A friend of mine, xkcd, recently created bestthing.info, a site designed to figure out what some of the best things are. Tonight I created the artwork and the design so it looks nice too. Check it out!

On the advice of a coworker, I tried out the IE7 Beta today at work. It was a bit of a disapointment. I’ve heard a lot of hype about the new IE, so it was really a letdown to actually try it out. The first disapointment was that the installer requires a reboot, and basically breaks the entire machine if you don’t reboot immediately. I had about 20 windows open and busy, so it wasn’t exactly practical to reboot. I started getting error dialogs about missing DLLs and finally our test tool app failed to start because it couldn’t load embedded browser controls. So, I finally had to restart. At this point the install finally completed and I actually had a working IE7.

On to the interface. It is ugly. Ugly and very clunky. They completely threw out all existing human interface guidelines. By default there is no menu bar - the menus are only accessible via icons in a toolbar. The menu bar can be enabled, allowing access to all options. But the menu bar is placed below the address bar. It really proves just how important interface consistency is. I also had to manually turn off all “ClearType” font anti-aliasing in IE despite the system wide setting. The font anti-aliasing was especially brutal, and the fonts were quite blurry and almost unreadable at times. I don’t know why.

People often complain about Firefox memory usage. As a very simple test, I started firefox and IE7 and loaded my rawdog rss feed in each browser. This is a large HTML file with many images linked. Here is the memory usage after loading the entire rawdog feed:

Close, but Firefox wins. Certainly IE isn’t lower, which is actually what I’d expected. The conclusion? I didn’t take my time uninstalling it (which required yet another reboot, thank you Microsoft).

About a week ago, I stopped at a local gas station and on the counter was a flyer for a local ultralight “Fly-in” (a gathering, basically). This sounded like a lot of fun, and Abby and I headed over to the small private airfield in Greenland, NH where the fly-in was occuring. There were a wide range of aircraft there, from small trikes to light sport aircraft and even what looked to be experimental general aviation aircraft. We both got a chance to take a short trip in a two seat light sport aircraft. It was quite impressive. The aircraft leaves the ground almost immediately after beginning the takeoff roll and climbs steeply after takeoff. The air was still and the ride was smooth.

After climbing for a while, we banked left and headed towards the seacoast area. The pilot demonstrated the stability of the aircraft. Properly trimmed fixed wing aircraft are inherently stable and at a stable airspeed can be flown “hands off.” With his hands off the control stick he had me lean forward to show the effect on the pitch of the aircraft. When you move forward from the center of gravity the nose does pitch down slightly and a descent begins. After this, we got a chance to see some of the surrounding area from the air at around 1000 feet. Returning to the field and joining the traffic pattern, we approached the grass field for a landing as the pilot used the rudder to yaw the aircraft to reduce airspeed (no flaps) and align with the runway after clearing some trees. After straightening out we flared for landing and touched down gently on the grass airstrip.

It was really awesome.

Via BoingBoing comes this gem about how the ABC TV President of Advertising would really, really like it if DVR manufacturers would disable fast forward on their products. The purpose of this is to prevent viewers from potentially skipping commercials. My favorite part is this:

“Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping–and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.”

So he claims that consumers don’t want to ad-zap with their DVRs, so they won’t care if they are unable to fast foward. But at the same time he is proposing this restriction for the express purpose of preventing users from skipping commercials (which, of course, he says he thinks they don’t want to do). Huh?