Suprisingly enough it strongly rivals Firefox for my needs, it has plenty of well-integrated functionality and could replace a few of the Firefox extensions I use.
The tools that I principally used were:

• Stepping through the DOM as it is in memory, not as it was when the page loaded
• Rapid experimentation with colours and styles
• Finding out where an element belonged in the DOM simply by clicking on it
• Flushing the cookies for the current domain only

There were a couple of hiccups, sometimes the screen wouldn’t draw correctly where it had highlighted elements and such. The problems though, weren’t much compared to what you can get with Firefox. There the extensions often duplicated functionality, did it in differing ways and besides that there’s the maintenance hassle that upgrading Firefox entails.

Being Microsoft there was a lengthy EULA, one item in particular stood out.

You may not work around any technical limitations in the software

Technically doesn’t this stop me from viewing source and grokking the code myself if the tool doesn’t fit my needs?

I’m not going to move away from epiphany for browsing or Firefox for developing any time soon, but when you’re stuck with I.E. the DOM Explorer does a really good job.

I was looking for something electronic which I could access from anywhere, so after browsing around different systems and how other people had done this. I decided to use Tracks to do it. It’s not perfect as it’s not available offline, but I can download the RSS feeds and can work with that offline, and print pages out otherwise.

Tracks has a few bugs in the latest released version, but I’ve downloaded the trunk version and it’s much improved, it has a lot of bugs fixed and some new features to ensure only your next actions are listed in your todo list.

There are a couple of things I’d like to see added in the short term – some kind of support for “someday/maybe” items and support for “people agendas”, longer term some 43 folders functionality would be nice.

It’s open source and written in Ruby on Rails, so hopefully it’ll give me more incentive to learn Ruby, so I can add this functionality.

Now if only I can find some calendar solution, I need to be able to publish it (and preferably edit it) online, and also be able to edit it with something that accesses evolution-data-server…

Mark Thomas is a comedian who gets his laughs by pointing out the stupid things others – frequently government, do. As well as being funny it’s also quite motivational.

The main things he talked about on the night were war, and arms dealing (he owns a German company called Guns ‘r’ Us). He got lots of laughter telling stories about his time at an arms fair. Despite being on the police watch list for the event and telling the organisers he’s writing a book about arms dealing, they gave him a pass and then commented how sneaky he was when he turned up…

He also told stories of the Hindujas, and how he’d got someone, secretly filmed, to admit their arms dealing connections, however when he came to Newsnight to run the story they said they’d have to ask the Hindujas for comments. The Hindujas comment came in the form of six lawyers. Newsnight did not run the story. Mark Thomas is now going to tell the story in the theatre across from the Hindujas estate, with a red carpet going from their front door, to the front door of the cinema.

The show was sort of like the bits of The Mark Thomas Product, where he tells you about the thing he’s done – only with no footage and things, but covering the multiple topics he’s interested in, such as the ECGD, human rights. It seemed like a brief whirlwind of the things Thomas has got up too.

After the interval Rob Newman came on to perform his half of the show, now, besides knowing he and David Baddiel sold out Wembly Arena once upon a time, I knew exactly nothing about him. He came onto the stage, dressed in clothes that looked about 100 years old, wearing a bowler hat and doing a John Cleese style, funny walk. I didn’t know what to expect.

His routine mainly concerned the war, oil and random-ish odd songs with the occasional push of non-hierarchical autonomous groups. The routine was kind of light with humour, instead he tried to educate the audience on his theories.

Newman seems to me, to have a brain just full of facts, figures and thoughts. I’d imagine he’s a very interesting person to know.

The theories were quite controversial, and I’m unsure as to how serious he was about some of them, the main ones that come to mind is that “The first world war was all about oil in Iraq” and the prediction of a melt down in society over the next fifty years.

The melt down in society will apparently come through the lack of energy – oil production is apparently past it’s peak and the other sources won’t be able to provide enough power quick enough to satisfy demand. One thing worth noting is that oil not only provides power for transport, but also for fertilisers and other things. Here’s more information on “Peak Oil“. It’s quite an engrossing read.

But besides being a bit doom and gloom, he finished off his act on a lighter note, with some jokes and with songs singing accompanied by playing of the ukelele, including an impressive version of Rock Around the Clock in Arabic.

The show was finished with Thomas on the harmonica and Newman on the ukelele doing a seemingly improvised musical battle, where they took the chance to take the mick out of each other in song. Newman could obviously sing better, and was funnier, with Mark Thomas frequently stopping to laugh at him and what he looked like.

There’s still four tour dates left – in Warwick and Canterbury, but they’re very soon. If you get a chance to see these two then I’d definetly take it up. Not only will you have a great laugh, but you’ll also have chance to learn something.

Also thank you to the lady who gave me 10p for parking.

The new features include:

• A blog poster (which I’m writing this from), which is really intuitive, simple and requires no user configuration but currently it’s really buggy, and not usuable for serious use.
• Flickr integration including a new menu bar which shows pictures from flickr – this seems pretty useless to me.
• Bookmarks being completely del.ico.us based – no persistant local storage, tagging etc. This could give me the push I need to use del.ico.us, it’s currently too much effort in firefox.
• A pretty cool built in RSS reader that aggregates your RSS subscriptions, I’d use this instead of my current thunderbird RSS reader.
• The ‘Shelf’, sort of a scrap book where you can collect interesting items and quickly include them in a blog post for example. Which is quite cool, and saves opening up notepad, or using lots of tabs.

The CEO of Flock, Bart Decrem has said that he

hopes to have 100 million users within five years.

Flock, the New Browser on the Block

Which seems to me to be extremely ambitious as most of it’s advantages over firefox are stuff which don’t appeal to Joe Average – RSS, flickr and blogging. The kind of crowd that already know about firefox, opera, safari and others and those three probably barely have 100million
between them.

I can’t see me using Flock as my main browser for a few reasons:

• I can’t be bothered to import all the data that I have stored up in Firefox, and Flock offers no way of importing.
• The blog editor is pretty much unusable.
• I can’t see a way to search from the address bar like is possible by firefoxes ‘keyword’ functionality

It is only a 0.5 “developer” release and as such contains plenty of bugs. Particularly it seems with the blog poster.

I filed a bunch: 1345,1346, 1347, 1348 and 1349.

I drove down to Sara’s dads near Southampton, with Sara and a whole lot of luggage on the Sunday, after a couple of misturns and half a tank of petrol we finally arrived. We promptly went to see her grandma in Fareham and then from there we went to eat in some nice pub that looked out over the south coast and the Isle of Weight.

Early Monday morning we drove up to Gatwick airport where I met Sara’s uncles for the first time, on the plane Sara let me have the window seat as I’m a first time flyer. It was quite cool flying over England, seeing the white cliffs of Dover and then flying over France, before climbing over the clouds – which made things quite boring until we started to descend once in Turkey.

Getting off of the plane I expected to be greeted by a wave of heat, luckily I wasn’t. It was hot but British Summertime hot.

Anyway the hotel (Club Belizie) was great, nice local food, very friendly staff and plenty of room – didn’t feel crammed in at all.

Food was served indoors with a wide range of Turkish warm food, fresh salads, breads, yoghurts and desserts and also outdoors on the barbeque. I ate plenty of kebap and plenty of peppered things – I now love stuffed peppers. I’ve bought a Turkish cookbook, not sure if I’ll ever actually use it, but it’s nice to think so.

There were also two restaurants, the Italian, which to be honest wasn’t that good (no lasagne for one thing); the Turkish, which was really good, nice food freshly cooked on the barbeque, great waiters.

Burgers, pizza and so on were also served in the mid afternoon. Though we didn’t realise this until the end of our stay.

There were a variety of bars inside the hotel and four pools, which we made use of.

The hotel was out on it’s own, away from Bodrum, however there was a mini-bus (dolmus) to the town centre that came outside the hotel every few minutes for 19 hours of the day and cost around 60p per person.

Went into Bodrum a few times, it seemed really chaotic – mopeds and Dolmus (Turkish minibuses) driving all over, all beeping their horns. It was however quite pleasant, it took a while getting used to the very demanding Turkish shopkeepers, insisting you come in their shop/cafe/pub and wanting to know why you didn’t want to and stuff. In the end we just decided we’d be ignorant foreigners and pay them no attention. There were plenty of designer knock-off goods around – Calvin Klein, Dolce + Gabanna and the like, didn’t buy any though.

I didn’t realise until the day before we left, but Bodrum was the place of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the Mausoleum of Maussollos. Didn’t have time to go to the castle which houses part of what’s left of the Mausoleum.

We did however see (from a distance) the ruins at Iassos when we visited Sara’s Aunties and Uncles villa across the bay from there and also we drove past the theatre of ancient Halicarnassus