Agronesia

Yes, Google will release its very own new browser! If you have time, do read the entertaining 38-page comic licensed in Creative Commons illustrating it.

The highlights are:

• It will be fully open source. It’s not surprising, being Google which uses lots of open source technologies itself and supports open source through means like Google Summer of Code.
• The rendering engine will be based on WebKit which also powers Konqueror and Safari. Why not Gecko, the one powering Firefox? Google claims WebKit is fast, easily runs on mobile devices, and is very easy for new developers to learn.
• Each tab will run in its own separate process. Therefore, one tab crashing won’t affect the whole browser. The Chrome UI will also allow you to analyze the resource consumption of each tab which is a very sweet feature. Closing a tab will completely release all resources associated with the process just like closing a normal application, preventing memory hog.
  
• A JavaScript engine designed from scratch designed by the Google V8 team at Denmark. It will be designed from ground up to run big demanding applications like GMail with blazing-fast speed.
• Google Gears will be included by default. This is the JS component that can make web applications run in offline mode and other stuffs that are supposed to make apps easier to develop.
• Address bar will be below tabs. Well, it’s kind of logical but… Well, big deal…
  
• Privacy mode like IE8 in which nothing of your browsing activity is recorded. Aka pr0n mode.
• Address bar, or Omnibar as they christened it, autocomplete like Firefox 3 but with additional entries like popular sites based on what you type.
• Opening a new tab shows the list of 9 sites you open most just like Opera, with the addition of search engines you might want to immediately use on its right.
  
• Pop up blocking and anti malware/phising features. the browser will continually download list of malicious sites. Kind of a must have in today’s browser anyway.

It’s nice to see Google playing nicely by making it a free software. What I have high hopes most is in the JavaScript engine. The comic actually goes quite a great length explaining many of its technical details in comparison with other engines with simple languages (for a programmer of course), so again read it :).

As a (would be lazy) JavaScript programmer, I’ve got IE7, FF3, Opera, and Safari installed anyway (I believe I have Amaya installed at one point too). Another one in the neighborhood won’t be such a shock.

PS: www.google.com/chrome should have a content appearing soon.

On a previous post I discussed about the results of a Windows BPM finder program MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It sometimes produces values that are 2 times or half the seemingly actual value. And then the doubt grew on me, “Is that program even accurate at all?”. So, I was set to program my own BPM finder.

But I don’t know any sound programming stuffs, so I went for the easy path of a human-assisted program in which the algorithm is very intuitive. A human would tap the beats while playing a song and the program will do the simple mathematical calculation (it’s “beats per minute” for a thing, so it’s basically just a division).

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MixMeister BPM Analyzer - analyzing DOES take time

The BPM (Beats per Minute) of a song can be stored as an ID3 tag on your MP3 files. In essence, the BPM is the tempo of a song which indicates how fast or slow a song is.

Programs like iTunes can display the stored BPM number and utilize it. If your song collection has BPM value, you can for example make a playlist for the fast songs and another for the slow songs. The fast songs can then be copied to your MP3 player for your gym activity, for example.

The problem now is that this value is initially empty. We can even insert a random number on programs that supports MP3 metadata editing. Luckily, there are programs that analyze BPM and store the computed value on the files. One such program is MixMeister BPM Analyzer which is free to download. Using this freeware is very easy, you just need to drag and drop the files or folders you want to analyze. It’s computationally quite heavy so if you have tons of files be prepared for a long wait.

(I wonder whether there is an open-source program for this purpose)

The result in iTunes after the BPM is analyzed

I tried searching for such programs because I wanted to know the BPM of songs I want to try playing on the keyboard. The calculation output is quite interesting. For most files, the program seems to be accurate. However, for some files the software computes a BPM which is actually 2x faster than the seemingly real value or else half of it. For example, the program gives 82.42 BPM for a song (Berryz Koubou’s “Gag 100kaibun Aishite Kudasai“) despite it being a fast one, so the double value 163.84 BPM seems to suit more. There’s also a slow song (Morning Musume Sakura Gumi’s “Sakura Mankai“) which is given 160.03 BPM, but clearly 80.015 BPM is closer to the real answer.

But theoretically, a musical score written in x BPM can be easily rewritten in 2x BPM or 0.5x BPM. We just need to double or halve every note’s duration. Of course, by this modification a note might be moved to another measure. In a sense the program is correct.

What kind of baffles me is that I can probably sense the beat of a music intuitively, but I wonder how one makes an algorithm that can find BPM. Ah, sound processing, an area where I have practically null experience.

After a day’s worth of PHP hacking coupled with some swearing, I’ve finally finished a rudimentary ad manager! What does it do? Well, basically it rotates through a pool of ads. A life demo can be seen here. Refresh the demo page several times and see the ads magically rotating.

It’s called Yumeko AdManager because… Well, probably because it will be used on my Japanese learning site Yumeko. Because Google AdSense still don’t allow us to use it on Indonesian web sites.

This program is licensed under GPL 2 and you can download it here (there’s a documentation, yay!). I even made a special page for it here in case I’m inclined to update it.

Here are some of its features:

• Relative appearance rate of ads can be set
• Tracks appearance count
• Tracks click count
• Expiry date for ads can (uhm… must) be set

What’s obviously lacking is an interface to add and manage ads. Yes, you need to play around using tools such as PHPMyAdmin to add the database rows. But anyway it’s all explained in the documentation :).

Other than PHP, I’m also interested in learning more about this black horse JavaScript to make… ah, let’s call it “interactive programs”. But alas, there’s only so much hours in a day…

No, I don’t know stuffs about Chinese. Probably except the first two newbie lessons on ChinesePod. What interests me most about Chinese is how its hanzi sound map to Japanese kanji’s, how many characters used in Chinese are alien in Japanese, and how simplification makes the character between traditional and simplified Chinese awfully different.

I was reading about the romanization of Chinese today when I found the link for Google Pinyin, a Chinese IME. Before, when I need to access a Chinese hanzi I would draw it using Microsoft Japanese IME’s handwriting recognition. Of course many of the simplified characters like 吗 isn’t available there. The solution is to write the traditional characters like 嗎 and get the simplified equivalent through the dictionary program Wakan. Clumsy I know. That’s why when I read about Google Pinyin I thought “Let’s try a Chinese IME for the sake of it”. The fact that Google makes an IME also interested me much.

First of all, why the need for Google Pinyin at all? Well, because Microsoft’s built in Chinese IME sucks? Probably. I’ve tried both (very shallowly!) and I can say that the Google one seems to be more fun and easy to use.

To use it, just go to its website, download the program, and install it. The link is 下载 which in Japan would be read as kasai but I won’t even guess how it sounds in Chinese. Then you need to install Microsoft’s Chinese IME from the Control Panel. After that just switch to Chinese from the language bar. The default will be Google Pinyin but you can switch to Windows XP’s IME using Ctrl+Shift.

Thanks for reading. 我叫アグロ。我很好。我爱你。你呢？谢谢。谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢。(笑)

My internet quota is limited so any way to cut down useless usage is helpful. If we talk about flash, there are some websites that genuinely use it for advanced functionality like Wordpress‘ stats system and Google Analytics. However many just use it for bad design and nonessential content which just waste bandwidth.

This is where add-ons like Flashblock comes to play. It lives up to its name: the Mozilla Firefox extension will block flash and replace it with an “f” icon (meaning “**** you” presumably). If we really need the flash content, we can just click on the placeholder.

There’s a whitelist feature which is useful because as I said some websites use flash properly and need it to function. Even the uploader in Wordpress uses flash.

I’ve downloaded the shiny brand new Firefox 3! Go download it yourself, and to celebrate it try to do these things:

1. Play JavaScript Mario

The classic scrolling game, but now using JavaScript! It isn’t faithful to the original in that we can go backwards though. Play!

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Starting from June 17, 10 a.m PDT, or June 18 in Indonesia, we can download Firefox 3 final! I’m running its latest RC right now, and will of course download it as soon as it becomes available.

They are aiming to be the most software downloaded in 24 hours, and that’s partly the reason I’m hyping it. You can actually pledge to download Firefox, and 1.5 million people have actually pledged. It’s a shame that while Indonesia has almost 2 times the population of Japan, Japan has almost 9 times people pledging! This shows how primitive, or how free-software-apathetic, the Indonesian culture is.

So, don’t forget to do it tomorrow. (I wonder whether their servers can handle the load)

My memory usage was soaring past 1.5 GB, so I closed the main culprit, a Firefox 3 RC2 with 20+ tabs opened. As usual, I thought it was time to restarts other programs as well.

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date is part of the GNU Coreutils or core system utilities on a GNU/Linux system. It is a command line program that tells you the current date.

Basic usage

Just type the command date on the terminal:

[agronesia]$ date
Sun Jun  8 02:11:51 PDT 2008

It will display the date according to the system’s time zone, in that case PDT.

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