Dean Sas’s Weblog

Flock

// October 21st, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve downloaded flock a firefox based web browser. It’s a basically reskinned firefox + some (well integrated) extensions. It aims to coexist with Firefox and not fork it, I suppose it’s vaguely similar to the ubuntu and debian relationship.

The new features include:

• A blog poster (which I’m writing this from), which is really intuitive, simple and requires no user configuration but currently it’s really buggy, and not usuable for serious use.
• Flickr integration including a new menu bar which shows pictures from flickr – this seems pretty useless to me.
• Bookmarks being completely del.ico.us based – no persistant local storage, tagging etc. This could give me the push I need to use del.ico.us, it’s currently too much effort in firefox.
• A pretty cool built in RSS reader that aggregates your RSS subscriptions, I’d use this instead of my current thunderbird RSS reader.
• The ‘Shelf’, sort of a scrap book where you can collect interesting items and quickly include them in a blog post for example. Which is quite cool, and saves opening up notepad, or using lots of tabs.

The CEO of Flock, Bart Decrem has said that he

hopes to have 100 million users within five years.

Flock, the New Browser on the Block

Which seems to me to be extremely ambitious as most of it’s advantages over firefox are stuff which don’t appeal to Joe Average – RSS, flickr and blogging. The kind of crowd that already know about firefox, opera, safari and others and those three probably barely have 100million
between them.

I can’t see me using Flock as my main browser for a few reasons:

• I can’t be bothered to import all the data that I have stored up in Firefox, and Flock offers no way of importing.
• The blog editor is pretty much unusable.
• I can’t see a way to search from the address bar like is possible by firefoxes ‘keyword’ functionality

It is only a 0.5 “developer” release and as such contains plenty of bugs. Particularly it seems with the blog poster.

I filed a bunch: 1345,1346, 1347, 1348 and 1349.

Engels Maiden Speech

// October 21st, 2005 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized

My member of parliament Natascha Engel made her maiden speech today. She spoke about our area and of the good that Labour had done with regeneration efforts. She gave compliments to Harry Barnes her predecessor, who, despite being a labour MP actually managed to be pretty good.

She did pay tribute to socialism and trade unionism, saying that True socialism and trade unionism, [are] the very roots of the Labour movement…

They might be at the roots however I find it hard to believe that they are at the head.

There’s a “question time” style debate on tonight with her at in Tupton l, I can’t see me making it though.

Holiday

// October 16th, 2005 // 2 Comments » // General

I spent the first part of this week, and all of last week on holiday in Bodrum, Turkey.

I drove down to Sara’s dads near Southampton, with Sara and a whole lot of luggage on the Sunday, after a couple of misturns and half a tank of petrol we finally arrived. We promptly went to see her grandma in Fareham and then from there we went to eat in some nice pub that looked out over the south coast and the Isle of Weight.

Early Monday morning we drove up to Gatwick airport where I met Sara’s uncles for the first time, on the plane Sara let me have the window seat as I’m a first time flyer. It was quite cool flying over England, seeing the white cliffs of Dover and then flying over France, before climbing over the clouds – which made things quite boring until we started to descend once in Turkey.

Getting off of the plane I expected to be greeted by a wave of heat, luckily I wasn’t. It was hot but British Summertime hot.

Anyway the hotel (Club Belizie) was great, nice local food, very friendly staff and plenty of room – didn’t feel crammed in at all.

Food was served indoors with a wide range of Turkish warm food, fresh salads, breads, yoghurts and desserts and also outdoors on the barbeque. I ate plenty of kebap and plenty of peppered things – I now love stuffed peppers. I’ve bought a Turkish cookbook, not sure if I’ll ever actually use it, but it’s nice to think so.

There were also two restaurants, the Italian, which to be honest wasn’t that good (no lasagne for one thing); the Turkish, which was really good, nice food freshly cooked on the barbeque, great waiters.

Burgers, pizza and so on were also served in the mid afternoon. Though we didn’t realise this until the end of our stay.

There were a variety of bars inside the hotel and four pools, which we made use of.

The hotel was out on it’s own, away from Bodrum, however there was a mini-bus (dolmus) to the town centre that came outside the hotel every few minutes for 19 hours of the day and cost around 60p per person.

Went into Bodrum a few times, it seemed really chaotic – mopeds and Dolmus (Turkish minibuses) driving all over, all beeping their horns. It was however quite pleasant, it took a while getting used to the very demanding Turkish shopkeepers, insisting you come in their shop/cafe/pub and wanting to know why you didn’t want to and stuff. In the end we just decided we’d be ignorant foreigners and pay them no attention. There were plenty of designer knock-off goods around – Calvin Klein, Dolce + Gabanna and the like, didn’t buy any though.

I didn’t realise until the day before we left, but Bodrum was the place of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the Mausoleum of Maussollos. Didn’t have time to go to the castle which houses part of what’s left of the Mausoleum.

We did however see (from a distance) the ruins at Iassos when we visited Sara’s Aunties and Uncles villa across the bay from there and also we drove past the theatre of ancient Halicarnassus