The Colours of Chrome

Apart from the logo and the name, everything else related to Chrome is almost monochrome, typical Google minimalistic design. Even GMail and GTalk have colorful logos and the rest black and white and a cool shade of blue for the bare minimum borders and bars. The immense power, speed, and security that Google promises behind this plain look should make it the best of all browsers.

Also because it is a product by Google.

However, I could not refrain myself from finding faults since the day Chrome was launched. Without going into the gory details, let me list down the features I missed badly:

1. The Chrome omnibar Google is so proud of, is less powerful than the Firefox 3 'Awesome bar'. [The omnibar learns as you use the browser; it can transform itself into the search bar of various sites you search on frequently, the following limitations still exist.]
      a. In Firefox 3 address bar, type in a term and the autocomplete function shows in a dropdown all possible matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks and tags. On the other hand, the Chrome omnibar only automatically suggests related queries and popular websites, or if your input string occurs in the url of a page you had already visited.
      b. It also does not go to the most likely page, the I-am-feeling-lucky feature I am so used to in Firefox 3. (For example, you could type in "firefox features" in the address bar and it would take you to the features page on the official Mozilla website).

2. Does not let you perform a text-search inside text areas occuring on a page. Also, the absence of a toolbar doesn't let you search on pages where Ctrl+F is mapped to something else, like in the new Yahoo! mail.

3. Lets you move only one by one between your last viewed pages using the back and forward buttons, unlike FF3 where the back/forward buttons give you a dropdown to directly jump to any of your previously viewed pages. [Lets you move between last viewed pages by right-clicking or click-and-holding on the back/forward buttons. Not intuitive though.]

4. There is no 'Open' option for attachments, it saves them directly to the designated downloads folder, rather than the temporary windows folder. Also, there is no progress bar for a downloading file.

5. The status bar is temporary and not wide enough. You might not be able to view the complete url when you hover over a link.

6. Zoom in and out works only for the text as opposed to the entire page as in Firefox.

7. The powerful Javascript support does not work for some features for some applications. The place it irks the most was Google's very own GMail, where the alerts do not have the default button selected, so they cannot be operated using the spacebar.

8. Chrome doesn't ask you to save tabs when you exit, and therefore they are lost if you accidentally close the browser.

I believe the above list would still expand. Yes, you could write your own or hunt for addons that provide some of the above missing features and make up for some of them.

Google Chrome, however, is not an utter waste. There are quite a few very useful and interesting features:

0. The omnibar learns as you use the browser; it can transform itself into the search bar of various sites you search on frequently. Or you could configure your omnibar to search on specific sites.

1. It is no doubt faster, even though I felt multiple processes instead of threads for various tabs would reduce performance. Multiple processes, however, seem to be effective in a lot of other problem areas, like security and browser crashes. More details in the Google comic book: Google Chrome: Behind the Open Source Browser Project.

2. Chrome persists data you write in a text area. So if you were typing something in a text area and the browser crashes, you do not lose it. Also, you can expand any text area on any page to any dimension you want to.

3. The smart 'new' tab lists your most frequently used, recently closed, and bookmarked pages. The simplistic look without any toolbars makes sure all tools appear as if they are a part of the webpage.

4. The history is much more exhaustive than in any other browser I've seen. It gives you a minute-by-minute history of every day in a full page rather than in the constricted sidebar. Also, you have the power of Google search within your history: search for any word in the text of the pages you previously visited and you get the pages instantaneously.

5. The task manager that manages different tabs comes handy in the case of a single page crashing/hanging, and also for identifying the high resource-intensive tabs.

6. The minimalistic UI gives you much more space on the page as opposed to other browsers that eat up lot of vertical pixels through their toolbars and stuff.

7. Incognito mode (no trace of visited pages on your machine), application shortcuts (direct shortcuts to desktop like applications without any tabs/address bar), better javascript support by means of a new Javascript Virtual Machine, the Inspect Element, are a few other features of Chrome.

Chrome is being talked about as Google's competition to Microsoft, though I believe it is difficult to wean Internet Explorer loyalists as they are the non-so-tech-savvy ones content with the OS in-built browser. Chrome is built on Apple's WebKit framework, the same used by their Safari, but Apple fans are generally very loyal. Mozilla Firefox is one browser that might feel the heat, if not now, in due course of time.

Out and out, I have mixed feelings for Google's new browser. While the look-and-feel and speed are things I like, it is difficult to un-learn stuff from Firefox. Let me see if I can write some good enough addons for Chrome.

Menstruation and the Origins of Culture

That's the title of the thesis submitted by Chris Knight for his PhD at the University College, London, which was later published as a book by Yale University Press. Chris is a professor of Anthropology at the University of East London and a founding member of the Radical Anthropology Group. This thesis presents and tests a new theory of human cultural origins, and forms an interesting read. I've already downloaded it and have started digging my teeth into the 530-page tome.

Christopher Denis Knight mentions in his 32-page CV that he worked as a postman/van driver for the Post Office before studying anthropology. His list of publications counts at 43 now, 12 of which were jointly authored. His thesis was a reconsideration of early twentieth French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's work on symbolism and truth, and no, that's not the cloth manufacturer.

With that overdose of trivia, let me come to the point. The aforementioned thesis is in .doc format, has been 'reviewed' the MS-Word way, and is available only on the author's official website. It has a reviewed spelling error correcting protohumen to protohuman. So, when I run a google search for protohumen, that is the single place on the world-wide-web (Ok, before I mention that a thousand times on this blog) referring the word. Answers.com does not find the word either, but gives Google reference to the same Word document, still abiding by the Googlewhack rules of having a link to answers.com for each word.



Add one of the 7,114 distinct words from the document (out of a total of 185,108 words) and run a Google search, and you have a googlewhack! The whack engine is smart enough and does not let you record whacks with the same word more than if you use it excessively, four times in an hour, but technically you have plenty of whacks for you unless someone else picks up.

So this is another loophole in whacking. There are now four ways to record whacks:

Method 1 :

• Find a pair of words resulting in zero Google search results.
• Create a web page with the two words.
• Wait for your page to get indexed by Googlebot.
• Record your whack on the stack as soon as it appears on Google results.
• I used my previous post to record my first whack using this method:
           triskaidekaphobia dancegoers

Method 2 :

• Find a single word that gives a single search result on Google, and gives a link for definition on the right. I believe you can only get non-existent words this way.
• Scan that document for distinct words (Ping me for the java application I wrote to get the above count of 7,114). You can do a few hundreds manually too.
• Club those distinct words with the master word, one at a time, and record four whacks, after which you wouldn't be allowed.
• Come back after an hour a couple of days to use the same 'uniwhack' again.
• I whacked the following using this hack:
           sexual protohumen
           traditional protohumen
           protohumen cosmology
           coherent protohumen
           peasanties forestry
           peasanties oblivion
           peasanties scourge
           ragged bildungsromen
           bildungsromen emerald
           bildungsromen asses
           bildungsromen kush

Method 3 :

• Try pairs of words from already existing whacks, you have many combinations possible; they've already recorded 610,000 whacks, out of which the latest 2,000 are visible.
• I 'copied' to record these couple of couples:
           spreadably outcry
           insidious spreadably

Method 0 :

• Try pairs of rare, unrelated words (opposites are related; unrelated words would be from entirely different spheres). This is the actual intention of whacking.
• I could do a few couples this old-fashioned way too:
           linguaphiles endoderm
           linguaphiles pachyderm
           lactic linguaphiles

I am sure there are some other cheats you can discover to find whacks. I am done with my share of whacking, and none of the methods I mentioned above would work for the words I have in my whacks as soon as Googlebot crawls and indexes this page.

Triskaidekaphobic Dancegoers

Well, I am neither afraid of 13 nor do I go attend dances, and I do not know anyone with similar tendencies, but this does look a whacky title for a post written to introduce the words Triskaidekaphobia and Dancegoers on the same webpage. Why did I need to do so? To record a GoogleWhack in the Whack Stack.

From the official website, a Googlewhack is that elusive query(two words-no quote marks), that returns a single, solitary result. There are three rules to it:

1. both of the terms must exist in Google's list of legitimate words on answers.com,
2. a Google search on the words without quotes should return "Results 1 - 1 of (any number)", and
3. the two words should not be merely a part of a wordlist.

I tried a few couples of words but could not find a whack, and soon lost patience. Finding two words that occur only once together on the world-wide-web was not an easy task. I instead realised that finding a pair that does not exist at all might be easy, and I can create a page including both the words, and as soon as google indexes that page, I'll be able to record a whack, without breaking any of the rules.

So here I am, with this post. There is no other page on the web that has these two words. Let us hope I am able to record one this easy way. It is not difficult the normal way either. Why don't you too try and log one? Its fun!

BackRub

Ms Brown was not in a position to haggle. She was recently divorced and living with her sister, so when a small technology start-up offered her a job in 1999, she welcomed it with open arms. The post paid $450 a week, plus a pile of what were then worthless stock options. She was the 41st employee of the organization, which, like many other startups, was incorporated in a garage by two students.

Today, nine years later, the company has 15,916 employees, sports a revenue of $10.6 billion (2006), has a stock market worth of $207 billion, and is the most popular name on the internet—Google. Ms Brown is one of the 1000 employees who have accrued fortunes of at least $5 million apiece from the web-giant.

Oh, did I tell you about Ms Brown's job profile? She was hired as a masseuse. After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, she retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. Phoebe, are you listening?

Google shares recently hit an all-time high of $747.24, up nearly 900% from their debut. “I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” Ms Brown said. “Every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she told The New York Times of the fortune that she reaped from her former employer in the course of just five years. She now owns a large house of her own and spends time travelling the world overseeing the charitable foundation that she founded with her windfall.

She is also looking for a publisher for her memoir—"Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google". And as you would expect, these days, at least once a week, she splashes out on her own private masseuse.

PS: The Google search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" (because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance). I wonder whether that was Ms Brown's suggestion.