Author: Paul Tomblin

Google Chrome: not ready for prime time

Here’s what I discovered after a day of using the current beta of Google Chrome for Mac:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

About the only thing I liked about Chrome more than Safari is that when I restarted it, it would re-open the three pages with 15 or so tabs between them that I had open beforehand. Safari can be trained to open the one page with 10 tabs that is my main window, but then I have to manually fiddle with the other pages. Oh, and Chrome opens new links in a tab instead of a window – that’s nice that I don’t have to hold down command when I click.

The main reason I was tempted to use Chrome is that using a busy wave in Google Wave causes browsers to eat memory like crazy. In Safari, to recover that memory I have to close the whole browser. In Chrome, you can recover it by closing the tab. Nice, but I was closing the tab and re-opening it every few minutes because the “space to next unread blip” functionality would stop working. I have to restart Safari about once a week if I avoid Wave, and about once a day if I use Wave.

I find it deeply ironic that the two biggest problems I had with Chrome were with Google apps. Maybe I’ll come back to Chrome when it’s ready. But not now.

New Years Resolutions

Start this off with a look back at last years, because for once I did a pretty fair job.

Here are my resolutions from last year:

break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial
I actually broke 19 minutes, so chalk that one up as a win.
finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)
I didn’t just finish, I came in 5 seconds behind Mike Finear, after dragging him in my wake for several miles. Another win.
figure out if I want to continue flying or not.
Gave up flying, didn’t really miss it. Found myself obsessing over every mistake I ever made in the air and about how blasé I was about the danger at the time. Trying to tell myself that’s because I was on my game back then so I could handle it, and now I’m out of practice I wouldn’t handle it so easily if it happened now. Can’t tell if that means I should never go back, or if I need to really practice a lot if I go back.
develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something
I started an iPhone app, but hit a snag and put it aside. Realized that the GWT web site would be a better help with my job search, and made some half decent progress on this before I actually got a job.
diet
That went pretty well. Between February and June I lost 40 pounds and then hit a plateau. Unfortunately it’s the same plateau I hit every time I go on a diet. Spend most of the fall still within spitting distance of being on the diet (it’s hard to be strict when you’re home all day) but not losing any weight. However, I think I was building some muscle mass in my arms and core, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. Managed to gain 10 pounds of it back between Thanksgiving and now. Still a win, I think.
exercise
Yeah, pretty much. I started out the year being barely able to paddle 2 miles, and now a 10 mile workout holds no terror for me. Still trying to figure out how to keep that fitness over the off season. (Yeah, I know, “Off season? What’s that?” – getting out to paddle once in a blue moon is no substitute for paddling three or four times a week)
get a better job
Well, it took until a week before Christmas, but I got a decent contract job. Hopefully it will lead to more decent jobs.
once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain
I didn’t actually do anything about this one. But between not having to sit at a desk, not having to drive much, losing weight and exercising more, my knees weren’t that bad. Of course after a week of driving 3 hours a day to my new job, my knees are now the worst they’ve been since back when I used to drive to Ottawa twice a month. Hopefully that will recover now that I’m working more from home.
1600×1200
How about 1920×1080 on the left, and 1920×1200 on the right. Now *that* is resolution, baby!

That was the year that was. This is my list for this year:

  • Break 17:30 in the Baycreek Time Trial. I’d like to break 17, but I think 17:30 is more attainable.
  • Join NYMCRA and start competing for points. I’d like to do at least 5 of the points races this year, but they haven’t put out the 2010 calendar yet so I don’t know which ones those will be. Last year I did Tupper Lake, Armond Bassett, and Long Lake, and I could easily extend that to 5 by doing Round The Mountain or Bear Mountain and the long course at the Rochester Open Water Challenge. I probably won’t get a lot of points, because unlike the other guys I don’t get any handicap points because I’m not over 50 and my Thunderbolt is Unlimited Class. If I’m reading the points system right, at Long Lake I would have gotten 85 points because although I was only 5 seconds behind Mike F, he got handicap time for being in an EFT, a Touring Class boat and time for being over 50, so his adjusted time is 3:34 ahead of me. Competing for points might add a new twist to races, but mostly I see it as a reason to go to more races.
  • Start building up my training volume. This year my GPS recorded 670 miles of kayaking, and that’s not including the early part of the season before I bought it, and the few times I forgot to charge the damn thing. I’d like to increase both the number of paddles and the length of them. If I can manage a few 20 mile plus days, I’d be slowly working towards doing the “90 Miler”, maybe in 2011 as a 50th birthday thing.
  • Get the diet back on track and try to break through this plateau I was stuck at this fall.
  • Finish revamping my navaid.com site into GWT so it doesn’t look like something designed in 1992, which it probably was.
  • Figure out the GRIB thing that Laurie wants me to do.
  • Hold onto this job, or find another one quickly when it ends.
  • And that’s about it for the public ones.

Hopefully I’ll do as well this year as I did last.

Off season? What’s that?

Jim and I snuck out this afternoon for a paddle. It had been snowing pretty hard this morning, and I envied Dan and Stephen who were going skiing, but by the afternoon it had warmed up to the mid thirties and was raining off and on. I was nearly ready to knock off for the day when I got a text message from Jim inviting me to paddle. I can never say no to Jim, so I loaded up the Looksha and headed out to the river.

The river had dropped quite a bit – you could see a shelf of ice about a foot or more up from the current water levels. That made finding a place to put in a bit difficult. But at least the river wasn’t full of ice floes this time. It was still running fast, though. We paddled up stream using every trick to try to stay out of the main current, but barely managed about 4.4 mph the whole way up. Because I was in the Looksha, I could be a lot more daring in terms of cutting between debris in the river, both because the boat is stable and strong as a tank, and also because it has a kick-up rudder so a submerged trunk won’t knock the rudder off the boat or knock me out of the boat. Jim and I were able to experiment with a few tricks where we could see where sneaking in close to shore could gain you a couple of boat lengths on somebody taking a safer route out in the current.

Coming back was a different story – we hung out in the middle of the stream to get full advantage of it, and averaged about 7.4 mph or so. The big advantage of coming back is that because there is no advantage to getting in close to shore, we could paddle side by side and talk more.

One seemingly contradictory thing about this Looksha is that while it’s a big wide stable tank, it’s actually a tight squeeze getting in and out. The seat has side pieces that hold me in pretty tight when I’m wearing cold weather clothing, and the cockpit is much shorter front to back so I can’t draw my knees up. Getting out on a steep bank where I couldn’t use a paddle brace was pretty undignified looking, and I got kind of muddy, but at least I only got one foot soaked in freezing cold water.

Bottom line? Last year, my last paddle of the season was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This year, I’m paddling the day before New Years. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Paddling among the ice floes

It was a brilliantly sunshiny day, and the temperature was around 37 degrees F, so Jim and I decided to go paddling in a part of the Genesee River near his place that was “open” (for some value of open). Our usual partner in crime, Stephen B, was busy with family stuff. When I arrived, the floes were pretty dense, very thick, and roaring down the river at about 1.5 miles per hour. I kind of wish I’d brought my Looksha instead of banging up my Thunderbolt. The Looksha is a stronger, heavier boat, plus if I’m going to damage a boat, I’d rather damage the one I’m not going to be racing. Jim paddles a big heavy downriver boat for just that reason.

Trying to get in on the slippery bank, I managed to soak both feet, which is not good. Then it was hard to get turned upstream without going out into the main flow of floes. But we were able to sneak up stream by staying tucked in close to the near bank. Then after a while the ice jammed in on our side of the river, but the other side was very clear of ice for over half the width of the river. We ferry over by turning perpendicular to the current and allowing ourselves to drift downstream as we pick our way across. We ended up repeating this process a few times as the river snaked back and forth. If you choose the right point to cross in a gap between floes, you don’t even lose much paddling time.

The banks are high, and so we’re enjoying the bright sunshine but are protected from whatever wind there might be. It didn’t take long for my feet to warm up, and with my PFD on I didn’t even bother with the anorak I’ve been wearing on the colder days. (I got a really nice paddling jacket for Christmas, but it was one size too small so I’ll have to wait before I get to paddle in it.)

With the river flowing so fast, we paddled up for about 55 minutes, and down for about 25 minutes. On the way down, my feet started to get cold again – Jim said that cold feet are often the deciding factor for how long you can paddle in the cold, and he recommended that I get some neoprene wet suit boots or something. But even cold feet couldn’t diminish my feeling of how great this was. Even a bad day paddling is better than a good day in the gym, and this was a good day paddling.

Impressions after a few days at work

My office
Woo hoo, I have a job!

A few short impressions from 2.5 days of work:

  • The drive sucks. It’s about an hour and forty minutes each way, and today it was snowing so it was a bit longer. I’m going through a tank full of gas every two days, which even with a Prius seems expensive. They told me in the interview I’ll be able to start working from home soon, so I’ve got to get that set up.
  • The construction trailer I work in sucks. I sit next to the door, and it’s cold and drafty, even when people remember to close it behind them. Right behind me is a meeting room with paper thin walls where everybody uses the speaker phone. Worse still, the heater outlet is there so most times when the meeting is on, people turn off the heater. If we’re lucky, they remember to turn it back on afterwards, but yesterday we didn’t discover that nobody had turned on the heater until my toes were about to drop off.
  • My computer has two screens. I had two big screens when I was at Kodak, and I’d forgotten how useful that is when you’re programming to be able to devote an entire screen to Eclipse while you used the other window for running the app, as well as other web browsing and the like. As soon as I have my first paycheck, I think I’m going to buy a cheap LCD panel for my home office.
  • The pace is hectic. My supervisor never has time to show me anything, but he’s expecting results immediately. That can be frustrating. On the other hand, it’s good to have something to do and a project where things actually happen.
  • They wrote their own web framework. As if the world doesn’t have enough Java web frameworks, they wrote their own. And it has its good points and bad points. Each page starts with an XML page description document and an XSLT document. But it’s not what you think – the XSLT document doesn’t process that page description document. Instead, the page description document specifies the Java beans that either produce or consume nodes in a different XML document, which the XSLT document then processes into an HTML page. The forward and back buttons on the browser don’t work on many of their pages, for reasons I don’t entirely understand yet. They use Javascript a lot. I’m going to come out of here with a lot of experience in XSLT and JQuery, I hope.
  • The company seems equally split between people who are friendly and helpful, and people who refuse to look up when you speak to them. Fortunately it appears I’m mostly going to be working with people in the first category.
  • I’m genuinely getting a good feeling about working here. It’s such a refreshing change from the place I worked last winter.