NLL Playoff Picks: Championship Game

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I’m now 5-for-6 in playoff game predictions, having missed the Buffalo-New York game last weekend but getting the Calgary-San Jose game right. Luckily I didn’t post score predictions because I would have been way wrong. Who could have predicted 5 goals for San Jose (who scored 20 last week) and only 3 for Buffalo, including 0 for Steenhuis and Tavares? Who could have predicted Matt King shutting out San Jose for three periods and outscoring Colin Doyle and his goal being the game-winner?

New York vs. Calgary

Given the goaltending performances last week, we might be looking at a 3-2 game, which is unheard of in lacrosse. Then again, 17-5 and 9-3 scores are pretty unheard of anyway, and we had both of those last week. Even as good as Vinc was last week and as strong an offensive team as the Titans are, I don’t think they’re a match for Calgary. As long as Calgary doesn’t get too cocky after last weekend’s blowout, the Championship is theirs to lose.

Prediction: Calgary

Unfortunately, I will be vacationing in Las Vegas this weekend, so I won’t be able to watch the game. Well, perhaps “unfortunately” is the wrong word to use here.

Chrome vs. Firefox

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I have been a loyal Firefox user since version 0.8 or so, back in 2004 when it was still known as Firebird. When designing my web sites, I used Firefox exclusively, and before publishing them, I frequently forgot to make sure they worked properly in IE, which they usually didn’t because I used CSS standards (parts of which are either ignored or implemented wrong by IE) as much as possible. I installed the Adblock add-on the moment I heard about it, and have seen very few internet ads since then. It’s been great. There were only two major drawbacks to using Firefox:

  1. Some websites didn’t work properly in Firefox, either because they use evil ActiveX controls which only work on IE, or because they were simply developed using IE and other browsers were ignored. Notably, Sybase’s internal vacation request and scheduling system uses ActiveX so I have to use IE for that. Both of these issues are becoming less and less prevalent as browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome gain market share.
  2. Firefox uses a boatload of memory. I would sometimes have a Firefox window open with only one tab (usually showing my gmail inbox), and Task Manager would tell me it was using well over 200 MB of RAM.

Then Google Chrome was released, with the promise of much faster rendering and Javascript. I considered trying it out, but read a couple of reviews at the time saying that it was not bad, but not really “ready for prime time”. In recent weeks, I’ve read more reviews from people who have made the switch and are quite impressed with Chrome. A few weeks ago, after hearing from yet another source that Chrome used much less memory than Firefox, I decided to give it a try. Since then, I have used Chrome almost exclusively. I’ve noticed a few differences, both pro and con.

Advantages of Chrome

  1. Everything is faster. In particular, Javascript is much faster. Gmail is very snappy, and other sites that are heavy on the Javascript (like Stack Overflow) are also faster.
  2. Chrome uses much less memory. Right now, I have one Chrome window open, with one tab showing my gmail inbox. There are four (?) Chrome processes running, using a total of 43 MB of RAM. I’ve seen other times where I have a couple of tabs open, and there are seven or eight Chrome processes running. But the total amount of memory they’re using is still less than one Firefox.
  3. A problem in one tab that causes a crash will only cause that tab to vanish, not the whole application. I’ve only seen this happen once, and actually the tab didn’t vanish at all – the video that was supposed to play in it never did, but Chrome kept right on truckin’ along. Firefox doesn’t crash that often for me either, but when it does, the whole thing goes away.
  4. Some sites (like Google Reader or, again, Stack Overflow) have “tooltips” that don’t seem to work in Firefox, but do in Chrome and IE.
  5. Text areas are always resizable. Very nice.
  6. Chrome detects known malware sites and prevents you from going there and even from loading third-party javascript from them, though you can bypass the protection if you really want to. Firefox, without NoScript, will happily serve you up any nasty Javascript it’s told to.

Advantages of Firefox

  1. Firefox has a rich community of add-ons. For Chrome it’s already begun with user scripts, but there aren’t many of them and it’s a lot more manual work to install them, and you also have to use the less-stable beta branch version of Chrome. I’m sure that in future versions there will be automated installation and lots more to choose from, but for now Firefox wins. Some of the ones I love that have no equivalent in Chrome (yet):
    • NoScript disables Javascript entirely unless you manually enable it for the particular site you are on. I have it set so that sites I frequently visit have Javascript enabled just enough for the site to work. If a site uses its own stuff plus something from doubleclick.net, the doubleclick stuff is disabled. AFAIK, there’s no way to do this in Chrome, so I probably have doubleclick cookies on my machine now. Damn those doubleclick people, damn them all to hell. (Yes I know they’re now Google people)
    • AdBlock for Firefox rocks. So much so that I’ve linked to it twice in this article. With Chrome, I am seeing ads on pages that I never knew had ads. After a while I discovered a similar thing for Chrome called AdSweep, which worked pretty well, though I saw more ads than I did with Firefox. Unfortunately, AdSweep requires the beta branch, as I mentioned above.
    • XMarks (formerly FoxMarks) synchronizes your bookmarks and saved passwords between instances of Firefox (i.e. work and home). It doesn’t yet exist for Chrome.
  2. Firefox can re-open tabs that have been accidentally closed. I haven’t found a way to do that with Chrome. It is possible in Chrome, though not exactly intuitive. When you open a new tab, it shows you some frequently-viewed and recently-viewed pages, and there’s also a list of “recently closed” pages.
  3. Firefox supports keymarks in their bookmarks, which are just shortcuts. For example, I can enter “fb” to go to facebook.com. Chrome doesn’t support these directly, but does a very fast search (hey, it’s Google) on your bookmarks and brings up bookmarks that match what you’ve typed in the bar. However, Firefox keymarks supports parameters, so I can do a search on IMDB by saving a bookmark like “http://imdb.com/find?q=%s;s=all“. The %s is replaced with the parameter you enter, so if I enter “imdb glitter” in the address bar, it does an IMDB search on the Mariah Carey movie “Glitter“, if for some reason I wanted to. Chrome seems to understand “imdb” and immediately does an IMDB search, so that’s fine, but I have another one that accesses our internal bug tracking web site (called iReport). If I enter “ir 12345” in the Firefox address bar, the bookmark will create the proper URL to take me to the web page for iReport issue #12345. Doing the same on the Chrome address bar ignores the ir bookmark and does a Google search, which obviously doesn’t do what I want.
  4. In Firefox, there is a separate downloads window which lists what’s being (and has been) downloaded. If you’re downloading something large, you can minimize the actual browser window and just leave the downloads window open and watch the progress that way. You can even minimize the downloads window and watch the title of the button in the taskbar, since the title of the window contains the percentage complete. Very handy. In Chrome, it seems to be associated with the tab that started the download. I downloaded a fairly large file earlier today using Chrome, and the only way to see the progress of the download was to have the browser open to the page where I started the download. You can create a tab that shows the download progress, but you still need the entire browser window open.
  5. Firefox allows you to select some text on the web page and “View selection source”, which is easier when debugging problems then downloading the entire source for the page and searching through it. No such option on Chrome.
  6. Firefox has the “Manage bookmarks” window which makes dealing with bookmarks easy. With Chrome, you have to do it one at a time, and there’s no way to sort bookmarks. However, I use delicious.com a lot, so that’s where the majority of my bookmarks are anyway.
  7. On at least one message board site, the keyboard shortcuts to add italic and bold indicators to text don’t work on Chrome.

The result

I’m sticking with Chrome. There seem to be more advantages to Firefox but the only one that was really significant to me is NoScript, and many of the rest are fairly simple things that will likely be fixed before long (I know the sorting bookmarks one is already fixed, just not released yet). I’m generally pretty careful about what web sites I visit – if a site is in any way questionable, I don’t visit it at work, and at home I’m protected by OpenDNS, which I have configured to completely block all porn sites as well as known phishing and adware sites. Chrome’s built-in protection is nice too.

Other than that, the Firefox advantages are either no big deal or easily worked around. The speed of Chrome (not just browsing speed, but the overall speed of my machine is faster without Firefox using 1/4 of my RAM) is just too big of a win.

Update: I revisited this comparison six months later and posted a updated review.

NLL Playoff Picks – Round 2

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Since I was four out of four in my first round picks (did I mention that already?), I will stick with the picks I already made for the second round as well.

East

Buffalo vs. New York

Second verse, same as the first. The Bandits are hungry to repeat as champions, and I just don’t see New York being able to stop them (though I think Calgary has a good chance). It won’t be a blowout, but I don’t think it’ll be that close either.

Prediction: Buffalo

West

San Jose vs. Calgary

I said in the first round picks that I don’t like betting against Colin Doyle in the playoffs, but this Calgary team is just too strong. The Stealth have too many rookies to go all the way this year, but if they can get off to a good start next year, the Stealth could be the team to beat next year.

Prediction: Calgary

Dirty old man

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When I got up this morning, I weighed myself. 174.5. Then I had a shower and right afterwards (my hair was still wet), I weighed myself again. 173.5.

The logical conclusion? The shower removed one pound of dirt from my body. Maybe morning breath isn’t my biggest problem.

NLL First Round Results

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So… let’s see how accurate my first round predictions were:

Game Prediction Actual result
Rochester – New York “New York in a close one“ New York won in overtime
Boston – Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo won
Colorado – Calgary Calgary Calgary won
San Jose – Portland San Jose San Jose won

So that would be, let’s see here… carry the one… four for four. A perfect record. I even called the overtime game.

Just sayin’.

Soccer doesn’t always suck

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I’m not a big soccer fan. I enjoy watching my kids’ games, but other than that, I just don’t watch it. I’ve tried to get into it when the World Cup is on, figuring that if I’m ever going to watch soccer, I may as well watch these guys since they’re the best in the world. But I just can’t. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a rooting interest – neither Canada (my home country) nor Scotland (that of my parents), are ever in the running so I generally don’t care who wins. I also find that soccer just isn’t that exciting a game to watch on TV, and the fact that soccer players are the worst divers I’ve seen in any sport doesn’t help. But when I got the opportunity to get some tickets to last weekend’s Toronto FC game match, I took advantage of it and got tickets for me and the boys – Gail was away for the weekend or she would have come too.

I’ve seen a number of musical groups live that I really enjoyed, but I don’t listen to them otherwise. Leahy is a good example – they are fantastically talented musicians and I really enjoyed watching them play, even though it’s not generally my kind of music. At the show I got all excited and I bought a CD of theirs, but I almost never listen to it. Similarly, I rarely listen to the soundtrack of Les Misérables, which is one of my favourite musicals. It seems universally true that live music is better than recorded music, and it’s similarly true of sports. I can’t think of too many sporting events that wouldn’t be better to see live than on TV so I figured the same might be true of soccer, and I was right. Maybe it was the rooting interest in the home team, or maybe it was the atmosphere (much louder than a Rock, Jays, or even Leafs game despite being outdoors), or maybe it was surprise at the fact that a sporting event can be exciting despite a single goal over the course of 90+ minutes. Most likely it was a combination of all of these but whatever the reason, I enjoyed the game.

Watching soccer live gives you a better overall view of the plays and how things are set up. It’s not just “kick the ball towards the opposing net and hope that either (a) you get a clear shot or (b) one of your teammates randomly ends up in a good spot and he gets a clear shot”. Now I’m no idiot, I know that professional soccer isn’t like that at all, but on TV, you just don’t (or at least I don’t) see that as well.

The next time the World Cup rolls around I will, in all likelihood, ignore it again. But if I get another opportunity to see a Toronto FC game, I might just go.

La la la la la

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My letter was not published. But there were two other letters published, one who agreed with me and one who did not. In case the links don’t survive for long, here are the letters in their entirety. First, the guy who agreed with me:

Thousands of biologists have confirmed on the micro scale that organisms change over generations.

On the macro scale, these observations have been confirmed in the fossil record, which shows both diversity and similarities among species that indicate a common ancestor. This has led to the theory of evolution.

Other scientific theories include the germ theory of disease and the theory of electromagnetism.

Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is philosophical speculation that an intelligent being created the universe. It cannot be tested and has no data to support it. As such, it has no place in science classes.

The other guy’s letter is not available online (though the above letter is there twice) but it said:

Another left-brain-thinking scientist tries to tell us to look at the beauty of creation as one big accident.

I really hope that second guy is not a teacher. Yes, life itself is a truly remarkable thing, and intelligent life even more so. But you can’t just ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence that evolution has happened and is continuing to happen. Doing this in favour of a belief that cannot be proven (or even, as the first letter writer suggests, tested) is the scientific equivalent of closing your eyes and covering your ears and yelling “God did it! La la la la la I’m not listening to the evidence! La la la la la”

(Aside: The really ironic part of the second letter is that according to a Wikipedia article on brain function, the whole left-brain-vs.-right-brain thing isn’t real science either.)

Maybe the building blocks of life were created by God. Since we don’t know for sure how that happened, I have to admit that the idea is at least plausible even if I personally don’t believe it. Maybe God created the first seeds of life and then allowed evolution to take it from there. Look at that, we’re both right! Everybody wins!

Teach all theories? Yes, if it’s actually a theory

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There was an article in the Hamilton Spectator a few days ago about how evolution not being taught in Ontario schools until Grade 12 biology, a course which is not mandatory. As a result, we have students in Ontario universities that have never learned about evolution or natural selection and think that it means “people came from monkeys”. In today’s Spec, there is a letter to the editor in response to this article, which states:

Evolution may be a valuable lesson but it is still a theory. The title seems to imply that Darwinian theory equals truth.

The teaching of ‘intelligent design’ and ‘creationism’ are theoretically just as valid.

The teaching of all three in a science curriculum would help students to learn, analyze, discern and decide for themselves what data is relevant and to find their own truth.

Isn’t that the best education?

I just finished writing a response and emailed it to the Spec. My response:

The writer is confused about the use of the word “theory” with respect to the theory of evolution. Evolution is a fact — scientists have observed it happening. The theory of evolution describes why and how it happens, not whether it happens.

A scientific theory is not just a guess. The theory of evolution is no more a guess than the theory of gravity. We may not understand all the details of how evolution works, but there is no question that it is happening.

Intelligent design, on the other hand, is pseudo-science that is not supported by any facts, only religious faith.

We’ll see if it gets published.