Playing with Google Chrome

I get pretty excited everytime I hear something new on the web browser realm. As we all know a new browser named Chrome from Google has been announce and everybody wants to take a look at it, as I did right away.

What interests me the most is to see how fast this new V8 Javascript engine is(I am not javascript expert). As I believe the performance of the javscript is very important for the future web application.

I try some sites and notice that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Docs performs faster. I don't have any benchmark but you could really able to feel the performance gain with Chrome. Then I try it with VersionOne(a project planning and management tool) which I had some performance problem due to it's heavy javascript usage, but the result is VersionOne doensn't function well.

While playing with it, I like the tabs on Chrome it's the best I've ever seen it has the most complete features. The minimalist UI of Chrome is very nice and the way they implement the status bar is very unique and fell for it. Over all the Chrome is really speedy, but it uses a lot of memory, really a lot!

Though Google admits that they're not creating Chrome to conquer the browser market but to set a new trend in making a browser that's really meant for Web 2.0, I believe we'll be seeing more good things on the future browser. The seperate process for each tab and improve javascript performance is the key and Chrome will succeed on this one and eventually browsers base on Chrome will come out. Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner, we'll see also how much improvement it does in javascript performance.

Are we going to have a Browser2.0?

Preparing for Django 1 release

To all the django fans I am pretty sure that you're all excited on what is taking place in the development Django as it fastly approaches to version 1. When Django 1.0 Alpha was release I kept myself from upgrading and decided wait for the final version 1 to arrive fearing that it might break something. I did the same thing when the Alpha 2 was release, but new features are just too awesome to ingore and finally I decided to upgrade. As expected something went wrong and having no idea what's going on I quickly turn to Django IRC channel for some help. Nice rozwell tell me why (at 18:58) and present this page to me which is a list of back imcompatible changes that's going to help us prepare for Django 1.

This page is helpful and I am presenting to all isn't aware to it. Get set for Django 1!

Formsets: Django Forms new features

As fas as I can remember, I don't see this feature mention on the up coming Django 1 release. So I was very surprise and happy to see this new feature when I browse thru the forms documentation. Formset is a layer of abstraction to working with multiple forms on the same page. It can be best compared to a data grid. Formset makes things easier for you when dealing with multiple forms such as validating, ordering, and deleting.

I'll be updating my code and see how much it helps.

Why I like to replace desktop apps with web apps

Thanks to the wonderful web apps that we're seeing today. And some of them are really useful and giving me enough reason to replace some of the desktop apps that I using. This might not be applicable to all of you as it really depends on your needs and situation.

Here are the reason why I like and prefer to use them

• Preserve hard disk space

  I know hard disk are cheap nowadays but this might not be true to anyone like me. I am using a laptop with 40GB hard disk and I have both Windows XP and Ubuntu on it leaving me a small free disk space for other installations and for my download activity everyday which I later transfer to my external hard disk.

• Maintain my system to be as clean, fast and light as possible.

  Every time we get to use a newly install windows system, we feel the system is fast to boot, response, and shutdown but as soon as you begin to install something on it, it becomes slow.

• Portable

  I can access my documents, listen to my music playlist and watch my favorite music from home and work or any computer that has internet connection

Web apps that replaces my desktop apps

Web App	Remarks
Buxfer	Finding a free personal finance desktop application is hard, but on the web there's a lot of it which are really good and my perosonal favorite is buxfer.
CrunchyRoll, YouTube	These really saves me a lot of disk space and time. I no longer need to download and keep music videos and animes in my hard disk
Delicious	Way much better than the bookmarking features that the browers has to offer today.
Gmail, Yahoo Mail	No more email client software on my system. No need to delete emails, and to do backups( and I believe they do it better than me)
Google Docs	I am just a casual word processing and spreadsheet user, so Google Docs is more than enough to me and offers online storage for me which makes my data portable and makes sharing your files easy. And this is where it saves me a lot of disk space, as we know both Microsoft Office and Open Office requires a lot of disk space.
Imeem	With this I can easily access and organize my music playlist from home and from work place, and also saves me a lot of disk space. It really change my way of collecting, listening, and organizing music. I love this app!
Jjot	It lets you easily compose, organize, and search for your notes. Veryful useful and productive!
Meebo	Saves me from installing gTalk and Yahoo Messenger. And the best thing I really like is that Yahoo Messenger currently doesn't do online achieving of my chat logs and meebo has this feature.
Picasa Web	Helps me share my photos with friends and keeps a collection of wallpapers, interesting images that I don't want to takes my disk space.

Did I miss any web apps that could possibly replace the desktop apps I am using? Thanks.

Notepad++ has reach version 5

Notepad++ has been my favorite all around editor, it's fast and light which support all the languages I am working with (CSS, HTML, Javascript, Python) and might as well for you.

I guess there's no new major feature in version 5, but here are the fixed bugs and added features from the previous version (4.9.2)

• Improve Notepad++ performance - on startup and on exit.
• Add Calltip capacity.
• Add HTML/XML tag match highlighting.
• All the menu commands can be added in context menu, including plugins' commands, macros and user defined commands.
• Add bookmarked lines operations : delete all marked lines, copy all marked lines into clipboard, cut all marked lines into clipboard, paste from clipboard to replace all marked lines content.
• Add rename and delete current document features.
• Fix crash bug : Open files with date pre-1970.
• Fix clone mode bug : now the actions done in one view will be synchronized in the cloned view.
• Add tooltips in document tab to display the full file name path.
• Change hide lines behaviour : Hide lines now saved during switches.
• Change file history list behaviour : Most recent closed file is on the top. Add number on list.
• Caret width and blink rate are customizable.
• Add asterisk in title bar if file is dirty.
• The bookmarks' look & feel are improved.
• Add "Select all" and "copy" context menu items in Find in files results window.
• Fix goto line with command line bug.
• Improve smart highlight / mark all / incremental search highlight all visibility.
• Tabbar's coulours is configurable via Stylers Configurator(Active tab Text, Inactive tab text, Inactive tab background, Active tab focused indicator and Active tab unfocused indicator).
• Add the smart highlight file size limit - 1.5 MB in order to improve the performance.
• Add exception handling (dumping filedata).
• Fix go to line command line bug.
• Enhance Find in files and Find in all opened files features' performance.
• Fix dialog off screen problem under multi-monitor environment.
• Add 2 plugin message for v5 : NPPM_GETFULLPATHFROMBUFFERID and NPPM_GETPOSFROMBUFFERID.

If you want to see the previous improvement click here.

The author might not yet release this version, but you can already download it here.

Firefox 3: Zoom page feature

During the days of version 2, I use the text size adjust feature to adjust the font size of a web page for some cases where I need to see it big, but sometimes this makes the page ugly, or destroy its layout. Now that I am using version 3 and I was surprise that this time it adjust the page viewing size smartly, and I really like it! I haven't seen this feature mention before.

To use the page zoom feature press Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-, Ctrl+0 to restore back to the original. You can also use it with mouse by press Ctrl+Scroll up or Ctrl+Scroll down

If you're not using firefox 3 download it now.

Free Anti-Virus comparision

For my newly install windows xp, I decided to make a comparison of free anti-virus to choose from. And here's what I got.

Comparison table

	Avira	Avast	AVG	ClamWin	Comodo	PC Tools
Anti Rookit	Yes	Yes	No	?	No	?
Anti Spyware	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?
Auto Update	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Download size	21MB	23MB	46MB	21MB	35MB	20MB
Firewall	No	No	No	No	No	No
IM Protection	Yes	Yes	No	?	?	?
Outlook Support	?	Yes	?	Yes	?	?
POP3 & SMTP	No	Yes	Yes	?	Yes	?
Scheduling	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?
System Requirement	Not mention	Pentium Class 128 MB 50MB disk space	Pentium 300 256 MB 30 MB disk space	Not mention	Pentium 300 128 MB 50 MB disk space	Not mention
Remarks	has ads				Comodo has other free security products like anti-malware, anti-spam, and firewall.	PC Tools has free firewall.

And I choose Comodo Anti-virus, tell me yours.

Software used

I am in bad luck today and had to reformat my system and while I re-installing all the software I use, I'll take this opportunity to share and recommend the list of software I used. Basically my preference are small and light to the system and free!

Editors

• Notepad++

Internet

• Emule
• Firefox
• Limewire
• uTorrent

Media

• FastStone Image Viewer
• VLC
• ConvertZ

Productivity

• Foxit Reader
• Open Office

Utilities

• 7 zip
• Comodo AntiVirus

Any suggestions?

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, as my first post here's a little about me.

Who am I

• CrunchyRoll
• Facebook
• Friendster
• Imeem

What I do

• CSS
• Django
• HTML
• Javascript
• Jquery
• Python

Enjoy this blog and a bowl of beef ramen!