Kraken

I recently finished listening to an audio book version of China Mieville's Kraken. I grabbed it after mis-reading that it was some
kind of follow on from Mieville's Perdido Street Station, as it plodded through a fairly realistic
London during the 1st part of the book I realised I was misinformed.

I was beginning to think it was going to be a pretty normal who-dun-it.

Then the cracks in Mieville's London opened up and I was swallowed
into a magical and seedy underworld. Much like the protagonist my mind
was left spinning as a long cast of strange and wonderful people enter
into the storyline. I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who
enjoys a good dose of unique fantasy. If you can suspend disbelief and
wrap your head around a ganglord who is a tattoo on another man's back
or that someone can be folded up into a box and re-emerge without any
harm, then dive into Kraken.

coding

I’ve been tinkering and hacking together some extensions for GoogleChrome, even going to the step of setting up a github account where I can managerevisioning. It was while bouncing around other people’s projects ongithub that I became reacquainted with markdown, as there is an optionto save your readme files in markdown format. After realising how daftI’ve been for not employing markdown in my various projects I’ve takena step to rectify this by now parsing posts I make via posterous formarkdown formatting.

yay markdown

• markdown is so easy and cool

yes

yes it is

if ($displaying=="nicely formatted") { $fuzzy="happy"; }else { $fuzzy="unhappy"; }

Firefox to Chrome?

You know you're a geek when you decide to make a post about switching web browsers....

With the release of Chrome 10 I'd decided to give it another go. For the last few years I've been a big advocate of Firefox, but the sheer 'cleanliness' and speed of Chrome can not be denied. Until now I'd always found little things with Chrome that kept me from truly falling in love with it. Until a recent release it didn't display my InfoAgent page correctly, taking a dislike to the table intensive layout. I even went so far as haxing up a new pure css based layout just so I could use Chrome for a while, as my InfoAgent page is where I launch virtually all my web surfing from. A few releases back Google decided to be a little more flexible on table layouts and the original version of the page worked again. Side stepping this complaint.

Over my years of Firefox use I'd collected a number of extensions which I now couldn't live with out. Over time, almost all of these (or similar addons) have become available for Chrome; Diigo, Readability, Adblock. However there still isn't versions of the Photobucket uploader (important for me since this is how I collect images to be displayed here on fuzzy's logic) and TabMixPlus.

I was then left with a dislike of the fact that I couldn't move the tab bar from the top of the Chrome window to the bottom, where I'm used to it being. I started using TabMixPlus for Firefox before Firefox ever added native support for tabbed browsing, and the habit was hard to break. It just makes sense to me.... I use a windows manager at the bottom of the screen, surely managing browsing tabs from the bottom of the browser is the logical place. If nothing else, to simply avoid racking up mouse miles. TabMixPlus also added a number of features such as always opening new tabs when I search or type an address into the address bar. Chrome doesn't natively allow this, but there is the alt+enter hotkey to do the same. It'll take me a while to remember to do this every time and I really don't understand why I can't just set an option to make this the default behaviour....

On the Photobucket front, I've found that another similar image collection site does have an uploader addon for Chrome, so I'm now testing Image Spark out. If I don't find any compelling reason not to make the switch from Photobucket to Image Spark I'll continue to consider a permanent switch from Firefox to Chrome. I'll also continue looking for ways to gain more control over Chrome's tab system. Stay tuned for updates on this incredibly interesting topic!

meta: soundcloud added

As you can see below I've added automatic posting of tracks that I add
to my favourites list over at soundcloud. For those not in the know, its a site
where artists are able to upload their music and get feedback from the
community. It has become the place I go to find dubstep or drum and
bass tracks to listen to while doing mindless data entry at work.

Doing this has reminded me how cool my system is [insert horn tooting
here], as its very simple for me to suck in content from any site
around this wonderful internet.