I confess, like Aaron Weiss did, that I want to get famous.

However, I don't want to get too famous. Because that either leads to a bunch of good comments, flame wars, or spammy comments.

I think I would prefer to have a smaller, but still present, audience. I do like to do this kind of informal writing, and I would think it nice if I had a small audience with which to discuss it.

In the blog world, however, you usually get famous for one of two reasons: either you did something that made you really famous, or you provide good fresh content regularly. I hope to do the latter. And I figure the best way to do that, since I'm not that astute of a writer, is to assemble a team of writers, which is, incidentally, what we want to do. Funny how that works, huh?

Anyway, enough down that road. More shall come later on the subject.

For what seems to be to have been a couple weeks, I've been working on getting WordPress all customized to my liking. Right now that mostly means struggling with the theme. PHP and CSS. I hope I can get it sorted out within, say, the next week and a half. Anyway, probably sometime before the end of the year, we're going to be online with our very own website (thanks Google, it's been nice knowing you). I'm still leaning towards abrokenmold.net. I think that's going to be www.abrokenmold.net, even though I like the no WWW look, because it can present some issues. Even if I'm not dealing with those issues at the moment, I do want to be prepared for the future. One might also notice that there is a website at brokenmold.net and that having such a similar domain name is a poor idea. Maybe so, but we already have the name and I want to stick with it. Plus we have a jump in that brokenmold.net seems to be abandoned.

So, anyway, a somewhat quick dump of some thoughts.

I got a business doing websites
When my friends need some code, who do they call?
I do HTML for ‘em all
Even made a homepage for my dog

-Weird Al Yankovic, "White and Nerdy"

Wednesday was a kind of milestone, or climax, or finish, for a project of mine. And that project was Matt Barley's website.

It started as a idea in Matt's head at some time or another, and he eventually conveyed to me at the New Year's 2008-2009 party at the RimRock Inn that he had been procrastinating on the project for some time and didn't get it done in 2008 and so wanted to get it done this year. I said I could help him, and so, on January 9, the domain name was registered, and a web page converted from a Word document made on Matt's MacBook was thrown up, slightly hand edited.

The first thing I did after that was to recode the page cleanly, with the help of KompoZer. Matt wanted a menu on the side, so it went table based. Yep. I just said that. It wasn't the best of designs, and later on I changed that to a menu positioned left with CSS. Praise God for CSS. Eventually it went back to plain HTML structure with a text menu below the header. Also, somewhere along the line, Matthew of abm fame gave a couple design suggestions and some code for one of them.

And then there was the photo galleries. First I did them with Web Album Generator and tried to embed them in a page, and then tried a page per album, using in iframe. That was a pain, and eventually I gave up and put them on separate pages and edited the CSS in each album folder to make those pages appear look like the rest of the site. And then Matt didn't like so many pictures on a certain album, or something like that. So, we ended up switching to Picasa Web Albums and linking to Matt's public page from his website. That worked out pretty well, since Matt can now manage the pictures all himself, which is great for both of us.

Eventually, I wanted to set up some sort of solution so Matt could edit the site on his own. I thought of a content management system first, and looked up one I recalled seeing linked from BugMeNot called CushyCMS. So I went and checked it out. It turned out to be, as one reviewer put it, more like a remote content editor. You put the proper class on div elements you wanted editable by Cushy and give it an FTP account to work with, and that's how it works. As another reviewer said, most of the time he'd probably forget to download the version from the site if he wanted to edit with something else (e.g., by hand with a text editor). So, that idea ended up being quashed before I even tested it.

I checked out three systems after that, really: Joomla, WordPress, and CMS Made Simple. XAMPP running on Windows on my laptop was my testbed of choice. Joomla was easy enough to set up, but seemed kind of complicated. WordPress looked like it might work well for blogging, but that's not what I was gunning for (although abm may be gunning for it in the future). CMS Made Simple ended up being it. The template/stylesheet system was easy enough to understand, and the use of the Smarty template system seemed nice. Not that I had heard of it before, but inserting Smarty tags seems to me a good way to insert special content into pages.

The first day of development gladdened the heart, because it seemed like it would work out great, and there was a pretty sweet little Picasa Web Albums module I found. There were some frustrations after that. A lot of aggravation dealing with CSS. In fact, that's been a thing all through the development of the website. Eventually things got ironed out and the site was finally ready for launch. The launch however, was terrible. I tried several times to upload and correctly configure the site for being on the server, and made a clean version of the site a couple times while at it. This process was highly frustrating, the least of reasons not being that I still have dial-up! Anyway, I finally got it nailed down and done correctly.

After after putting it in a test directory and then getting the go ahead from Matt, it went root, and now sits there beautifully. It's not much, but I have to admit I'm rather proud of it and am thinking that I may even redo our church website with CMSms if given stewardship of it. So, go check it out.

This bugs me to death since I'm on dial-up. Just last night, I pulled a process out from under the nose of my firewall while it was asking about it and it locked up my (Windows) system pretty nasty. I should file a bug report with PC Tools about that…

Anyway, thanks to burning desire and this and this thread on mozillaZine Forums, I found Cache Fixer. Quote: "Cache Fixer extension drops the "dirty" flag on every startup and if Mozilla crashes, you still loose cached data, but only the current (crashed) session. I think it’s better, than loosing all cached data."

That's awesome, but it only works up to Firefox 3.0pre. So I used the maxVersion trick so it will work with up to Firefox 4.0. Here it is on Box.net. Hopefully the developer will put an official updated version up soon. Please note: I have nothing to do with development, I just changed a text string and then zipped the files back up.

Also, as I posted back here, the dumped cache is intentional behavior. We're just choosing to change that behavior (woot!).

Thanks much, Mr. Ivanov.

Last Friday (4.10.09), Nathaniel, Hugh, Elliot, and I gathered to build the computer I had researched and purchased the parts for. It was my first build, and quite educational and satisfying, even if it did thwart our purposes until the early hours of the morning.

Specs:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz
PC Power & Cooling S61EPS 610W
ATI HIS Radeon HD 4850 512MB DDR3
Crucial 4GB PC2-8500/DDR2-1066
Western Digital Caviar Blue 320GB SATA 7200rpm
LG 22X DVD±R Black SATA GH22NS30
COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW
LG 19" Flatron W1952TQ-TF

The log of events:

5:13:00pm Watches synchronized.

5:16:26pm Pictures of components.

5:18:28pm Case removed from box.

5:19:35pm Side panel removed.

5:23:19pm Pictures of heart throbbing loot.

5:28:00pm Preinstall SATA drivers downloaded from Asia.

5:31:23pm Front panel removed.

5:33:41pm Motherboard drivers transfered to floppy disc via USB floppy drive.

5:47:27pm Moved to kitchen in order to circumvent electro-static discharge risk.

5:51:52pm Removed motherboard from box and anti-static bag.

6:03:54pm I/O panel busted out after much difficulty.

6:04:09pm Installed I/O panel.

6:14:49pm Standoffs installed.

6:17:47pm Motherboard mounted.

6:33:31pm Began testing screws due to irregularity in tightness.

6:35:54pm Standoff discrepancy diagnosed and motherboard removed.

6:49:39pm Discovered we had no less than FOUR faulty standoffs.

7:05:59pm Dinner break.

8:15:21pm Motherboard installed.

8:21:14pm Power supply installed.

8:38:51pm Front panel connections established.

8:50:45pm Prepared heatsink for installation.

8:53:34pm CPU installed!!!

8:57:03pm Checked motherboard screw tightness.

8:03:52pm Arctic Silver thermal compound applied to CPU.

9:08:12pm Heatsink installed.

9:12:27pm After much deliberation decided to install HDD in the top slot.

9:14:49pm HDD installed.

9:23:41pm Memory modules installed.

9:34:33pm GPU installed

9:42:27pm Optical drive installed.

9:56:08pm Double checked everything.

10:09:07pm POST!!!

10:14:36pm The zip-tie attack begins.

10:59:07pm Windows XP installed.

11:14:01pm BSOD due to incorrectly configured AHCI BIOS options.

11:26:07pm Began reinstalling Windows XP, having floppy problems.

12:20:00pm Tried enabling Mode 3 Floppy support.

3:24:17pm Must.... have..... sleeep.

[Next day]

2:07:14pm Successfully switched to AHCI mode after Windows XP installation.

Actually, I won in the Judges' Choice student category and tied for second in the People's Choice category with Samantha Robbins (who also took second second Judges' Choice with the same picture, it seems, and also tied for third in People's Choice with Ashtin Olsen). In the second annual Chieftain photo contest. To be specific.

Here's the Judges' Choice winner (yes, that's Matthew):

And here's mine from People's Choice second place:

I am told there might be monetary prizes, but I don't remember for sure and nothing has appeared in the mailbox yet.

MewthoutYou is releasing a new album in May! Suh-weeeet!!!!!!

It's called It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright.

Pending track listing according to aholidayathesea on Last.FM:

1. Cattail Down
2. The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie
3. A Stick, A Carrot, & A String
4. Bullet To Binary (Pt. Two)
5. Timothy Hay
6. The Angel of Death Came To David's Room
7. A Fig With A Belly Ache
8. Goodbye, I
9. The Beetle King On The Coconut Estate
10. Every Blade of Grass
11. Whatever Goes, Let It Go

This is going to be sickness, 11 new tracks of mewithoutYou! If it's true… as of right now it looks like it just popped up very recently; I'd say it's still rumor status.

I really like Catch for Us the Foxes, so… sweetness. Oh yeah, and I like what I've heard of [A→B] Life. Less sure about liking Brother, Sister from what I've heard so far, but maybe I'll change my opinion once I own the album (whenever that is).

P.S. Release date cite: here.

Thanks to a comment on that DownloadSquad free music post I linked to a while back, I wanted to see if I could grab some free music from brother-sister.net, mewithoutYou's official site for their latest released album, Brother, Sister. Four songs from the album are available for streaming.

So, like the commenter, I installed the Firefox add-on Live HTTP Headers, which is kind of fun… it let's you see the HTTP calls the browser makes. So I pointed Firefox to brother-sister.net, and it let me see the calls the Flash element, in this case, was making when I switched songs. I saw that it was pointing to .swf files, Flash files.

Yesterday I grabbed all the URL's and downloaded two of them with Free Download Manager. Since they were Flash files, my idea was to convert them to mp3 (or maybe something else) or grab the sound out of them via decompilation.

The two programs I grabbed to do that were HooTech's SWF FLV to MP3 Converter trial and Decompile Flash Free Version. Neither would open the .swf files. I admitted defeat.

But, later that night, I thought… I did download something… and they were several megs each. Then it occurred to me that maybe they were actually MP3's, so I tried it out, and boom! They absoballylutely were! So, there you are, four free mewithoutYou songs with a small effort.

The following instructions are for Windows using Firefox, but the process is fairly similar with other operating systems and browsers.

The .swf links:

a Glass Can Only Spill What it Contains (track 5)
Nice and Blue (pt. Two) (track 6)
C-Minor (track 9)
O, Porcupine (track 11)

So, if those don't download and just sit there, just right click the links and select Save Link As… Or, if you have a download manager, add new downloads for the files… right click the links and select Copy Link Location to get the proper address and then paste them into your download manager.

Then, when the .swf's have finished downloading, open the folder you downloaded them to, and change the extensions to .mp3 (for example, change C-Minor.swf to C-Minor.mp3). This can easily be accomplished through right clicking the files and selecting Rename. If you can't see the extension (so C-Minor.swf would just look like C-Minor), you need to turn on known file extensions.

And there you go, you have your MP3's. And at a fairly good 112 Kbps quality. They don't have any tags, though so you could automatically tag them (put in information like artist, title, album, album year, etcetera) with Mp3tag or Auto-Tag in Winamp. Or you can manually tag them with a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes (album information here).

Enjoy.

Also, I further tried out Decompile Flash Free Version and SWF FLV to MP3 Converter this morning using a real Flash file. SWF FLV to MP3 Converter seems to work OK, but it's only a trial; on exit you are told that it's a trial version and "The version only converts 50% audio and extracts 5 sound elements at most." Decompile Flash Free Version, however, extracted all of the elements of the same Flash file for me… for free. And it's not a trial. I extracted all the sound elements just fine. So, if any of you Windows users need a decent (to me) Flash decompiler and partial editor for free, this looks great.

If you have a fast connection, I'd say head over there RIGHT NOW. Jamendo. The interface is nice, and there is a lot of legal free music, most of it under Creative Commons licenses. Awesome… albums and albums of free music. Good stuff there, too.

This was one of the items on the list I linked to not too long ago, just so you know.

I don't remember why, but a while ago I ran into and read this blog post from late last year (I suppose I could probably dig through my Google Web History…) about the origin of the word "woot," aptly named The Real History and Origin of Woot and w00t. The post is long by itself, casting away various theories of origin and giving its blessing to the 1993-dance-catch-phrase theory, but the comments are much longer. Like a big long argument. Hummm. Some interesting stuff, but not without less polite interruptions.

I actually first heard the word from a guy who used to go to our school (he was in high school, I'm thinking, and I probably in junior-high). I just thought he made it up at first. We picked it up at school, and I saw it online later on which told me it was something others said, too.

So, where and when did you first hear woot? What does it mean to you? How do you use it?

Edit by Nathaniel, January 08, 2008: It looks like that post was actually a rip, or a repost of this Download Squad post. Or possibly the other way around, but I would guess DLS had it first.

I ran across this list of legal free music a while ago and took a look at it again recently. It has 35 different sources, which sort of seems strange in a world where bootlegging music is just a matter of clicking on that strange looking "u" or that familiar lemon. The ones I've used before on the list are:

• mp3.com
• purevolume; free streaming of songs from loads and loads of bands, free mp3's from some
• music.Download.com; thousands of free mp3's… I've found and downloaded some stuff I liked (Armor of God, Pillow, andrew lawler); also some artists on there with just streaming
• Last.FM; I've never used their internet radio service before (except for an on demand song one time, I think), but I have snagged some downloads from the site. The download page has a tag cloud so you can see what genres are popular. Lots of music, and lots of variety, I would guess.
• Spiral Frog; downloaded three whole albums and then some from them. The cache? DRMed WMA files. The license expire after a couple months, I think, and you have to take a survey at the site, which isn't actually so bad. I suppose if you can stand DRMed music, and your device supports it (*cough* no iPods! *cough*), you might want to  take a look. They actually do have a lot, and I did buy a hard copy of an album after downloading it late last year. I've heard it said it's a good way to try out music you might buy, and I think I agree; it would be easy enough to pop it into your favorite media software (sans iTunes) and see if you like it (though the site does offer streaming, too… take your pick). Well, if your a Windows user and if you have broadband.

They also mention on the page Nine Inch Nails' free release of The Slip. I had actually heard about it before I saw that, but in any case, the music is still available, though a hard copy has been released, I think (or get it anywhere… it's legal to torrent and share it). The nin site has the files in all sorts of formats, and if you're an audio freak, you can always grab the FLAC files and transcode them to whatever you like. My track recommendations are Discipline and Letting You. And, by the way, this is industrial, so if you dislike such heavy music, you'll probably want to skip it.

Finally, I thought I would discuss the YouTube way. You can find a lot… and I mean a lot of music on YouTube. Videos that are just blank or a picture or the like the whole way through just for the sake of the audio track are pretty obviously pirating (albeit low quality pirating) if it's copyrighted. But what about music videos? Is it fair use to upload a self made or mixed video with a copyrighted song? I don't know. How about snagging official music videos made officially available? It's pretty easy to grab the audio with FLV Extract. But is it legal and right? I haven't found out, but it is on my mind (at least in the back of it). Feel free to share anything you know or think about this or any additional legal free music sources.

Update, March 30, 2009: I updated the post to note that the Vista folder is in a bit of a different place. Also, I found out today that version 2 of the plugin was released in January. And I didn't even notice until when investigating the Vista path via my bro on his Vista laptop, I saw the file name and the extension of the plugin was different and that he actually had a Facebook icon in his Picasa. Also, the new version seems to install fine automatically (just a couple of boxes to click through). I did a small test and it seems to work fine using my Picasa 3 installation. The new plugin is for Window/Mac Picasa 2 or 3 (still no Linux, augggg!). The old version of the plugin seems to be working, still, and is still downloadable by the address I specified in the post (as of 03.30.09) so if anybody wants it, get it there; if that link goes dead, I uploaded it here. Oh, and I couldn't say anything about manual installation of either plugin on a Mac... sorry, I don't own one and don't feel like chasing down the correct folder. /end of update

The Picasa Facebook plugin is brilliant. There is a Linux version of Picasa, too, but unfortunately, the plugin only works with the Windows (and now Mac) version.

It downsizes the images in Picasa and uploads them to Facebook, which makes it tons faster. Pretty seamlessly. Which is nice, especially if you're on dial-up. And a great solution for anyone, considering you can't download the full size images off of Facebook anyway (not as far as I know).

I would just link and leave if that was all there was to it. Unfortunately, I had to manually install the plugin. There is a installation button on the Facebook page, but it doesn't work (at least for some people). So, I knocked together a guide in a Facebook note. This is the rewrite. Please note, although I have heard the plugin works with Picasa3, this guide is for Picasa2. It may or may not work for installing it in Picasa3. I don't know. If anyone has info on this, please tell me.

So, if the installation doesn't work automatically for you, follow these instructions. These are for XP, but pretty much the only difference in Vista is that the folder to put it in is different:
C:\Users\[your username here]\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\buttons\

1. Have your web browser running
2. Paste http://www.webkinesis.com/fbpicasa/facebook.pbf into a new tab or window and go or just follow this link
   For version 2 of the plugin, http://www.webkinesis.com/fbpicasa/packages/v2/facebook_v2.pbz or link
   
3. If your browser asks you what to do with the file, choose to save it and select whatever location you want (don't forget where, though)
4. If your browser didn't ask you what to do with the file, you should be seeing what is actually the content of the file. It's a bunch of text. If you don't understand it, don't worry, it doesn't matter. Just save it like you would a webpage (File > Save as or Save Page As) to wherever you like.
5. Now, we have to put the file in the right place. Copy the file first.
6. Open My Computer. Open C:\Documents and Settings\[your username here]\
7. Now, you're going to have to have hidden files visible to continue (Tools > Folder Options, View tab, Show hidden files and folders, OK)
8. Now open \Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\buttons. (So now you're in C:\Documents and Settings\[your username here]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\buttons)
9. Paste facebook.pbf into this folder
10. Now, open Picasa
11. Open the Tools menu and select Configure Buttons…
12. On the left side will be your Available Buttons, on the right side your Current Buttons. Find the Facebook button on the left, select it, and click Add>>
13. The Facebook button will appear with your other buttons on near the bottom of the Picasa window.
14. Select some pictures, click the button, follow the prompts, and enjoy! Keep your eyes peeled: there should be a link at the bottom of the window that appears at some time, offering to let you enable Extended Access (it's a Facebook thing). Do it. Otherwise, you'll have to approve all photos you upload from Picasa on Facebook itself before they are published. That's a drag.

Notes: if you're not a power user, you probably will want to turn off hidden files. Just follow the same steps you used to turn them on, except this time select Do not show hidden files and folders.

Feel free to ask questions and otherwise comment.

…for now, that is. My previous posts were: DRM CD's are uncool, More on the DRM CD case, the great DRM aha!

On October 7th, I followed the instructions posted at the CDFreaks Club to remove Macrovision CDS-300 drivers. This consists of finding the file sdcplh.sys on your Windows partition/drive, deleting it, and restarting Windows. Boom. It worked. Marvelously. I also decided to disable Autorun on my optical drive, but it turns out that for all my knowledge, I didn't know how. Lol. Annoyances.org readily gave the solution. Like many things in Windows, it was in the Registry, but TweakUI handled it easily. So anyway, I could rip tracks fine now, no scrambled audio effect. Great! I tested it out by ripping the first and last tracks. No problems detected, MP3's played fine. I'm pretty sure this only affects Windows, so if you use Mac or Linux, rest easy. It seems kind of stupid for me to get suckered in like that. Oh well, now I know.

removing CDS-300

So, here's a step by step on how to get rid of the CDS-300 protection (How do you know it's CDS-300? There is a folder named CDS300 on the disc. Simple as that):

1. Start Menu > Search
2. If needed, click to search All files and folders
3. Type in sdcplh.sys and then press Search
4. Once it has been found, right click it and select Delete and select Yes if you are asked for confirmation
5. Restart your computer once the file has been deleted
6. Once you're back, enjoy unscrambled ripping of your CD!

Thanks to CDFreaks (hyqwn) and Alex Halderman and Edward Felten.

And if you ever insert that CD into a Windows computer again, I recommend holding down Shift whilst you do (i.e. press down before you put the disc in, let up a few seconds after the CD tray has closed or, in the case of a slot loader, you've inserted the disc) so that the program will not Autorun.

Also of note, there is an Uninstall.exe on the disc. I'm not sure if this would actually remove the driver (sdcplh.sys), but it does at least set the "agreement" status on the disc's autorunning up to "not agreed."

Here are some pics… before and after removing sdcplh.sys

successful ripping!

There are also two other protections schemes I found out about during my research, MediaMax and XCP. I actually thought I had XCP on my CD, but it turned out to be Macrovision's CDS-300. So, I actually learned a fair bit about XCP and MediaMax. Much information can be found in Alex Halderman and Edward Felten's whitepaper. XCP, which only works on Windows, installs a rootkit on your system, which malware can and has taken advantage of. MediaMax, which works on Window and Mac (though the Mac version actually requires the user to start the installer), if Autorun is enabled (and it is by default), actually does automatically install software on your computer without notifying or asking you. Furthermore, MediaMax also opens up a security hole, as described in the whitepaper.

removing XCP

I've never actually encountered XCP (though I thought I had), but I'll list some instructions that I think would work to get rid of it, based on information I've gleaned from the internet. I am told that if the disc uses XCP protection, you'll see a file on it called VERSION.DAT (you might just see VERSION, depending on your Windows settings)

1. open Run (Start Menu > Run or in Vista, just type in the search box)
2. type cmd /k sc delete $sys$aries and press Enter
3. restart your computer
4. open Command Prompt (Start Menu > All Programs/Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
5. type cd \ and press Enter
6. type del $sys$*.* /s
7. wait until it's done (it will have a list of deleted files and then finally display the prompt C:\>)
8. restart your computer (I don't know if it's really necessary, but it's not a bad idea)
9. You're done; I do recommend downloading CCleaner to clean up your Registry, though. Just open up CCleaner, click the Registry button on the left, and click Scan for Issues. Once the scan is done, click Fix selected issues… when it asks you if you want to backup changes to the registry, just click yes and save it in My Documents or somewhere else convenient. That way, you can just double click the file to reverse your changes if your computer starts acting wacky after this (assuming the Registry cleanup somehow created a problem that made things act wacky).

Thanks to Black and White Incorporated for the information.

removing MediaMax

The other big CD protection software is MediaMax. Halderman and Felten kindly explained how to remove the Windows version.

1. open Command Prompt (Start Menu > All Programs/Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
2. type sc stop sbcphid and press Enter
3. type del %windir%\system32\drivers\sbcphid.sys and press Enter

In the future, always hold down the Shift key like I described earlier, if you put the disc in a Windows computer, because the software on the disc WILL install stuff without your consent. Unless you have Autorun turned off.

Regarding the Mac OS X version of MediaMax: I don't know too much about it, but I did find out that OS X does have an autorun feature (called 'autostart', I am told) that can start the process, but it still needs your permission to install the software. Don't give it that permission. Deny and rip away! If you do install it… I'm afraid I don't know how to remove it. Good luck if you try, and please share any findings with the community.

Well, that's it for now. Hope you have fun avoiding DRM.

Just saw this:

Why am I getting nowhere on my case?

It's CDS, not XCP.

Let me elaborate.

My Switchfoot CD is protected with Cactus Data Shield, not Extended Copy Protection.

Now how did that happen…? I see that the Wikipedia article on the album mentions that some copies of the album were protected by Cactus. Ok. Why didn't I figure this out sooner?

A Google search led me to this page, which mentioned CDS-300, which struck a familar note with me from browsing the CD. Aha.

Alright. Hopefully I should be able to fix it with this new knowledge, and some helpful info from that page. And then I'll post on what happens, some summary information on this stuff, and info on how to avoid or fix the situation.

Google's released the first beta of their browser, Chrome, on September 2. Of course, it might be in beta for years, but anyway... the browser's features and some of what's under the hood were known the day before from a comic that was leaked onto the internet. The comic has since been released by Google. Google then released the browser a day early.

Chrome gained usage share quickly, surpassing Opera, in fact. At least for a while. It's currently at 0.68%, according to Net Applications. Check out their Chrome tracking for updated info.

And my opinion....

It's pretty sweet. The browser is lightweight and very usable. It feels like an awesome minamilist meld of Safari and Firefox. I really like the UI. And... add feed management, and then really nobody should use IE!

Of course, the browser is having it's share of troubles, such as being affected by the 2 second stop Flash bug like Firefox, or getting Hotmail's gander up because of the browser's user agent, which, interestingly enough, includes Safari and Mozilla.

So... I like Chrome. But it's not replacing Firefox for me. Except for one thing. Gmail. I use Gmail in Chrome as an application, which works much like Prism in Firefox. It's pretty speedy with Gmail, and the cache keeps loading time pretty quick, which is great because I'm on dial-up. And I don't have to reload Gmail if I have to restart Firefox or it crashes.

And... some links.

Wikipedia article for the technical rundown.

Grand Stream Dreams has two good posts on Chrome, here, where he shares a bunch of links, and here, where he pokes Chrome with a stick; reccomended reading, as he points out the real installer of Chrome (since the installer downloads Chrome from the internet) and also points out a sweet way to get the nightly builds.

September 19, 2008 Edit: Hmm, I forgot to post a link to Chrome. Lol. Download Chrome.