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October 2009 - Posts

Here's how hard it is to write 2,000 words

posted Saturday, October 31, 2009 12:37 PM by hussain
The day was cold, brisk and windless.  He'd just stepped outside his house, onto the unadorned concrete slab that passed for a porch in the subdivision to look out at the other houses.  As he did every morning, he liked to look at the day, see what sort of hustle and bustle was going on, and use that to juxtapose the tenor of his sedentary stretch of office to come.  In truth, the office was quite busy with being late to meetings, or conversing at cube thresholds with coworkers, but it wasn't looking out at an open space vista framed by a few houses in the cul-de-sac.

The neighborhood he lived in was quiet in the early am, busy around 8 or 9 as people left, unless it was the weekend when the elementary school aged kids and their parents would block off the cul-de-sac with kids-at-play flags and hover as children sped around on trikes, bikes, or just running with abandon.  His cats would peer curiously out the front windows on weekends.

On the really nice weekends, he'd let the cats out in the back yard and sit on his pressed wood deck and listen to the weekend days open like a pop up book.

----

... And then I allowed myself to be distracted. Thanks to Google Doc's "Word Count" feature, 2,000 words is going to take 10x as long.

Counts Selection Document
Words:  -  216
Characters (no spaces):  -  932
Characters (with spaces):  -  1146
Paragraphs:  -  4
Sentences:  -  8
Pages (approximate):  -  2
Readability Selection Document
Average sentences per paragraph:  -  2.00
Average words per sentence:  -  27.00
Average characters per word:  -  4.31
Average words per page:  -  108.00
Flesch Reading Ease: [?]  -  67.41
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: [?]  -  11.00
Automated Readability Index: [?]  -  13.00

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Google's Chrome OS - The Quickening

posted Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:15 AM by hussain

So, yesterday, someone released a beta of what was supposedly a Google Chrome OS build. The twittersphere was all twitterpated. I downloaded this .deb file and stood up an Ubuntu 9.04 vm (VirtualBox) to see what it really was.

The Google Chrome OS, as announced in July, is a lightweight linux-based OS with the Chrome browser as its centerpiece.

Turns out, it's a Chromium build (4.0.222.6) with a compact navigation bar and a Google-icon menu on the top, left side. Clicking said icon brings up Google's Short Links.

Here're some pictures:


Starting it up


It's chromium++: note compact top bar with Google menu icon on left, clock bar on right


From ChromeOS


Compact nav bar


Clicking the google icon maximizes the browser and directs you to Short Links, but underlying OS's top bar is still visible.


Short Links info, "?" icon button

There's also this anomalous download of a SUSE vm with Chrome+OpenOffice, etc. Which is not the Chrome OS.

Google's planning on a Chrome OS announcement tonight, so hopefully there'll be an official release and more info other than just these previews.

I, for one, welcome the singularity.

Edit (10/16/2009):
I built the latest Chromium version (4.0.223.1 29191) and the leaked version is pretty different, as the latest browser does not have the compact navigation or the Google icon.

"This is actually just a small recruiting event and we won't be talking about Chrome OS at all," the spokesperson told Betanews moments ago, "just one engineer talking about UI design for Google Chrome (the browser)." The implication that Chrome OS was the subject was chocked up as a "false alarm." - betanews
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