Dave Kellam

Here’s a thread describing some hacks for Safari.

They’re big on computational complexity in computer science, go figure. An nice way to describe computational complex it with asymptotic notation, basically a rough estimation of how long something takes to run. I was working on my algorithms assignment and came across some asymptotic notations that I hadn’t seen before. To tell you the truth I didn’t even know they were called asymptotic notations; they started us off with big o notation, and then handed us big omega and big theta notation. Now they give me this squirrely w notation (which I discovered is actually called little omega notation) and little o notation, which are very similar to their bigger brothers but different enough to warrant a name change. Anyway, I hadn’t bought the textbook yet but needed to learn what these new notations were but the internet saved me again.

Now the question is: what did I do for a week? And the answer is: not all that much. I did some drinking, I did some school work.

This looks cool.

I was trying to figure out how to get a rough estimate of a factorial number without a calculator and came across an example of numerology at its best. The conclusions are great — basically he proved the existence of God.

I’ve been playing around with Safari a bit, and agree with a lot of the comments that people have made. The one big thing people are complaining about is the lack of tabbed browsing. I’m pretty sure this will get implemented, how could they overlook one of the key reasons that so many people have switched to Chimera? I think it’s because of they want people to try using the SnapBack feature as opposed to tabs. It works much the same way I tend to use tabs, i.e. opening up a bunch of links from a weblog in tabs so that I can still go back and finish reading the site. That’s how the SnapBack works, you can go off down some trail, leave a marker and be instantly teleported back when you don’t feel like being there anymore. I think it’s a good method for browsing weblogs and such, but something people wouldn’t have bothered trying if the tabs were available. That said, Apple will still put tabs into the browser because they’re very useful (especially the bookmarking groups of tabs).

I can’t say a whole lot about the rendering engine they decided to use, based on the Konquerer engine rather than Gecko. They went for lean and mean, but might have pissed off the people whose website code no longer works properly. I know for sure that Java things seems to be working better for me (I was never able to do this crossword puzzle in Chimera).

Next up, I don’t think the browser has 128-bit encryption. Or if it does, it’s just not rendering either of the pages that I use encryption on properly. Namely my banking website and my school’s course/marks website.

Last thing I want to comment on is the bookmark managing. I think the new system is great, it’s what I’ve been looking for. It’s the way I’ve been trying to use bookmarks (with IE on windows and Chimera on mac) for a long time. I use a lot of bookmarks, it’s the crux of my browsing but Chimera has piss-poor bookmark management. I ended up using Bookit, so i didn’t have to deal with Chimera’s lackluster sidebar.

Maybe this bike will be around by the time I have my midlife crisis.

Gary Carter was elected into the baseball hall of fame today. He was my favourite baseball player when I was a kid, although I’m not really sure why. I vaguely remember watching the 1986 World Series that the Mets won, that might have been it; I also might have had a lot of Gary Carter baseball cards to begin with and the name got stuck in my head.

An online copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I remember a computer professor talking about the book in first year, I should probably read it.

I just finished watching Adaptation (IMDb, official, weblog) and had to jump onto the internet to see what was going on. I started reading this thread and felt it summed up the movie pretty well. Some people love it, some people hate it; it’s brilliant and it’s crap. Everything all rolled into one and each to his own getting what they can out of it. I was laughing throughout the last half of the film, laughing at him doing everything that he said he wasn’t going to do. I thought it was brilliant writing, but I’m a sucker for multilayered self-indulgent stories about people trying to write a story. And it was entirely self-indulgent which is where a lot of the humour lies. It’s worth checking out, deffinitely one of the better movies that I’ve seen recently.

I was really impressed by the use of flash for this site detailing a voyage through the western US. It’s just a cool way to do a travel log.