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After playing with D-lusion’s ‘Rubberduck’, which is actually fun, I skidded towards the Propellorheads’ ‘RebirthMuseum’ site to see if I could try it. Yes, I ‘ve read today’s Slashdot discussion about this one too. If I remember correctly, the link(s) first appeared at Metafilter (can’t find the link: pretty shitty search mechanism at MetaFilter).

It’s a big download apparently: a 215 MB as a torrent file (so this means I need to get Azureus or other torrent client first²), so I decided to wait for that one for now. I’m not in a hurry, since I’m not into garage or ‘drum and bass’ music^{1 3}. It’ll be fun only because I know how to work with machines and trackers like these.

Imagine how expensive home-recording, sampling and sequencing was back in the 80s.

¹ I was going to add a footnote here, but I forget.
² I’ve never seen any use in bittorrents (besides finding Slackware one’s), so Azureus was installed and removed a many times.
³ Right, I remember: I hardly listen any music. A couple of months ago, I managed to get some of my musical collection in MP3 format, but honestly, I hardly listen to them.

Via Scoble, Google has post-Katrina maps of New Orleans (Scoble link). According to Scoble, the Microsoft Virtual Team is on it too, but I guess, Google beat them to it.

Watching CNN the last couple of days, I noticed that one of their specialists (literally) showcased Google Earth to show ‘hotspots’ and that. During the Iraq war, this kind of technology was (most) probably expensive. Good stuff, this.

Since I was not in the state (work!) to reply in the comments section of Alan’s (excellent) post and since I do not want to end a thread as the last person ‘trolling’, a quick overview here:

In my comments I was not poking fun at the American government: I only observed a pattern of running after the facts. Simple as that. Secondly (completely separate from above observation), as a former student in Civil Engineering I thought it was rather amazing that despite frequent warnings nothing was done about the levees in New Orleans. I find this unacceptable. In simple civil engineering economics: it’s cheaper to build dikes and dams and preserve human lifes than trying to reclaim flooded land and find hundreds (thousands) of deads. As for the consequences of building dikes, of course this is an ongoing struggle: Where humans live, there’s a constant fight with mother nature.

Alfons mentions about the experiences during and after the Juan hurricane in 2003. Reading back the entries I still taste the same nonchalance. And we weren’t even mentioned on CNN!

  I call bro and we (Gayle and I) throw a memorable act of ‘cynically depressed survivors of Hurricane Juan’ together. We laugh about our own misery as we decide to eat another dry cold sandwich for supper.

As a matter of fact, had we known about the impending disaster, we would have had the car parked in Truro’s fabulous high-rise 6-tier underground 24 hour guarded parking lot. And, we would have made sure the kitty was tied to the couch and we would have had a backup generator to keep our Internet connection running so you could experience our misery live, 13 hours a day. But then, if you add up all those wishes, you come up with something that is close to the definition of 20/20 hindsight.

I‘m one of the lucky people who managed to get the free Opera license key. Cheers to the Opera Dev. Team.

Testing it, I found out that I didn’t like the default ‘Opera look’: something I managed to reset to the Windows default as soon as I discovered the feature. I don’t like Opera’s ‘revolutionary e-mailer’: for some kind of reason, I can’t not imagine an e-mailer that opens right in the browser.

There are a couple of rendering flaws too, particularly in the forms parsing code (it seems). Some boxes are small, some of them are big. The biggest problem I have is with the addressbar when it’s focussed: for some kind of reason, the tab literally tabs to the next available control in the browser. In Firefox and Explorer, the Tab key goes to thenext entry in the Autocomplete list. Building an Autocomplete like this is pretty hard: In RoundAbout I built an Autocomplete in a KeyUp event, ‘low-key-ly’ called ‘Memo3KeyUp’. Pay attention to the FLineProces flag that takes care of the very fast typers among us.

That said: the scrolling is superb and beats Firefox. Also, would you take your girlfriend/wife boyfriend/husband to the Opera or Firefox? For now, I’ll keep Opera as a backup browser. Internet Explorer is definitely out.