30 years of PacMan.

To pin a tab easily, just right click on the tab and select pin.

Some links will open in a new window and there is no tab. But don’t worry, just right click on the title bar and select to convert to tab. Now you can bring that tab back to the main Chrome window. Useful for Pandora popups.

Google Buzz is a good idea that has a few problems. Until they fix those problems, I am off. Not sure how much harm is already done. Hope it is not not much.

My gmail account is personal. A lot of my family and friends are listed there. When I open up it doesn’t mean I am opening up the profile of my friends and family. I also do not want any one to follow me and get access to my non public information.

The default setting for any application in this century should be a closed one. Unless it is a stand alone one where you explicitly open a new account, like twitter. Facebook is pretty closed. I like it that way. Twitter is open and I like it that way. Buzz right now is neither and I don’t like it.

It feels like buzz was rolled out in a hurry unlike all other stuff rolled out by Google. I don’t remember seeing any closed beta for it.

As soon as I enabled buzz, I posted on twitter that “Not everyone considers friend and follower the same. Do buzz differentiate those?”. Now it sounds like the whole web is saying the same thing.

For now buzz is turned off in my gmail.

Update 2/15/2010: Just re-enabled buzz. On that later.

I have added ads to this site recently. I did not want those ads change the look of my theme. One way to achieve this for text based ads is to have a transparent background. Google AdSense ad setup did not have a way to express that. Backgound color is required is only RGB. All the ads made the site look terrible than it already is. Luckily for me I am not using gradient colors over a large area. The background image is a small rectangle that is tiled. I changed the background color to match the background image and it looks better than standard colors.

If you have gradient backgound spanning a large area or have a background image that is not uniform color try to place ads outside of those areas. You can probably create a bar or box with borders that will blend with the rest of the site. The best way to work around the problem is to come with a color scheme that will allow you to place ads in a more acceptable manner.

The fight continues…

If I try to access a Silverlight application that is hosted on pretty much any web site, Chrome handles it without a problem.  But when I try to access a Microsoft web site that has a Silverlight application, the webpage complains that the plugin has expired. Expired?

This is the page that complains. That page throws a message box. Not good. Now if you do not respond quick enough, Chrome will popup another message box asking if you want to stop the unresponsive plugin. Not good either. In this case it is the browser asking the question. But you never know. Message boxes should be banned from html and java script and also from all plugins. Only the browser process should dish out message boxes.

In the above page I think it was MSTECHED site ad or something that was causing the problem.

I clicked yes on the button that takes me to the Microsoft web page for downloading Silverlight. That web page says this browser is not compatible with Silverlight. Well, not according to all the Silverlight applications I have used on the web. Everything works fine.

There is a clear distinction between fair competition and animosity. These two are showing the latter with elementary school maturity.

Ok, Google logo change happened a while ago and it is not new anymore. I just noticed the similarity today. It is kind of mirror or upside down of the Microsoft Windows logo with a different shape. Blue, yellow, green and red in four squares. Was that intentional or just a coincidence?