David Naylor: Blog: August 2008

31 August 2008

Solrosor

29 August 2008

Bröllopspresenter!

Ända sedan bröllopsdagen har jag tänkt att jag borde fota av alla bröllopspresenterna och visa för omvärlden vad vi fick. Och nu i veckan blev det av.

Vi fick helt sanslöst mycket fina saker. Här är bara en del:

Hardanger-bestick, Carina heter de har jag för mig. Tillsammans med tidigare förlovningspresent har vi nu en komplett uppsättning. :)

Tolv vackra vattenglas från Iittala.

Och så en hel del keramik från Höganäs:

Skålar ...

... ugnsformar ...

... en fruktskål ...

... och fem muggar.

Tre vackra gröna uppläggningsfat snedstreck skålar.

En gryta.

En tavla på temat kärlek.

En handmålad prydnadstallrik, målad av Jennys farfars sambo Bonnie. (Den föreställer deras hus.)

Tre coola prydnadsklot.

En vacker glasskål.

En till vacker glasskål. (Man kan ju inte ha för många!)

Sex skottska champagneglas.

En tavla på temat trollsländor. :)

Tolv fina vinglas.

En svensk, en engelsk och en amerikansk kokbok. (Den amerikanska finns inte ännu på bild.)

Fler ugnsformar. (Kan man väl inte heller ha för många?)

Bilder på Jenny som tandfé och sumobrottare.

En cool vit fruktskål med hål.

En flaska champagne.

Som om inte allt detta vore nog fick vi en hel massa pengar, två soffor (som vi hoppas få i veckan som kommer), en väggklocka, en tekanna, en brödrost, ett våffeljärn, två badlakan, en resväska, en matberedare, två ljushållare (en lite mindre och en lite (?) större¹), en vattenkokare och ett vildmarkskit.

För pengarna har vi bland annat beställt en tv, levt loppan på Gotland och köpt en DVD-brännare.

Tack alla fantastiskt generösa människor som över en dag gjort vårt hem så fint!

1) Den stora ljushållaren fyllde ut det jättestora platta paketet som alla undrade vad det var.

Labels: bröllop, Eskilstuna, photography

28 August 2008

Quick Review of IE8 beta 2

IE8 about dialog

I just downloaded IE8 beta 2 and gave it a quick spin. Here are my first impressions, starting with the good:

The new tab grouping & colouring feature is nice. Hopefully someone will make a Firefox extension to replicate this behaviour. (I can't seem to find one today.)
The private browsing feature is great. Firefox 3 should have had this by default. (At least two Firefox extensions exist that do this.)
The Accelerators feature is good and exists as a Firefox extension: Context Search.

Then a few good things where IE8 has caught up with the competition:

It passes the Acid2 test and now renders the web in a much more standards compliant way.
It has a Find bar and not a Find window that constantly gets in the user's way.
It restores crashed sessions.
It lets you restore closed tabs.
It has an improved Fullscreen mode, à la Firefox 3.

The bad is that my main reasons to avoid Internet Explorer are still there:

Opening a new tab still feels as slow as beating an elephant to death with a USB stick. The funny thing is that the IE team mock Mozilla et al for working with improvements on the millisecond scale, while they themselves still have improvements to make on the whole second scale.
The menu-buttons to the right are slow as well.
I still can't rearrange the toolbars and buttons as I would like to. Which equals a step back to Netscape 6.
Ctrl+L still brings up the stupid open dialog instead of just focusing the location bar.

It remains to be seen if they can improve the tab-opening performance enough for the final release. I'm guessing they won't. (Enough in this case would be as fast as Firefox 3, which on my 3200+ AMD opens tabs instantly.)

Labels: browsers, internet explorer

27 August 2008

Krönika nummer två

Min andra krönika på ekuriren.se ligger ute nu. Finns att läsa här för den som vill.

(Den första finns här.)

Labels: Eskilstuna

26 August 2008

Four ways to improve form filling in Firefox

Over at Aza Razkin's blog a flood of discussion has been going on for a few days, on ways to improve Firefox. This post is esentially a cross-post of my reply there.

In my view, form-filling is one area that can be improved a lot. I have been trying a few extensions that aim to improve form filling on the web, but they aren't smart enough and they require a lot of pre-configuration.

Instead, form filling in Firefox should take a few lessons from the awesomebar:

Use data from forms on all visited websites to give suggestions. So if I have ever entered David Naylor into a box it will be suggested when I want to enter it (and start typing D…) on a website I never visited before.

Using all the saved entries as suggestions will give us a problem of very/too many suggestions. This can be countered by the following improvements:
1. Count form entries per site: When visiting Gmail, keep track of the fact that I’m entering my own user name almost every time and put it at the top of the suggested list (even before I type anything). Then stick my girlfriend as number two, etc. (Currently entries are listed in the order they were first entered, right?)
2. Count form entries across sites: When I visit a new webshop, understand that I’m most likely to type David Naylor when I start typing D… into a form.
I guess, ideally, Firefox should understand whether I’m about to type into a name box or an e-mail box and use that knowledge to bring up the relevant suggestions quicker/further up. This function would have to be implemented with non-english websites in mind though. Perhaps this could be done by learning the names/labels (?) of the boxes being submitted with certain pieces of information.
When asking whether to save a password, Firefox should give the user the option to log in automatically (fill login + password and submitting) in the future.

Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla

Firefox 3 being pushed to users

Today is the day Firefox 3 will start being pushed as an update to users of Firefox 2. That means, very soon 20 percent of the internet population will have one of the best rendering engine around with ...