A couple of weeks ago Rose and I did some gardening. Well, Rose gardened whilst I sat out in the sunshine and took a photo every now and then. We bought some plants from a garden centre, a couple of which are below.

One of my favourites was a chilli plant; it’s so curious looking and wonderfully colourful. Here it is, attempting to hide behind some lavender:

This makeover focuses on bringing both the look and behaviour of Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox. Using a few extensions, a couple of about:config hacks and a theme, you can produce a remarkably similar experience to Chrome within Firefox. It’s not identical, but it brings over most of Chrome’s features I value. Here’s the final result:

Options

The only change to Firefox’s default options is to enable the “Always show tab bar” in the Tabs tab of the Options dialog.

Google Chrome’s copyright notice implies the browser has been under development for two years. The long gestation period shows, as Chrome exhibits significant polish.

Chrome has a long list of sound technological choices beneath its polished exterior— I’ve yet to decide how many are truly new ideas —but the exterior is what has really caught my attention. The attention to detail would impress an Apple engineer; subtle animations and great pieces of UI detailing are present throughout the product.

Ganglia is a monitoring framework for clusters of servers. It records many statistics and can record custom defined ones too. It works in a distributed manner, with each machine you wish to collect statistics for running the Ganglia monitor deamon, gmond. Each monitoring deamon’s statistics are collected by a metadata daemon, gmetad, running on either one of the monitored hosts or a separate machine. Ganglia provides a PHP frontend which displays the data from gmetad in the form of pretty graphs.

Two of these you probably don’t read, but should; one you probably do read, but wrong; and another couple you may have passed by.

All have the common thread of touching on technology which interests me, and that they often talk about the wider industry and world rather than purely the technology itself.

1. Tim Bray’s Ongoing

Far and away my most consistently subscribed to weblog; I’m not sure if it’s ever left my feedreader du jure. To give an example, recently Tim referenced a post from 2004, which I remember being excited about the day it was written. Tim posts the right mixture of technology and tidbits to retain my engagement week after week, month after month.