First post in “I am” series.

I am reading some nice papers from good guys. The first one is titled “What should blog search look like?”. Its by Marti A. Hearst from UC Berkeley, Matthew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs (he is the good guy) and Susan T Dumais from Microsoft Research. It is appearing in CIKM – SSM’ 08 on 30th October 2008. Matthew Hurst was nice enough to put a copy on his blog, thus he earns the title good guy The paper can be downloaded from Matthew Hurst’s blog post. Since i hate you clicking the link and leaving the blog, i am linking scribd copy as well.

I thought it would be nice to have a new category called “i am” on the blog. I plan to push updates about what am i doing right now. I read a lots of stuff,and hack a lot a code, and play a lot of games, and utter tonnes of rubish (as Geoffery Boycott puts it, roooooooobeeeesh). I draw the idea from facebook, lets see how far does it go.

I have finished migration to new wordpress completely. This also includes the new blog on a new machine. Have assigned a subdomain to it. It is now blog.jatspeak.com instead of jatspeak.com/blog. The RSS feeds pointing to older blog need to be changed, i have tweaked it to serve contents from newer blog.

The new feature set includes :-

1. Ditching google analytics for wordpress’s own analytics engine.

2. Wordpress 2.6.0

3. Fork+K2

4. Zemanta recommendation engine, It helps the author to link more and more posts Aids content creation.

Following is now obsolete

1. Dreamhost.

2. Sphere blog recommendation engine.

3. Feedjit traffic widget (Still searching a better one. recommendations welcome)

4. smsgupshup widgets. (Kaddy won’t be happy)

5. I curbed the footer index as well. Am not happy about that. That will come back soon. Currently K2 does not have that.

I was facing problems in RSS migration. Apparently dreamhost was not allowing fetching files though php. So, i have put together an ugly hack. I pull the file from new machine on older one though wget, and then read it to output. This is bad! but it works! So, as always, first make it work, and then make it better.

I tried out IE8 beta and opened gmail. I could not log out completely. See the following video (It has been shot from my phone, so quality is not very good, but you’ll get what i mean)

On the other note, I am sure thakkar is going to hate it. One more browser that breaks standards, to support!

Google announced Chrome, last night, and promised to deliver tonight IST. In case you still are unaware read the official google blog. In case you have any questions about the motive for this game, they have tried to cool the hot heads and foxes through a comic book strip. Its a a couple of pages of scriptures, and will take some time to go through. I liked the idea of marketing their initiative though a comic strip. It answers and lot of questions you might have, and is like FAQ 2.0. It focuses around Why, How and What. A new browser on the block was bound to get some curved eyebrows. After all, google has widely endorsed firefox (and continues to do so).

Following is the summary :-

1. It is grandchild of webkit.

2. It has tabs.

3. Each tab runs in separate process, which means, firefox’s memory leak problems might go away. In case of a crash, only one tab dies.

4. Javascript also gets a virtual machine model, no more asynchronous stuff.

5. Homepage has been improved a lot.

6. Gears supported.

7. Multithreaded.

8. Detachable tabs.

9.  Mozilla prism like functionality.

10. Tab bound sandboxes.

11. Plugin support (pligins not sandboxed)

12. Open source.

Looks like an impressive list to me. Combines the experience of desktop apps and power of web apps. They have used the word process so many times, that i am a bit curious about what happens when i open standard 35 tabs like firefox. Our friendly fox is single threaded, which means that all tabs share same memory space. I suspect that initial memory footprint is a bit high in case of chrome, which can lead to a bit of problems in case of memory starved PCs. I see a lot of context switiching between processes.

The more active apps you use, the more is the active work done by each process. For example, i use youtube to listen to music instead of watching the videos. i build a playlist for this. Thus, one tab is reserved for youtube. In case you use many bandwidth consuming, rendering heavy apps, this might slow down chrome a bit, but it would scale well when majority of your tabs are mere text based static web pages.

The good side is that if one rouge javascript is not sticking to its business, the whole browser might not come down (and you will not loose your tabs and your research on fixing the latest bug).

The sandboxing is still not very clear, thus, it will be interesting to see how cookies and all work (I see people using cookies for interprocess communication more and more).

Gears, though has been around since some time, but is still to take off. So i do not see that as a killer feature.

More juice after some chroming!!