If you use Firefox, you should definitely do the things detailed in this blog. Firefox is already fast, but this makes it faster.

A handful of Firefox tweaks that will double your browser speed : Boy Genius Report.

Everyone in the geekworld has been talking about Google’s new Chrome browser lately, and for good reason. I feel bad for Opera,  who has been around for ages and has created a pretty damned good browser, but still gets no respect. Opera is at version 9.5, and people still say, “Opera what?” when they hear the name. On the other hand, Chrome is only in beta, and it’s the talk of the town. A lot of this has to do with Google’s unquestionable star power, and also hip marketing strategy: there’s an online comic book explaining what’s under Chrome’s hood.

Being the unapologetic Internet lover that I am, I had to give it a spin. Honestly, I’m pretty impressed. It has a few new innovative features. For instance, the “home page” learns from your browsing habits and puts up thumbnails of your most visited sites, so you can just click on them. The design is very clean and user-friendly. It’s missing a lot of stuff, like a bookmark manager, but this is just a beta, and I’m certain that those features will be added later.

Chrome seems pretty fast. It loaded up all the pages that I tested without any complaint, and rendered them correctly too. Chrome’s claim to fame is its power to handle Javascript, which is powering everything from blogs to social networks. Chrome is a star in this department. Obviously, Gmail works brilliantly in Chrome, loading and running noticeably faster than in Firefox. Other Javascript-heavy sites like Facebook also perform beautifully in Chrome. I can see myself using Chrome exclusively to access these kinds of sites.

I did a little Javascript speed test to get some numbers. Internet Explorer 7 clocked an average of around 1000ms on this test. Firefox 3 ran it at a respectable 300ms. Chrome was consistently below 200ms. Pretty impressive indeed. Firefox 3.1, which comes out soon, promises major improvements to Javascript performance, so it will be interesting to see what happens in this battle.

Perhaps the most interesting innovation of Chrome is its use of multithreading. Chrome creates a new process for each new browser tab, and even each plugin that runs. The payoff for this will happen some time in the future, as websites get more complex and more likely to crash your browser. If a site crashes one tab, you can just close it without affecting other tabs. In current browsers like IE or Firefox, a crashing tab might take down your entire browser. So far, that hasn’t been a problem for me, but I think future sites might be more demanding. Multi-threaded tabs is probably one of those ideas that makes browser developers wish they’d thought of it first.

I’m excited too to hear that Google has plans to make Chrome the basis of future mobile browsers. Currently, browsing the web on phones sucks. Let’s face it. An open source browser that can be applied to any phone platform is good news for everyone who wants to access the web on the road. Again, it sucks to be Opera.

Here’s something new and interesting. Swurl aggregates all of your social networking Web 2.0 goodness into one place. You can add your blog(s) , Flickr, Twitter, Facebook status updates, etc. into one big RSS feed so that people can keep the hell up with what you’re doing. It’s very easy to sign up and set up. I like!

As a side note,  I signed up for Twitter. I can’t stand the word “twitter.” It sounds so… mindless. But, the concept is cool. I will probably use it for things that don’t justify the massive effort required to create a blog post.

This is cool. I looked up my address on Virtual Earth, and found that they had rendered my building in 3D! Actually, it’s the only building in my neighborhood that shows up in 3D.  And who’s that in the parking lot? Emeril Legacy!

For the last year I’ve been tossing around the idea of renting some studio space. The main reason is that I often feel cramped shooting in the small corner that I’ve set aside for a studio. I often feel cramped working at my computer in the other small corner I’ve set aside for this. But, is buying more space the only way to get more space? I don’t think so. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I can make better use of the space I have now, instead of increasing my monthly expenses. All it’s going to cost me is a lot of hard work.

One of the things I have to think about is all my computer stuff. Computer stuff is important to me, so there’s no avoiding this. I don’t want to lose any functionality or convenience because I’m shifting things around.

Here’s how things are right now:

The first diagram shows all the computer stuff I need to maintain, and where it is located. The second diagram shows a very rough floor plan of my place, which is not to scale, or necessarily even the right shape. I notice that I even got the shade of green for the loft wrong. Nice!

I have realized that I do not need a huge bedroom, and that space would be better used as a living room. That would free up my current living room to be a studio. My current studio would become an office.

Here’s how it would look in diagram form:

Ahhh much more spacious. I’m also planning to redo the floors in the new shooting area and my kitchen/lobby/office area. Instead of carpet and vinyl flooring, it will be a laminate/hardwood. I’ve also picked out some paint colors to completely repaint the interior, all the way up to the 16 foot ceilings. But that is a story for another day. This is going to be a busy spring!