Month: February 2010

Chrome – still not great

Update: A few hours after I wrote that, I decided to quit and restart Chrome to free up some memory, and now none of the extensions I installed are showing up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with Google Chrome on the Mac. At the time, Chrome on the Mac was lagging quite far behind the Windows version. Supposedly now it’s all caught up, and so I’m going to revisit my previous complaints:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
    • Still happens.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
    • I haven’t been using Wave, so no comment.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
    • Still happens.
  • The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
    • Still happens. There is a tiny bit of real-estate near the “+” to open a new tab that is still available, but it’s a pain to grab.
  • It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
    • I found an extension that will reload individual tabs on a schedule rather than the whole window on demand. That’s actually nicer than having to reload everything manually. It’s not bad, except when your computer goes to sleep you have to restart it by reloading all the tabs individually. Plus when it reloads on a tab that is on a different Space than the one you’re on, it will switch back to that Space, but that’s a Spaces problem not a Chrome problem.
  • It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.
    • The only RSS plug ins I could find will add the RSS feed to a web based RSS reader like Google Reader. There is no support I can find anywhere for the OS-defined RSS reader. So I’m experimentally putting NetNewsWireLite out pasture in favour of Google Reader. Not bad, but not great.

So over-all, it’s got a few user interface annoyances, but the really big sticking points have been taken care of by plugins. And I was happy. Until today. And that’s when I discovered that Google Chrome is utterly useless for a web developer – there appears to be no way to make it reload your javascript file that you’ve just changed unless you go to “File->Clear Browsing Data”, uncheck everything except “Empty the cache”, click “Clear Browsing Data”, and wait, and wait, and wait. In normal web browsers, you just have to hit shift-reload on your page and it will reload that page and all the attendent files, including CSS and JavaScript files. That’s it, I’m switching back to Safari (or maybe Firefox) for the page I’m developing.

Oh, plus the built in “Developer Tools” in Chrome suck in comparison with Firebug, but that’s apples to oranges since Firebug is a plugin.

A bad day paddling is better than a good day erging

Today was a gorgeous day, brilliant sunshine and warm, but a bit of wind. Doug, Bill and I met up at Bay Creek for a paddle on the creek. The water was a bit lower than last time, but it was more open. Doug’s Burn is in the shop getting fixed, so he paddled a much tippier Jet. Or is it the other way ’round? I can never keep the KayakPro boats separate – too many 17’3″ long boats, and their web site says one is 438mm wide and the other is 438cm wide, which probably is wrong. Bill showed up with a Romany sea kayak – his wife and daughter are in the Rough Riders club, so this is his secret other life kayak. Since he normally paddles a surf ski, I can’t blame him for paddling a more stable (and more importantly, one without a leaky drain in the cockpit) boat.

Doug was paddling a strange boat and was on a low intensity week, I’ve had sniffles and sneezes for a week, and Bill hasn’t been paddling for months, so we took it easy. On the way up, a Forge Racing canoer came paddling down, and barely managed to grunt out a response to our hellos. One of us made a remark about how unfriendly the Forge Racing guys, and wondered why Jason, a kayaker and a really friendly guy, hangs out with them. And a few minutes later, Jason came by in a canoe – and unlike the first guy, he had a friendly greeting for us and a smile.

We didn’t go all that far, and we didn’t paddle that hard. But it was a beautiful day, and we were in boats and with friends. And that’s what’s important.

More erging

I went erging again. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear I didn’t bring my video camera. The last few times I’ve done a long “distance” workout, I’ve done half an hour straight, then for the last half hour I’d spend 15-20 seconds having a sip of water, paddle normally for the remainder of 9 minutes, then paddle very hard for 1 minute, repeat, then sip, paddle for the remainder of 8 minutes, and go hard for 2 minutes.

This time I tried doing the “9 minutes normal, 1 minute hard” right from the beginning. Given that I’d done a fairly hard 25 minutes on a rowing erg yesterday, that was probably a mistake. The breaks were often a bit longer than normal, because the foot brace on Stephen’s erg kept slipping, as well as having a few iPod issues. Everything was ok, but at the end I only got one minute and twenty seconds into my last hard bit when I just had this weird “I don’t want to do this any more” feeling. I wasn’t especially exhausted, and I didn’t stop because I was tired. I just didn’t want to continue any more. It’s kind of odd for me to get 59:20 into a planned 60 minute workout and stop then. You’d think that close to the end you’d just keep going.

I’m getting some major calluses forming on my right hand (the “control” hand) at the base of my middle fingers, and a bit of an open sore on my left hand on the top of my thumb. I’m not sure where that sore is coming from.

More erging

[youtube o7pA1Ac0ZLs]On Saturday I went to Stephen’s to erg, and on Wednesday I went to Doug’s to erg. I’m trying to emphasize the things that Dan and I worked on last Thursday, but it appears that I did a better job of it on Saturday and on Wednesday. Both times I paddled for half an hour non-stop, then started doing 9 minutes normal, 1 minute fast, and about a 30 second rest while I got a drink of water, and then went really hard for the last two minutes. But on Wednesday, my stroke rate was higher, my heart rate was higher, and from the video I don’t think I was rotating as well. Also, I tend to do a stroke-stroke-pause instead of a stroke-pause-stroke-pause, so I don’t know if I am, but I think I’m not pulling as hard on one side as the other. It’s too bad the erg doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting the same power on both sides – on the boat you’d know because you’d be going in circles.