DrTweeker.com

It’s ‘Zero Day’ for Google’s new browser-child. Certainly, Chrome may have been tested against tens of thousands of websites before it was released (according to google), but apparently a few monkeys should have been added to the mix. I guess you can never fully test for the human interaction factor. Surprisingly for Google, I’ve already encountered several bugs in the couple of hours since I’ve downloaded Chrome. And while these may not be “OMG browser crash”, they are still major things that need to be addressed, in my opinion, for Chrome to be functional for normal use.

First Bug: I can’t scroll up!

Chrome will let me sail to the bottom of a page using the touchpad scroll function, however once you’re there, you’re stuck. You either have to grab the scrollbar manually, or use PGUP/Shift+Space to maneuver upwards on the page. It appears Chrome has an odd bug in that it doesn’t properly recognize the "up" direction of my touchpad on my HP nx9420 business notebook. At first I thought it was just a quirk, so I tried it out in FF/IE but it was working as normal, but with Chrome, I can’t ’scroll-up’ via the touchpad - whether on a page in general, like search results, or even inside a scrolling text box within a page. I’m not techy enough in the UI department to even begin to track this down - and oddly enough the scroll wheel on my USB wireless mouse works perfect - I’m guessing that sends an entirely different call to the browser than the action of my finger using the scroll-up motion of the touchpad. And yes, I’ve done the basic troubleshooting, and it’s only within chrome that the problem exists. The exact same environment within FireFox 3 or IE8B3 does not reproduce the bug.

UPDATE: I’m not alone in this issue, and there’s a growing thread in the Chrome Help Google Group and though I can’t seem to find it now, there was a post from ‘Ben’ of the Chrome Team saying they were aware of the issue, and supposedly working on it – so we’ll see how responsive they team is.
Link to my specific posting, with some techy details for the issue.

Another Bug: Can’t upload photo to Google Groups from Chrome.

Another annoying bug (and possibly just a google groups browser check setting, more than a true ‘bug’ of Chrome, but still fits within first impressions…).

I seems you can’t edit your Google Groups Profile (select/upload picture) with Chrome Browser. When I tried, I got this error message, despite how pretty it is (smiley is my addition), it’s still odd that Google’s own browser isn’t 100% functional for Google sites. Again, I think this falls back to the ‘human interaction’ testing, of which was really only started today, with the millions(?) of us downloading Chrome for the first time. You can’t really expect an automated testing environment to test things like these two bugs I’ve noticed so far – but then again, you really have to ask yourself, did no one at google try to edit their profile photo using Chrome in the past year or two it’s been in the works? Makes you wonder…

Not sure what other bugs will appear, but time will certainly tell. Any bugs that you’ve found so far?

Also, there’s still a bit of confusion on zero day as to proper linkage on the Chrome help site. The current known issues page still links to an internal (trackhelp.corp.google) address as seen here. If they keep their standard URL format, then the proper link should likely be:
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs

Indeed, that link does show some recent fixes, such as:
Recent fixes

–Crash when clicking some messages in Gmail
–Extra Google Chrome processes continuing to run after you close the tab
–Repaint delay when you switch back to a tab

However, that link doesn’t quite appear to be ready yet, either – and the Chrome Group links to yet another known issues site, here:
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/request.py?contact_type=known_issues_2

No matter what the final ‘known-issues’ link ends up being, the most current discussions on specific topics can be found in the Chrome Help Google Group.

It was bound to happen – Google has announced the public beta release of the new ‘Google Browser’, called ‘Chrome’. At the time of this post, the download link was still not functional, but Google promotional materials show it will be located at the easy to assume www.google.com/chrome – so by the time you’re reading this it will likely be available for download.

UPDATE A: According to SearchEngineLand, Google will host a FAQ and demo session for Chrome at 11AM PST / 2PM EST, so it’s assumed the launch will coincide with that event this afternoon, or shortly thereafter.

UPDATE B: After some quick searching, the link to the above mentioned Demo/Q&A Presser Event/Webcast is here (via google investor)

The way it was ‘leaked’ (does anyone really believe that anything is “accidently” leaked from Google – I think not!) was really cool too, with a comic book about the browser and it’s features (full Google link here). So, why another browser? What about Firefox/Mozilla? My first thought was finally!, but then I thought about it for a while – and the question remains – do I need another browser? On my personal notebook I already have Mozilla’s FireFox as my primary browser for most everything, and the Mozilla PRISM project for my dedicated webapps such as gMail/gCal and a couple of server control panels (also called SSB – single site browsers). Other than the crazy problem of FireFox using 500MB of RAM every couple of days, I’m quite happy with my setup, and only occasionally switch to one of the other browsers I have installed for compatibility testing (Opera, beta IE8, FF2 portable on a USB stick, etc…). There’s also the relevant note that Google & Mozilla has a contract that doesn’t expire for a few years yet – so it looks like they may not even be going for a huge market share (thought they’re likely to get it) as far as wanting to be the dominant choice for users across the world. In fact, the agreement between Google & Mozilla was just extended for another 3 years (until 2011) a few days ago – and Google doesn’t do anything by accident or chance, so you better believed that played into their decision of when to launch the beta/preview of their Chrome Browser. One FireFoxer blogged about the Firefox Summit retreat/gathering that took place last week:

We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income.
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/08/26/firefox-summit-reflections/

With all that in mind, my answer is YES, I do need another browser. Maybe not ‘need’ as much as ‘would be nice’, because let’s face it – choice is good. Why lock myself down to a single browser environment, when even indirect competition might make something work a bit better. Since I have gotten very accustomed to my FireFox plug-ins and customizations, it’s unlikely that I would be making a complete switch to Google Chrome anytime in the foreseeable future. If gMail is any indication, then Google Chrome could be in beta status for the next several years anyway. In fact, that might just be the plan – keep Chrome in beta status for a few years until the contract with Mozilla expires, and then launch a campaign to be the dominant choice in browsers.

The one thing I’m excited about (besides the fact that it’s a google project!) is that it will have built in functionality for SSB type behavior – which sounds a lot like the setup I already use with Prism from Mozilla, which will allow your web based ‘applications’ to have a browser type window of their own, free from the distractions of menu bars, tabs, and the like. Oddly enough, I have a draft on how to use Prism to setup SSB “web-apps’ that I haven’t completed – so maybe I’ll wait and see how Google Chrome plays out to see if it even needs to be published. Maybe with a browser that’s from Google itself, plug-ins that make gMail and other “G” web-apps better when viewed in browsers such as FireFox, will be obsolete when using the Google Chrome browser – it’s a long shot, but an interesting idea.

Will you be rushing to download Chrome today? If you’re among the other billion people anxiously refreshing the page to see if it’s available, leave a comment with your thoughts on it, and how you think it will fit into your browsing setup – it’ll be interesting to come back in a few weeks or months to see if it worked out as planned. I’ll update the post here as soon as I’ve had a chance to evaluate it, too.

Interesting Reading that’s Relevant:

CNET | Forget Facebook. The Web’s platform is Firefox

TechCrunch | Full info on Google Chrome, including screenshots

If you have a HP branded PC or laptop, you  know how passive aggressive their computer recovery system can make you. While it sucks that they’re too cheap to include a set of actual recovery DVDs (or heaven forbid, a real full working copy of Windows Vista/XP which we paid for!) in with your new computer, at least they do give you the ability to make your own - but with restrictions, of course. Making the plot a little thicker, if your HP is only a couple of years old then there’s a very good chance that HP decided to take a few gigs of your shiny new hard drive and dedicate it to a ‘recovery partition’ that you can’t touch (at least, if you want the software you paid for to be recoverable) and installed their system restore software on it. Yes, this too, is both good and bad. If you simply want to start over, or your windows installation is beyond repair, you can reboot and press F11, and you’re only minutes away from a fresh installation that resets everything as it was when you first plugged it in. Of course, if your problem is a hard drive failure, you’re not really any better off, since HP’s wisdom isn’t always the wisest. Luckily, on almost all systems, HP will allow a set of ‘recovery discs’ to be created ONE TIME. You get to choose the format: burning directly to DVD/CD or creating a set of ISO images. Of course, once the recovery media is created, you can make multiple copies of it any way you choose (and you should do so!), however the HP Recovery Manager software will only generate one set, and that’s it. After that, you will have to contact HP and they will let you order (for a pretty hefty price + S/H) a set of recovery DVDs that will be shipped to you.

Last year, however, there was a lawsuit over all of this mess with HP and their taking over of HD’s and recovery media and other crazy stuff, and out of it came a SoftPAQ update that was installable to your specific system that would allow the Recovery Manager software to create ONE EXTRA SET of recovery media, in the event you want to do so. Unfortunate for all of us, however, is that this SoftPAQ was removed after only a couple of weeks, and was never to be seen again – I assume it was cutting into a large part of HP’s profit center on recovery disc sales.

As with all things on the internet, all was not lost. And while I obviously can’t redistribute a SoftPAQ for every system made, and nor do I have any access to any of them anymore, I have recreated the simple steps that  allow you to re-create a second set of recovery media ONE TIME only. I tested this as of 08/01/08, and it worked flawlessly (I actually needed to create a second set for my notebook, which brought about this research and article, in the first place).

Some notes:

1. 1. This page is for historical  & educational purposes only. I am listing the steps that I took to recreate a second set of recovery DVDs, which worked for me, without error. I AM NOT responsible if you hose your system, or make your system unable to be recovered in any way, or make modifications which are not repairable. Put simply: if you break it, you bought it – not me.
   2. Some folks who I asked to try to reproduce this before posting the article have reported they were only able to re-create the second set of recovery media in the same format as they initially created the first set. Others were able to create a different type. Your mileage may vary (YMMV) and I have not been able to track down the difference yet, update when I do.
   3. You will ONLY be able to create ONE EXTRA COPY of your recovery media. This is built-in by HP and I have not been able to bypass this restriction, though I’m sure someone more in-tune with HP’s configurations might be able to shed some light on this. In fact, in times past you could contact HP and they would even walk you though creating a second set of recovery media - using similar steps to these.

Here’s the error you’ll get if you’ve already created your backup media, and try to create a second set:

“PC Recovery Disc Creator”
“A set of recovery discs has been created for this PC .
Only one set is allowed per PC.”

So, if you want to create a second set of HP Recovery media, click through for my notes on doing so:

Read more »

Hi there! I figure the first post for my return to blogging here on DrTweeker.com should be something useful, and save my re-introduction until folks realize I’m back (so add my feed!). Now, how about something useful, like a Firefox extension that might just make you rethink the way you save or tag your bookmarks, and organize the things you want to save for reading or sorting later (even when you’re offline!). Oh, and I suppose I should note that this is not an advertisement or anything like that – just a Firefox add-on that I’ve come love & want to share:

Who:
IdeaShower.com

What:
Read it Later (v0.9741)

Where:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7661

Why:
DrTweeker Recommends it!

In case you’re just looking for the basics, here they are – but read on below to find out why I love this extension so much. I don’t think I could quantify the amount of time and headache it has saved me, and just how handy it has become in my everyday browsing. It’s also worth mentioning that my bookmarks are now the most organized they’ve been in years.

It’s called ‘Read it Later’ and is from ideashower.com. In it’s most basic description, it lets you mark pages to ‘read later’ without adding them as a full-fledged bookmark. You could think of it as a queue for bookmarks – and when you follow up on reading it later you can choose to trash it (keeping your bookmarks uncluttered from one-time reads of new stories or the like) or add it to your bookmarks (as well as an option to add to digg, reddit, & del.icio.us, among others). You can install it directly from the Firefox Add-on’s repository, or from the author’s site – which is quite awesome in itself, and I can identify with quite well on the way he looks at projects, but any ways.. onto the extension/add-on(not sure what the proper term is nowadays for Firefox, so they’re interchangeable in this post).

Some of the Key Features:

• Saves pages to a reading list, for later reading
• Offline option to read on the road/plane
• You get a personal RSS Feed to use as you choose
• Syncs with your other PC’s & also works with Fox Marks

On why I like ‘Read it Later’ so much…

At first I was surprised that this extension has been released for quite a few months, and I knew nothing about it… but I rarely go randomly searching for add-on’s or extensions without something particular in mind, and I had long ago given up on finding anything useful as a browser add-on to solve the information overload created by the tons and tons of bookmarks I had accumulated while attempting to reach the end of the internet. So, upon reading about it, it was just one of those ‘wow’ moments. It was the answer to a problem that I had been dealing with for a couple of years with only marginal success (managing my bookmarks in Firefox).

I’ve always had an issue with bookmarking sites in Firefox that I may not have time to read right now, but that I may need to follow up on at a later date. Sometimes it may be research or an idea for an article or post for one of my blogs, a nifty ‘how-to’, or even a program or WordPress plug-in that I want to try out – but didn’t have the time (or wasn’t at home) to do it right now – so I would bookmark the site. You can imagine how quickly my bookmarks became unmanageable – it got to the point that I just simply had to quit bookmarking for this purpose, as the list was so long and unorganized that I never had the time to go through it all, nor manage what I had followed up on, without deleting the bookmark or manually moving it to a different folder – which just added more steps to the process, so it was a no-win.

I came up with several solutions, none of which were ideal or worked for the entire workflow. Here’s how they pretty much evolved when I had to quit bookmarking, as my time management was going to hell quickly and I was spending more time trying to find/organize the resources instead of putting them to use.

• Tabs: My first answer was to simply use the tabs as a filtering tool – I’d open the relevant links that I wanted to follow up on in a new tab beside the current one, and leave the browser open (many times days at a time) and close the tab when I was finished with it. This kept a very ‘in your face’ reminder of the things I wanted to read/use, but the usability factor went south, as while this ‘worked’ it was very cumbersome, and lacked any real organization. It also was a real mess for reboots or browser restarts - have you ever tried to reload a couple hundred tabs just to install a plug-in or restart Firefox? It really isn’t pretty. This method often more than quadrupled Firefox’s memory usage and led to sluggish browsing on a really fast machine.
• Evernote: With the release of Evernote, I found a solution that was a little more workable as I could much more easily save not only the entire page for later, but I could choose to only save the relevant portions, if needed – all right from within Firefox. Evernote allowed me to keep things in whatever relevant ‘notebook’ (similar to a folder) I wanted, as well as share & access it online if I was not at my primary computer. While this solution worked fairly well, it still wasn’t a smooth workflow, and I was dealing with two separate applications. After I clipped something into Evernote to follow up on, there was no clear ‘reading list’ or ‘to do’ reminder for my follow up items from within Firefox. This completely detached these items from Firefox, so if I wanted to actually add a bookmark to keep, it required a few more steps. Also, since Evernote activated their limits on storage space to view/share the notes online, it restricted the process of just storing items first, and sorting/following-up later unless I wanted to only save them to the local computer only and not sync/share/view online. While Evernote ended up being a portion of the final solution, it was not complete on its own for my needs.
• Tagging: Firefox 3 introduced ‘tags’ for bookmarks, and I reconsidered using only Firefox again to manage the items to read/follow-up on later, and create some tags such as ‘follow-up’, ‘to read’, or something similar – but even with all of the new functions for sorting and organizing bookmarks in Firefox 3, I was afraid that I would fall into the same information overload without a little something extra in the workflow to keep me on track and access the information quickly.

So after trying all of the things above, some in combination with one another, it was pretty much bliss when I installed ‘Read it Later’ and it worked perfectly for what I needed. In fact, I can mark a page for later reading without even opening it – now that is handy! It’s accomplished by simply right clicking on a link that you want to add, and clicking ‘Read it Later’. The page is then automatically added to the reading list as unread, where you can later access it and then either remove it from the list, add it as a regular bookmark, or leave it as is for later. When I’m catching up on items from my reading list that, I often save the items that I have used or blogged about, but may want to refer to later, such as how-to’s or tech articles, to Evernote so they’re no longer taking up space in my browser, but are available to me in the future for reference.

I know that’s a crazy long post, and that a quick “Hey this is cool, check it out” would have probably sufficed, but I was in a writing mood today, so 1300 words later, there ya have it, enjoy! So head on over and check it out:

Visit/Download Read it Later (current v0.9741)

An upgrade to the latest and greatest in WordPress releases is in progress, so if anything’s funky with the site for the next hour or two, now you know why!

Hmm.. what’s that? You say your FeedReader  just did a double-take? No, silly - it isn’t your feedreader, it’s me! Yep, after about a 6 month hiatus of blogging here on DrTweeker.com, I’m indeed back. After the mess that happened with the hosting of the site a few months back I was just kind of jaded I suppose, and continued with my many other ongoing projects, and left DrTweeker.com sitting idle *pouts* sad, I know - but c’est la vie, right? So, the past is in the past, and now I have an upgrade to complete!

Ahhh yea…. feels good to be ‘home’ !

//DrTweeker

I couldn’t pass up the headline above. Dell announced it’s closing all kiosks, effect at midnight last night, in all US locations. WOW.

From Consumerist:

There was a rumor going around since last night that Dell was shuttering its 140 mall kiosks nationwide in another wave of belt-tightening. Now it’s official: “Dell Inc. will close its 140 kiosks in the U.S. as the computer maker is changing its retail strategy to sales in partnering stores. Kiosks outside the U.S. are not affected.”

All stores were taken down last night around midnight. Conference calls were issued today and ALL employees associated with Dell Direct Stores (marketing, training, sales, management) were laid off with little to no hope of lateral job changes within Dell. Severance seems to be 60 days with pay. If you had a Dell Direct Store near you go check it out - it should be gone today.

Severance packages are arriving to employees’ homes this morning

Also: WSJ Article

I can just imagine some dell employees walking around the mall this morning, wondering where their kiosk is at, and if somone is filming a very bad episode of Punk’d.

Just a quick update: I’ve located a *very* old backup of some early posts - namely December 2005 ~ March 2006. It’s only 3 months worth, but it’s a start. Also, I’m going to be unpublishing the ones that linked to an old podcast, as that’s not an active project anymore. So I’m not sure how many will be left, and I still have to find the images for most of them, but gotta start somewhere

I’m still going through the old stuff, and I came across this - wow, what a flashback In case you’re not sure what an “Evil Dr. Party” is check out my about page. Here is the flyer for the the Evil Dr. Party held on New Years Eve in 2005:

Do you have any old archives (articles, text, photos, images, logos, graphics, documents, or pdfs?) of DrTweeker.com from 2005-2008 ?  If so leave me a comment, email me (drtweeker@drtweeker.com) or use the contact link above.

I was playing Rummikub tonight with Steven’s mom (Angie) & sister (Mary), and Mary snapped this candid shot of me with her phone, which wasn’t half bad so I decided I’d share it:

I look a bit surprised, as i looked up just as I realized there was a cameraphone in my face. Gotta love the hat, too - It’s my fav currently! And yes, that’s a cigarette - a Marlboro Mild 100, to be exact. Healthnuts beware!!

Steven’s mom got me playing Rummikub last week - and I absolutely love it! We actually got her the game last year, but at the time I thought it was something else - but now I’m glad I’ve figured out what it is & how to play. The only downside is that it’s addicting. very addicting. Then again most games like this are, but I don’t mind and haven’t grown tired of it yet. The only odd thing about it is the scoring system, which I still don’t totally understand the complete concept of - so I still need to read more on that. Anyone else play Rummikub?

PhotoCredit:  Mary (Thanks!) 

Anyone that knows me well knows that I have a domain name portfolio that roughly resembles the size and density of the state of Texas - at least for someone that doesn’t normally buy/sell domains as a business/hobby. These are almost all exclusively domains for my own use or projects, and have built up at a pretty steady pace over the years. For instance, here’s an email that I just got below (at bottom of post), that shows all that domains that expire just within the next few weeks:

The first three on that list were for a specific issue that i had with Comcast Cable last year - and they served their purpose exceedingly well. It was sad that i had to go to that extreme to get some things fixed - but it worked, none the less.

I’ll renew the domains and keep them in my portfolio for future use if no one is interested in them, but in the off chance that someone is, I offer the following three comcast related domains up for sale:

• ComcastFixMyProblem.com
• ComcastIssueBlog.com
• ComcastFixMyIssue.com

If you’re interested, just shoot me an email to and let me know. Full legal domain ownership will be transferred to you. You can transfer them to your own godaddy or other registrar account. If you’d like hosting for them, I can provide that as well at a discounted amount. I have not set a fixed price on them, nor do I care to get rid of them enough to actually post them on one of the domain aftermarket sites, but if anyone’s interested, email me with a serious offer.