Web Browsers That Inspire Fearless Confidence (While Surfing The Internet)

The title of this post is slightly incorrect, linguistically. However, I'm not changing it, as it's tightly tied to the URL of this blog post.

Currently, I use the following Web browsers on my Windows XP laptop.

1. Apple Safari 3.1 (AS)
2. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 (FF)
3. Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 (FF)
4. Opera Browser 9.27 (OB)
   
5. Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (IE)
   

I never feel confident or secure when browsing using IE (probably due to its long and tarnished history of severe security bugs). Similarly, I don't get the feeling of security when using AS (although to a far lesser extent). So I use these 2 browsers to browse only the "good" websites (like BBC, CNN, Gmail, Blogger, New York Times, etc.). It may be noted that my use of IE is very limited (I use it only when someday I feel like using IE), whereas my use of AS is heavy.

However, FF 2.0.0.13, FF 3 Beta 5 and OB 9.27 give me full confidence when I'm on the Web. I sail through the Web without any fear whatsoever, & without anything inhibiting me from clicking something (even when on notorious websites like those listing software cracks & serials), and they've never betrayed me to date.

Here is another list with the browsers ordered according to how much I trust them

1. Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5
   
2. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13 (I've to use it because some of my favorite add-ons aren't yet available for FF 3 Beta 5)
   
3. Opera Browser 9.27 (Yes, I trust it just a little bit less than FF, perhaps because it's a closed-source computer program)
   
4. Apple Safari 3.1
5. Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

About Me - See My Yahoo! Profile

Human brain could be storing & retrieving information as 'related blocks'

ALSO SEE THIS APR'20 FB POST BY ME.

Update (14-12-08):- A sequel to this post can be read here (Human brain's information retrieval system is imperfect (apparently))

The purpose of this post is to merely document my observation, without drawing any concrete conclusion, because I believe I'm way too amateur in the field of neuroscience to be able to draw one. An expert or a researcher, however, should be able to gain useful insights from this observation.

I watched Face/Off sometime in late 2006. A few days back, I was trying to recall the name of the institute shown in the movie, where the act was performed. Although, I remembered the feel of that name (i.e. that its length was small- something like 4-7 letters, and that it had a single syllable), I wasn't able to recollect the exact word. Finally, I fired up the movie and jumped to the scene where the institute was about to be shown. Below is the screenshot of that scene


This is when the interesting thing happened. Although it's clearly visible in the above screenshot that the name of the institute has not been shown yet, it immediately struck me that the name was "Walsh Institute".

Is this merely a coincidence? I don't think so.

This is not the first time that such a thing has happened to me. Safely assuming that the brain lurking inside my head is a normally functioning standard human brain, this event allows me to suggest that it's possible that human brain stores information in the form of blocks or groups (or compartments), with each block/group storing information that is connected/related in some way to rest of the information in that particular block/group, but not to information held in a different block/group. For those familiar with computer science, this means that the data structure possibly in use is something like a block/group, wherein each block/group holds all (or at least most of) information related to a particular entity (where an entity could be an event or an object), so that some kind of transfer of control (of the information retrieval system of human brain) to a particular block/group (which holds information about an entity) is essential to be able to recall information about that entity.

What could possibly have happened in my case is that when I saw the above scene of the movie, control got transferred to that block of my brain where information related to Face/Off was stored (something which we refer to in our daily life as "my concentration/focus shifted from the work I was doing to the movie"). This caused my brain's information-retrieval system to be able to retrieve this information immediately, something it wasn't able to do earlier because earlier (and normally as well) the control would focus on that block/group of information that was related to the task I would be doing at any particular moment. Control would transfer only momentarily to the block/group related to Face/Off (because my core focus would be on the work that I would be doing at that time), and in that short duration, the information retrieval system wouldn't be able to dig deep into the Face/Off block/group to be able to extract intricate data. Firing up the movie possibly caused a forced shift of control (i.e. the control now shifted continuously to the block/group related to Face/Off, so that now any other block/group would be given momentary attention, while this Face/Off block would be given continuous attention), and hence easy & immediate retrieval of intricate information happened.

I had paused the movie at the above screenshot, and when later I played it back further, the name indeed was Walsh Institute, as visible in the screenshot below.


This post not only introduces the idea of storage of information inside human brain in form of blocks/groups, but also introduces the concepts of control and control transfer.

Update (12-4-08):- It seems to me that the title of this post is slightly inconsistent with the ideas presented herein. The title seems to suggest that information retrieval too takes place in units of blocks/groups. I do not intend to suggest this, but I'm not correcting this post's title because this post's URL is tightly tied to its title.

Update (14-12-08):- A sequel to this post can be read here (Human brain's information retrieval system is imperfect (apparently))

Never. Stop. Thinking.

After a while you ask yourself:
Do these people ever SLEEP?

When is it time to go home? To say, "That's the best I can do." What work can be left until tomorrow? Can yours? What if tomorrow depends on the work we do today? Can that be left until tomorrow? Good ideas have no punch cards. They can't tell time. They have no excuses. All they possess is the desire to be found. While they remain hidden from most and invisible to the weak, they will eventually show themselves. To those who never stop thinking.

INFINEON CYCLE (Perpetual Thinking Process)

From an advert in a September 1999 issue of TIME magazine. One of my key inspirations.

My Dreamlist / Wishlist

Launch of my 'Daily Goals' blog

The purpose of this new blog is simple. To declare my daily goals so that I'm pushed to complete them (However, this list shall generally not be complete/exhaustive, since there shall be tens of small & large unforeseen tasks too that I shall finish each day, apart from the ones listed on this blog. Also, it shall be too taxing to list every single small/medium/large task that I finish each day, so I shall only list those which I am able to, with the non-mentioned ones being finished implicitly). I firmly believe that if I religiously keep completing every day's list that very day, no one can stop me from succeeding.

Amateur Users, Mozilla Firefox & Peace Of Mind

I'm frequently requested by friends & relatives to cleanup their computers, that are full of viruses and other malware. They tell me that it (the malware) "came" from the Internet. Thank god, now there's an effective (preventive) solution to these woes - Mozilla Firefox.

What I do is to backup all of their important data, format the machine, install the operating system again, and install the latest version of Firefox on it. And boom! Gone are all the drive-by-downloads, the unwanted pop-up ads, and a nice side-effect is the increase in browsing performance.

And how do I ensure that they do not use Internet Explorer again (accidentally or otherwise)? The simplest way (and its quite effective too) is to remove its icon from, the start menu, the desktop, and the quick-launch tray. And I also make Firefox the default browser.

The blue e isn't visible anymore, and I've noticed that what people can't see, they use it less often.

Here's what someone has to say. Although it isn't about Firefox, the spirit nonetheless is the same...

"I'm actively contemplating installing (Ubuntu) for a few friends and family, because I'm sick of de-spywaring their Windows machines." --Stephen O'Grady, analyst, RedMonk

Read My Thoughts On Human Brain

I inadvertently found a Antegooglewhackblatt

The query in question is whieghfield. And as a consequence of the Googlewhackblatt Paradox, this word shall no longer be an Antegooglewhackblatt, but a Googlewhackblatt.

Here are the screenshots

"Chaos" (The Movie) And The Pigeonhole Principle - An Interesting Goof

***Caution: Spoiler Ahead***

While reading the list of goofs in the movie Chaos, I noticed that nobody had pointed out this important mathematical goof in the movie. At around 1:13:00 time in the movie, note this set of dialogs

1. "...about a billion dollars..."
2. "Now. If you look at all the transactions, no 2 amounts are the same, and none of them are over 100 dollars"
3. "...less than 100 dollars, from, say, 10 million accounts, no reflex"

According to the Pigeonhole principle, it's not possible to make about 10 million transactions, each less than 100 dollars, such that no two transactions have the same amount [assuming the least count is 1 cent]. It's only possible if transaction limit is 100,000 dollars.

However, if 10 million transactions [all withdrawals] are made such that no two amount to the same, then the minimum amount withdrawn would be ((10,000,000)*(10,000,001)/2) cents - about 500,000,000,000 dollars- far, far more than 1 billion dollars.

Pigeonhole Principle - Also known as Drichlet's Box / Drawer Principle

It's unfortunate that the people behind Chaos overlooked this important mistake -especially when they were trying to make a movie that apparently is so dependent on mathematics and Chaos Theory.

Finally, to withdraw 1 billion dollars such that no 2 withdrawals amount to the same, we need at least about 450,000 withdrawals [starting from 1 cent, 2 cent, 3 cent and so on till about 450,000 cents].

A Goof In The Movie "Crimson Tide"

Are the top web search engines correspondingly related to the top web browsers?

I should begin by admitting that this idea sprung up in my mind (probably) as a repercussion of my watching the movie "Chaos" today morning (there isn't much of a direct relation between the movie and this idea though).

This is pretty straightforward- the current top web search engines (Google Search, Yahoo Search, Live/MSN Search, Ask.com Search- in that order) bear resemblance to the current top web browsers (Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera Browser- in that order again) in some striking ways- apart from a broad similarity in their current market shares.

I'll list those here

1) Google Search and Windows Internet Explorer- Both these market leaders are zippy (a clean install of IE 7 runs and renders fast- and most of the complaints of IE 6 or IE 7 being slow or heavy are a result of bad add-ons or wrong settings). Both are lightweight- IE is the least resource consuming browser on Windows operating system, when stacked up against the other 3 in question here- while Google Search is the lightest web search engine out of the 4 being considered here.

2) Yahoo Search and Mozilla Firefox- Both these powerhouses pack large number of useful features, and both "get the work done", although in the process of achieving this, they tend to be heavier than their more popular rivals.

3) Live/MSN Search and Apple Safari- Slick looks mark their main resemblance, as is the tremendous promise both of them hold. Both are expected to gain market share at the expense of their larger rivals.

4) Ask.com Search and Opera Browser- "Innovation" and "Innovative features" are the hallmarks of both of them. Each one of them is an underdog, fighting for survival, constantly innovating in the process. Each of them provides innovative features and tools not to be found (yet) elsewhere.

I can even add AOL Search and Netscape Browser/Navigator here- with feature richness but undue bloat characterising them both.

The important and unresolved point, however, is- does this correspondence have something more than what meets the eye (something scientific, some patterns maybe)? Or is it merely a consequence of an unsettled mind watching a movie as confounding as "Chaos"?

If we are able to identify some common characteristics in the products and services talked about in this post (which caused them to attain their respective positions in the market), we shall be a step closer to identifying and listing "Rules for Success".

P.S.- Identification of these "Rules for Success" is an area of my interest, and I have put significant time and energy into it.

Microsoft Silverlight forces the web browser process to run at 'Above Normal' priority

I felt like puking after what I just noticed- I had downloaded and installed Microsoft's Silverlight runtime on my computer a day back. Today I was browsing the web on 2 browsers together- Opera and Mozilla Firefox. When I opened www.microsoft.com in Firefox the website threw up a Silverlight based animation [whereas it used JPEG or Flash/SWF while I had not installed Silverlight]. The animation slowed down my computer [Intel Celeron M 1.5 GHz based laptop] significantly and perplexed me.

On analyzing what was wrong, I noticed that firefox.exe process was running at 'Above Normal' priority, and manually trying to lower it to 'Normal' simply failed- firefox.exe would automatically [and immediately] switch back to 'Above Normal' priority [but that's only if Silverlight is active- as soon as the tab having www.microsoft.com was closed, Firefox could again be switched to 'Normal' priority- so I conclude that it was Silverlight which forced Firefox to run at 'Above Normal' priority].

However, to me there is something else that is far more important- a Flash animation running in parallel in Opera browser slowed down immediately [and significantly] when Silverlight got activated in Firefox, whereas the Silverlight animation running in Firefox appeared to run faster [relative to the Flash animation].

To me, nothing else is more important than what I wrote in bold above. With this [yet another] wicked tactic, Microsoft gives a user not 1 but 2 false impressions:-

1) Silverlight is made to look better than it is- by forcing the process to run at 'Above Normal' priority, Microsoft is essentially fooling users by the apparent performance of Silverlight

2) Flash based animations running in other browsers are made to look slower than they actually are- user gets an impression of poor performance of Flash, compared to a parallel running Silverlight animation

Also, this is going to impact performance of other browsers as well [which a user runs in parallel]. And because this has not been documented anywhere, nor is the user informed about this, users will unknowingly develop false impressions of speed and performance of other runtimes and other browsers. This is nothing short of pathetic!

Personally I feel that Microsoft deserves to be sued for such a lame and desperate act- this act is an admittance on Microsoft's part that it lacks the engineering talent required to produce a high performance runtime that can equal, let alone better, Adobe's Flash.

My 2 cents for Microsoft:-

"Real men triumph without cheating."

(Microsoft does possess the talent to decipher what I meant...)

The importance of using a high fidelity speaker system

I have frequently noticed that people give disproportionately large attention to having a good visual display subsystem, compared to the audio subsystem. I have seen many friends bothering less about the speaker system when getting a desktop computer assembled.

Personally, I feel that this tendency is not good. 2 reasons for this

1) I am an avid player of music on my Yamaha PSR-330 electronic keyboard cum synthesizer for over 9 years now. I believe I have a good sense and understanding of music and sound. And my experience with music/sound over years is that although sound plays a very important part, its contribution is more 'silent' as compared to the contribution of visuals. To put it more clearly, in many scenes in movies, it is the sound running in the background that creates the right mood/emotion, although this is hardly ever explicitly recognized by audience. Thus sound is more like a silent warrior that does play a significant role, but its importance is realized by only a handful of people [musicians and singers especially]. Although in real life, sound has this quality called 'prominence', in many scenes in movies [especially in the emotional ones], sound is not prominent, as larger proportion of attention of audience is towards the visuals. Visuals, in general, get a disproportionately large amount of credit for the overall effect a scene creates. This reason highlights the importance of the role played by sound.

2) I draw the following analogies between display and audio subsystems

Screen size (of a display) = Output power (volume of a speaker system)
Color gamut range (of a display) = Frequency range (of a speaker system)
Brightness, contrast etc (of a display) = quality of sound output (of a speaker system)

If any single component of a display subsystem is lame, it is outrightly turned down by people. (from point 1) A speaker system too must have high fidelity, lest the effect of sound intended by artist/creator never reach the audience.

One final word- Watching a movie on a small screen with a poor speaker system produces a fraction of effect that the same movie would have produced had it been seen on a large screen with good speaker system.

p.s. I recently bought 2 sets of speaker systems [both are creative sbs-370 systems- my own belief is that, as of now, this system gives highest value for money among all 2.1 speaker systems i know, in addition to reproducing sound quite faithfully]