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A Family First of their own
Today's Crikey carries a letter that reminds us that Family First, currently causing problems for the ALP in the Senate, are a creation of... the ALP.
Andrew Burke writes: Every time Stephen Fielding casts his vote to defeat a government Bill, as he has with the luxury car tax, let's remember who's responsible for his election -- the Victorian ALP. If their preferences in 2004 had gone to the Greens rather than Fielding then there would have been one more Green vote and the Bill would have passed, with the Greens' sensible amendment to exempt efficient cars. Over the next couple of years it may prove to be a very painful mistake indeed.
05 Sep 2008 14:36 [category: /politix] #
Factional map of the ALP
For those wanting to follow Australian politics, it's critical to understand the factional structure of the Australian Labor Party and the influence this has on events. For example, the Left has traditionally been given the Deputy Premiership of NSW, while the Premier has always (until this afternoon) been from the Right.
The problem for outsiders like me, trying to understand the internal machinations of the ALP, is to know which MP is aligned to which faction, never mind all the myriad sub-factions. Factions inside the ALP often hate each other more than they even hate members of other parties, and political bastardry is common within the ALP.
So what I'd like to know is this: is there a resource somewhere that lists all the ALP's MPs and the factions to which they're aligned? Is this perhaps something that should be attached to WikiProject Australian politics or similar? A category attached to each MP's Wikipedia page would be a good place to start.
Oh, and bye Morris, bye Costa. You won't be missed.
05 Sep 2008 13:52 [category: /politix] #
Coolest Chrome feature: search within page
So far this is my favourite little UI hack that I've found within Google Chrome. Kind of appropriate that a search engine company would get this right, I suppose.
If you're familiar with Firefox's search feature, Ctrl-F to enter a search term finds the results within the page progressively as you type in the little search box. Chrome moves the search box to the top-right and highlights the answers as you type. Even cooler, it highlights the location of matches in the current page along the side inside the scroll bar, so you can see the frequency of the search term.
That's so obvious now you wonder why nobody thought of it before, particularly given this is the same presentation used by graphical diff tools that developers use every day. Very cool.
Update: Julien Goodwin points out that this feature has been in Opera for over a year. I don't use Opera though, so I've never seen it.
04 Sep 2008 13:11 [category: /geek] #
Google Chrome: first looks
I've been playing around with Google Chrome this morning on my work (Windows) machine. This is Google's browser software, and I have to say I'm impressed. I had expected something a fair bit less polished, but instead we've got a near-usable browser already! Something that still hasn't happened with Apple's Safari on Windows. What's more, this will (soon) be available on all platforms.
The new browser is fast, stable, slick and smooth. The chrome-less interface is very impressive, and makes perfect sense when you consider the browser the centre of your computer interface, as Google intends. Memory use is very modest, with each tab separated out into its own process. In total it's using 175 megs of memory, versus 152 megs for Firefox for similar activity. Importantly though, it doesn't seem to bloat out with repeated use.
JavaScript works fine with Google applications, less well with some other sites. It's certainly zippy though! Gmail and Google Analytics zoom along nicely.
Developer tools look interesting so far, with a DOM inspector hidden under the confusingly-named JavaScript console -- there's a console there, but a whole lot more too! It would be hard to have FireBug-level functionality in this first release, but there's a good chunk of it there. I've got some work to do making sure everything works in this new browser, so the development tools (or lack thereof) will either make life easier or (as with IE) very hard.
The only thing I can see preventing me from making this my main browser is the lack of an ad blocker, but I'm sure one will be along shortly. Once it's available for Linux, with an ad blocker, I suspect I'll be making the switch.
03 Sep 2008 11:22 [category: /geek] #
Google discovers solvent abuse
We all thought the folks at Google were on crack. Turns out they've been on something quite a bit cheaper. Sometime "tomorrow" (though mentioned as "Tuesday", but probably Mountain View-centric time), Google Chrome will be released for Windows. It's Google's attempt at a browser, as leaked by Google Blogoscoped.
It's well worth looking through the promotional comic about the design process and what they're aiming for. Complete process separation of browser tabs can only be a good thing, though I wonder how much of the web it will break. How will things like the iframe hacks Google themselves use to get around browser scoping remains to be seen. Though breaking them wouldn't be a terrible thing, provided there are other, more secure ways to achieve the same thing.
All in all, it looks very promising. More players in the web browser market can only force more innovation, so more power to them. Of course for those of us trying to make browsers work, it makes life a little more difficult for us. One more test target. Then again, the more browsers the more standards become important.
Windows only at launch, according to the official blog, with other versions following soon after. Hopefully not too far after!
