapod. The service is well worth the fee, but the product selection is… suboptimal.

There were two main reasons to build this computer. Damian’s laptop, a hand-me-down almost 8 years old, had been showing signs of impending failure for some time. No surprise, he runs it 24×7 and the heat has physically damaged the finish on his desktop. And Pam, who plays Sims2 on her relatively recent desktop-replacement laptop, had been grumbling for a little more oomph. A plan was laid and by Christmas each would have their upgrades.

The Core i7 CPUs were just hitting the shelves and I briefly considered going that route. The on-board memory controller, new for Intel, meant new motherboard designs and chipsets. With reliability (not to mention my wallet – the i7s are kinda pricey today) in mind I chose the Core 2 Quad Q9550 instead. Well-supported, I’ve heard of folks pushing the 2.83 GHz part to 4 GHz and beyond. Cooling is always an issue but I didn’t want the hassle of liquid systems so an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro was added to the list.

The Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R motherboard has been getting excellent reviews for its tweakability and DDR3 memory support so it was added to the list. Everyone knows that memory is king. I started with two sticks (4 GB) of Corsair 1333 Mhz DDR3. It’s an easy no-loss jump from there to 8 GB. And if swapped for 4 GB parts, this board will hold 16 GB so there would be some headroom left for the future.

The next choice was the GPU. Wow, things had come a long way since I last paid attention! After an evening of digesting reviews a choice was made: the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 from EVGA. The 896 GB NVIDIA-based unit turns in solid performance for the price and also has some potential for tweaking later.

Key to user satisfaction is a good monitor choice and one in particular has always stood out: the HP w2408h. 24 inches of HDMI, 5 ms, high-contrast saturated colors with a native 1920×1200 resolution. Sometimes you’ve got to just swallow hard and go for it, and this was one of those times. Pam would be delighted with this monitor, and that’s what I was aiming for.

The rest of the component choices were rather pedestrian. A DVD-RW drive for loading stuff, a Western Digital SATA drive for holding stuff, a Microsoft wireless laser mouse for pointing at stuff, and a WLAN card to avoid a new cable run. A nice-looking, well-built Antec P182 case would hold all this nicely with plenty of room for expansion. Oh, yeah, and an OEM 64-bit Vista Home Premium. Y’know, buying a copy of Windows always leaves my stomach a bit unsettled and this was no exception – not to mention that this would be the first Vista box in the house. Well, at least it shipped with SP1…

A bit of back-of-the-envelope power analysis called a power supply of 650-700 watts, so a BFG Tech ES-800 was added to the list. (This PSU would end up failed in less than a month, hmmm, more on that in a future entry.)

The final order was placed with Newegg and soon the components were coming in. Between these and other Christmas shipments our UPS driver was becoming a daily visitor! 

Physically, the build went quite uneventfully, easily even, thanks to component standardization and that well-designed Antec case. Oh, there were the usual share of driver issues, a BIOS change or two, a few ‘trial’ Windows installs, stuff like that, but nothing that couldn’t be handled. Vista reported a base score of 5.9 for every subsystem, the highest available as this is written.

Pam named her new rig Thor. Then the machine-shuffling got started in earnest.

Overall I’m pleased with the result, but there have been a number of… interesting… things that I’ll talk about in subsequent entries. Like that failed power supply, for one. Stay tuned.

Some days ago we stopped at the supermarket for a couple of things. Standing in the checkout line we saw something new – Chocolate Skittles.

Chocolate Skittles

Now, I actually like Skittles. Especially the sour ones that are encrusted with that crystalline stuff that stimulate your taste buds not unlike a full stack of Marshalls cranked up to 11 does to your ears. My kid, like 99% of all kids, loves that stuff, too. (An equal proportion of adults hate that taste stimulation, incidentally, which I believe is by design.)

But these chocolate things? Ugh! Gave ‘em to my kid. He gave ‘em back. My wife refused to try ‘em after watching our reaction. ”Tastes like ass.” To say that the flavors in the package – S’mores, Vanilla (huh? vanilla in a ‘chocolate mix’?), Chocolate Caramel, Chocolate Pudding, Brownie Batter – seriously miss the mark is a gross understatement.

Products don’t just spring into being without consideration. Somewhere in Mars there was a meeting, the result being a decision taken to bring these abominations to market. Probably a bowl or two of ‘em right there on the conference table, alongside the coffee cups and water bottles. I wonder if any of the suits actually tasted ‘em. Somehow I doubt it.

Some years back I knew a girl that worked for Mars. She said that samples from their (rather extensive) product line were freely available in all their offices. I’ll bet the bowls of these never, ever need to be refilled.

Natalie Dylan (a pseudonym, of course) hopes to make a cool million auctioning her virginity. And why not? Some are outraged at the prospect, but why shouldn’t she? I’m actually surprised that it took this long for something like this to hit the news, given our capitalist society. Natalie seems to be a smart girl: “Not only does she have a degree in Women’s Studies, she is looking to raise money to continue her education and get her master’s degree in Psychology so she can practice Family Psychology” from the promotional flyer posted at the Bunny Ranch. She just wants some cash. CBS reported a few days ago that the bidding is up to $250K.

So, um, I wonder if there’s a peripheral deal for the video rights?

My wife’s laptop was getting full. NTFS, as you probably already know, begins to suffer performance-wise when it crosses the half-full line. And the default MFT size is kind of small to begin with. Presently that all-important area was about 98% consumed and the drive itself had only 20% or so free space. Her last install of a Sims2 expansion pack brought another round of complaints.

Easy enough to remedy. Head out to Best Buy for a replacement drive. But how to get the new drive installed and set up as pain-free as possible? Usually it’s a fresh IPL, but I was looking for the easy way out.

I have this neat device from CoolMax. The CD-350-COMBO is a multi-headed cable that plugs into a raw IDE or SATA drive and presents to your system as a USB device. When your laptop is your workbench this device is worth its weight in gold. Soon the new drive was partitioned, formatted, and tested. (For good measure, I allocated a much larger MFT as well.)

With that problem solved I turned to the task of cloning the existing drive. I recently read of something called XXCLONE, which promised a file-by-file copy (including all the locked stuff) from a running Windows system, with the ability to make the destination bootable. This would be a good time to try that out.

The install to the wife’s laptop was easy enough: unzip and copy a file. I used the CoolMax adapter to cable up the new drive, the destination for the copy. I set XXCLONE to task and went away. The copy would take a while. When I returned it was finished. I made the new drive bootable with a couple of clicks, uncabled and shut everything down. It took a few more minutes to physically swap the old drive for the new one.

The first boot took a little longer than usual. Windows was a little confused, I guess, because the drive change triggered the New Hardware Wizard. But soon things settled down. Between these two tools, a usually-tedious job was turned simple!

There’s one other thing I should mention. The XXCLONE documentation claim that because it makes a file-by-file copy, it defragments the destination drive automatically. I run Diskeeper on all of our machines, and it reported the drive as heavily fragmented. I needed to run the boot-time defragmentation job before the new drive delivered its expected performance.

Additional stuff, 17 December 2008: There were a couple of nagging issues following the drive cloning. I’m not sure if it’s XXCLONE or if it’s integral to the cloning process itself, but some applications installed with the MS Installer were no longer accessible through Add/Remove Programs. Instead there would appear a dialogue:

“The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.”

The solution, while a bit of a pain, is to obtain and install the Windows Install Clean Up utility from Microsoft. Run the utility and select the errant application from the list, then clean it up – which amounts to removing it from the installer’s database. Finally, re-install the application.

In my case it was Office 2003, which called for finding the license number and install media as well as a few rounds of patches and service packs. There were a few other applications as well, but that was the most substantial.

The Internet is absolutely all over itself lately about Google’s new browser, Chrome. It’s only a beta, but when you think about it, what product of Google’s is not beta? When I heard the news my first reaction was one of distrust. After all, nobody really knows what data Google is collecting about their users. But I decided to give the browser a try anyway after reading their comic book, which describes the technical attributes of their new-from-the-ground-up browser design.

Wow is Chrome fast! Page rendering is absolutely blazing! Compared to any other browser I’ve ever used, Chrome is the absolute fastest by far. That alone should compel you to give it a try.

Because of the way Chrome spawns individual processes it clearly uses more system resources than other browsers. On today’s modern systems that shouldn’t be a problem and the benefits of enhanced resource management are clear. [Added later on the same day: It still crashes, though, despite process isolation. See the EvilFingers site for an explanation and demo of the flaw in v0.2.149.7. http://evilfingers.com/advisory/google_chrome_poc.php]

Chrome Crash

As usual, the masses are very quick to point out flaws. The first thing that I heard of was Chrome’s vulnerability to drive-by security problems. Downloads occur in the background, and it could be easy to accidentally launch an executable. It shouldn’t be a problem if you’re careful.

There is a phrase that’s been going around lately to describe privacy enhanced browsing, the so-called ‘porn mode’. I object! There are many, many reasons why one might wish to take advantage of enhanced privacy while they browse. Why not use a less antagonistic label, like ‘privacy-enhanced’ or ‘privacy-mode’? (You’re welcome. I’m omitting a rant about how language kills.)

Cookies and pop-ups seem to be handled more intelligently as well, although those that pay for pop-up ads may not agree. Pop-ups are minimally displayed in and the user needs to choose to see it. This can trigger a billable event without the (benefit?) of the user ever seeing the pop-up. As a user I’m pleased with this behavior. As a business owner with Web properties I’m also pleased, because I’ve long believed that using things like pop-ups and cookies to track my customers is poor behavior on my part.

There’s been quite a bit of speculation about which direction Google may take Chrome. Some are even saying that this could be the beginning of the end for desktop operating systems altogether. Can you imagine this thing sitting on a bare metal hypervisor, without the overhead of an operating system? Exciting times are ahead.

When you ride a motorcycle you subject your eyes to all manner of risk. The importance of quality eyewear can’t be understated. It’s astounding how many riders donordinary sunglasses and think that they’re protected. I guess they’re okay if you wear them beneath a helmet visor that’s never lifted, but I prefer a helmet without a visor and that calls for glasses or goggles designed specifically for bikers.

I’ve had a number of pairs of goggles from Harley-Davidson. They go far to convince you that their apparel and other rider gear – Motorclothes ™ – are second to none. Well, not in my opinion. First, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything in their line that’s made in USA. But specifically, their goggles didn’t last very long for me. Like most eyewear, there’s a gasket that fits between the frame and your face. Theirs is foam with a felt-like surface that actually touches your face. After a short time – as little as a month or two – the felt on every single pair peeled back, leaving the foam right on my face, there to absorb sweat and grime. I tried gluing it back on. Contact cement works best but it doesn’t last. As if that isn’t enough, the strap tension adjuster is plastic and when it breaks that’s that. So I can’t recommend Harley-Davidson eyewear.

If you’re into goggles, Body Specs makes a quality product. My personal favorite is the BSG line. They fit well and the gasket is both high-quality and replaceable. In fact, their warranty will replace a failed gasket. When I had them replace one under warranty they told me that failures were rare and sent me two for my trouble. I’ve had several sets of BSGs and my biggest complain is that the elastic strap will eventually lose its stretch. The BSG line is convertible; you can snap in glasses temples in place of the strap but none have ever fit me well enough to use that way.

Today it’s all about convenience. I wear polychromatic glasses which self-adjust to light levels so I’m never caught with the wrong lenses installed. For the past year I’ve been using the same pair of Panoptx Diablo. Oh, look, they’re now marketed under the name 7EYE. Not sure what that’s about, but there you go. Anyway, the glasses are a pit pricey but the lenses are bulletproof (not a scratch on ‘em in a year), they’re very comfortable, and the gasket is still like new. My complaint about them is the finish of the frames which began to peel. It’s kind of like they had a plastic coating that’s flaking or peeling off. They have an excellent warrany, though, so I’ve sent ‘em in for repair. I’ll let you know how that goes once I get ‘em back in the next week or two.

In the meantime I’ve picked up a pair of WileyX. My wife picked up a pair and I liked them so I figured I’d try them out myself. So far so good, but it’s only been a few hundred miles. The lenses are polychromatic, the replaceable gasket has a good fit, but the temples don’t loop around the ear like the Panoptx. Instead they’ve got a rubber-like area that just stays put, kind of like Oakley sunglasses. WileyX is pricey, too, but still a good deal less than the Panoptx.

The quest for the perfect eyewear seems never-ending sometimes. What’s your favorite?