Category / Technology

by TheJames

Omniweb, my new favorite browser

I just stated using Omniweb 5.5 yesterday.

I have to say it is a very nice experience! it is very stable, offers rendering that is exactly the same as Safari, an excellent interface with the best (and unique) application of tabs, ok it’s more like thumbnails, that I have ever seen. And many other very useful and unique features, like automatically saving your current browsing session so that if you quit Omniweb you can come right back to where you left off. It has add-blocking built in. And you can set site specific preferences, so if you like to view a certain website with large text, or only allow certain javascript functions, or have the browser identify itself to a certain website as some other web browser like IE, Firefox, or just Safari.

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by TheJames

Websites as graphs

web2dna imageI was playing around a while ago with the idea of purchasing one of those DNA posters; I have always thought they were really cool looking. I still haven’t gotten over the price of those things, but I did find someone who thoght that was equally cool and made a web program that converts your website into a similar DNA like design. It does this by evaluating the ammount of images and text on the pages and pumping it through some algorithm. Really beautiful, go check it out. Here is what mine looks like.

As a side note the creator of the Web2DNA project also pointed to a webpage that turns your website into a graph, also neat but not as colorful. And again ,here is mine

by TheJames

AOL Data Splunked

Last week there was this big thing about AOL releasing 650,000 user’s search query data or roughly 20 million queries. Now that is disturbing, but it doesn’t really break any confidentiality laws because they didn’t give away anyone’s identity. But what really gets the goat (so to speak; is user 927’s search data or user 17556639 who is obviously planning to kill his wife) is the search topics of some users. These can be viewed using a nicely parsed html interface available over at Splunked.

Oh, BTW don’t try to view it using Safari or any derivative, Splunked only likes IE and Firefox.

by TheJames

Hard Drive Failure

Last night I went to copy a CD for Jenny and my laptop gave me a very
bad message.
“Your hard drive has reported an error that Mac OS X cannot recover
from. If this drive has not failed completely back up as much data as
you can.” the next few minutes were filled with a slow torture or
intermittent clicking noises emanating from my laptop during its
death throws.

I managed to back up some of my files, but little things like ALL of
my bookmarks, contacts, email, web projects, music… (the list goes
on and on) have all been lost. My last back up is about 3 months old.

So, please send my your contact info and any bookmarks and links to
files / programs that I might find useful. And learn from my pain;
back up regularly.