I'm kinda late, huh?  But I took my time.  Every time M$ released a new browser (that's, err, twice in the last 7 years?  I think so) — so every time they released a new browser, I rushed to download it, install it, only to be horribly disappointed thereafter.

Well, today I'm quite pleased.  I tried IE8.  It's OK!  Can you believe I said that?  I, I mean, me — Mihai Bazon — am telling you that IE8 is OK.  It's about as OK as Firefox was 6 years ago.  It's even as fast as Firefox was 6 years ago (and here I mean Firefox on that hardware, compared to IE8 on bleeding edge hardware).

Other than speed (seriously M$, can't you do any better?  Come on!), IE8 does seem to do a lot better job than any older IE concerning rendering quality (and here I mean CSS).  And that's it.  No exciting news on the DOM side (but people didn't cry about it all that loud, because we could work around it).

So to recap:

• Slowest browser on Earth (as usual).
• CSS support is better than IE7, but worse than real competition (as usual).  Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera — they're all still light-years ahead.
• Still no support for standard DOM events (as usual).
• filter:alpha(opacity=STILL_SUCKS) (as usual).
• Oh wait, still no font antialiasing when opacity is not 100% (as usual).
• Dude, it's unusably slow. (as usual).

Good work folks.  Looking forward for the next 3 years.  Meanwhile, I'm happy to see your marketshare shrinking daily.

And by the way, Vista sucks!  It truly, deeply, sucks!

I spent some time with Python and thought I'd share some opinions.

In short, my conclusion is that Python is a great programming language and I'll definitely invest some time into it: it has a clean syntax, it's very fast (2x compared to Perl), it has lexical scope (which is the only kind I care about, but see below), true objects, first class functions.  It has its share of downsides and I hope I'm expressing them well here.

I welcome any Perl and Python experts to state their opinion on the matter, and maybe fix/optimize my code if this is possible.

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Wait a minute...  Emacs is not my wife.  I'm spending too much time with Emacs.  If you used Emacs (or VIM for that matter, same thing) for more than a few years, then you know how frustrating it is to try to convince other people about the true genious that rests in your editor.  In 10 years of using Emacs I convinced many frieds to try it and some were quite successful and agreed that Emacs is "The Shit".  However, half a year later, they kept telling me how Emacs sucks and .Net studio rules.  Oh well.

This story is about Emacs and about my wife.  My wife knows so little about computers, that to her, the difference between Emacs and Notepad is not obvious.  You see, she has to write a few papers for her university degree (God I'm so glad for I never finished one).  She did these with OpenOffice.

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Google launched yesterday “Google Chrome”, their revolutionary (no bullshit) Web browser.  I played with it a little.  It's amazing how well they did it!

It's incredibly fast, it has a nice and clean user interface, it knows most keybindings (which I couldn't live without) from Firefox.  It has a wonderful start page which shows thumbnails to the 9 most visited sites in your history.  But if you want to view pages that you don't want to show up there, you can turn on the “incognito” mode.  It runs one separate process per tab (I'll never understand why other browser makers didn't think about this) which means that even if a tab crashes, the others will stay up.  It also means that you can run some computationally intensive stuff in a tab without affecting the whole browser.  And did I say it's fast?

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Here's my update to an old javascript-mode (authors Steven Champeon and Ville Skyttä).  In essence, I was unhappy with indentation, but I also removed some stuff that I don't need and fixed various small things, such as highlighting literal regexps.

The indentation is based on CC Mode, which is almost Good Enough for JavaScript; the original javascript-mode.el (note that I'm talking about the version I had back in 2004; they might have fixed it in between, but I don't think so) had some indentation problems, for examples in cases like this:

[ go to project page ]

I finally released probably the biggest projects that I've independently worked on.  DynarchLIB is a fully-fledged user interface toolkit for development of Web applications.  It contains a rich set of widgets, a consistent object/event system, browser-server communication helpers, various JavaScript extensions, etc.  Worths checking it out. ;-)

Also see the Dynarch online chess, currently the first public application based on this toolkit.

PS: the administration frontend of this very site is based on DynarchLIB as well. ;-)

A few days ago I wanted to create Romanian subtitles for a movie that I want to watch with my friends.  After Googling around I found 4 projects that claim to do this in Linux.  These are:

• gnome-subtitles
• ksubtile
• subtitleeditor
• gaupol

All of them seemed very disappointing.

( go to project page... )

I talked previously about the Firefox problems on Linux, however, I now identified a case that can reproduce the slowdowns.  It happens when you have a lot of text in some element.  Even if that element is displayed with overflow: auto, or overflow: hidden, it'll be slow as hell to drag'n'drop it.  Additionally, all operations seem to be a lot slower in the whole page (that is, even if they don't directly affect that element).

Here is a demo that shows the problems.  If you're running Firefox on Linux the poor performance should be easy to see; if you're on Windows, use more lorem ipsum. ;-)

If you have any idea how to work around this issue, I would love to know it—please share your thoughts by commenting in this page.

The fastest browser on Earth

I never thought I'd say this, but here I go: Safari is the damn fastest (modern) browser on the planet.  Nope, it's not Opera, not Firefox and definitely not IE.

I'm playing with Safari 3.0.4 on Windows and it simply rocks.  The rendering engine is quite good as well—I'm doing pretty heavy AJAX stuff and there was no special hack I had to do for Safari.  So let me congratulate the WebKit team for this fine product! (I still can't forgive Apple for using KHTML instead of Gecko; Gecko is better, it just needs to catch up with performance and it looks like this is going to happen in the next release).

Until a few days ago, I had a TV cable-based network connection.  I had a fixed IP so it was easy to configure firewall in various machines that I can access to allow access only from my home IP.  And I was happy.

My ISP has recently moved me to a more robust, Ethernet connection, which is done via PPPoE.  All great, but the IP is changing every time I connect.  That wouldn't be a problem if I never had any downtimes, but in practice this is not possible.  Every once in a while, my router will reconnect and will get me a brand new IP and machines where I configured a firewall won't let me in.

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I'm using Emacs for almost 10 years, but still I never wrote too much about it.  Partly, the reason is that I'm not an Emacs guru (although I'm using it for 10 years, imagine that).  Emacs is so functional in itself that you don't have to become a “guru” to like it (by “guru” here I mean someone who can bring substantial improvements by writing Lisp code, such as writing a major mode).

I'm using Emacs for most my editing needs.  These include, sometimes, typing text in a <textarea> in Firefox (there is a nifty extension called “it's all text” which allows you to use a decent editor to type in those rough boxes).  I also frequently use Emacs for typing email (check Wanderlust if you haven't already, one of the best email clients I ever used).  And obviously for writing source code of any kind—XML, JavaScript, Java, C, Perl, Python, Ruby—you name it, we have it.  I remember a great saying by Paul Graham: “all other things being equal, it's a bad decision not to chose the best programming language for your problem” (that's not ad literam what he said, but you get the point).

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