Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5.  I noticed a huge cosmetic change.  Observe:

Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome.  The tabs are now above the address bar.  Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change.  Also, although I can’t share it in a screenshot, they have changed the tab animations so they are really slick like in Chrome.  Overall, the animations are one of those things that really add to the experience without doing much.  It just feels nice to have things slide in and out rather than pop into existence.  They also seem to have REALLY sped up the startup to the point where Opera is once again a joy to use.  They also made a change to the way the text searching works:

I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now.  I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends.  Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows.  I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers.  At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days.  That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle.  Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts.  Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan.  So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about.  Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life.  (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently)  I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.

Because of the upcoming talks at Copenhagen, everyone’s been talking about global warming recently.  The news even featured  a member of a Commonwealth government claiming that global warming is not true.  In my own country, Republicans like to say that global warming isn’t true.  The opposition parties in both countries disagree.  Look, this debate is over the wrong question.  There can be no debate about whether global warming is happening.  It either is or it isn’t.  That’s not up for debate.  Are average temperatures higher year over year compared to the past?  Then we have global warming.  The globe is getting warmer.  End of debate.  If not, then we don’t have global warming.  What we really need is debate over whether it’s human caused, human exacerbated, or neither.  After all, the planet has been warmer and cooler than its current temperature.  So we need to figure out if what we’re doing is enough to make a difference.  If it is, we should probably knock it off so we don’t make things worse.  If it is solely our responsibilty, then we need to stop right away.  But if it’s going to get warmer no matter what and our activities only matter in the thousandths of a degree, then there’s no point in doing anything.  So this is where we need to be and this is what we need to figure out.  Stop arguing over whether the planet is getting warmer or not.  It’s like arguing if the sun came up today.

While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing.  I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes.  The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in the following idea - what about a subscription model for authors.  Right now it sucks to be an author in that your pay is very irregular.  I know that my paycheck will be the same week to week.  But authors get an advance for a book and then some royalties depending upon how well a book sells.  So they can’t really plan their finances easily because they don’t know ahead of time how many books they will sell.  But, with digital distribution, it might be easier to sell the author’s readers on a subscription model.

I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now.  It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason:  my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs.  As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch on our computers.  We want to be able to watch these on the TV just as if we had rented little silver discs.  The Roku box is tiny.  Here’s a shot of the front:

Happy Birthday to the Compact Disc - it’s 25 today.

2 Days Ago, Happy 10th Birthday to Gnome

and Yesterday happy 14th Birthday to Debian

Our sexually crazy and confused friends over in Japan have decided to contribute to the end of humanity with the Honey Doll (warning link contains some images/sounds NSFW) :

Unlike the blowup doll everyone makes fun of, the Honey Doll is supposed to mimic real women. It looks real (or creepily almost real) and has real feeling breasts - or so I assume from the pictures since I can’t understand Japanese. It also make real orgasm sounds. So for loser guys who might spend a little more time finding a real woman, I think they may give up. And then there’s the stereotypical guy that doesn’t want to have to deal with a real woman and all her problems and just wants to have sex. I think it’s roughly the end of humanity……

Today I tested my POS Compaq render node (running freeBSD with no GUI) with the same bouncing ball as in this previous post. It took my node 796 seconds to render the same animation. This is somewhere around 1.65 times slower. However, the software should just be throwing frames at whichever computer is ready for a new frame. The node took about 20 seconds per frame on average to render. My Linux computer takes 12 seconds. Here’s where I’m pretty bad at math, but I think this means that a render farm with just these two computers should finish in a little over half the time as just my Linux computer. But I can also throw in my laptop which should also be in the same range. So a 3 hour render should go down to a 1 hour render. (Roughly speaking)

What a beautiful hex number!

Check this page out to see what it may mean.

The Free Speech Flag…..just check out the hex that represents these colours.

While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t really want non-DRM’d music when Jon Random User probably doesn’t even know the difference and won’t see why he should pay twice as much for the same song.