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First, thanks to Matt Round who inspired me to do dumps in this format, and whose blog is fantastic.

Here is some straight-talking about what makes good tequila. I always found that there is some good, subtle, tasty tequilas out there, but now I know what makes them different. I personally enjoy the very aged, woody types.

About as functional as your common music player’s visualizer, but this one visualizes the Eclipse commit history.

I’m usually pretty hard on time elapse pictures of urban transportation (what could be more trite in photography nowadays?), but this fellow proved that it can still be done in an interesting way.

Elephant’s Dream, which 2 years ago billed itself as the first “Open” movie, was written with free tools such as Blender and is licensed under Creative Commons. It is a fairly enjoyable 11-minute journey of two odd fellows in a beautiful but sinister machine world.

Here is a picture of Venus passing in front of the sun. Sometimes astronomical pictures give me a sense of awe that nothing else really can.

SquirrelFish. Everyone should look to these folks next time they need inspiration for naming their JavaScript interpreter. And the logo? Spectacular.

The Slashdot era was about news without writers, only editors. The Digg era was about news with just users. Next, Twitturly shows us that all you need is the algorithm. An excellent use of Twitter’s latent “What people are talking about” data.

Uncrate is “The Buyer’s Guide for Men” but it is better described as “Badass product you know you want every day.”

Not only does Ginger People’s candy have that perfect sweet-hot ginger taste, but their ginger people art is unforgettably charming. I haven’t seen their ginger beer in stores, but I love their other products and the noble dark and stormy enough that I plan on ordering some.

A quiz that shows how well you remember the logos that you see every day.

And to end on a pointless note, here are some dog speeders.

Most people don’t seem to use the === operater in JavaScript. Some lists of JavaScript operators don’t even include it. It is not as useless as the community’s negligence would suggest. There are times when it can be used to write more precise code. So what does it do, anyway?

== asks: Are these the same value? (”500″ == 500) is true though one is a string and one is a number.
=== asks: Are these the same type and the same value? (500 === 500) is true, but the above is not.
Both operators ask: “Are these the same object?” in the case of object comparison.

Some of the implications are subtle.

Primatives and the objects that represent them are different types with the same value.
(5 == new Number(5)) is true.
(5 === new Number(5)) is false.

Undefined and null are different types but have the same value.
(null == undefined) is true.
(null === undefined) is false.

False has the same value as primatives that evaluate to false.
(false == 0) is true.
(false === 0) is false.

True does not have the same value as primatives that evaluate to true.
(true == “Greg”) is false.
(true === “Greg”) is false.

Being aware of the difference will let you better understand your code’s behavior, and allow you to pick the right operator for the job.

For example, use (arg === undefined) to check if an optional argument was provided. If you use (!arg) or (arg == undefined) some odd things might happen, like explicit null being treated as an omitted argument.

Know that saying “if (foo)” and “if (foo == true)” and “if (foo === true)” are all different. (Try setting foo to each of 5, true, and new Boolean(true))

Always use the strictest operator possible. Use looser operaters when you’re sure you want to allow the “fuzzier” behavior. === is very strict, so it is a good tool to have in the old toolbelt.

As an Opera user, I was one of the few people excited about their recent 9.5 release. Overall it is a good release, though I’m going to start with the bad news first in a second. I’m going to discuss things from my perspective rather than cover all the features in the change log one by one, so your mileage may vary.

The new UI design initially got the thumbs up from me, because I love dark and sleek, but it turns out the usability is not so impressive. Removing all the icon colors makes them less recognizable, the tab close buttons are smaller and harder to click, and the new tab button defaults to the right of the tabs, where its location continuously changes as tabs are added or removed. This can all be changed by the user, and in my mind, must be. As pretty as the dark icons look at a casual glance, this is not a change for the better. It looks like a lot of these changes were meant to look good in Vista. The previous default theme wasn’t OS-specific though, which I think is a better approach. Also, Opera said that the new tab button to the right of the tabs would be familiar to IE users. It is OK to make changes to ease the transition for new users, but you should only do so when you’re not harming your own product. Microsoft, well, isn’t the best group to look to when it comes to UI design. The original theme, which you can still get for Opera 9.5, has clean blue tabs, soft grays, and occasional pale yellow highlights. I have the feeling Opera will bring this back, or try something very different for their next major release.

On the bright side, my favorite features are still here, occasionally with subtle improvements. The ability to make a search out of any form field, the tab trash can, the way it opens with my tabs from last time, are all great. I know Firefox has since adopted some of these features, but I still get the feeling Opera is paving the new ground with these little niceties.

I am the only person I know of who likes Opera’s mail client, but sadly the previous release had a bug that made me unable to read emails from a certain other person. This was a deal breaker, and I had been using Thunderbird until this release. The bug is now fixed, and I now have a good feeling of Opera vs. Thunderbird for a mail client. Thunderbird seems, well, a little lame. I prefer Opera’s Search Don’t Sort mentality, which GMail has already proven to me to be the superior method of mail organization over folders and filing. Opera mail’s search is damned fast. I did the same search in Opera and Thunderbird over about 20,000 messages. Opera found it in about a second, Thunderbird took maybe 20 seconds. It is kind of a requirement for this mail paradigm, but is probably something any Thunderbird user would appreciate.

That isn’t the only fast thing in Opera. It just feels fast in general. Some of the benchmarks I’ve seen seem to support this feeling. The trade-off seems to be that about once a month Opera falls flat on its face and dies. Well, I haven’t used Firefox or Internet Explorer enough lately to know if this is more or less often than those browsers. But it isn’t a big deal: Opera comes right back up in the same state I left it.

My beef with the new theme and icon set doesn’t reach every corner of the usability picture. There are some smart changes too. The left panel that carries default panels like mail, contacts, history, page information, and so on is now opened and closed by a button on the tool bar rather than a narrow strip along the side of the browser. Much better. Apparently new panels can be downloaded and added, but I haven’t felt the need.

Another feature worth mentioning is “Opera Link”, which synchronizes your settings and bookmarks between installations of Opera. I believe Firefox plug-ins that do this have abounded lately, so it’s nice to finally have that feature in Opera. My bookmark list is much more interesting and useful than it used to be, as I never really settled on any bookmarking service like del.icio.us.

Overall I’m happy with what I got. The new major features are great, there are some little tweaks here and there, the funky theme is surmountable with their peachy theme chooser, and I still feel a a little pang of joy when my browser treats a torrent link as a regular download, along with my normal downloads. It’s surprising that only 1.4% of people that use this thing. Maybe it is because Opera focuses so much on the mobile world, and interesting contracts like Opera for Wii. Probably the lack of a massive operating system that installs you by default, or an amazingly devout Free software community. In any case, I like what I got with this release.

Opera 9.5 is finally out.  I’m one of those weird Opera users, so this is actually exciting news for me!  I’ll do a more complete rundown of the release later on, but for now here are some screens of the new darker, sleeker look ‘n’ feel.

Here is the landing page for the new release, in Opera 9.5.

Here is the Preferences dialog with some more of the new look ‘n’ feel.

Here is how the left side-bar was removed and the items are shown in their own tabs if you select them from the tools menu.

These are things I figured out from experimentation. I have no doubt that they are documented out there somewhere, but I’m not much for reading manuals, I confess.

Double-press the menu button

This does one of two things, depending on the context.

iPhone locked: This will bring up iPod controls. The touch screen will now let you pause, play, skip, etc.

iPhone unlocked, music playing: Same as above

iPhone unlocked, no music playing: Takes you to the “Favorites” list to make a call.

Horizontal swipe

In some lists, such as your inbox, swiping from right to left or left to right over an item this will bring up the option to delete the item you swiped over. Barely faster than other methods, but I have started using it when convenient.

Maps zoom vs. Safari zoom

You probably already know that in the browser you can double-tap to zoom in on a section of the page, then do it again to zoom out. In the Maps application, things work a little differently. Here you can double-tap (tap twice in a row quickly) to zoom in, but to zoom out you tap with both fingers at once (can’t call this double-tapping too, do we have a more terse lingo for the two-finger-tap yet?)

Being a web developer (and TechCrunch reader) I end up trying a whole lot of web apps.  Some of them are very cool, but few are so cool that I actually end up using them.

Recently Wakoopa managed to sneak into my “cool enough to keep” list.  Aside from sounding like a Super Mario Bros. enemy, and having a stylish white, gray, black, neon green, and neon pink theme, Wakoopa is basically Last.fm for desktop apps.  You install a service (Mac or PC) that reports which of your applications receive the most of your attention.  Here is what I have been using for the last few days:

I guess it isn’t very interesting that I mostly just use my web browser (Opera is great, by the way), which makes you immediately wonder if this should be a way of tracking which web sites you visit.  But the usefulness isn’t in seeing your own habits.

The first interesting use is in discovering new applications.  Just perusing the categorized and tagged lists of apps, ordered by popularity, is a great way to discover tools and time-wasters alike.

This screen shot shows a few things.  First, that the first couple results aren’t very interesting.  Second, that they are not 100% accurate (unless there are some masochists doing their text-editing in Photoshop out there).  but third, we see some very popular applications that aren’t so well known.  I haven’t heard of a couple of these, but immediately I feel the need to go figure out what makes them so popular.  That is really the core of the Wakoopa product.

Aside from discovery, Wakoopa has another interesting use.  A friend of mine recently bought a Macbook and asked me what all the fun apps for it are.  I named a few (Adium, VLC, Handbrake), then realized that I could link them to my Wakoopa profile to show them what I actually used.  They found this pretty helpful.  In short, Wakoopa seems like an efficient way to share with friends what applications you find useful, and I’m sure I’d be interested in seeing the same about people I know.

I recommend giving this site a try.  I don’t have any Wakoopa contacts yet, so if you do, feel free to add me.