Recently I pretty much switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows machine. The feature I liked the most was the speed by far. I use GMail alot now and JavaScript performance is important. Firefox 3 was lagging behind quite a bit by being perceivably slower than Chrome at loading and working with Javascript heavy sites. Thankfully Firefox 3.5 (in particular TraceMonkey) takes a big step in closing the gap.

Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It's so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.

I just started re-ripping all my CD's again, and this time I am trying to do it a little more smartly. This time I am ripping everything to lossless FLAC format. This was I will not have to rip my CD's again. I will have a high quality archive of all my music, which I can just encode into any lossey format I want or need later.

I like iTunes and now I have a MacBook Pro I was even more complled to use it, but I really dislike how they refuse to support any other music formats. I started to encode in Apple Lossless but then thought better of it. Because it seems like you are at the mercy of Apple if you ever want to re-encode you music in a format other than AAC.

I have been using FIOS at home for several months now, and it has been the best internet service I have ever had. I opted for the 20mbs down, 5mbp up plan because it was only $10 more a month. Every time I run the speedtest it is always pegged right at the cap amount, no dips or slows.

Today over on Ars Technica I just read that Verizon has increased the speeds of the service! When I get a chance to check it I should now have 25mbs down and 15mbs up!!!

The upload rate is huge for me, because I am starting to use services like DropBox much more frequently. Also suddenly online backup services like Carbonite (thanks Leo twit.tv) seem much more useful.

Anyway, I am excited to get back home and try it out.

UPDATE: They are not quite as awesome, they are just updating their new plans to these speeds. So it will cost more to get 15Mbs up, and not just a blanket upgrade for everyone like I first expected. Still great but I will have to think about it. :)

Last weekend I decided to take the plunge and buy my first Apple computer. The recently announce MacBook Pro 13.3 seemed like the perfect fit for me. I have been looking for a small laptop for a long time, I even bought a Dell XPS 13.3 and had to return it. So when the new updated MacBook Pro's were announced at WWDC I just decided to order the next day.

After using it for a couple of days I thought I would post some inital thoughts on the system, and compare it to my limited experiences with the Dell XPS 13.3.

The first thing that hits me as a new Apple owner are some of the intangible things. For example, just opening the box and seeing the well designed and thought out packaging made me excited. When you open the lid of the box you are presented with your system right on top, no flyers for free virus protection, or extended service. Just the clean lid of your system with a little pull tab to help you gracefully lift your system out of the box.

This just made my laugh a little. Even in the specs for the upcoming OS X: Snow Leopard release Apple takes a little jab at Windows.

"HFS+ read support in Boot Camp.
Boot Camp now includes HFS+ read support that enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It’s read-only to prevent PC viruses from affecting Mac OS X, but you can easily save your work to your Windows partition and access it later from Mac OS X."

One of the first things I noticed about Chrome after moving from Firefox is the lack of the quick search box. At first I thought I would miss this alot because I use the quick search box in Firefox all the time. However Chrome's address bar is more intuitive and powerful than Firefox's and does the job of address and quick search box perfectly well.

In Firefox when you start typing you get a list of suggestions from your history and bookmarks. But you have to physically select an item from the list using the arrow keys and enter, or the mouse.

In Chrome as soon as you start typing a similar list appears, however the closest match is automatically displayed in the address bar. If that is the address you are looking for you just hit enter, if not you keep typing a few more key strokes until the site you want pops up. If your site does not popup you can hit enter at anytime and it will take you straight to search results.

I have been using Firefox forever, but I just decided to give Google Chrome a real shot to see how I like it. And my first impression of it is the awesome speed. All the PR about the speed of Chrome seems to be true in my limited subjective experience with it. Just browsing all my normal websites I see a noticeable display time improvement. JavaScript heavy pages (i.e. Gmail) in particular load very quickly. Even graphic heavy pages seem to load more snappily.

The release of Chrome is just great for all of us. Now that web standards are starting to become well... standard, for all browsers except for IE, the more browsers the better. With Chrome, Opera, and Safari all focusing heavily on performance Firefox is already starting to follow suite.