Zzzzzzzzz….

Lots of work.

New baby.

Etc.

Wandering electrons… but not too far is now officially in sleep mode.

Just the same, do feel free to explore what’s already here, and all my best!

Opera pre-alpha 10.5 raises the bar

In case you haven’t yet heard, Opera has released a pre-alpha of the upcoming version 10.5 of their desktop browser.

This version will have the new Carakan ECMAScript/JavaScript engine and a new graphics library called Vega, among other nifty additions, such as private browsing.

And as new versions of Opera often do, it’s going to raise the bar on what is considered to be good performance.

Here are a few recent articles:

At Opera Labs: “Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Labs”

At the Opera Developer Network: “Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha build released. Here is what’s new…”

At Opera Core Concerns: “Carakan Revisited” (precisions on the Carakan engine)

At BetaNews: “The once and future king: Test build of Opera crushes Chrome on Windows 7”

At Lifehacker: Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha is All About Speed (and Private Browsing)

At OSNews: “Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha — Now That’s More Like It!”

And of course a Google/Yahoo!/Bing/Ask/etc. search will find even more info.

Important reminder: We’re talkin’ PRE-ALPHA here. Downloading it at this point is not for the weak of heart and could even cause problems in your computer. If you nevertheless want to give it a spin, there’s a link in the Opera Labs post.

BBC discusses Opera’s US challenge

The BBC published an article today on Opera and it’s strange difficulty penetrating the American market: Opera browser bids for America

The Peregrine has landed! Opera 10 released

Version 10 of the Opera web browser was released today. Here are a few links to introduce you to the latest and greatest web-surfing innovation out of Norway.

First the video:

This video of course just scratches the surface of what Opera can do. There are a few new features that were not mentioned in the video. Notably Opera now has a built-in spell-checker, automatic updating and a re-sizable search box, three features that had been widely requested in the Opera forums. You can read about these features and others, including the 40% increase in surfing speed, on this link:

Turbocharge your Web experience with Opera 10

Or for the complete list of what’s new in version 10, even the super-techy things like its perfect acid3 results, check out the change log:

Opera 10 for Windows changelog

Remember, Opera for the desktop is totally free and totally add-free, and has been for years.

If you haven’t already discovered “the other alternative browser”, be sure to download it today to see what you’ve been missing!

Opera Browser main download page (gives an overview of features as well)

Opera browser for operating systems other than Windows (Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and still more (some of these may still be in beta))

Bravo Barney Frank

The Opera browser is today’s featured article on Wikipedia

It is well-known that I am a big fan of the Opera web browser (or check out the version 10 beta!). I even have a blog more-or-less completely dedicated to it (whose posting activity, as is the case here as well, is suffering from my ever-increasing workload).
An Opera Forums member pointed out that the Wikipedia article on the Opera browser is today’s featured article on the English Wikipedia front page.
What a great opportunity to learn more about the other alternative browser!

EDIT: And while we’re on the subject of Opera, I just reddited upon an interview with Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the company’s co-founder and CEO, on the NPR website. Von Tetzchner explains his take on the future of Opera, notably as concerns the Unite platform and web-based applications…
Opera: A Survivor Whose Time Has Finally Come?

Opera tips and tricks: On-the-fly drag to scroll

I was just replying to victorxstc2’s request for a feature that would allow click and drag, i.e., moving a document about in the window by clicking on it then dragging, like you can do in Adobe Reader.

In fact this option exists in Opera and can be set permanently via the Opera settings menu, by turning on “Scroll Is Pan” under “User Prefs”.

But it’s not particularly practical, because doing so makes it virtually impossible to choose text by clicking and dragging.

So I started playing around with keyboard combinations to see if click and drag could be done on the fly, that is, without changing the setting in opera:config.

And Eureka! it can!

The magic formula is: Ctrl+Alt+normal mouse click and drag the page about to your heart’s content.

Handy!

Insert special characters in a click

Special characters, like “¶”, or “Ω” or “≈”, are already a pain to insert in Word documents (or the like) and a super-mega pain in the a** to insert correctly into web pages, where if you’re going to be disciplined about things, you need to put in the html entity, so that the symbol will display correctly everywhere.

At least, these things were a pain until now!

I was just taking a look at Lifehacker.com, one of my favorite daily reads. They put up an article today on a new website called copypastecharacter.com. This website is, in reality, a single flash-based webpage, but little websites can sometime have big benefits for users.

Indeed the website is just a display of special characters, but the beauty is in the use. All you have to do is click on the special character that you want and Bing! (no free advertising for search engines intended) the character is on your clipboard, ready to be pasted wherever you need it.

You have the choice of copying the normal text character, but also the html entity; I think that the real beauty of the website is with this latter. In other words, website developers will find this more useful than your average Joe typing in Word.

†, ¼, ⇧, ®, § …

Easy as pie.

(EDIT: All the above symbols display correctly in Opera, Safari and Firefox, but the third from the left, an up-arrow, may not display correctly if you’re using Internet Explorer [hmmm, wonder whose fault that is…].)

www.copypastecharacter.com

Grasp basics (and a bit more) of pharmacology

What exactly happens when you take an aspirin? Why do you have to continue taking certain medications instead of just taking them once? What exactly is the difference between pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics?
If you’ve ever wanted to better understand what that little pill does to your body–and what your body does to that little pill–you’ll enjoy the Interactive Clinical Pharmacology website.
This site was developed by the the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Christchurch Hospital and School of Medicine in New Zealand.
What I appreciated in particular was the ability to interact with the website’s animated illustrations. This allows you to grasp a bit easier certain complex aspects of pharmacology. But fair warning: the website does presume, as the authors put it themselves, “a basic understanding of physiology and pharmacology”.
Interactive Clinical Pharmacology

Incredible animation on angiogenesis at Amgen

Beyond a certain point of growth, cancer cells, like any other cells, need blood vessels to provide them with nutrients and dispose of waste.
Angiogenesis is the process by which new blood vessels are formed in living tissue. Although the term, in and of itself, is not obligatorily attached to cancer, it is usually used in this sense; that’s to say the ability of cancer cells to invoke the creation of new blood vessels in tissue, thus assuring their nutritional needs and allowing them to continue to grow.
Controlling angiogenesis as a method of cancer treatment is thus a major field of current research.
The therapeutics company Amgen has put up an absolutely amazing Flash animation explaining the process of cancerous angiogenesis. This is really, really well done and an excellent illustration of just how powerful the web can be for educational purposes.
Don’t be frightened off by their use of medical terminology: the supporting animations are so well done that even a novice can keep up and learn a lot on this promising therapeutic path for cancer treatment.
Bravo Amgen!

Pioneering New Frontiers in Tumor Angiogenesis