So, Google made a new browser. Curious to see what the fuss was about I downloaded it to have a look.
Woah.
It's fast. I mean really fast. The first impressive thing it did was import everything from Firefox. I have a google keyword search set up in firefox, meaning I can type "g blah" in the address bar and do a google search for "blah". Chrome managed to pick up on this, plus it has the ability to automatically detect site searches. Do a search on Amazon and any time you open a new tab, type "a" then tab, you'll be able to do an amazon search in the address bar.
Looking through the comicbook which talks about Chrome, I like the idea of every tab being a separate process. Chrome has a process explorer that lets you view the CPU and memory usage of each tab, and kill non-responsive ones. The idea is that one crashed tab doesn't take the entire browser down with it. Neat. Add to that the whole sandboxing concept for each application/tab and popups that only show up within their parent tab, and you've got a pretty stable annoyance free browsing experience.
More cool stuff. It's pinched the awesomebar idea from Firefox, and I think this is a good thing. It's also got the Opera-a-like feature of speed dial when you open a new tab, giving you thumbnails of your most visited pages. There's also an incognito browsing mode, which opens up a window in which no tab is allowed to write any information, bookmarks / cookies / history etc. There's also a reasonable javascript console for web devs. A bit like firebug.
And did I mention that it was fast?
There's two things missing. Adblock and mouse gestures. If they invented these for Chrome, I'd actually switch from Firefox for a bit. I'd probably end up missing a few things, like Yslow, but I'm sure that I'd get used to that. Whatever people say, another open source browser with really good ideas is very good for the market. People say that without Firefox, there would be no IE7. Lets hope that Chrome makes a similar impact on the browser scene.
Well, with cable dropping to its lowest level in a number of years, the monthly rental on the server that hosts this and a number of other sites was becoming a bit more than I liked.
I helped Robin configure a server for his D4H site a while back, and remembered that he was using Slicehost. Dimly remembering that they were quite good (and cheap) and not using any other market research, Ben and I got us a slice. Overall, I'm impressed. We've got the 512MB option whilst we migrate and then we'll move up to something bigger once everything is over. For $38 per month though, we get a 64-bit Xen-based VM, which seems to be on a dual dual-core Opteron box along with 512MB RAM, 20GB space and 200GB bandwidth. Ample for the moment. Even when we scale that up to a sensible amount of memory, it works out cheaper than what we were using before. Also, migrating from a physical box to a VM means that we're no longer responsible for the hardware and can enjoy the IO performance of a large RAID 10 array, rather than rely on a single disk. Neat. Equally nice was the time between deciding that I wanted one and logging into the box was about 2 minutes. They'd allocated, configured and built my choice of OS in an amazingly fast time. The support is good too - I wanted an extra IP address (an extra $2 per month) and they were very responsive over email.
I'll have to give it some time before I can wholly recommend them, but things are looking good.
This site is the only domain that I've moved over so far. I'll move all the services over and then the websites last methinks. If anything breaks, ignore it and I'll figure it out eventually.
So, I've moved house. This on its own is a good thing as I now have a lot more room to put stuff and live in a nicer place. However, when I combine these upsides with the sheer awfulness of having to physically move my stuff, get screwed over by estate agents and be surrounded by a web of general incompetence, I start to feel that this was a bad idea.
Getting movers in to move my stuff was a good plan. In an astonishingly short amount of time, they had emptied the old place of all boxes and furniture before racing over to the new flat and dumping it all in the lounge. Expensive people, but very much worth the money. This is where the goodness stopped. Despite the agents promising us that all the existing furniture could be removed, a quick call to the landlord after we moved revealed that this was not the case. I now have 4 sofas (plus lots of other stuff) in my lounge, and I don't particularly want 2 of them. In theory, the agent is sorting this out, but given their tendency to lie to everyone about everything, I've half a mind to just dump it on the pavement outside and declare it to be not my problem.
The other calamity is cleaning. Most tenancy agreements require you to clean a place before you move out, and promise a professional clean before you move in. The previous tenants obviously didn't clean before they moved out, and no clean was done before I moved in. So now I'm in the fantastic situation of being unable to unpack to allow the cleaners to come this week and do something. I'm sleeping on the floor. I'm not happy.
Legally, I'm not sure where I stand. I'll see where things are by the end of the week.