The winner is....

Edit: This post is now basically obsolete. You can pretty much skip it.

If you read my last post, you know that I decided to try using Opera instead of Firefox for one week, or until I definitively made up my mind. I didn't quite need the full week. After using Opera for five days, you could say that I have definitively made up my mind. So what is my definitive decision on which browser I will use, you are probably wonder? If you know me well, you probably have noted that my use of the word "definitive" comes off as rather sarcastic. That's because my final, definitive decision is that I will continue using both browsers. Both of them have features that make browsing this crazy series of tubes much easier for me, and both of them lack some of said features that the other does have. Much of the time, I think I should be able to reasonably guess which browser will suit me better for a particular inter-series-of-tubes-web-nets browsing session. For the most part, my browsing sessions fall more of less into one of two categories. Either the type where a) I know pretty much exactly what page(s) I want to go to, or b) those where I don't. Before I explain which browser I will use for which type of browsing, and why, I'll explain a few more of my series of tube browsing habits for you.

The important thing to keep in mind is that I did not undertake this experiment in order to write reviews of opera and firefox for the everyman. I have particular preferences that are a bit quirky, so my goal was just to see which browser is better for me, not better in a more general sense of which one would win over more users if everyone had to give them both a fair one-week shot. The main thing is that when I use a browser, I hate having a bajillion toolbars showing. It's gotten to the point where really all I need to be able to do is see the menu bar (you know, file, edit, bookmarks, etc), the tab bar (I like tab browsing and I'm not amazing enough to go without it), and be able to search easily. To type in a location (notice I did not mention having the location field showing) I just hit ctrl+L (works in both FF and opera) to open the location dialog and enter my destination. It's a nifty trick. You should try it. That way, I have as much viewing space as I can get.

So I decided that when I don't really know where I'm going, I will use Opera. My first big problem when I switched what that you can't move the search box into the menu bar in opera, as you can in firefox, which results in having to have a whole extra toolbar if you want to be able to use the search box. That would have been a dealbreaker for me. But I quickly came across something that is sooooooooo much better. I almost pissed my pants at how awesome it is. In opera, you can use any search field you find on any website right from your location bar. It comes with google, yahoo, ask.com, and several other enabled, but you can easily add others, and may I stress easily. It works by assigning a short key sequence to each search. If you want to search google, instead of typing a website, you just type in "g [your search terms]. You can change the letters assigned to each search to any of your choosing in the options dialog. To add a new search, you simply right click on the search field on the page you find it on and click "add search", then assign whatever letter or letters you want to it. It is absolutely amazing. In firefox, I had to hit ctrl+k to highlight the search box, then ctrl+up or down arrows to highlight the search engine I wanted. That makes it very impractical to regularly use anything but the two at the very top or bottom of the list. Opera also has a few nice features worth mentioning. You can customize most keyboard shortcuts, though not all of them, a few of which I found annoying. If you try not to use the mouse much when browsing like me, that's pretty useful. Also, it's much easier to copy your location in opera as compared to firefox if you are picky like me and don't like to have your location field shown because it's a waste of space. I don't need to copy my location enough for this to be terribly important though.

As for firefox, its main advantage is that it is indeed faster. In cases where I knew exactly where I was going, I found that opera slowed me down a bit because it took longer for pages to load. It's not terrible, but sometimes it did annoy me. I also find firefox's options for tabs to be more flexible. When I have multiple pages open in various tabs, I find it much easier to use firefox. My computer isn't particularly old, and can handle the extra memory that firefox requires, so that is not really an issue with me.

Those of you who care about browsers as much as I do for some odd reason are probably aware of the great debate of whether firefox's plugin capability or opera's natively high flexibility, but inability to add plugins is better. I think it just varies from person to person depending on exactly what you need. Opera's base installation offers great functionality, and because they are controlling things from top-down, you know things will just work, and work well. With firefox, there are literally endless ways to customize your browser. It's just a matter of whether somebody has made a plugin for what you need (or if you can write them yourself). The drawback is that plugins are more bottom-up, and there is the possibility that one might interfere with another, or that if you add too many, they'll eat up tons of memory. In the end I might have to side with firefox on that one, because like I said, the possibilities are endless. It's just too bad I can't write plugins myself to do everything exactly how I want (like immitate opera's awesome search functionality. Hopefully someone will come up with that soon).

One week with Opera

In the past I've preached a lot about trying different programs for different functions, or at least being aware that there are choices out there. Well I've decided that it's time to put my money where my mouth is. I switched from using IE to Firefox about a couple years ago, because back then IE really sucked hardcore. At the time, Opera wasn't free yet, so Firefox was the main other contender. I switched. I liked it. I got way too used to it. Then Opera started giving away their desktop browsers for free in hopes of drawing more people to pay for their mobile phone ones. Naturally I downloaded it to check it out. I definitely liked it, but I was too used to firefox. I had all my settings just how I wanted them. I had a bunch of neato plugins, some of which added functionality that opera couldn't match. There were certain things I didn't like about firefox, though. Primarily, it is a memory hog, especially with each additional plugin you have. Also, there are some things I just can't quite customize just exactly how I want them, and sometimes those things are quite bothersome. Also, in the intervening time, I've changed some of my browsing habbits, such that I can easily do without some of my precious plugins anymore.

So finally I've decided to give Opera a real try. I will be using it for one week, as much as possible. I will post again after the week is up, or whenever I decide that I've given Opera a fair shot and it blew it, whichever comes first, to let y'all know how I think it stacks up. I may post some updates before then as well, if I feel like it.

If you're using firefox, and have an old slow computer with not enough memory, I encourage you to partake in this experiment with me. IE actually got a lot better with 7.0, so it's worth checking out too (I tried it for a bit and decided to stick with FF). For now, my initial reaction is positive. I took a little time to learn all the keyboard shortcuts that I'm fond of using, which didn't take nearly as much effort as I've made it out to take in the past. It is a bit slower at loading pages, which is the common complaint about it, but we'll see if that gets to me. I'll let you know in a week or sooner how it's going.

New Post!: OO.o, Apple in the Press, Microsoft isn't All Bad

Yes, I am making a new post. It's been a while, I know. "Big deal, wanna fight about it." Yeah, so I like to make unattributed quotes of popular shows and movies. "Big deal, wanna fight about it?"

On to the next point of discussion: OpenOffice 2.0 was released today. For those of you who didn't know, you are not bound for all eternity to using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office just beacuse everyone else does including all your teachers, colleagues, business partners, friends, etc. Why? Because there are other office suites and stand alone word processors, spreadsheet apps, etc. that can do just as good of a job. "But they don't read or save in Microsoft Office formats," you protest? Yes they do. Well some of them. You'd have to be a freakin retard to make an office suite or office application that can't read and write in Microsoft Office formats, because the reality is that they do hold a monopoly on the office suite (very unnecessarily). Now if you are looking for an entire office suite, I'll admit, your options are fairly limited. As far as I know, you're stuck with either OpenOffice (OOo, for OpenOffice.org) or WordPerfect, which may or may not suit your preferences/needs better than MS Office. If you are just looking for a word processor, though, you have more options. In addition to OOo and Word Perfect, I understand there are some other stand alone word processors, AbiWord being the main one I'm familiar with. Other than that, you'll have to look for yourself. Now as far as other stand alone office applications, I'm guessing they're out there, but I don't really care, so you'll have to find them yourself, you lazy bum.

Now, for those of you on the other end of the spectrum, in case you hadn't heard, OOo isn't perfect. Yeah, it's free which is sweet. It also works really well, on top of being free, which is even sweeter. It also does many things which MS Office does poorly, or cannot do, such as reading old MS Word formats (does poorly (which pretty much totally blows away the main argument as to why you just can't use anything other than MS Office. So what if everyone you know uses Word. If they have an older/newer version than you, you can't even open eachother's documents, even though they're made by the same freakin company. MS just wants you to spend money upgrading)), and exporting files to .pdf, among many others. Still, though, if you have a more sophisticated argument as to why you don't want to switch from Word than "everyone else uses it," I must admit, it is not perfect. With 2.0 it definitely is a lot prettier, and I'm sure they've fixed many things, but I'm not sure what they are. Anyway, my main gripe with OOo is their support for different languages. Yeah, when you download, you can choose to download packages for one of various different languages, so that's good. But once you've commited to your language of choice, you might remain somewhat in the dark as to how to make OOo compatible with producing documents in other languages (and in case you hadn't noticed yet, when I say OOo, I do theoretically mean the entire office sweet, but realistically, I'm only talking about the word processor since that's mostly what I use.) Now my first problem was how to type accents for Spanish and Portuguese. I was used to the MS Word shortcuts, which I admit now are really retarded (literally, they're quite inefficient, or slow). Anyway, I searched all over OOo's resources, and couldn't get a straight answer. Once I found it though, it was much simpler than I thought. All you have to do is change your keyboard mapping.
Don't worry. You can switch back and forth very easily. Unfortunately, this answer was not very easy to find. Then I was confronted with the problem of using spell check in different languages. Now, although OOo's support in this area is lacking, you could argue that it's still much better than MS, since they don't charge you for a freaking spell check dictionary which a damn 6th grader could compose. Still, if you don't mind paying money, Word's is much easier to install and use. Now I searched far and for an answer to this problem as well. It's not nearly as simple as it should be. Unless you are lucky enough to find the extremely simpler shortcut way which should be much better publicised but is not. Now, I'm not going to tell you the long way to do this, since it's pointless and retarded (literally, again). Here's how you do it. Once you install OOo, assuming you're in windows, go to c:-->Program Files-->Share-->Dict-->ooo. DO NOT TRY TO MANUALLY INSTALL DICTIONARY FILES. YOU WILL LIKELY FAIL JUST LIKE ME. Even if you know exactly what you're doing, there's a much easier way (oh and if you're in linux, you can probably find the equivalent folder, right? good. It's the same basic Process.) Inside said folderwhich I have directed you to, open the file called DicOOo.swx. Enable macros if prompted. Scroll down to the English part (unless you speak french). Click the button that says "Start DicOOo." Then click "retrieve the list" and select the spell checker dictionaries you want, then repeat for thesauri and hyphenation dictionaries. The rest should be obvious (I hope). Once it's done installing them, all you have to do is exit the OOo quickstarter. Now, even once you have your dictionaries of choice installed, it's still far from simple and not entirely obvious how to use them. On many sites I've read, they claim that you just go to tools-->options-->language settings-->writing aids, then click on the very top button that says "edit" and select your language of choice. This has not been my experience. Maybe I'm still not doing something right. I don't know. Anyway, before doing that, I've found that I must first go to ...-->language settins-->languages and select the language of choice as the "default language for documents" then go to the above steps. A) I don't know why some claim that the first step I mentioned (remember, though, the second step in the actual process) is sufficient. B) There shouldn't be two steps anyway. You should be able to select a particular language for a document, and it should make all necessary changes for you.

Now, despite this whole gripe with the spell check, OOo really is pretty good, so don't get me wrong. If you want to use it in just one language, you should have few problems. And if you want to use more than one language, if you do as I've instructed above, you should be ok (well, at least if you want to languages that use the latin alphabet. Still, I think the process of changing your keyboard map is basically the same even if you're using a different alphabet). So like I said, OOo is not perfect. I think that if they really want to gain a lot of users, they'll have to take care of the problems above, and other similar ones arising from a combination of poor design and poor support. Still, Word isn't perfect either. They feed off the fear that people have of using a word processor other than theirs, and they charge absurd amounts (any amount being absurd, IMO) for dictionaries (really just lists of words) that a sixth grader could compose. Literally, given the time, a sixth grader could make a list of words that exists in a certain language. It's not hard, and really not even time consuming if you split the task between people.

If you're still reading this, you're insane. Oh, there's more though. Gotta make up for weeks of not posting.

On to topic #2:
There was a post on slashdot today on an article by John Dvorak about how apple gets disproportionate coverage in the media because all the tech journalists happen to use macs. One blog post in response to this article expressed surprise that so many journalists use macs. Now, I did not have a specific idea that many journalists used macs, but I had long held the idea that macs had better software for publishing, design, print layout, etc. than microsoft. Judging by this /. post, I wasn't just imagining this. I dunno. Anyway, transitioning smoothly into topic #3...

So said articles carry the assumption that Microsoft isn't all bad and does deserve some coverage. Sure, it's obviously the largest tech company in the world, but it has a pretty bad reputation by now. I'm not saying it's all undeserved, just that there are some things which microsoft still does well. For instance, I've long thought that Windows Media Player is a mighty fine media player. PCworld seems to agree see #47. So despite all the MS bashing I've done on this blog, and in this very same post even, I must admit that MS is not all bad, just like OOo isn't all good. I just don't like that people feel that you have to be insane to go with anything else, simply because everyone else uses Microsoft. They do a lot of good stuff, just don't think you have to use Microsoft.

If you read this whole freakin post, you must love me a lot. Or you must be very very bored.

(I'm breaking my 4 tag limit because this post is obscenely long).

Filed in: Thoughts Tech OpenOffice Microsoft Apple

Not sTux with Windows Anymore

I finally installed linux on my computer. After a few setbacks, I managed to figure it out. Odd that I should have had any setbacks since Ubuntu, the linux distro I decided to go with is often said to be quite user friendly. It even bills itself as linux for human beings. Anyway, I persisted, and managed to install it successfully on my computer. I haven't completely gotten rid of windows yet, though. I can now boot into either WinXP or Ubuntu. But now I am no longer stuck with only using windows. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I should be updating more frequently. I waited this long because I did not want to have to make a post without being able to proclaim that I had installed windows, as I had said that I was going to. So now that I have installed it, I can make all the posts I care to.

Filed in: Meta Tech Linux

Rejoice

After a brief hiatus, I am back. I attend school at the University of Minnesota and live on campus, and they decided that in order to use the internet, I had to get some updates. When I attempted to install them, I could not. I got an error message that said "access denied." Nothing else. So I spent a good couple days trying to get that to work. Then I figured something must be pretty messed up on my computer, so I had to reformat my hard drive. Then I spent a couple days getting my computer somewhere close to they way it was before. So now I am back.

It turns out that I had a bug on my computer. It is known as "Microsoft Windows XP." It turns out that there are many bug fixes for this problem. So anyway, in order to get the updates in question, service pack 2, to install, I had to reformat my hard drive. I considered just installing linux instead of Windows, or partitioning my hard drive to dual boo, but decided instead to just buy another hard drive and load linux on that. So I have managed to get windows to work for now, but I have my new hard drive, and will soon have linux on it, and will then no longer have to deal with this most ingenious of computer viruses, which infects the vast majority of home computers, known as windows, when I don't want to.

Filed in: Meta Tech Microsoft Linux

and It's not even Christmas...

From Metafilter:

Apple iBook sale in Richmond, VA, turned violent today when people began to fight over the $50, four-year-old used machines on sale by Henrico County School System. One woman urinated on herself instead of losing her place in line. Others were shoved to the ground, and one man tried to drive his car into the crowd.

Craziness!

Filed in: News Tech Humor Ibook