I’ve started trying out Camino. There wasn’t really a reason to other than I wanted to. I’ve always wondered if there were any real difference between Firefox and Camino. After using it for a few days, I’ve discovered a few things.

First, we’ll have a look at a little history. As we all know, Mozilla sprang forth from the ashes of Netscape. Now, people were finding the Mozilla suite a little unwieldly, so they decided to come up with a standalone browser, and they called it Phoenix. Phoenix eventually became Firebird and picked up momentum and turned into the web browser we all know and love called Firefox. At about the same time, other Mozilla devs were experimenting with Cocoa, and out came Chimera. This browser became today’s Camino.

So what is the difference? The big thing is that Firefox is cross platform and Camino is Mac specific. Camino is integrated tightly with a lot of OS X services and uses Mac libraries for its interface, which makes for a prettier, faster app. On the other hand, because Firefox has XUL and Camino doesn’t, Firefox is infinitely more extensible than Camino.

At first I didn’t really notice how fast Camino really was. That was, of course, until I accidentally opened Firefox one day. And I waited. It was then that I realized that Camino was quite noticeably faster in starting, in loading pages, and in quitting. Firefox took up much more memory than Camino did and it showed. After a huge browsing session, Firefox takes its time cleaning up after itself.

So I think I will play around with Camino for a bit longer before making any solid decision.

So I finish my calc exam with two minutes to go. I put down my pencil after checking it, satisfied with what I could come up with. I felt I did pretty good, except for maybe one or two tricky ones, but that’s pretty good. So my prof comes up to me and takes a look at my exam. Then he puts it back down and says “You still have two minutes.”

It’s a good thing I’ve learned to just accept that I’ve done a good job and not obesess over half a percent, because if I wasn’t me, I probably would have been frantic in those last two minutes. It turns out that I almost, but didn’t quite get, the complex number trig integral question, but meh.

Complex numbers are like a double shotgun.

As one of my friends put it, “That’s a great metaphor to remember. Wait, no it’s not.” Oh, that crazy Chang.

When I was browsing my feeds earlier today, I came across a Slashdot story on a talk called “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” by some guy called Eben Moglen. I’ve just finished the hour long video and I highly recommend watching it. Moglen is a law prof at Columbia University and works with the Free Software Foundation. He talks about the role software will play in the very near future in equality and social justice across the world. (more…)

If anyone knows where I can get a Playstation to USB adapter for my controller in Toronto, please alert me. That is all. Thank you.

We were informed a few days ago of this conference called the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference. It’s in Montreal, January 18-20, and we’d stay for the 21st as well. The Software Engineering department is heavily subsidising it. I was thinking whether I should go or not. I mean, it’s an incredibly cheap trip to Montreal and a software engineering conference.

And then luckily, it was decided for me. Turns out CCF Winter Retreat is on the 19th to 21st. I love it when everything works out. So it looks like no Montreal and no CUSEC for me.