Even the Web page got better

As this before and after picture of The White House Web page shows, the arrival of the new president has brought some awesome changes already. Also note Brian Warren's comment on his picture, "It validates." Hooray for Web standards and better design in general!

Spelunky

I've recently started playing a pretty great game called Spelunky. It's a platformer with retro graphics and awesome randomized gameplay. It was written by one of the guys from Bit Blot, so you know it's got to be good.

Overall, the game is very fun. Easy gameplay (very casual, no real storyline besides the opening scene (which is also random!)), great graphics, and a very polished feel. The only thing I don't like about the game is the amount of buttons it requires. Even on a gamepad, it's pretty bad. Fortunately, you don't need to press most of the keys very often.

So the next time you're sitting around, bored out of your mind, give Spelunky a try. I highly recommend it!

A very interesting site

I stumbled upon an interesting site just now. It's called Sleeveface, and the premise is that the sleeve of a record obscures part of a picture to create an illusion.

Some of my favorites include the above one with Freddie Mercury, this one of Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen.

Switching from Rhythmbox to Banshee - first impressions

Let me prefix this post by saying that I have not used Banshee since its infancy--and that it has clearly come a long way. I have been a devoted Rhythmbox user for several years. Previously, I have been known to use MPD with a myriad of different frontends. Banshee is under active development, with new features being added constantly. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for Rhythmbox. Since updating to Ubuntu 8.10, I've decided to make the switch to Banshee.

Initially, I noticed an improved startup time over my previous stint with Banshee--from about 1 minute to a whopping 5 seconds. I'm sure this improvement is not solely for Banshee, however--I am on a slightly faster computer, and I'm sure updates to Mono have made it more efficient.

The user interface has some good points and some flaws. First, the good: it's very streamlined, well organized, and just plain pretty to look at. Conversely, it has some bad parts: the "Next" button icon should never change, the seek bar is far too small, and it does not jump to the currently playing song (nor does it provide such an option).

I do not like most of the keybindings; I am used to the "find as you type" search that Rhythmbox supports, which means I often find myself hitting N, R, or T, only to find out I am not searching, but instead opening a dialog or changing/restarting the song. I would really kill to have Alt+Left and Alt+Right as previous/next keybindings, too.

I really don't want video support. I have a video player for that. What can I do to get rid of it from the left menu?

Overall, I'd say it's a superior player to Rhythmbox now. I look forward to overcoming the quirks I listed, or finding ways to customize it to fit my needs.

Stolen from P.G.O

Jeffrey Stedfast, you are my hero/nemesis--this game is amazing. Light Bot is a game where you tell a robot to light up certain tiles on the screen. It reminds me a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, but aimed a bit more towards programmers. Highly addictive, very fun. Sometimes a bit challenging, but that just adds to the enjoyment.

Google Chrome

Since everybody and their brother has been talking about Google's Chrome browser, I figure I'd throw in my two cents. First impressions: it's fast, it's buggy, but it still makes me happy.

It is much faster at loading than Firefox. I'd say around 1/3 of the startup time. Actual page load is comparable, it seems. I'd like to see some benchmarks about just how fast it is in comparison to other browsers. Of course, it'll all be different in a Linux environment...

It seems to be very buggy. After first opening it, I just went around trying out its features. The porn window incognito window decided that it wanted to continuously load a page a few times per second. I closed it and opened a new one, and it was fixed. Also, the first cookie that the browser tried to set erred out, but set correctly the second time.

Chrome has some very interesting things which I like about it:

• The title bar reminds me of the Tango Window Experiments, but I wished there was a way it could keep your theme (at least on Linux).


• The interface is extremely lightweight. There's no clutter like there always is on a fresh Firefox install.


• Browser windows open in the browser. At least, for the most part. Things like history and downloads all open in a new tab, rather than a popup or a sidebar. Things seem to be very homogeneous.

With all that said, it does have its downsides. For starters, there is no status bar. Instead, tooltips pop up in the lower left telling you the location of the link you're hovering over. Options and settings are not well organized at all; they're just grouped together into "basics," "minor tweaks," and "under the hood."

Overall, it's a very good program. It seems very usable (as in, good for end users), but probably not the choice for most seasoned computer veterans. I'd like to see what Google can do with a browser and a lot of user input, however. I'm sure they can come up with some really amazing things.

Sharing calendars between Thunderbird and Sunbird

When you use Thunderbird's great Lightning extension, it sets you up with a blank slate--no calendars from your previous Sunbird installation will be imported. In the future, I'd like to see a dialog similar to when you're installing Firefox; "Would you like to import settings from...?" Is that too much to ask of an extension?

Until then, a quick fix is to symlink between your Sunbird calendar database (~/.mozilla/sunbird/profile.default/storage.sdb) and your Lightning database (~/.mozilla-thunderbird/profile.default/storage.sdb). Just run ln -s .mozilla/sunbird/profile.default/storage.sdb .mozilla-thunderbird/profile.default/storage.sdb where profile is the name of your programs' respective profile names.

The largest advantage, for me, anyway, is that now I can share local calendars between the two programs. While Google Calendar is great, it does not (currently) support tasks. What this means is that you must make a local calendar solely to store your tasks. And, of course, local calendars aren't shared between Thunderbird and Lightning, nor are they easy to share: they are stored in the database for that program, but the symlink takes quick care of that.