Plaidophile

I've tried Opera several times in the past but I never really liked various things about it, such as weird UI issues (its bizarre insistence on MDI for so many years, for example). But Firefox 3 has been a bit annoyingly slow, and Chrome is a nice idea marred by a hell of a lot of Big Ideas getting in the way of getting the basics right, but various comments I've seen from people sick of hearing about both of those browsers reminded me of Opera (both on poe-news and on The Register). So, I'm trying Opera 9.5 out.

At least on Windows, it's pretty nice. It feels a little faster than FF3 (although TEXTAREA is a bit laggy), and its default key bindings are irritating but it was easy enough to fix those and make it behave exactly like Firefox. I really like how UI-wise it actually works with the native GUI instead of tring to do its own thing (unlike, say, Firefox or Chrome), and it's also the only browser I've ever seen which does a good job of doing smooth scrolling which still feels responsive.

So far the only bug I've run into is that the background on my 404 error animation doesn't move, which tells me there's something weird with how it deals with CSS background-position in DHTML or something. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of adding a resize widget to the lower-right corner of the window (the default skin had one but this other skin doesn't). I'm sure there'll be other problems as well, but I think I'll give this a try for the next few days and see how it works out for me.

Paper or plastic?

Okay, I really like how Stephen Fry endorses GNU, but there's a bit amiss with that video:

• The only computer visible is a MacBook Air, which is probably running OSX (although he never displays it running anything at all). Stephen never says he actually uses GNU, he just prattles on about how wonderful it is, but seemingly (per his comments regarding OSX's EULA) doesn't realize that, at an OS level, OSX is essentially GNU with a non-GNU UI running on top of it.
• The music at the end is built entirely out of commercial, royalty-free, but non-redistributable piano loops which are part of GarageBand (which is commercial software), and somehow the credits list it as being some song that was ostensibly composed by someone (apparently stringing loops together in more or less exactly the order they are provided is composition now?) but of course this is a long-running pet peeve of mine.
• While it's nice that they used an Ogg video, they use a Java-bytecode-based player to play it, so it's not like it's end-to-end Free there either.

Also, his plumbing metaphor falls somewhat flat. Neither Microsoft nor Apple actively prevent people from exploring their OS or sharing what they've found to others, and plumbers and plumbing enthusiasts can't simply copy pipe fittings and fixtures and the like without paying for materials which are likely to be prefabricated (unless someone has their own smelting/molding/etc. equipment).

Today I decided to restart MGS4, and in 3 hours I passed through act 1, finally. Then in another hour or so I finally got through all the long-ass cutscenes before act 2.

What the hell, Kojima.

I just love how iTunes crashes and then leaves its database in an inconsistent state where you have to rebuild it to ever use iTunes again.

I also love how iTunes keeps its smart playlist configuration in the database, seeing as how I have a lot of carefully-written smart playlists which I use for seeding my iPod and the like.

iTunes is such a piece of crap.