Firefox vs. Opera: Round Two

Today I’ll be looking at usability in both Firefox and Opera. The main concerns I have for a browser’s usability include Cookie and Password Management, Customization, Rendering, and Bugs/Quirks. For today, I will only be talking about cookies and passwords.

Why does this matter?
Seeing as how I’m someone who enjoys the ”set it and leave it” way of doing things, I am very much concerned with how a browser handles my settings. I have a list of sites that I visit often which require cookies to function properly (like Gmail, for example). I have so many accounts (four different ones just for Gmail) and on so many different sites with so many different variations of “johnnysasaki” and “larker” and whatever else I can’t recall at the moment that I do not like sitting there and thinking for a minute or two before typing in my username and password. I also don’t like trying various options before getting it right. This is why I really think cookies and passwords are so important.

Firefox vs. Opera: Round One

As per Herman’s request, I’ve done some very simple tests to get a feel for differences between Firefox and Opera. Two things I’ve looked at this time were Load Times and Memory Footprints. These are completely objective observations and I have not changed/fudged any numbers. How did it go?

Opera 9.22 Int’l

Update: I would be glad to do comparisons between the two on my machine. I’ve been considering that actually, since load up times (for example, of Speed Dial pages) become extremely important for someone who opens new tabs as often as I do. Memory footprints are also going to be important for people like me without more than a gigabyte of RAM. I’ll get on a side-by-side soon.

Keeping my promise from before, I have decided to give Opera another chance to prove itself to me. I had ventured once into these strange waters but did not have anything to show for it except for a lasting impression of “This just doesn’t feel like my Fox.” I decided then that I would, given the right amount of time, try it out in earnest at a later date. Since I’ve upgraded from Blogger to WordPress, I also figured it’d be fitting to try out Opera at the same time. So what did I find out?

info @ the P.Pole 07.23.07

Here I am blogging happily on WordPress. Surprisingly enough, the decision to swap over didn’t take me too long and I’m (so far) glad that I have made the switch.

5 things I like about WordPress:

P.Pole’s [Custom] Template

I’m quite proud of my template for this blog that I’ve slowly created and altered over the years. It started out as a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of template that most blogs run on but I didn’t want my page to look exactly like all the others. Okay, to say that it’s completely groundbreaking in its layout is a huge exaggeration, but for someone without any actual knowledge of how to code (apart from some very primordial HTML), I think I’ve done quite nicely for myself. I mean, I had to pretty much move, shape, shift, and shapeshift by trial and error. Here’s how I “coded” the stuff on this page (which, by the way, looks proper only on Firefox so far, by my testing, because of my “coding”):

1. I imagine something cool I want to achieve and catalog it away for a rainy day.
2. I take note when I see something I cataloged on another site I happen upon.
3. I press Ctrl + U (read: “View source”).
4. I sift through to the good part and see if it’s something done without javascript (which I don’t know how to use).
5. If it’s javascript, I sigh and move on. Otherwise, I move on to step six.
6. I go to Google.ca and look up something along the lines of “HTML (or CSS) [tag] tutorial” where [tag] is whatever the hell tag or function or whatchamacallit I saw the other page using.
7. I then read through and try to understand how the tag and its parameters work.
8. This is the fun step: I spend hours and hours typing in stuff mostly haphazardly, clicking “Preview”, and then going back to make the appropriate (i.e. guess and check) corrections.
9. When this is all done I marvel at what I’ve created for a few moments before I check its rendering in Internet Explorer (explosion) and then in Opera (assplosion).

If I had any idea whatsoever how to code this all properly without relying so much on guess and check, I’d be able to make changes so that my page would render decently across all forms of web browsers. Sadly, I do not have the patience to sit down and really learn this stuff as it bores me. And anyway, I think I sort of enjoy my current way of doing things too much to give it up. Firefox tricked me into thinking it kept web standards before, but now I know that the developers took a few liberties with it (or so I’ve heard from watching videos of conferences with web standard discussions). Apparently they decided that some rules were better kept and others bent/broken. I don’t know what that means in detail but hey, I don’t think I’ll need to know all that to be able to enjoy my Webernets.
Nevertheless, I thought maybe since my current template is running a bit cluttered I would consider upgrading my template to Blogger’s new way of handling templates that much resembles Xanga’s styling pages. This would mean pretty much wiping my entire template settings (even though I simply love my fly-out/mouse-over menu things). And so, I decided to check out Blogger’s version of the template designer on my other “blog” (which is just there to reserve the domain and for testing such as this). I wanted to see if I could make it work towards my needs, whether it was worth the switch, and whether there might be a chance of my reworking my menus (again, my favourite part of this template) to work there. So far, no luck. I mean, it’s convenient to have them do kind of what I’ve done with the hierarchy look that now comes default but it’s not a mouse-over fly-out.
It’s got auto-adding and -sorting of new stuff (like links, archive links, etc…) whereas I update my template every month with the new links myself (every month I add a new list item linking to the new month’s posts). Still, I’m not convinced. It looks as if the new template designer thing is great for adding page elements and quickly editing them but it doesn’t do much in terms of allowing me to really tweak stuff with the HTML/CSS editor and that’s what I need to be able to do above all else. It’s either that or I just don’t know enough to be good at manipulating (the right bits of) code. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m going to stick with my current state of affairs until I really find a reason to switch over and get rid of/recreate my mouse-over menus. I love that thing. Mouse… over! Mouse… over! Wee!

A "Do Whatever the Hell I Want" Badge

I went and saw Transformers the Movie today with Allen at the Famous Players/Cineplex at… I don’t know exactly, but I think it was around Yonge and something to the north. Anyway, it turned out to be a rather good movie for someone who is a fan (but not hardcore fan) of the stuff. Al had lukewarm thoughts about it all but that’s because he was more of the die hard fan. Anyway, I didn’t do anything else much today except go home afterwards and just relax in the comfort and the companionship of my trusty radiation bombarding computer set up. I chowed down on a few Bagel Bites and they weren’t half bad so I’ll have the other ones tomorrow for lunch. I’m still looking forward to practices for LoaH and retreat this Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Speaking of movies, I got around to watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last week and there’s something about Emma Watson’s look that I just can’t place. She’s definitely not ugly or anything, but I just can’t decide conclusively whether she’s got a delicately amiable or ever so slightly annoying face. I mean, her character’s hair (I’m not even going to attempt spelling the actual name for you off of memory) Hermione is, by nature, quite a put-off, what with being long-ish and frizzy. But the rest of her (as in the way she looks, acts, and speaks) doesn’t really bug me all that much (I’d always imagined her character Hermione to be a real know-it-all while reading the book). At least, that’s how I felt until near the middle or so of the Goblet of Fire. That one shot of her all dressed up for the ball settled it for me: not annoying looking.
I also spent a good chunk of my evening listening to a lecture/workshop given by John Piper about living by faith in future grace. I regret to say that I had been slightly distracted while listening for the latter half of the message so I didn’t catch all the little gritty bits as I normally like doing but the general gist was quite stirring to say the least. I’m not even going to attempt paraphrasing or summarizing the message. If you’ve got the longing and craving for it, check it out for yourself here (whereas the larger set of links and pages of his work can be found here). It’s cool stuff to me, but in random bursts at best. Too much of a good thing (in this case, over-saturation with new ideas on divine matters) too fast is probably not the best–cramming such things all at once proves to be a bad way to really reflect, consider, discern, and internalize well and properly.

Blueprint

…was the name of this year’s edition of the Vic Park yearbook. It was a long year of hard work and to be frank, I’m not sure it payed off. Before I go headlong into a rant about all the things wrong with it, I want to at least give congratulations to Amreet in particular since his sports section was nuts (in the good way). I also want to mention that the cover is pretty neat looking and some other pages (few and far apart) are pretty nice too. Now, let’s get into the heart of things: why does this yearbook suck?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way: not everyone on the committee/team was cut out for the job in the first place. When working on pages that are going to go into a yearbook, graphics and a good sense of design is very very necessary. I’m going to come right out and say that nearly everyone on the yearbook committee this year, honestly, had little to no experience working with Photoshop/digital image manipulation software. This isn’t coming from having to field questions about how to do things (which I did) or from having them admit the fact (which no one did), but from just looking at the kind work put out by some of the members.
Designing a page around the theme of “blue prints” is a little more than tacking on a graph-paper background and throwing text on top (well, at least not for every single page). I did that once, but the idea of the page was to keep things clean and simple (the page was titled “Basic Principles” and it was the principals’ page). This also happened to be the page I had to rush because the head editor “forgot” n times over the course of 6 months (while being reminded by me quite often) to get the photos and write ups I needed, not to mention losing the write ups once after finally getting them.
Lesson #1: Only take people onto the yearbook committee who actually have Photoshop experience. The reason those people (mostly Indian girls, not that that has anything to do with anything) even got on the committee was because they all happened to be Sheliza’s friends. Therefore, the blame falls mostly/completely on Sheliza for this one.
Next we’ve got the fact that many simple things went completely catastrophically wrong for no good reason apart from negligence on the part of people doing administrative work. The way we do things is as follows: first, pages are mocked up and then created as semi-roughs which are sent for “proofing” to the plant which sends us back what the page would look like in the book so that we can make corrections and send back the good copy with changes and extra info (such as spot colour hue and positioning). For one thing, I had pages with spot colouring that I didn’t even want to be coloured (thus effectively wasting the colouring we payed for) since it’d look better without it.
Whoever was on admin decided for me that these pages would receive spot colour treatment anyway. To make matters worse, the tones of blue chosen for my pages were completely off. For example, let’s take an example of graph-paper blue vs. a dark but not quite navy blue. Those two are both blues but the latter makes black text placed on top completely illegible and reading painful to do. To make things even worse, the positioning/shape of the colour (which is printed separate of the first B&W printing) was totally off/not quite enough, leaving blank white bits all over the place. Ugly.
Another thing that admin screwed up on was the submitting of corrected pages. After getting the proofs back, we make corrections and then send the plant finalized versions. I remember correcting and resubmitting a candids page (basically a page with loads of photos) to be resent to the plant. Well thanks to the awesome admin people we’ve got (who are still remaining nameless until I finish ranting about this) the plant never got the updated/fixed page because of, well, nothing. I’m guessing the person doing the collection and distribution of corrections just… never got around to it and sent out “corrected pages” (the same pages we got back with all the mistakes) without actually repackaging the final pages. Way to stay on task.
Lesson #2: Make sure your administration staff/person is reliable and knows what they are doing. I do believe this year’s admin person was mainly… oh that’s right, Sheliza again, the head editor. Thanks for screwing with my pages Shez, you’re the best.
One thing that was told to me and everyone else on the team by both Ms. Leung (the staff supervisor) and Sheliza our head editor was to make sure not to put loads of photos of ourselves in our own sections since that is generally frowned upon. I actually got told off for putting three photos from the yearbook camp/retreat of not only myself but other members too on my candids page (which had at LEAST 100+ small thumbnail sized photos). Then lo and behold, we find about a zillion pictures of certain people on yearbook in the final section of the book (which is devoted to messages from the yearbook executives). That wouldn’t be a problem since those pages ARE to recognize the committee members, but when 99% of the photos include either only the head editor (who is responsible for the section) or photos of the head editor and her friends, then we’ve got a huge problem. Can you spell hypocrite?
The messages themselves were all written up and handed in, but some people were given much more page space than others for no reason. Sheliza had tons, but she’s the head editor so she’s supposed to have lots of stuff to say. Mona, on the other hand, was just another editor but also had an ass-load of space to write up, whereas other people–who, in my opinion, did much more work–had to settle with very little. Simply astonishing.
I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with hypocrisy (since we are all tempted into doing it from time to time) if the rest of the messages from the committee were at least typed up properly. Scanning through the messages written, I found a few people’s messages (including mine) were completely screwed up. This screwage includes double typing some sentences as if the copy+paste went completely berserk or something, irregular text formatting (e.g. making some letters within a word black instead of white when failing to highlight the entire paragraph for formatting), and even cutting messages short, in mid-sentence! It’s almost as if… hm… the pages were done in the final minutes before the due date. Great work ethic, whoever was responsible.
Lesson #3: What can I say? Teams can only work as well as the heads. And when leaders are petty, sloppy, incompetent slackers who play favourites, well, you can guess at the kind of final product you’d get from it all. This year’s head editor was… Surprise! Sheliza! Let’s have a round of applause!
So all in all, I’m pretty angry about how this yearbook turned out (especially at how some of my pages look). The spot colouring was off completely–in my defense, I mentioned not having it on those pages because they’d look better than way but Sheliza ended up doing it anyway because “we paid for it” and what kind of reasoning is that by the way? The corrections I made weren’t even submitted. My message at the end of the book was one of the ones that were completely raped, hands down on the ground. This whole year’s worth of working under Sheliza has been by and large a huge hassle. At this point I’m pretty much miles past the line of diplomacy and I’m just bashing her but really, find one argument I’ve made that wasn’t valid. I’m sure I haven’t nailed everything in this one post but I doubt we need anymore to work with. This rant is ending here and I hope I never have to do this kind of thing again.
Final Lesson: Get rid of Sheliza. Really, just, do it. Get her gone. That is all.

NOTE: I’ll post some photo evidence/examples after Mediamax gets back online from maintenance.

EDIT: Here are the pics of what I’ve been ranting on about.
The Good:

• Alexander’s Cover
• Amreet’s Sports Collage
• Amreet’s Sports Pages
• Mustafa’s Division Pages

The Bad:

• the numerous “ZOMG HAND IN SOMETHING!” Filler Pages
• the botched Yearbook Committee Messages

The Raped:

• Candids Page
• Grade Nine Day (1, 2)
• Principals’ Page

I think that about sums it up. I’ve only got one or two pages that I am proud of in the entire yearbook, and one of those is the World Events Spread (click here for my original digital render). I’m pretty sure the only reason that one turned out the way it was supposed to was because I didn’t leave any part of it to anyone else to take care of. Sorry, but that’s how I’m saying it.

ObjectDock 1.9

Lately I’ve ditched my XP partition almost completely (I haven’t used it for a month and the last time I did was yesterday to try and open a corrupted file). I’m not missing the clutter and crap of XP. Now I’ve got the clutter and crap of Vista! I got curious today and checked the List to see which docking programs were compatible with Vista and to see whether my (favourite) ObjectDock by Stardock was on the List. Luckily, it was and I promptly downloaded version 1.9 (some previous ones don’t work w/ Vista). I spent the next hour or so tweaking, making icons, disabling Windows functions (such as the standard taskbar) and just having a fun time with my new dock. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out (click the thumbnail for a full view of my desktop… in full resolution too!). I’d rather be running on 1280 x 1024 but my new monitor/my dad’s old monitor (I switched to a newer LCD monitor when my old one started showing ugly-coloured spots of pink and green…) doesn’t support that high of a res. Anyway, that menu collapses into the bottom of my window and the Vista icon/start menu button doesn’t show unless I press the Windows key (pretty neat actually). I still have all the functionality of the taskbar AND start menu, but a more clean look. The only downside to this all is that I can’t view my system tray icons unless I go into object dock’s preferences and un-check “Hide Windows task bar.” Then again, I don’t use my tray very much anyway…

EDIT: Rocketdock is part of Punk Software brand wares. There’s also Uber Icon (

Sunday Afternoon

What better way is there to spend such a wonderful afternoon than to take a quick nap as I wait for my F.E.A.R. Combat download to finish? Don’t worry, I’m getting it legit this time off of their official site (free multiplayer version up for download here). I just nabbed myself a not nearly as legit copy of pzizz and I’m going to be testing it out momentarily (it’s an app that’s supposed to help you sleep). This seems a bit sci-fi to me, using a computer to make my body do stuff, but if it works, I think it would be very useful for someone like me who doesn’t get enough natural sleep. I’ll keep you updated on its effectiveness in a wink.

EDIT: So it’s a pretty cool idea that actually kinda worked. I feel more energized and awake after pzizzing but it’s only been the first run. I’ll probably do it again soon (to rest up between… “study sessions” since exams that actually matter are coming up).

Disturbingly Cool

I’ve had a PSP for awhile now. Most people don’t believe me when I tell them that my dad was the one to want it first–I just have fun with it whenever he’s not using it–but it’s true.
Having played with it on and off for many months now, I think I can give a pretty good summary of the sweet package. My PSP is a white one which hails from Hong Kong. Before you write it off as a fake, I assure that it’s the real deal. It’s made in Japan and thus, has a Sharp screen (as opposed to the Samsung screens used in models made in China–that is, the ones available state-side). I remember it cost my dad about $150 CDN when he bought it a month or so after it was released here in NA.
My favourite part about the PSP is its screen. The screen’s beautiful. It’s sleek, wide where it counts, and views beautifully even from the side (I’m still talking about the screen you pervs). I remember having brought it to some event night at church and watching Advent Children on it while almost four children crowded around to join me. Everyone go a piece and no one go the dreaded side-glare that some devices (like the backlit GBA SP) give off. And all this is important, especially if you don’t buy into Nintendo’s BS that graphics don’t matter, and if you plan on watching movies off your PSP. Really, if I’m going to shoot a zombie’s head off, I want to see ALL the splatter effects you can conjure up.
Anyway, without going into any more detail, here are a few pics of my baby running Tekken and her pretty backside.


For the more… gadgetsexual ones out there, here’s a pretty interesting picture I found on Kotaku the other day. I’ve been dying for a chance to post this.
NOTE: I think today I accidentally stumbled upon a second (that’s right, a second) PSP in my dad’s room. That’s just like him to go buying electronics without anyone else knowing (I’m sure my mother would go nuts if she found out… He pulled this same stunt with GBA SPs too, which explains why I have two). But get this: this fabled second PSP is neither black nor white, it’s silver. I’ll sneak some shots of it the next time both my mom and dad are out. >_O