Coney Island is near its end of days. It was supposed to be shut down last year, yet kept going for one more. Being the last year it's supposed to be open, we (me and my Mom) went to visit, both for the first time, to celebrate my birthday this year. It also turns out, today is the last day that Astroland is open.
So, most of the time we were there, we were actually in the aquarium. We walked down the boardwalk a bit, saw it and went in. Spent a few hours there, and I lucked out to grab this great shot of a sea lion performing a jump. We walked around the rest of the area a bit too, and almost went to ride the Cyclone. But, being the last day, quite a few people had that idea; the line was WAY out of the normal area onto the sidewalk. We had been on our feet for hours, and facing the prospect of continuing to do so for, who knows, at least an hour, I wouldn't have been surprised by two, we passed.
So, the big news this week is that Google has released their own browser, dubbed Chrome. They put together a comic book, of all things, to explain what, and why, it is. This was actually a very good idea; it was well made and quite nifty.
There's a variety of things going on with Chrome. It's pushing the browser speed barrier, at a point in time that the barrier is being rather well smashed from all sides. The point is clear: Google is all about web apps. Faster browsers mean Google's apps are more usable, and people can depend on them rather than the more traditional alternatives.
They built a javascript engine from scratch, with some awesome speed tweaks baked into the design. But is it really that fast? I've put together the most comprehensive and fair evaluation that I could come up with to examine just that point. Let's start with the graph:
I've cut off the top end of the scale; the numbers for IE smashed all the rest down to be unreadable. I also broke a decision I made starting off. I wanted to compare shipping browsers only, not betas. Neither IE6 nor 7 could run all the tests, however, so I budged and included the latest IE8 beta. As you can see, 8 is generally an improvement, but generally just to crappy from crappier.
The results are surprising, to say the least. It appears that, yes, Google Chrome really is that fast. Here's the numbers:
Note that the V8 test was the only one to return a "score" (high good) rather than a time-to-execute (low good), so the graph displays max-score, rather than just the raw score. And makes it only more obvious that something weird is going on with the results. The V8 page describes itself as "a suite of pure JavaScript benchmarks that we have used to tune V8". Either they used it too specifically, or they really created/chose the tests specifically to highlight the narrow area that V8 is specifically capable with. Every browser is within a plus-or-minus range of 100 from the average, discarding Chrome, which scores more than 1800 over second place. That's a giant margin.
There's a thousand and one other, probably better, reasons to choose whether or not to use Chrome, especially from among Firefox, Safari, and Opera which are all very close seconds. It's certainly not for me (yet) as there's so many Firefox extensions I'd feel lost without. But I can certainly see it being a wonderful browser for a more casual user.
Tegs started acting a little strange this evening. Before long, I saw why. We had a mouse on our hands! My two year lease is just about to run out, and this is the first one they've seen since the last place.
They've clearly forgotten what to do with one. I only managed to shoot these few pictures (and a few that totally missed the motion) before they lost track of it. (Look at Tegs' tongue sticking out in that last shot, so cute!) I managed to format the pictures and type up half this post before I saw Tegs pawing at the underside of the computer where, behold, the mouse had found safety, if only briefly.
They got it back out, so I shot some video. I only captured around a minute before the thing managed to disappear again. Also, learned that my digital camera doesn't shoot video that you can see with anything less than full sunlight (even 4 decent lamps in a small room, not enough).
No clue where it might have come from. Tomorrow morning I'll either wake up to a corpse somewhere around here, or the added mystery of wherever it managed to get away to.
I turned 18 in 1998, smack dab in between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It's 10 years later, and I've still never registered. Partially because I just can't motivate myself to invest the time to educate myself enough to feel I made the "right" vote, partly because I don't think it really matters (either way, somebody bought that candidate), and mostly because I think the electoral college is bunk.
Perhaps 200 years ago, it made sense to "chunk" tallying the election, but it doesn't today. I took the time to find detailed election data for New York (deep link) and it tells quite a tale.
The graph is the voting history for New York state, over the past 50 years. Over that time frame, there have been twelve presidential elections, but in only three cases did Republican win the state, Democrat taking the other nine, and generally by larger margins. Any politically minded person will tell you (or, they've told me, at least!) that the New York outcome is all but a foregone conclusion.
As I said at first, I'm not horribly well informed. As things are now, I'd probably go with the majority anyway — but it doesn't matter! If I decided to vote republican, I'd probably need to find about 1.4 million other people to agree with me (or change 700k Dems' minds). Anything less, and the electoral votes will end up exactly the same. I can go back and forth a bit, but the conclusion comes out the same: Meh.
I've just discovered a truly wonderful new physics game called Fantastic Contraption. It's a casual flash game, with wheels and rods. The point: to build a contraption to move a red piece from the building area to the goal.
Yep, that's it. The simplest games are often the best. Sometimes there are obstacles, sometimes there are gaps, and coming up with a contraption to scale the course is fun!
One of the nifty bits is the social features. You can create a link to the exact contraption that you build, and let someone else see it play. Here's a few I made, for the early levels.
Don't just look at my solutions, make your own! It's loads of fun, go have a play. Come up with something crazy and off the wall, and it's even more fun!
I posted a while back about my first and second successful geocaching experiences. That was back in April, when I was on vacation visiting my father.
This week, I'm on vacation in New Jersey, visiting my mom, among other things. Today we made it out for some geocaching. We went for two caches, and found both!
Above is a little map showing the two caches we worked with today. To the left is a shot of the travel bug that we found in that cache. Since we were planning on seeing a second cache that day, we took it along with us. I'd never found any trackables before, so it was quite exciting!
The second cache was very creative. It was designed around a bridge in the area, which has an interesting back story. It was another relatively easy, but still enjoyable, find. If you look carefully at the shot to the left, you'll see a hint of the patchy near-burn I earned on the back of my neck (not to mention my forearms), for hangin' around outside at the fair on Thursday. Not far away from the first, but we dropped the travel bug off here. Another new experience down!
As I just posted, I decided to spend some of the time this week, while I'm on vacation, fixing up the R/C plane I built years ago, and only (briefly!) flew once. I planned on taking it out solo, because I was a bit anxious and a bit unconcerned about a crash. I'd let it sit on the shelf for so many years, I wasn't worried about it much.
On Tuesday evening, we drove out to a park with a nice big open field, got everything just about set up ... and some rain started falling. So we gave up. We made it out to the 4-H fair a bit late last night, and chatted with a few guys in the R/C plane club. We found out the time they were scheduled to be flying, and showed up in time for that today.
I got very lucky, in that I managed to meet up with a very talented man who was there named Rich (I think .. I'm so bad with names), who you see on the left. I'm holding the plane in place in that shot, as he trims up some of the controls on the engine. After that, he flew it briefly, and we adjusted some of the control surfaces (elevator, rudder, aileron). After another test flight, he took it up and handed me the radio. I was a little shaky, but definitely flew it around in a few circles and let him land it, with no crashes whatsoever.
At this point, we tried to fine-tune a few more control surfaces when, alas, one of the parts broke. The control rod for the elevator turns out to be a long length of plastic tubing, with metal threaded rods glued on each end. The metal rod fell out, and will need a bit of repair before it's flight worthy again.
Finally, I have a little bit of video. I was hoping to get some shots of it in flight, but lady luck wasn't with me. My digital camera does video. It's one of the newer styles, with an LCD display and no viewfinder. Which is nearly impossible to see, in bright sunlight. So very very little of the in-flight footage actually had a shot of the plane. It also turns out that the video it shoots is of rather poor quality. Nonetheless, here's a brief shot of takeoff, and a little taxi-ing on the ground after a landing. (Sadly, not me at the helm for any of it, but c'est la vie.)
I'll probably give it another round of repairs, and another shot. Given that I live in Brooklyn and have to travel out here to Jersey to fly it, only time will tell when that might happen. But, I now know that: I really should have a couple licenses to be flying at that field, that field is full-time for model plane flying, and that field has some people who meet there regularly, almost every day. So, if I want to, I certainly have the opportunity!
Back in college, a good few years ago now, I bought and assembled this R/C plane. I had done R/C cars as a younger kid, and they're a lot of fun. I had even been in a model plane club way back in grade school, though they were never powered. I finally decided that building, and then flying, a plane would be fun. It took quite a lot of time, but I assembled the whole thing very carefully, and did quite well, I think. It's an Sig Kadet LT-25, a beginner class plane. If you can't tell from the picture, it's got a 63 inch wingspan. It's an impressive beast.
After quite a bit of painstaking work cutting and gluing and so forth, it was done. I took it out to the back of the school's soccer field, with some friends. There was a tiny little parking (probably?) area near the back corner, and there we headed to perform the take-off. There was just one hitch. The rear wheel, used for steering, wasn't aligned well. The plane decided to veer sharply to the left, still on the ground, leaving just enough time to build plenty speed for shearing the front wheels right off, when hitting the curb.
After so much waiting, my patience had worn out. I foolishly handed it to my friend, and told him to give it a gentle loft, from a running start. The good news: it was airborne. The bad news: the by-hand launch wasn't even nearly straight, it was heading straight for some power lines. I managed to avoid them, but in the process, I lost most of what little elevation I had, and was no longer high enough to make it back over the fence. Crash and smash.
Of course, I always intended to repair and fly again. Most of the repairs happened. The fly again, not so much. Well, after all these years spent gathering dust, I've resolved to make the plane fly again! I'm home in Jersey for my traditional week long vacation, the week of the 4-H Fair.
I've dedicated some time for repairs. Most of the repairs, like I said, were already done. I bought some pieces to replace those that didn't make it through the years-long wait, and some fuel. This afternoon, I managed to get the engine started and running, which is a great sign. After a final check for the alignment of the rear wheel, I plan to take off some time tomorrow afternoon/evening! Wish me luck!
I've been a user of delicious for quite some time. Today, they launched a whole new version of their site. It's broken some things.
Their new design seems pretty nice overall. It will take getting used to, but I see great potential for it. A big, big, problem however is the changes to the posting interface. When I saw the new site the first time, I lost all my tags listed on the page for easy clickability. Thank goodness, I've figured out how to get that back.
The "v" parameter has gone up, it must mean version. And you have to use the new version. Their default bookmarklet also adds a "noui=1" which is exactly what removes this wonderful feature! So to get it back the easy way, use this updated version of my old bookmarklet:
The post interface is a bit too noisy, and they've narrowed the space for the tags, so they don't fit on my screen anymore. One step at a time, however.
