Mailund on the Internet

I spend a lot of time on the web, but I don’t really have any strong preferences as to which browser to use.

I started using Safari when I switched to OS X but since it doesn’t play well with several web applications I use – including the CMS at work and the editor in my WordPress blog – I kept Firefox around for those sites.

I’ve never really gotten around to trying out Chrome.  First, because I was on Linux when it came out so I couldn’t join in on the fun to begin with, and second because I just didn’t bother when it came out on Mac.

Anyway, this morning – after reading this benchmark – I decided to try it out, and in fact I am writing this post in Chrome.

Installing was no problem and it imported my bookmarks from Safari, so no problem there either.

To see if it was noticeably faster than the other browsers I use on the more interactive pages I wanted to try out Google Docs.  It works okay there, but I cannot say that I notice much difference from Firefox.  Not that I really expected to.

One weird thing, though: when I clicked for “offline” editing it asks me to install Gears.  Ok, I install Gears, restart the browser and do it again.  It just asks me to install Gears again.

What? Doesn’t Chrome play well with Gears?  Or is it just on a Mac?  According to the Gears page it requires Firefox or Safari on a Mac (and there it works like a charm) but I am surprised that it doesn’t work with Chrome.  Especially since it explicitly asks for Gears.

Oh well, I will try running Chrome for a while and see what I think about it.

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A Blog Around the Clock has a list of links to blog posts about commenting on (scientific) papers.

There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity.

Read the post to get all the links.

I must admit that I have never left a comment on an online paper.  If I blog about a paper, I leave a traceback, but that is as far as it goes.

Since putting a review of a paper on my blog, just to add a comment, is a lot of work, I guess I should just get used to leaving comments instead.

Still, I am reluctant to comment on papers.  I don’t mind firing off a half thought through comment off at a blog, but I feel that for a scientific paper I should make sure I understand all the details of the paper before I start commenting on it.  I guess I just have to overcome that feeling.

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It is Monday again, so you have a week of work to look forward to, but first, here’s a list of blog posts and news items from last week I think you should read!

Biology

• Protein sequencing gone awry: 1 sample, 27 labs, 20 results (Ars Technica)
• Altruistic chimpanzees clearly help each other out (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
• Superfreaks about the face (Gene Expression)
• The Fitness Cost of Resistance Could Be… (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Genetics

• Why the indigenous still dominate the Andean region (Gene Expression)
• Personal Genome Project: waiting list now 13000 long (John Hawks)
• The next generation of genome-wide association studies (Genetic Future)

Intellectual Property

• “A Breakthrough In Data Licensing For Open Science” (Common Knowledge)
• “Could You Patent the Sun?” (Mike the Mad Biologist)
• Reminder from the MPAA: DRM trumps your fair use rights (Ars Technica)
• Lawyer: RIAA must pay back all $100M it has collected (Ars Technica)
• Copyleft v. Copyright: FSF, RIAA face off in court (Ars Technica)

Paleontology

• Sahelanthropus: Did camelherders bury Toumaï facing Mecca? (John Hawks)
• Darwinius
  • Human Descent from Lemurs? Could be, sortalike (Neuron Culture)
  • Poor, poor Ida, Or: “Overselling an Adapid” (Laelaps)
  • No, it’s not an ancestor either (Evolving Thoughts)
  • Getting to know “Ida” (Laelaps)
  • Interview w/ The Scientist on Ida’s Media Strategy (Framing Science)

Programming

• Fetching docstrings from objects: easy, right? A painful exploration of the Python object model (Void Space)
• Book review: “Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt” by Mark Summerfield (Eli Bendersky)
• More PyQt plotting demos (Eli Bendersky)
• Make text stand out with outlines (Revolutions)
• How to Motivate Programmers (Coding Horror)

Space

• Habitable planets & Alpha Centauri (Gene Expression)
• To the stars! (John Hawks)

Statistics

• Profile of R creator Ross Ihaka (Revolutions)
• Taming tapply (Revolutions)
• Difficulties in communication, the reader is always right, etc etc (Statistical Modeling)
• Handy statistical lexicon (Statistical Modeling)

The Web

• Mozilla preparing to scrap tabbed browsing? (PC Pro)
• Online social networking isn’t for everyone (Confessions of a Science Librarian)
• How Google’s cute “doodles” became Satan’s pawns (Ars Technica)
• Cloud computing (Good Math, Bad Math)

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I must have instinctively know this; that is why I spend the working day surfing the web.

Ars Technica: Study – surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity

And the story is posted the 2nd of April, so it is not even an April’s fool.

Now, what does the story say about downloading pr0n at work?

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I spend a lot of time on the web, so I am always excited when I find a new Firefox plugin that does something cool for me.  Like my Google Notebook or Zotero.

Today, I learned about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity and that it might be in the next release of Firefox.

This looks really awesome!  Like Spotlight for the web, but easily extensible.

I am installing it right now to try it out!

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