alex.mullr.net/blog

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block make a good point on the gdgt podcast, one that made me stop and think:

• I think the tell will be a year from now, how many people at Google are running Chrome OS as their primary, or say sole, operating system at work. And I think that that number will actually be relatively low. I think that most people will still be running a more fully functioning install of Linux.
• I don’t think you could develop code in Chrome OS.
• There isn’t really a good, at least that I’ve heard of, a good web-based IDE, web-based code developing. You can’t substitute a terminal in the browser.

I’ve seen nothing so far that makes me want to get rid of TextMate (my text editor of choice on the Mac). But like I’ve said (somewhere, possibly on Twitter?) before, there’s nothing to stop this from being a secondary machine.

Listen to it »

Just in case you nonbelievers don’t think Google Chrome OS is going to change anything, take a look at this:

As a second computer (laptop), there’s no reason this can’t take over the world.

After looking at it more accurately (my 80 most used pieces of software), 63% of what I do today could happen on Google Chrome OS with no change to my habits whatsoever.

My Favourite Windows 7 Feature from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

The taskbar glow is just gorgeous. It takes the most prominent colour in the icon, and makes the entire application bar glow that colour.

So Pleased Snow Leopard Isn’t Buggy from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

Check what happens when window focus is changed.
Gosh, releasing a buggy OS. That would’ve been a mistake.

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I've started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.

I spent a bit of time this evening updating my Last.fm scrobbler (if you can call it that), which I have written about before.

It simply makes it a lot easier to use: enter your username and password, click the button (I know the enter key doesn’t work, and I hate myself for not being able to fix it). You’ll move to a page where you need to enter three fields (artist, track and length) and click submit. Done. When compared to the old method, it’s several thousand times better.

I feel much happier. I’m trying to do something interesting with it involving Delicious, but we’ll see if I can get the code working or not…

By the way: not including a giant, massive link to the new page is one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. *facepalm*.

Well… I made it to the University of York, and survived Freshers’ Week; making my way through two fire alarms, a few dozen pints of Guinness and more free Dominos pizza than I care to remember.

The newsy-thing that came up today is the flyer that’s displayed to the right – UoY’s Computing Services are asking for people’s opinions on migrating the University email and calendar setup to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft’s Live@Edu. This is huge for me. Not only is it a fairly large (thousands of students) organisation considering migrating to the cloud within the next couple of years, they’re actively soliciting opinions from students. I’m so pleased to see things heading in this direction.

The URL on the flyer requires a University of York login.

Also: Oh God, I hope I don’t piss people off by posting this… ;]