Firefox 3 RC1

I should probably stop using this blog for speculation and opinion and start using it for posting stuff that people might actually find useful. Still, it feels nice to share and get it out there, even if no one is reading it.

Today i finally found myself with 5 minutes spare (among the endless torrent of assignments that marks the end of the University semester), so i decided to check out the new Firefox 3 RC1, as it had been recommended highly by a friend at uni. I used Firefox 2 extensively during my summer holidays working at Unlimited Realities and was very impressed with Firebug and the fast JavaScript engine (very obvious with the heavy AJAX scripts i was writing). Since then i basically didn't bother installing it on my computer at home. Why? because while internet explorer is chunky, slow, and has few or no addons; it did what i needed it to do. Ok, so i couldn't be bothered, but that's probably the reason half of IE users are still using it; it's what came with their PC. IF Firefox came with every PC (provided people knew what it was) it would have a fairly decent market share. All browsers are much of a muchness; most users care that they do what they need to do, and that's about it. Firefox is adopted by most power users for many reasons; developer-friendliness (Firebug, open source community, wide range of addons, etc.), speed (as i mentioned about the JavaScript engine), and of course the good old anti-Microsoft stigma. The last reason isn't such a big one these days; Microsoft do alot of PR work to try improve their image with developers and power users.

Anyway onto Firefox 3 itself; first let's consider the Interface. I'm running this on Vista, and i have to say, the look'n'feel for this version of firefox really does update it to XP/Vista interface, but then according to the release notes this is very much indended; they have tweaked the UIs for the Mac and Windows versions to make them seem less out of place. I thought this was a smart move; i actually like the look and feel of Firefox better than the IE look and feel in Vista, and i don't think it would look out of place in XP either. Firefox continues it's tradition of offering a concise and uncluttered interface, and avoiding the hallmark mistakes of most alot of past Microsoft apps; huge and overflowing menus, cluttered and overpopulated toolbars which i never personally use. I like the simple approach of just having the browser controls and a favourites bar.

Now to move onto the Firefox feature i've always liked, and still do in this installment; addons. As an open source project Firefox has good support for the addon community, with a following so large and devoted that i would liken it to the WoW mod community. If you browse the Firefox Addons site you can come up with addons for anything from ripping video off flash-based players like YouTube to ad blockers. My favourites after a quick float around the site were ScribeFire (what i'm writing this blog in), Download Statusbar and FireGestures. FireGestures i think is very cool, especially if you're working on a touchscreen or with a laptop touchpad. Basically you make a gesture with the mouse pointer and it converts it into an action in Firefox. There's a heck of a learning curve in learning the gestures, but other than that i think this plugin is very well done. As i said, i'm writing this in ScribeFire, which gives me a WYSIWYG editor which automatically logs me in and sends my blogs directly to the server, allowing me to be even more lazy.

Overall i have to say i'm very happy with Firefox 3; if you're a novice user, wait until the final release comes out and then give it a go. If you're reasonably confident you can download the RC1 now. This will definately be my primary browser, at least until someone comes out with a browser that can beat it's plugin support and superior speed (neither of which Internet Explorer has ever been good at).

With All the Formalities

I'm currently in the process of plowing through the end-of-semester rush of assignments that always comes at university; it's like all the papers forgot they have to get another assignment done, so they hastily tack it onto the last week or second to last week of the semester. Of course this is never the case; assignments are planned out at the beginning of the semester, so those of us who have to do them can't use the old excuse "it crept up on me and covered my eyes so i couldn't see it".

One of the worst things about doing a report is the level of formality usually espected. In my first Practical Work Report (Practicum 1) for engineering, i had my mark downgraded because the report was "too personal", and "felt more like an essay than a report" to be fair the man was right. I used the letter "I" far too much, but my excuse was that i was writing about a personal experience. How else am i supposed to write about diagnosing a problem with an offshore tide monitoring station. My computer didn't diagnose the problem, it didn't diagnose itself; I did it. For my latest statistical report i decided to make it pretty casual: the lecturer is a fairly laid back and funny sort of guy, so i thought i'd throw a few colloquial terms in there, use "I" alot (after all I was the experiment), and talk about walls of text.

It got me thinking, why can't all reports be like this? I can see how it might be regarded as unprofessional to not be as objective as possible, and how you could get bored of someone talking about themselves. But when describing what actions you took, surely the use of "I" is not prohibited. For me it's boring just writing like this about personal experiences. I can be objective about things that just happened in my presence, or decisions that were made not just by me. Anyway objectiveness is just the tip of the ice berg. I also tend to be the sort of person that doesn't make good use of appendices; i prefer not to include irrelevant material in my report, and if it's that relevant it should really deserve to be up front, in the body of the report itself.

Ah well i guess it's all hopeless in the end. So much depends on standards and compliance in the modern world. I'll learn to change my ways in the end.

Better Window Tiling

I was thinking about this today in my computer lab, where i was working with a multi-windowed program, and at the same time flicking between tutorials and help files. What a pain in the butt.

Luckily the program in question, LabVIEW, allowed the tiling of windows that were related to the program. However i still had to alt-tab for the documentation and help. For once i would like to see an OS include some really smart tiling, something allowing you to actually specify which windows you want to tile, instead of tiling all or none. And options like being able to choose whether to scale the windows to fill all available space, or scale them as a factor of their current dimensions, so they fit together as a sort of jigsaw, but you don't get overly thin or short windows, obscuring most of the content and defeating the purpose of tiling them in the first place.

Of course the only reason this is even possible is because my university is rich enough to fill our engineering labs with 23" and 24" screens. Tiling isn't very applicable to small screen sizes or small resolutions, probably why it's never been considered a big feature of most desktop environments. But my point is it would be nice to have something to do some slightly smarter and more customizable tiling instead of just expanding every open window to the size of the screen.

Keep thinking.

The Housing Market

ok, let me just say, this is entirely speculation (i know, when isn't something i post here -_-).

[speculation]
I was thinking about the housing market and it's current state, after seeing an American news article saying Forclosure filing rise rise 65%. Wow, sounds like they're well and truly in trouble. But then if 65% is an increase from 3% to 5%, it doesn't sound quite so bad. I don't know the exact figures, but it would figure for the media to try and get "maximum effect" out of the numbers they have available, to try and get their point across... But still, 65% in a single month is very high, and considering the number of forclosures has been out of control for many months now (causing the credit crunch), whis it probaly alot bigger increase than we would all hope.

Anyway onto the actual speculation. This article featured a picture of a house with an auction sign in front of it. That then in turn made me think about a comment made on the NZ herald website about the same topic. The comment in question was this; the reason the house market is in such bad shape all over the world is because people at the moment know house prices are just plain stupid at the moment (who would have figured >.>), with people (and their real estate agents) filling their heads with dellusions of super high sale prices. This in turn just causes people (like ourselves) to sit on what money we have at the moment and wait patiently for house prices to get more realistic. I thought this was a fair comment to make, and very true. However i would go one further: the reason why the housing market is in such a dilemma in the first place can be put largely down to the boom of "investment" or rental properties.

The pyramid scheme of our day. For yonks (ages for those of you who don't speak kiwi) the latest and greatest investment has been property. Anyone with any smarts has bought a couple of houses and done them up a bit, then slapped a nice big rent price on them to not only service their loans but actually turn a profit from. Fair enough too, goodness knows i'd have done the same a few years ago. Anyway i'm not speculating on why the house prices have gone up. There are a million different reasons, and that could be another 5 blog posts in itself (at least).

Basically the reason people can sit and wait patiently for house prices to come down (decreasing the value of people's investment properties) is because there is so much investment property around. Someone invests in a property, what do they do next? They rent it. With a flood of rentals on the market rent rates (although climbing with the house prices a bit) have not climbed at nearly the same exponential rate (at least not in the small town there i live; i pay NZ$60 a week for rent, and no i don't live in a chicken coop). So while someone could own their own (starter) family home for say $200,000-$300,000 and pay (at best) somewhere around 10% interest p.a. So $20,000 to $30,000 just to service the loan. Maybe my maths is screwy, cause that sounds like alot just sitting here. Ok so there's 52 weeks in the year, we divide that loan servicing down and we get.... $384 to $577 a week.

Anyway the point was, at least $400 a week just to service your loan. I currently get NZ$150 from the NZ goverment per week to live as a university student. This isn't free money, i have to pay it back (eventually), and it doesn't scale with inflation, rent prices, commodity prices, or any of that. So i'm living for $150 a week in the current climate, while some poor sods have combined wages of over $1000, but over half of that is going to servicing the debt on their home. Woot for owning your own home....
As you can see, right now you would be crazy to own your own home; with repayments say you're paying $600 a week. For a low-income couple that's a reasonable amount. For a single person that's even more. So the assumption people (myself included) are currently working on, is that why get a loan now, and be paying this much for the next god-knows-how-many years. We would all hope that house prices will drop by about 30-50% (to about what they were before the housing boom) and then we pay 20-50% less interest. In the meantime we can live on a much smaller amount of money (like my $150) and save the rest for a deposit, not only ensuring we pay less of that pesky interest when we do get into the market, but also that we increase our chances of being able to put a deposit down on a nicer house.

Ok that's enough of a rant for today.

Again, these are just my thoughts, prettymuch all speculation and opinion, so feel free to completely ignore them.
[/speculation]

On a non-speculative note (or less speculative) i've started writing a computer copy of a draft i wrote up on a few scraps of paper floating around my desk i've titled "Galaxy-like desktop interface: truly 3D desktop". I believe thisis the sort of thing that needs to happen if we are ever to move any closer to Virtual Reality and Ubiquitous Computing. Plus who didn't think it was cool when Tom Cruise was throwing video clips around on a projected screen using his hands (mice are old skool).

Keep thinking.

The Internet

Today was interesting, Massey University Palmerston North hosted a guest lecturer who talked about the internet. It was largely a history lecture, but some interesting issues and ideas were raised surrounding the internet. One comment that i found particularly interesting was about embedded device networking and it's interfacing to the internet.

One idea this raises is if your home appliances were connected to the internet, how would they be kept safe? What would you do if someone hacked your toaster or changed the temperature on your hot water supply. But yea the main idea i got thinking about was ubiquitous networking (sort of related to the smart toaster). What if we had every modern device with any sort of smarts try and network to any other device in range? This would create a constant moving P2P network between these devices. The great application for this is mobile phones, and viral information distribution. You could create bulk messaging systems like say a news website. This website could then be updated at a hardwired local node (say a cell site), and then that cell site transmits to all other nodes in range. If you wanted to save bandwidth you would make use of the viral distribution network: transmit to say 20% of the network, then use that 20% to virally spread the information to other devices in range.

This would practically put mobile service providers out of a job if it could be made to work; you could distribute information en masse simply by getting each node to sync with every other node in range. My great vision for this would be diminishing the need for wireless access points for internet; the devices become the internet; their interconnections support a short range network allowing information to hop from device to device to reach it's destination, rather than relying on the cell site to transmit the information to each device.

For another example, you could have two people on opposite sides of a town/city IM each other. Normally message would be transmitted to the cell site, then through local network infrastructure, then to possibly another cell site, and finally transmitted to the target phone. From the phone company's point of view they could free up bandwidth on the infrastructure for other information. From the person's point of view it would be cheaper because there practically isn't any cost to make a message jump from phone to phone.

This is not a perfect system by any means though: the first and biggest hurdle is that the technology would have to be available, and it would require cooperation from phone vendors and telecos. With most telecos, they would not be willing to let people exchange any sort of information for free; they make their money by making people pay for it. A great example is how Telecom NZ has always used CDMA handsets that are stripped of all software that allows you to transfer content from computers or other devices. This means you have to buy any new content from their "online stores" via WAP or other mobile services.

Ideally though, it is exciting to think about mini-networks driven by mobile devices. Bringing us slightly closer to that goal of faster, cheaper information exchange. It relies on the principle of human population density, where most people are concentrated on popular centres, which cause more people to gravitate toward them simply by being populous. Because in these areas people are so densely packed in a single area, viral information distribution and networks like the one i have described would be highly feasable to reduce the amount of traffic going through cell sites. It could also make internet access cheaper for people on the move if it could be integrated with local wifi networks; phones could attach themselves to nearby wifi networks and be used as mini cell sites for other phones to communicate with.

The big thing about any part of this theory that i've put forward is that it means phones/nodes/devices/whatever we're talking about here would be constantly active. For mobile phones this would mean a much, much shorter battery life. Even standard wifi equipment uses a reasonable amount of power. So this theory is largely hitched on the classic hitch to all mobile technology; a power source/battery life. You could lower the power requirement, but this would shorten the range considerably. This might still be feasable in a small area scope; maybe up to a couple hundred metres of low-bandwidth networking? This would be enough for places like schools, universities, businesses.

In the beginning....

There was me.... now there's a blog.

I guess i should start in the logical place - me. That is after all what this blog is supposed to be about right? Me, my intrepid adventures, etc. etc.
First, the name. I hear you saying "What sort of name is GenBattle?", well here we go: when i first started playing online games (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault/Spearhead, i was about 14) my online alias was General Specific, from the cartoon Sheep in the Big City. Anyway eventually fter circulating my way around that whole scene i moved onto other games in a series after this point, most prominently including the game Freelancer which i played for almost 2 years, and on and off for a bit longer. Anyway with thisgame came a new game name for 2 reasons: firstly freelancer game names couldn't contain spaces and were a bit limited on length, so "General Specific" wasn't the ideal phrase; secondly, it wasn't a very space-themed name. Since it was a space game, and at the time the new Battlestar Galactica series had just started, i thought up the original name of "Battlestar". From there it was a series of morphs from not being able to get the game name i wanted on different games/servers/services (like gmail) so i merged the two into a combination that was (by and large), unique. Of course i was proven wrong when i bought an Xbox and this name (nor any morhping of it) was available.

So now that we have the name out of the way; why am i suddenly making a blog? I didn't have one yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that even. I've never really been a person to be motivated about anything that contains the words "social networking", mainly because i do believe that there is no such thing as private information on the internet. Also because i just haven't had the time or motivation; i've never thought i really had much to write about, yet here i sit, probably talking to myself. Anyway, i've been sidetracked. Why i started this blog. There's a combination of reasons; one is that i've decided to at least have a go at trying to develop a few creative ideas i've had for a while but not done anything about. As one of my lecturers always used to say; "Smart people are lazy". We later got him back with this whenever we were late for something, like many university students are with assignments. Another reason for starting this blog is to try improve my communication skills, and let other people know what i'm up to. Yet another reason is just to fill time; i'm a university student and gamer, but at the moment there's something missing as far as time filling goes. I could go into the WoW addiction that has left this hole, but that's a completely different story/post altogether.

As i've already said, i'm not a big fan of putting information on the internet with the intention of no one ever seeing it. Lately my ego has been inflated to the point where i have come to think that what i post online could actually be useful or interesting to others. And what do i intend to post online? Well i suppose it just depends. As i said, there are some personal projects i would like to make a decent start to, which it will be good to document, as much for my benefit as for others. I've never been good with keeping track of things in my mind, but at the same time i've never been in good habits of writing anything down. There's a first time for everything. I will also try to post any technical information i stumble across; as an example i'm currently in the middle of taking apart one of my Xbox 360 controllers because the trigger failed just as i was going to sell it. I'll post something on this when i've got nothing else to post about.

For now i think i've just about killed my fingers with all the typing, and to double it's getting late here in New Zealand. Until next time my dear blog.