The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Safari 3 Beta

Yesterday, Apple released Safari 3 beta. Mainly, it makes Safari available for Microsoft Windows. There are a few enhancements that Mac people might notice.

1. Increased speed – Safari is apparently faster than it was, but if I run Safari 2 and Safari 3 side by side, I don’t notice much of a difference.
2. Bookmark improvements – Bookmark All Tabs (I already had this in Firefox), nifty search field in Bookmarks “Book” is pretty handy.
3. Tab changes – Now, you can rearrange tabs on the tab bar by dragging them around. I can do that, though, with the keyboard in Firefox, as well as with the mouse. Still no love with the key commands, though. But, now Safari warns you if you try to quit with multiple tabs open.
4. Resizable Textarea – This is certainly an improvement to Safari for bloggers and forum users, but I have the same functionality via a plug-in in Firefox.

The new Safari hesitated for a minute before rendering the Acid 2 test. The spellchecker also likes to highlight HTML tags (like <ol>). Not a bad release. I’m hoping for some kind of plug-in architecture and configurable tab keying commands for the full release of Safari 3.

Out on the Town

So, I was supposed to go to Staple on Friday night, but I overslept my disco nap (sorry, Fil). I decided to get my ass out of my house for a change and lined up a few Saturday night parties that might be worth checking out. Leaving my house about 10:45, I headed up toward San Francisco and decided to stop at Mission Rock to support my friend, Eric Sharp, who was supposed to be playing a set with Rick Preston.

Unfortunately, Mission Rock had a total crowd of less than 30. I paid my $15 to get in not knowing this, went upstairs, talked to a couple of cuties, danced around a little bit (hey, it’s been a few months), and got bored quickly. At 12:30, they turned the music off and the party was over. I got to hang out in an empty space for an hour for $15. The promoter handed me a bunch of happy hour passes (yeah, I’m going to hang out at Mission Rock at 3 in the afternoon on a week day, uh huh).

I headed over to an after party in a swank live work loft that seemed to be the headquarters of a small startup company, as well as a recording studio. Rick played a nice set, a couple of other DJs played some music, and I met a few cool people. I hung around chatting with strangers until way too late.

I think I’ll be more inquisitive at the door before I pop full price to get into an empty club. But, after parties are nice. Next month, maybe I’ll go out again.

Camino 1.5

Recently, Camino 1.5 was released. I took it for a test drive.

What I like

1. RSS Feeds. Finally. Camino does something interesting in that it doesn’t try to display an RSS feed, but asks for a designated application to handle the feeds. I haven’t seen this in any other browsers.
2. Session Saving. If you crash, you want your tabs back. This is important. Browsers that don’t offer this capability are not browsers I use.

Opportunities for Improvement

1. Tab behavior. Camino emulates Safari’s tab behavior. I’ve addressed this before and Camino drops the ball on this one. Not only do they not get command key tab selection correct, they’re not using a standard key mapping when compared with other browsers. Option-command-arrow? Please. Get this one right.
2. Plug ins. Maybe the typical Camino user doesn’t want plug ins, but they’re extremely useful. I don’t want to add a bookmarklet to add bookmarks to Del.icio.us (especially with that broken tab behavior). I am not wildly thrilled about doing any real work on any browser that can’t run Web Developer or Firebug.
3. Camino strikes me as simply being an afterthought—an alternative to Safari that tries to be Safari. It’s not skinnable with Themes, it doesn’t run Plug Ins. The only similarity this browser has with Firefox is that they both run Gecko. The new features in Camino all seem to have been released on Firefox long ago. Firefox also seems dramatically faster than the new Camino.

I’m afraid I’m going to stick with Firefox. Sorry, guys. Congratulations on the new release, though. Keep up the good work and I hope some of my suggestions will help out.

Split Second

I was thinking about my friends this afternoon and I remembered that I haven’t talked to Ian in a little while. I visited his website and noticed, from his blog, that he’s having some difficulties selling his own music, because of a mixup between two companies about who owns the copyright.

I also had no idea, when I happened to look him up on youtube, that he starred in a short five minute independent film, entitled Split Second:

It’s really good. You should check it out, along with his music videos.

D-Day +23,011

On this day 63 years ago, my grandfather and nearly three million Allied soldiers invaded France in the largest seaborne invasion of all time. He came ashore on Omaha Beach in his tank, after the infantry had cleared the way for the armored divisions.

After this invasion, Grandpa stayed in Europe for almost three more years, fighting Germany and, later, occupying the defeated Axis powers. He and his entire generation saved the world from fascism. And for that, they deserve our thanks.

<salute />

Bubble Shy

Marc Andreessen, an undisputed Silicon Valley technology leader, addresses the Web 2.0 bubble misconception in an essay that has lots of great points. He mentions that all of us in the technology industry are a little gun shy, since many of us were hit very hard by the dot com crash of 2001. I even expressed some jitters with the recent buyout of Last.fm.

He uses a baseball analogy that is, itself, a home run.

The whole structure of how the technology industry gets funded — by venture capitalists, angel investors, and Wall Street — is predicated on the baseball model.

Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run.

The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts.

When looking at it like that, it makes it a little easier for me to ease back on the snark and realize that, as Paul Graham said, “If most of your ideas aren’t stupid, you’re probably being too conservative.“

The New Yahoo Maps

Yahoo recently relaunched their Maps application. It’s very pretty. I’m going to stick with Google Maps, though. Here’s why:

1. I can’t navigate Yahoo Maps with my keyboard. On Google Maps, I can arrow any way I like, use the + and – keys to zoom, use the mouse wheel to zoom, page up/down to move a screen north/south, home/end to move a screen west/east. (Actually, keying works in Safari on the Mac, but not in Firefox.)
2. Google Maps zooms in dramatically tighter than Yahoo Maps. Zooming in with satellite view to maximum on 1 Infinite Loop: (Google has one more level of zoom on street level, max satellite: 240 × 120px; Yahoo at max zoom: 120 × 60px).
3. I cannot tab to form fields on the Yahoo Maps application, because it’s a Flash application (Safari or Firefox, Mac OS X). I can in Google Maps.
4. The search field in Google Maps is much more simple in Google than in Yahoo.
5. Geotagging on Flickr is not well integrated with Yahoo Maps. Example: Flickr thinks my photos from the climbing gym (816 Stewart Dr, Sunnyvale, CA) were taken in San Jose, California. It likewise thinks that Woodside is part of Redwood City, Portola Valley is part of Palo Alto (despite being in another county), Saratoga is part of San Jose, and that West Campus Drive at Stanford is in Menlo Park. This is just a minor nit, because the map under the “Taken in” link still points to the correct location on the map.
6. ⌘A (CMD-A) in a field on Yahoo Maps selects everything else on the page, since Yahoo Maps is in Flash. I usually use ⌘A [delete] to clear out a field on Google Maps. If I have to jump all over the place and click-drag on everything to edit, I’m not going to want to use the application.
7. Google Maps has “My Maps”, which lets me draw my own maps.

What I like about new Yahoo Maps that Google needs to look at:

1. Yahoo Maps in many countries that are completely blank in Google Maps. One major instance of this is Mexico. Google offers maps in Brazil, but not Mexico. Google even offers sporadic mapping around Africa, across Russia, in Australia and New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, and Europe. Yahoo has unnumbered highways all over Latin America and maps in Russia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, and other countries that primarily use non-Latin alphabets are anglicized. If I don’t read Japanese or Chinese or Thai or Russian, I can’t navigate Google’s maps in those country. While Google Maps are primarily for local residents of local, English-speaking people on English localized websites are navigating around to find landmarks, plan vacations, or just out of curiosity. Having a Romanized version of CJK locations would be helpful.
2. Zoomed out levels on Yahoo Maps show the area in shaded relief. That’s really cool.
3. Yahoo Maps has county, municipality, and neighborhood boundaries and names. (Note to Yahoo: Height Ashbury?)
4. I like that Yahoo Maps understands “Stanyan @ Haight, SF”. So does Google with “Stanyan & Haight, SF”.

Neither Yahoo Maps nor Google Maps will allow me to plot courses that allow me to stay off freeways, but that’s not enough of a priority for anybody except bicyclists to care about. (Note: Jeremy Cole corrects me on this issue. Google Maps has a checkbox on directions called “Avoid Highways”. Borders Sunnyvale to Jack London Square, for example. Thanks, Jeremy!)

Going Nuts on Yelp

Today, I finally wrote the reviews for places I Plazed or dodged in from when I went to Oregon and Idaho at the end of March. Since Yelp doesn’t offer the ability to predate posts, they’re all dated today.

I still have a couple more months of stuff in the Bay Area to add, but as of today, I have reviewed 250 places, 75 of which I’m the first to review. Yay, Yelp!

(Yeah, I am pretty generous and generic with my ratings, but I’m not much of a writer anyway.)

Climbing Gym

Today, my new friend, Alex, invited me to go climbing at Planet Granite in Sunnyvale. I’d gone to a climbing gym once before in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was visiting my friend, Amber. I figured that, if I could handle a climbing gym in a state whose highest point is only 901 feet higher than its lowest point, I should be able to do the same thing a few miles from my house in California.

We zipped buy my house so I could dress appropriately and headed over. The gym let me in as a guest of a member and I harnessed up, put on the ballet slippers climbing shoes, and strained to remember my belay terminology.

I handled a 5.3 route to start out, carefully picking out my route, primarily to remember not to go apeshit with my upper body. I fell off my workout routine at the beginning of the year, so my arms, shoulder, and chest are not in peak physical condition. Using too much upper body would leave me exhausted at the end of two climbs.

Alex decided that I should attempt a 5.6 next. While it was precarious, I got up to the top fairly quickly, although the miniscule size of some of the holds left me taking longer than I probably could have made the ascent. I tried another 5.6 next, this one with big holds that were an orange that matched my shirt. He graciously agreed to shoot me on the way up (very carefully). I tried a long, twisting 5.7 route with an overhang as my fourth climb, but I was losing my grip quickly and could not maintain strong enough fingers to continue past the overhang. So, I got 3½ routes done today. Not bad for a newbie, right?

He showed me who was boss by picking out a 5.11 route. Despite huge gaps that almost had him jumping from one hold to the next, he made it to the top. It was exciting to watch. The climbing gym was really fun!

Thanks for the invite, Alex.

Eight Years in the Bay Area

On this day in 1999, I took up residency in the San Francisco Bay Area, moving at first to a hotel in Mountain View, then to a trailer court in San Jose, before finally settling in with my friend, Steve. In the last eight years, I’ve experienced a lot of wonderful friendships, unforgettable nights on dancefloors, painful injuries and heartbreaks, and great jobs. Friends I’ve met in California are among the best friends I’ve ever had. The one friend I’m missing here is, hopefully, moving out here soon to join the party.

I still get chills when I see the “CA” at the end of my address. I still can’t believe sometimes that I live right in the dead center of the Silicon Valley—the absolute epicenter of the technology industry. I really love living in Santa Clara County, despite the nudging of my large social circle in San Francisco. This has been a great eight years.

Occasionally, I miss my old hometown, Moscow, the sleepy liberal college town in the Idaho panhandle. The four biggest things I miss are:

1. The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival — I’m coming next year, Moscow. Are you ready for me?
2. KUOI FM — My college radio station, on which I hosted “House of Jazz” for a few years in the late ninteies.
3. Lionel Hampton School of Music Jazz Choir I — I sang tenor in this group for 7 years. Every semester was wonderful. Crooning ballads across the circle at all the cute sopranos, second sopranos, and altos, was a great fringe benefit.
4. Moscow Food Co-op — the best independent grocery cooperative I’ve ever seen.

The things I miss about my college town are eclipsed by the things I love about living in the Bay Area. I’ve had some wonderful opportunities to stretch and grow while I’ve been here. I’m looking forward to what’s next.