When Apple launched Safari for PC last year, I was excited to finally get to see that browser in action. As a PC user (yes, even as a graphic designer, I use PC’s; long story, that, so perhaps one for another day.) And whilst I really do enjoy using Safari (second only to Firefox), I do have one complaint. Why does Safari for Windows take so long to open?

Using my stop watch to calculate the time expired between when I double-clicked on the programme icon to when it became fully functional for browsing. Here are the results:

Firefox 3 = less than 2.0 seconds

Internet Explorer 7 = just about 2.0 seconds

Opera 9.51 = about 3.0 seconds

Lynx = less than 1.0 second

Safari for Windows = 5.0 seconds (quicker after the programme has been opened, closed and re-opened)

Sure enough, my method isn’t overly exact or scientific, but it’s good enough to clearly demonstrate that Safari takes a comparitively long time to open. I find this frustrating – it’s about the only bad thing I can say about Safari, but it’s enough to keep me from being tempted to switching from Firefox to Safari as the primary browser.

Recently, I had to update the code on a website that I made several years ago. The process included, among other tasks, converting all the <b> and <i> tags to <strong> and <em>. After playing around with the it for a while, I determined that the most efficient way to find and replace the old tags with the new ones was to do a search for b>, and then to replace it with a strong>.

By seaching for the b>, I avoided having to sift through all occassions of the letter b in the source code and content. The same would hold true for the <i> tag: simply search for i> and replace with em>

Earlier this morning, back when it was still dark out and I was too tired to turn on the lights in my office, I was seated at my desk, using the stark lighting of the monitor to see the keyboard. (Sound familiar to anyone?) I was using the calculator to figure out some basic maths (Sorry to Mr. Molnar, my maths teacher, for needing to use a calculator for basic addition), when I got this amazing message on the calculator: Result of function is undefined.  How cool is that! Suddenly inspirted, I flicked on the light and tried to re-create whatever computation I had just done to achieve that message.  I tried for several minutes before I started to think it was all a dream in my head. Good thing I remembered to save a screen shot.