Viki in the sunset on Explore

The photo about Viki (~BabinKuk) hit Explore today on Flickr:

This is my 12th photo on Explore. I can't really understand how this works, this photo is not even on my main page, no comment has been added to it in the last two months, etc. But I'm happy that people like it. :)

Breakfast at Google

I usually eat a pretty special breakfast: Strawberries! I like them very much. I usually take 3-4 bowl of them, depending on my mood. Sometimes I add some more spice, and replace one of them with a fruit salad. But strawberries are better than kiwi, star fruit, banana, etc..

They are especially good with some joghurt on the top of them. They are really sweet without added sugar, and I think they are healthy, too.

Enjoy your meal! :)

Glarus - Klöntalersee

Last weekend we decided to go to hike to some nice place with friends from the firm. Diana chose a nice hike: from Glarus to Klöntalersee. The photos were awesome in the webpage, there was a lake, there were mountains, the forecast predicted nice weather, the expected duration was only 2.5-3 hours (in one direction), which meaned that if I stopped to take some photos, it is only 4-5 hours, which was totally enough. So it sounded like a very nice trip!

We departured around 11 by car fro Zürich. The distance was not too much, but we stucked in a traffic jam for about an hour, so it took more than two hours to get there.

The weather was really great during the trip:

The clouds looked even better through (polarized) sunglasses:

In the traffic jam we listened to many slovak child songs, and a very famous star from the 60s. We listened him so many times that I though we'd never forget his name. But I did. I even sang one of his song in karaoke earlier, but unfortunately it does not come into my mind now. Juro, can you help me out? :)

When we arrived to the starting point in Glarus, the battery of my iPhone 3G just got empty. It was a pity because I wanted to use that to record the track of the hike for geotagging the photos. Fortunately we had a T-Mobile G1 with MyTracks, which lasted until the end of the hike.

We headed uphill. We did not really know where to go, we hoped that sings would show the way to the waypoints listed in Activity Workshop page. We went through meadow and forest:

At this crossing, we presumed that we were going to the wrong direction, since we had to go down slightly:

But the road headed upwards later. Looking back:

We stopped for a short while at 778m. Everyone had a rest except the photographer:

Yes, this route still goes upwards!

But no, we did not plan to go THAT high:

Nice view while looking back (HDR):

The way behind us:

In the forest:

Elevation: 1015m, it was a good achievement so far. We wanted to go to Schwamhöchi, so we still went to the right direction:

But after that, we were lost. We followed a path which we should not have done, so we ended up missing Schwamhöchi with the nice view to the lake, so I could not take a nice photo of it.

At the highest point of our trip, we arrived to this place (~1060m):

From here, we went downhill, and the best view to the lake was this (at 938m):

When we arrived to Rhodannenberg (862m, which was basically a restaurant at the lakeshore), I took some photos of the lake and after that we got something to drink and rested a little:

From this point, we took the easy way: took the bus back to the car, then headed home.

I am slightly disappointed about the weather we had: it was all cloudy, no blue sky, so the photos were not that good that I expected. The two HDR photos which I made during the trip were OK, but that's all.

The hiking performance was not so bad: 600m up, 200m down, 3.5h including some rest too, so I was very satisfied regarding this!

If you want to enjoy the slideshow of the whole trip, just click here:

Unscientific javascript test: Firefox 3.5, Safari, Chrome on Mac

Firefox has 3.5 recently released, and it claimed to contain a faster javascript engine than its predecessor.

Safari, Chrome also contain fast engines, so I decided to give them a try: which one is faster?

Chrome Experiments contains fun stuff in JS, so I used that. Note, that I am using a MacBook Pro for testing on a Mac OSX because that is my work computer. Note also that watching javascript animation is totally not a scientific speed test. :)

I chose the Depth of Field experiment, which requires a lot of calculation.

For FF 3.5, the result was not really enjoyable, it had an average of 1 frames per second on the first 32 second of the animation: I counted around 35 frames altogether. On Safari, it was around 70 frames, on Chrome, it as around 80 frames.

I think the result is obvious without any nifty graphs. :)

Chrome for Mac is not really a production-level software yet, but it can be usable pretty well for javascript-heavy applications like GMail, Google Calendar, or any other sites, except the ones that use Flash (Youtube for example), since there is no plugin support yet.