Examancer

To be honest, this isn’t something I planned to write about. I have been watching the economy and the bailout discussions very closely and although I had plenty of opinions on those events I didn’t feel the need to share my opinions. I had hoped my next blog entry would be about one of the many projects I am working on. However, the political wrangling going on in Washington over the bailout plan is too much to ignore.

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The Omaha World Herald is reporting that a majority of City Council members are supporting a plan to require muzzles for Pit Bulls in the city, and require their owners to obtain a minimum $100,000 of liability insurance.

This is a predictable reaction to recent attacks by Pit Bulls in the city, and it’s a reaction I feel is knee-jerk. These new requirements fail to address the problem in a responsible and fair manner. In this proposed plan all Pit Bulls and Pit Bull owners will be punished, with no significant change in the treatment of the dogs and owners involved in attacks. Citizens are clamoring for some kind of response from legislators, and what our esteemed mayor and council members respond with is a finger pointed at the average Pit Bull owner. The average Pit Bull owner doesn’t own a dog that has ever attacked some one. The average Pit Bull owner restrains and trains their dog sufficiently to prevent an attack from ever occurring. However, the average Pit Bull owner will be handed the punishment for the actions of a minority of owners who do not properly restrain, train, and care for their Pit Bull.

Less short sighted solutions could include something like stiffer penalties for the owners of Pit Bulls involved in attacks.

I wrote my first Greasemonkey script today, and it happens to be an automatic Twitter Refresher. The script will refresh Twitter every n seconds (10 seconds by default), unless you have placed any input in the input field, in which case it will not refresh.

I haven’t tested this in Greasemetal (Google Chrome) or Greasekit (Safari) yet, but it uses very simple and standard javascript DOM to work, so I’m pretty sure it will work fine in other userscript environments.

Pretty simple, but its something I really wanted so I figured I would share in case anyone else needs a tool like this. Also available through userscripts.org.

Let me know if you can think of any other sites this would be useful for.

When Google released the beta for their new browser, Chrome, they stated their main goal was to create a lightweight, fast, and robust platform for web applications. After spending some time with Google Chrome I can say for certain they have succeeded in that goal. This is still a beta project, and it has its short comings, but it shows real promise and it is hands down the fastest browser I have ever used.

Here is a quick overview of my thoughts on Google Chrome:

Pros

• Super fast rendering
• Super fast javascript and great inspection tools
• Super fast user interface
• Very compatible and standards compliant (thanks webkit!)
• Simple, clean, attractive, and intuitive UI
• Fantastic stability and resource management

Read on for more detailed thoughts about the Google Chrome beta browser.

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Just before heading off to bed last night I came across an interesting leak of information via LifeHacker,  Gizmodo, and Ars. However, the breadth of coverage wasn’t necessary to catch my attention. I knew this was big news the moment I read the headline… Google is releasing a browser, and its called Chrome. The beta is set to be released later today. Read on.

Update: Google Chrome beta has now been released. I’ll write up my first impressions soon.

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