Water absorbing zig-zag stone

I was talking with one of my friends the other day, when I wanted to recall the word which depicts the type of stones above. Having totally forgotten the word: "paving stone", which also has the same meaning in Indonesian, I ended up using a long explanation: "a stone which form is zig-zag and can absorb water, usually used in parking lots" (it doesn't have to be zig zag as I found out later). Heh, I am sure there are other Indonesian words that I've unconsciously forgotten, not to mention the name of the streets that I used to pass through.

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The Effect of Culture in Answering Questionnaires

I think I've discovered a topic unrelated to my major when I ask several people to answer my questionnaires several days ago. What I asked them to do, was to give scores ranging from 1 to 10 (1: bad, 10: good), for a number of images, just to indicate how good that image is (this is rather over-simplistic but you got the idea).

During that period, I found that Asian people tend to hesitate in giving low scores, while Western people don't even bother if they can give a lot of 1 or 2 scores. Another thing is that there is one person from an area near my home country who only gave 7 and 8 score for all the images. I don't mean to be rude, but that doesn't sound too far from just randomly assigning 7 or 8 to every image.

But really, the thing is, is culture affecting us in answering questionnaires ? I agree that "good" and "bad", especially for scoring images, may be different for each person, but after I noticed, that there seems to be a pattern among people from the same area, and it is different from the pattern among people from other areas, I couldn't help but to think that it may be that culture is affecting us. Or perhaps another reason is that people from a certain area tend to perceive the same thing as "better" or "worse" compared to people from another area.

Anyway, this is just my thought at the moment. I'll need to do more research and gather a lot more samples if I want to pursue this idea, and I'm not sure if I want to do anything about it, at least not right now, but don't you just find it interesting ?

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Windows (Vista ?) and Its Mean Default Setting

I was having a discussion with my Professor today and while presenting my work on Firefox, suddenly the browser was closed and the system restarted, all in the name of automatic updates by Microsoft, which became obvious after restarting.

The machine has Windows Vista installed, and I am not really sure if the default setting of "prioritizing" automatic updates over our work is only set in Windows Vista, but I never had this kind of problem before. If I am not mistaken, the default setting in XP is to display a dialog box to reboot only at midnight if there are update patches. This time, no window whatsoever, at 10.30 am, my computer was shut down, during a presentation with my Professor ! Now, doesn't that add a HUGE reason for me to hate Windows today.

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Google Chrome: Spreading Computations Over Many Browsers (or Computers)

I had a crazy idea the other day when I was reading a Javascript book and trying to review my Javascript knowledge, which is way out of date if you ask me. Ajax and web apps didn't exist a few years back, so it didn't occur to me back then, but when I came across a lesson about setInterval and setTimeout, I suddenly had an idea. I think it's really possible although I am not really sure yet, but what if we have a server out there, that talks to our browsers using Ajax, and tell our browsers to do computations and send the result back to the server ?

I began to do a little bit experiment by writing a code to increment a variable from 1 until 1000 by Javascript that you can download from codepad.org. Unfortunately, I was a little bit disappointed since the code runs very slow on Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2, Safari 3.0, and IE 7.0, all the popular browsers today. Okay, so I realized that maybe it was just a dream.

But, since Google Chrome made its beta debut a few days ago, that dream began to sprout again. The code is much much faster in Chrome than in the other browsers although is still far behind from the speed that can actually be performed by my computer. Then again, Google Chrome is still at its beta stage, and my instinct tells me that there is perhaps a setting somewhere that is limiting the maximum speed of Javascript in Chrome. It is reasonable though since most of the time, you don't want to have a webpage (such as my code up there) eating up a lot of your computer resources.

So, instead of doing the computation process somewhere else, my idea actually works the other way around by doing the computation process on our computers and let the server collects the results from the many computers that it connects to. I am wondering if the term: cloud computing, also applies, btw. This will also allow us, common people, to build our own local network system, and divide the computation process to each PC that we can get, by using browsers (only !).

I just can imagine that in the future, there will be an ad, for example by NASA, that says "We terribly need a lot of computation process to perform a life simulation on planet X, and we are grateful if you can spare your computer's idle time to help us by visiting this URL", and we are talking about all computers on Earth here ! This is all theoretical, I know, but I think it is highly possible.

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Google Chrome: Brief Tryout

I have just downloaded Google Chrome (Beta), which is just released today, and here are my notes.

Features:
- You can drag one of the tabs to form a separate window.
- Instead of opening in a new window, if you click "view source", it will open up in a new tab, and you can still drag the tab to make a separate window.
- The bookmark function is similar to Firefox 3's awesome bar
- You have a task manager inside the browser to shutdown annoying (or freezing) tabs.
- You can make desktop shortcuts of your favorite web applications.  If you click on a shortcut, it will open up a window which looks like a desktop application.
- The favorites toolbar is located below the address bar
- Address bar and search bar is combined. If you want to search something, just type it into the address bar.

Drawbacks:
- Not integrated with social networking services, unlike the main browser that I am using now: Flock
- Only has "view full source" instead of having an additional "view selection source" as in Flock or Firefox
- No plugin as in Firefox/Flock
- Since I live in Japan, the language is automatically set into Japanese and I can't find how to change it into English.
- I personally don't like the tab design, which looks too stiff

Note that I am not doing any speed comparison and any web standards compliance, nor that I am planning to do that. If you are interested about such issues, you can check the news link below. I am just trying my daily browsing activities using Google Chrome, and  I may be able to figure out more after using it for some time The cool thing about Google Chrome is that your tabs inside the browser are run independently from the others, and so if one tab crashes, then the other tabs won't be affected (check the task manager !). Another thing is that, just like Mozilla Prism, they are trying to make the line between web app and desktop app more blurred. I have to say though that the "application", that is opened after clicking on the saved shortcut, still feels like a web app, although maybe the line is perhaps blurred a little bit.

All in all, I can't say that I will switch to Google Chrome anytime soon, and especially not now that I am used to the social networking services which are integrated in Flock. From technical perspective, Google Chrome is indeed cool by having the tabs not affecting each other, but we have yet to see if that function is a must-to-have, or a cool-to-have feature. Although having your browser closed just because one window crashes is frustrating, I personally don't see it happening so often.

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